The column in battle

[Justin Swanton]

how do you figure that from the above debate Justin?

(ed) as in a what do you agree with, and what not / show working sort of way

Just Patrick's observation that a column attacked in both flanks would go down faster than it could react. In Optio charge and melee combat are separate, with a unit having the ability to react to some extent if it survives the charge.

I imagine that hitting a column in the side equates to all the benefits/penalities conferred by a flank attack in the various rules systems.

[Justin Taylor]

The rationale is perhaps that if big chief saith "Turn left" the assembled multitude will indeed turn left, but then spend the rest of the move sorting themselves out, hence the half-speed condition.

Indeed, the early days of basic training are a real scream for anyone watching. I loved the bit in the film Glory where the sergeant taught the recruits their left from their right (and yes it does happen in real life).

I totally agree a column should not be able to; shoot, charge or evade.

[Mark G]

it was more the forming of any column in the heat of battle that I was looking at, Justin.

I think we all agree that once formed, it would be highly vulnerable if caught.

but I don't think its as simple as just saying, oh, well, the (regular) men face to the flank, and that's now a column, and off they go.

That's 19th century drill.

Ancients, especially regulars, required the best men to be at the front.  its therefore arguable that a whole series of evolutions might be necessary in order to get men who know how to lead the way into a position from which to do the leading - and conversely, men who never expect to have to make the decision could easily be the ones suddenly having to work out how to set the pace.

have you considered that aspect at all?

Now, if they are far enough away from any threatening enemy, then it should be pretty routine to go through that (although I would expect a 'full move' to do it, unlike some rules which have it happening quite quickly.)

But to do so when there was an enemy near ?  I think that's back into the same DBMM position which this thread started on - something that might look neat on the table, but is just wrong.

Once you get into a tactical distance, wheeling (or turning, if you prefer) seems the only way to ensure that the men you need at the front (and back) remain there.

anything else is forming a route march column - which they just would not do near the enemy.

[Justin Taylor]

have you considered that aspect at all?

Absolutely but mostly discounted it. For instance I am not a fan of the standard being in the front rank theory, standards being important things and you don't want to risk losing them. So I favour a nice sensible position.

I hope that shows you where I am coming from.

As to changing formation, yes that allowed in TDIC and therefore changing into a column is no different from changing into a line - and therefore takes time which might be more usefully spent doing other things. I suppose a game of TDIC takes 8-10 turns so you don't have time to waste (one move forming column, so you can move the next turn and another move taken coming of column so you can fight!). As to stopping players from doing silly things, well the first thing you realise is that you never can, then you go through the phase of saying is there any silly thing I should stop them doing at all and then you get to the final stage of, let them do it, they will learn, its not as if anyone is going to die. Bearing in mind, any rule you write is something people have to read and then apply to their games, so the simpler a set of rules are the better. Motto is, only write what you have to.

Now as to history, if Sumerians can approach in column, turn to the flank to form line of battle then I reckon that anyone should be able to do so. I will leave it to them to sort out how their officers get to the right place. I am sure they were happy with the solution.

[Patrick Waterson]

but I don't think its as simple as just saying, oh, well, the (regular) men face to the flank, and that's now a column, and off they go.

That's 19th century drill.

Ancients, especially regulars, required the best men to be at the front.

Classical armies manoeuvred by subunits.  What this means us that if you want a line of, say, ten maniples to shift themselves elsewhere, it happens as follows:

1) Each maniple pivots 90 degrees on the spot, around the standard(s) in the middle of the maniple.  This incidentally seems to be why the Roman maniple had a 'prior' and 'posterior' century: when the maniple pivots, one goes in one direction and the other about-faces and goes in the opposite direction.  It approximately halves the time spent on the manoeuvre, even adding in two about-turns for the posterior century.

2) Each maniple is now facing in the direction of desired travel, in a chain one behind the other.  Note that as far as each maniple is concerned all the people are in the right places.  Leaders are at the front, optios closing up the rear, standards in the middle.

3) The signal is given and they move off.  The foremost maniple leads and the others follow in its track.

