Look to the West: Thread III, Volume IV (Tottenham Nil)!
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
- Status
Thande
Donor
Yes.
It has become that. It kind of did in OTL to some extent with Louis XV's flirtations, but the UPSA means it has completed the process.
Well, you and the in-universe exploration team...
Speaking of which, how does the UPSA treat the Jesuits? Since the Jesuits and the Jansenist went together like oil and water, I don't think they would be treated very well.
Thande
Donor
That's a good point to raise. The UPSA is probably the only place where they do get on relatively well, for the same reason that in the OTL USA religious minorities tended to stick together out of solidarity even if they would have hated each other back in the old country. Though this may change if and when Jansenism becomes fully associated with the state and establishment in the UPSA.
I think electing Henry Stuart as Pope is pretty much the only way you'd get AH fanboys to support apostolic succession and papal infallibility 
I love the story of Corazzi's spoiled ballot. And like the story of his receiving Rouvroy's confession in Rome, I really hope it's true even though it probably isn't.... which it strikes me is an odd thing to say in the context of a work of fiction.
How definitive is the split between the Italian and Austrian Hapsburgs at this point? Because I can see the Patrimonial Wars being a *biiiiig* problem between Turin and Vienna, whichever way...
I love the story of Corazzi's spoiled ballot. And like the story of his receiving Rouvroy's confession in Rome, I really hope it's true even though it probably isn't.... which it strikes me is an odd thing to say in the context of a work of fiction.
How definitive is the split between the Italian and Austrian Hapsburgs at this point? Because I can see the Patrimonial Wars being a *biiiiig* problem between Turin and Vienna, whichever way...
Thande
Donor
Well, I deliberately use the old "stuffy historian says 'this is almost certainly untrue'" phrasing so people can decide for themselves whether some of the more outlandish things in the TL are 'true' or not. As Richard III and his whoops-turns-out-he-really-was-a-hunchback-no-Shakespeare-didn't-make-it-up thing proved recently, this isn't exactly uncommon in OTL.
The split is pretty definitive now...I won't say any more, leave it for when the relevant update rolls around.
Alex Richards
Donor
So we've got two of the three European conflicts of the Great American Wars confirmed (The Patrimonial War and a Revolution in Old Spain.) I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the third will be in the Germanies.
Oh shit, I didn't see this coming, now I remember why I love this TL so much! Nice writing, made a lot of sense and isn't too implausible compared to what happened to the Papal State a little later than this IOTL. This is going to have a huge impact on the Habsburg states, now that they're separated. Maybe a war between Italy and *Austria/Danubia? That would have a huge impact on central Europe and southern Germany, not to mention what's left of Switzerland.
I'm kinda impressed and depressed with how well you've pulled off a fractitious world where continent-spanning wars break out every generation or so. This world is on the whole a lot more war-like, with political borders being repeatedly adjusted through Congresses on treaties. Could there maybe evolve a permanent War Congress that exists to craft various solutions to use in a variety of truce agreements for the next war? A sort of proto-UN/think tank. I don't know where this would stand on the proto-Societist conflicts and ensuing Societist scares and conflicts, but I hope it gives you ideas.
I don't even quite know how this ties into the Great American War. I suppose the GAW will be multi-continental, but the drastic and radical changes will mostly be in the Americas. This could be the rise of the Societist Union of South America or what have you, and some sort of political coup over the Empire of North America and Empire of New Spain model. Oh, the possibilities.
I'm kinda impressed and depressed with how well you've pulled off a fractitious world where continent-spanning wars break out every generation or so. This world is on the whole a lot more war-like, with political borders being repeatedly adjusted through Congresses on treaties. Could there maybe evolve a permanent War Congress that exists to craft various solutions to use in a variety of truce agreements for the next war? A sort of proto-UN/think tank. I don't know where this would stand on the proto-Societist conflicts and ensuing Societist scares and conflicts, but I hope it gives you ideas.
I don't even quite know how this ties into the Great American War. I suppose the GAW will be multi-continental, but the drastic and radical changes will mostly be in the Americas. This could be the rise of the Societist Union of South America or what have you, and some sort of political coup over the Empire of North America and Empire of New Spain model. Oh, the possibilities.
Really cool pair of updates! I wonder if France is still Jansenist, the idea of Gallicism pretty much died after Napoleon in OTL. I like to see the little details you put : a more catholic China, revolution brewing in Portugal... The mention of the name Cyrus the Great made me wonder if the Persian culture is more popular in the west than OTL.
Probably not. The Jansenist movement was all about reforming the church on augustinian lines. In OTL, the revolution forced the Jansenists and the Gallicans to swallow their pride and conform to the papal agenda. Since ITTL, the revolution still takes place, the Jansenist movement in Europe is most likely dead.
The Jesuits were very successful in China IOTL. Papal interference caused more determent to the evangelical mission then anything else. If the Papacy reevaluates its position on the "Chinese rites", Catholicism could make significant head way into china.
I think calling the Patriomnial War part of the Great American War would be stretching the definition, it is probably just a conflict that takes place at the same time. I honestly think we haven't seen the second or third of the European fronts in the Great American War yet, although the Germanies is a good guess IMO.
