"Even as he watched, Eodan saw Roman standards in the dust, a gleam, a rippling steely line, and the army of Marius came from chaos and fell upon the Cimbri!" (p. 27)
"The combat had passed over this area already. Death lay around Everard. He hurried behind the Roman force, toward the distant gleam of the eagles. Across helmets and corpses, he made out a banner that fluttered triumphant red and purple."
-Poul Anderson, "Delenda Est" IN Anderson, The Guardians Of Time (New York, 1981), 8, p. 238.
"Everard saw men on horseback, Roman officers. They held the eagles aloft and shouted, but nobody could hear them above the din."
-ibid., p. 239.
"Everard fled through chaos."
-ibid., p. 241.
"Man's works were so horribly impermanent; he thought with a sadness of the cities and civilizations he had seen rise and spend their little hour and sink back into the night and chaos of time."
-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), CHAPTER THREE, p. 238.
Pulling back:
a Cimbrian at the Battle of Vercellae;
a Time Patrolman at the Battle of Ticinus;
a time traveler in the far future.
All three experience chaos.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I also thought of Anderson's account of how the rebel Parliamentarians were besieging Charles I at Glastonbury in A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST.
Ad astra! Sean
Combat is a different experience at different levels -- rather like a fractal picture. There are structures to a battle that can't be seen at the point of the blade,. but they're there and are important.
That's an important reason why a Roman army could often defeat barbarian forces many times it size, and even in defeat usually inflicted disproportionate casualties. It was structured and trained so that a commander could impose order on the chaos of fighting. Usually the Romans only lost if they were taken by surprise or ambushed (Teutonberger Wald) or if their commander made some very bad mistake (Crassus at Carrhae.
Eg., at the Battle of Watling Street, which ended Boudica's rebellion, Suetonius beat a Briton force that outnumbered his at least 5 to 1, and suffered only about 400 dead as opposed to at least ten thousand on the other side, and probably more.
That's about as lopsided as Kitchner's defeat of the Mahdi at Omdurman in the Sudan in 1898, and no Maxim machine guns were necessary, just spears and swords.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And in THE GENERAL books, co-written with David Drake, you strove to show us a general, Raj Whitehall, who grasped this need for seeing the structures in a battle and what would be needed to win that battle. Like the Roman armies, Raj Whitehall's army was organized and trained in such a way that the commander could impose HIS order on the chaos of combat.
Yes, the loss of three legions at the battle of the Teutoberg forest was a first class disaster for Rome. But, doomed, surrounded, and trapped as those legions were by Varus' folly, the Germans did not seriously try to take advantage of it by invading Gaul. My suspicion was that was because the Romans at Teutoberg inflicted such heavy casualties on the Germans that the survivors were too few to attempt an invasion of Gaul.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: probably. Casualties can hit a tribal people very hard, because loosing too many fighting men (who are also essential workers) can fatally weaken them vs. a vs. the neighbors, and fighters always grouped locally even in a coalition like Arminius' anti-Roman uprising.
The Zulu beat a British force at Isandhlwana in the early stages of the Zulu war, but when he was told of the losses the Zulu had incurred doing it, he cried aloud: "A spear has been driven into the belly of the nation!"
(Disciplined firepower was always a British strength: as far back as the 100 Years War, their favorite tactic was to put themselves in a position where their enemy would attack -- or had to attack -- and then plant their feet, stand solid and shoot them down as they came on.)
Also, the Germans' after the Teutonberger Wald (or at least their leaders) probably recognized that it was a special-circumstances one-off that they'd be very unlikely to repeat in an open-field encounter on the Romans' terms.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, both in how casualties can hit a tribal people very hard and in that the German leaders decided Teutoberg was an unlikely to be repeated one off and that it was wise not to push their luck too far.
Ad astra! Sean
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