As the Persians trusted for success mainly to numbers, war to them was little more than an exhibition of brute force. Sometimes as many as 1,000,000 men were brought into serv ice for one campaign. In battle the troops were massed in deep ranks, thove which were supposed to be the bravest being in front, but, if the line of battle was once broleen, defeat appears to have been inevitable, for the army lost heart, even if the commander himself did not set the example of flight and the general stampede that followed usually cleared the battlefield. Rawlinson's description of the appearance of the Persian forces in time of war is one of the most vivid word pictures painted by any historian: The troops were drawn from the entire empire. and were nuirshaled in the field according to nations, each tribe accoutred in its own fashion. Here were seen the elded breastplates and scarlet kilts of the Persians and Medea; there the woolen skirt of the Arab, the leathern jerkin of the Berber. or the cotton dress of the native of Ilnidustan. Swart ravage Ethiops from the Upper Nile, adorned with a war paint of white and red, and scantily clad with the skins of leopards and lions, fought in one place with huge clubs. arrows tipped with atone. and spears terminating in the horn of an antelope. In another, Scyths. with their loose spangled trousers and their tall pointed caps, dealt death around from their unerring blows; while near them. Assyrians, helmeted. and weanng corselets of quilted linen. wielded the tough aPear or the still more formidable iron mace. Rude weapons. Ince cane bows, unfeathered arrows, and stakes hardened at one end in the fire, were seen side by side with keen swords and daggers of the best steel, the finished productions ol the work shops of Phcenicia and Greece. Here the bronze helmet was surmounted with the ears and horns of an ox; there It Iva* superseded by a foz-alcin, a leathem or wooden skull cap, or a head dress fashioned out of a horse's scalp. Besides horses and mules, elephants. camels and wild asses diversified the scene, and rendwed it still more strange and. wonderful.
Wars of the Romans.—Although the Per sians fought and won battles in spite of their crude methods of fighting, Greece was the mother of the art of warfare. It must not be imagined, however, that the splendid body of perfectly trained soldiery comprising the armies of Athens, Sparta, Thebes or Macedon was the product of a day, or of the genius of a single man, for nothing less than centuries were re quired for the perfection of this wonderful force. In the heroic days, the days of the Homcric battles, the Greek soldiers were no more to be commended than their Persian rivals. Loosely organized, poorly drilled and badly +equipped, the mass of the army was capable of doing. little more than give the in spiration of numerical strength to the small bodies of heroes who did all the fighting. At length, however, tire idea of the phalanx evolved itself, and, in a remarkably brief period of time, the history of the world was changed. At no time prior to the invention of the modern instruments of war has man conceived such a formidable weapon as the attack of a charging phalanx. It was this powerful engine of war that accomplished the. downfall of the Persian force at Marathon. It was a still more perfect phalanx that resulted in the defeat of Thebes and the victory of .Macedon on the fields of Chmronea. It was clearly the Greek phalanx —solid, erect and terrible in its effect — that enabled Alexander to inaugurate the campaign that had for its purpose the conguering of the entire known world. It was with the aid of the phalanx that Athens was preserved; that the. Peloponnesian war was won by Sparta, and it was this same maneuver that saved the day for the Greek forces, until, at last, the Roman legions swept down upon a degenerate Macedon to declare the end of the Grecian Empire. The story of
Rome's supremacy is not dissimilar to that of the rise and fall of the Grecian power. She scorned to make use. of the phalanx, her legions fighting in such open formation that those in the front rank could fall back, when weary, and allow those in the second file to advance and take their places and yet the discipline and generalship of the great army was so per fect that it succeeded in establishing a wider empire than that of Alexander's, an empire which, in 133 B.C., included all of Southern Europe from the Atlantic to. the Bosporus, as well as a part of Northern Africa. Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor were then Roman de pendencies. Her army had made her prac tically mistress of the civilized world. Sev eral centuries elapsed before Rome's glorits be gan to fade. During this time her power was still further extended, civil wars had been sup pressed and revolutions crushed, for when the Roman army could fight according to the scien tific rules of warfare it was practically an invincible force. When the destroyers of the great empire came, however, they brought with thetn no knowledge of the science of war which Rome knew so well. To Alaric the Goth, Attila the Hun, and Crenseric the Vandal, war was simply a question of mere numerical hu man strength. They had no more idea of the advancement in military art than had tire Saracen horde that swept across the country and that might have planted the standard of Lslam in every nook and corner of Europe if Charles Martel had not won his great victory on the plain of Tours. Against these three great barbaric leaders Rome was almost power less and as they swept down upon her, as one wave of the sea follows another, Rome fell, never to rise again. City after city was spoiled and burned; Rome, even, opened her gates without a blow. The tiara and purple robes of the empire were sent to Constantinople and Zeno appointed Odoacer to be Patrician oi Italy.
The Middle From the fall of Rome and up to tire close of the 15th century, wars were less frequent between nation and nation than among the various nations themselves. French fought French; Germans, Germans, and Spaniards, Spaniards and even the war be tween the English and the French, the war that desolated France. for more than a century, was no exception to this rule, for the enmity that was the cause of all the strife was not that of two rival nations, but was due entirety to the fact that rhe rulers of England were French princes, themselves hereditary sover eigns of French provinces, like Nortnandy or Poitou. Similar conditions existed in other parts of Europe so that the student who reads of the wars of the Middle Ages is struck by the absence of the well-planned and carefully executed campaigns that distinguished the warfare of both previous and later periods. There were civil wars, it is true; local insur rections, or single battles of more or less im portance, but, with the exception of the in vasion of the Saracens, the expeditions of Charlemagne, and the conquests of England by the Danes and the Normans, there is little tO remind one of the well-organized systems of warfare which distinguished the days of Greece and Rotne and which have since been revived by nations of modern times. It was not until almost the close of the Middle Ages that anything was done to improve the art of war as it was known to the ancients. Then the. invention of gunpowder and the abandonment of armor revolutionized the science of fighting. Strange as it may seem, however, gunpowder was known for more than two centuries before the French, at the close, of the 16tE century, armed their soldiers with matchlock muikets, while conservative England, fearing that archery would be superseded, forbade the use of the new weapon as late as the time of Henry VIII.