I thought that. Given also that he was rich enough to have a cuirass in the first place, he may have been. Or he could have been on foot and caught a bouncer.
Worst part was probably that, given the size and relatively low velocities, he probably saw it in the last split second before impact. Maybe even instinctively started to try to lean back away from it.
"Well, fuck."
Either way, that ball didn't slow down much.
Which makes you wonder what happened to the guy behind him.
"Well, fuck."
Or the guys on either side of him.
"Hey! Where'd François go? I was just talking to him a second ago."
"Holy shit! Did you see that? That just fucking happened!"
I'd say he needed his laundry cleaned or at least his underwear.
I've often thought about shrapnel from armor causing further damage in a scenario like this. In that time period where most militaries were kind of transitioning over to the "modern" style army, unarmored musketeers with bayonets, there were still big units of pikemen and lancers on horseback.
So the guy standing directly behind this guy, he's catching that cannon ball. It passed through this poor fucker, I think a second armored body might fully stop or take enough energy away from the round, but who knows for sure.
Regardless, there's a bit of armor missing from this cuirass. It went somewhere when the ball impacted and tore through him. Is it possible that it sent little shards of needle-sharp metal flying out his back like a fucking shotgun? And would shooting a volley of muskets into a formation armored like this cause a similar effect on a much smaller scale? Guys behind the ones who get shot are blinded by bits of flying metal and shit like that.
It's when you see a photo like this that all of the variables involved in such an event become mindblowing.
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