"Castelar wasted no time finishing him."
-Poul Anderson, "The Year of the Ransom" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2006), pp. 641-735 AT p. 666.
"She opened the pistol and checked that she had one round left and considered shooting Zalachenko in the skull. Then she remembered that Niedermann was still there, out in the dark, and she had better save it."
-Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Played With Fire (London, 2009), Chapter 32, p. 562.
So these two major villains, Varagan and Zala, could have been finished off there and then but Castelar did not want to waste time and Lisbeth needed to save her last bullet for Niedermann! Fictional ironies.
Anderson's Time Patrol series is a remarkable source of quotations and comparisons as I have remarked before, e.g., here.
19 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Well, it did make sense that both of these characters did not finish off these villains. Don Luis Castelar was too BUSY trying to survive and escape to finish off Varagan with another slash. And Lisbeth really did need to save her last bullet.
Sean
Castelar probably thought he had finished off Varagan -- a deep stab wound in the abdomen was always fatal before modern medicine, because it led to infection of the body cavity. So it didn't matter if he bled to death right away or lingered for a few days with a fever.
If you have someone incapacitated, there are ways to finish them off quickly.
If their head is resting on the ground, a couple of hard stamps to the back of the neck, or the throat, or the jaw-hinge almost always work (by severing the spinal cord, collapsing the windpipe, or choking the person on blood respectively).
Just stamping on the side of the skull is usually fatal too.
In medieval battles where they've recovered a lot of the bodies, the characteristic -fatal- wound is caused by a flurry of blows to the head while the man is down on the ground, but it's usually preceded by some other injury.
Typically you put someone down, then followed up by hitting them in the head four or five times. It's difficult to get someone in the head right away, because defending the skull is instinctive and relatively easy, and people will get a helmet as soon as they can. But it's the quickest way to kill; the brain and surrounding area is the least naturally protected vital target.
A striking metaphor I'm fond of is that the human skull and brain are about as resistant as a ceramic teapot full of jelly.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I should have thought of that! After all, I KNEW abdominal wounds were almost always fatal before modern medicine.
That makes sense, what you said about finishing off a fallen enemy by striking at the head. And that metaphor you used is striking!
Sean
Mr Stirling,
Thank you for this information. I hope none of our readers make use of it!
Paul.
It's pretty instinctive. For example, in a fight situation people naturally duck their chins down toward their chest and look at you from "under their brows".
This is so natural that it's the archetypical "threat" expression -- chin down, eyes glaring from under the brows, teeth showing.
The -reason- this is instinctive is that it covers the front of the throat, another very vulnerable point, and presents the thickest part of the skull, the forehead.
If someone's stupid enough to try and punch you in the face or (much more dangerous) the throat, dropping your head into this position is the fastest counter -- their fingerbones will break before your forehead does, and that also braces the neck muscles to limit injury to the spinal cord by distributing the impact through the deltoids into the shoulders.
When I was helping to teach a self-defense course, one introductory exercise we used was to have the pupils make a knuckle and tap very gently at the temple, forward of the ear and just above the line of the ear-hole.
Then increase the force of the tap a little at a time until it hurt.
Try it: it doesn't take very much.
The point was that while the human body is extremely tough and resistant to generalized battering, it has a lot of vulnerable spots if you know where they are. That's one; any sort of solid blow there is incapacitating, and if you use a weapon (anything hard, really) then likely to be fatal.
Another instinctive response is that when people are knocked to the ground they curl up and cover their head with their arms -- again, this is an effective way to limit damage (though it's a bad situation all 'round).
One thing Poul's work brings out -- if anything, he softens it a bit -- is how dangerous everyday life was if you go back more than a few centuries.
There's been a lot of research over the past 40 years or so, and it indicates that before the Early Modern period homicide rates in medieval European states, even ones as relatively law-abiding and centralized as England or the Low Countries, were between 40 and 120 homicides per 100,000 people per year.
Oxford, for example, which had a concentration of young men due to the university, hit 110 per 100,000 during the 14th century. Amsterdam, which was relatively peaceful, had about 40-45 per 100,000 in most years. Cities usually weren't much more violent than the countryside -- they were more tightly governed, which may have acted as a check.
We're not talking periods of war or revolt here, just everyday life.
By way of comparison, nowadays the homicide rate in the US is around 5-6 per 100,000 in most years, which is high by the standards of most of the Western world.
Homicide rates in heavily governed places started declining long-term in the late 1500's in most places in Europe, as national governments finally established judicial control over most people.
But they remained very high by our standards (in the 25-50 range) until the 19th century, when modern police forces and things like widespread literacy intervened.
And until the 19th century, there was a general attitude that the law on personal violence existed to protect dependent people (women, children, the clergy) and to suppress robbery with violence and assassination -- killing by stealth.
There was an ingrained attitude, despite written law to the contrary, that if two adult males (especially if of roughly equivalent social status) wanted to go at each other in some semblance of a fair fight, that was their business and nobody else's.
The code duello was the most obvious and best-known aspect of this, but it extended much farther down the social scale.
It wasn't until the 19th century that this general outlook started to seriously recede -- first in bourgeois urban circles, then outward from there.
