Word: infantrymen
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...Greek phalanx - columns of spear-carriers drawn largely from free property owners with a substantial stake in a battle's outcome - established infantrymen as the centerpiece of European military power. At the Battle of Poitiers (A.D. 732) Frankish infantry, the phalanx's latest adaptation, routed much-feared Muslim cavalrymen. The Franks' victory confirmed, says Hanson, "that good heavy infantry, if it maintained rank and found a defensible position, usually defeated good cavalry...
Once firearms arrived, "Europe, far more easily than other cultures, was able to convert ranks of spearmen" into deadly infantrymen. They "fired as they had stabbed - in unison, on command, shoulder to shoulder and in rank." From this flowed astonishing Western military feats: Hernán Cortés' 1,600 men slaughtering more than 1 million Aztecs (1519-21); a Christian fleet's crushing of a larger Ottoman Muslim armada at Lepanto (1571) and the creation of an empire on four continents by a British army that in 1879 had only...
...Greek phalanx?columns of spear-carriers drawn largely from free property owners with a substantial stake in a battle's outcome?established infantrymen as the centerpiece of European military power. At the Battle of Poitiers (A.D. 732) Frankish infantry, the phalanx's latest adaptation, routed much-feared Muslim cavalrymen. The Franks' victory confirmed, says Hanson, "that good heavy infantry, if it maintained rank and found a defensible position, usually defeated good cavalry...
...Once firearms arrived, "Europe, far more easily than other cultures, was able to convert ranks of spearmen" into deadly infantrymen. They "fired as they had stabbed?in unison, on command, shoulder to shoulder and in rank." From this flowed astonishing Western military feats: Hernan CortEs' 1,600 men slaughtering more than one million Aztecs (1519-21); a Christian fleet's crushing of a larger Ottoman Muslim armada at Lepanto (1571) and the creation of an empire on four continents by a British army that in 1879 had only...
...convoy passed abandoned bunkers, some manned by the corpses of Taliban troops. A few hundred yards ahead, Alliance infantrymen exchanged small-arms fire with Taliban stragglers. An Alliance foot soldier, hit in the back, lay doubled over in pain. Others rained blows on a captured jihadist as he was duckwalked toward a jeep. Occasionally a small black puff and a crack would mark the explosion of a rocket-propelled grenade. But the fiercest fighting, a remarkably brief exchange of recoilless rifle and mortar, had tapered off shortly before; and by 4:30 the brigade rolled over what for two years...