Stone-Shot against Mud-Covered Mantlets
An incendiary artillery tactic with columns of arithmetic and mechanical sketches.
A note describes firing artillery loaded with stone chips at protective mantlets smeared with mud, so the shot strips the mud away and leaves the screens open to incendiary fire. Beside it stand columns of multiplication and division working with values such as 1080, 720 and 240. The sheet is filled with perspective sketches of trestle frames, batteries of stacked cylindrical vessels, and a small regular solid (dodecahedron).
On this page
Clearing mud from mantlets by stone-shot
Artillery charged with chips of stone is fired into the mantlets that have been covered with mud. The shot cleans off the mud and makes the screens receptive to the incendiary fire then directed into them, a two-stage attack that first exposes and then burns the defensive screening.
Columns of multiplication and division
Several vertical columns of arithmetic sit at the upper right, working products and quotients around the figures 1080, 180, 45, 720 and 240. They appear to be the numerical reckoning behind the mechanical or ballistic studies on the sheet.
Trestles and batteries of cylinders
The sheet is crowded with perspective sketches of trestle frames and rows of stacked cylindrical vessels, drawn with long ruled sight-lines. They read as apparatus or containers laid out in constructional perspective.
Small regular solid
A small regular polyhedron with pentagonal faces (a dodecahedron) is drawn in the lower-centre of the sheet. It sits among the mechanical studies as an isolated geometric figure.