Kanlaon

First order of business: Self has been perusing Gendrya and found a really badass one-shot. An excerpt:

She wielded two swords when she reached the tower. The Red Priestess wasn’t alone.

The girl wielded her swords, blood swiping tracks on the floor.

And he came out of nowhere, wielding a hammer.

Her other reading of the night is of course Waterloo (never mind the subtitle, which goes on forever). The battle is at midday of 18 June 1815. Napoleon has finally ordered his artillery to let loose on Wellington’s forces.

Here are the numbers:

Napoleon has 246 cannon, Wellington 157.

The French had 12-pounder cannon, The British 9-pounders.

Napoleon used his Grand Battery “as an offensive, as against a defensive, weapon.” He had used them this way before, most spectacularly at Wagram in 1809, where 112 French cannon “tore the heart out of the Austrian army.”

Wellington, on the other hand, had scattered his artillery “along the whole of his line” and used them “defensively . . . they were absolutely forbidden to engage in counter-battery fire.” Wellington was serious. When Wellington saw one of his batteries attempting to counter the French  artillery fire by opening up, “he ordered the arrest of the battery commander.”

Here self would like to interject with an account of her first visit to the British Imperial War Museum, two months ago, in June. At the entrance are the biggest long-range guns self has ever seen. They are massive. About as massive as an Egyptian pyramid. She can only imagine a whole battery of these guns firing away. The sound would shatter eardrums.

You have to walk right beneath these guns to get into the museum. It gave self a chill.

Inside the museum is a gorgeous engine called the Merlin. Shined to a high polish. Looks like Geiger art. Manufactured by Rolls Royce. For use in British World War I fighter planes.

Stay tuned.