4) Arriving in the right general location, the procedure in 1) above is reversed, so all maniples are now lined up side by side.

5) The line now moves to close with the enemy.

This is not 19th century drill; that had not yet been invented.  It is classical drill, Roman-style - like most worthwhile things, simple if you know how but effectively impossible if you do not.  The men do not left-face or right-face, each subunit pivots independently so that all assume the new orientation.

Justin (T), if each turn in TDIC is nearer 20 minutes than 2 minutes, you might even consider letting a line form a column and move off, or a column move and reface to form a line, in the same turn.  This is just a suggestion as TDIC is your system.

[Justin Taylor]

Absolutely, if you had 2 minutes per move then a) you would have to have a lot of moves in a game (around 10 rounds of combat before a Roman line was replaced?) b) you would find game time running a lot slower than real time (so you would have to plan a couple of days to fight your battle).

But the time delay in forming column/line adds an appropriate penalty to doing it in a game - so discourages it being done lightly. I am sure you know the old army saying, "Hurry up and wait." which means you spend a lot of time rushing to get something done and then hang around waiting for the next instruction!

I am very impressed at your proposed drill manoeuvre, as thats far more complex than anything I ever learned.

[Mark G]

absolutely right Pat, which is why maniples would never face to flank and march off laterally.

yet that's where this debate seems to have headed.

we can debate whether this was by posterior treading backwards or not, or by a more traditional wheel type turn - it largely depends on whether you think they formed a continuous line of paired centuries or not.

but the details of that matter not when its ignored in favour of allowing another 19th century style 90 degree turn - which appears to be free or with minimal penalty - and off you go.

the only rationale so far seems to be to ensure that units are hyper manoeuvrable, which is entirely missing the point.  They were not, they basically formed up at a safe distance, and marched forward to attack - which is exactly what the Sumerians did - using march columns at a safe distance from the enemy, forming line of battle, and moving to engagement distance.

quite wrong to interpret that as a tactical movement.  so why do it?

[Patrick Waterson]

Absolutely, if you had 2 minutes per move then a) you would have to have a lot of moves in a game (around 10 rounds of combat before a Roman line was replaced?) b) you would find game time running a lot slower than real time (so you would have to plan a couple of days to fight your battle).

Roman line replacement probably only took a couple of minutes.  What seems to have been involved (judging by obiter dictu comments like Livy's retro cedentes in VIII.8 and Polybius' epi poda in II.33 plus a lack of references to maniples performing any sort of manoeuvre during line relief) was simply the files of hastati backing through the files of principes, which means eight men have to shuffle backwards between eight men on either side.  Even at one pace per second, which is pretty slow time, the whole business can be done in a less than half a minute (including the hastati getting clear and lining up behind the corresponding files of principes).

Add thirty seconds or so from the giving of the signal for the principes line to throw its pila over the hastati into the midst of the enemy and then draw swords, moving up so that each file of principes was positioned to be between two files of hastati, and the whole manoeuvre could be done in a minute with two signals: one which instructs the principes to hurl their pila and position themselves (and alerts the hastati that relief is imminent) and the other, given as soon as the principes are poised in position, to instruct the hastati to start backing away.

But the time delay in forming column/line adds an appropriate penalty to doing it in a game - so discourages it being done lightly. I am sure you know the old army saying, "Hurry up and wait." which means you spend a lot of time rushing to get something done and then hang around waiting for the next instruction!

I know it only too well.    But try that on a classical battlefield and you end up on the losing side pretty quickly - these people did not just drill for training, esprit de corps and ceremonial purposes; to them it was life and death, just as a good fire plan is today.

the only rationale so far seems to be to ensure that units are hyper manoeuvrable, which is entirely missing the point.  They were not, they basically formed up at a safe distance, and marched forward to attack - which is exactly what the Sumerians did - using march columns at a safe distance from the enemy, forming line of battle, and moving to engagement distance.

quite wrong to interpret that as a tactical movement.  so why do it?

