history of artillery work during the first three centuries of its
existence. Whilst the material had undergone a very considerable
improvement, the organization remained almost unchanged, and the
tactical employment of guns had become restricted, owing to their
slowness and difficulty of movement on the march and immobility in
action. In wars of the type of the War of Dutch Independence and the
earlier part of the Thirty Years' War, this heavy artillery naturally
remained useful enough, and the _Wagenburg_ had given place to the
musketry initiated by the Spaniards at Bicocca and Pavia, which since
1525 had steadily improved and developed. It is not, therefore, until
the appearance of a captain whose secret of success was vigour and
mobility that the first serious attempt was made to produce field
artillery in the proper sense of the word, that is, a gun of good power,
and at the same time so mounted as to be capable of rapid movement. The
"carte with gonnes" had been, as is the modern machine gun, a mechanical
concentration of musketry rather than a piece of artillery. Maurice of
Nassau, indeed, helped to develop the field gun, and the French had
invented the limber, but Gustavus Adolphus was the first to give
artillery its true position on the battlefield. At the first battle of
Breitenfeld (1631) Gustavus had twelve heavy and forty-two light guns
engaged, as against Tilly's heavy 24-pounders, which were naturally far
too cumbrous for field work. At the Lech (1632) Gustavus seems to have
obtained a local superiority over his opponent owing to the handiness of
his field artillery even more than by its fire-power. At Lutzen (1632)
he had sixty guns to Wallenstein's twenty-one. His field pieces were not
the celebrated "leather" guns (which were indeed a mere makeshift used
in Gustavus' Polish wars) but iron 4-pounders. These were distributed
amongst the infantry units, and thus began the system of "battalion
guns" which survived in the armies of Europe long after the conditions
requiring it had vanished. The object of thus dispersing the guns was
doubtless to ensure in the first place more certain co-operation between
the two arms, and in the second to exercise a military supervision over
the lighter and more useful field pieces which it was as yet impossible
to exercise over the _personnel_ of the heavy artillery.