Late 1800's warfare

Some backstory, I'm currently writing a screenplay set in the late 1800's, involving an ongoing war. What are some resources I could look into to get a better understanding of what a battle during that period would've looked like, or could any of you give me a quick rundown?

Anything on the First and second boer wars?

Is there any recollection of any first hand experience of how the battles were like?

This is a peroid of warfare I have a hard time picturing,

Franco-Prussian for instance. Were these essentially like early civil war battles?

Did units fight in close order or were they swarming around

Yeah some guy named Winston Churchill was there and wrote about it I believe. A Dutch author named Bossenbroek wrote a great book on it, think it was translated to English as well.

Where is this occurring? Colonial wars in the brush tended to be very different from regular wars in more developed regions like Europe or China.

It's set during the War of the Pacific (Chile v Peru/Bolivia), I'm going by a book comprised of the diary of a soldier that was involved in the war, and his recollection of what it was like, but I'm looking for some other stuff to get a different perspective

Unfortunately I don't have any sources for South America. Sorry to bother you.

>involving an ongoing war.

Which one? The American civil war? The Crimean war? The Franco-Prussian War?

...

Also Sir Baden-Powell. He wrote quite a lot about it, too iirc

Prussia pioneered forms of small-unit tactics and of course both sides had breech-loading rifles, so were able to reload when prone. The first part of the war consisted of multiple large encircling battles and rapid breakthroughs by the German armies, so there wasn't much trench warfare. Most of the French casualties were probably due to the new breech-loading artillery guns.
On the other hand, the F-P war was the last war where cavalry charges were still used.
As you can see on the picture, the formations are pretty much a stage of evolution between a line and more modern forms of small unit tactics.

search info on russo-turkish war of 1877–78, thats last major conflict of XIX century.

Thanks

>down the rabbit hole

can you elobarate a bit? like what exactly is your project about?

It follows the story of a soldier that volunteers to join the army during the war
I'm currently at the part of his first real battle, and can't seem to get it right
I'm going by what's on the book, but his description are a bit murky, not really going into too much detail of what the tactics were like.
His platoon charged into the enemy and started hacking away, but doesn't describe much more than that

I need to propose a historical research project and explain how and what tools I would use for such a research, could you give me some direction that relais on your project? I just need the propose a reaserch not actually to do it

Read up specifically about the War of the Pacific.

All the belligerents at the time seem to have been dependent on foreign powers for their militaries, and none of them were really prepared for war when it broke out.

As far as Chile goes, they're more famous for their Prussian influences, but that actually came after the War of the Pacific. Up to that point, they were more reliant on French advisors. They apparently had quite a few German-made field artillery pieces at their disposal that gave them both numerical and qualitative advantage over the Peruvians and Bolivians, but their small arms were almost exclusively a mix of French and Belgian designs like the Gras and Comblain, both of which used black powder cartridges.

The Chilean Navy supposedly was superior to that of its enemies, but that didn't seem to stop them from being outgunned at times. The Battle of Iquique, for example, saw a converted merchantman (the Esmerelda) go up against a Peruvian ironclad with predictable results. The Chileans would end up with a good number of foreign volunteers in their navy by the end of the war as well.

This painting is from Napoleon's Invasion of Russia, so that's 1812.

War in the East by Quintin Barry

Comprehensive on Russo-Turkish war.

I was also thinking of making a story set in the period of 1870s-1890s
Don't know where to start to keep military, tech, and other stuff accurate

It all depends on how autistic you want to be about it, really. Sure, you could go Clancy-tier and go into excruciating detail and realism about all the combat, but Hemingway's war novels (For Whom the Bell Tolls and A Farewell to Arms) both were excellent despite him not doing too great a job with the finer details of the weapons and combat. For Whom the Bell Tolls in particular had some pretty glaring errors with the weapons he was describing despite him having been heavily involved in the very war he was writing about.

>On the other hand, the F-P war was the last war where cavalry charges were still used.
Untrue
Cavalry charges occurred during WW1 and WW2