War: A History in 100 Battles. Richard Overy

the next decades Turkish rule was driven back in Hungary and Transylvania. The Habsburg–Ottoman war was finally ended with the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699. On 25 December 1683 in Belgrade, Kara Mustafa Pasha was ritually strangled with a silk rope. John III Sobieski died in 1696, Poland’s most famous king and military commander.

       10. BATTLE OF VALMY

       20 September 1792

      The Battle of Valmy is commonly regarded as the battle that saved the French Revolution. Three years after the overthrow of France’s absolute monarchy in summer 1789, large Austrian and Prussian armies were advancing on Paris to eradicate the revolutionary regime and restore the old social order. The Prussians were met by an army of French levies raised, they were told, to save the new nation and the liberty of its people. In truth the battle was little more than a modest exchange of fire, but the Prussians withdrew and Paris was saved. The revolution entered its more radical phase, and four months later the French king, Louis XVI, was executed.

      The horror stories spread abroad by émigré Frenchmen of the violence and depravity of the revolutionary leaders and the mobs they led fuelled the ambition of the crowned heads of Europe to try to extinguish the new system before its seditious infection touched them, too. An army of around 30,000 was gathered together by the Prussian King, Frederick William II, under the command of the Duke of Brunswick, widely regarded as one of the finest commanders in Europe. Alongside some 32,000 Austrians to the north and the south, the Prussian army moved forwards through Luxembourg and eastern France in August and early September, capturing one city after another to reach and cross the River Meuse. In Paris, the fright of invasion sped up the search for counter-revolutionary suspects and the subsequent September Massacres accounted for more than 1,000 grisly deaths, among them priests, aristocrats and a much larger number of common prisoners who were an easy target, but largely guiltless.

      The main French force, commanded by General Charles-François Dumouriez, arrived to the west of the river to occupy a ridge of hills and strongpoints. Dumouriez told the minister of war that he would defend to the death, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, but the first strongpoints soon fell to determined Prussian and Austrian attack. Dumouriez retreated south, where he was joined by 10,600 men under General Pierre de Beurnonville and 16,000 troops brought from Metz by General François-Christophe Kellermann. Brunswick was confident that his well-trained Prussians would sweep aside what he regarded as a revolutionary rabble, but his 30,000 soldiers were now faced by as many as 36,000 French, with 28,000 in reserve some distance away, a half-and-half mixture of veterans from the armed forces of the king and new National Guard levies raised to defend the revolution. Although discipline was lax, and the reliability of former royal officers unpredictable, it was commitment to the new national cause, rather than military spit-and-polish, that shaped the force, just as it had encouraged Washington’s irregulars in America a decade before.

      The Prussian king, travelling with Brunswick, insisted that the French would continue to retreat and encouraged him to move forward to cut off their line of escape and destroy them. On the night of 19 September, the Prussians prepared to march. At 6 a.m., the advance guard moved forward through thick rain and fog until, to their consternation, they were shelled by Kellermann’s invisible artillery, drawn up on the slopes of Mont Yron, around which Dumouriez had placed his guns and long lines of infantry, a total front-line force of 36,000 men. The artillery was manned by the old regular army and was regarded as among the most proficient in Europe. The Prussians continued to move forward, more hesitantly now until they had captured the first French guns at the inn of La Lune, where the king and his staff could also shelter. Brunswick then drew up his army in battle array opposite the hills and the village of Valmy, the artillery lined up in front of the 34,000 soldiers he had brought this far. What he lacked was a clear operational plan.

      Only when the fog lifted at noon could the Prussians see, not a revolutionary mob, but line upon line of uniformed and disciplined soldiers, well-established at the summit of an awkward slope. He ordered his infantry to form columns and advance against the French line. It was at this moment that Kellermann rose to his role as commander of the revolutionary troops. He stood up in the saddle, placed his hat with its red-white-and-blue cockade on the end of his sword, and, raising it on high, called out ‘Vive la Nation!’ It was the first battle-cry of a new age of national wars. His troops echoed back with cries of ‘Vive la Nation!’ and ‘Vive la France!’ and prepared to fight the Prussians singing the new revolutionary anthem, La Marseillaise. This was war for a modern cause, not to satisfy dynastic ambition.

      The story of Kellermann’s rallying call may have become embellished in the telling, but all witnesses recall it. Whether it was this that perturbed Brunswick, or simply the growing evidence that he was greatly outnumbered by men who could, after all, fight effectively, he hurriedly recalled the columns. An artillery duel continued until dusk when torrential rain brought the desultory conflict to an end. Though no real battle had occurred (300 French casualties, 184 Prussian), Valmy was treated as the first major victory of the revolution. The next day, the monarchy was abolished and the First French Republic proclaimed. Brunswick and Frederick William prudently withdrew back to the Rhineland, leaving the French free to deploy an impressive total of around 450,000 men for adventures in Savoy and Belgium. There were to be more than twenty years of war before the disruptive effects of the new revolutionary order were tempered by defeat and the restoration of a monarchy. The Prussian Carl von Clausewitz, in his reflections On War, saw the revolutionary victory as the start of a new age, in which war became the business of the whole body of citizens: ‘nothing,’ he wrote, ‘now impeded the vigour with which war could be waged.’ Kellermann could not know that his flamboyant gesture, enough to turn the cautious Prussians back, would open the way to total war.

       11. BATTLE OF TRAFALGAR

       21 October 1805

      Any visitor to London standing in Trafalgar Square and gazing up at the tall column at its centre may well wonder why the British named such a prominent landmark after a small southern Spanish cape, lapped by the cool Atlantic on the Costa de la Luz. The column supports the slender statue of Admiral Horatio Nelson, almost certainly Britain’s most famous sailor, whose smaller fleet defeated a large Franco-Spanish naval force in a bitter day-long engagement in 1805, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. Even more remarkable for a battle in which leadership played a critical part, Nelson himself was mortally wounded early in the fight and died before it was over.

      The battle was in many ways accidental. In the summer of 1805, Napoleon planned the invasion of England across the Channel from Boulogne and Calais. A large army gathered there, but by August it still lacked the naval superiority necessary to give invasion any chance of success. An alliance with Spain earlier in the year might have given Napoleon the large naval force that he needed, but the British naval blockade kept the Franco-Spanish forces divided. When Napoleon ordered Vice Admiral Pierre Villeneuve to gather a fleet together from the scattered units, the best that could be achieved was the safety of the Spanish port of Ferrol and, later, Cádiz. Napoleon flew into a rage at the apparent timidity of his naval commander – ‘What a navy! What an admiral! What useless sacrifices!’ – but the truth was that French and Spanish ships were not fully prepared for combat, many lacking trained men, or in some cases even men who had been to sea. Villeneuve knew that command of the British fleet sent to prevent an invasion force from gathering had been given to Nelson, victor at the battles of the Nile in 1798 and Copenhagen in 1801. Nelson’s reputation preceded him: a shrewd tactician and a brave and aggressive admiral. Unsurprisingly, Villeneuve, and the even less enthusiastic Spanish commander, Admiral Federico Gravina, were reluctant to risk a major battle. When a frustrated Napoleon finally abandoned the invasion, he ordered the combined Franco-Spanish fleet to leave Cádiz for Naples, where it could support the French army preparing for war against a new anti-French Coalition. The Spanish commanders objected to risking a fight and even Villeneuve’s own subordinates hoped that battle could be avoided. The French commander