照Keegan那本书的意见
Rudyard is telling us that guns were posted some distance, perhaps twenty or thirty yards, in front of the infantry (a position unthinkable a hundred years before or after); that they were firing a multiple projectile, consisting of 'a number of small cast-iron spheres in a sheet metal can which disintegrated on discharge' (canister), at an operational range of about a hundred yards or less; that the French who survived the salvoes, of which they had to stand perhaps two or three as they approached, actually rode past and round the guns, whose crews fled before them to the shelter of the infantry squares.
That they did not try, or succeed in, spiking them either (that is, driving a spike into the touch-hole by which they were fired) has always caused puzzlement; the probable explanation is that the act required a man to dismount, something which no cavalryman, whether out of braggadocio, stupidity, caste-pride or self-preservation, seemed prepared to do in the face of the enemy.
他也认为不管是骄傲还是自我保护,让骑兵在如此近的距离下下马将钉子钉进火门是一个不大可能的事情 |