e tossed on pikes. Nor did war seem then to shock the public
conscience, as it has at last succeeded in doing. The people saw
nothing but dazzling glory in the slaughter of foemen on the stricken
field, in the fanfare of the trumpets and the thunder of the captains
and the shouting. Soldiers, said Luther, founding his opinion on the
canon law, might be in a state of grace, for war was as necessary as
eating, drinking or any other business. Statesmen like Machiavelli and
Bacon were keen for the largest armies {488} possible, as the mainstay
of a nation's power. Only Erasmus was a clear-sighted pacifist, always
declaiming against war and once asserting that he agreed with Cicero in
thinking the most unjust peace preferable to the justest war.
Elsewhere he admitted that wars of self-defence were necessary.

[Sidenote: Arms]

Fire-arms had not fully established their ascendancy in the period of
Frundsberg, or even of Alva. As late as 1596 an English soldier
lamented that his countrymen neglected the bow for the gun.
Halberdiers with pikes were the core of the army. Artillery sometimes
inflicted very little damage, as at Flodden, sometimes considerable, as
at Marignano, where, with the French cavalry, it struck down the till
then almost invincible Swiss infantry. In battle arquebusiers and
musketeers were interspersed with cross-bowmen. Cannon of a large type
gave way to smaller field-guns; even the idea of the machine-gun
emerged in the fifteenth century. The name of them, "organs," was
taken from their appearance with numerous barrels from which as many as
fifty bullets could be discharged at a time. Cannon were transported
to the field on carts. Rifles were invented by a German in 1520, but
not much used. Pistols were first manufactured at Pistoia--whence the
name--about 1540. Bombs were first used in 1588.

The arts of fortification and of siege were improved together, many
ingenious devices being called into being by the technically difficult
war of the Spaniards against the Dutch. Tactics were not so perfect as
they afterwards became and of strategy there was no consistent theory.
Machiavelli, who wrote on the subject, based his ideas on the practice
of Rome and therefore despised fire-arms and preferred infantry to
cavalry. Discipline was severe, and needed to be, notwithstanding
which there were sporadic and often very annoying {489} mutinies.
Punishments were terrible, as in civil life. Blasphemy,