Orc Logistics

10 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by Ollamh in Economics in Middle-earth, J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

Tags

American Civil War, BEF, Belgium, British Expeditionary Force, food and ammunition, French Army, German Army, Great War, guerilla, Helm's Deep, Horace Smith-Dorrien, Le Cateau, Marius, Marius' mules, Minas Tirith, Mons, Orcs, Paris, Romans, Schlieffen, Schlieffen Plan, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, Wagons, World War I

Welcome, as always, dear readers.

In August, 1914, as the German army was pushing through Belgium

in its attempt to sweep to the west of Paris and drive the French armies

eastwards towards the Germans waiting for them there (the so-called Schlieffen Plan),

they were met by the small (70,000 man) BEF, British Expeditionary Force,

a few miles north of the Franco-Belgian border, near the town of Mons, where the British fought a delaying action.

The Germans were in such strength that the British were forced to pull back, retreating southward with the Germans pursuing so closely that the commander of one half of the British army (2^nd Corps), Horace Smith-Dorrien,

decided that it was necessary to fight a second delaying action, at Le Cateau.

A major reason to do so was not just that the German pursuit was so close, but that it was necessary to protect the trains. This doesn’t mean the railways, but the endless lines of wagons

which carried all the food and ammunition for the soldiers and stretched for miles behind them..

It was also primarily horse-drawn and, on narrow roads, mostly unpaved, the trains moved very slowly, which was a major reason why armies in earlier centuries rarely ever campaigned during winter.

This was a problem, all the way back to the Romans. In the 2^nd century BC, the Roman general, Marius, in an attempt to do away with as much of a baggage train as he could,

ordered his men to carry as much of their equipment as possible, thus cutting down on baggage wagons and pack animals. His men were less than pleased at being so loaded down and began to call themselves “Marius’ mules”.

In the late 18^thto early 19^th century, when French revolutionary armies swelled beyond the ability to pay to supply them, the order was to travel lightly and to live off the land. This may have reduced baggage—and even, perhaps, speeded up movement—but it made local people very hostile to the French and, in Spain, the response was to ambush the French whenever possible, which is where the word “guerilla” (originally meaning “little war”) comes from.

This could happen, particularly to Union supply trains,

during the American Civil War.

So, such trains were utterly necessary—if a large army had to cross miles of territory and perhaps fight on the way, they would need everything a train could carry. At the same time, trains could be both vulnerable and thus draw off numbers of soldiers to protect them when such soldiers might be better employed on the battlefield, as well as cumbersome, because they were slow-moving, forcing armies to march at their speed (and in dry summer weather, the dust they raised could give away the direction of an army’s movements).

In The Lord of the Rings, we see two invasions: that which attacks Helm’s Deep

and that which attacks Minas Tirith.

The mass of invaders is vividly described:

“For a staring moment the watchers on the walls saw all the space between them and Dike lit with white light: it was boiling and crawling with black shapes, some squat and broad, some tall and grim, with high helms and sable shields. Hundreds and hundreds more were pouring over the Dike and through the breach.” (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 7, “Helm’s Deep”)

“The numbers that had already passed over the River could not be guessed in the darkness, but when morning, or its dim shadow, stole over the plain, it was seen that even fear by night had scarcely over-counted them. The plain was dark with their marching companies, and as far as eyes could strain in the mirk there sprouted, like a foul fungus-growth, all about the beleaguered city great camps of tents, blac or somber red.” (The Return of the King, Book Five, Chapter 4, “The Siege of Gondor”)

And yet there is no hint of what will supply them in their assaults and beyond. We could argue, of course, that, as in so many things, JRRT is interested in the movement of his narrative and its effects: masses of orcs are much more menacing than long lines of wagons, and we’re sure that this is actually the case, but there is another possibility. The Great War began in Belgium as a war of movement, huge armies attempting to outflank and block each other like chess players. For better or worse, those armies needed such baggage trains, as we’ve said. By the time Tolkien had arrived at the Western Front, in mid-1916, the war had become static, as if both sides had dug trenches and were besieging each other.

