Warfare is a nasty business no matter the era, and the human cost of combat is inevitably ledgered with the scars of both the physical and emotional wounds of the combatants, as well as the loss of life and limb that inevitably result from it.To justify and make sense of the frenzy of battle and the horrors of its aftermath, civilians commonly remember historical clashes in the contexts of bravery, heroism, righteousness, or even sovereignty. The major battlefields of the ‘45, too, are steeped in legends that conjure all of these terms and cast a long memorial shadow, perhaps disproportionate to their size and certainly to their duration.
Eyewitness accounts from the actions at Prestonpans, Falkirk and Culloden invariably describe the fighting as brief, explosive and generally unbalanced toward one side or the other. But perhaps the qualities that stand out the most in these narratives is the hotness and brutality with which the martial engagements of the last Jacobite rising were waged. Moving beyond the memorial legend and
