Home1815 Edition

GRANADIER

Volume 10 · 326 words · 1815 Edition

a folder armed with a sword, a firelock, a bayonet, and a pouch full of hand grenades. They wear high caps, are generally the tallest and briskest fellows, and are always the first upon all attacks.

Every battalion of foot has generally a company of granadiers belonging to it; or else four or five granadiers belong to each company of the battalion, which, on occasion, are drawn out, and form a company of themselves. These always take the right of the battalion.

GRANADO or GRENADE, in the art of war, a hollow ball or shell of iron or other metal, of about 1/2 inches diameter, which being filled with fine powder, is set on fire by means of a small fuse driven into the fuse-hole, made of well-seasoned beech wood, and thrown by the granadiers into those places where the men stand thick, particularly into the trenches and other lodgments made by the enemy. As soon as the composition within the fuse gets to the powder in the granado, it bursts into many pieces, greatly to the damage of all who happen to be in its way. Granadoes were invented about the year 1594. The author of the Military Dictionary has the following remark on the use of granadoes. "Grenades have unaccountably sunk into disuse; but I am persuaded there is nothing more proper than to have grenades to throw among the enemy who have jumped into the ditch. During the siege of Cassel under the count de la Lippe, in the campaign of 1762, a young engineer undertook undertook to carry one of the outworks with a much smaller detachment than one which had been repelled, and succeeded with ease from the use of grenades; which is a proof that they should not be neglected, either in the attack or defence of posts."—The word Granado takes its rise from hence, that the shell is filled with grains of powder, as a pomegranate is with kernels.