Man’s best friend at the dawn of humanity was not the dog, nor the trusty wheel—it was a poke in the eye, early proof that the “it’s better than a poke in the eye” statement is entirely invalid. Early man’s first hunting tool was the spear. With a spear our distant ancestors had the ability to approach prey and strike it from a distance. While throwing the spear was an option, early humans and Neanderthals did not do this. Instead the spear was held onto, and in that way the hunter didn’t lose his tool by throwing it, and the spear didn’t need to be aerodynamic. The hunter could deliver a sharp poke to the eye and earn him and his tribe a meal.
Eventually, man learned that the spear could be used for more than just hunting; it could also be used to kill other men. Why hunt when you can just kill your neighbors and take their food? Thus was born the sharp pointy stick, lord of the battlefield well into the modern era.
Greeks: Armored Pointy Sticks
Greeks, as far back as 500 BC, developed a fighting style that revolved around the spear. Greek warriors, called hoplites, wore bronze armor and carried stout shields. The hoplites gathered together in a boxy formation called a phalanx and used long spears as their primary weapon. Armored phalanxes that marched together flattened anything that fell before them. They were immune to most missile weapons (as was demonstrated in the Persian invasion of Greece between 499-450 BC).
At Marathon, the Athenian phalanx marched towards a beach where the Persians had just disembarked from their ships. Despite being outnumbered and having virtually no long ranged weapons of their own, the Athenians obliterated the Persian army with only a handful of losses. Persian stones and arrows simply bounced off the fearsome Greeks, and their disorganized slave-armies lacked the training to get past the wall of spikes arrayed before them.
In 480 BC at Thermopylae, now made famous by the Frank Miller comic book and film 300, a heavily outnumbered Spartan army, along with a few allies, held back a truly gargantuan-sized Persian force (though it is unlikely they fought in slow-motion with a CGI backdrop and a wailing guitar as musical accompaniment). Although the Spartans were eventually defeated, they inflicted a great enough wound to the Persian army that within a year the Persians were driven from Greece entirely.
So pleased were the Greeks with their weapon of choice that they turned on one another and decimated the countryside during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. After staving off the Persian Empire, which was larger and wealthier than Greece, the Greeks in turn were invaded by a small kingdom known as Macedonia. King Phillip of Macedonia introduced several new military methods, such as longer spears, to the “Greek” way of warfare, and with them was able to dominate Greece. While Philip’s conquest of Greece is of note, his son Alexander sought to outshine his dad and conquer everything.
Alexander perfected his father’s techniques and used a variation of the typical Greek phalanx. Alexander’s father noticed that the formation of men in a phalanx were all equipped with the same length spears. This meant that the men in the back ranks could not participate in a fight except to push on the backs of the men in front of them to help steamroll over their foes. Philip revised the phalanx by giving the men at the front of the formation shorter spears, about eight feet long, while the men behind them had longer spears, and so on, up to fourteen feet in length! This new system was known as a syntagma. Alexander used the syntagma coupled with his elite cavalry to conquer Greece, Persia, Egypt, and parts of present day Pakistan.
Alexander’s death of sickness in 323 BC plunged his empire into civil war, where once again pointy sticks clashed with one another. When the Roman legions came to Greece, they swept aside the Greek syntagma using close-order tactics and maneuverability to exploit the inability of the syntagma to defend its flanks. While a short sword could easily be moved from side to side, the same wasn’t true of the long spears in the hands of the Greeks.
Middle Ages: A Fast Poke in the Eye
Before the invention of the stirrup, the spear could not be used easily on horseback. A rider had to release the spear moments before it impacted his target, or the force of the weapon’s impact would knock him from his steed.
By 800 AD, the stirrup had been introduced in Europe, courtesy of Asia, and riders were “locked” into the saddle. For the Franks, this meant they could use spears as they were meant to be! The Franks dominated large parts of Europe in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire. The armored nobility devised heavy armor to protect themselves along with a spear built specifically for mounted warfare: the lance.
