Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, "Armour Plates" to "Arundel, Earls of"

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.