Supply was clearly still necessary, but it was a complex combination of ports and ships and railway lines and wagons and mules and even human mules, close to the front.

In a way, the whole business of supply had begun to look like just that: a business, like importing bananas from the Caribbean, having them arrive in London, then passing them on by train to cities and towns across Britain.

So, instead of being part of long marching columns,

their even longer lines of wagons lagging behind, Second Lieutenant Tolkien would have seen long lines of men and animals, lugging endless boxes and cans and bundles—

necessary for war, but hardly dramatic, and so best left to the imagination of certain readers, those who can never see a battle without wondering, “When it’s time for lunch, who feeds all of those soldiers—or orcs (and never mind what certain people might eat)?”

As always, thanks for reading and

MTCIDC

The Nazgul Brothers?

27 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth, Narrative Methods

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Tags

aircraft, anti-aircraft gun, Aviation, Bellerophon, bombers, British Army, dogfights, Dragons, early airships, flight, flying machines, Great War, harpies, Hermes, machine gun, manoeuvres, military intelligence, Nazgul, Paris, Pegasus, Schlieffen Plan of 1914, Sir Douglas Haig, Sir James Grierson, The Blitz, The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien, trench fever, trenches, Wraiths, Wright Brothers, WWI Trenches

Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

Imagine a world where there were no airports, no contrails, no roar of engines, no small silver objects crossing the skies, the sound of their flight trailed behind them. The only flying things would be birds and those in different seasons, some permanent, some migratory (or used to be—where we live in North America the Canada Geese, whose great chevrons across our skies used to be powerful signs of winter to come or spring soon to appear, now squat here year round).

This would have been England in 1892, the year JRRT was born. There were early airships—basically big balloons of various sorts, but they were primarily stationary and used for (limited) military intelligence.

Then came the Wright brothers

who, in December, 1903, produced the first engine-propelled, manned flight in their enlarged kite.

Thereafter, flight would, literally, take off, but the Wrights, who were idealistically inclined, believed that such an invention would actually end war by making it too terrible.

The British army thought differently, however, and there were soon aerial observation units attached to military formations. In fact, Sir James Grierson

tactically outfoxed his rival, Sir Douglas Haig,

not only by his skillful use of aircraft for observation, but also by his keen understanding of how to conceal his own movements from Haig’s aircraft

in the army manoeuvres of 1912.

The Great War, when it came, two years later, would then be the proving ground for all sorts of aerial experimentation.

First, it was just observation.

A British aviator, flying north of the army, first spotted the massive German columns which were designed to outflank the British and French armies and capture Paris in the Schlieffen Plan of 1914.

Because observation was their task, the earliest aircraft were unarmed, but this changed and soon there was aerial combat, the so-called “dog fights”, the popular images being “knights of the sky” who jousted with manoeuvres and machine guns, rather than with lances, maces, and swords.

Next came the use of aircraft to disrupt enemy formations and their movements, bombing and strafing, sometimes as part of major attacks, the whole idea being to dominate the sky over the enemy’s trenches, while protecting your own.

And this is where we imagine 2^nd Lieutenant JRR Tolkien

in the summer of 1916, standing in such a trench,

looking up, and thinking…

We can also imagine him imagining—not seeing flying machines, but something much earlier. After all, with his education, background, and interests, it would have been difficult not to think of classical harpies

or Hermes

or Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus.

And, with his Norse passion, there would also, of course, be dragons…

And, perhaps a combination: a Bellerophon mounted on a miniature dragon?

In the world of the trenches, there were two defences against aircraft: friendly aircraft in the air

and anti-aircraft guns on the ground.

But the war ended fairly quickly for the scholarly lieutenant, laid low by a more primitive enemy than Industrial Age Germans with bombs: lice.

JRRT became sick with what was then called “trench fever”, an illness conveyed, like typhus, by the bite of the tiny insects who colonized the clothing and bodies of soldiers in every dugout in Europe. Wracked with recurring fevers, headaches, and complete exhaustion, among other complaints, men ill with trench fever were brought to base hospitals and, if sick enough, were sent home, as there was no cure, to recover as best they could. Tolkien spent the rest of the war in the hospital or in garrison in England and thus escaped the last and perhaps worst years of the war in the trenches.

