Duisburg rang with gunshots and some fell Martinet, Inspector General to Louis XIV. Advancing on the city, the French army fought on and rushed ahead to fire again. Most shots went astray with the wind, never as straight as the bayonets held under the barrel.
None would argue, the bayonet made them better soldiers. The pike and its carrier, once the musketeer’s premier line of defense, had firmly lost their ground. The bayonet made a pike of each man’s musket and each man his own force, the defensive offending line. One iron wedge moved the army into highly mobile efficiency, pointing the way to the enemy as even the bullet could not, hard-edged and unwavering -- and for those genuflecting to reload, to where Martinet preceded them.
The defenders clashed with the opposing advance, enemy falling upon enemy. Cavalry sabre on infantry musket, gun battles mixed, in a way no pikeman could ever muster, with knife fights. Martinet’s men had drilled on the hard groundwork of occupation as a single body of men -- soldiers not mercenaries, as many once were. A body of force recognizable as the king’s army. Hiring guns had always been risky, money buys desertion as much as victory.
But even as the French charged off their spits, Belgian Duisburg was spared their looting. When at rest, this army marched in line to the storehouse. Depots along the French campaign route fed them. Field and town could remain unscourged and the army on the chase, ever moving, ever fighting, ever in formation from the chow line to the front line.
Strategy and execution sat with the boots on the ground. Sat best with men trained to soldier as a standing army – and the man who drilled them was Martinet.
He’d seen the bayonet used by hunters in Bayonne, where from he’d taken the name. He’d seen the waste of rummaging for food after hours of fighting, a bit like building the oven only after the goose is ready for cooking, and conceived the depot. Houses and knives, their forms bespeak their function.
Self-reliance set the army moving, killing for country above all profit save the profit of pride, hammered by discipline to do so. Martinet made soldiers poor. Muskets firing, shoulder-to-shoulder, looking to their formation to guide them through the moment of truth, they bespoke the beginning of the modern army. Belgian Duisburg was first to see the tide change.
The morning of the siege, Martinet stood by his tent and was pleased to see his soldiers fed and their muskets clean. He’d stirred the air, and the favourable wind, he noted, was with France. It blew against Duisburg’s walls and would be at his back on the charge.
He’d been the hammer, tempering mettle into a long, sharp blade on the fire of his morning reveille. The smallest spark of his wrath was enough to burn a man. He never let them off the flame, never their iron cool. A strict eye on the hearth’s condition made for fine students. France would not want for nails. He’d planed the wood in preparation for them and built a fine house, fortified and furnished it, for France.
As the battle began and the smoke of truth grew with the smell of grapeshot, he led and men followed into the fog. Bayonne had never so many sons. They fell and marched in ranks, and fired in close volleys. The best of the enemy responded. On went Martinet, the eve of his legacy approaching, the city before him, this model for every hard-hearted sergeant yet-to-come – and got it, perhaps in the head or stomach or heart. The heart most likely, shot through the back. A French soldier killed by French fire; a quick and sour end to a man of long and savoured vision. Whether by murder or accident of war is unknown but murder is suspected.
Once the siege ended some mourned him, others did not. Louis XIV did but the king did not control what rested with history. Those soldiers who remembered would speak of his heavy hands and skills in swinging them. War for him was not occasional. It was an everyday tutorial, a soldier’s work for a soldier’s life. Home was where the depot sat and where you laid your fist.
His star brightened and dimmed all at once. Many spoke of him, encyclopaedias wrote about him. His name, etymologically a cousin to both a hammer and a scourge, lost its capital and became often paired with “strutting”. Applied to dictators and men of lesser vision, Martinet became synonymous with his opposite: the uninspiring who enforce obedience even to rules that defy sense and common purpose -- incompetents who, blind with high, unfocused tempers, destroy what instead should be built stronger. Soon, when one thought of him, one thought of them. Not his devotion to purpose but his swift and frenzied hands.
A man once prized for his efficiency, who turned armies of fortune into one force of country, shot by weapons he improved, fell to the lower ranks. Though Duisburg did not burn, Martinet surely did. The body turns to ash and lifts high on the wind, while the mind is consumed in an instant. The worst of a man is remembered while the best, trampled and buried, haunts.
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