Observing Fortresses by Eye: Eighteenth-Century Officers' Skills

Dear Readers,

As a reader of this blog, hopefully you have an appreciation for siege and fortress warfare in the Kabinettskriege period. If terms like trace italienne, glacis, and covered way are new to you, take a second to review this post. Today, I want to report on an activity I carried out during my research trip to Europe in the summer of 2019. For one weekend (when the archives were closed) I traveled to Vesting Bourtange in the province of Groningen in the Netherlands. This small village was transformed back into a star fortress in the 1950s as a way of bringing tourism to the area.

The state of the reconstruction at Bourtange today.
I specifically did not have this image pulled up while drawing my sketches

It is one of the few examples of a completed star fortresses which remains more or less intact, with the various glacis, wet ditches (moats) , bastions and curtain walls completed and available to walk. As part of my weekend at the fortress, I decided, immediately upon arrival, to conduct a visual inspection of the outside of the fortress, and sketch my inspection. This was an incredibly common experience for eighteenth-century officers and engineers.

Imagine yourself as an artillery or engineer officer preparing to attack an eighteenth-century fortress. Your commanding officers have assembled the soldiers and artillery necessary to begin a formal attack on a fortified place (as happened at many places in the Seven Years War in Europe and North America, such as Louisbourg, Schweidnitz and Niagara, and Charleston and Savannah during the American War of Independence.) Upon arriving in the vicinity of the fortresses, your first task would be to see how closely your outdated maps of the fortress match the actual layout of the defenses.

Christopher Duffy describes this practice in his excellent book on siege warfare, Fire and Stone: The Science of Fortress Warfare:

The still remained the difficult task of relating the designs on the map to the actual ground as it presented itself to the eyes of the besiegers. From a distance, most fortresses looked like collections of grassy mounds, among which it was not easy to distinguish the gates and guerites, or by the shadows that were thrown on the works when the sun was low.[1]

This experience of war was fairly universal, and Duffy cites sources from the 1650s to1750s describing the unfortunate task of officers having to inspect fortifications directly before a siege. Of particular interest for us, Duffy reproduces the writings of the Saxon Officer Tielcke during the seige of Kolberg in 1758:

We used to approach within grapeshot range of the fortifications; two general went together, one of whom kept his eyes fixed on the enemy's batteries, and when they prepared to fire, both threw themselves flat on the ground, and let the balls go over their heads.. On moonlit nights we used to steal up to the palisades of the covered way, and endeavor to form some idea of the works by the shade.[2] 

With this type of practice in mind, I approached the fortress from each side, coming no closer than 500 meters. I photographed the scenes, so that you all can get a sense of the view from this distance.

 Obviously, with a camera, the details are a bit less clear than they were in person, and the view in person was more "zoomed in" than on a phone camera. With that said, I completed a walk around the fortresses, and made the following sketches.

My initial sketch of the eastern part of the fortress

A preliminary sketch of the south part of the fortress

A more developed guess at the South and west faces of the fortress

Another view from the south

My final sketch, with recommendations for attacking fronts

 As you can see from the sketches above compared with the actual overlay, I wasn't that great at this. I confused the south great glacis and ravelin with a more developed hornwork, which I only identified (incorrectly) as a westward facing ravelin. I missed the north-east facing ravelin entirely, which would have complicated the approach of my south-eastern attack.

Errors and difficulties aside, this was a very enjoyable way to spend an afternoon in the Dutch countryside, and I will be giving an opportunity to practice this again in the near future.  I'll conclude with a few photographs of the wonderful fort at Bourtange.

The Bridge connection the crownwork to the bastion fort

The view towards the easternmost bastion

The bridge and crownwork from the first photo, viewed from the south-east ravelin

The northernmost ravelin and windmill

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Thanks for Reading, 

Alex Burns

[1] Duffy, Fire and Stone, 102
[2] Tielcke, J. G. An Account of the Most Remarkable Events of the Last War, Vol 2, 318-319.