Envoy has traveled seven and a half light years to investigate the wrecked Kith ship, Fleetwing. Against some protests, Captain Nansen, on the strength of his greater training and experience, intends to enter the possibly dangerous interior of Fleetwing, not to delegate that task to anyone else. He remarks:
"'I well know the doctrine. The commander should stay with the ship.'" (p. 479)
Is it possible that Poul Anderson wrote that dialogue with Star Trek in mind?
Imagine Starfarers adapted as a TV series.
Starfarers, Chapters 17, 21, 46 and 49-51 are a revised Kith History. It follows that Chapters 1-16, 18-20, 22-45, 47, 48 and 52 tell the story of the ten thousand year round trip of Envoy, starting with its antecedents and ending with its consequences, interspersed with some information about events back on Earth. We might next reread this long story or at least some parts of it. (Addendum: The information in this paragraph needs to be amended. See here.)
30 comments:
Hello,
That is an interesting point about a doctrine keeping a valuable starship commander out of potential hazard. I read an interview recently via the Science Fiction Book Club with Astrid Anderson Bear. The Andersons were casual friends with Gene Roddenberry. And on one occasion in the late 1960s the family travelled to the set of the show. Poul Anderson did submit a script but it was not picked up for the show.
When I read "Boat of a Million Years" I could not help but think of Mr. Flint in the ST:TOS episode "Requiem for Methuseleh." There were many interesting themes. I believe Jerome Bixby wrote the episode. Bixby was an editor for Planet Magazibne and other SF publications.
If it is okay I can post a link to this interview. It is in pdf form. The interview was from late 2019 and was quite interesting.
Cheers, Scott
It’s usually doctrine that commanders stay where they can command effectively; not to reduce risk, but so they can receive information rapidly and send out orders efficiently. The bridge of a warship was/is as dangerous as anywhere else, and generals like Napoleon and Wellington rode up and down right behind their gun-lines, intervening as needed. George Washington remarked that he found the sound of musket-balls going by his ears ‘exhilarating’.
WW1 generals had to stay back because of the size of the forces and the communications tech, but even so 74 British general officers were killed by enemy fire between 1914 and 1918, proportionately about as high a rate as infantry privates. WW2 armoires commanders often lead from a ‘command tank’, since they had radios.
In the story in question, the ship isn’t under outside threat, so it’s credible enough that the captain would lead in person. Good officers like to work hands-on, when circumstances allow.
Nelson should not have been on that deck where he was shot.
Scott: I don't think that links work in the combox but you can try.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: You expressed more clearly and concretely the reservations I had for Scott's comments. Well, I hadn't known Wellington and Napoleon took that active a role at Waterloo!
Paul: One problem as regards Admiral Nelson was his VANITY. He insisted on wearing his medals and honors even in battles. All that bright, glittering metal will attract the attention of hostile sharpshooters!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
And it did.
Paul.
Paul:
Here is an attempt to post the interview link.
https://middletownpubliclib.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Discussion-about-Poul-Anderson.pdf
Some interesting anecdotes.
Cheers, Scott
Kaor, Paul!
Unfortunately, it did. I'm sure some of Nelson's subordinates tried to persuade him not to wear his medals during battles.
Ad astra! Sean
Scott,
Thank you. Blog readers might be able to go to the https address.
Paul.
No, Nelson had to command from the quarterdeck; beside being traditional, it was the best place to get information (starting with Eyeball Mk. One) and send messages.
And apart from a few specialist skirmishers, nobody in a Napoleonic battle on land or sea tried to conceal themselves.
They wore bright uniforms and medals and tall hats with plumes and stood in the open blasting away at each other from point-blank range, or using cold steel at arm’s length, with the unfurled regimental colors flying overhead.
The only partial exception was fortified positions and ‘bastions’, but that was rare in open battle on land and unknown at sea.
Ships (including the admiral’s flagship) engaged at no more than a thousand yards and usually less, often yardarm to yardarm, slamming in broadsides with the hulls almost touching and grape and solid shot sweeping the decks and foot-long oak splinters spearing men like shishkebabs.
