Day: January 9, 2005

Earlier this week, I raced to the end of Sharpe’s Triumph, by Bernard Cornwell. This novel is set in India in 1803, where the British General is Arthur Wellesley, whose fame as the Duke of Wellington still lies in the future. Our hero Sharpe saves the general’s life (of course) in a furious bout of fighting, where the well-drilled British troops assault — and defeat — a much larger force fielded by a group of Indian princes. In real life, Wellesley/Wellington called this battle (for Assaye) his proudest victory.

I’m going to try the library for the rest of the Sharpe series, rather than buying them all as I did with Aubrey-Maturin. San Francisco Public Library has a powerful website, and it’s much faster/better than the last time I tried it several months ago. I’ve requested the next three books… hope they come in reasonable order.

An aside on military tactics of the early 19th century

I’d never understood the reasons for grouping infantry into squares, as grouping all your targets in one place seemed counter-intuitive. But that’s only for defense against cavalry. I didn’t understand a detail that make all the difference. Cavalry in this era still depended on their swords — the firearms of this era were unwieldy on horseback. Officers would still carry pistols, but firing while galloping wasn’t likely to do much intentional harm. So, if you’re a troop of infantry, the only way to stand up against a galloping horde (disciplined or otherwise, soldiers on horseback trying to kill you are a horde) is to team up with other infantry into a tight, defensible square, where your muskets (rarely rifles) could pick off horsemen who could only attack each person from one side.

In the book, a group of Scotsmen hold off an incredible assault by holding a square, and using corpses as barriers. (Ah, the glory of battle.) The square shrinks as men fall, but they lasted long enough for reinforcements to arrive. I bring this up because all I can think of when I remember the American Revolutionary War stories we were taught is how the British would march along in groups in their red coats, and the Americans were more guerillas, hiding in the trees, etc. Yes, a vast oversimplication, but that’s what I remember of the earliest tales I was told. Nice to get a bit more depth in the picture.

During the holidays, I finished Children of the Mind, another novel by Orson Scott Card in the “Ender Quartet.” This wraps up this half of the eight-part series. Honestly, I’m hoping the other half of the series is more even. The pages turned fast enough, but I didn’t enjoy this one as much as the others I’ve read from Card.

However, the Afterword intrigued me, as Card explains some of the background reading which helped drive his thinking, including a Japanese historian I’ve never heard of, Kenzaburo Oe, and his book Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself. Oe is a Nobel Prize winner for literature (1994). Japan, the Ambiguous, and Myself is the title of his Nobel lecture, which was included in the “small book” of the same name that Card came across. I don’t know if Card’s Afterword for Children of the Mind would be of interest without reading the book, but I appreciated the glimpse of the depth of Card’s thinking, beyond what’s in the novels. And maybe in the distant future, I’ll try some Oe.