*sigh*

(Do I always have to make it complicated???)

A healthy, well-cared-for, and fit horse can travel about 30 miles in one day. A healthy, well-cared-for, and fit human can actually travel more than that.

An army takes at least twice as long to travel the same distance, unless they are desperate and there are forced marches.

When William the Conqueror invaded Britain, some of Harold the Confessor's troops force-marched from York to London (about 175 miles, as the crow flies) in four days. This kind of speed modern reenactors have been unable to match. (It took Harold two more weeks before he felt enough soldiers had trickled in for him to meet William, though.)

Look up some of the marches that actually happened if you want to know how far and how fast a large group can travel. History has lots of them.

There is a nice distance conversion utility that features lot of interesting units here:
http://www.text-trieve.com/products/references/lengthconv.htm

It does not include the ever-popular cubit, defined as the length of the arm (a "short cubit" is from the elbow to the tip of the thumb, a "royal cubit" is from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger). Obviously cubits are unstable units that varied quite a bit. Certain Egyptian rulers decreed that their own personal anatomy should be used in all measurements, but even that varied.

Most people will be in the same boat as yourself when they see an archaic unit like league, rod, cord, furlong, cubit, or a unit made up by you. They will not be able to appreciate the distance described.

You could have fun by describing the unit in dramatic terms. For example, a league could be "two thousand camels placed nose-to-tail."

A league is pretty big; you would probably find it easier to bring a smaller unit into perspective. For example, a furlong is exactly "one hundred and ten soldiers, laid head to foot" (assuming soldiers are six feet tall).

When conducting military maneuvers, you may also find yourself wondering how far characters can see, especially the distance to the horizon. The formula is 1.17 * sqrt(height of your eye). Look here for the explanation:
http://www.boatsafe.com/kids/distance.htm

This assumes that your fantasy story takes place on an Earth-sized planet. Smaller planets have closer horizons.

[This message has been edited by Doc Brown (edited June 11, 2001).]

NOW, if only I can figure out how to write my battle scene!

First, watch some that have been done in movies (GLORY, GLADIATOR, BRAVEHEART, etc) and try to describe what you are seeing. (This is a good writing exercise for any kind of scene, by the way.)

Second, remember point of view. If you are showing the battle from the point of view of someone watching it from a distance--the general supervising up on the hill (though that's a pretty recent development in military strategy--through most of history, the military leaders have been right in the thick of things)--it's going to be very different from what one of the soldiers down in the mud and blood and noise will experience.

If you describe it from the middle of the battle, your point of view is only going to know what is going on a very short distance away. It's going to be confusing, and panicky, and it's going to be all the guy can do to just stay alive and see a blow coming in time to block it, much less see a chance to kill someone else.

Whether you are up on the hill watching from a distance or down in the struggle will depend on what you want the reader to experience and understand about the battle. So you need to think about that, too.

Actual fighting can get a bit monotonous.

Whilst I hate to keep referring to existing examples, David Gemmell writes some beautiful battle scenes into "Legend".

I presume that you want your battle to shape one or more of your characters' lives. In this case you might want to set the battle up on the strategic level (Generals), then depict it on the tactical level (footsoldiers):

"General Everstrong ordered a thousand troops to march through the phylocus fields and a platoon of hammer dragons to attack the Hell Canyon redoubts. This left the southern flank lightly protected. Roger had a bad feeling as soon as he heard the General's decision. His feeling got even worse when he saw the black flags of a thousand Thuggarian deathtroopers coming over the hill . . ."

On the strategic level, you can build great tension by showing both sides of a battle. For example, you can have a good guy Colonel point out that their lines have a weak spot. The reader knows that your main hero happens to be stationed right on that spot. Cut to bad guy headquarters, where the evil leader is planning a crushing attack on that very location. But then his Lieutennant cautions that the weak spot might be a good guy trap, and urges the attack be mounted elsewhere. The evil leader weighs his options . . .

Or perhaps you are struggling with technical details of battle rather than story telling devices. Can we help to spur you along with more information about weapon ranges, troop movement, rates of fire, or anything else?

The story telling device I can tweak... It's giving me a hard time because I want to be realistic and honest, without being too boring in the detail. BUT before I can even begin to tweak that, I want to be sure that I'm accurate with the technical details of battle. Doc asks, "Can we help to spur you along with more information about weapon ranges, troop movement, rates of fire?"