The lance could be as long as twelve feet, and with the force of a charging horse behind it, could knock aside other armored knights and obliterate unarmored peasant levies. The knights were so fond of the lance that they even developed a practice weapon for mock combat with one another. Jousting remained a popular sport amongst the wealthy until the King of France, Henry II, was accidently killed in a joust when a sliver of wood entered his eye. His death allowed his wife, Catherine Medici, to take control of France and promptly embroil it in a religious civil war, where the words “saint” and “massacre” would be used in the same sentence.
However, the actual value of the mounted knight on the field of combat was called into question well before jousting fell out of favor with the death of the king. Even today, historians note that the popular image of the knight with lance in hand ruling over the battlefields was largely an invention of the nobility.
Renaissance: Rebirth of Sharp Things
Starting around 1400 AD, Europe saw resurgences in art, science and technology. While the Renaissance is famous for beautiful paintings such as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Michelangelo’s painting of the Sistine Chapel, it also brought about a military revolution that looked back to older methods of warfare.
Italian statesman Nicolo Machiavelli is most famous for The Prince, but he also wrote extensively on military theory. Machiavelli was disgusted by the Italian mercenary knights of the 16th century known as condottiere. Machiavelli believed that ancient Roman methods of combat would better suit the people, but the discipline and training necessary to use short swords against mounted, lance-wielding knights was not yet possible.
It was the Swiss who one-upped Machiavelli by revitalizing an even older method of warfare. Swiss mercenaries armed themselves with nearly twenty foot spears known as pikes. The Swiss formed into formations that looked suspiciously like Greek phalanxes, though with more baggy pants, flashy colors, and raucous drinking.
Against the lance armed knights, the Swiss pikemen simply pointed their longer pointy sticks at the charging horses, which had the good sense not to run onto them. The development of portable firearms truly put an end to the knight on the Renaissance battlefield, but the pike put the first nail into the coffin.
The 17th and 18th Century: Gun + Pointy Stick = Win
Pikes were easy to use and train with and were the main weapon of choice during the Renaissance and the major conflicts of the 17th century: the English Civil War and the Thirty Years War. Hordes of men eagerly formed into blocks and collided with one another in Greek fashion across the fields of Europe.
Hans Holbein the Younger sketched such combat which he dubbed “Bad War.” Gunpowder was the up and coming weapon of choice, however. The only real drawback to early firearms, besides their horrendous accuracy, was their slow reloading time which left them vulnerable to attack. Fielding soldiers with the primitive harquebus (which occasionally blew up in the hands of its user) and later the match-lock musket required fielding melee troops to defend them. This made firearms somewhat cost-prohibitive.
By the 1700s, the spear was combined with a more efficient, though still slow to load, firearm known as the flint-lock musket. The musket was already a long-barreled weapon, and it didn’t take a genius to come with the idea of making it both pointy and explosive.
At first, a small blade was affixed directly into the barrel of the musket and could be used similar to a pike. The drawback was that with the blade in place, the musket could not fire, and so a change was made. A lug was affixed to the bottom of the musket’s barrel and there a blade could be snapped into place without plugging up the muzzle. This blade was known as the bayonet, and is still used today.
With the pike and firearm married to one another, the pike-blocks of the Swiss vanished and the nation-state armies fielded primarily musketmen.
The Napoleonic Wars: All Hail the Pointy!
From 1700 to almost 1850, the musket largely remained the same. The weapon had a smooth barrel and imperfectly shaped lead balls as ammunition. This made accuracy dismal at best, and so the tactics of the era revolved around shooting one’s opponent a few times before charging. The idea was that charging with the bayonet affixed would scare the enemy off the field. There was some truth to this; during the Napoleonic Wars, while aggressive marches with fixed bayonets were common, relatively few people were wounded or killed by them. Such was the fear of being gutted by cold steel that troops did all in their power to avoid close-quarters combat. Amazingly, soldiers preferred to stand in line and shoot at one another rather than march down one another’s throats with pointy sticks at the ready.
