Bojiště Königgrätz 1866 v roce 1923
Try entering this in the YouTube search bar, very short video but bears out my impression that the bohemian battlefields were much less wooded in the last century than they are today.
That's interesting, I'm reminded of the Petre Napoleonic books that had his Edwardian photographs of battlefields fairly unchanged.
Having just spent 5 days revisiting the battlefields with the foliage in full bloom I was struck by how restricted the fields of fire were from positions which according to the accounts had good fields of fire. And of course the various sketches made soon after the battle of the panoramas from various viewpoints all confirm this view.
I would recommend The Bohemian Battlefields of 1866 by Lt. JHM Cornwall, available from Helion. Not sure when they were done, but they appeared originally in The Journal of the Royal Artillery 1913/14. The vistas seem pretty open in these sketches of various views of the battlefields.
Quote from: holdfast on 04 June 2018, 10:02:01 AM
Having just spent 5 days revisiting the battlefields with the foliage in full bloom I was struck by how restricted the fields of fire were from positions which according to the accounts had good fields of fire. And of course the various sketches made soon after the battle of the panoramas from various viewpoints all confirm this view.
Ditto, I spent a fortnight last month doing the same thing. Did you by any chance get a look at any of the gun positions Pidoll constructed on that low ridge that extends east from Chlum, I couldn't find any surviving evidence but having spent an entire day looking at the northern position I'm of the opinion it wasn't as bad as Mollinary (the real one) would have us believe, from Maslowed it looks quite good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gofh5lG05lc
Battlefield archeologists locating Pidoll's earthworks on the right flank below Chlum using magnetrometry.