The three most likely fronts in the European theatre of the Great Europen War IMO are:
i) Iberia
ii) The Germanies
iii) Something involving Britain and France
teg
ii) appears to be confirmed - there will be a 'Unification war' north of Danubia (part 164). A look at the map of Europe in 1840 from the last thread shows that the obvious place for unifications will be Germany. So I think the eponymous unification will be that of Saxony and its satellites, but not much more. I think I remember a hint that Belgium will continue to exist for quite a while, and that there will be problems in Norden over the status of Schelswig, which shouldn't exist if Billungia is subsumed into Germany (what else would the result of the unification be called?). Since there will be a war, I wonder who Saxony's opponents will be. Poland is probably friendly and Danubia is confirmed to be neutral, so I think they can be discounted. The "Isolationgebiet" (probably spelled differently)? The rest are a mystery, as is the scale of the war. (Will Scandinavia be involved? Poland? Russia?)
The fall of the Janissary Sultanate (part 164 again) also happens at about this time, and we know that Greece risks getting involved in a "major bloodletting". So I guess this means that Greece opportunistically grabs quite a bit of the former sultanate, and just barely avoids a war with the Ottoman Empire which wants it back. (So how does it avoid the conflict? Does something distract the Ottomans? Russia, maybe?)
Last edited:
So an earlier Pope Francis .
Good update. Wondering what the Church was up to given all the changes, especially in light of the Jansenist Catholicism you've mentioned in other updates taken up by several historical figures.
So will this Pope try to heal this growing divide in Catholicism or has the split already become permanent? (sorry if you addressed this in the update, might have missed it, read it while waiting for this moron I'm working with to make his mind up...but anyways...)
.Good update. Wondering what the Church was up to given all the changes, especially in light of the Jansenist Catholicism you've mentioned in other updates taken up by several historical figures.
So will this Pope try to heal this growing divide in Catholicism or has the split already become permanent? (sorry if you addressed this in the update, might have missed it, read it while waiting for this moron I'm working with to make his mind up...but anyways...)
Thande
Donor
Interlude #18: The Expanding Arsenal
“There is an old tradition in some lands—doubtless it has some counterpart in all lands, though unfortunate cultural divergence through geographic separation may obscure this at first glance—of people, particularly children, celebrating various festivals by playing the game of bobbing for apples. This involves attempting to remove a floating apple from a tub of water using only the mouth, with the hands remaining behind the back.
Now if one were to ask a child engaged in this pursuit ‘what are you trying to do?’, they might reply ‘I want to get an apple’. Yet though this answer may appear to be superficially accurate, a literal examination of it shows that it is nonsense: if the child simply wanted an apple, then why does he not use his hands to grab it? It is not just about getting an apple, it is about the act of playing the game. The actual prize is minor to the child’s interest; it is the process in which his interest lies, from which he derives enjoyment.
Now consider the number of rulers in human history who have justified their wars by saying that they are ultimately seeking a lasting peace. They, too, are playing the game, and the prize is merely an excuse to play the game. Picture them bobbing not for apples, but for olive branches floating in a tub.
A tub filled not with water, but with blood…”
*
From – “Sharper Sticks: A History of Advancement in Warfare” by William Peter Courtenay, 5th Baron Congleton, 1952 –
If the early nineteenth century was noted for its rapid technological innovation in the field of war, the mid-nineteenth century was a time in which those innovations (together with more recent ones) began to be applied in a way that genuinely increased military power across the board. When M. Cugnot’s steam innovations had first shocked Europe, an objective cost-benefit analysis would show that under most circumstances they were inferior to the established methods of towing artillery: horses when speed was required, oxen when endurance was preferred. Steam tractors required a supply of coal, which complicated the supply train situation, whereas animals could usually live off the land with only occasional supplements. There were also far more people around who knew how to ‘maintain’ a horse than trained engineers capable of keeping a steam engine in fine condition and repairing it when it failed. Indeed, without the actions of a few individuals, the steam engine in warfare might have remained nothing more than a curiosity for years.
The genius of General Pierre Boulanger changed this. Before the Battle of Lille in 1795, the French Latin Republic—still fledgeling and fragile—seemed about to fall to the armies of Emperor Ferdinand IV’s Holy Roman alliance. The revolutionaries would be executed, the monarchy would be restored and the whole affair would be written off as just the latest in the long list of fruitless French jacqueries and rebellions against the ancien régime. It matters not that small men in our own time produce statistical analyses ‘proving’ that the French would have beaten the German alliance regardless of what happened at Lille. What matters is how the battle was perceived at the time. Before, disaster and despair; after, glory and triumph. And at the centre of it all, the steam engine.
Boulanger realised that in 1795, as noted above, steam tractors were more of a curiosity than a genuine replacement for traditional artillery transport methods. There were a few situations in which M. Cugnot’s invention outperformed animals, particularly when artillery needed to be transported up a long continuous slope, but generally they were not worth the expense that the ancien régime had invested in them in its dying days. They could easily have been portrayed by Robespierre and the National Legislative Assembly as another Versailles, another frivolous waste of the wealth of France that truly belonged to the people. Yet they had one advantage: they were novel, alien, unknown. The ordinary soldier in one of the German armies had never seen anything like them, and thus men who would stand fast in the face of ten times the number of horse-drawn galloper guns would quiver and break when Boulanger sent in his ‘unnatural’ Cugnot guns, gliding forward slowly and steadily like a spectre. Indeed, some reports at the time (though possibly exaggerated by Jacobin propagandists) spoke of superstitious German soldiers believing that the Cugnot guns were pulled by ghost horses, and that Charlemagne had awoken to defend France and sent spectral armies ahead of him.
