Foot Artillery of the Guard: Napoleon’s “Belles Filles” (NAP0103)

The “belles filles” are the guns

The title has misled people for two centuries, so let us settle it first: Napoleon’s “beautiful daughters” were his cannon. Here they are, one of them firing — a long orange flame out of the muzzle, the gunner who pulled the lanyard still at the end of his own arm. Bearskin caps, dark blue coats with red facings: this is the foot artillery of the Imperial Guard, and it is the arm the Emperor came from.

A gun is a team, and every man has a number

Eight to fifteen men served a field piece, and each had a numbered task he did and only he did: sponge, load, ram, prick the cartridge, prime, stand clear, fire. Done well it produces two or three aimed rounds a minute. What looks like a crowd around the gun is a sequence, and any man out of place slows all the others.

The bucket in the foreground is a safety device

That wooden pail of water is not scenery. After every shot the barrel holds burning residue, and the wet sponge is run down the bore to kill it before the next cartridge goes in. Skip the step and the powder ignites in the hands of the man loading it. The most repeated act in a gun crew’s day is the one that stops it from destroying itself.

The officer with the telescope is doing the other half of the job

He is watching where the shot falls. Artillery is the only arm of that period that could observe its own effect and correct — infantry and cavalry find out what they achieved when it is over. That feedback loop is why gunnery attracted men with mathematics, and why it produced officers who thought about a battle as a problem in geometry.

Guns concentrated, not spread out

The habit Napoleon carried out of artillery school was to mass batteries rather than distribute them along the line. At Wagram a grand battery of about a hundred guns was assembled to hold a collapsing centre. Twenty guns firing at one point do far more than a hundred spread over a front — obvious once stated, and rare in practice, because concentrating them means stripping other sectors.

The bearskin says which army this is

The foot gunners of the Guard wore the bear fur cap of the grenadiers — the mark of belonging to the Guard rather than to the artillery. The Guard was a whole army in miniature: its own infantry, its own cavalry, its own guns. The same cap, and the same logic, is in NAP0173. The mounted version of these gunners is NAP0008.