Various Interesting Things About The Napoleonic Era Part II

Ah, you thought I'd given up on this dusty topic that can only be of interest to people who collect ascots and have an enduring love of Coronation Street. How wrong you are.

Killing - On Land
Whereas now all you need is a few billion dollars worth of laser guided ordnance dropped from tens of thousands of feet lit up by an elite military team that has more hours training in Killing The Enemy With Dental Floss than I have spent being alive, in the Napoleonic Era, killing was all about cojones. Not that modern day or soldiers in Korean and Vietnam and WWII etc etc didn't have cojones. But in the Napoleonic Era that's ALL there was. No real tactics perse, or situational awareness, it was more or less a gigantic game of chicken.

You had three main groups in a land battle: cannons, cavalry, and infantry. They work in a sloppy rock papers scissors fashion. Infantry can beat infantry, cannons soften or beat infantry. Calvary can, in certain circumstances, destroy infantry, but in other circumstances, the reverse is true. Calvary, from what I can tell, tries to stay out of the way of cannons altogether. Then you have different grades of calvary (lancers, heavy cavalry, cuirassiers, oh god you're falling asleep already), and different grades for the other two roles in the army. But we won't get into that.

But we were talking about cojones,and games of chicken. In that time, there is no 'spotting' the enemy, finding the ambush, looking for IEDs. The enemy is wearing some ridiculously garish uniform, marching in a very large group (column or line) right at you. They are marching at you because muskets are only accurate (for generous definitions of 'accurate') at about 50 yards. I think you're at about 50/50 for whether the musketball will even hit you. So the enemy marches at you, you can see your likely death walking in cadence.

Behind them are their cannons firing iron balls (between 10 and 24 lbs) at you. You have to march at them, doing the same thing, hoping that an cannon ball doesn't find you and decapitate you or cripple your or disembowel you in a shockingly sloppy manner. I mean, the cannons will most LIKELY not hit you. Unless the gunners are good, and learn how to graze the shot, meaning the shot hits the first line, then bounces, but not too high, and keeps doing carnage all down the column.

And all the while you march, and your best friend gets his legs removed at the pelvis and that annoying bloke who still owes you 10 shillings cops it some upper crust officer is yelling at sergeant to yell at you to close ranks. That's right, fill up the space left by the careening ball of death that just left guts and viscera all over your already garish uniform.

And then you finally get in range. You all move together. Present arms, fire, load, veeeeeeery slowly. A really well trained infantryman could fire 3 shots in a minute. After the first or second volley there's smoke everywhere, you can't actually see your enemy are are just firing into smoke, hoping that the smoke is parted for a musketball coming from their side to you.

That, I'll humbly submit, takes cojones. Loading, firing, staying with your platoon.

At some point, the calvary might charge you. Big, massive beasts, trained to trample and bite (although, what with the trampling, I'm sure the biting doesn't worry you so much), and ontop, some enormous fellow from the upper crust who has had better food and better training than the poor fellows he's about to ride over. Infantry. Usually peasants or thieves or murderers, the general trod-upon of society.  So this upper crust fellow is knee to knee with his fellow calvary men, charging you, swinging an enormous cavalry sabre to cut across your face or to sever your spine.

But remember that thing I said about 'in certain circumstances'? Well, there was one thing the infantry could do, which was form a square. Outer layer of soldiers put their muskets to the ground, bayonets facing out, the second and third ranks fire. Horses, for some inexplicable reason, will not charge into pointy sticks.

And, here again, cojones comes into play. If you hold the square, with your mates, you're ok. You're safe. If you panic,if you all start to break and run, well. That's what calvary is made for. Running down broken and scattering infantry. Complete slaughter.

Next post, Killing on the High Seas.

Some People Saw The Meltdown Coming, in February.

Sorry for the lame YouTube post, and one not even featuring Terry Tate(!), but this video is really excellent.

The English : Judge, Jury and Executioner

The English have, no doubt, gotten a pretty raw deal in modern media. Look at any action flick or poorly written space opera, and you can be sure that the fellow in the over-starched grey uniform will give his orders with a terse, aloof accent that, while not one that can be found anywhere in the world, nevertheless is one that the World in General thinks the Brits have. The Brits also appear to be on the side of oppression in almost every historical epic worth mentioning. Even if it's say, Ancient Rome, you can bet your toga that Nero will have the flair of the Isle.

It's as if America has some sort of ancestral memory of the Brits, scars of taxation without representation and taking orders from gentlemen with fancy accents and powdered wigs. I imagine that'd be a wound that wouldn't heal well.