And the big answer is YES!! I really do have to have this battle chapter in that I've already been building up to this for the past 2 chapters, and I don't want to cheat the climax of this particular plot segment. In short, I have 2 opposing armies. One is loosely based on the composition/techniques/ discipline of the Mongols under Ghengis Khan. This army is comprised of 15,000 cavalry troops (light & heavy) and has no infantry; there is a "surprise" division of 5,000 light cavalry archers that will play a crucial part in the battle towards the end. The opposing force is your typical medieval-esque (sp?) army. It is comprised of 32,000 mixed troops (infantry and cavalry). This army has been at a forced march for the past 5 days, but have been "on the road" sotospeak for nearly 2 weeks arriving at the battle field; they are somewhat demoralized by other events. The battle field itself is a valley hemmed in my low hills and forests, and in the not too distant north and west are mountains. The smaller force will win after feigning a rout and the larger force, already suffering heavier losses than the smaller army, will become overwhelmed by this unexpected reserve force of 5,000 cavalry-archers.

The technical part that I'm having problems with include:
1) From what I've read, most historical battles with archers usually commence with a volley of fire, then the infantry moves in. Is this really true? Why would any army wait around for that? What's the firing range. My husband (a former Marine) thinks it's 250 yards.
2) What role do archers typically play-- if any-- once infantry troops from both sides have begun fighting?
3) How would ground troops outlast or outmatch mounted troops? Do mounted troops fight each other much the same way as ground troops fight?
4) What is the rate of fire for a bow?
5) I know that war steeds were bred for size and temperment. What is the relative size difference between a war steed and a regular horse?
6) I have a book on weapons which has great pictures and terms for everything. However, it doesn't have terms for how they're used. What is a good resource for these type of terms (thrust, parry, etc)?

I'm sure there are more questions, but that's all that I can think of right now. I really do appreciate the help in getting the details right on this!

If not, how are your men armed and outfitted?

If your archers on the other side were infantry, I'd recommend longbows and tell you to look at the battle of Agincourt.

But you said they are mounted, so they will be using bows with a shorter range that the longbow. Surely there is something on the web that will tell you about the various ranges of the different sizes of bows.

(My absolute favorite websearch page is www.google.com--it's a metasearch engine--it searches the search engines--and it is fast and very helpful.)

During the age of chivalry (when there were knights), the ideal was to have the knights fight the knights (cavalry versus cavalry) and the peasants fight the peasants (infantry versus infantry). It wasn't chivalrous for a knight to fight a poor pikeman on foot.

In reality, though, the infantry would try to kill the horses carrying the cavalry, and the knights would try to decapitate the peasants with terrible, swift sword strokes.

As for war horses, there were a few different kinds. If you've ever seen how much bigger the Budweiser Clydesdales are than a regular horse, you've seen what a war horse looked like. Different countries had different kinds, but to carry a knight in armor, that kind of war horse had to be BIG.

If you wanted a horse that was smart enough to fight under you, then you might want to look at Lippizans. Those "airs above the ground" they do were originally battle movements and could kill a man on foot most efficientlly.

A horse that is going to carry an archer (and your Mongol-esque warriors) is probably more like an Arabian, small and fast, and able to change direction instantaneously.

You might want to look at battles in the Holy Land between Saladin's army and the armies of the Crusaders.

I know that doesn't quite answer all of your questions, but I hope it helps a little.

If their own infantry or calvary enters close combat with their target the archers must stop firing. This is with long bows fired at long range (250 yards is a pretty good mark for this type of archery). Some interesting data here:
http://ejmas.com/jcs/jcsart_denig_0301.htm

A long bow fired horizontally by a stationary hunter will be deadly accurate at 15-20 yards, and hit-or-miss out to about 50 yards. As you might expect, this would often employ a different type of arrow. I do not know rate of fire for this, but from watching an archer friend shooting at a target it might be as slow as one shot per minute.

2) This is a good question. In all the wargames I ever played as a teenager, I never figured out a desirable use for my archers once close combat was joined. They can cover a retreat, but who considers retreat desirable? However, it does sound like this would fit into your story. If you find a better use for archers let me know.

Of course flexible archers, who carried a variety of arrows and possibly different types of bows, might be able to assist in close combat. They would have to move near the battlefield (maybe 20 yards from their targets) and use a much slower rate of fire to aim carefully.

Close range archers are a great offensive weapon, but they have little innate defense. Footsoldiers and cavalry can cross 20 yards to slaughter them faster than they can reload and aim their bows. Give the archers a defense, like a stone wall with arrow slits (loops), and they become unstoppable killing machines. Perhaps you could put your archers 20 yards from the battle, protected by a deep gorge that the enemy cannot cross?

Because this is a fantasy story, you might be able to invent something that the army can carry into battle. For example, imagine a wall of flame that cuts a swath across the middle of the battlefield, or special archers hypnotized to fire accurately from galloping horses.

3) I am not an equestrian by any means, but I do know that riding a horse can exhaust a human. So can carrying and using a heavy cavalry weapon. The rate of exhaustion can be increased by frequent maneuvering or attacks that miss their targets. Other factors include weather (being unprepared for cold or heat) and thirst or hunger. Dehydration is particularly exhausting.