At home, he became Professor Tolkien, taught his classes, fathered four children, and then a second war came, one in which the primitive air war of the first war was intensified by more sophisticated aircraft, more powerful explosives, and plans to bomb Britain into ruin and submission in what was called “The Blitz”.

JRRT went back into service, this time as an air raid warden, even as two of his sons were more directly involved in the war.

Night after night, the bombers came,

to be met with the same weapons as the previous war: aircraft,

anti-aircraft guns

and, because the enemy began to attack at night,

searchlights.

And this brings us back to our imaginings. Working on The Lord of the Rings, staring into the night sky, listening for enemy bombers, would Tolkien have thought of danger to Middle-earth in the form of flying things, not machines but terrible figures mounted on even more loathsome creatures—and what could be done about them? Magic, perhaps?

Thanks, as always, for reading!

MTCIDC

A Longer Stretch

19 Wednesday Jul 2017

Posted by Ollamh in Fairy Tales and Myths, Heroes, Imaginary History, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literary History, Narrative Methods

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Achilles, Angelica Kauffmann, Athena, Bard the Bowman, Circe, cyclops, Dora Wheeler, English Longbowmen, Errol Flynn, Greek, Henry VIII, Heracles, His Dark Materials, John William Waterhouse, Laertes, Lord Asriel, N.C. Wyeth, Odysseus, Paris, Patroclus, Penelope, Philip Pullman, Philoctetes, Portsmouth, Priam, Robin Hood, Sparta, Stelmaria, Telemachus, The Amber Spyglass, The Golden Compass, The Illiad, The Mary Rose, The Odyssey, The Subtle Knife, Tolkien, Troy

Welcome, dear readers, as always.
In our last posting, our central focus was upon Bard the Bowman and what he might have looked like.

As we do so often, we tried to use something from the history of our world to help us to flesh out JRRT’s description. In this case, we looked at Henry VIII’s battleship (a carrack, in the vocabulary of the period), the Mary Rose, which sank during a naval battle with the French on 19 July, 1545.

The ship was raised in 1982 (you can see the large surviving section of the hull in the Mary Rose museum, in Portsmouth, England).

It was full of artifacts—and of crew.
Because she sank so suddenly—and in the middle of a battle—almost none of the crew of 400 and more escaped. One of those trapped was this man.

His was among the roughly 90 skeletons well-enough preserved to allow for forensic exploration. That exploration, and the subsequent brilliant reconstruction, brought back to life a man about 6 feet (182cm) tall, with a powerfully-developed upper body. His build, certain characteristic marks of stress, and the fact that over 130 longbows and several thousand arrows were found in the wreck, led the archaeologists to see this man as an archer. We, in turn, then used him as the body-model for Bard.
But “bowman/archer” to us, who are crazy for adventure, immediately brought back Robin Hood, first in what we believe to be his best 20th-century incarnation, Erroll Flynn,

in the classic 1938 film.

To which we would add N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations

for the 1917 Robin Hood.

Thinking about bowmen in adventure stories then took us back to the first big adventure story in western literature, the Odyssey, and its hero, Odysseus, who has two associations with bows, but who, oddly enough, is never depicted as an archer, but rather as a trickster, who uses his brains to escape everything from a one-eyed giant

to an enchantress, Circe, who has already turned a good number of his crewmen into ham-on-the-hoof.

One of our favorite illustrations of Circe is by John William Waterhouse, which he worked on from 1911 to 1915.

The leopards in this version of the painting (in another, apparently, they are bears) reminded us of the snow leopard which is Lord Asriel’s demon, Stelmaria,

in Philip Pullman’s trilogy

His Dark Materials, the three books being The Golden Compass (in the British edition, Northern Lights), 1995, The Subtle Knife, 1997, and The Amber Spyglass, 2000.

