Bonaparte was a fan of the "whiff of grape" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_royaliste_du_13_v... but we all know how that ended.
exactly. Whatever you use in warzone you're risking that the same can be used against you, thus all the conventions on warzone weapons usage and prisoner treatment. Thus all the training, so that your soldiers wouldn't cross [too frequently] the redline to trigger the response.
I remember reading for example that in WWI new young soldiers, i think in Russia, were sometimes issued old style non-flat 3-edged rifle attached combat knives. Whether the knife is flat or 3-edged wouldn't make any difference during the actual stabbing and the immediate time after that. Where it makes all the difference is outside of the immediate combat situation - those non-flat knives would make for unnecessary horrible very hard to heal wounds, and thus if you were found with such a knife on a battlefield you'd be killed right there instead of taken POW. So the older soldiers would make sure that the newbies would promptly lose the knives.
The situation is similar to hollow-point bullets - they create those horrible wounds without any tactical benefit on actual battlefield.
https://www.icollector.com/Austrian-Model-1849-Agustin-Jager...
