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Decimation, from the Latin for the removal of a tenth, was described by Polybius as a lottery in which one in ten men of a disgraced unit was clubbed to death by his own comrades, while the survivors ate barley and slept outside the camp walls. Historians doubt it was ever routine in the early Republic. Livy's case from 471 BC under Appius Claudius contains anachronisms, maniples of 120 to 200 men could not spare the losses, and provocatio gave citizen soldiers the right of appeal. The practice likely survived as an aristocratic myth until Marcus Licinius Crassus revived it in 72 BC against men who fled from Spartacus.

Once Crassus broke the seal, Caesar, Mark Antony, Octavian and Galba all used versions of it, until the professional army made it untenable and Emperor Maurice banned it in the Strategikon. Early modern generals reading the same classics brought it back: royalist officials decimated the Huguenot garrison of Brouage in 1577, Wallenstein hanged one in ten of a fleeing regiment after Lützen in 1632, and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm had 90 of Madlo's men chosen by dice after Breitenfeld in 1642. In the First World War Luigi Cadorna used lotteries and firing squads until he was sacked after Caporetto.

• Antony's decimation after defeats against Parthia and Media in 36 BC killed around 80 men.
• Emperor Macrinus tried a diluted version that executed one man in every hundred.
• For Madlo's regiment, an executioner from Prague did the killing instead of the soldiers themselves.
• In July 1917, 16 men of the Catanzaro Brigade were chosen by lot and shot after a night revolt.
• Leon Trotsky twice ordered every tenth man killed in units that retreated on the Volga front.

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In August 479 BC, a year after Salamis, the Persian general Mardonius faced a Greek alliance of Spartans, Athenians, Tegeans and Megarians, around 80,000 men, across the Asopus River near Plataea. For 11 days neither side would attack: the Greeks held the slopes of Mount Cithaeron, the Persians the plain behind a fortified wooden camp. Feeding the Greek army took an estimated 120 tons of food and 300,000 liters of water a day, much of it hauled by some 35,000 helots on a 47-mile supply line. When Persian cavalry slaughtered a supply convoy and fouled the Gargaphia spring, the Greeks had to fall back at night.

The retreat fell apart in the dark. The center got lost, the Athenians were isolated, and the Spartan officer Amompharetus refused to withdraw, slamming a boulder at Pausanias's feet as his vote to stay. At dawn Mardonius saw a broken army and charged. Pausanias held his men under an arrow storm from the Persian wicker shield wall while waiting for favorable sacrifices until the Tegeans charged first. In the crush that followed, a Spartan named Arimnestus killed Mardonius with a thrown rock, the Persian line collapsed, and the Athenians breached the Persian camp.

• The Persian cavalry commander Masistius wore scale armor under his robes and fell only to a blow through the eye.
• Persian soldiers grabbed Greek spears with bare hands trying to snap the shafts during the shoving match.
• Artabazus, who had advised against attacking, marched his contingent intact all the way back toward Asia Minor.
• Pausanias set a Persian feast beside Spartan black broth and mocked the rich invaders who came to rob Greeks of their poverty.
• Captured Persian bronze became the Serpent Column, which Constantine moved and which still stands in Istanbul's Hippodrome.

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The Praetorian Guard began as nothing more than a temporary detail guarding the praetorium, the commander's tent in a Roman camp, used by generals from families like the Scipios and later by Octavian, who had five cohorts at Actium in 31 BC. As Augustus, he made the guard permanent but hid it: nine cohorts of about 500 men, only three on duty in Rome at once, all wearing civilian togas inside the sacred pomerium where no other soldiers could bear arms. Shorter service, pay far above the legions and the donativum, a cash bonus paid on accessions, births, marriages and failed plots, turned them into a privileged caste the satirist Juvenal remembered for the hobnailed sandal driven into his foot.

Under Tiberius, the prefect Sejanus gathered the cohorts into one fortress, the Castra Praetoria, and used it to poison the emperor's son Drusus. In 41 AD guardsmen murdered Caligula, then found his uncle Claudius hiding behind a curtain and made him emperor. They killed Galba for refusing a bribe and Pertinax for cutting their bonuses, then auctioned the throne from their ramparts to Didius Julianus. Septimius Severus tricked them into marching out unarmed and disbanded them, and Constantine finished the institution after the Milvian Bridge in 312.