These are remarkable books—full of vivid characters and places-other-than-here-and-now, and we have read and reread them since they first appeared. If you haven’t read them, we would add only one proviso: there is a strong anti-religious theme throughout and some devout readers might have difficulty with Pullman’s views. If you are willing to imagine that this is a critique of beliefs in other worlds than our own, however, we would unqualifiably recommend them. (Our favorite characters are Lyra, the fierce and fearless heroine, and Iorek Byrnison, a panserbjorn, or armored bear. There is a film version, released in 2007, based upon The Golden Compass, which we enjoy, although it has simplified and changed certain elements in the original story.)

But back to Odysseus the archer…
In the story of Troy, the famous archer is Paris, the son of Priam, the king of Troy, who uses his skill to kill Achilles, the most famous and powerful hero on the Greek side (in this pot illustration, almost by accident!).

Paris, according to some accounts (there are a number of them and they can differ in all sorts of details), is then killed by Philoctetes, who has inherited Heracles’ bow. A prophecy lies behind that bow: it seems that it is a necessary element in the conquest of Troy.

When Heracles is suffering from a poisoned shirt, and builds a pyre to cremate himself

it is Philoctetes who is willing to light it and, in return, he receives Heracles’ bow. On the way to Troy, however, Philoctetes is bitten by a snake and left behind on an island.

In some versions of the story (including Sophocles’ play), Odysseus acts as the main agent for, initially, bringing the bow to Troy, and then for bringing Philoctetes himself. So far, that is Odysseus’ only connection with archery. He is depicted as clever—being part of a successful scouting expedition in which a Trojan ally is killed and possibly the creator of the wooden horse—but, otherwise, his main accomplishments lie in beating up a trouble-maker at a public meeting and, at the funeral games which Achilles holds at the end of the Iliad for his companion, Patroclus, winning a footrace.
This footrace, however, leads us from Troy westward, as well as backward in time.
For all that there are these two huge things called the Iliad and the Odyssey, they are not all of the Troy story. They themselves are just collections of smaller stories stitched onto a plot outline. In the case of the Iliad, that outline is very basic: a. Achilles leaves war; b. Greeks substitute other warriors for Achilles; c. Achilles returns to war. The Odyssey is actually even more basic: man tries to find a way to sail home from Troy. Along with these, there are fragments from other parts of the tradition and lots of separate tales which often act as back-stories, probably invented when the popularity of the Troy tale in general caused a demand for singers to supply more material—the ancient equivalent of fan fiction!
One of these back-stories explains why Odysseus wins at the funeral games: he must already have been a famous foot racer, as he wins his bride, Penelope, from her father, the king of Sparta, in a footrace.

Not long after that, having gotten Penelope pregnant, he is off to Troy and won’t return for twenty years.
In the meantime, Penelope gives birth to a son, Telemachus, who grows up fatherless and in a household increasingly besieged by young men who claim that Odysseus must be dead and demand that Penelope must marry again.

To delay being forced to accept one of these obnoxious toads, Penelope (our favorite in the story, along with Athena) claims that, before she can choose, she has to finish a shroud she is weaving for Odysseus’ father, Laertes. (That’s Telemachus, on the left.)

In fact, although she weaves by day, she un-weaves by night and continues to do so for three years before one of her maids tells the suitors what’s going on.

(This is a remarkable piece of work designed by the painter/designer, Dora Wheeler, 1856-1940.

It is not a painting, but, in fact, an embroidery—silk stitched into silk cloth—and a remarkable artifact—and, unfortunately, the only surviving one of its kind.)
In year 19, Odysseus comes home—disguised by Athena as an old beggar, to keep him safe until he can plot his revenge and gather allies. In the meantime, Penelope (who, to us, is as quick-witted as her wandering husband) announces an archery contest, the winner to—win her. Besides the trickiness of the target (having something to do with shooting through axes—scholars have argued over just how that works for years), there is the bow: it has such a pull that only her husband, she says, has ever been able to string it.

(This illustration is by another wonderful woman artist, Angelica Kauffmann, 1741-1807. Here’s a self-portrait.)

Needless to say, the suitors are unable to do it, but that dirty old beggarman can—and does—and then, with a little help from Telemachus and a servant or two—not to mention Athena—proceeds to slaughter the suitors and clean house.

