02-19-2013, 03:20 PM
I have a few tentative ideas, but I will need more thought and more reading of the early sources before I am willing to put them in public.
Fair enough, it will be interesting to read them, but I hope you will not find me presumtuous in saying a few things about what you are prepared to share.
That is only a contradiction if you assume that soldiers only use wise tactics. I see nothing to justify that assumption in the last five thousand years of military history!
I think you are mistaken. I believe one first of all has to assume that soldiers are sentient human beings of flesh and blood, and performing a logical and functional type of warfare, however crazy it might seem at first sight, and however crazy their commanders might be. If you are not prepared to see them as human beings, governed by emotions and trying to deal with a terrible situation as best as they can, you will end up describing an ant-attack. Again, you are projecting the evils of total war onto ancient and medieval warfare, and that might very well be a mistake.
Eduard, you keep repeating things like "throw his pony on the spears" and assuming that such attacks were suicidal for the cavalry horses and riders. I suggest that the first step is to write battle narratives at the traditional big-picture level, and then to perform a Face of Battle analysis of the mechanics of these big events to understand how they could have worked.
I think that you are mistaken here too. Writing battle narrative at the traditional big-picture level relies on other battle-narrative at the big-picture level, and only very slightly on what actually happened. As you would know from Keegan, the narrative tradition is basically corrupt, or rather, it suffers from literature rearing up its ugly head. If you make this the basis of a reconstruction, no wonder you have to deny throwing your horse into a mass of spears is suicide.
I am sorry Sean if I sound school-masterish, I just hope I can persuade you to start with logic and psychology, not with a seductive literary tradition, when you develop your ideas.
Fair enough, it will be interesting to read them, but I hope you will not find me presumtuous in saying a few things about what you are prepared to share.
That is only a contradiction if you assume that soldiers only use wise tactics. I see nothing to justify that assumption in the last five thousand years of military history!
I think you are mistaken. I believe one first of all has to assume that soldiers are sentient human beings of flesh and blood, and performing a logical and functional type of warfare, however crazy it might seem at first sight, and however crazy their commanders might be. If you are not prepared to see them as human beings, governed by emotions and trying to deal with a terrible situation as best as they can, you will end up describing an ant-attack. Again, you are projecting the evils of total war onto ancient and medieval warfare, and that might very well be a mistake.
Eduard, you keep repeating things like "throw his pony on the spears" and assuming that such attacks were suicidal for the cavalry horses and riders. I suggest that the first step is to write battle narratives at the traditional big-picture level, and then to perform a Face of Battle analysis of the mechanics of these big events to understand how they could have worked.
I think that you are mistaken here too. Writing battle narrative at the traditional big-picture level relies on other battle-narrative at the big-picture level, and only very slightly on what actually happened. As you would know from Keegan, the narrative tradition is basically corrupt, or rather, it suffers from literature rearing up its ugly head. If you make this the basis of a reconstruction, no wonder you have to deny throwing your horse into a mass of spears is suicide.
I am sorry Sean if I sound school-masterish, I just hope I can persuade you to start with logic and psychology, not with a seductive literary tradition, when you develop your ideas.
