Hey of us! Apologies for the dearth of a publish this week – a mixture of educating, writing and household calls for needed to come first. Nonetheless, in order that I don’t go away you with nothing to learn, listed below are some issues I’ve been studying and watching these days you could discover fascinating.
Over on YouTube, Tod Todeschini of Tod’s Workshop is doing a little fascinating experiments with fireplace arrows, attempting to refine a design and components that performs properly, utilizing simply medieval supplies. The outcomes are spectacular, although after all at greatest this form of methodology can solely yield a believable ‘it may have labored like this’ conclusion (for the reason that supplies had been accessible) moderately than ‘that is how they did it.’ What I discover most fascinating, nonetheless, is how comparatively modest his ultimate fireplace arrows are: they burn scorching and for some time, however it’s exhausting to overlook that he must get fairly fortunate with them to set his wood goal alight. I don’t assume that’s a failure of Tod’s method, however truly successful: he’s confirming the efficacy of those weapons, in that it takes a lot of fireside arrows to get a settlement or camp burning, as a result of every particular person arrow is comparatively unlikely by itself to gentle a hearth. However after all a military in a siege context that may maintain making use of fireplace arrows can ultimately trigger quite a lot of little fires which can get uncontrolled, thus making them a priceless siege instrument.
Additionally on YouTube, I ran throughout an older video on ships biscuits, usually identified on land as hardtack, which matches by means of the method of making them and the methods you would possibly eat them. The Romans had the same marketing campaign meals, referred to as bucellatum which appears to have been the same dense, dehydrated biscuit (Amm Mac. 18.7.2; HA Avid. Cass. 5.3, Pesc. Nig. 10.4; Cod. Iust. 12.37.1; cf. ‘ready rations’ in older sources which would be the similar, Livy 21.49.7-8, 34.12.6, 37.37.5; Entrance. Strat. 4.1.1). A military may put together these prematurely of a march so as to transfer by means of areas with out provides or transfer rapidly for a short while with out the necessity to forage, since they might maintain – a lot the identical method they had been utilized in early fashionable warfare. By eradicating principally the entire water within the baking course of, these types of hardtack can final a lengthy time (many years) with out spoiling and pack quite a lot of energy into a comparatively small package deal. In fact, they’re not very appetizing, so with the ability to compel your troopers to eat hardtack was itself an exertion of a type of self-discipline.
We additionally had reporting on an fascinating archaeological discover outdoors Vienna, Austria of a mass grave of what seems to be roughly 150 Roman troopers from the late first century AD. We don’t have full publication but simply an preliminary press announcement, however from the outline, the evaluation, that this was a battlefield burial of a defeated unit by an enemy (in all probability the locals) makes quite a lot of sense. 150 is one thing of an odd quantity. We’d in all probability anticipate a big patrol in power like this to be executed with a cohort (480 males), whereas 150 is simply too many for a single century (80 males). My preliminary guess could be that this was initially a cohort which acquired right into a struggle that it misplaced – maybe an ambush – with many of the cohort fleeing or retreating (however clearly with heavy casualties), whereas the victors looted and swiftly buried the fallen (taking their very own lifeless again for a extra ordered, correct burial).
Additionally value noting in your historic new and updates, we’ve had a new Pasts Imperfect late in September, with an essay on monsters and monstrous peoples in historic and medieval thought and the standard bevy of fascinating hyperlinks.
Lastly, I’ve had various folks ask, given my dialogue of American civil-military relations, what I considered the latest general-officer all-call assembly in Quantico, which I’ve come to calling the Quantico Shame, which I suppose solutions the query of what I believe. I’m working up a chunk of my very own on this (not for the weblog, for some other place) however within the meantime, I believed that each Kori Schake’s take at International Coverage (alas, paywalled) and Alan Elrod’s at Liberal Currents had been each good at expressing why the content material of that assembly was so troubling and harmful and such a transparent and open breach of two-and-a-half-centuries of profitable civil-military custom. I will even add that for a navy which has, for a minimum of the final 165 years, distinguished itself by profitable its wars by means of relentlessly superior logistics and organizing, the emphasis on chasing the mirage of ultra-masculine ‘robust males’ super-soldiers (on the expense of logistics, organizers and bureaucrats) strikes as nearly absurdly traditionally illiterate. America navy has spent greater than the final century and a half mopping the ground with manly-man armies, be they the Flower of Southern Chivalry or the Nazi Übermenschen. The place it has failed (Afghanistan, Vietnam) it has not been preventing armies of body-builders however scrappy, under-fed, foreign-supported forces keen to be tactically and politically versatile, like a smaller boxer ready for a bigger one to ‘punch himself out.’
Lastly, a poem, Margaret Atwood’s, “The Loneliness of the Navy Historian.” An excerpt (learn the entire issues):
My commerce is braveness and atrocities.
I have a look at them and don’t condemn.
I write issues down the best way they occurred,
as close to as will be remembered.
I don’t ask why, as a result of it’s largely the identical.
Wars occur as a result of those who begin them
assume they will win.
[…]
Nevertheless it’s no use asking me for a ultimate assertion.
As I say, I deal in ways.
Additionally statistics:
for yearly of peace there have been 4 hundred
years of battle.
And that’s all for now. Again subsequent week for extra on the labor of peasant ladies! Right here’s an image of some cats to shut us out:
