1 - The art of war on land

Summary

By the last decade of the seventeenth century the attitude of influential European opinion towards warfare was undergoing radical change. The intolerance that embittered the wars of religion had largely ebbed away, except in regions exposed to the Ottoman; and although the increasing scope of hostilities led to the ever deeper commitment of available national resources, only the desperate French war effort after 1708, and the Homeric sacrifices borne by the Swedes in their protracted struggle with Russia, looked forward in any way to that patriotic inspiration destined, from 1793, to produce the levée en masse and ‘total’ warfare. Between the eras of religious and national wars the conduct of military operations tended to become ‘limited’, less perhaps in the sense that objectives were restricted to dynastic or commercial ambitions as that the fighting itself was increasingly regarded as a relatively gentlemanly affair governed by firm conventions. In any case, the impact of war on the civilian populations of Europe was still restrained by poor communications, which tended to channel campaigns to certain well-fought-over areas. Although the economic consequences were widely felt, wars varied considerably in the amount of direct misery they inflicted. The Great Northern War earned a reputation for ferocity, whilst in the South-East Turkish atrocities were occasionally avenged by Austrian reprisals. In the West, the two sackings of the Palatinate by the French forces, in 1674 and 1688, and the Allies' ravaging of Bavaria in 1704 are often cited as examples of the horrors of war; but the widespread contemporary outcry about these excesses suggests that they shocked the conscience of the age.