Much the same tactic was used, both by Boulanger and his imitators, concerning artillery rockets and to a lesser extent observation balloons. Rockets were inferior in the damage they could do compared to standard cannon, but their sheer unfamiliarity—as well as the unpredictable way the rockets arced across a battlefield while shrieking inhumanly, in contrast to the orderly geometric arcs of cannonballs—also panicked otherwise experienced troops. Balloons were genuinely useful for observations, but the French found that the mere presence of a balloon could intimidate an enemy army even if there was nobody actually in it. While Jacobin French tactics relied on conscription and the mass march[1] by troops with only cursory training, generals did find it useful to ensure their own troops had trained in the sight of all the new revolutionary weapons, so that they were calm with their presence on the battlefield. The weapons thus granted the French a considerable advantage, yet in a curiously indirect way: mostly, they were simply a tool to reduce enemy morale and organisation below French levels and then have the two armies fight it out using mostly conventional infantry tactics. Yet this was enough, and led of course to Jean de Lisieux proclaiming that La Vapeur est Républicaine and further time, effort and funds being expended on improving the weapons.
Many, though by no means all, nations copied the French innovations during the War of the Nations and the Watchful Peace. Once again, it was not so much that one Cugnot gun could counter another any more effectively than a horse-drawn gun could, but simply the presence of those weapons within one’s own army served to calm and reassure soldiers and view their French counterparts as less alien and intimidating. They were no longer the unknown. At this point, the nations could quite easily have collectively dropped the weapons as the advantage was gone, but inertia kept their use and research going at a low level, and of course there would always be technologically inferior opponents that the Boulanger tactics would still work on.
Lisieux himself found steam-driven armoured wagons, the Tortue, to be a useful crowd-suppression tool. They were occasionally used on the battlefield, most famously at the Battle of Paris in 1809, but did not excel in this role: they were too slow and vulnerable. Their armour could easily repel brickbats and blades and absorb a limited number of musket balls, but could sometimes be penetrated by rifle bullets and was no defence against cannonballs. A modern army could therefore easily neutralise a Tortue except under very specific circumstances (such as concealing the Tortues and then revealing them in a short-range ambush) but they remained useful against disorganised urban rebels who lacked such heavy weaponry. It would be decades before the invention of the Devil Brew,[2] the apparently obvious weapon that could render Tortue-type vehicles vulnerable even to rebels lacking much in the way of combat resources. This may seem peculiar to modern eyes, but it is worth remembering that naphtha and other fuels were not in common everyday use in this period.
Steam had also made its mark at sea, but in a very specific way. Military thinking post-war, derived from the French developments under Surcouf, considered there to be a strict division between oceanic and riverine navies.[3] Before steam, sail was the primary means of propulsion for oceanic ships and oarsmen (usually enslaved) for riverine ships such as galleys. The division was not as clear as this brief description implies, with many riverine-intended ships also using sail, but the overall point stands. Surcouf’s steamships were dubbed ‘steam-galleys’ as in many ways they resembled the old galleys, but with steam engines instead of oars—opening up the flanks of the ship for use in housing additional weapons and other items, rather than being limited to bow guns only like traditional galleys. The steam-galleys were innovative, being a genuine force-multiplier even in their own time unlike the more ‘novelty shock value’ aspects of the landborne steam tractors, and were much-copied. The deployment of rockets rather than (or in addition to) cannon on some steam-galleys proved that the shock value tactics could also be combined with the more practical innovation of the engine. Steam-galleys proved vital in later conflicts in the Mediterranean and the Baltic Seas. Steam-engined barges were also used extensively on rivers for civilian traffic and logistic support in time of war, and late in the Popular Wars experiments began with deploying combat versions of such vessels. These would prove to have only limited applicability until they were married to armourclad protection late in the Democratic Experiment era, the craft which would eventually be named ironpikes.[4]
However, naval authorities remained stubbornly resistant to the use of steam in oceanic navies. Many ostensible reasons for this are recorded in studies at the time, but behind all of them was a simple conservative traditionalism. Sail was not merely a means of propulsion to most navies at the time, it was a part of the very fabric of their being (no pun intended). It was difficult, and rather alarming, for most admirals to imagine a navy in which young midshipmen no longer had to learn a wide variety of knots and the complexities of the ropes that required them, where the names for all the multitudinous varieties of sails were relegated to the history books as an obsolete footnote. The distinction was thus preserved. Navies did use steam on the high seas, but only in the form of employing steam tugs to tow their ships of the line in order to gain an advantage against the wind, or when there was calm. Most of the time the tugs would rather inefficiently be towed behind the sailships instead, or in the case of the more compact models even hoisted aboard. Such tactics were used extensively in the Atlantic battles of the Popular Wars, but remained limited in scope. It would not be until the first armourclads that steam engines were finally used regularly as part of the propulsion system on mainstream warships—though tellingly, they were officially and insistently referred to as ‘integrated tug systems’. The conservatism intrinsic to the navies meant that early armourclads such as France’s Spartacus and America’s Lord Washington bore more resemblance to their forefathers than their descendants, with extensive masts (though forged of steel) and fully rigged with sail. It would not be until the end of the 1860s that, in part simply due to the older generations retiring or dying off, that navies would finally, reluctantly, let go of even an auxiliary sailing rig for their vessels. Perhaps ironically this came in the middle of the Long Peace, and thus the apparently dramatic moment of the ancient sail technology finally dying its death came not with a shout, but with a sigh. The transitional ships may only occasionally be glimpsed in combat by the student of naval military history, and remained largely an untested unknown when the Long Peace finally came to an end with the Pandoric War in 1896.