Napoleon Bonaparte led France in a general conquest of Europe. Napoleon used a variety of techniques, but the bayonet was a key component of his strategy. He once said, “A Revolution is an idea which has found its bayonets.”
While most nations lined their soldiers up, the French mimicked the Greeks and put their men into massive phalanx-like columns. These columns would march, with bayonets affixed, and like a hammer hitting glass, shatter the thin lines of their opponents.
At Waterloo in 1815, Napoleon’s bayonets were trumped by British firing discipline, and though the Emperor was banished from Europe, the bayonet remained the central weapon of choice even when it led to the deaths of millions of men due to its ineffectiveness.
American Civil War and World War I: Pointy Stick Meets Artillery
Although Napoleon was defeated, military strategy in the United States of America and Europe revered him. At West Point, America’s officer training school, budding leaders were taught about Napoleonic drill and tactics. Most of these ideas had a similar trend: close with the opponent quickly and drive him from the field with something sharp and stick-like.
Weapons had changed by 1861. The new rifled muskets could fire five times as far as the old smoothbore muskets and new artillery had shells (thanks to the British-born Henry Shrapnel) that exploded. While the tools of war had changed at the outset of the American Civil War, the tactics had not.
American soldiers, both North and South, generally lined up against one another and attempted to use Napoleonic tactics against Industrial Age weaponry. The results were devastating. Over 600,000 Americans died in the four-year war, more than perished in World War II, fought 81 years later with far more deadly weaponry and with much larger populations.
The American Civil war should have been a clue as to the nature of modern warfare, but Europe clung to its Napoleonic ideals. In 1871 Prussia invaded France and not only won the war, but unified the disparate German kingdoms into a single Imperial Germany.
While the war seemed to go well, in truth the French were just having a bad day and quickly learned from their mistakes. When World War One broke out in 1914 and Germany tried to invade again, French forces dug in at the Marne River and introduced German bayonets to machine-guns, high-explosive artillery and the other horrors of trench warfare.
High Command from every belligerent nation was still a supreme believer in all things pointy and the charges that went with them. From 1914 to 1918 every nation involved in the war in Europe conducted warfare utilizing Napoleonic infantry charges against landmines, flame-throwers, tanks and poison gas. Losses were beyond staggering.
One out of three men in England ended up bearing some form of wound. In France, 60% of its male population was decimated. Similar casualties occurred in Germany, Austria and in Russia, whose losses were so horrendous that the people revolted and established a communist state.
The mindset of the commanders was a difficult one to break. General Haig of Great Britain, for example, once claimed the machine-gun was overrated and could be over-come by grit and determination. When that didn’t work, he simply told the newspapers that the nation had to brace itself for heavy casualties.
At war’s end, twenty million people had died, and to cap off the years of destruction, the Spanish Influenza (which actually appeared in the United States first) wiped out another twenty million in the last year of the war. In 1919, more dead than living travelled as coffins filled the trains of Europe rather than passengers. The bodies piled high enough to convince military leaders to re-think the wisdom of bringing sticks to a gun-fight.
Today: Tradition of the Pointy
The bayonet proved ineffective in the next great conflict: World War Two. Japanese soldiers were fond of using it, but mostly against prisoners who couldn’t go anywhere or shoot back. In combat, even brave Japanese soldiers were unable to bring their shock-tactics to bear. While hand-to-hand combat did occur in World War Two, it was a rare event, and by no means a chosen method of combat as it had been in prior wars.
With the close of WWII, the bayonet remained a part of training drills for soldiers. The practice continues even today. The purpose? Mostly for emergencies, but also out of tradition. Ever since we lived in caves the spear has been with us, and now in a modern era it still remains, albeit in a more ceremonial role.