• Augustus kept the guard dispersed in towns around Rome so it would not look like an occupying army.
• By Domitian's reign a praetorian's base pay had risen to 1,500 denarii, against 250 for a legionary.
• The jurists Papinian and Ulpian both served as praetorian prefect and were killed by the guards they commanded.
• The Speculatores Augusti, about 300 large men in distinctive boots, served as couriers, spies and executioners.
• Constantine had the inner walls of the Castra Praetoria facing the city torn down.

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On Palm Sunday 1461, between 50,000 and 65,000 men, roughly 2 percent of England's population, met in a blizzard on a plateau between Saxton and Towton in North Yorkshire. The crisis began with the mental illness of the Lancastrian king Henry VI. In 1460 Richard, Duke of York, captured Henry, and the Act of Accord let Henry reign for life while disinheriting his son. Queen Margaret of Anjou raised an army in Scotland and the north, killed York and his second son at Wakefield, and spiked their heads on the gates of York. York's 18-year-old heir Edward IV won at Mortimer's Cross, was proclaimed king in London, and marched north offering amnesty to commoners but not to Lancastrian nobles facing attainder.

After Lord Clifford's stand at Ferrybridge ended with an arrow in his throat, the Duke of Somerset anchored the Lancastrians behind Towton Dale with marshes and the flooded Cock Beck on his flank. A south wind drove snow into Lancastrian faces. Edward fought on the front line, held through a flank attack from Castle Hill Wood, and was saved when the delayed Duke of Norfolk struck the Lancastrian left. The fleeing Lancastrians were cut down in Bloody Meadow and at the Cock Beck, with modern estimates of 2,800 to 9,000 dead.

• Lord Fauconberg had his archers loose one high volley on the tailwind and step back, so Lancastrian return fire fell short and was gathered and shot back.
• Nearly three quarters of English peers fought, at least 19 for Lancaster and eight for York.
• Chroniclers said the pursuing Yorkists crossed the Cock Beck on bridges of bodies.
• A 1996 mass grave held more than 50 men aged mostly 24 to 30, including Towton 25 with a skull split across the face, and a 2010 survey found early handgun fragments.
• Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part 3 stages a son who killed his father and a father who killed his son, and Tysoe villagers long cut a Red Horse into a hillside to recall Warwick killing his horse.

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In 1917 the British held the low ground of the Ypres salient while the Germans watched from the ridges around its rim. Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig planned to take those ridges, seize the railway hub at Roulers, and push on to the Belgian coast and its U-boat bases. Prime Minister David Lloyd George and French chief of staff Ferdinand Foch opposed the plan, but the Nivelle Offensive had sparked French army mutinies, Russia was faltering after the Kerensky offensive, and American troops were months away. As a prelude, tunnelers spent months digging under Messines Ridge, and at 3:10 a.m. on June 7, 19 mines packed with nearly a million pounds of explosives went off together.

The main offensive opened on July 31 at Pilckem Ridge under General Hubert Gough, whose deep advances ran into German defense in depth, concrete pillboxes, Eingreif counterattack divisions, and about five inches of August rain on ground whose drainage the bombardment had wrecked. General Herbert Plumer's bite and hold attacks at Menin Road Ridge and Polygon Wood in September turned the tide until the October rains returned. The Canadian Corps took the ruined village of Passchendaele on November 10.

• The Messines blast was reportedly heard by the Prime Minister in London.
• Intelligence chief John Charteris blamed a regular August monsoon, but John Hussey's analysis of 1901 to 1916 records showed August was usually dry.
• Plumer's infantry advanced about 1,500 yards behind a creeping barrage landing roughly 50 yards ahead, then dug in to meet German counterattacks.
• On October 12 an ANZAC attack became one of the darkest days in New Zealand military history, with wounded men drowning in the mud.
• British official historian James Edmonds put German losses at 400,000 against 244,000 British, while Jack Sheldon estimates about 217,000 German casualties.

