For once, in a novel about an Intelligence officer, the characters genuinely gather intelligence. Miriam/Banner reports to Flandry:
"'Yewwl found clues, oh, yes. Production of combat gear, uniforms, possible military rations, certainly more palladium [scroll down] than a civilian economy can account for, and maybe - this isn't sure - maybe a plant for fissionable isotopes. A fight broke out and I, I'm afraid she's been killed.'" (p. 164)
The rest of the narrative is straightforward:
Yewwl kills the Ramnuan who had killed her son and is killed while attacking Hermetians;
Flandry disarms Cairncross with two quick strikes at his secret weapons production and storage facilities;
Cairncross either flees or is killed by some of his own men;
Flandry and Banner return to Terra where they begin a new partnership -
- and the series is not quite finished even yet.
14 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And Cairncross, possibly, was forced to flee because he was not ready to openly rebel. We see a civil war being NIPPED in the bud, before it could "flower."
Ad astra! Sean
It's an illustration of the gradations between pure intelligence gathering, covert ops, black ops, special-forces work, and outright war.
At each iteration, "subtle" becomes less important, and "mass" more so.
Neither ever entirely predominates, but the balance shifts.
The Black Hand's assassination of Franz Ferdinand was on one end of the scale, and the 1914 campaign in France which resulted from it at the other.
It was still crucial to get more than one assassin to Sarajevo -- not least because that bunch of clowns were comically incompetent. Even then, nearly everything depended on luck at crucial points. It reads like Franz Kafka's take on a James Bond novel.
Conversely, the French campaign was a matter of mass armies colliding, where weight of shell and disposition of divisions was crucial; but intelligence work also contributed -- frex, the air reconnaissance which discovered that the Germans were turning east north of Paris and enabled Joffre's counterstrike at the Marne.
In A STONE IN HEAVEN, the forces actually engaging are tiny -- a few individuals. But they're crucial to much larger numbers of people.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I only WISH those murderous Black Hand clowns had been totally thwarted. We might have been spared WW I and its dismal consequences: the near wrecking of Europe, no Russian Revolution, no Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, et nauseatingly al!
I thought the crucial point in the German invasion of France in 1914 was the High Command's nerve cracking at the sooner than expected Russian invasion of Prussia. Which led to two entire German corps being uselessly transported to the Eastern theater. Those two corps, left in France, might have enabled Germany to defeat France, end the war in the West, and turn on Russia with massive reinforcements.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: every little bit helps, but the basic constraint was logistical.
The German right wing had to march on foot from its railheads and pull its supplies and guns with horses. The Germans were using about as many men as could fit on the roads and be supplied by horse-drawn wagons over that distance.
The French could shift forces behind their front by rail, at 15x the rate of men on foot, and able to haul heavy loads.
By the time of the Marne, for example, many of the crucial German heavy field pieces, the 150mm howitzers that had dominated the French 75's and slaughtered the French infantry in the frontier battles, were not involved -- the horses had given out, or there weren't enough shells, or both. The German lead units were down to 50% of their TOE strength and you could actually follow footprints of men leaking blood from their boots; the German infantry were asleep on their feet, terminally exhausted from weeks of marching and fighting at the limit of endurance -- and many of them were reservists, soft civilian feet in hard new boots, conscripted beer-wagon horses pulling their guns.
So the crucial event was Joffre's (belated) realization that the main German weight was on their right, in Belgium. Joffre -almost- took to long to admit this; there was tremendous resistance to admitting it in the French General Staff HQ, because it meant overturning all their peacetime plans and abandoning all hopes of a short, victorious war based on an offensive posture.
This was why, for example, the French high command refused to believe the Germans were putting their reserve divisions into the front line of the attack. They had the data, but just flat refused to believe it, or to believe it fully.
That -nearly- lost France the war.
But Joffre did realize it just in time and shifted his forces westward; and he could do that faster than the Germans could respond, because he was on rails and pulled by steam and they were on foot and pulled by oat-burners. Plus he had intact means of communication with his corps and army commanders, and von Molkte was out of communication with his half the time.
It was very close, though.
Another three days of hesitation, and it would have been too late -- von Kluck and von Bulow had the French Fifth Army in a vise and without the intervention of the new army Joffre had pulled together around Paris they would have rolled the French left wing up from west to east.
The French would have had to give up Paris and retreat beyond the Loire, and the war would have effectively been over.
And air reconnaissance was crucial to that.realization.
Sean: for the German plan to work, the French had to cooperate by keeping the bulk of their forces in the east and attacking there. That very nearly came off for the Germans.
Now I realize how little I know about history.
Paul: well, history has been my primary non-fictional interest for 50-odd years now, and I read a -lot- of it.
And anthropology and economics and so forth, but that's part of history.
It shows. My primary interests have been philosophy, religion, mythology and cosmology.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks for your fascinating explanation of how the Germans nearly won the war in France and why they did not. Yes, the right wing of the Germans had outrun their logistical support, the troops simply could not DO any more without adequate support. Yes, the French nearly blundered their way to total defeat because of their obsession with attacking the Germans with their right wing forces, when they should have focused far sooner on the left.
The best book I've found about WW I was Winston Churchill's abridged one volume edition of THE WORLD CRISIS. Most other works I've seen to treat the Great War in a thin way. I would also like to read the volume in the unabridged edition devoted to the Eastern Front, because most histories I've seen don't seem have much interest in the struggles of Germany and Austria-Hungary with Russia.
I've also read Churchill's six volume history of WW II.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I would recommend Hew Strachan's work on the Great War. The Eastern Front has attracted a lot more attention recently; the war was won and lost in the West (almost the reverse of WW2) but the outcome in the East helped determine that in the West. Spring 1918 was the time Germany came about as close to winning the war as it did in 1914. Falkenayn's offensive at Verdun probably kept the Russians in the war for another year.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I've never heard of Hew Strachan before, but I will look him up.
Yes, I can see how Falkenhayn's disastrous attempt to take Verdun consumed priceless resources which would have been better used on the Eastern Front. A Russia which collapsed in 1916-17 instead of in 1917-18 could very well have enabled the Central Allies to win.
And Germany should have listened to Kaiser Karl of Austria's strongly expressed wish that the Central Powers offer real and substantial terms for a proposed peace settlement in early 1918 before the Spring Offensive. Almost certainly, the Entente Powers, strengthened by the intervention of the US, would have refused an early Armistice and compromise peace, but at least the onus of continuing the war would not be on the Central Allies. But Berlin insisted on a winner takes all roll of the dice!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Prussian, and later German, military doctrine was heavily weighted towards gambles. The smaller your predominance of force, the more you have to rely on superior agility, quality, and luck. The latter involves a cold-blooded willingness to accept big downside risks.
Prussia usually fought against odds, and relied on those factors and winning wars quickly to offset weight of men and metal.
The US military tradition was the opposite, and to a slightly lesser degree the British was too. Relying on distance and time to enable them to mobilize overwhelming force in long wars, often with allies.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The problem was, for Prussia/Germany, you had to be lucky EVERY time! And that's simply not REALISTIC. Every time Germany miscalculated and ended up in a long war, as in 1914 and 1939, the odds of winning starts going down!
The Anglo/American way of handling long wars was more realistic, even if, at first, the UK or US suffered repeated defeats at the beginning of a war.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yeah, but the Anglo-Saxon approach was really not available to Germany, if it was going to be a Great Power at all. It didn't have the depth of resources, size of territory and protection of encircling water than Britain, and then US, did.
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