Feet of Clay Work

To turn a passion for music into a career is a rare achievement; to write a song that is remembered ten years down the line is an even rarer one. Calixa Lavallée not only achieved both of these, but also the exceptional achievement of having his song was adopted as his country's national anthem 100 years after it was first written. Yet, in Burnished Rows of Steel, Calixa Lavallée is demnstrated to be possibly the worst songwriter in recorded human history - and also, ironically enough, very bad at French.

The Players Are Set

In Chapter 18 Part 1, we have an interesting chapter. The meat of which is supposed to be the Battle of Fort Pillow, which has apparently been under siege or the threat of siege since early 1862. Though apparently everyone has been tied up in a somewhat stalemated 'siege' of Nashville.

In any case, the various dispositions of the armies and river fleets aren't nearly so interesting as another apparent example of the author's laziness.

This chapter has a brief section relating to the film The Horse Soldiers, which in our history was produced in 1959, but in this story is produced in 1939, but more on that in a moment. The section takes place by opening with a reference to IMDB (yes, the Internet Movie Database, founded in 1990, clearly a difference of 129 years leads to this) talking about the film. The movie is referring to a story 'loosely' based on General Bufords's "Tennessee Raid" in the summer of 1863. Historian Bridget Catton relates:

"[Buford] drove through western and central Tennessee, tearing up railroads and upsetting [rebel General] Van Dorn's troop deployments before reaching US-held Nashville. The climactic battle scene at the “Palmyra Meeting House,” where the Buford character, General James “Jim” Butler (whose Tennessean antecedents are heavily played up) faces his brother John, a rebel cavalry officer, is based on the fighting at Pittsburg Landing, Tennessee, between Buford’s division and that of the rebel general Nathan Bedford-Forrest.

While all well and good for an alternate history section, the authors sheer laziness in writing this section boggles the mind.

Covering blushes

Burnished Rows of Steel, Chapter 3 Part 2:

the covered face, a half-built but existing earthwork that defended the shore approaches to Montgomery... Unfortunately for the British, however, Parrott had emplaced several rifled guns in embrasures cut into the covered face

Textbook of Fortification and Military Engineering, for use at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, Part I (1877):

Counterguards are works intended to protect the faces of bastions... When they are so narrow as to be suitable only for musketry they are termed couvrefaces; such narrowness has the advantage that the besieger has no room to establish breaching batteries upon them.

Of course, you can tell through observation that the covered face is too narrow to mount artillery. However, in light of TFSmith's pretensions to academic status, it's nice to know that a covered face is by its very definition too narrow to mount artillery.