On May 11, 1745, over 50,000 British, Hanoverian, Austrian, and Dutch soldiers suffered defeat at the hands of 56,000 Frenchmen and their allies at Fontenoy, one of the classic battles of the eighteenth century. Fontenoy symbolizes the mid-eighteenth-century European conceptualization of regular war, the highly stylized enterprise in which soldiers marched in perfect order and straight lines to exchange volleys of musket fire within a stone's throw of one another. From the decorum of Lord Charles Hay's apocryphal challenge to the French line – “Messieurs les Gardes Françaises, tirez le premiers!” [Gentlemen of the French Guard, fire first!] – to the ordered advance of the British infantry against the French lines, British soldiers looked to Fontenoy as a model of bravery and behavior that they should strive to emulate.

Decorum and order, however, made up only part of mid-eighteenth-century Europeans' martial culture. The mid-eighteenth century was also the age of unchivalrous and chaotic irregular warfare, what the French called petite guerre. For most eighteenth-century Western European soldiers, Britons particularly, petite guerre was the antithesis of regular warfare. Their view of regular war revolved around images of battles like Fontenoy, battles between professional soldiers using parade ground tactics; petite guerre, they knew, focused on raids against enemy detachments, ambushes of isolated outposts, devastation of enemy fields, villages, and towns, and, in many cases, the rape and murder of innocent women and children.