During most of the nineteenth century, infantry weapons dominated the battlefield — first smooth-bore muskets and then rifles — as these casualty numbers from the Civil War suggest:
| Source | Union Combat Deaths |
|---|---|
| Rifle or smooth-bore musket | 124,000 |
| Fragments from shells | 12,500 |
| Cannonball or grapeshot | 359 |
| Cutting weapons | 7,002 |
As Conventional Warfare: Ballistic, Blast and Burn Injuries notes, the casualties in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 were similarly distributed:
Rifles were responsible for 92% of German wounded and 91% of German killed.
By World War I, this had changed, and more than half of all combat casualties came from artillery.
The CSA hadn’t much artillery. I wonder how Conferederate casualties compare, facing many more Federal cannon.
Oh look, the heyday of populism in American politics was also the time when massed infantry dominated the battlefield.
Quelle surprise!
A similar point holds in the Franco-Prussian War, where the French were using a cutting-edge bolt-action rifle, the Chassepot, and outdated muzzle-loading artillery, while the Prussians were using the not-quite-as-advanced Dreyse needle gun and some very advanced breech-loading Krupp artillery.
Little Phil Sheridan accompanied the Prussians as the American military observer during the Franco-Prussian war. He was specifically interested in the effect the guns of Krupp had on French formations. He wasn’t impressed.
I remember that piece of yours, Fouché, but I didn’t remember Sheridan’s observations on Krupp artillery. I suppose the newer style of artillery didn’t live up to its hype until the Great War — where it did tremendous damage but didn’t cause many casualties per shell.
John Mosier’s The Myth of the Great War is deeply flawed but strongly details how the innovation that made World War I particularly lethal was artillery with hydraulic recoil. A nearby cemetery has an 1898 vintage U.S. manufactured artillery piece erected as a memorial to local men KIAed during World War I. It’s steel, breech-loading, and has a rifled barrel like the guns of Krupp. But its hydraulic recoil is rudimentary and, since it can’t be elevated far, it’s optimized for direct fire and not indirect fire. The ability of 1914 German guns like the 15 cm sFH 13 (elevation -4° to +45°) or 15 cm sFH 02 (elevation -5° to +16°) to be elevated for indirect fire compared to Entente guns like the French 75 (elevation -11° to +18°) was a key reason why so many French soldiers disappeared mysteriously from the battlefield in 1914-1915. The French didn’t deploy equivalent guns until 1917.