Counter march
As a counter-march , even Contre march , a method in the firefight with the will firearms equipped part of the infantry in the early modern period referred to. After the shot, the shooters went ( marched ) against (Latin contra ) the direction of attack through gaps between the ranks to reload back behind the formation. The process was used from around the middle of the 16th century and developed into one of the most important forms of fighting for arquebusiers and musketeers up until the 17th century .
In this procedure, the riflemen lined up in rows ( groups ) of about 10 men behind one another, the distance to the neighboring group was almost 2 m. At the beginning of the fight, the men in front of the ranks walked a little forward and fired their arquebuses or muskets . Then they marched back among the ranks, while the second went in sequence to the firing position and everyone else moved up. Then the second lined up in the back and the third fired, and so on. When everyone had fired once, the first shooters normally had enough time to get their muzzle-loaders ready to fire again.
This way of fighting enabled a constant defensive fire and was therefore closely related to the violence of the pikemen (span. Tercio ). Positioned on their flanks, it could offer them good protection against skirmishers and against the " Caracolla " tactics of the cavalry and enormously weaken an opposing slaughterhouse before the collision or put it to flight straight away. As the tactic spread, there was mostly counter-march against counter-march.
In those armies that introduced the Dutch-style meeting tactics around 1600 , the counter-march disappeared along with the violence. But that also means that it was common in other armies well into the Thirty Years' War .
Another form of shooter change is the enfilade . With the same number of riflemen, the order of battle was much narrower when using the enfilade. The counter march could also be used offensively for this. The procedure was practically reversed. The fired riflemen stopped and reloaded while the rear ranks advanced through the gaps and fired in turn, and so on. This allowed the entire formation to advance slowly but steadily while firing.
literature
- Georg Ortenburg: Weapons and the use of weapons in the age of the Landsknechte , Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Koblenz 1984, ISBN 3-7637-5461-X
- Herbert Schwarz: Combat forms of infantry in Europe through 800 years. Munich 1977