The Great Battles of All Nations

I wonder what specific battles the Alaric and Attila prints portray.  (Incidentally, the Nazi seizure of control in Italy after the surrender in September 1943, which was announced simultaneously with the invasion at Salerno, was Operation Alaric.)

We stopped at Thermopylae, and it definitely has widened since then.  It's also flat once you get away from the mountain.  But this is hardly surprising; I recall that H. G. Wells noted the change in The Outline of History.

Incidentally, Will Cuppy in The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody was very skeptical of elephants and suggested that Hannibal never seemed to have them in his victorious battles.

Going back a little further, I saw a lot of interesting material here.  KFZ's was nice, remind us that the name Thermopylae means "hot gates" for the thermal springs there.  And the statue with the "molon labe" slogan ("come and take them"), which has seen other uses since then (including at Gonzales in 1835, where it ignited the Texas revolt against Santa Anna).  Sadly, I don't recall seeing anything like that when we stopped there, though I'm sure there must have been something at the specific site.

The flaming ships for the Armada is appropriate.  Despite the damage the Spanish took on the way up the channel, the crucial event was the fireship attack at Calais the night after they arrived.  (One book said that Parma was already prepared and only needed 18 hours to get there and load his men, so Drake had to act quickly.  If the Spanish had landed his army in England, it's doubtful the tiny English army could have stopped them.)

Even the fireships didn't do much damage, but it drove the Spanish out of the harbor, and the wind was unfavorable for going back in.  So they decided to return by going north around England and Ireland, which is when they suffered most of the damage (mostly from the weather).

Those are interesting photos of sketches, but I have to warn you that "WellingtonCam" seems to show a picture of Boney (note the hand in his coat, for example).

Perhaps my favorite anecdote of Sedan in 1870 actually came the night before, when General Ducrot, noticing that the Prussian fires surrounded the French, famously said, "We are in a chamber pot, and we will be shat upon there."  He was quite right.

FluCam, indeed.  Most amusing.

No doubt about it.

I think I notice a very distant relative by the cannon.