This is one of Holts' new thematic battlefield tours, and looks, not at a specific battle or campaign, but at the development of weapons and tactics from the mid 17th Century to the end of the First World War.
The Battle of the Dunes took place within what was to become, three hundred years later, the Dunkirk perimeter. It was fought with the weapons that had been used in the Thirty Years War in Europe and the Civil Wars in Britain, with infantry plying pike and matchlock musket. The development, towards the turn of the 17th and 18th Centuries, of flintlock musket and socket bayonet made possible those classic battles of the Age of Enlightenment, and we shall visit two of them on this battlefield tour, Malplaquet, where the Duke of Marlborough beat the French at shocking cost, and Fontenoy, where the Duke of Cumberland was defeated by Maurice de Saxe.
Although weapons had been improved rather than transformed by the time of the Napoleonic wars, infantry battle formations had often become shallower, so as to maximise firepower, and the rifle was now in use, albeit confined to a minority of combatants. Visits to the battlefields of Quatre Bras and Waterloo will show how the armies of the Napoleonic era fought. Professor Richard Holmes will give a talk linking the weaponry of 1815 with that used ninety-nine years later, considering the development of rifles like the needle-gun in Prussia, the Chassepot in France and the Martini-Henry in Britain. On the last day of the tour we will contrast the First World War 1914 battlefield of Le Cateau with the 1917 battle of Cambrai, the first time the tank was used on a large scale, in an action that pointed the way ahead to the mechanised war of the mid 20th Century.
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