These were not 'march columns' in the sense of a getting an army from A to B: these were battlefield manoeuvre formations.  Whether the movements they undertook would be termed tactical or operational is largely a matter of how one views the perspective of the battlefield.  What matters is that they took place: Cynoscephalae and Cannae both show movement to envelop the enemy rear, and the only way troops could have moved with expedition within the time frame involved would be as a chain of subunits such as we might call a 'column'.

Turning a maniple through 90 degrees on its centre has several advantages over trying to wheel one on its right or left marker, the two main ones being a saving in time and the retention of the correct interval between standards thus enabling immediate reassembly as a line when turning each subunit to face the enemy.

It is also worth remembering that such 'columnar' manoeuvres would not be undertaken unless any enemy troops within interfering distance were tied down.  A 'safe distance' could be comparatively close when nobody is capable of interfering with the manoeuvre - it could be well within what would normally be considered 'engagement distance' (whatever that is).

[Mark G]

It is also worth remembering that such 'columnar' manoeuvres would not be undertaken unless any enemy troops within interfering distance were tied down.  A 'safe distance' could be comparatively close when nobody is capable of interfering with the manoeuvre - it could be well within what would normally be considered 'engagement distance' (whatever that is).

indeed, which takes us back to the quite sensible proposition that such manoeuvres - say anything greater than a simple 45 degrees turn - should be restricted by proximity to the enemy.

[Justin Taylor]

Roman line replacement probably only took a couple of minutes.

Sorry what I was thinking of was the length of time that the Romans would fight before being replaced, at 2 minutes per turn that would be around 10 turns of combat - in the meantime units would of course would be continuing to move around on the battlefield.

So the idea of a 2 minute per turn makes for a very slow game, 20 minutes per turn really get things moving. So Romans; in, fight and then replaced in the next turn.

I know it only too well.    But try that on a classical battlefield and you end up on the losing side pretty quickly - these people did not just drill for training, esprit de corps and ceremonial purposes; to them it was life and death, just as a good fire plan is today.

Its not about the moving, its about the instructions to move - as we have discussed, command and control. You do what you are told and then wait for the next orders. So yes. loads of drill in the Roman army; how to fight, how to set-up camp, no doubt how to manoeuvre. Not bad (in Republican times) for a bunch of farmers. Possibly why the professional legionaries were better, they had more time to learn it all. Of course the British army still likes drill to be smart and snappy - but people don't start off that way.

I can see the order, advance and fight the enemy is going to be fairly simple. Then you start making life more complex. Move forward, stop, wait for someone to decide that the velites have done their work, let them back through the lines, move forward, throw pila, fight and then do a line replacement. No wonder they had a lot to learn

[Patrick Waterson]

It is also worth remembering that such 'columnar' manoeuvres would not be undertaken unless any enemy troops within interfering distance were tied down.  A 'safe distance' could be comparatively close when nobody is capable of interfering with the manoeuvre - it could be well within what would normally be considered 'engagement distance' (whatever that is).

indeed, which takes us back to the quite sensible proposition that such manoeuvres - say anything greater than a simple 45 degrees turn - should be restricted by proximity to the enemy.

Or rather, by the enemy's reactive ability.  Proximity alone is meaningless; it is the ability to interfere that is all-important - and that is a function of whether the enemy has troops uncommitted, not troops nearby.

As an example, doing a 45-degree turn 30 yards away from an opponent able to act will probably get you charged and broken.  Doing an entire Trooping the Colour repertoire 20 yards behind men who are already committed to fighting for their lives puts you in no danger.

Battlefields are dynamic: what you can and cannot safely do is a direct function of initiative and tempo (which are poorly represented in most rules, which is why Alexander's battles are so hard to simulate - Alex was a master of tempo, and always kept inside his opponent's 'command loop' and reactive ability).  What Alex achieved by dynamic positioning and action, Hannibal achieved by dynamic planning: he also planned for a moving battlefield, with relationships changing all the time, and sought to put his own stamp on it by predicting the enemy's manoeuvres and then capping them with his own.  (If the enemy did not oblige, Hannibal was in a bit of a quandary.)