So, remembering the Mary Rose archer (as well as Bard), can we now imagine Odysseus’ build? And, for that matter, Robin Hood’s?

Thanks, as ever, for reading!
MTCIDC
CD

Armistice and Simbelmyne

11 Wednesday Nov 2015

Posted by Ollamh in J.R.R. Tolkien, Military History, Military History of Middle-earth

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Allies, armistice, Armistice Day, barbed wire, Belgium, Christmas Truce of 1914, Eisenhower, Evermind, flamethrowers, France, German Government, Guy Fawkes Day, John McCrae, machine gun, maxim gun, military, military rifle, Paris, poisoned gas, poppies, Remembrance Day, Simbelmyne, tank, The Lord of the Rings, Theoden, Tolkien, truce, Veterans' Day, Western Front, Woodrow Wilson, Word War I, WWI Trenches

Dear Readers,

Welcome, as always.

“At the foot of the walled hill the way ran under the shadow of many mounds, high and green. Upon their western sides the grass was white as with drifted snow: small white flowers sprang there like countless stars amid the turf.

‘Look!’ said Gandalf. ‘How fair are the bright eyes in the grass! Evermind they are called, simbelmyne in this land of Men, for they blossom in all seasons of the year, and grow where dead men rest. Behold! we are come to the great barrows where the sires of Theoden sleep.’ “ (The Two Towers, Book 3, Chapter 6, “The King of the Golden Hall”)

Like our bonus posting last week, for Guy Fawkes Day, this one is tied to a specific day, now called “Veterans’ Day” in the US, and “Remembrance Day” by our linguistic cousins around the world.

November 11^th here was originally called “Armistice Day” when it was first declared by Woodrow Wilson in 1919. The change to “Veterans’ Day” came in 1954, but, to us, it would be good if it had remained as it was, both its name and what it commemorated, and President Eisenhower had chosen to add another holiday to the calendar, instead.

The armistice was, of course, the truce which marked the beginning of the end of World War I, the date and time—the 11^th hour of the 11^th day of 1918—agreed upon by commissions of the Allies and the Imperial German government who met in a railway car outside Paris in early November, after over a month of on-again-off-again negotiations. This was only a truce—the actual peace treaty was not agreed upon and didn’t come into effect until 10 January, 1920—but it did stop the fighting in the west almost immediately.

The war to which it gave a permanent pause had been appalling in its losses: over 17 million people had been killed and 20 million wounded and the weapons used to kill 11 million soldiers had gone from the ordinary military rifle to the machine gun to barbed wire to poisoned gas to flamethrowers to the tank—and that was just on land.

In the process, it had driven men to dig 500 miles of trenches on the Western Front, where they lived a life of perpetual misery.

Thus, the news, even of a truce, was the best of news to soldiers and civilians on both sides.

The price for that truce and for the eventual peace was almost too much to bear: all over northern France and southern Belgium seemingly endless, but necessary, cemeteries had gradually sprung up and, with the coming of peace, had been rationalized and formalized so that they looked like militarized civilian graveyards. To visit that area today is to understand, in some small way, what a horror that war was for those caught in it. And this is just the Western Front: there are many more burial places to be.

In 1921, people in the US began to wear little artificial poppies as a symbol of remembrance on 11 November and the custom was adopted abroad and still continues in Canada and Britain, at least. It is said that the custom was inspired by this poem, written by a Canadian soldier on the Western Front, John McCrae, in 1915. He had noted that poppies seemed to grow more quickly on ground which had been freshly turned—in the fighting and in the burials afterwards. And the image of the flowers, bright red as fresh blood, scattered across the fields was too powerful for a poet not to use, particularly a soldier-poet.

We here at Doubtful Sea want to commemorate all of the soldiers on both sides in this posting and wish that the famous Christmas Truce of 1914 had seen the end of the war, instead of four years and millions of deaths later.

And we offer, as Tolkien fans, not only the poppy, but the Evermind, the Simbelmyne, in remembrance.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

MTCIDC

doubtfulsea

~ adventure fantasy

Tag Archives: Paris

Orc Logistics

The Nazgul Brothers?

A Longer Stretch

Armistice and Simbelmyne