bhaskar saikia

On 18 June 1815, the fields of Waterloo became the stage for one of history’s most iconic open battles. Two armies — Napoleon’s French and Wellington’s Anglo-Allied — stood in ordered lines across rolling farmland, waiting for the clash. Muskets, cannons, and cavalry charges decided the fate of empires. It was war in its most visible form: men facing each other in the open, rows of uniforms against rows of uniforms.

But that world was already at its twilight.

Just a few decades later, the Crimean War (1853–1856) revealed the cracks in the old model. Rifled muskets, the Minié ball, and explosive artillery shells transformed the battlefield. To charge in neat lines across open ground, as at Waterloo, meant slaughter. The Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava — a glorious disaster of horsemen thundering into Russian guns — became a tragic symbol of how quickly courage could be wasted in the face of new technology.

From then on, the art of war evolved not toward spectacle, but toward concealment.

By the time of the American Civil War (1861–1865), frontal assaults across open fields, like Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, ended in devastating losses. Soldiers learned to entrench, to skirmish, to let the earth itself become their shield. The Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) continued this pattern — rifles and rapid artillery made defense stronger than attack.

And in World War I, the shift was complete. Machine guns and barbed wire ended the age of the gallant advance. Men disappeared into trenches, battlefields became wastelands of mud and craters, and victory was measured not in charges won but in meters of ground gained after months of attrition.

Technology kept pushing warfare further into the shadows.

World War II saw mobility return — tanks replacing cavalry, aircraft ruling the skies — but still, deception and surprise mattered more than open confrontation.

During the Cold War, the battlefield itself blurred. The greatest conflict of the 20th century was not fought in open plains but in whispers, codes, espionage, and proxy wars. Nuclear weapons made frontal combat between superpowers unthinkable.

Today, in the 21st century, war often unfolds without uniforms or battle lines. Cyberwarfare, financial sanctions, disinformation campaigns, drone strikes, and covert operations define the conflicts of our time. Battles are waged in code, in satellite feeds, in the manipulation of opinion and the targeting of infrastructure. The open fields of Waterloo have given way to invisible networks, where the enemy may never be seen, only felt.

The Arc of Change

Waterloo was the last great echo of an era where war was a visible clash of armies. The Crimean War marked the turning point, forcing commanders to adapt to weapons that punished visibility. What began as a retreat from open formations became, over two centuries, a complete transformation: from frontal attacks to covert wars fought in the shadows.

In the end, the story of warfare is the story of humanity’s struggle with its own ingenuity. Each new weapon makes the battlefield more hidden, more complex, less about glory and more about survival. And yet, behind the technology and the tactics, the same truth lingers: war is never about open fields or closed rooms, but about lives caught in its path.