Which is why ‘the scuppers ran with blood’ was often quite literally true. Blood poured over side in streams and severed limbs and torsos lay around so densely that they had to be kicked overboard to clear the way.
On land, in a major engagement bodies carpeted the ground so you could step from one to the other for hundreds of feet at a time, and sometimes a whole battalion would lie dead in formation (in square, usually) from the colonel down to the drummer-boy.
(One standard tactic was to force infantry into square by cavalry charges, and then rush up field guns to mow them down with grapeshot or canister. They had to stay densely packed or the horsemen would ride over them and chop them into dogmeat.)
Set-piece battles were almost unbelievably brutal and involved waves of mass killing concentrated in space and time. Usually you were close enough to see the expression on the face of the man you killed. Maneuvers could take time, but when an attack was driven home or repelled it was a short massive bloodbath.
That was the point of the endless drill and the ferocious discipline, to make men capable of enduring this and move and stand and fire to the word of command in a stinking slaughterhouse.
Incidentally, this sort of face-to-face slaughter done with mechanical precision was something of a European specialty, which is why European armies could usually wallop the snot out of much larger forces in, say, India. Europeans fought like a machine with human parts, and they fought to utterly destroy the other side. Towards the end of the conquest period some Indians (the Sikhs are the best example) managed to train their forces up to this level, usually employing European mercenaries as drill masters, and the battles became much bloodier.
Mr Stirling,
I can only marvel at this wealth of historical detail - and how we CAN enjoy reading about it. Any activity taken to an extreme becomes fascinating.
In Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe series, the hero implausibly survives in the front line of many such slaughters.
Paul.
Paul: well, unlikely events do happen. Hitler survived four years as a company and battalion ‘runner’ on the Western Front, which was absurdly, astronomically unlikely. He wasn’t even crippled or mutilated, though he was in hospital in November 1918, blinded in a gas attack. Unfortunately, he recovered. Note that when the police opened fire during the ‘Beer-Putsch’, Hitler survived though men were killed right beside him. (Apparently he went flat very quickly — ‘front-swine’ reflexes.)
The legacy of musket-and-bayonet war was important long after. It was perfectly rational given the technology of the time, but the cultural attitudes it bred remained potent long after weapons improved.
It is very hard to read of unlikely events like Hitler surviving without wondering whether a malign force protected him but my friend, Andrea, thinks that Fortuna is the deity that we should imagine as controlling events. She must not be entreated or given offerings. A priestess kept her temple clean and neat but did not offer any sacrifices. But, despite this, Fortuna favors the brave.
Hitler was vicious and personally sadistic — he liked to watch films of his enemies being tortured to death over and over — but brave as hell.
Fortune favors the bold because if you try you may succeed but if you don’t dare to try you will certainly fail.
Same reason as luck favors the prepared.
In my latest book, Luz gives a little talk to a class studying unarmed combat. She stresses that the training gives a set of building blocks that have to be fitted together in unique ways in different, high-pressure improvisations. You need to think quickly and keep your nerve, but the skills also have to be drilled in so they’re instantly available.
One example of sheer dumb luck: at one point in the war Hitler and three other runners were outside the Battalion HQ bunker. An orderly came out, gave Hitler a message, and off he went. A few minutes later, a shell landed on the bunker and killed the other three. If one of the others had gotten it…
You read it first here, folks! Luz gives talks on unarmed combat!
A Time Patrol villain HAS to impersonate that orderly and give that message to one of the other three runners.
As for enjoying films of torture - some human minds are in a very different place.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: Many thanks for the many interesting comments you added here. While I understand why armies and navies wore bright, distinctive uniforms, to make it easier in the smoke and chaos of battle to tell which side was which, I still wonder if Admiral Nelson HAD to wear his medals/honors? Wouldn't an admiral have orderlies, messengers, subordinate officers near him for relaying orders? Shouldn't the ordinary rank insignia be enough? It still seems a needless risk for him to wear eye catching shiny medals.
