It wasn’t a good battle for France, they’d been handed the first real defeat they had suffered on land for 10 years. Although it wasn’t the turning point of the Wars (which was the disastrous Russian invasion), it was a sign of things to come.

Under the circumstances they would try to make the death of a general seem as dignified as possible. But bullets were not that accurate back then and cannonballs are capable of tremendous damage.

It was the first defeat Napoleon had suffered since the Battle of Acre (and he’d lost then because he had fought Britain on their strongest point battles in countries where they had colonial leverage and could deploy their navy, which was the best in the world) ten years prior.

The French got a wake up call that day.

Only the first two of those films need be acknowledged.

Both for The Godfather. Brando won but refused to accept the award and sent someone to lecture the audience about Native Americans instead.

I would imagine that Pacino’s tantrum is little known, because it was overshadowed by Marlon Brandon’s own boycott.

Brits and their French allies. The Frogs only lost once Britain left.

To some extent, it can veer into conspiracy theory stuff at times.

Most battles of the American War of Independence were field battles. The Patriot is historical fiction.

The Boer War talk Britain about how to counter insurgents by cutting off their supply lines and taking the war to them. The Boer leaders got the shock of their lives once Kitchener took over.

Indeed, Britain allied with Japan to fight off the Vietnam insurgency, just months after having been fighting them.

Britain had always been a reluctant enemy of Japan, there was far more closeness between the countries in culture (Britain had taught Japan's Navy and had been allies with Japan ever since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905), than there was between the USA and Japan.

Hence, why I said just a grain. Many urban legends have a kernel of truth to them.

Oh absolutely, the idea that witchcraft was a pagan religion being supressed is nonsense.

Witches were considered Christians, just flawed ones. Midwives and others would have actually been used to help carry out the witch trials, to search women for the alleged "marks of the devil".

The reality is that if you were a woman, disease and starvation were a far bigger anxiety than witchcraft accusations.

The number of women allegedly burned (witches were normally hanged, rather than burned, as burning was a punishment for heretics and witches weren't considered heretics) is always massively exaggerated.

The period before WW1 is remembered as an Age of Innocence but it had its own macabre stuff.

Many of the books bound in human skin, are from the late 19th century and were poor people whom the doctors felt entitled to use their skin to remember them by.

General Kitchener the head of the British Army, kept a human skull he had taken from a dead chieftain and used it to store pencils in.

Britain had already had their War in Vietnam in the form of The Boer War of 1899-1902. The Boer War was shockingly brutal and eventually concentration camps were used to achieve victory but lessons were learned. Britain was much better at counter insurgency than it was at field battles.

There will probably be a grain of truth in that. Most witches accused were women, but most of those who accused them were also women.

So, say a mother loses her baby in a miscarriage and the midwife herself happens to be childless. It is very easy for her to suspect that a jealous midwife has done something sinister.

Probably true. The Boer War I think is a good insight into the tactics The Union might have had to use had The South not surrendered and instead adopted a guerrilla warfare approach.

Britain defeated the Boers in conventional warfare in the early 20th century, however the Boers then adopted commando raiding tactics which were highly effective.

Eventually Britain brought in a scorched earth policy and concentration camps to isolate the insurgents and starve them out.