But the onset of the Bayonet in the hands of the valiant is irresistible.

From The Road to Guilford Courthouse by John Buchanan. Page 160.

But this is only part of the story, for the eighteenth-century foot soldier also had at his command a fearful but most simple weapon that in the Revolutionary War British officers came to rely on even more than firing by volleys. The British bayonet was sixteen to nineteen inches long.5 It added a foot and a half to a five-foot musket. It had a socket rising from the base; the socket had a right-angled slot that fit over the muzzle and with a half turn locked into place. It was called the socket bayonet. The very simplicity of the bayonet and its rare use in our age of automatic infantry rifles belies its importance and effectiveness in earlier times. The sight of a line of disciplined British infantry, advancing at a trot and shouting huzzas, muskets leveled and protruding from them some eighteen inches of cold steel at charge bayonet, was known to turn American militia bowels to jelly and heels to quicksilver. British officers were well aware of this. General John Burgoyne instructed his officers “to inculcate in the men’s minds a Reliance upon the Bayonet. Men of half their bodily strength, and even Cowards, may be their match in firing; but the onset of the Bayonet in the hands of the valiant is irresistible.”

The socket bayonet was not even a century old by the time of the American Revolution. Simple in concept, terrible in application, by the early eighteenth century it had revolutionized infantry tactics. European armies disbanded units of pikemen, who were no longer needed to protect musketeers from cavalry charges or while they reloaded or changed formation. In essence, the infantryman now had two weapons in one: it could kill either at a distance or at close quarters. The bayonet was technologically the more dependable of the two, and its use was a tactic that required little imagination, an attribute neither widely distributed among British officers nor desirable for those delivering or receiving such an attack. Holding a deep contempt for their American foes, British officers were quick to call on the bayonet when faced with opposition, and the splendid other ranks were just as quick to respond. Invariably, militia would panic and flee. And invariably, American generals, including George Washington, ignored painful lessons and repeatedly lined up militia in formal ranks in open fields to await the onslaughts of highly trained, rigidly disciplined British and German regulars, and raged when those precisely placed lines crumbled into stampeding herds. The proper use of militia in formal battle awaited one of the rare generals of the war who can truly be called brilliant. That man was not Horatio Gates.