But this is to get ahead of ourselves. By the end of the Democratic Experiment, steam technology had matured to the point where it had finally become a genuine step forward for militaries and was no longer a toy. To a lesser extent the same was true of rockets, which could now be relied upon to at least vaguely hit what they were aimed at. And of course, as one technological advantage came to the fore, another to counter it would be created. Many such countermeasures were produced by military researchers in the Hapsburg Kingdom of Italy and eventually, via cross-pollination, in Danubia.[5] Both states faced a generally technologically superior opposition, from France and Saxony respectively, and unable to always match them one-on-one, unorthodox ideas were conceived to counter the technologies from a disadvantaged starting position. This is arguably the first coherently theorised example of Davidian warfare.[6] Probably the most celebrated aspect of this consists of then-Major Antonio Rizzi’s development of the first antidrome weapons in history.[7] We should be careful not to exaggerate the impact of the first steerables on warfare: popular history tends to focus on Lord Byron’s spectacular attack on Strasbourg (then Strassburg) in 1830, but this was a single exceptional incident and there are no other unambiguous records of steerables becoming directly involved in conflict in the Popular Wars.[8] Byron had particularly favourable conditions: usually the rather primitive propulsion of the steerables meant they were unable to fight against the wind in a sufficiently controlled way. For the most part, steerables were merely used for reconnaissance, as their tethered balloon ancestors had been for years, and sometimes for dropping men or supplies behind enemy lines for secret missions. Nonetheless this rendered them a significant threat, and Major Rizzi was tasked with developing a countermeasure.
Italy’s own steerable programme was at an early stage and the idea of fighting a war in the air between steerables was unworkable (not that it has stopped a certain film adaptation of Byron’s life from portraying such a battle…) Rizzi thus developed ground-to-air weapons capable of downing a steerable. He explored several avenues, including the use of rockets and most famously the ‘star shot’, a modified version of the well-established hail shot shell in which sharp metal fragments were used instead of balls, and magnesium was added to illuminate the enemy craft as the shell exploded. The star shot was an iconic weapon of the Nightmare War, but came with a host of disadvantages—the fragments raining down could easily hurt friendly troops or civilians on the ground, and if the shell missed it could also arc down and strike an undesired target. It would not be the star shot or the rockets that became the lasting innovation of Major Rizzi’s work, but the far more ‘boring’ and conventional ‘Vespa’ one-pounder heavy rifle (or light artillery, depending on one’s perspective). The Vespa had a swivel mount and could be mounted atop a steam carriage or even a horse-drawn one for rapid movement around a battlefield. A refined version proved to be the most effective of Rizzi’s weapons and was swiftly copied by other countries throughout the 1840s.[9]
Despite the adoption of this weapon, research into steerables continued at a fast pace. The experiences of the Nightmare War in particular had shown that modern artillery could easily turn a battle into a miserable stalemate in which the old infantry tactics rarely led to a breakthrough, and only at an unacceptable cost of life.[10] A means of neutralising that artillery was therefore a high priority, and improved steerables seemed like a logical choice. Many theorists talked of heavier-than-air aircraft that could fly like birds, but they were shouted down as lunatics. Barring a few extremely debatable experiments in the Democratic Experiment era, true aerodromes would not come about until the late 1880s.[11] In the short term, a more realistic answer was to improve artillery’s accuracy and fire control so that enemy artillery could be silenced by one’s own. Obviously this led to a considerable arms race in terms of both technology and training. Applying these tactics to landborne artillery was tricky enough that two roughly equivalent national armies could stay competitive, and sometimes it would come down to the tactical ability of their generals. By sea, however, these superior fire control methods meant that wooden ships could be targeted and neutralised practically as soon as they were spotted, with modern breechloading rifled cannon easily blasting through ships of the line that had been capable of absorbing considerable punishment from older smoothbore cannon. Explicitly short-ranged weapons such as carronades became increasingly useless except in ambush situations. For a period in the Democratic Experiment and Great American War, naval conflict fitted the sardonic description of the Scandinavian Admiral Ulf Clemmensen: “We used to fight duels with swords. Now we fight duels with pistols”. No longer a lengthy give-and-take conflict at short range in which two opponents could inflict blows on one another before one emerged victorious—it simply came down to who could ‘draw and fire’ first. With such experiences being ubiquitous in the Great American War, it is no surprise that even conservative navies were hasty to drop wooden ship construction on focus on replicating the rare armourclad ships. Particularly memorable was the incident at the Battle of Lac Borgne where the armourclad Périclès withstood repeated rifled cannon attacks from the Concordat forces, the formerly potent weapons bouncing impotently off the armour. Of course, it did not take a tactical genius to realise that when armourclads became universal, they would then have the opposite problem: ships’ armour would now be stronger than their weapons. But that was a problem for another day.
Railways were another important innovation of this period, but—for the most part—most nations viewed their only relevance to warfare as being a means of logistical resupply to a front, and another internal artery to be neutralised if it was in danger of falling into enemy hands. Few realised that railways could play a more direct role in war, but that was about to change.
