Bombardment, the act of throwing bombs or shells into a town or 
fortress for incendiary purposes. A bombardment 1s_ either 
desultory, when ships, field batteries, or a proportionally small 
number of siege batteries, throw shells into a place in order to 
intimidate the inhabitants and garrison into a hasty surrender, or 
for some other purpose; or it is regular, and then forms one of 
the methods of conducting the attack of a fortified place. The 
attack by regular bombardment was first introduced by the 
Prussians in their sieges in 1815, after Waterloo,'” of the 
fortresses in the north of France. The army and the Bonapartist 
party being then much dispirited, and the remainder of the 
inhabitants anxiously wishing for peace, it was thought that the 
formalities of the old methodical attack in this case might be 
dispensed with, and a short and heavy bombardment substituted, 
which would create fires and explosions of magazines, prevent 
every soul in the place from getting a night’s rest, and thus in a 
short time compel a surrender, either by the moral pressure of the 
inhabitants on the commander, or by the actual amount of 
devastation caused, and by out-fatiguing the garrison. The regular 
attack by direct fire against the defences, though proceeded with, 
became secondary to vertical fire and shelling from heavy 
howitzers. In some cases a desultory bombardment was sufficient, 
in others a regular bombardment had to be resorted to; but in 
every instance the plan was successful; and it is now a maxim in 
the theory of sieges, that to destroy the resources, and to render 
unsafe the interior of a fortress by vertical fire, is as important (if 
not more so) as the destruction of its outer defences by direct and 
ricochet firing. A bombardment will be most effective against a 

fortress of middling size, with numerous non-military inhabitants, 
the moral effect upon them being one of the means applied to 
force the commander into surrender. For the bombardment of a 
large fortress, an immense matériel is required. The best example 
of this is the siege of Sebastopol, in which quantities of shells 
formerly unheard of were used.'*° The same war furnishes the 
most important example of a desultory bombardment, in the 
attack upon Sweaborg by the Anglo-French mortar boats, in which 
above 5,000 shells and the same number of solid shot were thrown 
into the place.'*! 

Written between September 29 and Oc- Reproduced from The New Ameri- 
tober 6, 1857 can Cyclopaedia 

Cyclopaedia, Vol. III, 1858