Just FYI:

During the Napoleonic conflict, to use a cannon in an anti-personnel role, you'd generally fire "grapeshot". In essence, you'd stick some gunpowder in the cannon, and then stuff a load of crap (metal shards, pebbles) down the barrel. When you fire the cannon, the crap all comes rushing out of the barrel and splays out, like a blunderbus. This will make a mess of anybody in front of the business end of the cannon.

Unfortunately, the range of grapeshot sucks -- after a few metres, it's all dispersed and you're lucky if you do more than annoy people with the noise.

Onto the scene comes one Mr Henry Shrapnel, who invents a cunning way of increasing the range of anti-personnel weapons.

Essentially:

1. Take a hollow cannon ball.
2. Put a charge in the centre of it, with a fuse.
3. Around the charge, pack all of the crap that you would have stuffed into the cannon. Musketballs are good.

Hey presto, you have a weapon suitable for maiming people at a distance. It looks like those bombs that Wile E Coyote always seems to end up with.

You then put this shell in the cannon, with a small gunpowder charge to propel it towards the enemy.

The cunning (and difficult) part is that the fuse of the shell is lit by the propellant charge firing. You have to cut the fuse to the correct length, otherwise it'll either detonate before it gets to the French (in this case), or it'll still be fizzing when it lands (and can be snuffed out and subsequently fired back at the English).