In a novel with a large cast of characters, the characters interact in different combinations. Hanny Lennart, vice president of Global Cybernetics, Polesotechnic League representative of the Home Companies and now also Special Assistant Minister of Extrasolar Relations for the Solar Commonwealth, has previously telephoned Nicholas van Rijn and met with van Rijn and Bayard Story. Now Lennart telephones Admiral Eric Tamarin-Asmundsen of the Hermetian Navy.
When the call is finished, van Rijn, who has been listening, converses with his son, Eric.
Finally, in this chapter, Chee Lan and Adzel converse while the former rides the latter along a beach. They pass David and Coya Falkayn but we are not told any of that conversation.
On Eric's orders, the original trader team of David, Adzel and Chee Lan are about to travel to occupied Hermes as they have recently travelled to Babur, then Mirkheim. This mission is the one that will solve the mystery although no one can know that yet.
16 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
All this makes me see elements of mysteries, a genre Anderson was fond of, in MIRKHEIM. The plot thickens!
Ad astra! Sean
The Baburites are villains, but also dupes. OTOH, they're more or less willing dupes -- they were eager to believe what the others told them.
That's the problem with burning belief and strong longings; they give you extra energy and determination, but they make you stupid.
In a particular sense: they make you extra willing to believe arguments or 'evidence' that leads to the conclusion you want. This operates below the conscious level.
Helmuth von Molkte once defined officers in a descending order: the best were energetic and intelligent, the next best were intelligent but lazy; the third best were stupid but lazy, and the worst of all were stupid but energetic.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Makes sense to me. The Baburites allowed resentment and wishful thinking to get in the way of objectivity.
You and Dave Drake demonstrated von Molkte's dictum in THE GENERAL books.
Ad astra! Sean
"intelligent but lazy"
Heinlein's "Man who was too lazy to fail"
Kaor, Jim!
That one I am not familiar with, unless "Waldo" is meant.
Ad astra! Sean
S.M. - "Stupid but energetic" would define the IJA and IJN during WW II; "stupid but lazy" would be the Wehrmacht.
The Red Army would be "intelligent but lazy;" the US, UK, and the Western Allies generally would be "energetic and intelligent."
Sean,
It's in the dreadful TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I never read that one, I was so disappointed by his I WILL FEAR NO EVIL that I wrote off RAH's later stuff.
Ad astra! Sean
Agreed.
DaveShoup: the Germans were -strategically- inept. Grossly so.
The Prussian military tradition involved acceping high-risk gambles ('rolling the iron dice', as they called it) and it didn't distinguish between -campaigns- and -wars-, because they generally fought one-campaign wars.
Short and sharp was their preference, because a long war of attrition was something they just couldn't do well. Prussia had Germany's problems, but on steroids -- small territory, shallow resource base.
They succeeded by keeping their wars short, before their enemies' greater resources could grind down their tactically superior forces.
Except for the 7 Years War, where they were rescued from the brink of dissolution by the "Miracle of the House of Brandenburg", when the Czarina died and her successor was a besotted Frederick the Great fanboy with a man-crush on him and dropped out of the war.
Note that Frederick, after that experience -- where it didn't -matter- how many battles he won -- never engaged in a serious war again.
Though Hitler had a fairly good strategy initially (eliminate the French, do a deal with the British that made them friendly neutrals, then attack the Russians) which only fell through because Churchill was the British Prime Minister.
If Halifax had been, and he was the alternative, he'd have pulled it off and probably destroyed the Soviet Union in 41-42.
The Germans were tactically almost always superior to us in the World Wars, and operationally quite often; they were just better at it than us because they put more long-term effort into it.
It didn't matter in the end.
We beat them because we outnumbered and outweighed them and could manage the integration of strategy with operational and tactical capacity.
Even as late as 1944, the average German division -- despite their losses and production shortfalls -- was about as good as the better American and British ones. The gap against the Russians was even bigger.
Thankfully, as Stalin quite accurately said, "quantity has a quality all its own".
In both World Wars the Germans were great at winning fights, fairly good at winning battles, but lousy at winning wars.
Note that in WW1 they beat the Russians and made them give up, but couldn't -quite- drive the French out of the fight with the British (and then Americans) backing them. It was on a knife edge until the failure of the Michael offensives in 1918. Many of the top British leaders (Milner, frex) thought they'd be driven off the Continent that spring.
And in WW2, they beat the French quite decisively in 1940 and did drive the British off the Continent, but couldn't manage the Russians with the British still hanging on and refusing to make peace, and then Hitler went nuts and declared war on the US when he didn't have to and the US Congress was fixated on Japan.
Tactical effectiveness is important, but not all-important unless it's at "Omdurman" (Maxim guns vs. spears) levels.
Professional military men, particularly below the overall-command level, tend to overestimate its importance, though.
It's an understandable professional deformation, because making their companies and battalions and brigades and divisions as effective as possible is what they -do-, for most of their working lives. Like the Prussians before them, they confuse winning battles and winning wars. You have to be -eventually- able to win battles, but you don't have to start that way unless you've got no strategic depth.
That's a basic reason Clemenceau said:
La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires.
"War is too important to be left to the military men."
