Britain, Ireland, the US and Russia have had civil wars.
The cruiser Marduk was on patrol off Venus when it received news of Earth's secession from the Solar Union. The crew cheered the captain when he declared for the Union. Brothers Robert and Benjamin Crane wound up on opposite sides. How would you handle that? I have friends who would be on the other side if it ever came to it. The nearest approach in my experience was the Great British Miners' Strike which split the country in 1984-'85. My Conservative mother, visiting here, answered the phone when a National Union of Miners Branch Chairman rang. He had rung to tell me a pack of lies on the assumption that the police had tapped my phone! We have not had that degree of overt conflict for quite a while but what will come next after this present crisis?
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And we see Anderson giving us a different ending for the English Civil War in A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST. An ending I strongly suspect he believed would have been better for Great Britain. And there was the civil war Aaron Snelund and Hugh McCormac started in THE REBEL WORLDS.
Ad astra! Sean
BTW, that picture is very unrealistic. Bayonet charges often made men -run-; they rarely resulted in hand-to-hand combat except where physical circumstances (trenches, buildings, dense forest) made sudden surprise encounters common.
In open territory, in the last 50 yards one side or the other would "sense" that they were going to win. If the defenders, the attackers would either run or go to ground and start a firefight; if the attackers, the defenders would run.
This often happened in pre-gunpowder battles too. It's when neither side flinched that you got the really epic slaughters.
The Landschneckt mercenaries and the Italians used to call fighting the Swiss "bad war", because neither side would stop -- the respective pike phalanxes would just run right into each other full-tilt. Then they'd shove and stab and some would roll under the feet of the locked ranks stabbing and cutting with knives and swords. Hundreds would be crushed or suffocated, because the rear ranks kept pushing after the formations came in contact.
This is an illustration (by an eyewitness):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Push_of_pike#/media/File:Battle_Scene,_after_Hans_Holbein_the_Younger.jpg
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Yes, I recall how rare bayonet charges were in your own THE GENERAL books, for the reasons you gave. Civil Gov't soldiers would train in the uses of bayonets, but Raj Whitehall seldom had occasion for using such things. Rather, as you said, battle would last till one side or the other "flinched," as you described.
I recall a some what different in your first GENERAL book. Tewfik bin Jamal had nearly trapped and destroyed Raj's smaller force and kept up a fighting pursuit trying to finish off this Civil Gov't force. Tewfik finally gave up and broke off the chase when Raj's determination simply wouldn't allow his men to "flinch."
There were times when Raj even WANTED his enemies to run away, so he would not have to kill them!
Ad astra! Sean
BTW, one corollary after the invention of firearms is that both sides could go to ground and keep up a firefight, which might kill more men than a head-on clash, if over a longer time. WW1 was full of examples of that.
If you want an example of something really gruesome, take a look at the "tunnelers" of WW1, the men who mined and countermined between the trench systems. They'd use crude listening devices to detect each other's digging, and sometimes the tunnels would collapse into each other as one side or the other broke through into the enemy's diggings, and the tunnelers would fight in total darkness at close quarters with knives and pistols.
Some of the -undetected- tunneling efforts planted enough explosive under the enemy fortifications to equal the power of a small nuclear weapon, and the detonations could be heard in London, all the way across the Channel. Tens of thousands of men died in instants when those were set off, and thousands more buried alive -- often survivors were found wandering around the fringes, raving mad.
Just before setting off one of these enormous mines, an officer said: "We're about to make history!" His subordinate replied: "I don't know about that, sir, but we're certainly going to rearrange geography!"
And there were the tunnels and tunnel rats in Vietnam.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: Gruesome, indeed! Both long lasting firefights and the mining and counter mining of WW I on the Western Front. I assume that's where a lot of "shell shock" victims came from.
Paul: I have heard of how US forces would fight NVA soldiers like that. Wierdly, there were even men who seemed to LIKE being "tunnel rights."
Ad astra!
Sean,
The Viet Cong survived endless bombing by going underground. There were miles of tunnels, bases, HQs, hospitals, buried bodies, booby traps etc. Tunnel rats had to be small, agile and resourceful.
Paul.
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