At the Time Patrol Academy, Dard Kelm wears:
"...a skin-tight gray uniform with a deep blue cloak which seemed to twinkle, as if it had stars sewn in." (2, p. 7)
When Everard and Whitcomb hunt in the Oligocene:
"Both wore Academy uniform, light grays which were cool and silky under the hot yellow sun." (2, p. 15)
When two Patrolmen arrive to arrest Everard and Whitcomb, they wear:
"...Patrol gray..." (6, p. 50)
Belatedly, we are told in The Shield Of Time that an hourglass in a shield is:
"...the emblem of the Patrol, the insigne on uniforms that were seldom worn." (p. 296)
That emblem will have to be shown from the beginning in any screen or graphic adaptation. The image shows the shield of time on Everard's timecycle.
10 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
A stylized hourglass within a heraldic shield would make a natural emblem for the Time Patrol. Maybe a white hourglass in a black shield? That would also help make it stand out when worn with grey uniforms.
Ad astra! Sean
It's not surprising they don't wear the uniforms much -- functionally, the Patrol is like an espionage organization. I should imagine that any 'intervention force' they keep ready for strongarm work would wear field gear.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Again, I agree. Uniforms would be worn mostly at the Academy or in eras when the Patrol could operate openly.
Ditto, what you said about intervention forces.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that one of the original purposes of uniforms was to enable combatants to tell who was on their own side immediately. It cut down on friendly fire. Or friendly pikepoints.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And you had to wear the uniform proper to your country army's or allegiance to avoid summary execution as a bandit or unlawful combatant.
Uniforms used in the field were once bright and colorful. Was that to make them easier to see in the smoke and dust of battle?
Ad astra! Sean
sean: partly, partly for the "rule of cool" (which helped with recruiting and morale) and partly to intimidate the other side.
Note the large hats, busbies, etc. often worn -- they made soldiers appear taller, which affects people at an instinctual level.
There was no downside to colorful uniforms until the end of the musket-and-bayonet period. Fights were at point-blank range (often under 100 yards) and done in massed formations standing up.
Skirmishers were considered rather "iffy" because they took cover and fired from behind cover.
The French persisted in blue coats and bright-red pants until 1914; the resistance to a camouflage color was very emotional.
The British were the first to go for that -- they were dressing their expeditionary forces in the field in gray or khaki as early as the late 1870's, and had made that universal by the 1880's. The Germans went over to field-gray in, IIRC, 1907 -- and the members of the Kaiser's military entourage drew straws to see who'd be the unlucky one who told him about it.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Gotcha, there were practical and psychological reasons for colorful uniforms.
A bit surprised the British were the first of the major powers to switch over to khaki/earth toned field uniforms so early.
You mentioned the UK and Germany, I then recalled how Nicholas II, as described by Massie in NICHOLAS AND ALEXANDRA, took a personal interest in new earth toned field uniforms for the Russian Army, and tested its use himself.
I assume Austria-Hungary went over to earth tone uniforms around the same time as Germany.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: AH went over to "pike-grey" in 1908 -- it's slightly lighter than feldgrau and has a sort of faint bluish tint.
The British were fighting different opponents, many of whom used guerilla-dispersed tactics, especially when the acquired breechloaders. Red coats were just too conspicuous.
Some of the British units in the Indian Mutiny (1857) improvised by taking their white-colored "summer fatigues" outfits and dying them with tea or other substances to get a khaki color for field use; after that it became more and more common, unofficially and then semi-officially.
And some of the native units there used similar colors, so it spread from colonial fighting back to the home army via rotation of units.
Colonial militia and "frontier guard" units had adopted camouflage even earlier, and the Rifle regiments used green as their standard color as early as the Napoleonic Wars.
For that matter, the British infantry in the American Revolution generally didn't wear regulation uniforms after the first year.
Contemporary pictures and comments make that clear. Retrospective illustrations showing them in parade-ground gear and formations are mostly inaccurate.
What they actually wore were open-necked coats that were originally red but quickly faded to a brownish color in the field, brown or grey pants of ankle-length (not the knee-britches in the official regulations), brogans and a minimal amount of harness to carry an ammo pouch, bayonet, knife and usually a tomahawk as well.
Often with a slouch hat and blanket roll -- rather like Confederate infantry in the ACW.
They usually used "light infantry" tactics, too -- loose linear formations, two-deep, with wide intervals between men, moving at the trot or run in action.
A lot of it was based on the "Ranger" units (Rogers' Rangers is the most famous but not the only one) raised during the French and Indian War.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very interesting, both what you said about the evolution of uniforms and the infantry tactics used by the British in the US War of Independence. As regards the latter point, I now wonder if the bloody slaughter of the Battle of Bunker Hill hastened and drove that use of "light infantry" tactics.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it did. Also experience in the French and Indian War.
There was a tension between the needs of colonial fighting and European combat. Tight formations worked better in Europe; for one thing, you had to be able to stand off cavalry. Looser ones were better in most colonial warfare.
So after the American war, the British army re-emphasized "European" styles of drill and combat formations.
Then in the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars the French used a combination of clouds of skirmishers to disrupt the enemy, and follow-up attacks by dense columns -- both required less formal drill than previous methods, and the combination worked very well against a lot of Continental armies.
And they had lots of cavalry ready to pounce on a weakness.
The British responded by a mixture of light infantry (Rifles and others) to prevent the French 'voltigeurs' (skirmishers) from harassing and disrupting the regular formations, together with linear regular formations to beat the French columns through superior firepower, via rapid volley-firing, and then bayonet charges.
The British cavalry was never as good as the French -- one French cavalryman observed that the British horse knew nothing but how to charge, and did even that badly (tended to keep going when they shouldn't, were hard to rally, and ended up scattering).
Between British and French artillery it was more or less a draw; advantages and disadvantages that about balanced out.
But the British infantry was better than the French; one French commander observed that trying to attack British infantry was "like trying to chew on rocks".
As the Houseman poem goes:
"These, in the days when the sky was falling;
When Earth's foundations fled
Followed their mercenary calling
Took their wages, and are dead:
Their shoulders held the sky suspended
They stood, and Earth's foundations stayed
What God abandoned, these defended
And saved the sum of things, for pay."
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