obility
fell with the heavily armed cavalry of the nobility. With the
development of the bourgeoisie, infantry and artillery became more and
more the important arms of the service and because of artillery the
trade of war had to create another industrial subdivision, to-wit,
engineering.

The development of firearms proceeded very slowly. Shooting remained
clumsy and small arms were ineffective in spite of many individual
inventions. Three hundred years elapsed before a musket was produced
which sufficed for the arming of a complete infantry. First at the
beginning of the eighteenth century, a musket with a bayonet attached,
which discharged a stone superseded the pike as an infantry weapon.
The infantry of that day was exceedingly unreliable, only kept
together by physical force, composed of the basest elements of
society, frequently made up of men picked up by the press gang and
prisoners of war intermingled with soldiers recruited by the various
princes. The only fighting formation in which these soldiers could be
made to use the new weapon was the linear tactic, which reached its
highest development under Frederick II. The whole infantry of an army
was drawn up in a very long hollow square three files deep and
advanced in battle array en masse. It was usually permitted to one of
the two wings to be a little in advance or a little in the rear. This
helpless body could only advance and keep its formation on perfectly
level ground and then only at a slow marching time (seventy-five steps
to the minute) a change of formation during the fight was impossible
and victory or defeat was determined rapidly at a stroke as soon as
the infantry came under fire.

These helpless lines in the American Revolutionary War came into
collision with the rebel troops, which certainly could not drill but
could shoot so much the better in that they were fighting for their
own interests and therefore did not desert like the enlisted soldiers.
These did not, like the English, deploy in massed bodies on the open
field, but in rapidly moving bodies of sharpshooters in the thick
woods. The organised lines were here powerless and had to contend
against invisible and unapproachable foes. The sharpshooters thereupon
were brought into existence as a part of the army organization--a new
method of fighting arising from a change in the military material.

What the American Revolution began the French completed in the
military realm. To the drilled