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| Near Sombreffe, Wallonia, Belgium (Source) |
He saw his company commander, Capitaine Jacques Pretre draw his sword and straighten his back. He saw the captain glance back over his shoulder and grin at the men behind him. Though Pretre looked nervous, he also looked as if was enjoying himself.
Jegou was not.
He was relatively new to the army, he had been among the young soldiers conscripted in 1813, one of the so-called Marie Louises.¹ He had turned 18 on the march to Leipzig. All he knew of army life was defeat. Many of the soldiers around him had been with the army since the glory days of 1805 and 1806. They welcomed the return of Napoléon. Jegou welcomed the chance to not be unemployed.
As the drums began to rumble and thump, Jegou thought that perhaps unemployment wasn't that bad after all. His heart nearly jumped into his throat as he heard the command, "En avant!²"
Seconde-Lieutenant Moritz Neugebauer heard the drums, faintly at first, then growing louder he heard the sound which had sent shivers down the spines of many of Bonaparte's opponents ...
"Vive l'Empereur!!"
Getting a tighter grip on his sword, Neugebauer barked at his men, "Steady lads, the Frenchies are on their way!"
Nearby, looking out of a shattered window, Soldat Horst Schwartzman gulped as he saw the first skirmishers. The French were indeed here!
"Make ready!" Neugebauer shouted.
"Ah, there, in that building! See them, Bernard?"
"Heh, I do my lad, I do."
Riqueti knelt and steadied his musket, aiming at an open window, he had seen the shadow of a man within. Though his smoothbore musket was no better, nor worse, than any other musket in the French army, he knew the idiosyncrasies of his weapon. He was consistently accurate out to a hundred paces.
There! He pulled the trigger, then immediately began to reload.
"Get back on that window, Schwartzman!" he heard his sergeant growl.
Taking his position, he heard the order, "Feuer!!"
"They're dug in as firm as ticks in those villages, Sire."
Trudeau gave a long, drawn out hiss between his teeth, then fell face first to the ground. Riqueti looked on in shock as his comrade lay there, dead. That sudden Prussian volley had struck home.
He heard his sergeant nearby, "Fall back to that line of trees we passed, lads. The squareheads are snug in those buildings, we'll need more men to winkle them out."
Riqueti stood and fired, hoping he had avenged his comrade's death.
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| Ligny Ernest Crofts |
The aide-de-camp had galloped all the way from Général Vandamme's position, his horse was lathered with sweat, the young lieutenant's uniform was as well.
"De la Bédoyère, is Gérard in position?"
"He is, Sire."
"Soult! Dispatch to Gérard, march now, Vandamme seems to be bogging down."
Turning once more to De la Bédoyère, the Emperor grinned, "Time to raise the ante I think. Lieutenant, ride back to Général Vandamme with my compliments, 'Press your attack, Gérard is going in on your right!' Go!"
As the young officer galloped off, Napoléon Bonaparte put his glass to his eye once more. He would probe these damn Prussians, then when he had their full attention, Ney would hit them from behind!
Not six miles from the Emperor's position, Chef d'escadron Louis Bosquet was once again trying to prod his commander to action.
"Monsieur le Maréchal, cannon fire to the east has been reported. The Emperor's wing of the army is in action against the Prussians. We need to move, the crossroads is being reinforced even as we speak." Bosquet was nearly frantic at the time being wasted.
"Where is d'Erlon? I won't move without him close by." Maréchal Ney was petulant this morning, out of sorts.
"His lead division is within an hour's march, he will be up soon enough to support our attack on the crossroads!"
"Calm yourself, Bosquet, I will not be rushed."
As Prussian and French soldiers killed each other not far away, the French under Michel Ney sat and ate their breakfast.
¹ See here.
² Forward!
It starts! Those white cross-belts provide a good aiming point.
ReplyDeleteAiming a smoothbore musket is more of a hope than a reality. Also, due to the ballistics of the thing, troops were taught to aim low as the ball tended to rise over the short distances these weapons were effective at.
DeleteConscripted as a way out of not having a job, can't say I ever thought of it like that but then I have never really been hungry.
ReplyDeleteBack then many soldiers lived better than their civilian counterparts. At least the army was required to feed and pay the troops, no one was required to feed the civilians.
DeleteI cannot imagine going into battle in a Shako (well, to be fair, I cannot imagine going into battle at all...).
ReplyDeleteWas Ney really not in that much of a hurry? (I say that; I remember the movie battle of Rourke's Drift where the British officers are eating lunch while the attack is happening in the camp below.)
I'm going to try and convey my opinions and thoughts on Marshal Ney over the course of the story. It was quite likely that he was suffering from PTSD, he had switched sides twice: Napoléon to the King, then back to Napoléon. He knew that if they lost he stood to lose everything. The royalists had treated his wife badly during the period prior to Napoléon's return. To say he was a complex individual with all sorts of things on his mind would be an understatement.
DeleteThere is a coolness that is required to be a good officer. Taking tea or eating lunch while under attack does take the coolness to the extreme, though. But oftentimes it's acts like, well, eating lunch or taking tea during an attack, that holds the panic of the troops down.
DeleteGeneral Washington was known to calmly sit on his horse, so was Lee and Stonewall.
As to PTSD, maybe. Would explain a lot. And then there are other factors, like multiple traumatic brain injuries or even a lot of low-level concussions, all which are easy to receive on any battlefield, especially in cavalry.
Ney was quite a warrior, allegedly the last soldier to leave Russia after that disaster, firing a musket at the pursuing Russians as he did so. It's more than likely he was suffering from PTSD, perhaps a concussion or two as well.
DeleteOne can attain some better degree of accuracy with a musket by selecting your balls carefully. Find one that fits the barrel really tight, and only use ones that are that diameter. Patch them well, too, using proper patch material and properly placing the patch material. Carefully measured charges also help, and packing said charges properly. Controlling the levels of fouling helps immensely, which means swabbing out the barrel after every couple shots.
ReplyDeleteDumping a loose powder charge and not tamping it down, using anything for patching, having balls that wallow down the barrel, all rob accuracy from a smoothbore. You can't get rifle accuracy, but you can increase the accuracy over the average shooter.
Going to some sort of weight-stabilized slug works, too, but I don't think they were available during the Napoleonic War era.
Men trained as skirmishers did just those things. The common rank and file were expected to bang away on command and not really aim except in the enemy's general direction. But they were taught to aim low, that much I remember.
DeleteBeans, Gadgets have always believed in ramming the projectile home, so there is a good bite of the rifling on the rotating band, put in the 600 pounds of propellant, red quilted ends facing the breech, close the breech, put in the primer, and step back, out of the way. But that is just the Badger way.
ReplyDeleteI know little about smooth bore muskets. You want a consistent thickness to the patching, I should think.
Does one obtain weight stabilized slugs by using an accurate bullet mold, and spinning it to centrifugaly get the weight contracted at one end?
Smooth bore muskets are fairly primitive, only specialist troops would go to the trouble to make them accurate. The big thing was volume of fire.
DeleteYou can get weight-stabilized slugs by casting them. Basically the front is solid while the rear is an empty skirt. The Minie 'Ball' is a perfect example of a weight-stabilized slug, though the skirt expanding to grab the rifling in a rifled musket adds a heckuvalot of accuracty.
DeleteThink more shotgun slug. Or lead pellet fired from a BB gun. That's what you can do with a proper slug. Seems shotgun slugs were first commercially availabe in the 1890s. Though they may have existed long before that.
And you, StB, were cheating as you were using a breech-loaded rifle. While most of Nappy's troops were using muzzle-loaders, which the USN got rid of by the 1890s.
All of Napoléon's troops used muzzle loaders. The Austrian army actually had an air rifle (seriously) which was a breech loader, the Girardoni air rifle. Had a tube magazine as well. They were delicate, required extra training to use and weren't widely used. Apparently Lewis and Clark took one along on their expedition!
DeleteI am glad you are back in your tale telling chair!
ReplyDeleteIt's comfy.
Delete