There are different ways to write about war. See Damn All Wars. I like Poul Anderson's way. See:
Experience Of War
Real War
In Stirling's and Drake's The Hammer, I get it that Raj Whitehall is uniting a planet and also that his means to this end include slaughter, enslavement and crucifixion but there is a limit to my enjoyment of reading about such activities! (The slaughter is of disorganized antagonists, not of civilians.)
Remembering that, on the planet Bellevue, men ride big dogs, consider:
"With hideous perfection the shells airburst directly over the Squadron line. A thousand men and dogs died fractions of a second later as shrapnel sleeted through the close-packed ranks. The men behind had no chance of avoiding the sudden bloody shambles ahead of them; massive six-deep pile-ups of dogs and men blossomed, the collision killing nearly as many as the explosions." (p. 498)
Hideous, indeed.
"From the point where the Squadron charge had begun, a thousand meters of ground was carpeted with bodies. Many of them were still moving; a heap of them slid aside as a dog burrowed its way from underneath and hopped three-legged back toward the south. The whimpers and moans were strong enough to reach the Civil Government line, and so was the copper-salt stink of blood and feces." (p. 499)
Three senses, although usually they are gateways to natural beauty!
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I remember this as well. And Raj took no pleasure in this slaughter. He even said to Thom Poplanich, I think at the beginning of THE HAMMER, that he would rather kill himself if all that would result from this slaughter was nothing good or merely more slaughter.
Beyond that, what I thought was of how STUPID the Squadrons were. They played into Raj's hands, fighting at a time and place of HIS choosing, not theirs. The smart thing for Admiral Auburn to have done was to use his superior numbers to refuse battle, to box in and surround Raj's army. A seige would have destroyed the Civil Gov't's expeditionary force.
But, given the way the Squadrons thought and felt, it would have been impossible for Auburn to have done this, if he had even thought of it. He would have been accused of cowardice and been at real risk of being deposed as Admiral. And this of course was one of the factors Raj used in forming his plan.
Ad astra! Sean
People actually do this sort of thing fairly often.
The Mahdists in the Sudan in the 1890's, for instance, had considerable experience in fighting the British, and British-led forces, back into the 1880's; they knew what trying to charge home over open country into the teeth of disciplined infantry equipped with breechloading rifles was like.
The specifics -- the Lee-Metford magazine rifles, the Maxim guns -- may have been new, but the general phenomenon was not; they'd gotten the pants beaten off them several times, including a few battles the previous year where the new gear was in use.
They tried it anyway, and the result was one of the most lopsided battles in history -- probably something like 12,000 Mahdists died that day, and as many over the next week of untreated wounds. Total British losses were around 48 killed, most of them in the misbegotten blunder of the 21st Lancers' charge.
Partially the explanation was that most of the Khalifa's troops came from ferociously warlike and aggressive warrior cultures, in many of which a man wasn't allowed to marry unless he could prove he'd killed at least one enemy (usually by presenting the severed genitals) which placed an overwhelming emphasis on stand-up fighting.
Even more important, the jihadist ideology of the Mahdist state required that Allah show his favor by granting victory. If the Khalifa tried to wage guerilla warfare and relinquished his capital, he'd be pretty much admitting that he'd lost divine favor, at which point his internal enemies and his subordinates would kill him.
A broadly similar set of motivations led the Ndebele to try to charge home against the forces of Cecil Rhodes British South Africa Company a few years earlier. The Ndebele were offshoots of the Zulu, they knew what had happened to the Zulu, and like the Mahdists they had quite a few modern weapons -- but their souls and their honor were in their spears, so they tried to stage massed charges.
On a writerly note, if you're going to show a battle, I think it's sort of bad to gussy it up. It's not a pretty activity.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks for pointing out some real history examples of the sheer folly of an army trying to fight the way the Squadrons did. The Mahdists were ruined by their jihadist idiocy, the Ndebele reminded me a lot of the Squadrons, minus the collecting of genitals.
I agree, war and its horrors should not be gussied up. No argument there.
