The Line of Soldiers

Ever wonder why soldiers used to fight standing shoulder to should in long lines?

At the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, General Greene organized his army into three long lines. Although the use of three lines was unusual, the grouping of men into long, tightly packed lines was the main infantry tactic of the time. To understand why, it is helpful to look farther back into military history.

Few people question why the Ancient Greeks or the Romans organized their armies into large blocks of men. It is easy to understand how a big group of men armed with swords or spears would easily crush any kind of disorganized or individual resistance. One man cannot stop fifty. True, such groups were more vulnerable to fire from arrows or rocks, but for the most part these weapons lacked the effectiveness to stop a large group.

To look at it another way, humans have a strong sense of self-preservation and this is tested to the limit in battle. An individual or small group confronted with the enemy is likely to decide it is safer to run away. Conversely, the soldier fighting in the large group is likely to conclude it is safer to stay in the large group where his fellow soldiers will protect him.

Now, fast forward time to the War of American Independence. Warfare has changed. The standard soldier now carries a gun and is supported by artillery. But it would be wrong to think of these weapons as comparable to the rifles and machine guns of later wars. The standard infantry weapon was the smooth-bore musket. Although powerful at close range, the guns effective range was around 100 yards. It is true that much more accurate rifles existed, but they were uncommon in armies due to the cost of construction and the long time they took to reload. The artillery tended to be small by comparison to later wars and was only generally decisive at very close range.

Thus, although most battles in the American War of Independence began with huge volleys of concentrated musket fire, these volleys, like the arrows and rocks of 2,000 years before were rarely decisive. Instead as the armies drew closer, they fixed bayonets to the end of their muskets, essentially turning them into spears, and fought in a similar way to the Greeks and Romans.

At Guilford Courthouse thousands upon thousands of musket balls were fired, but musketry had little to do with the outcome of the battle. Really it was a series of charges and counter charges that defined the ebb and flow of the conflict. Only at the very end, when Cornwallis fired all of his cannons into a tightly packed mass of men did any kind of gunfire have a decisive impact.

There were other reasons why men organized into lines. Long lines made it difficult for an enemy to flank your army, that is get around the side or rear and force you to fight in two directions. Also, only in large units could infantry hope to stand up against the fast moving, powerful cavalry of the day.

The line of infantry would remain as the most common tactic for nearly the next 150 years. Although the American Civil War taught some brutal lessons about its declining usefulness, it took the true horrors of the First World War for most military minds to finally realize that the infantry line has passed its usefulness.