But in many ways the US still holds the English in powdered wig role. Anytime one needs the Authority on something, or A Real Serious Decision, it's always someone with an accent that sounds most at home making comments about "Chelsea" or ordering a scone. The Severe English Judge has become a trope in reality TV. If you have judges judging things: dancing, singing, dancing in groups, there is some bloody Brit in there making the FINAL DECISION.

There are two throwaway judges, usually, The Artist, who adds nothing useful and just wants EVERYONE to win, the Wannabe, who tries to make some sort of critical point but is hindered by his overuse of the word 'dawg', and the Brit.The audience pretty much ignores ALL judgements except for the Brit's. The Opinion That Matters.

Americans aren't to be trusted in their assessment. They are too 'rah-rah why can't we all win', yet at the same time, by the very nature of contests, someone has to win. So it's up to the Brit to nod his well coiffed head and either give begrudging approval or sit and ponder while he constructs the best way to destroy the aspiring singer/dancer/group dancer's dreams in a way that only a Greater Demon from the ninth circle could.

I think it's also the sentiment that the Brits, and Europe in general have more rigour. Things are more Old School Serious over there. One gets images of 2nd Grade children having to memorize every little country in western africa for their geography lessons, whereas in the America the children just have to find the US on a globe. Maybe this is part and parcel with Britain having Tradition and History. I mean, when there have castles, they aren't ironic remakings of a bygone era, they are actual castles (albeit bought up and inhabited by some media baron or Madonna).

It's the order of the world. The Brits, have Rigour and Judgement, the Americans, well, they have the guns, I suppose.

The English : Humour

Thanks to TimoOK for the photo.

I've been meaning to do this for a while, a series of posts about the Brits, the English, those bloody Colonial Powermongers, whatever.

They're such an interesting group, they seem to possess the best and worst of so many things I hold dear. Maybe it's because they allow the latter that the former blooms, I don't know. Maybe it's because they've been around for so damn long. And really, British and Humour is such an inconceivably massive topic that it makes me faint just to consider it. But consider I must.

For one thing, engineers and science geeks (especially computer science) absolutely LOVE British humour. From Black Adder to Fawlty Towers to Red Dwarf to the venerable Pythons. A single quip from one of the more obscure episodes will leave the average geek howling the aisles for days. Days. It's the universal tie that binds all nerds. Certainly a theoretical astrophysicist, a perl hacker and a HAM radio operator have little in common (if they aren't, indeed, the same person), but throw them in a room and yell "NI!" and they'll be trading custom Texas Instrument Calculator programs before you can find all the anagrams in 'desultory'.

This might mean that British humour, or the best of it, is really for the bright. Or, alternatively, British humour is so odd and untoward that only people who do math for fun and use the phrase 'but recent literature suggests' would get it. Maybe both.

If one looks at it from a Art versus Popular debate, British humour is often considered on the side of 'Art', while everything else is vile and derivative; particularly American fare. While from the other side, British humour makes little sense and is best left to history like Churchill's dismal early military career.

A perfect illustration of this is when SNL hosted a small performance of the Dead Parrot sketch with John Cleese and Michael Palin. It's as venerated by comedy connoisseurs as "Who's on First". When SNL hosted it however, the American live audience just did not get it. Or it wasn't funny. But obviously it's respected well enough that a multi-million dollar show is willing to have the aging actors come over and do it. Obviously it Has Merit enough for people who MAKE that stuff for a living are willing to have the Pythons on.

And let's not forget that most of the Kings of humour writing (IMHO) are British. The ones I most respect and admire: Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, Oscar Wilde. British actors are almost legendary for their off-camera wit.

But there is a flip side. The Dark Side.The side that many will point to when they confess, after too many glasses of cheeky Bordeaux, that they just 'don't get it'. They'll point to Eddie Murphy or Jerry Seinfeld or Chris Rock and say, 'now THAT's funny' (as if humour was a mutually exclusive thing).

I'm talking of course, about the Benny Hills, and the sundry other programs that were never funny, never could be funny, but for some reason have inherent cultural cachet, so stay on the air and put the laugh tracks under duress to even so much as chortle. You've seen them perhaps, on some publically funded channel, right before the piercing expose on military funding and right before the driest newscast in the English speaking world. The colours are washed out. The lighting looks like it was done by an apoplectic chimpanzee with a detached retina; and beat after beat is filled with humour that is so obvious and low brow that you think it's high brow and spend the rest of the evening pretending like you're working on the New York Time crossword but in reality are trying to figure out what "that's a fanny I'd like to folly" really meant, in the subtext.