Continuing from the last post, here's another way to show how useless numbers alone are in deciphering a battle. Most good military histories include a map that looks something like this:
In this case, we're looking at a detail of the final phase of the Battle of Antietam. The IX Corps, under General Ambrose Burnside, pushed across Antietam Creek. The image is static, but you get a sense of the troop movements, the terrain across which they fought, and (in many maps) the outcome. In this case, the mapmaker is trying to depict that, after Burnside's troops captured a bridge and moved beyond west bank, the Confederates counterattacked, pushing the IX Corps back to the creek.
It's hard to convey the entire course of a battle in a single map; multiple maps are usually best. Here are two maps of Antietam side-by-side, including the larger map from which I extracted the detail. You can see the changes from the beginning of the bloodiest single day of combat in American history, around 9:00 AM, and at the end, before sundown. Zooming out, these two maps show you the troop movements around what became the Antietam battlefield, showing how and why the Union and Confederate armies clashed at this particular spot.
If you want another example of this "multiple snapshot" approach, take a look at these maps depicting the beginning, middle, and end of the Battle of Austerlitz. In an age of relatively easy-to-use video tools, it's no surprise that many historical cartographers are now creating fully animated maps, letting you play, pause, and rewind the course of a battle or campaign. The BBC created this animated map of the Battle of Trafalgar, complete with details on ship-to-ship tactics.
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