Finally, we should of course examine infantry and cavalry. During the Watchful Peace, France had focused on applying its existing innovations more effectively rather than developing new ones—partly for political reasons, certainly, but nonetheless a significant shift. Rather than simply equipping troops with rifles and then using the same tactics, for example, new tactics were developed to better fit an all-rifle army. Similar conclusions were independently reached by the Saxons, and would be further developed at the new Kriegsakademie built in Berlin after the Popular Wars. Regiments were also reorganised according to the principle of interchangeability, the idea that (in the words of the French Marshal Richelieu) one infantry regiment should be able to do the same job as any other infantry regiment, simplifying logistics and planning considerably. Of course this came with its own disadvantages, which would become more obvious during the Great American War.
Aside from sail, cavalry was probably the biggest loser to the innovations of the nineteenth century. Certainly it had by no means become obsolete by the start of the Great American War in c. 1849 (depending on what definition of that conflict one uses) but it no longer had the primary role it had once enjoyed in European conflicts. Cavalry could still be a useful rapid reaction force either to ambush unsuspecting infantry or capture artillery trains. Many nations increasingly deployed their cavalry regiments abroad for colonial projects, horses being particularly useful in areas such as southern Africa and Antipodea where the natives had never seen them before—thus, in an ironic full circle, horses possessed the ‘novelty shock value’ of the steam tractors that had replaced them. One problematic point about considering the decline of cavalry, as made by S. S. Janson in The Fall of the Horse, is that it came at the same time as the decline of the nobility’s power in Europe. Given the association of the nobility with cavalry, reinforced by the divide of the Jacobin Wars in which the Jacobins always struggled with obtaining enough trained cavalrymen, it may be difficult to separate the decline of cavalry due to technological change with the decline of cavalry due to social change. But that question lies beyond the scope of this work…
[1] Human wave attack.
[2] Molotov cocktail.
[3] “Blue-water” and “White-water/brown-water” respectively. The name riverine is a bit inappropriate, as it includes environments like the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas.
[4] ‘Monitors’ in OTL.
[5] Courtenay is being a little anachronistic in his choice of naming terminology here, aided and abetted by the fact that nobody, then or now, is quite sure what to call the Austrian Hapsburg state in the years of Francis II’s reign.
[6] We would say ‘asymmetric warfare’. The TTL term is an obvious Biblical reference to David and Goliath.
[7] Antidrome = anti-air. This is also an anachronistic term; it would not come into common use for decades yet.
[8] See Part #132. Recall that ‘steerable’ is the TTL term for an airship, meaning the same as ‘dirigible’ in French.
[9] The Vespa is similar to OTL’s Ballonabwehrkanone, produced by Gustav Krupp in 1870 to shoot down French balloons trying to resupply Paris while it was besieged.
[10] This may sound reminiscent of WW1, but it is actually more like the bloodier battles of the American Civil War in OTL in its character.
[11] Aerodrome is the TTL name for aeroplane—it was briefly used in this sense in OTL as well before being re-applied to mean the aeroplanes’ base instead. There were actually experiments in heavier-than-air flight in the 1840s in OTL as well, in particular the Aerial Steam Carriage by William Samuel Henson, John Stringfellow and others in 1842. They were unable to get a human-sized version off the ground due to the steam engine being too heavy for its power, but did produce a scaled-down model capable of brief powered flight.
“There is an old tradition in some lands—doubtless it has some counterpart in all lands, though unfortunate cultural divergence through geographic separation may obscure this at first glance—of people, particularly children, celebrating various festivals by playing the game of bobbing for apples. This involves attempting to remove a floating apple from a tub of water using only the mouth, with the hands remaining behind the back.
Now if one were to ask a child engaged in this pursuit ‘what are you trying to do?’, they might reply ‘I want to get an apple’. Yet though this answer may appear to be superficially accurate, a literal examination of it shows that it is nonsense: if the child simply wanted an apple, then why does he not use his hands to grab it? It is not just about getting an apple, it is about the act of playing the game. The actual prize is minor to the child’s interest; it is the process in which his interest lies, from which he derives enjoyment.
Now consider the number of rulers in human history who have justified their wars by saying that they are ultimately seeking a lasting peace. They, too, are playing the game, and the prize is merely an excuse to play the game. Picture them bobbing not for apples, but for olive branches floating in a tub.
A tub filled not with water, but with blood…”
– The Societist Primer, 1879;
compiled from several speeches and pamphlets by Pablo Sanchez
compiled from several speeches and pamphlets by Pablo Sanchez
*
From – “Sharper Sticks: A History of Advancement in Warfare” by William Peter Courtenay, 5th Baron Congleton, 1952 –
If the early nineteenth century was noted for its rapid technological innovation in the field of war, the mid-nineteenth century was a time in which those innovations (together with more recent ones) began to be applied in a way that genuinely increased military power across the board. When M. Cugnot’s steam innovations had first shocked Europe, an objective cost-benefit analysis would show that under most circumstances they were inferior to the established methods of towing artillery: horses when speed was required, oxen when endurance was preferred. Steam tractors required a supply of coal, which complicated the supply train situation, whereas animals could usually live off the land with only occasional supplements. There were also far more people around who knew how to ‘maintain’ a horse than trained engineers capable of keeping a steam engine in fine condition and repairing it when it failed. Indeed, without the actions of a few individuals, the steam engine in warfare might have remained nothing more than a curiosity for years.
