Synopsis

War in the 18th century was a bloody business. A line of infantry would slowly march, to the beat of a drum, into a hail of enemy fire. Whole ranks would be wiped out by cannon fire and musketry. Today we marvel at the courage of those who plodded slowly and remorselessly into the maelstrom. How did they come to do it, and why?

The scope of Christopher Duffy’s investigation is wide. The brutalities of the battlefield naturally assume a central place, but he also traces the lives of the officer and the soldier from the formative conditions of their earliest years to their violent deaths or retirement, and shows that, below their well-ordered exteriors, the armies of the Age of Reason underwent a revolutionary change from medieval to modern structures and ways of thinking.
 

ISBN 1-85326-690-6