Shrapnel – named after Henry Shrapnel, an English army officer in the artillery who experimented to produce what he called a “spherical case shot”. The trick was to multiply the effect of single musket balls and to increase the range considerably.
The word first appeared in English in various petitions to the House of Lords in which the spherical case is defined as Shrapnel shells in 1806. Six years later at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, another petition states that “the French complained much of the Shrapnel case shot”. And in his dispatches the Duke of Wellington praised its effectiveness.
Effective and excruciating. This is also how the war photographer James Natchwey saw it when it wrote that “It has occurred to me that if everyone could be there just once to see for themselves what white phosphorous does to the face of a child or what unspeakable pain is caused by the impact of a single bullet or how a jagged piece of shrapnel can rip someones leg off if everyone could be there to see for themselves the fear and the grief, just one time, then they would understand that nothing is worth letting things get to the point where that happens to even one person, let alone thousands.”