The genius of General Pierre Boulanger changed this. Before the Battle of Lille in 1795, the French Latin Republic—still fledgeling and fragile—seemed about to fall to the armies of Emperor Ferdinand IV’s Holy Roman alliance. The revolutionaries would be executed, the monarchy would be restored and the whole affair would be written off as just the latest in the long list of fruitless French jacqueries and rebellions against the ancien régime. It matters not that small men in our own time produce statistical analyses ‘proving’ that the French would have beaten the German alliance regardless of what happened at Lille. What matters is how the battle was perceived at the time. Before, disaster and despair; after, glory and triumph. And at the centre of it all, the steam engine.
Boulanger realised that in 1795, as noted above, steam tractors were more of a curiosity than a genuine replacement for traditional artillery transport methods. There were a few situations in which M. Cugnot’s invention outperformed animals, particularly when artillery needed to be transported up a long continuous slope, but generally they were not worth the expense that the ancien régime had invested in them in its dying days. They could easily have been portrayed by Robespierre and the National Legislative Assembly as another Versailles, another frivolous waste of the wealth of France that truly belonged to the people. Yet they had one advantage: they were novel, alien, unknown. The ordinary soldier in one of the German armies had never seen anything like them, and thus men who would stand fast in the face of ten times the number of horse-drawn galloper guns would quiver and break when Boulanger sent in his ‘unnatural’ Cugnot guns, gliding forward slowly and steadily like a spectre. Indeed, some reports at the time (though possibly exaggerated by Jacobin propagandists) spoke of superstitious German soldiers believing that the Cugnot guns were pulled by ghost horses, and that Charlemagne had awoken to defend France and sent spectral armies ahead of him.
Much the same tactic was used, both by Boulanger and his imitators, concerning artillery rockets and to a lesser extent observation balloons. Rockets were inferior in the damage they could do compared to standard cannon, but their sheer unfamiliarity—as well as the unpredictable way the rockets arced across a battlefield while shrieking inhumanly, in contrast to the orderly geometric arcs of cannonballs—also panicked otherwise experienced troops. Balloons were genuinely useful for observations, but the French found that the mere presence of a balloon could intimidate an enemy army even if there was nobody actually in it. While Jacobin French tactics relied on conscription and the mass march[1] by troops with only cursory training, generals did find it useful to ensure their own troops had trained in the sight of all the new revolutionary weapons, so that they were calm with their presence on the battlefield. The weapons thus granted the French a considerable advantage, yet in a curiously indirect way: mostly, they were simply a tool to reduce enemy morale and organisation below French levels and then have the two armies fight it out using mostly conventional infantry tactics. Yet this was enough, and led of course to Jean de Lisieux proclaiming that La Vapeur est Républicaine and further time, effort and funds being expended on improving the weapons.
Many, though by no means all, nations copied the French innovations during the War of the Nations and the Watchful Peace. Once again, it was not so much that one Cugnot gun could counter another any more effectively than a horse-drawn gun could, but simply the presence of those weapons within one’s own army served to calm and reassure soldiers and view their French counterparts as less alien and intimidating. They were no longer the unknown. At this point, the nations could quite easily have collectively dropped the weapons as the advantage was gone, but inertia kept their use and research going at a low level, and of course there would always be technologically inferior opponents that the Boulanger tactics would still work on.
Lisieux himself found steam-driven armoured wagons, the Tortue, to be a useful crowd-suppression tool. They were occasionally used on the battlefield, most famously at the Battle of Paris in 1809, but did not excel in this role: they were too slow and vulnerable. Their armour could easily repel brickbats and blades and absorb a limited number of musket balls, but could sometimes be penetrated by rifle bullets and was no defence against cannonballs. A modern army could therefore easily neutralise a Tortue except under very specific circumstances (such as concealing the Tortues and then revealing them in a short-range ambush) but they remained useful against disorganised urban rebels who lacked such heavy weaponry. It would be decades before the invention of the Devil Brew,[2] the apparently obvious weapon that could render Tortue-type vehicles vulnerable even to rebels lacking much in the way of combat resources. This may seem peculiar to modern eyes, but it is worth remembering that naphtha and other fuels were not in common everyday use in this period.
