Quote Originally Posted by Furious Mental View Post
Consider French revolutionary armies and it becomes pretty obvious that the instinct of untrained or scarcely trained men under fire was to spread out and use cover. No one needs to be trained to use their common sense. What they did have to be trained to do was operate in a formation even if it was an open and flexible formation.
Um, that time period (which is after the ending of the campaign in this one) featured the "Levée en masse," which was the 1st large-scale compulsory conscripting of the Industrial Age. Napoleon's tactics focused on a combination of massed cannons, cavalry charges, and infantry columns breaking through the enemy line and convincing the survivors to leave the field ... bloody, but effective (at the time: imitating them later led to the horrific casualties of the ACW and WWI).

Skirmishers were deployed relatively rarely, and even then they were recalled and re-attached to the assault column. One theater that saw extensive use of skirmishers (and guerrillas) was the Iberian Peninsula,