Ladies and Gentlemen, a new debate at home in those shiny days of confinement (anything seems to turn into a debate BTW), me reading that masterpiece War and Peace (which I read when young in Spanish) in English (Oxford Edition)... the master says French Dragoons wore blue... ahemmm...Book Three Part One  page 700... everybody knows French Dragoons wore medium/dark green... WHY  not a footnote by the editor translator or the ministry of culture saying he was drunk that day, or he was daltonic, or knew nothing about uniforms!... It spoiled a bit the read and so I said aloud... I was immediatly corrected by wife and daughter who defends Tolstoi by the simple argument "you do not mess with Tolstoi"... what do you think?

IronAss,

We think that you are lucky to have this high level of discussion and brave to ready big books like that and in an other langage than yours!

About Tolstoi... being Russian, We would look into alcoholism!

About the blue dragons... may be some US light dragons of 1812... may be !

;-)

In 1812 at Smolensk?... maybe not sire... he was referring by ear maybe (just a supposition) to some cavalry outfit Allied to the French... only rational explanation... but French Dragoons? OMG!... thanks for the comment... vodka not excluded though...

No, not colour blind. Tolstoy didn't have access to the Internet, so he couldn't research the uniforms! He wasn't at the battles of 1812.

It's probably that Tolstoy simply presumed that the French were all dressed in blue (which is what he would have observed at Sebastopol).

As for "War and Peace", read it many times. It was the BBC series back in the nineteen seventies that really got me in to this period, when I was 15 years old.

Thank for an interesting comment Harlequin. You have several points there. I have a copy of the Sevastopol Sketches and understand your reasoning... French wore blue... and that's that. Also from a writers point of view if he shoud have said Green it would have been confusing for his Russian readers as Green was the main colour of the Russians uniforms. All this analitics are positive.... but I am debating at home another slightly different point: Ok for whatever reason Tolstoi wrote Blue Clad French Dragoons... but we know they wore Green. What benefits the work War&Peace more ... to keep editions coming with that mistake ... or editing the next editions and simply say Green instead of Blue?... we are talking about author rights to be wrong and stick to it... or be corrected for the sake of authenthicity. The debate is raging at home!

I don't think it needs to be changed. It is possible Tolstoi either thought the uniforms were blue or decided to say they were blue in order to make it clear for the reader what was going on; on the other hand given the context (a young officer describing a confusing cavalry action) maybe the dragoons were not French at all but from some other nationality that was part of the Grande Armee. In any case I would not change the text but it would be nice to have a footnote pointing out the discrepancy. Maybe some reseach could identify a likely unit of blue clad dragoons from Napoleon's polyglot force!

Dear Mr. Henderson, a footnote (compulsory) is my resistance last trench in this debate.

Sir, I admire your tenacity and sincerity!

In Spain the Dragoons were severely lacking in horses, equipment and uniforms. The uniforms had to be made of brown cloth that they found in churches and convents. Trying still to find a blue uniformed Dragoon

Have done a bit more research. The only contingent that fought at Smolensk alonsdide the French were the Duchy of Warsaw. Polish Chasseurs wore green uniforms, The Hussars wore dark blue dolmans. The Uhlans wore a dark blue Kurtka. The Cuirassiers wore French cuirassier uniforms in BLUE.  No dragoons. Maybe a civilian would make the mistake of seeing a Polish cuirassier and mistake his helmet for one of a dragoon. Tolstoy may have picked up on this account thereby describing, in his short novel, the curassier as a dragoon in a blue uniform

Nigel