The progress of firearms during the 19^th Century has been long understood and accepted. The Napoleonic short ranged, inaccurate, smooth bored musket gave way, first to the rifle musket then the breech-loader, before reaching the pinnacle of the magazine bolt actioned rifles, such as the Short Magazine Lee Enfield. This continuous development of range and accuracy forced the parallel development of field fortifications resulting in the ‘hell on earth’ of the trench warfare in 1914-18. A seminal example of this development was the American Civil War, troops fighting with rifled weapons capable of ranges of over 1000 yards using Napoleonic tactics, more suited to the short ranges of the 18^th Century, which lead inevitably to massive casualties of Pickett’s Charge and the like. In a direct response to these losses, armies developed the field fortifications of the later war, cumulating in the siege of Petersburg. This article will discuss an alternative view first offered by Paddy Griffith in 1986, developed by Brent Nosworthy and a current assessment of this view point provided by Earl J. Hess. Read more »

I was talking last night in the pub to my friend Ian about the site and its development. I have some plans about the changes I want to do, but plan to do them slowly as I can learn and understand what those change mean and can then put them on this diary.

One of the planned changes was to add one of those little icons that show up in the address line and on your bookmarks. Ian told me it was called a Favicon and that as browsers cache this info when a site is bookmarked then I needed to make the change now or nobody would see it!

As I already had an image I wanted to use I set about the job this morning. First problem was the image did not transfer very well to being only 16×16 pixels, it was too detailed. The image was of a 15th century capital T with all that fancy leaf work,so I had to simplify it not a pretty image at full scale but not too bad when reduced to icon size.

I then had a quick look via google to find out how to install it and found this entry  here so that was easy enough, I edited my test site (on a USB stick) and tested it. Spend more time finding out how to un-cashe the old site from my browser so I could see the change. Then uploaded the new header and icon file. Bobs you uncle site has a new favicon.

Welcome,

If you have read the editorial you will see why I have been moved to create this site. This series of posts will act as a journal of my journey no the development of this site. The site is starting at a very simple level and will develop in sophistication, I hope, over time.

While I was an IT professional my background is in large corporate databases and severs not in the technologies and techniques of web design. Hopefully my experience of IT will allow me to avoid too many errors but my lack of web based knowledge will allow non-IT readers to understand and appreciate how a site such as this may be built. That said what am I doing to site site at the moment? Read more »

Guilt is a difficult word to define, we tend to ascribe more guilt depending on the consequences of an action, rather than focus on the actual actions of the participates. The point of this article is to argue that Austro-Hungarian declaration and subsequent invasion of Serbia did not inevitably lead to the First World War, and their actions were constant with similar events which did and do not attract the burden of guilt that the events of July 1914 attract. The article will focus on the actions and intentions of the various participates and whether those actions could be considered reasonable at the time, rather than consider the catastrophic results of those actions. Read more »