American Rifle - Alexander Rose [14]
The downside of this tactic was that much ammunition was wasted—a source of great worry in an era when every pound of lead and ounce of gunpowder had to be transported by horse and wagon at no little expense and danger. Analyzing data from several recent wars, the French found that just one out of every ten thousand cartridges supplied to the army would subsequently hit an enemy. A Prussian military writer claimed that a soldier using a musket required his own weight in lead to put a single man out of action. A widely accepted rule of thumb, however, held that it actually took seven times that. Sir Richard Henegan, who witnessed the fighting in the Peninsular War against Napoleon, calculated that an infantryman needed to fire 459 shots in order to hit an enemy.91 Using Henegan’s figure, a skilled musketman who fired five shots a minute, and who often had just five minutes of firing time before a charge, could participate in up to nineteen battles before he actually killed a man using his firearm.
That sobering fact mattered little to commanders of the time. Battles were mostly won not with muskets—firepower served as a kind of appetizer for the main course—but by soldiers’ obedience to orders. Ferocious discipline was key to ensuring simultaneous fire along the line, to preparing to receive a volley, and to mounting an assault. Since the complex maneuvers and clockwork tactics of contemporary warfare hinged on large numbers of men unquestioningly adhering to their officers’ commands, soldiers, from the minute they enlisted, were subjected to tedious drills and exercises designed to extinguish individual thought and initiative. Men who used their own minds were menaces to morale and the mass.
A core assumption among commanders was that men were little more than tamed beasts: they could be trained to perform tricks and whipped into fearful subservience, but in battle they must ultimately be unchained to indulge their bloodlust by ravaging the enemy. That was what bayonets were for. During a battle, once the initial rounds had been loosed, infantry would advance with bayonets fixed and seek to break the enemy. The true test of an army was not how well it fired its weapons at a distance but how lustily it fought hand-to-hand.
The Indian way of warfare was wholly removed from these European tactics. Where the Europeans insisted on decisive clashes of arms in the open field, Indians preferred guerrilla attacks in the woods.
The practice of invisibly lurking with an intent to kill an unsuspecting enemy was integral to Indian fighting. Native American warfare avoided pitched battles in favor of low-level insurgencies that inflicted relatively few casualties but dragged on for years, tiring out nervous settlers, wearying militiamen with constant call-outs, and exhausting government treasuries unable to afford the cost of maintaining a permanent professional force for protection. Europeans naturally became frustrated by the Indians’ refusal to stand and fight.92 Cotton Mather quoted Julius Caesar (representing the forces of civilization, if not of Christianity) on the nomadic Scythians, whom he likened to the maddening Indians: “Difficulius Invenire quam Interficere” (It is harder to find them than to foil them).93
Frontiersmen popularized the term “skulking” to describe the Indian reliance on (in the worried words of William Hubbard) “ambushments, sudden surprises, or overmatching some of our small companies with greater