Chapter 94 — On Armies
Blade of Dawn · Page 1 of 4
Regarding the "armies" he had seen in this world so far, Gao Song's assessment came down to a single word: freakish.
At least, that was true within the borders of Ans.
The severe regression of civilization, the low productivity, the aristocratic enfeoffment and fragmentation, the absolute dominance of high-end combat professions—all these factors worked together to produce the deformity of the Kingdom of Ans's military system. This country was nominally a unified whole, but in practice every enfeoffed noble amounted to the sovereign of an independent kingdom, and the so-called king was merely the most resplendent of all the lords (and not necessarily the most authoritative one at that). The kingdom had no integrated professional soldiers—only the levies of each noble and the royal knight orders within the city of Saint Frostrest. Nor did the nobles of each rank possess any top-down governing authority; the situation akin to classical Europe's "the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal" was especially severe here. Even the many southern families who claimed to be nobles directly under the king merely adhered to the royal house through treaties of alliance, owing the king only a handful of obligations—to monitor the southern frontier, provide intelligence, and send troops in wartime—and obeying no other orders he might give.
The soldiers under their command were, naturally, their own as well.
Even the few soldiers under a viscount were the viscount's own.
So if a great noble needed to wage a war, how would he raise a grand army?
Simple. If his prestige still sufficed, if he found a good pretext for the war, and if he promised sufficient benefits in the postwar division of spoils, then the lords great and small beneath his name were obliged to bring their private troops to fight alongside him. These private troops formed their own units, each led by its own lord or by a powerful combat professional dispatched by that lord (usually the latter—by this era many Ans nobles had degenerated to the point of being unable to ride and fight, and could only hire strongmen with money to hold down the family seat). In battle, these "mongrel armies"—with standards, designations, organization, and tactics all wildly varied—would surge forward in a swarming mass, and depending on the enemy's strength and the size of their own share of the spoils, would pick their own postures for going through the motions or playing dead on the ground. Once the fighting was done, the leaders would run off to the great lord or the king to reckon up their shares of the spoils.
The result of all this was obvious: the entire kingdom possessed not a single professional army, nor any unified command system or rules for training soldiers. Each noble pieced together his private troops in his own haphazard fashion—weapons not standardized, military organization not standardized, logistics not standardized; even the troops trained by a noble father and a noble son might not be standardized, if the two did not get along particularly well.
And beyond the motley variety of the soldiers, this chaotic military system produced a whole series of other grave consequences: combat effectiveness took an extremely long time to coalesce, training efficiency was abysmal, soldier selection was utterly without method, the desertion rate was terrifyingly high, and once the strongman leading a unit fell in battle, entire units of soldiers were as good as finished—for they had neither discipline nor knowledge, and all they had learned was to charge along behind the knight who led them.
The Cecil family was, in this respect, somewhat stronger than other nobles. As the "Guardians of the Southern Frontier" who had once held back the tide of monsters at the borderlands, the Cecils—even in their decline—had preserved a habit handed down through the generations: a relatively scientific militia system.