The life and times of the goosestep

[dirac]

A look at the history of the goose-step, by Mark Scheffler for Slate:

http://slate.msn.com/id/2077384/

[Mel Johnson]

That's all right as far as it goes, but the Great Elector's goose-step was a much slower affair than the one we see today. The marching cadence of a seventeenth-century army was a little more than half as fast as the twentieth-century edition. It's a lot easier to do that way, considering the Prussians were still wearing a form of body armor as late as 1715. Hard to do a 120-step pace with a buffcoat on!

And it looks better on a pike army which sort of looks like a bunch of square tree-plantings moving down the road or across a field. Twenty-foot pikes have a way of making everything move more slowly!