The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

While, as you’ll see, there were many, many things that were not optimally planned (at least in my judgment) about this Pennsic, I do have to give the organizers credit for doing one thing: Armored battles in the morning, Rapier in the afternoon.  This meant that I could easily fight all battles on both fields, sometimes with a quick strip-and-re-armor between one battle and the next, but still relatively doable.

So, Monday morning I staggered out of my tent, plopped down on a chair in front of His Excellency’s Garage Tent, Armeed this l’homme, and we set off down the road to the battlefield for

The Valley Battle

This was two large triangular “cutouts” of land about midfield, representing two mountains that we could fight on either side of, with a “river” running between them.  The idea was that only knights would be mounted, and could therefore walk through the river.  Everybody else knee-walked.  There is a general sentiment among Atlantia that boils down to “Balls to that, we don’t knee walk”, so Atlantia took the right bank and let somebody else worry about the river.

Three flags were spaced out between the “mountains”, the middle of which was in the river, so the battle boiled down to a limited front with some flank skirmishing on the far sides of the mountains.  At various points ownership of the flags would be checked, but the other part of the Atlantian plan was “Take the flags and hold them for the battle” so that we didn’t really care about when those ownership checks are.

Now, I speak as though I had any role in tactical planning, but to head off that supposition, let me say that I absolutely did not.  This being an armored fight, I put on my helmet, picked up my polearm, and joined the line like the grunt I am.  Everything I say is just from observations made while trying not to keel over from anoxia.

Oh yeah, and that River Rule?  Totally ignored.  Everybody stood. In my limited experience, armored fighters don’t do well with small terrain (things marked by just a few hay bales).  There was that town battle a few years back where they obliterated hay bales and ended up fighting through walls with nobody noticing.  It happens.  The fencers, on the other hand, would have observed the River Rule, which makes for an interesting tactical proposition: Fight a mountain battle for rapier, give each side ten or twenty “horses” to hand out to fighters (marked with… something).  But from what I understand, the field battle last year was laid out like this mountain battle, without a river or flags.  Oh, and I hate limited front battles (or, at least, single, limited front battles).

As far as I know, Atlantia never surrendered the flag after our initial push.  I fought the first half with polearm, but was so out of shape and in crap condition that I couldn’t sustain it, and we were short on spears, so after the first 30 or so I swapped out for spear, which I didn’t use much, but could at least stand there and menace their spearmen.  What I did that was probably even more effective was spend some time spotting for our archers.  “Archer, two spearmen up there, kill one,” and they could put a bolt right in the spearman’s face grill.  The archer would fall back to reload, and another would come up and kill the other.  It was damn impressive, and eventually the enemy left flank facing us had a line of ten or fifteen shieldmen with no spear support.

That seemed like a great opportunity to roll them and crush them, but that may just have been my rapier bloodlust.  We had the flag and could keep it, we’d won, there was no need to disorder our lines  to add insult to injury.  But I do so love adding insult whenever possible.  That maybe should change.

Free Scholar Charity Tourney

At the gun signalling the end of battle, I trotted over to our armor cart, stripped to my pants and underarmor, and chugged over to the rapier field to fight the Freescholar Charity Tourney, because it is my absolute favorite tourney format ever (triple elim progressive weapons).  Her Highness, in her awesomeness, had already taken my fighter card and charity contribution over to sign me in, so I was changing.  Now, I may have been wearing a certain shirt, but per the orders of my Provost, was making sure nobody saw it as I swapped into my rapier garb.  When I turned around, I realized that half of the Free Scholars were wearing theirs where everybody could see.  They get all the fun.

I was just a little late for my first fight, so they gave me a bye, and due to some miscommunication with the MoL, I ended up with a bye the second round, too.  So, third round, I finally got to play, and pulled Geoffrey ap Clwyd.  Drive 10 hours, fight Atlantians, oh well.

Geoffrey’s an excellent long range fighter, and can out muscle me in a parry, so I engaged him at measure for his hand, not wishing to expose myself to his lunge, and took his sword hand.  He switched to offhand, so I closed, and in a flurry of attacks, landing exactly nothing.  I will take this small opportunity to blame my legs: after the armored battle, they thought lunging was a stupid idea and would have no part of it.  As I was standing there negotiating with them, Geoffrey lunged and landed a clean shot on my throat.  So that was that.

Fourth round, I pulled somebody whose name I’ve forgotten (and I apologize for that, somebody).  I was fighting sword and stick, and eventually took the fight.  With the rapier battle coming on quick, they moved to the quarterfinals, and one victory does not the quarterfinals merit, so I headed over to the battle field to rally the troops.