Yes, considering the extraordinary risks Hitler ran during WW I, he had the luck of Satan with him, to survive without any serious, lasting injuries. Ditto, how he survived the Beer Hall Putsch!
I think it was the wars of the 1860's: the US Civil War, the Austro/Prussian War, and the Franco/Prussian War, which started to bring home to analysts that the close order tactics of the Napoleonic Wars had to change to take into account the advances in military technology. But not the need for discipline or drilled in reflexes!
Paul: Unfortunately, there are very bad people who enjoy sadism, torture, and watching people being tortured. Even more unfortunately, that does not mean such depraved persons are necessarily cowards or incompetents.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: wearing medals in action was SOP, like extra-fancy uniforms as you went up the pole of rank. Yes, there was an element of bravado, But it was expected bravado, without which you’d loose essential respect.
Note also that dispersed tactics were practically difficult. They made keeping track of what and who was where and what hard to impossible (remember that this was long before radios), they made it more difficult to maintain the momentum of an attack (because men had to learn to repeatedly rise out of the relative safety of cover and advance into fire), and they subverted the traditional ways of maintaining morale, which involved ‘cuff to cuff’ contact with comrades, and having your actions immediately visible to both officers/NCOs (discipline/fear) and fellow-soldiers (shame/guilt/solidarity).
And everyone in a Napoleonic firing line actually fired his musket, because it was a drilled collective action. For a long time after dispersed formations became standard, many men -didn’t- shoot… which is just what a lot of military leaders opposed to the new system had predicted.
There were ways around all this but it took time, trial and error and a whole new system which put much more of a burden on the individual soldier. The officers who felt uneasy about the innovations weren’t just being reactionary or stupid; there were good reasons to be dubious.
Nb: in the RN of Nelson’s time, only officers and Marines wore uniforms at all. Ordinary sailors just wore sailor’s slops. It was a ‘kill me if you can’ taunt to the enemy, in part.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks for your always interesting comments! Noted, it was expected of Nelson and other officers to wear their medals even in battle. And uniforms for all ranks and men of the RN only became standard after Nelson's time.
Incidentally, I did notice how army uniforms for all the belligerents in WW I became plainer and used earth toned colors as WW I dragged on. Which I thought was to make them less noticeable by their enemies.
And in Solzhenitsyn's novel AUGUST 1914 I saw a lot of what seemed amazing incompetence by Tsarist Army officers who seemed totally unable to change tactics to fit the changes in military technology. But your explanation of why that was the case makes it plain it was not always because of stupidity, but the sheer difficulty of bringing in a whole new system of training and tactics suitable for handling the changes caused by new technology.
And the dead locked trench warfare of the Western Front in WW I shows how this problem was true of the French and British as well.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it was to make them less visible; people had realized it was necessary… but often reluctantly.
The British went first , converting to khaki in the 1880’s, starting with troops in India (khaki is Hindi for ‘dust’); the Russians next (green). The Germans converted to field-grey (a greenish gray) in 1910… but the officers concerned drew straws to see who had to tell the Kaiser. Wilhelm wasn’t any sort of a soldier except on his fantasies, but he did love fancy-dress uniforms.
The French went to war in 1914 in blue coats, red pants and with brightly polished mess tins strapped to their packs so they could be seen miles away. There had been proposals for something more modern, and a lot of French colonial troops wore khaki, but it was impossible to get the metropolitan regulars out of their finery. One officer suggested it was all a plot to hide the unmanly physiques of effeminate types, and a more than usually cretinous politician said: Les pantalons rouges, c’est la France!
(Though it turned out the red dye was all imported from Germany…)
It took the slaughters of the opening phase — the French lost 250,000 dead in the first 100 days, 2,500 every 24 hours — to break the spell of the red pants.
All European armies were over-committed to offensive tactics and winning by superior morale, but the French were the worst; for example, they had no heavy field artillery at all, because it would slow them down.
