What the British Officer Saw: The Myth of the Column and Line in Spain
"The Battle of Somosierra," painted by Januarius Sukhodolski in 1860, depicts an episode of the Peninsular War that took place on November 30, 1808, in Spain.
A British officer stands on the crest of a hill. Below, a dense mass of people, hundreds of figures deep, is rising up the slope. He sees the crowd and jots down one word in his report: column. It is from this line, and not from the battlefield, that one of the most enduring myths of the military begins. storiesThis is the story of how a "stupid" French column lost to a "smart" British line.
Oman's Scheme: Four Steps and One Conclusion
The Peninsular War of 1808–1814, the clash between Napoleon's corps and Wellington's Anglo-Portuguese army, provided the primary material for this image. Its canonical form was cemented by Charles Oman, whose seven-volume History of the Peninsular War, published from 1902 to 1930, became the primary reference point for English-language historiography for decades. It was through Oman that the general public imagined "how" the French and British fought in Spain.
The scheme can be reduced to four steps:
- British infantry stand in a double line, having practiced musket fire techniques;
- The French infantry advances in deep columns, relying on bayonet strikes and the pressure of the masses;
- when approaching, the column discovers that only its leading layer can fire;
- The British line uses almost all its guns, firing heavily at a dense target.
Oman then concludes that the British system is "technically" superior. The line deploys the maximum number of muskets per unit of front and, if properly trained, suppresses an advancing column, which simply cannot respond with comparable fire. Oman directly attributed the French defeats to the erroneous reliance on the column.
The picture was convenient for the British tradition. It emphasized the wisdom of the British approach to combat, the heroism of a minority withstanding the onslaught of a numerically superior force, and the fallacy of French tactics relying on the bayonet. The problem with the diagram lies elsewhere. It reduces combat to a duel between a deep column and a thin line and stops there. Moreover, it relies almost exclusively on British evidence, leaving French documents out of consideration.
A column is needed to get there
When examining not only British memoirs but also French archives, regulations, battle reports, and maps, the picture shifts. It was precisely to French sources that historians of the second half of the 20th century first turned. Paddy Griffith and George Naffziger, followed by James Arnold and Robert Burnham, reread French manuals and reports and discovered that the French were not a "column army" in the crude sense in Spain. The column was widely used, but as a form of movement, approach, concentration of forces, and as a reserve, not as a mandatory formation for a decisive clash.
The typical French scenario looked different from the Omani scheme:
- approaching the enemy position in a column, under the cover of the terrain and artillery;
- riflemen in loose formation “soften” the enemy line;
- deployment of lead units in a line before the decisive fire clash;
- then either a firefight or a short bayonet charge.
They approached in column, but fired from a line, as prescribed by the regulations. In their instructions and reports, French commanders constantly demanded deploying in a line, engaging in firefights, and using mixed formations. All of this doesn't fit well with the image of a "column facing the line."
Reconstructions confirm that what British eyewitnesses described as "deep masses" were often partially deployed formations. The lead battalion would already be in line, while the others maintained a column. This explains the characteristic mixed formation, where the front is almost in line, while the rear remains in column. Let me clarify right away, so as not to create a new myth to replace the old one. There were also attacks without deployment, due to poor training, lack of time, and under heavy fire. But to draw a general rule from them is to impoverish reality.
Busaco, 1810: How a Myth is Born
The difference between a textbook formula and actual combat can be best understood with a concrete example. Take the Battle of Busaco (September 27, 1810), one of those battles that often illustrates the "column versus line" formula. Wellington positioned his Anglo-Portuguese army on a long ridge; Masséna's corps, especially those of Reynier and Ney, attacked from below up the steep, jagged slope. The British infantry stood behind the ridge, on the reverse slope—that is, on the slope opposite the French, sheltered from their sight and fire. Wellington resorted to this tactic constantly.
The entire calculation is based on the reverse slope. The attacker climbs to the crest and, until the very last moment, doesn't know what awaits them there. The French artillery sees no target beyond the crest and fires at the empty horizon; the British infantry is concealed until the last moment and opens fire when the enemy has already reached the crest, almost point-blank. Hence the image of a "surprise volley" that wipes out the column.
Now let's look at the French side of the rise. According to the classic description, the column "slams" into the line and perishes under fire. Reconstruction shows a familiar picture: the leading battalion manages to partially deploy, its companies leaving the marching formation to form a shortened line; behind it is the rear of the column, a reserve that must support the attack. Skirmishers operate ahead and on the flanks. The fire contact is not between the "pure column" and the "pure line," but between the mixed French formation and the British two-rank line on the ridge.