Here's a brainstorm: suppose the mounted troops make an assumption about the battlefield, and the ground troops invalidate that assumption. The classic case is an army expecting to cross a bridge which is destroyed just before they arrive. Alternately, the horsemen might assume that they can draw water from nearby wells just before riding into battle, unaware that a clever footman has fouled them with salt. Things like this can cause the horsemen to run out of gas quickly.

4) I already addressed this.

5) Thank goodness Kathleen knows something about horse breeding. My only comment is that an army equipped with so many big horses will need an awesome supply line. They have to care for those beasts. This is one reason why Hitler failed to capture Moscow; the German tanks were the biggest and the best, but the German army could not keep them fueled, armed, and repaired so far from home.

6) I do not know the answer to this. If I had this problem, I would search the Internet first, then drop by the library.

Of course most of these thigs can be described using ordinary language. "She repelled the hail of arrows with her shield, each impact ringing like the toll of a great bell" or "He fended off blow after ferocious blow, growing weary at the ceaseless attacks . . ."

I can't wait till this chapter is behind me. It is my great project for the week.

Tom Clancy is much maligned, but he's still (IMHO) the best writer of the 1990's. The critics might not like him, but can 100M+ books in print be wrong?

He often alternated between character POV's (for vignettes) and an omniscient POV (for the big picure) in his battle scenes. (Example: Red Storm Rising, chapters "The Dance of the Vampires," "The Frisbees of Dreamland," etc.)

Also, early books by Larry Bond

quote:

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Tom Clancy is much maligned, but he's still (IMHO) the best writer of the 1990's. The critics might not like him, but can 100M+ books in print be wrong?

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All too easily.

quote:

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This is one reason why Hitler failed to capture Moscow; the German tanks were the biggest and the best, but the German army could not keep them fueled, armed, and repaired so far from home.

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The reason Hitler failed to capture Moscow in 1941 was because he wasted his army's strength attacking the other two major targets of Leningrad and Kiev. This left his panzer divisions out of position, well under strength, low on fuel, and (because tank transporters hadn't been invented yet, and tanks had to drive themselves everywhere) worn out and damaged.

For other reasons, and to sum up better, I'm going to quote from a long essay I wrote on the subject for my History course last year:

quote:

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One comes, therefore, to the big ‘what if’ of the whole campaign. What if Hitler had made the conquest of Moscow his priority, ignoring for the moment Kiev and the Ukraine? The respective temperatures of the two cities when winter set in make it clear that Moscow, getting far colder before either Kiev or Leningrad, should have been made the primary target if only for the reason that the window of opportunity was far smaller. Without sending Hoth and Guderian’s Panzergruppen north and south on their respective diversions, the advance on Moscow would have had more troops, as the casualties incurred (in the Leningrad and Kiev actions) in those two units would not have taken place. The lack of a delay would have allowed far longer for such an advance to take place, allowing better positioning and build-up of forces before the final swift advance to take the city. As can be seen from the evidence presented earlier, the conquest of Moscow would have virtually guaranteed a major Russian withdrawal, among the repercussions of which could have been to grant total victory for the German army in the Soviet Union west of the Urals.

Therefore, it is possible to see how the real strategic significance of the battle of Kiev lay not in the massive victory achieved by the German army, but in the way it diverted the whole momentum of the front south into the Ukraine, thus destroying any chance of success that the embryonic Moscow advance had. Hitler’s years as a politician made him wary of large enemies, and he was too concerned with the ‘mopping up’ of potential threats to his army’s flank and with the economics of warfare to be a truly great general – he lacked the singleness and ruthlessness of purpose to, for a time at least, ignore such diversions and concentrate all his army’s effort on a single target, Moscow. Had he listened to his staff, the advice of which was to make Moscow the first, primary target of the Wehrmacht’s blitzkrieg, then victory on the Eastern front could well have been within his grasp in 1941.

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In warfare, logistics is everything.

(oh, and in addition to this, German tanks were not the "biggest and best"; they were outclassed by the superior Russian T-34. Most of the tanks of the 145 divisions involved in Operation Barbarossa [figure taken from Panzer Leader by Heinz Guderian, eventually Hitler's Chief of Staff and the commander of Panzergruppe 2, subordinated to Army Group Centre for the summer 1941 offensive, under Field Marshal Von Bock] were Panzer III and IVs, neither of which had either weapons or armour equal to the T-34, which was also an extremely mobile, low-slung vehicle)

So, I'm not saying he's right in all his opinions. I'm saying his novels are enjoyable to read. "Mental chewing-gum," they are sometimes called.

I hate wasting time on characters and motivation and emotions; Clancy just gives me the good stuff: gadetry, politics and plot.