The same political cretin said in 1913 that ‘the superiority of the French army lies in the lightness of our guns’.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
What you said about how the British started modernizing their army in the 1880's reminded me of some of the stories of Kipling, which touched on that. And I also recalled how hard experience during the Boer War brought home to the British the value of directed, aimed fire.
And I do recall how the fancy uniforms of the French proved a disaster to them during the opening months of WW I, perfect targets for German artillery and rifle fire. The French were, as you said, far too aggressive in the wrong ways. Ir ended with all the belligerents relegating fancy uniforms for ceremonial occasions, not field use.
And cretinous politicians were not limited to France! We have far too many of them over here!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: things are complex. What the British found during and after the Boer War (including the Musketry Center at Hythe) was that what was important was not slow long-distance shooting (sniping, we'd call it) but "effective range" accuracy (usually up to about 800 yards), snap-shooting at fleeting targets, combined with the most rapid possible fire compatible with maintaining that degree of accuracy.
What the experts advised in the decade after the Boer War was that the army acquire more machine guns, including a light "squad automatic weapon", together with a semi-auto rifle, as well as reforming marksmanship training.
But the governments of the time wouldn't cough up for that -- machine-guns were expensive -- though they did fund the development of the Vickers, a much improved (and somewhat lighter) Maxim gun, and in 1913 the acquisition of some Lewis light machine-guns.
So what the Army fell back on was reformed rifle training, emphasizing rapid fire (the "mad minute") combined with a reasonable level of accuracy at man-shaped moving targets. Fortunately the Lee-Enfield rifle already had a superbly smooth bolt action and a larger magazine capacity than any other service rifle.
So by 1914, most of the BEF's men could fire 15-25 aimed rounds a minute, about four or five times what French or German soldiers could do, and hit targets at battlefield ranges much more often than the competitors. At Mons and the Marne, each British rifleman was firing many more shots than his German counterpart and hitting with a higher percentage of those more numerous bullets.
The problem was that this took years of intense practice to achieve and maintain.
The "Old Contemptibles" tore into the German infantry like a buzz-saw in 1914 during the opening battles. The Germans thought they had ten times the machine guns they actually did! And they slaughtered the German mass attacks at Ypres at the end of the year, beating back the last German attempt to flank the Western Front and roll it up.
But fighting means losses, and the old Regulars were largely gone by the end of the year; the Germans had more and better artillery, and they were good soldiers and vastly more numerous.
And the hastily-trained masses of volunteers, and later conscripts, couldn't be trained to the old Regulars' standards in the time available.
There's a saying that if wars were fought without casualties, elite units would always win. But in a big, prolonged war what happens is that the expensively trained elite troops get killed, or have to be taken out of the line as cadre for new units, and you end up with hastily-trained amateurs instead.
That's why the Hyde experts had wanted automatics for everyone and masses of machine guns. Hits are a function of the number of rounds you send the enemy's way, combined with "good enough" marksmanship. If you can't produce an army of rifle experts, automatics are the way to go.
Nowadays, improvements in training, cheap universal optics and just lately augmented reality equipment make unprecedented levels of small-arms lethality possible. Fortunately nobody we’ve been fighting just lately has anything comparable. Not yet, at least.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Many thanks for your always interesting mini essays. The depth and solidity of your knowledge is awe inspiring.
What you said about how the UK reformed marksmanship training after the Boer War fits in with very similar remarks by a retired Major of the 82nd Airborne. And it sure fits what I read about how deadly the shooting of the Gurkha soldiers shanghaied to Tran was in Jerry Pournelle's last, posthumous novel, MAMELUKES. All by themselves the Gurkhas defeated a brave army with COMPETENT commanders.
The trouble with elite soldiers is precisely that: they get killed off too quickly in war or have to be taken out of front line service to act as training cadre.
Cheap, high quality optics? I think I know what you mean. I recently purchased a very nice Gosky Starscope monocular telescope (10X magnification) for not much more than fifty dollars.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: in 1940, the equivalent would have cost thousands, and would have taken experts a long time to make.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And been much larger, heavier, and cumbersome to use! I can easily carry my Starscope Monocular in my pocket.
Ad astra! Sean
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