Quote:
Originally Posted by Philip
... The reason that armies wore bright colored uniforms and carried large regimental flags through much of the 19th cent. was so that troops and their leaders could distinguish friend from foe in the dense smoke generated by the volley fire of muskets, on top of the smoke of larger-bore weapons like cannon and the explosion of mortar shells.
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Ah Filipe ... the colored uniform resource didn't occur to me but, reading chronicles of the Peninsular war (1807-14), the impossibility to discern a thing whilst battling, with all that musketry and artillery smoke, is repeatedly mentioned.