![]() Even bayonet charges weren’t actually meant to be lethal – they were meant to cause a morale shock that cavalry could take advantage of. The best generals in the world, at that moment, saw infantry only as a wall of meat that protected the artillery. Which is where we get back to why Wellington’s Rifles were so special, why it’s a big deal they aimed their shots. He takes only fifteen seconds to run 50 meters. See:ġ: Line infantrymen had only a 1/200 chance of hitting a shot at 50 meters, and took twenty seconds to reload.Ģ: A very large man with a sword runs at approximately 3.5 meters per second. You can prove it with a bit of easy maths. So ‘grenadiers’ really means ‘a wall of fuck-huge men with swords’. Originally they did carry hand grenades, so they recruited the biggest, burliest, bravest men who could get in close and throw them hard, but generals soon figured out that the men were deadlier than the bombs. ‘Grenadier’ doesn’t mean what you’d expect, by the way. Grenadiers would then storm the shaken lines, causing a panicked retreat, and fleeing soldiers would be cut down by cavalry. The French line infantry would hold the enemy in place while the artillery did its work. Superior artillery would force the enemy into engaging the French in entrenched positions. Napoleon himself focused on cavalry, artillery and grenadiers – that was his genius. Muskets could be perfectly accurate, in the right hands, but army doctrine focused entirely on rate of fire, before charging with bayonets. There’s a reason battles were fought the way they were, with long lines of men walking within spitting distance of each other before drawing their firearms point blank. The Napoleonics are a truly insane period for warfare, see. He’s basically Rambo, if all it took to be Rambo was being able to shoot a guy before he could walk across a field at you. ![]() That is to say, Sharpe’s an action hero, but he’s clearing a very low bar. The books start with Sharpe as a musketeer, but the TV series skips straight to him being one of Wellington’s famous “Green Jackets” – light infantrymen who used cover, moved on their own initiative, picked their own targets, and actually aimed before they shot. Sharpe is a series named for its protagonist, Richard Sharpe, a rifleman under the Duke of Wellington. ![]() But before I can do that, I have to explain the entire history of eighteenth century warfare. What I really want to talk about is how its low-budget production actually enhances the show, and how cheap cameras can actually change the moral of a story. I get to write a great piece for you, and it doesn’t feel like work. I have a thing for a man in 18th century uniform. They’ve come to an uneasy compromise over a Sharpe DVD boxset.
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