Vedette (sentry)
military term; mounted sentry or picket, who has the function of bringing information, giving signals or warnings of danger, etc., to a main body of troops
A vedette is a mounted sentry or picket, who has the function of bringing information, giving signals or warnings of danger, etc., to a main body of troops. In modern terms, the soldiers who man listening-posts are the equivalent of vedettes.
Naval
Navies use the term vedette to refer to a small scouting or patrol boat.
The term has also been used for specific naval vessels (see USS Vedette), and a class of flying boat (see Canadian Vickers Vedette).
Structures
All around Salisbury Plain in southern England, the roads connecting the plain with the surrounding countryside feature brick-built guard-posts, staffed by security officers whenever there is military activity beyond such points. They are known as vedettes, and each one is named for a local geographic feature.
The Gardjola is a prominent guard tower on Maltese forts in Malta and an example of a vedette. It may be referred to in French as an échauguette.
Notes
References
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911).
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Vedette (sentry)” as military term; mounted sentry or picket, who has the function of bringing information, giving signals or warnings of danger, etc., to a main body of troops. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 11, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q2511695. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1911.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vedette (sentry)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.