Town Battle

The town had twelve houses of various sizes, laid out roughly in a 4 by 3 grid.  I could describe it more, but here’s a picture:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I think 5 and F were not quite as far forward as they looked, and were nearer in size to the others.  This was important, as it put the control of that central corridor a little more in reach.  We started on the ABCD edge.  As you can see, there are basically 5 alleys that cross the field, and a line formed anywhere within the town would have 6 chokepoints to control.

The conventions were that the battle would be run three times, with two banners to place in two of the opposite side’s houses each time (so, we would target 123456, and once targetted houses would not be re-used in later battles).  My estimate had been that aggressive, fast-moving forces could end the fight in 2 minutes.  The battles were planned to be 18 minutes, with no rezzes after the 9 minute mark.

There were a couple of declared or assumed conventions that didn’t materialize as planned.
The first was a completely random draw on the houses (say, 1 and 4, or 6 and 2).  Instead they were paired (1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6) and the order in which the pairs were used was randomized (maybe).  This meant that, basically, each army was pushing on one zone of the battlefield.

The other was a plan to have 20 fighters stationed in the houses at lay on.  This was nixed because, though the warlords on both sides agreed to it, it was not in the written agreement so the King of the Middle disallowed it.  This was a huge disappointment, because that was a brilliant bit of tactical complication.  Who do you put up front?  An organized unit (the Dragoons) or a bunch of independent operators and heavy hitters (Gardiner’s)?  Is their goal to engage and nullify the opposition’s forward unit and then stall the main enemy advance, or to decline engagement with the forward unit and control forward territory, skirmishing to survive until reinforced?  Or is there some other option?  This was a really cool idea, and so naturally it had to be tied to the tree in the backyard and put down.  Oh well, maybe next year.

The Actual Fighting

Atlantia had the far left alley (A+) and the center (BC).  The East had AB and CD, and Aethelmarc had D+.  And at the front of the BC column was Windmasters, reinforced by Nottinghill Coill, Black Diamond, and Marinus so it totalled over 20 fighters, and a second wave of Ponte Alto coming behind.

Round 1:

The target houses were 5 and 6, which meant that we were going for the closest houses, and that the BC column would be securing access to one of them.  And extra special, the Black Tigers were set up opposite us.  At Lay On, the Lads (they’re all young and energetic) beat feet and secured the far end between 5 and F, providing access to 5 to our banner bearer, and the fight was done in less than 2 minutes.  Somewhere in there I killed a few people, died and rezzed, and that was the only killing I got to do all battle.  Such is the lot of command.

Round 2

The target houses were 1 and 2, which meant we had to push past the 5-F line, up to the F-3 gap and eventually work our way into the doorway for house 2.  The original plan of “Benjamin runs banner up to 1, comes back, runs banner up to 2, while the rest of us are still halfway to the town” didn’t work, so it became a slugfest.  The chokepoints, all together, provided for maybe a front of 30-40 fighters.  We were stacked at least 5 deep on our side, the Mid was stacked at least 3 deep on theirs, and set about the meat grinder.  As with the first run, we’d secured the ground on the far side of the mid-line in the initial run, and with our numbers were unlikely to surrender any, but we still needed to push forward.  “Hey,” says Wistric, “What a great opportunity to try out that ‘Forward’ thing I been thinking about.”  So we did, yelled “Forward” and “Push” and… well, not a lot happened.

The problem was diagnosed, later, as one of our training philosophy with new fighters.  And one of the best exemplars of this is Wistric’s First Rule: “Don’t Die”.  We teach new fencers not to die, because we don’t want them being stupid and exuberant and getting themselves killed.  It’s a way of emphasizing the need for control.  But, when we’re in a position where we need to trade lives for land, we order them to go forward and nothing happens.

So Wistric’s First Rule is getting a corollary: “Don’t Die, unless that’s what needs doing” which probably also has a corollary of “And take one of them with you”.

Eventually we hit the 9 minute mark and rezzes ended, so it became a fight of attrition, grinding away at the enemy until there were none of them left and we could walk the banners in.  That took a few minutes, and I think the whole battle lasted 12 minutes or so.

During the attrition phase I had a bit of an insight: a knight with a short-ish broadsword was standing next to the house, trying to throw hook shots around it, and of course accomplishing nothing.  I tasked him with sweeping down blades, and then tasked Jean-Maurice with exploiting the opportunity (and, when JM died, another fighter).  This chewed up the enemy really quickly, and helped us gain access to the target house.  I think a bit more of individually targeted command needs to be included in my repertoire.

Round 3:

We were targeting houses 3 and 4, and basically it went just like Round 2, except we were a little more free to play.  Towards the end, once we had the enemy down to being holed up in the houses, I left a holding force to occupy the killing cup formed in the doorway we were facing and went to go find somebody to kill because, seriously, I had not killed anybody since the first battle and my sword hand was itchy.  I got into the other house and pushed up to the line only to find that Davius had killed the last enemy fighter.  So I killed him.  The punk.