Square (military)
A Karree (from French carré , square) was in the military from the 17th to the 19th century a battle formation of the infantry with a front closed on four sides to defend against cavalry . The square offered effective protection against cavalry attacks, as it had no unprotected flanks and the horses shrank from the mounted bayonets . Your predecessor was the hedgehog of mercenaries . The main weapon of the square was not the firepower of the firearms pointing in all directions, but the density of the huddled soldiers and their bayonets pointing outwards.
The square was either hollow or full ( carré plein ), depending on the size of the inner space, which in the former was used to accommodate cavalry and vehicles, and in the latter the mounted commanders, minstrels, doctors, etc. The squares were usually formed in battalions and released their fire in limb salvos. The first limb fell on the knee while the remaining limbs stood; two or three limbs were the rule. Squares consisting of a battalion (about 1,000 men in full strength, but often significantly fewer during war) were 100 feet or less wide. However, larger squares could be formed from several battalions up to division strength, as was the case in the Battle of the Pyramids .
Shelling by artillery proved to be most effective against infantry units set up in the square , as the dense crowding of the soldiers led to high losses in the event of a hit. Although a square from a battalion was a difficult target for cannons due to its small size, a hit with a cannonball or grapeshot was enough to kill many soldiers and possibly cause panic. Karrees were also extremely susceptible to attacks by other infantry units, as only a small part of the firearms could be used against them. In addition, they were practically immobile and relied on the high morale of the soldiers who make them up.
The heyday of the Karrees were the Napoleonic Wars , z. B. at the Battle of Austerlitz , the Battle of Wagram , the Battle of Nations near Leipzig or the Battle of Waterloo .
With the introduction of breech loading rifles , the square lost its importance and was no longer used by the German infantry in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71. The great attacks of the French cavalry were repulsed in the battles of Wœrth in Alsace and Sedan in rifle lines.
The square celebrated one last great success in the fighting of the British Army during the Mahdi uprising in Sudan. There about 1,500 British in a square formation were able to defeat about 10,000 Mahdists in the battle of Abu Klea on January 17, 1885.
literature
- Gabriel Christoph Benjamin Busch , Handbook of Inventions , Volume 10, Part 2, pp.522f
See also
Individual evidence
- ^ Rory Muir: Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon. Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1998, ISBN 978-0-300-08270-8 , pp. 130f.