While I'm not much of an official historian, I have a bit of interest in this subject. Firstly, the premise of your question seems to be that you assume an army requires light to engage in combat at night, or that armies require light, torches, or floodlight to engage in night time combat.

Using modern times as a starting point and working backwards... The majority of modern warfare fought at night is only lit by the muzzle flashes and explosions of a war zone, and providing a fighting force has access, night vision or infrared instruments.

The bottom line for any night fighting is that you don't want to project or have light projected from or onto your position. That's a good way to get killed.

So with all that in mind, fighting at night was generally the same as it is now. It's extremely advantagous to attackers or ambushers, but is generally avoided because something as simple as maintaining your footing becomes a complete mess. But if you do engage in night fighting, it's worked like this; With firearms, you shoot at the opposing forces muzzle flashes and attempt to hit any targets you can see. Pre-firearms, it'd play out similarly to the way you would imagine - everyone would hope they retain their dark adaption and shoot (arrows) or attack targets they can see. Moonlit nights help in this case too.

There are some historical examples of this, but I don't know them intimately enough to talk about them with any expertise. I assume wiki articles are frowned upon, but there's a great list of ancient night time battles, here. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Night_combat#History