The officers knew well enough that it was false, but it nevertheless served to animate them with a certain bravado and swagger. The narrator suggests that that visualisation, a product perhaps of contemporary journalism and popular fiction, had an influence upon the officers commanding a Russian company.
#BITING THE BULLET NAPOLEONIC WAR SERIES#
The first visualisation is of warfare as a series of exciting, hand to hand engagements, fought at close quarters with sabres and bayonets. The story is presented as a narration by a Russian, who makes the following claims : I was reminded of a story from long ago in the Caucasus, part of which I saw, part of which I heard from eyewitnesses, and part of which I imagined to myself. The story’s eponymous hero, Hadji Murat, was one of the Chechen warlords. The context of the story is the fighting in Chechnya in 1851.To use Phillips O`Brien`s distinction, the grand policy of the Tsar was to stabilise the southern border of the Russian Empire, while the strategy chosen by his Generals was to kill Chechen Warlords and to sack and destroy the villages where they recruited their bands of fighters. His short story of 1912, Hadji Murat, contains examples of ways in which war is visualised.
‘Your podcasts have sent me back to Tolstoy. Anders Engberg-Pedersen on the impact of the Napoleonic wars: One of our regular podcast listeners – John Weeks – shared these reflections with us recently, inspired particularly by the episode we recorded with Prof.
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