Or to put it another way, if you do have strategic depth, you can afford to lose all the battles except the last one, or two.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Fascinating comments, but I do have some quibbles. E.g., I don't believe the Germans beat the Russians in WW I. For all its weaknesses, the gov't of Nicholas II had both strategic depth and vastly greater resources at its command than did the Central Allies. The winter of 1916-17 was largely a quiet time on the Eastern Front, with both sides preparing for a resumption of the struggle by April, with the Germans and Austrians dreading that!
What changed the odds was the catastrophic March Revolution, when the incompetent authorities in Petrograd weakly allowed initially trivial disturbances to get out of control. Compounded by the misleading or even false reports sent to the Tsar!
What we got was the needless abdication of the Tsar, a weak and ineffectual Provisional Gov't, and Lenin soon slinking back from exile to plot and agitate his way to seizing power (with German help). Lenin, a loathsome wretch, traitor, and tyrant!
What should Hitler have done, after Churchill became PM? Shelve OPERATION BARBAROSSA, cling to the alliance with Stalin (who, btw, was giving Germany vast amounts of the resources needed for war), and focus on somehow ending the war with the UK. And not declaring war on the US, no matter if Japan was Germany's ally.
Fortunately for us Adolf chose to roll the iron dice!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, but the -reason- the revolutions happened in 1917 was the incompetence of the Russian army and the civil administration, and the low level of national consciousness among the Russian population, particularly the peasantry.
The Russians won battles with the Austrians, and won big victories over the Turks, but they got beaten (with enormous casualties) nearly every time they got into a major fight with the Germans, starting with Tannenberg in 1914 -- in which fight, for starters, the two Russian commanders refused to -talk- to each other.
There's cliquishness and internal squabbles in every army, but the Russians took it to a whole new level.
The series of catastrophic defeats that began with Gorlice-Tarnow in 1915 put the cherry on the ice cream.
So did the massive confusion in the transport system, which left the cities (unnecessarily) starving in 1917.
Russian morale in 1914-17 was inherently fragile and broke under the strain. Nicholas was an idiot (witness his dismissal of the Grand Duke and assumption of the supreme command), which didn't help, and his Czarina was worse.
Note that in 1914-17, the Russians didn't try the 'retreat until the other guy is overstretched' that they'd often done before. Instead they stood and fought (and got beaten like a drum) on their western marches.
There were a number of reasons for that, but the most basic one was the Russian government was (rightly) afraid of what retreat would do to support for the war effort.
Stalin was strong enough to survive the grotesquely high casualties and enormous territorial losses of 1941-42, helped along by Hitler's attitude towards the Russians (and his refusal to lie about it) but Nicholas wasn't.
Sean: yup, Hitler should have postponed any attack on Russia until Britain was out of the war, and doubly have refused to declare war on the US -- though FDR's policy was one of -deliberate- provocation, hoping to produce exactly what happened.
There just wasn't much support for a declaration against Germany in the US after Pearl Harbor. Hitler screwed the pooch bigtime.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks! I don't deny the accuracy of what you said about Russia in WW I. But if you study the maps I've seen of the Eastern Front at the beginning of 1917, I noticed how the Central Allies had not succeeded in advancing eastwards very far. Not much more than Russian Poland, a small bit of Lithuania, and some modest slivers of Ukraine. So, while the Germans often defeated Russia, they were only defeats, not routs.
I agree it was a bad mistake of the Tsar to assume the direct command of the armies, far better to leave a respected professional like Grand Duke Nicholas in command. The Tsar's proper place was to be in or near Petrograd, to keep a close eye on both his subordinates and the debates within the State Duma.
I am puzzled by your comments about Russian cities and the transportation system at the beginning of 1917. Not that long ago I finished reading the three massive volumes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's MARCH 1917, a work that certainly seemed to be solidly researched. If I can trust that work, there was no lack of food in Petrograd when the "revolution" began, and more would be coming in once snow had been cleared from railroad tracks. The starvation and military disintegration began after the Provisional Gov't took over.
I agree weak Russian national consciousness was a problem. Which was why the shrewder and more forethoughtful politicians in the Duma were desperate to preserve the monarchy under either Nicholas II's son or brother. Because what really moved the hearts of Russian peasants was loyalty to the Tsar.
I agree with what you said about Stalin. Hitler really mucked up with that premature attack on the USSR and by letting FDR goad him into declaring war on the US.
Ad astra! Sean
SM - I stand by "stupid but lazy" would be the Wehrmacht. Your statement "1944, the average German division -- despite their losses and production shortfalls -- was about as good as the better American and British ones." is historically quite wrong.
In 1944, the "average German division" facing the Allies in Italy and the West was understrength, with poor cadre, and filled with former Poles, Czechs, and Soviets. About the most the "average" German division could do was die in place while making the most of being on the defensive and/or terrain.
The handful of German formations actually capable of mobile warfare in France and NW Europe from Q3/44 onwards were shot to pieces whenever they tried to do so; about all their armor could do was serve as mobile pillboxes until destroyed. From Mortain to the Ardennes, German attempts at mobile warfare invariably foundered, and against both Allied infantry and armored formations, which were better trained, led, supported, sustained, and equipped than the vast majority of the Germans.
Awful lot of mythology above.
Post a Comment