All Comments on 'The Girl with No Name Ch. 22'

I do enjoy your story. The sex scenes are useless but I can read other stories for the sex.

By the middle 1700s every military man and most commoners knew that high castle walls were useless. Border cities in Europe were protected by the Italian Trace (so called because it was developed in Italy and "traced" a new sort of line around the city). Meaning low walls with wide ditches in front of them. The old towers had been replaced by bastions, which were basically triangular positions for the mounting of cannons that could flank every section of the wall from the side, as well as fire out at assaulting troops.

Most everyone who sees examples today assumes that the bricks or stones are what the "wall" is made of. The bricks are just a protecting coat to keep the rain during peace time from washing the wall away. You see, the wall is made of dirt. It is made of dirt because when the cannon balls strike the dirt it is not damaged, the dirt absorbs the energy. Bricks would be smashed to powder and become dirt, and dirt is cheaper. When possible the defenders could go out and shovel the dirt back where they wanted it, as good as new. BTW coastal forts were made of stone and bricks for 2 reasons; a) the sea would be much more damaging to dirt walls coated in a thin veneer of bricks and b) because guns on ships could not be accurate enough to hit the same place over and over to smash the wall like siege cannons could.

Ticonderoga, in "Upstate New York", is an example of a small fort of this sort. It figured in the Revolutionary War.

I was aware of many of the issues that you raised for European combat in the 1700s when I wrote "The Girl with No Name". The way that I envision my counter-factual history is as follows: The Duchy is geographically isolated - surrounded by mountains to the north, west, and southeast, so the only realistic route into the country for a large army would have to be from the south, passing through thick forests. Between the late 1530s and the 1740s, the Ottoman Empire was too distracted by other enemies to worry about invading the Duchy. The Danubians got a pass more from luck than anything else for two centuries, so they felt no need to upgrade their military tactics. The traditional city walls in the western half of the country served more to keep out bandits, maintain an illusion of protection, and set city limits. The eastern part of the Duchy, which was settled later than the western half, did not have any walled cities.

Until 1754, Danubian city walls in the west were not tested by a foreign invader with modern artillery, so average citizens had no way of knowing the walls surrounding the western cities were useless.

During the 1760s and 1770s the Grand Duke did upgrade the Duchy's defenses and built border defenses as you describe, but that lies outside the scope of my novel.