Barry Lyndon - First Taste of Battle

published by Crawlius 11 months ago • 1022 views

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A scene from Kubrick's Barry Lyndon, depicting the red coats marching into sustained French volley fire to the beat of the British Grenadiers.

Comments

thats an in-effective way of getting your war on!

written by K0MMIE

| 11 months 1 week ago | CH

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Now wonder Darwin figured his theory out. In his days there were so many true Darwin award fanatics.

written by rbar

| 11 months ago | CH

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lol I can't really belive they actually have been so stupid

written by looris

| 11 months ago | CH

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"thats an in-effective way of getting your war on!"

It was actually a very effective way to get your war on. The musket only had an effective range of about 50 yards and was extremely inaccurate. The only way to make effective use of the weapon was therefore to mass your men. The idea was that if you if you have a group of musketmen standing shoulder to shoulder, firing in volleys, then the mass of musket balls being fired would be bound to hit something. Were they to spread out and fire individually, the inaccuracy of the musket would prevent them from hitting a damn thing. In other words, in order to mass their fire they HAD to mass their men.

In this particular attack, where the French are unsupported by artillery, the Brits would not have had to sustain quite so many volleys. It takes roughly twenty seconds to reload a musket, which is plenty of time for an attacking force to run across the 50 yards or so where musket fire threatens them. This then is what the attack would have looked like: the Brits march across the open field until they are roughly 50 yards away from the French; the French fire a volley and begin reloading; the Brits fire a volley and then charge in with the bayonet; the Brits will most likely close to hand to hand range before the French can finish reloading; a bayonet fight breaks out where numbers, skill and bravery determines who wins. Not quite as suicidal as this makes it out to be, eh?

If the French had artillery however, the Brits would be pretty well fucked. They'd be sustaining artillery fire from the moment they began marching to the attack, such that by the time they actually reached musket range, their attacking force would be so diminished that they would no longer be combat effective.

Still a pretty cool clip, nevertheless.

written by scottishmartialarts