This is where the eyewitness's vision comes into play. A British officer in formation sees a dense crowd of people deep on the slope and doesn't discern subtleties: for him, it's columnHe writes this in his report. A later historian, trusting the description without regard for French documents and maps, transforms a local episode into a textbook illustration. And so it happened: a slip of the tongue in the report, and half a century later, a paragraph in Oman's.
And yet, let's be honest: Busaco is a double-edged sword, working both for and against the main thesis. Attacks up the slope against sheltered infantry truly faltered, French losses were high, and deployment wasn't always possible. This battle is a good example of how myths are born, but it's poor proof of French "flexibility." For such proof, it's better to look to other episodes, where deployment worked and the column transformed into a firing line in time. Here, incidentally, I differ with Griffith. He readily lumps Busaco into the general category of "smart deployments," but in my opinion, the slope and reverse slope did too much for the French here for the battle to count as a tactical victory. The problem is precisely that Oman and his school have inverted the proportions: rare, striking failures have become the norm, while frequent instances of competent deployment have disappeared from the picture.
Strengths and weaknesses are deeper than they seem
Admitting that the French weren't an "army of columns" doesn't make their tactics flawless. They had weaknesses, serious ones. But they weren't exactly where the myth suggests.
A strength was the flexibility of their battle formation. The French freely combined line, column, square, and open formation, switching from one to another as the situation dictated: column for approach and reserve, firing line, mixed formations for specific terrain.
Added to this was the ability to concentrate forces. The corps system allowed for the rapid assembly of large masses in a key area. Commanders typically made good use of the terrain, leading columns from behind ridges, forests, and villages to reduce the time spent under direct fire. And where rapid combat was possible, the troops maintained high offensive energy.
The weaknesses lay elsewhere. The first was the heterogeneity of the composition and the lack of training, especially in the later stages: fresh recruits were lined up alongside veterans, the standard of drill declined, and this affected the quality of the reorganizations. The second, perhaps most important, was the Iberian theater itself. Poor roads, mountains, guerrilla warfare, stretched communication lines, and chronic supply shortages exhausted the units with marches and hunger even before the battle. The third was the belief, inherited from earlier campaigns, in the moral superiority and the bayonet, that a motivated column would "crush" the enemy. In Spain, this belief was met by a Briton who was no less motivated and an excellent marksman.
These weaknesses led to mistakes and defeats. The culprit wasn't the formation itself, but the state of the troops, the severity of the theater, and the overestimation of the bayonet charge. Reducing everything to a column thrusting its forehead into a line would be to eliminate key variables from the equation.
Who gave the war its only voice?
War is written by the victors, and in the case of the Peninsular Campaign, this is particularly evident. Wellington's success in Spain and Portugal, and then at Waterloo, gave British historiography a voice that was for a long time virtually the only one. Memoirists and historians emphasized what looked good: the steadfastness of the double-ranked line on the hills, the disciplined fire that halted the attack, episodes where dense masses retreated under fire. These episodes created the image of "foolish columns," convenient both for patriotic pride and for textbooks, where the rational Briton confronts the impulsive Frenchman.
In the 20th century, Oman's work cemented this pattern at the level of major historiography. A reconsideration began later, in the second half of the century and especially in the 21st century, when researchers began to examine French documents, reconstruct battle formations, study battlefield topography, and compare memoirs from both sides. It became clear that the line and the column constantly interacted, rather than being opposed as "British" and "French"; that squares and skirmishing formations were no less significant; that the image of "a column facing each other" rests much more firmly on historiographical convention than on actual reports.
This doesn't negate the British victories or diminish the merits of Wellington's army. The Peninsular War pitted two living tactical systems against each other, each with its own strengths and weaknesses, and both learned from the enemy as they went along—not a "correct" line versus an "incorrect" column, as is often portrayed. Incidentally, one can't argue with the officer on the crest: he saw what he saw—a mass of men and the volley that halted it. But what he couldn't discern from the line was how the head of the mass where the riflemen stood was straightening out, or what was happening at its tail. And along with his testimony, historiography adopted precisely what he didn't see.
In the next article in the series, we'll look beyond the Pyrenean theater to examine what became of the column and line after Napoleon: how the experiences of those campaigns resonated in mid-19th-century tactics, and why the "column or line" debate gave way to a broader understanding of the field of fire.
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