*twitches*

I had forgotten just how friggin' badly science textbooks tend to be written. It is. Not that hard. To MAKE INFORMATION READABLE.

Instead I just stared at it and went, "Okay, okay, gravity, yes, mantle, whatever, greenhouse gases, something, I have no idea what you're talking about but I think it's geology."

The class is EENS204, Natural Disasters.

And I have this horrifying feeling that I'm having trouble processing written information. *sigh* Must get back into the habit of reading and taking notes; I've only got one real lecture class (Natural Disasters) and one semi-lecture class (Literary Investigations -- that one's complicated).

oh, be still my heart

I've been doing a lot of reading about cavalry lately -- it shows up in S.M. Stirling's Emberverse quite often (I plan to do a bunch of recs on Dust's major influences at some point in time, and Stirling's one of them), and I'm currently reading Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power by Victor Davis Hanson, which has a number of questionable conclusions in it and doesn't actually concentrate enough on the battles for my taste, just the outcomes and why the battles happened the way they did, but which do occasionally have a couple of good points.

Now, the guy really hates cavalry. Not a cavalry fan. Not surprising: he's a military historian and a professor of classics, which means ancient Greeks and Romans, and they didn't tend to do cavalry: they did really good heavy infantry. Which he is a fan of. But he does have a point about how infantry should, can, and do fight and defeat cavalry, whether that be skirmishers or a charge.

No horse will charge a wall of serried pikes. Even the most heavily mailed mounted warrior will be thrown or pulled down from his mount and killed on his back should he try. In a crowded throng of swords and bobbing spear points, where the horseman cannot use his speed to attack or to retreat, even the advantage of his height and the power of the downward angle of his blows are no guarantees of success. Consequently, armies value disciplined heavy infantrymen because when properly organized and deployed they can kill horsemen. Foot soldiers are more nimble. They can dart easily behind the rider, who turns to his rear only with difficulty. The infantryman's sharp pike or sword blows to the animal's flanks, rear, legs, and eyes can send the poor horse rearing in milliseconds, throwing his master several feet up into the air, often with a lethal landing for a man in heavy armor. Horse are large targets and, when sounded, can become the enemies, not the servants, of their riders. Foot soldiers have two hands free for fighting, not one on the reins. (emphasis mine)

Why am I bringing this up? The battle in PC. Why such a complicated plan to take down the Telmarine cavalry? Why not put the Narnians up there in a wall of pikemen or spearmen, or have the centaurs charge to meet the cavalry head to head, a la LWW? Well, for one thing, not enough weapons -- that sort of polearm especially. It looks like the Narnians outnumbered the Telmarine cavalry around two to one, if not more (counting the Narnians inside the How during the duel). Looking at the screen, I might even put it at three to one -- the Telmarines are clearly not a horse-going people (compared to the Calormenes, the other reason I've been thinking about cavalry lately). Enough infantry to withstand a massed charge. But they're not heavy infantry -- they don't have the armor.

So that's one reason (or, well, two). Here's the next: disciplined heavy infantrymen. The Narnians are not much for discipline. They're not trained, battle-hardened soldiers. If they're anything, they're skirmishers, hit and run guerrillas -- but they're not trained, disciplined soldiers, not like the Narnian army we see in LWW, which very clearly is, even without the arms and armor. (I didn't need the deleted scene with Susan staring at the Narnian archers in stark horror to tell me that. There's a reason that Aslan's How becomes Parris Island in Be Like Water.)

See, the thing is, why come up with such a risky plan? What if Peter or Edmund miscalculated and they couldn't bring down the tunnels beneath the plain? Wouldn't it be easier to just have that line of infantry? It's the first thing you think about when you're debating the use of infantry against cavalry -- meet 'em with a line of pikes, angled so that the horses plow right into them. But if the infantry can't hold -- and even having one horse galloping down on you is a very scary thing (hell, having one horse walk towards you, if you're not used to it; horses are big. country girl, here), let alone a couple of hundred, as well as their riders, with the intent in their hearts to wipe you off the face of the earth -- then you can't do that. The Pevensies never had a choice: they had to do the tricky, risky plan, rather than what they probably would have done with the exact same number of Narnian troops in the exact some position during the Golden Age. They had to come up with a plan that would weaken the impact of the enemy -- physically and psychologically -- so that the Narnians would have the upper hand against the cavalry.

(Now, you could also argue that the filmmakers just wanted to do something shiny, but again I say: military consultants. Adamson had them. And they probably thought of this.)

Why was this on my mind? Dust -- cavalry and infantry on both sides, though the Narnian cavalry is heavy and the Calormene cavalry is light, so the Narnian and Archenlander knights are going to (eventually) go through them like a knife through butter. Water -- right now I have the tunnels collapsing in there, but I think I'm going to cut it in favor of something less clever and more traditional; these Narnians have had months more time to prepare for this. My usual thinky thoughts about the makeup of the Narnian military during the Golden Age. Just the fact that I was reading that book.

ETA: Dude. "The filmmakers wanted something shiny" is never a valid excuse, just like "[such-and-such] can't act." One, world-building, two, characterization. Also, I am trying to logic stuff out here.