It remained much stronger in some areas than others -- in the US, most obviously.
In the 1890's, Rudyard Kipling got into a serious quarrel with his brother-in-law in Vermont, where he was living at the time.
The brother-in-law bluntly threatened to beat the stuffing out of him (and probably meant it), and Kipling took him to law for it.
He was strongly advised against doing that, but went ahead anyway.
The result was a universal chorus of mocking contempt and derision from one coast of the US to the other when the newspapers got ahold of it, which combined with the neighborhood shunning him drove him out of the country (and seriously soured him on Americans).
What he hadn't realized -- just wouldn't accept until it was made very, very clear -- was that he'd be regarded as a coward and a weakling if he went to law on a matter like that.
"Uttering threats" was technically a felony then, just as it is now, but the universal expectation was that a real man would settle the matter privately, by going out behind the barn taking off his coat and slugging it out.
(There were circles where that wouldn't happen, but they were regarded by most ordinary people as effete and despicable.)
At that, Kipling was lucky he was in New England, which was extremely restrained and law-abiding by the standards of the US as a whole. If he'd been in Arkansas or Texas, it might have gone directly to knives and guns.
Or as Andy Jackson's mother expressed it to the future President when he was a child at her knee: "Andy, don't you never take a man to law for slander, or for assault. Handle them cases yourself."
Mr Stirling,
Thank you for this and many other historical contributions.
Nowadays, someone might be regarded as failing to stand up for himself if he did not take legal action when provoked. "Human nature" changes.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
No, human nature does not change. The WAYS of reacting or handling threats or challenges is what changes.
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Very interesting! It's indicative of how quiet and peaceful life has been for me that I had not known or realized that the description you gave: chin down. eyes glaring, teeth showing, etc., was the "threat expression."
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Again, very interesting! You certainly like to do research or simply read a lot of history. I would have put some stress, however, on how the Catholic Church also acted to restrain personal violence of that kind. I think dueling, for example, was condemned by the Church as long ago as the IV Lateran Council. And I recall one of the clauses in the Coronation oath of the Kings of France was to swear never to pardon duelists. So that, along with the state exercising increased judicial control, plus changes in attitude regarding violence, would tend to lessen homicide rates.
As for the quarrel between Kipling and his brother in law, my sympathies are with the former, not the latter! But I agree Kipling should have paid more attention to the advice he got that it was unwise to go to the law about his brother in law's threats.
Sean
Sean,
Disagree. Our prehuman ancestors changed themselves into human beings, thus created "human nature," by changing their environments with hands and brains. We are defined by change, not by changelessness.
Paul.
Generally speaking, medieval noblemen (and a lot of non-clerics generally) regarded the clergy as sort of half-way to being women for precisely that reason -- it was the career picked by men who didn't like the extremely macho and casually violent atmosphere of the secular world.
(Though there were some extremely militant clergy!)
There was a great deal of respect for the Church as an institution, and pretty much everyone accepted the basics of the faith and the necessity of the sacraments, but it didn't extend to liking or respecting its personnel unless they were conspicuously personally holy and quite generally men didn't take much of what it said about personal behavior very seriously. There were a lot of deathbed repentances!
The nobility's worldview was heavily influenced by the pre-Christian Germanic world, with a Christian overlay. The Church was always trying to domesticate them, and they were always pushing back.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree with what you said. For a very long time after the conversion of the Germanic peoples to Christianity the more violent or barbaric attitudes persisted. As late as the 1917 CODE OF CANON LAW, the Catholic Church imposed automatic excommunication on all who took part in duels (duelists, seconds, witnesses, etc.) A good sign of how the kind of "casual violence" you discussed lingered on even that long. Btw, the 1983 CODE OF CANON LAW said nothing about dueling, which I took to mean that barbaric custom was finally dead.f
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I fear this will remain one of our permanent points of disagreement. The ability to change our environments is not the same as making us less prone to sin, crime, violence, folly, error, etc. And Poul Anderson agreed with me when I discussed this in one of my letters to him. He attributed our flawed and imperfect human nature either to us being not very highly evolved chimpanzees or to Original Sin.
Sean
Sean,
But we can become less violent as the rest of this discussion shows.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But with NO guarantee that it will remain that way forever. Human civilizations are notoriously precarious and fragile, prone to collapsing or falling. More than likely, when Western civilization ends, it will be a violent FALL. And we have to expect another age or barbarism wherein casual violence will be widely tolerated or even approved of by many people. For that many parts of the world NOW still has plenty of that kind of casual violence discussed by Stirling.
Sean
Sean,
No guarantee, of course. I cannot defend a civilization that will probably end in a violent fall. That is not good enough for us and our children. We now know better. We can work to improve social relations and to prevent escalations of conflict, e.g., in Britain at present scapegoating is causing preventable polarization.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I cannot entirely agree. ALL civilizations, bad or good, or more plausibly, a mix of both, will fall or come to an end one way or another. Technic Civilization, to cite an example from Anderson's works, for all its flaws, was still better than the age of barbarism which succeeded it. But I certainly agree on the desirability of of improving "social relations."
Sean
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