Ad astra! Sean
Correction: it was the Mahdists who were "into" collecting genitals, not the Ndebele.
Sean
I think that some "civilized" countries also sent armies marching straight into gunfire?
Kaor, Paul!
That has been the case. The examples I'm thinking of being the STUPID ways the Soviets fought the Germans in WW II. And the classic modern example of this kind of folly was the deadlocked Western Front in WW I. The Anglo/French armies suffered stunning losses trying to frontally attack the well dug in Germans.
In strict fairness the Anglo/French commanders tried to soften up and suppress German defenses thru MASSIVE artillery barrages, but it mostly didn't work.
Ad astra! Sean
WWI wasn't really a case of blind folly: more of extremely bad luck.
War contains an inherent paradox: the defensive is usually the stronger, and easier/simpler form.
But to win, eventually you have to attack successfully.
Often the solution is to let the enemy break their teeth on your defense, and then counter-attack when they're weakened -- which is what eventually happened in WW1.
But the Allied generals on the Western Front -couldn't- just stand on the defensive. After their initial attack, the Germans were in control of Belgium and much of the richest part of France, and were beating the stuffing out of the Russians and conquering eastern Europe, which if they consolidated it would make them immune to the British blockade.
If the Allies didn't attack, the Germans had won the war.
There was a French newspaper which ran the same daily headline from 1914 to 1918: LES ALEMANDS SON A NOYON. Which translates as THE GERMANS ARE IN NOYON, which is a town about 60 miles (100km) north of Paris.
The problem was that the massively high concentration of force to space, the highly developed transport net, and the very high state of organization and tactical skill in the German army made the German defenses very strong and constantly getting stronger.
This was a problem that just didn't have any good answers. Haig and the the French generals -had- to attack -- which meant that they -had- to believe that successful attack was possible.
Petain was a realist and a defensive-minded general and relatively successful -- but Petain was also a quasi-defeatist who nearly threw the war to the Germans in 1918 by retreating away from contact with the British.
Haig was a demented optimist, always convinced that German morale was about to break and he'd smash through their lines and turn his cavalry loose in their rear. He kept attacks going months after any real gains were possible.
But eventually, like a stopped clock, he and the equally maniacally aggressive Foch were right, like stopped clocks, and the Germans -did- break under the hammering. It was sort of a race between the attrition of the German army under the relentless attacks and the Allies destroying their own armies.
Eventually the Allies did develop tactics and equipment which allowed them to demolish even the strongest fortified lines -- in the last "100 Days" they broke the Hindenburg Line and ground forward, at hideous cost but inflicting unacceptable losses on the Germans (who were weakened by their own offensive in 1918).
There weren't any easy solutions. Germany was very strong, and Germany intended to beat them into dust.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Thanks, as always, for giving us some very interesting comments. I recall how Churchill gave a very similar analysis in his history of WW I: THE WORLD CRISIS. What he wanted to do differently from what Haig and Foch did was to attack the Germans INTELLIGENTLY, in ways that would not be so ruinously costly in brave men's lives. Both in trying to develop the tactics and materiel needed to break the deadlocked Western Front and breaking that deadlock by attacking Germany and her allies elsewhere, hence the Dardanelles campaign.
I have wondered what might have happened if Germany had listened to Kaiser Karl's (who succeeded Francis Joseph as Emperor of Austria-Hungary) demands and agreed to offering REAL terms for a compromise peace with France and the UK. Terms that would have included evacuating northern France, Belgium, Luxembourg, perhaps even including ceding Alsace-Lorraine back to France. After all, the MASSIVE gains the Central Allies had won in the East should more than make up for these concessions!
At the very least such an offer might have taken the wind out of Allied anti German propaganda! And if the Germans had not provoked the US by the way they waged submarine warfare, the US would very likely had remained neutral.
But would have to mean Hindenburg and Ludendorff taking a long range, STRATEGIC view of the war, including paying more heed to the worries and scruples of the Kaiser and civilian politicians.
Ad astra! Sean
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