1) According
to Parker, what substantial changes did warfare undergo during the revolutionary
and Napoleonic periods?
2) According
to Keegan, what was Napoleon's overall objective in the war of 1815?
What were the two strategies he could have employed to attain this objective?
Which one did he choose? On the battlefield, why did he opt for a frontal
assault?
3) Keegan
divides the fighting at Waterloo into various categories. I would like
you to come up with short, one- or two-sentence answers to each one
of the following questions:
Cavalry
vs. Cavalry: What didn't happen when cavalry charged cavalry? What
did happen?
Artillery
vs. Cavalry: What generally happened when cavalry encountered artillery?
Infantry
vs. Cavalry: Could cavalry actually attack infantry? What usually
happened when cavalry approached infantry? Under what circumstances
could cavalry break infantry?
Artillery
vs. Infantry: Artillery could be very dangerous to infantry, but when
was artillery most effective?
4) According
to Keegan, infantry versus infantry was a special case, and he spends
a great deal of time discussing it. He writes that it is easy for us
to understand the ferocity of fighting in enclosed spaces that characterized
the struggle for La Haye Sainte and Hougoumont. On the other hand, however,
he thinks we have more trouble figuring out why soldiers would trade
fire face-to-face in the open field at a range of only a few yards.
He says (on page 168), "What makes episodes of this sort so difficult
for the modern reader to visualize . . . is precisely their nakedly
face-to-face quality, their offering and delivery of death over distances
at which suburbanites swap neighbourly gardening hints, their letting
of blood and infliction of pain in circumstances of human congestion
we expect to experience only at cocktail parties. . . ." Consequently,
he seeks to understand the psychology of infantry units in battle, which
leads him to contemplate the following questions:
* First,
why did the French infantry units involved in attacks collapse first
from the rear of their formations?
* Second,
what held the British together in the face of attacks? In other words,
what allowed them to "stand"?
* Third,
why was the British victory over the French a highly symbolic one?
1) What
were the five phases into which Keegan divides the battle of Waterloo?
2) How
did Waterloo differ from Agincourt? What changes had taken place since
Agincourt that made Waterloo different?
3) What
do the types of wounds suffered by the men tell us about what the most
lethal weapons on the battlefield were?
