OT Napoleans March

[kato13]

I put this in the Military service thread but it really was a huge thread drift so I decided to move it to a new thread.

If anyone ever wants to do this in another thread it is really pretty easy to move even multiple posts to a new thread. Another nice thing about having a live in moderator.

Originally Posted by Mohoender

I agree about weather but it does play an important role in any kind of combat including land combat.

Napoleon I experienced it during the Berezina. When the retreat started out of Russia he had about 400.000 soldiers, at the end they were only about 10.000 survivors. Most of them lost to weather conditions.

In the field of information display, the following map of Napoleon's march is widely considered to be one of the greatest graphics ever.




Larger
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi.../29/Minard.png

It shows the number of soldiers alive at any particular moment in the march (the width of the bar)

The direction of travel (the color of the bar Grey/Black)

The armies geographic location. (X/Y coordinates)

Progression in Time (changes in X)

The temperature during the return trip (the graph on the bottom)


It really puts the sheer number of causalities in perspective.