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When Romanos IV Diogenes took the Byzantine throne in 1068, the empire's eastern defenses were already hollowed out. Decades earlier Constantine IX had disbanded the Iberian army, about 50,000 professional frontier troops, to save money and remove a source of rebellion. The Seljuk Turks under Sultan Alp Arslan raided deep into Anatolia and in 1064 took the fortified city of Ani after a 25-day siege. Romanos went on the offensive with about 40,000 men: Byzantine regulars, Frankish and Norman cavalry, Turkic and Bulgarian light troops, peasant levies, and the Varangian Guard. Near Lake Van he split the army, sending 20,000 under Joseph Tarchaneiotes toward Khliat; that force never rejoined him, and sources disagree on whether it was destroyed or simply scattered.

At Manzikert on August 25 and 26, 1071, Romanos rejected a Seljuk peace envoy. Alp Arslan, wearing a white robe that signaled a funeral shroud, met him with a crescent of horse archers who fell back and shot into the Byzantine ranks. When Romanos ordered a withdrawal at sunset, rearguard commander Andronikos Doukas, his political rival, marched his fresh troops off the field. Romanos was wounded, unhorsed, and captured, the first Roman emperor taken alive by a foreign enemy in 800 years.

• Alp Arslan pressed his boot on Romanos's neck, then raised him up and hosted him for a week.
• The sultan opened at 10 million gold pieces and settled for 1.5 million, an annual tribute of 360,000, several frontier cities, and a marriage alliance.
• Doukas raced to Constantinople and put his cousin on the throne, and Romanos lost three battles to the Doukas faction.
• Romanos was blinded, exiled to the island of Proti, and died from infection caused by the blinding.
• Within a decade the Seljuks held more than 30,000 square miles of Anatolia, and Alexios I's later plea to Pope Urban II fed into the First Crusade of 1095.

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For most of history armies wanted to be seen. Julius Caesar painted his scout ships Venetian blue around 56 to 54 BC, but black powder smoke and short-range muskets made bright coats essential for telling friend from foe. Accurate rifles such as the Baker rifle changed that, and Rogers' Rangers and the 95th Rifles adopted greens and grays. In India in 1848 the British Corps of Guides dyed their white uniforms with mud, tea, and coffee, and khaki, Urdu for dust, became British service dress by the Boer Wars. France held on to blue coats and red trousers into 1914 until losses forced a switch to horizon blue. Aerial reconnaissance and long-range artillery then led France to create the first camouflage unit in 1915 under painter Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola, staffed with Cubists and other artists.

Norman Wilkinson's dazzle paint did not hide ships but confused U-boat range and heading calculations. In 1940 zoologist Hugh Cott explained countershading, and at El Alamein Operation Bertram used dummy armor and sun shields that disguised tanks as trucks. Canada's pixelated CADPAT followed in the late 1990s, along with radar-absorbing coatings, anechoic tiles, degaussing, and scent masking.

• London's 1919 Chelsea Arts Club Dazzle Ball at the Royal Albert Hall dressed guests in battleship-style geometric patterns.
• French camoufleurs built fake steel observation trees covered in real bark and slipped them into position overnight.
• US frog skin uniforms were pulled from Europe in World War II because they resembled Waffen-SS patterns and caused friendly fire.
• Britain's Cold War Berlin pattern used squares of white, gray, and brown to match the city's concrete.
• After the Warsaw Pact dissolved, former Soviet-aligned states reshaped their camouflage to resemble NATO patterns as a political signal.

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In 1835 Mexico repealed its federalist Constitution of 1824 for a centralized republic and moved to enforce laws long ignored in Texas, where immigrants from the United States had doubled in number by 1834 despite an 1830 ban. Though slavery was illegal in Mexico, about 5,000 enslaved people lived in Texas by 1836. Some Tejanos joined the revolt seeking a return to the 1824 constitution. The Tornel Decree of late 1835 declared foreign fighters pirates who would receive no quarter. The Alamo, a former Spanish mission sprawling over about three acres with roughly 1,320 feet of perimeter, never held more than about 200 to 250 defenders under the uneasy shared command of William B. Travis and James Bowie.

General Antonio López de Santa Anna marched more than 6,000 men inland through record snow and arrived on February 23, 1836, raising a red no-quarter flag. Bowie fell ill on the second day, and Colonel James Fannin's relief column from Goliad turned back after less than a mile. Refusing to wait for heavy guns due March 7, Santa Anna attacked before dawn on March 6 with about 1,800 men in four columns. Weeks later, Sam Houston's army routed him at San Jacinto in 18 minutes.