Steam had also made its mark at sea, but in a very specific way. Military thinking post-war, derived from the French developments under Surcouf, considered there to be a strict division between oceanic and riverine navies.[3] Before steam, sail was the primary means of propulsion for oceanic ships and oarsmen (usually enslaved) for riverine ships such as galleys. The division was not as clear as this brief description implies, with many riverine-intended ships also using sail, but the overall point stands. Surcouf’s steamships were dubbed ‘steam-galleys’ as in many ways they resembled the old galleys, but with steam engines instead of oars—opening up the flanks of the ship for use in housing additional weapons and other items, rather than being limited to bow guns only like traditional galleys. The steam-galleys were innovative, being a genuine force-multiplier even in their own time unlike the more ‘novelty shock value’ aspects of the landborne steam tractors, and were much-copied. The deployment of rockets rather than (or in addition to) cannon on some steam-galleys proved that the shock value tactics could also be combined with the more practical innovation of the engine. Steam-galleys proved vital in later conflicts in the Mediterranean and the Baltic Seas. Steam-engined barges were also used extensively on rivers for civilian traffic and logistic support in time of war, and late in the Popular Wars experiments began with deploying combat versions of such vessels. These would prove to have only limited applicability until they were married to armourclad protection late in the Democratic Experiment era, the craft which would eventually be named ironpikes.[4]
However, naval authorities remained stubbornly resistant to the use of steam in oceanic navies. Many ostensible reasons for this are recorded in studies at the time, but behind all of them was a simple conservative traditionalism. Sail was not merely a means of propulsion to most navies at the time, it was a part of the very fabric of their being (no pun intended). It was difficult, and rather alarming, for most admirals to imagine a navy in which young midshipmen no longer had to learn a wide variety of knots and the complexities of the ropes that required them, where the names for all the multitudinous varieties of sails were relegated to the history books as an obsolete footnote. The distinction was thus preserved. Navies did use steam on the high seas, but only in the form of employing steam tugs to tow their ships of the line in order to gain an advantage against the wind, or when there was calm. Most of the time the tugs would rather inefficiently be towed behind the sailships instead, or in the case of the more compact models even hoisted aboard. Such tactics were used extensively in the Atlantic battles of the Popular Wars, but remained limited in scope. It would not be until the first armourclads that steam engines were finally used regularly as part of the propulsion system on mainstream warships—though tellingly, they were officially and insistently referred to as ‘integrated tug systems’. The conservatism intrinsic to the navies meant that early armourclads such as France’s Spartacus and America’s Lord Washington bore more resemblance to their forefathers than their descendants, with extensive masts (though forged of steel) and fully rigged with sail. It would not be until the end of the 1860s that, in part simply due to the older generations retiring or dying off, that navies would finally, reluctantly, let go of even an auxiliary sailing rig for their vessels. Perhaps ironically this came in the middle of the Long Peace, and thus the apparently dramatic moment of the ancient sail technology finally dying its death came not with a shout, but with a sigh. The transitional ships may only occasionally be glimpsed in combat by the student of naval military history, and remained largely an untested unknown when the Long Peace finally came to an end with the Pandoric War in 1896.
But this is to get ahead of ourselves. By the end of the Democratic Experiment, steam technology had matured to the point where it had finally become a genuine step forward for militaries and was no longer a toy. To a lesser extent the same was true of rockets, which could now be relied upon to at least vaguely hit what they were aimed at. And of course, as one technological advantage came to the fore, another to counter it would be created. Many such countermeasures were produced by military researchers in the Hapsburg Kingdom of Italy and eventually, via cross-pollination, in Danubia.[5] Both states faced a generally technologically superior opposition, from France and Saxony respectively, and unable to always match them one-on-one, unorthodox ideas were conceived to counter the technologies from a disadvantaged starting position. This is arguably the first coherently theorised example of Davidian warfare.[6] Probably the most celebrated aspect of this consists of then-Major Antonio Rizzi’s development of the first antidrome weapons in history.[7] We should be careful not to exaggerate the impact of the first steerables on warfare: popular history tends to focus on Lord Byron’s spectacular attack on Strasbourg (then Strassburg) in 1830, but this was a single exceptional incident and there are no other unambiguous records of steerables becoming directly involved in conflict in the Popular Wars.[8] Byron had particularly favourable conditions: usually the rather primitive propulsion of the steerables meant they were unable to fight against the wind in a sufficiently controlled way. For the most part, steerables were merely used for reconnaissance, as their tethered balloon ancestors had been for years, and sometimes for dropping men or supplies behind enemy lines for secret missions. Nonetheless this rendered them a significant threat, and Major Rizzi was tasked with developing a countermeasure.
Italy’s own steerable programme was at an early stage and the idea of fighting a war in the air between steerables was unworkable (not that it has stopped a certain film adaptation of Byron’s life from portraying such a battle…) Rizzi thus developed ground-to-air weapons capable of downing a steerable. He explored several avenues, including the use of rockets and most famously the ‘star shot’, a modified version of the well-established hail shot shell in which sharp metal fragments were used instead of balls, and magnesium was added to illuminate the enemy craft as the shell exploded. The star shot was an iconic weapon of the Nightmare War, but came with a host of disadvantages—the fragments raining down could easily hurt friendly troops or civilians on the ground, and if the shell missed it could also arc down and strike an undesired target. It would not be the star shot or the rockets that became the lasting innovation of Major Rizzi’s work, but the far more ‘boring’ and conventional ‘Vespa’ one-pounder heavy rifle (or light artillery, depending on one’s perspective). The Vespa had a swivel mount and could be mounted atop a steam carriage or even a horse-drawn one for rapid movement around a battlefield. A refined version proved to be the most effective of Rizzi’s weapons and was swiftly copied by other countries throughout the 1840s.[9]
Despite the adoption of this weapon, research into steerables continued at a fast pace. The experiences of the Nightmare War in particular had shown that modern artillery could easily turn a battle into a miserable stalemate in which the old infantry tactics rarely led to a breakthrough, and only at an unacceptable cost of life.[10] A means of neutralising that artillery was therefore a high priority, and improved steerables seemed like a logical choice. Many theorists talked of heavier-than-air aircraft that could fly like birds, but they were shouted down as lunatics. Barring a few extremely debatable experiments in the Democratic Experiment era, true aerodromes would not come about until the late 1880s.[11] In the short term, a more realistic answer was to improve artillery’s accuracy and fire control so that enemy artillery could be silenced by one’s own. Obviously this led to a considerable arms race in terms of both technology and training. Applying these tactics to landborne artillery was tricky enough that two roughly equivalent national armies could stay competitive, and sometimes it would come down to the tactical ability of their generals. By sea, however, these superior fire control methods meant that wooden ships could be targeted and neutralised practically as soon as they were spotted, with modern breechloading rifled cannon easily blasting through ships of the line that had been capable of absorbing considerable punishment from older smoothbore cannon. Explicitly short-ranged weapons such as carronades became increasingly useless except in ambush situations. For a period in the Democratic Experiment and Great American War, naval conflict fitted the sardonic description of the Scandinavian Admiral Ulf Clemmensen: “We used to fight duels with swords. Now we fight duels with pistols”. No longer a lengthy give-and-take conflict at short range in which two opponents could inflict blows on one another before one emerged victorious—it simply came down to who could ‘draw and fire’ first. With such experiences being ubiquitous in the Great American War, it is no surprise that even conservative navies were hasty to drop wooden ship construction on focus on replicating the rare armourclad ships. Particularly memorable was the incident at the Battle of Lac Borgne where the armourclad Périclès withstood repeated rifled cannon attacks from the Concordat forces, the formerly potent weapons bouncing impotently off the armour. Of course, it did not take a tactical genius to realise that when armourclads became universal, they would then have the opposite problem: ships’ armour would now be stronger than their weapons. But that was a problem for another day.
