Reply To: Shooting at lines of troops that you can't see

[Marshal SinCere]

I remember the account of the British soldier at Waterloo who said that he welcomed the French cavalry attacks because it gave his side a respite from the artillery bombardment. I’ll try to remember who said it and at what point it was during the battle (the timing could be important because it might mean that the artillery fire at that time wasn’t ‘blind’ anyway).

I don’t think blind fire over a ridgeline should ever lead to a direct panic check in the enemy. I just mean that slow attritional losses and the horrible experience of having shells come in your general direction all day must have had some sort of effect on the Allies. Why else would Napoleon have spent all day bombarding the enemy lines if it had no effect at all? The things that interest me are;

i) should we bother to show this sort of thing in a grand tactical game?

ii) how do we quantify it?

iii) if a Division (say at Waterloo) suffers some losses from blind fire, to which battalions do we even choose to assign the losses to?

I appreciate that these are not easy things to address in a wargame, which is probably why rules designers don’t generally adress such things. I just think we should try.