What this brings us to is that a 'safety radius' is dependent not upon distance from the enemy but upon the enemy's degree of freedom to react.  Hold him by the nose and you can do what you like elsewhere. 

Roman line replacement probably only took a couple of minutes.

Sorry what I was thinking of was the length of time that the Romans would fight before being replaced, at 2 minutes per turn that would be around 10 turns of combat - in the meantime units would of course would be continuing to move around on the battlefield.

So the idea of a 2 minute per turn makes for a very slow game, 20 minutes per turn really get things moving. So Romans; in, fight and then replaced in the next turn.

I know it only too well.    But try that on a classical battlefield and you end up on the losing side pretty quickly - these people did not just drill for training, esprit de corps and ceremonial purposes; to them it was life and death, just as a good fire plan is today.

Its not about the moving, its about the instructions to move - as we have discussed, command and control. You do what you are told and then wait for the next orders. So yes. loads of drill in the Roman army; how to fight, how to set-up camp, no doubt how to manoeuvre. Not bad (in Republican times) for a bunch of farmers. Possibly why the professional legionaries were better, they had more time to learn it all. Of course the British army still likes drill to be smart and snappy - but people don't start off that way.

I can see the order, advance and fight the enemy is going to be fairly simple. Then you start making life more complex. Move forward, stop, wait for someone to decide that the velites have done their work, let them back through the lines, move forward, throw pila, fight and then do a line replacement. No wonder they had a lot to learn

I see what you meant.  It may however be better to drop the idea of Romans or Greeks as 'a bunch of farmers' and start thinking of them instead as Territorials who get regular (usually annual) combat deployments in addition to their training.

The Romans were a very systematic people, and put a lot of thought into creating an army that would basically run itself, leaving the consul to tell them where he wanted them to march, when he wanted them to fight, but otherwise having a military machine that could do what it needed to without his input (and given the general level of military talent among Republican consuls this was probably a necessity).  Naturally, the Roman army did not develop in isolation: it learned from its opponents (and got the occasional shock when its opponents learned from it), so over time quite a repertoire built up.

The result was an army that could do several things extremely well, but had embarrassing gaps in other areas.  Fighting against an opponent superior in cavalry was always a problem, though this was by no means unique to the Roman army (Hannibal famously went under at Zama when he tried).  The legion was useless frontally against a phalanx, and found it necessary to resort to cavalry, rough ground and/or elephants in order to crack one.  Fighting in woods was another problem, as the legion was optimised for clear terrain fighting and the careful cooperation between subunits and drill for replacing lines could get truly messed up by fighting amid trees, which also wreaked havoc on the carefully-controlled pila volleys.

While they did have a lot to learn, they came from a society where these things were expected of everyone; the boys would watch the manoeuvres on the Field of Mars every recruitment season, daddy would tell them what he did in the war (or rather in several of them) and they would have a pretty good idea of what to expect when their turn came to don their kit and take their places in the ranks.  Given that they would be training with the men and in the formations in which they would fight, everyone would know what was expected of him when they did march to war: the hardest part to master was probably establishing a camp, and there the Roman habit of 'a place for everything and everything in its place' would mean that they picked up their place in the scheme of things very quickly.

[Erpingham]

Not able to get to the computer for a few days and I see things have moved along.  I think one thing that it flags up for me is the question of how much we need to model process and how much effect.  So we are agreed that forces regular or irregular have ways of forming column and for forming line - they must have because we see them in both states.  Regular drilled troops could do this quickly, irregulars more slowly (or perhaps could move quickly from one organised state to another, as opposed to going from organised, through milling mob to getting back in some semblance of order).  We think that some well drilled experienced troops could risk these evolutions during battle, rather than while forming up, but rarely did.  So, can we manage the whole thing in rules terms with a set of rates of change, with drilled troops able to affect the change without disorder unless obstructed (e.g. by being attacked) while irregulars descend into a disorderly state which takes time to recover from?

