"The Empire's war on another civilized imperium starts its slide towards decadence."
-Sandra Miesel, CHRONOLOGY OF TECHNIC CIVILIZATION IN Poul Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 663-672 AT p. 667.
My feeling on reading The People of the Wind is not that it starts a slide towards decadence but that it echoes an experience of Manse Everard in an earlier period of another timeline:
"Manse Everard entered Pasargadae as if into a springtime of hope."
-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 3, p. 67.
The Merseian Rodhunate remains a distant threat. The border dispute has been settled. Avalon has remained in the Domain of Ythri. Christopher Holm has overcome his hang-ups, will marry Tabitha Falkayn and believes:
"'...that here on Avalon we've saved part of the future...'"
-Poul Anderson, The People of the Wind IN Rise Of The Terran Empire, pp. 437-662 AT XIX, p. 662 -
- even that:
"'- this thing of ours, winged and wingless together, will help...'" (ibid.)
- so that:
"'...someday there'll be something better...'" (ibid.)
- than continued war and bloodshed.
Governor Saracoglu expects great things from Avalon. Philippe Rochefort believes that the Terran Empire should not be torn down but defended and improved. A springtime of hope.
Ensign Flandry, with an expanding Roidhunate pressing against a decadent Empire, is set two centuries later.
"Lord, what fools these mortals be!" (That seems appropriate, somehow.)
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And the Domain learned a hard lesson on how far it could go in relations with other interstellar powers.
Also, Anderson had the Franco-Prussian war in mind while writing THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND.
I agree, we see the Empire in the spring time of hope in this story.
Ad astra! Sean
Yeah, it was classic "Cabinet Warfare" -- fought with limited means for limited ends. A province changes hands, the loser pays up, the respective diplomats shake hands, and everyone changes partners and the dance continues.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, except the French were embittered sore losers about their defeat--and spent over 40 years dreaming of getting vengeance on Germany. It might have been wiser if the Prussians had been content with getting money from France and skip annexing Alsace-Lorraine.
And France paid a hugely ruinous price for revenge in WW I.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Note that France did not start WW1; Germany did, and unilaterally.
By the 1890's, 'revenge' had ceased to be a practical force in French politics.
Not that they didn't want the lost provinces back; of course they did.
But France wasn't prepared to start a war to do so -- wisely, because they'd have lost, and they knew that.
The return of Alsace-Lorraine was a byproduct of WW1, not its aim.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Then all that talk I read about in French politics of the time about getting back Alsace-Lorraine was just empty hot air and chest thumping blather.
But I did read of how French military strategists thought the best way of fighting Germany was by "elan," a full scale frontal attack. And such ideas were catastrophic for France.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it started out as genuine, and then became mostly ritualistic.
And yes, their military doctrine in 1914 was disastrous -- an exaggeration of the general European consensus of the time which exaggerated the factor of 'superior willpower' over material considerations. "Vitalism" was in the air at the time.
There were internal French political reasons for that, though. Specifically, the French military's place in society and the reactions after the Dreyfus scandals.
From SM Stirling:
Every European military overemphasized the potential of the offensive.
Note that this was at least partially because a lot of military thinkers did recognize the potential trap of a prolonged attritional struggle and were fearful that it would lead to social breakdown.
So a good deal of the cult of the offensive was a 'flight' from that prospect -- a desperate attempt to leap over the material factors by wishing really hard.
Everyone did it, but the degree and manner differed. The German military combined an offensive doctrine with things like more heavy artillery and a respect for concentrated firepower which nearly won them a quick victory in 1914, and did enable them to force Russia out of the war.
From SM Stirling:
Note also that when the reality of a long war really sunk home in WW1, it produced a crisis of morale wherever/whenever it hit. If you read letters home from soldiers in 1915, they're full of "we'll get out of these trenches soon".
Russia in 1916 reached crisis point (not least because of a combination of incompetent government and weak national consciousness), France in 1917 after the failure of the Nivelle offensive, then Britain about the same time but not as badly because mass-mobilization in the UK started later. By 1918 British army morale was patchy -- much weaker in some formations than others.
In Germany morale was higher than the other countries for various reasons -- the war did start with notable German victories and was largely fought on other people's land; and Germany did manage to knock Russia out of the war in 1917, and overrun Romania, which yielded a lot of plunder in grain and petroleum.
German military morale only really hit bottom after the failure of the 1918 spring offensive in the West and the increasing presence of American troops, which made it self-evident Germany couldn't win.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Thanks for these fascinating comments. I would add as well how the Affair of the Cards, in which hostile politicians spied on French army officers, to weed out men with religious and political views they did not like, did its bit to demoralize the army.
The only caveat I would make is that I think you slightly underrate Russia. By 1916 the Russians were finally getting their act together, militarily, and the Central Allies were really dreading the prospect of resuming the struggle with Russia in the spring of 1917. Hence the feelers I think were made to the Tsarist gov't about a separate peace.
If it hadn't been for the incredible dunderheads who allowed trivial disturbances to get out of control (and lied to the Tsar about them!) history would have been very different.
Ad astra! Sean
From SM Stirling:
Sean: the Russian army in 1916 was capable of defeating the -Austrian- army. But every time they encountered the Germans, the Germans beat them like a drum, which is what happened to the Brusilov Offensive when it ran up against them.
And the disturbances weren't trivial.
The Russian government screwed up the food distribution system so badly that although there wasn't an -absolute- shortage of food -nationally-, the -cities- were on the brink of starvation, or in some cases a bit over it.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I am still not sure you are entirely right about the Russian army in March 1917. The map I studied of the Eastern Front at that tine shows how little, really, the Central Allies had achieved--only Russian Poland and some slivers of Lithuania and western Ukraine had been conquered. Their greatest gains came only after Lenin seized power from the Provisional Gov't and grovelled to the Central Allies with the ignominious Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
As for food problems, Chapter 3 of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's MARCH 1917 is a non fictional account of how Alexander A. Rittikh, the last Tsarist Minister of Agriculture, was successfully sorting out these food distribution problems. He had the State pay market rates to farmers and railroads for buying and shipping grain to the cities. No arbitrary fixed prices, no forced sales, no confiscation of grain. So, while there were problems, food was flowing to the cities and armies.
the point I tried to make was that, at first, the disturbances which began in Petrograd on March 8, 1917 were trivial. They got worse because Lt. Gen. Khabalov, commander of the military district, did not take quick and decisive action to stop them.
Ad astra! Sean
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