Railways were another important innovation of this period, but—for the most part—most nations viewed their only relevance to warfare as being a means of logistical resupply to a front, and another internal artery to be neutralised if it was in danger of falling into enemy hands. Few realised that railways could play a more direct role in war, but that was about to change.
Finally, we should of course examine infantry and cavalry. During the Watchful Peace, France had focused on applying its existing innovations more effectively rather than developing new ones—partly for political reasons, certainly, but nonetheless a significant shift. Rather than simply equipping troops with rifles and then using the same tactics, for example, new tactics were developed to better fit an all-rifle army. Similar conclusions were independently reached by the Saxons, and would be further developed at the new Kriegsakademie built in Berlin after the Popular Wars. Regiments were also reorganised according to the principle of interchangeability, the idea that (in the words of the French Marshal Richelieu) one infantry regiment should be able to do the same job as any other infantry regiment, simplifying logistics and planning considerably. Of course this came with its own disadvantages, which would become more obvious during the Great American War.
Aside from sail, cavalry was probably the biggest loser to the innovations of the nineteenth century. Certainly it had by no means become obsolete by the start of the Great American War in c. 1849 (depending on what definition of that conflict one uses) but it no longer had the primary role it had once enjoyed in European conflicts. Cavalry could still be a useful rapid reaction force either to ambush unsuspecting infantry or capture artillery trains. Many nations increasingly deployed their cavalry regiments abroad for colonial projects, horses being particularly useful in areas such as southern Africa and Antipodea where the natives had never seen them before—thus, in an ironic full circle, horses possessed the ‘novelty shock value’ of the steam tractors that had replaced them. One problematic point about considering the decline of cavalry, as made by S. S. Janson in The Fall of the Horse, is that it came at the same time as the decline of the nobility’s power in Europe. Given the association of the nobility with cavalry, reinforced by the divide of the Jacobin Wars in which the Jacobins always struggled with obtaining enough trained cavalrymen, it may be difficult to separate the decline of cavalry due to technological change with the decline of cavalry due to social change. But that question lies beyond the scope of this work…
[1] Human wave attack.
[2] Molotov cocktail.
[3] “Blue-water” and “White-water/brown-water” respectively. The name riverine is a bit inappropriate, as it includes environments like the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas.
[4] ‘Monitors’ in OTL.
[5] Courtenay is being a little anachronistic in his choice of naming terminology here, aided and abetted by the fact that nobody, then or now, is quite sure what to call the Austrian Hapsburg state in the years of Francis II’s reign.
[6] We would say ‘asymmetric warfare’. The TTL term is an obvious Biblical reference to David and Goliath.
[7] Antidrome = anti-air. This is also an anachronistic term; it would not come into common use for decades yet.
[8] See Part #132. Recall that ‘steerable’ is the TTL term for an airship, meaning the same as ‘dirigible’ in French.
[9] The Vespa is similar to OTL’s Ballonabwehrkanone, produced by Gustav Krupp in 1870 to shoot down French balloons trying to resupply Paris while it was besieged.
[10] This may sound reminiscent of WW1, but it is actually more like the bloodier battles of the American Civil War in OTL in its character.
[11] Aerodrome is the TTL name for aeroplane—it was briefly used in this sense in OTL as well before being re-applied to mean the aeroplanes’ base instead. There were actually experiments in heavier-than-air flight in the 1840s in OTL as well, in particular the Aerial Steam Carriage by William Samuel Henson, John Stringfellow and others in 1842. They were unable to get a human-sized version off the ground due to the steam engine being too heavy for its power, but did produce a scaled-down model capable of brief powered flight.
I can just think how bored someone from TLL would be with our way names. 'World War One and World War Two?' they'd grumble, 'You had a decent name for the first one with the Great War or the the War to End All Wars. And why not call the latter something relevant, like the Genocide War or something?'
And excellent update though. Far better than my tongue tied efforts to discuss military technology.
And excellent update though. Far better than my tongue tied efforts to discuss military technology.
- Status