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Cannon fodder is an informal term for military personnel who are regarded or treated as expendable in the face of enemy fire. The term is generally used in situations where soldiers are forced to fight against hopeless odds, such as occurred during trench warfare in World War I. The term may also be used to differentiate infantry from other forces (such as artillery, airforce or the navy), who generally have a much better survival rate. The term derives from fodder - food for livestock - but in this case soldiers are the metaphorical food sent against cannons. The term may have been introduced during the U.S. Civil War as a result of massed infantry charges against fortified enemy positions.
Origins of the term The concept of regarding the soldier mass as the "food" of battle was known at least as early as 16th century. In Shakespeare's "King Henry the Fourth", when Prince Henry ridicules John Falstaff's pitiful soldiers, Falstaff answers that they are "good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better..." The supposedly first attested use of expression "cannon fodder" belongs to a French writer, François-René de Chateaubriand. In his anti-napoleonic pamphlet "De Buonaparte et des Bourbons", published in 1814, he criticized the cynical attitude towards recruits, that prevailed in the end of Napoleon's reign: "On en était venu à ce point de mépris pour la vie des hommes et pour la France, d'appeler les conscrits la matière première et la chair à canon" — "the contempt for the lives of men and for France herself has come to the point of calling the conscripts 'the raw material' and 'the cannon fodder." Other uses In popular culture, the term has become an example of a stock character. For example, in works of fiction, particularly science fiction, cannon fodder is a (sometimes collective) term used for unnamed or otherwise unimportant characters whose sole purpose in the story is to die in battle or other types of conflict to add to the bodycount in order to give the appearance of grandiose battles (see also "Stormtrooper Syndrome"). In video games, cannon fodder is a term for small, easily destroyable enemies, like those found within scrolling shooters. In fact, there was a game with the title Cannon Fodder produced in 1993 by Sensible Software. Cannon Fodder are a band in Perth, Scotland. See also | ||||||||
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