I've got a theory.
I sometimes refer to it as the musket jackpot. I suppose it is a...
...A psychological theory to explain
why quite often, you get a situation arising in the battle which seems not tremendously logical.
We read from history books that there were times when men
with quite often slow loading firearms, muskets and so forth, are loading their musket
and they're -
BANG!
-not killing their foe, who's only a few yards away, and then -
- you might say, irrationally - trying to reload their musket again
And what does the foe do? Does he take advantage of this and charge in with the bayonet?
No! He stops and he... starts...
reloading... his musket.
Apparently,
This happened particularly in confined areas, so for instance,
In the Battle of Waterloo
There were a number of buildings on the field, and a very fierce fight was taking place in those buildings,
and there were men in those buildings who were *not* bayonetting each other,
but instead, reloading as fast as they could and trying to shoot each other
very short range!
Now, if he's just fired at me and - "Aah!"
"I'm still alive! He fired at me, and I'm still in one piece, I'm alive, thank goodness for that."
"Oh, he's now reloading, oh, well, I'll just go run over to him to him and bayonet him then!"
...They didn't do this, instead, they would try to shoot them and reload after each failure.
Why? Well, here's the theory. Um...
Getting involved in the bayonet fight is something that you really want to avoid if you possibly can.
Being bayonetted is very unappealing, and
In order to bayonett someone, you've got to get right up to him. Gotta get right next to him and
Do the deed, and, of course, if you're that close to him, you're very likely to be quite close to a few of his friends,
who may have similar ideas with you in mind.
So that's very unappealing? Now, it's true,
you may be able to bayonet your foe, but what you want is to win this fight
and be unscathed. Now, being shot with the musket ball tends to be fairly all-or-nothing,
you're either out of the fight, or he missed you, and you're fine,
So, what I want to be is absolutely fine, and for him to be able to fight.
So I'm going to load my musket - no, did that wrong way around...
[miffed english mumbling]
Anyway, I load my musket, and then I
Fire! Now if I'm indoors,
The noise a musket's going to make going off -
- If you've never heard a modern firearm go off
You may be surprised just how noisy they are. A modern pistol or a rifle being fired is
about 20 times louder than you could possibly imagine that they are.
When you're watching a film, the noise they make is just nothing close to the sound of
an actual firearm being discharged.
If anyone of you have ever fired a firearm indoors, you'll know "My goodness, that's so much more loud and
positively damaging to the ears" - that's why people in firing ranges, you see with earmuffs on.
Muskets are much louder, and they spew out a very large amount of smoke.
So if you're in the confined area of a building and someone fires at you, you're probably deaf and blind.
Being deaf and blind is not conducive at all to going into melee.
Charging forwards blindly and deafly with a bayonet in the hope of bayoneting all your foes
and seeing them off - No, that doesn't sound too convincing, does it?
But maybe, if you just make a whopping noise in their direction
and make them all deaf and blind, they'll run away,
and them all running away - that's really appealing. So let's hope this scares them off
BANG!
Oh they're still there. Okay, do I want to charge in? I don't really know who's there,
how many of them there are, I don't have any armor, I don't have any shield...
Nope, I'm going to, uh...
The training kicks in, what you do is you load, you fire, you load, you fire.
That's what I was trained to do - that's what I'm going to do.
I reckon it's all psychological - people don't get in with a bayonet
because of what's happening upstairs.
They want to win the jackpot. "If I shoot him, I'm 100% okay, and he's defeated".
"If I go in with a bayonet..."
"...Yes, I might win, but there's a very, very hefty chance that I'll win,"
"But be so savagely wounded that I might die anyway".
Unappealing.