One area we haven't particularly tackld yet where one might want to model columns in combat is the hollow square.  Here we do have columns which need to fight to the flank.  Interesting question here about how much moving in column could be done when the enemy were actively threatening but in terms of a game design with a long time period e.g.  1 move per hour as per old WRG, we may wish to tackle it.

[Patrick Waterson]

Are there any historical examples of a hollow square we should consider?

Alexander's deployment at Gaugamela has been likened to a hollow square (or at least rectangle).  His pikes formed the front end of the formation, his Thracians a second line some distance behind, and the 'flanks' were covered by cavalry.  A 'spoiling force' of light infantry and cavalry covered the forward corners.  It would seem that no columns were involved.

Appian has Antiochus III's phalangites forming a hollow square at Magnesia; these formations however were static (or at least seem to have remained static) and appear to have been a defence against cavalry.

Can anyone think of any others, anywhere within the SoA period?

On the rules front, we can with some confidence let drilled troops form a column of subunits and move around on the battlefield (Claudius Nero at the Metaurus in 207 BC is another example that comes to mind), and I think we can allow it to be part of a normal move rather than a change-formation-and-wait exercise because in the examples we have, it seems that troops were only put into this formation when they were intended to move immediately.

Irregular troops are more of an enigma, as we have the effect but not the process.  The effect seems to be that large-scale movements are possible (e.g. the Boii and Tulingi attacking Caesar's flank at Bibracte when he was fighting the Helvetii) but a column of subunits may not have been the means, although one can guess that something akin to it, following the primary chief's retinue in a de facto 'column of contingents' and expanding on both sides to fill out the line of battle, may have occurred.  This would be a less rapid and precise process than that used by regulars, as well as differing in detail, in that a battle line is created by expansion rather than by all the subunits executing a 90-degree turn, so at a certain level of abstraction could just take longer to execute.  If representation is to be any more concrete, then counting as disordered until reassembly is complete seems appropriate.  One does note that at Bibracte Caesar had time to interpose his third line between the incoming flank attackers and his army's flank, which gives us an indication of the comparative speed of the respective systems.

[Erpingham]

Are there any historical examples of a hollow square we should consider?

The one that comes immediately to mind is Arsuf 1191.  IIRC, Smail felt that moving in a box formation was quite common during the crusades.  However, the crusades aren't really my period, so I'm willing to hear that this theory has been swept away by modern scholarship.

[Patrick Waterson]

I have no idea what modern scholarship would attempt to put in its place. 

That is actually a very pertinent observation, because the Crusaders did maintain march discipline despite constant harassment of not just their cavalry/crossbowmen rearguards but also the infantry forming the 'flank' component of the marching force.  This infantry would have to have been moving in something very closely resembling what we understand as a column.

The standard Frankish (i.e. Crusader) procedure, as I understand it, was to have couple of files of spearmen with large shields on the side of the column facing the likely direction of attack (if marching along the coast this direction was inland) and two or more files of crossbowmen marching adjacent to them on the side away from the direction of attack.  Upon the appearance of Saracen archers the troops would just keep marching and accept any arrows shot at long range - they would do no damage to men armoured western-fashion (one may remember as early as the First Crusade tales and depictions of Crusaders walking around with a dozen or so arrows sticking out of their armour).  If the Saracen mounted (or foot) bowmen approached closer, a command would be given: the column would halt, the spearmen would kneel facing the enemy, the crossbowmen would loose a volley, reload, see if the enemy wanted more, and if they pulled back then everyone would face the direction of travel and resume their former movement.  At least that is how I think it was supposed to happen ...

Richard is regarded as having perfected this kind of formation and procedure, and he did have detachments of trusted knights riding up and down the column on the inside to make sure no gaps developed and everyone kept at their duties.  Gaps usually appear where different contingents meet, and the troops on the march to Arsuf were deployed by national contingents (or sub-groups of national contingents) but unlike the classical approach, the Crusaders seem to have developed the left-face by individuals rather than the left-pivot by subunits.  This is surmised rather then definite but seems likely.