There is one other reason for the effectiveness of artillery. A reason I like to call the "Psych" effect. I'm not referring to the effect from having your comrade in the file beside you have his belly ripped open by bone fragments of the grenadier who, until recently, was marching beside him and shouting encouragement to his mates, but rather the ability of the gunner who fired the solid shot causing the carnage to kill with such indifference. It is very difficult to train a man (or woman?) to kill. Post WW2 studies showed that less than 20% of small arm rounds were actually fired at a target; ie "a man". During the American Civil War there is a documented case of a Union line firing at an advancing Confederate battalion at 20 yards, and not one single hit being effected on the Rebs! Why? Because of the natural aversion a human has to kill another human. Man has a natural in-built resistance to bloodshed. Not so the case for the Gunner, (or the bomber pilot of later conflicts). To him, the enemy is nothing more than a target, not the flesh and blood that he is. Once the target (enemy) is close enough that he can truly identify with it, there is no chance of flinching at the moment of pulling the trigger. It's hard to miss a point blank range with a howitzer! In short, the gunner can kill without any effort. He is simply going through the motions; Load!, Ram!, FIRE! Swab… CONCLUSION Guns then, as is the case today, were great combat multipliers, and as the quality of the infantr y fell, (about 1809 in the case of the French), the more artillery was brought onto the battlefield to compensate and become the great killer. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars artillery was claiming from 70 to 80% of all casualties on the battlefield. In the hands of a great commander such as Napoleon artillery could be devastating. As Sir Thomas Picton stated at Waterloo, in the last great battle of the period, "Napoleon… wields his cannon like a pistol…" Between the years 1800 and 1815 artillery had given a taste of what was in store for future battlefields, and maybe for Mankind. Had Mankind's fate been loaded in the barrel of a gun? I wonder if the great gunner Napoleon would have approved? Back to Table of Contents -- Kriegspieler #10 To Kriegspieler List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by Kriegspieler Publications. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com