• Most of the garrison was in town at a fiesta for George Washington's birthday when the Mexican army arrived.
• Conscripts at the back of the dense columns fired blindly in the dark, causing heavy friendly fire casualties.
• Lacking canister, the Texians loaded their cannon with chopped horseshoes, nails, and door hinges.
• General Juan Amador climbed the patched north wall and opened a door, letting the Mexican army into the compound.
• No 1836 source records Travis drawing a line in the sand, and Santa Anna had five to seven surrendered Texians executed while sparing Susanna Dickinson, her daughter, and Joe, an enslaved man.

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In 1585, during the Dutch Revolt against Spain, the northern Dutch Republic closed the River Scheldt to shipping, cutting Antwerp off from the North Sea and steering trade to Amsterdam. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia confirmed the closure, and it held even after the southern Netherlands passed to the Austrian Habsburgs. The Diplomatic Revolution of 1756, which allied Austria with France, made the Dutch barrier fortresses in the south pointless, and the Republic turned to neutrality. In 1781, with the Dutch tied down in the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, Emperor Joseph II demanded an end to the barrier, then the evacuation of Maastricht, and finally the reopening of the Scheldt, despite a poorly equipped army in the region.

In October 1784 three ships sailed from Antwerp, among them the merchant ship Le Louis flying the emperor's flag. On October 8 the Dutch Dolfijn fired a single shot that hit a soup kettle on deck, and the crew surrendered. Joseph declared war on October 30. Austrian troops razed a customs post and occupied Fort Lillo, and the Dutch broke dikes that flooded the land and drowned civilians. Under the French-mediated Treaty of Fontainebleau in 1785, the Scheldt stayed closed, but the Republic paid roughly 2 to 10 million guilders.

• Observers wrote to Benjamin Franklin in Paris that war between the Habsburgs and the Dutch Republic was inevitable.
• The Annual Register noted the Dolfijn would have needed a broadside of at least seven guns to stop a ship the size of Le Louis.
• The Patriot movement used the crisis to form citizen militias, the exercitiegenootschappen, against the stadtholder's power.
• Friesland's Admiralty offered two new warships that got stuck in the port of Harlingen and had to be dismantled.
• When the Austrians took Fort Lillo, the decommissioned fort was mostly being used as a vegetable garden.

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By 1648 Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentarians had driven the Royalists west through Cornwall until their navy retreated to the Isles of Scilly, owned by the Royalist John Grenville. With no tax base or supply lines, the fleet turned to piracy and preyed on Dutch merchant shipping in the Channel. The Dutch Republic, newly independent under the 1648 Treaty of Münster, needed safe trade routes and sided with Parliament, drawn by economics, the regent class's republican leanings, and a shared Calvinist faith. On March 30, 1651, Lieutenant Admiral Maarten Harpertszoon Tromp arrived to demand reparations, and according to Whitelocke's Memorials he received no satisfactory answer. Legend says he then declared war on the islands alone.

No shots were fired. Parliamentarian Admiral Robert Blake forced the Royalists to surrender in June 1651, and Tromp sailed home. The 1654 Treaty of Westminster never mentioned Scilly, and the supposed war survived as island folklore. In 1986 local historian Roy Duncan, chairman of the Isles of Scilly Council, asked the Dutch embassy in London to check its archives, and staff found no document ending the conflict. On April 17, 1986, Dutch ambassador Jonkheer Rein Huydecoper visited the islands and signed a formal peace.

• Tromp could not declare war on England because the Dutch were allied with the Parliamentarians who controlled most of the country.
• Huydecoper joked that islanders must have found it agonizing to live under threat of a Dutch attack for three centuries.
• Historian R. L. Bowley argued in 2001 that Tromp never held a commission from the States General and was bluffing.
• Graham Donald, in Loose Cannons, wrote that neither an admiral nor the islands had the sovereignty to wage war and called the 1986 treaty a publicity stunt.
• The episode sets the legend beside the Anglo-Zanzibar War, the shortest recorded war, as a classic oddity of military history.