Sometimes his plots have stupid, stupid, stupid holes in them ("Russia joins NATO!" The Bear and the Dragon, 2000). But his books are still fun.

I submit, that in our free market economy, the best writer is defined as the one who has sold the most books -- people vote with their wallets.

In addition to this I believe it is likely I misread your original post, believing (due to what I can only call idiocy) that you said that "this was the reason why Hitler failed", rather than what you actually said ("this was one reason why Hitler failed). An inexcuseable error on my part; I can only ask your forgiveness.

I don't live in America (or Canada, for that matter, although I used to), and the educational system here in the UK is somewhat different -- I do go to College (just finished, actually), but here College is (as far as I can make out) equivalent to senior high school level; college here is University.

I'll email you the entire document, so I can demonstrate that my arguments are not unsupported -- although I can see why they appear so, given the somewhat limited nature of the extract in question.

Thank you for your patience, and once again, my apologies.

chad: I have to say that I completely disagree with your views on who are the 'best writers'. However, I think it very unlikely that I will be able to convince you of my point, as such arguments are so inately subjective. If you enjoy Mr.Clancy's fiction, that's fine by me; personally I think they're exciting, and good for a mindless read if you're too tired to read something more thought-provoking. I also find them horribly xenophobic and right-wing, with sterotyped views of nations and people (just look at his portrayal of the Japanese in Debt of Honor, or of the Russians and Chinese in The Bear and the Dragon). My personal favourite is The Cardinal of the Kremlin, as it gets less bogged down in Mr.Clancy's view of how the world should be (and his opinions of its inhabitants) and instead does what he does best: an exciting story with loads of gagets.

But that's just me; everyone and anyone is free to (and will, I'm sure) disagree.

Look up some of the marches that actually happened if you want to know how far and how fast a large group can travel. History has lots of them."

I have recently read the book Band of Brothers, by Stephen Ambrose (1992). It details the history of Easy company, 2nd Battalion, 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne, during World War 2.

After completing basic training at Camp Toccoa, Georgia, the 2nd of the 506 marched to Atlanta from Toccoa, Dec 1-3, 1942.

They marched 118 miles (100 on unpaved roads) through snow and freezing rain in 75 total hours -- 33.5 hours actual marching time. All while carrying full kits and weapons. Only 12 men fell out, and none from Easy company.

(It's a good book -- read it.)

FYI There is a sort-of battle scene in Patrick Robinson's thriller U.S.S. Seawolf that I hated. It is all told in third person, but Robinson jumps from one character's point of view to another every few sentences. This allows him to show you all the cool action he dreamed up, but makes for unrewarding reading.

In that battle there is plenty of action but no continuity.

It's hard to write huge plots like Clancy comes up with that won't have some holes in them, if you sift long enough, but imagine trying to write World War II as a piece of fiction and not leave any holes in the plot and you will get a feel for what it must be like trying to put together novels like Red Storm Rising and Debt of Honor.

As for the ideas that Clancy deals in stereotypes, um, I don't think I should even have to say this, but if you look closely at any of Clancy's work, you will see it is done with painstaking attention to detail. I know of no modern author that knows his subject matter better, or goes to greater lengths to be true to the people he is dealing with. I only wish I had his memory for facts and his energy for self-education.

Right-wing stereotypes? Hehe. If you're reading Clancy and expect a Liberal Mantra, I think you should look elsewhere for entertainment reading. But, to as a writer he is extremely good at playing both sides. For an example of this, just look at Rainbow Six, where he so convincingly deals with an apocalyptic terrorist plot, that I'm still wondering if he doesn't more than half-way sympathize with his villains.

Personally, if you folks want to criticize someone's work, why not pick on Robert Jordan. He is a commercially successful writer much more deserving of a thrashing, as far as I'm concerned. How I've trudged my way through his Wheel of Time books, I have no idea. I suppose I'm not prone to put down a book I've shelled out $7.95 for, but God knows there were times I was tempted.
Ugh.

Enough for now.

It was a real insight into medieval warfare…

the feeling of racing across the ground carried by the battle cries of your comrades. A sword in each hand, you sneer at the wimps who cower behind shields. You are young and strong. The wind in your hair whistles counterpoint to the adrenalin singing through your veins as the enemy shield wall fills your vision. Never have you run so fast and so well. Never have you felt so alive. This is not about death. Today you are immortal. Nothing can stand before you. You are… falling, tumbling to the ground. Oblivious to everything except the flour that fills your mouth and nose. Gagging, choking, blinding. You didn’t feel the impact of the flour bomb. You didn’t even get to a meter of the enemy. As you wait for a field nurse and the saliva in your mouth turns the flour into glue, you think next time I’ll carry a bloody shield!