Napoleon Series Archive 2017

Re: Artillery casualties
In Response To: Artillery casualties ()

Jorge, I've been studying wound types for many years during these long wars. The problem is that most data refers to men still alive and reaching surgical care. Dead counts on the battlefield were rare. It's only if you can amalgamate the dead on the field with the wounded and those patients who had died of wounds that you can get accurate proportionate ratios of which type of weaponry kills and wounds. The Austerlitz and Eylau data is good but necessarily incomplete. I've always felt from many accounts and reports of the casualties presenting for therapy that small arms fire was most likely the commonest form of wounding. Since, on the whole, the only way you could survive a round shot strike was by a hit on the limb or a tangential strike, the majority of ordnance deaths would be lying out on the field. Certainly, studying casualties retrieved alive would give results skewed towards wounds and death from small arms fire. Sadly, we will never know the true proportions since most information is selective or incomplete. Michael.

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