Introduction

Even week or two there's a post asking for good military fantasy, and I've been thinking lately that it might be nice to review a few books that are either labelled military fantasy or which come up in these threads. Since it was already on my TBR pile, I decided to start with Malice, the first book in John Gwynne's The Faithful and the Fallen series, although it's taken me so long to write this review that I've almost finished Valour Ruin Wrath the series and there will be the occasional hint about events in later books.

I won't be reviewing the book as a whole, and there's a lot to the book other than just fighting, but I do want to say that I enjoyed it overall. It's nothing ground breaking, but it is comfortably familiar and competently written, and I think the character work gets better as the series progresses. Unfortunately, in my view, the military aspects of the series are the worst part of it, and they start in Malice.

To me, military fantasy rests as much on the creativity and variety of scenarios as it does on how plausible the tactics, strategies and logistics of the book are, although there are limits. The Chain of Dogs arc from Deadhouse Gates, for instance, is a logistical impossibility but because it leans heavily into Rule of Cool and an effort is made to show how monumentally challenging the journey is from a logistics point of view I'm happy to overlook the issue. On the other hand, hundreds of thousands of Aiel living off the land in the Wheel of Time, often in a very stationary position, is something I'll bring up as a negative because it's a lazy attempt at grappling with the logistical issues of massive armies.

Malice, even though it does lean on the Rule of Cool, unfortunately doesn't quite meet for standard for ignoring issues. In part it's because the tactical aspects revolve my single least favourite trope of infantry combat, but also because the complexity of logistics either aren't understood or are handwaved away without the fig leaves some other series use.

Without further ado, let's begin.

Battlechiefs Hate Him: Young Prince Wins all the Battles with One Weird Trick

Warfare in the Banished Lands is a little bit like assisted suicide. You run at the other army in a loose mass, intermingle, and then fight a series of single duels where the victor is likely to lose a quarter of his men and the loser half their army or more. There are no tactics or strategy beyond this one technique. Find the enemy, charge them, hope you only lose a quarter of your fighting men.

The reason for this is apparently because "honour" doesn't permit anything like the use of thrown javelins or archery before the battle, even though throwing spears is a critical part of the skillset needed to become a warrior and all warriors are expected to be able to use a bow, and the only way to gain "honour" is to fight nobly in a stand up fight with all your strength from the word go.

Nathair's solution to this problem is the "shieldwall". It consists of overlapping shields and warriors armed with short stabbing swords who advance in a steady line, thrusting between gaps to annihilate the enemy with almost no casualties even when outnumbered 10:1. Only Draigs, a massive breed of lizard used by the giants as war mounts, or (in a later book) a herd of aurochs or (in the final book) giants with long handled axes that are somehow very distinct from their normal long two handed axes are able to break the shieldwall. Warriors right across the Banished Lands simply charge blindly into the shieldwall and are stabbed to death in short order.

There are a few issues with this. First and foremost, the shieldwall and short stabbing swords are likely the marriage of the usual pop-culture misunderstanding of how the Romans fought combined with a common Viking/Anglo-Saxon reenactor application of the misunderstanding to their period¹ . Our sources, both written and visual, are clear that in the periods when the Romans used short swords they fought with gaps between their shields and cut as well as thrust their swords in battle, possibly with each legionary taking up a 6ftx6ft square² . On the other hand, in the periods in which the Romans could conceivably be said to have fought in a shieldwall, with overlapping shields, they had long swords³ , and in both periods they had at least one or two throwing weapons with which to attack the enemy.

The use of a shieldwall and short swords as a decisive close quarters formation, regardless of whether or not it ever actually existed, wouldn't be such an issue for me if it had been used creatively or if it hadn't been 100% successful except when charged by giant lizards or giant cows. It does offer a good deal of protection, does offer a higher number of weapons for every two meters compared with a regular formation and is very hard to stop physically.

However, it also has numerous flaws. Obstacles in the terrain, like shrubs, random rocks and dead bodies will tend to break up the formation, the formation is vulnerable to javelins, archers and slingers if it doesn't have some of the same within the formation or in a supporting role, and, because it needs to move slowly, an enemy willing to harass it rather than get involved in a straight up slog will tend to have the advantage. It's for this very reason that the Germanic "boars head" of the 4th century CE attacked behind a wall of missiles, and why archery and javelins were so common in Western Europe in the Early Medieval period⁴ .

We don't see any of these flaws in action. Because the warriors of the Vanished Lands, unlike real world societies where individual prowess and honour are important, don't use javelins in field combat, we don't see javelins sticking into the overlapping shields and rendering them ineffective or even pinning pairs of shields together. And, because the warriors of the Banished Lands would rather go belly-to-shield against the shieldwall and use long swords than stand off and poke at it with spears, they die like flies. Despite this, the shieldwall manoeuvres perfectly across every battlefield with absolutely no difficulty or break in the formation, even while walking over enemy bodies.

This is a YMMV situation, but I personally find this sort of battle boring, especially when it's every battle involving Veradis. Even allowing for the idea that close-order formations had never been used in the Banished Lands⁵ , there's a lot you can do to show the teething troubles of the new development. For example, in the battle against Mandros, Gwynne could have had Veradis' shieldwall successfully force a cross of the river through their superior close quarters discipline but subsequently find themselves pinned and taking casualties from javelins until Peritus crosses the river with his more traditional warriors and is able to reply in kind. The shieldwall could then advance in the centre, driving it back while Peritus' warband helps pin Mandros' army in place, leading to it breaking out of a sense of self preservation.

From there it would have been possible for Veradis to consider adapting by issuing javelins to his men or forming a dedicated group of skirmishers who, with a handful of light javelins, could precede the shieldwall to soften up the enemy and prevent them from retreating too much. Or, if you wanted to change the worldbuilding slightly so that the people of Tarbesh didn't fight giants riding giant war lizards with just spears and swords, perhaps Nathair's first campaign there had opened his eyes to the value of having a few heavy draw weight warbows and he instructs Veradis to recruit a hundred or so archers from Tarbesh and integrate them with the shieldwall. While it might go against the established warrior ethos of the Banished Lands, so does the shieldwall, and Nathair is able to justify that by results⁶ .

I'm not saying that Gwynne should have done precisely what I suggested, I'm just pointing out ways to make the battles more varied and more interesting. The adaptation to each new set of terrain, enemies and circumstances is what makes great generals great, not a single trick that they use without variation, and I think that's also what makes great military fantasy great. Overall, I felt very disappointed in Gywnne's battles, which have generally been hyped up here.

The Grand Strategy of the Nathairid Empire

The strategy in the book is a bit of a mixed bag. Between the map and references to times and distances in the book, I'd say that Gwynne has a good idea of the kinds of distances involved in the various campaigns, as well as how fast a mounted force can reasonably travel over an extended period of time - the latter being something authors routinely overestimate - but he falls down in the areas of naval strategy and logistics.

One of Nathair's greatest strategies, in universe, is the amphibious assault. Rather than traveling entirely overland, in several instances he sends small armies of hundreds or thousands of warriors via sea in order to cut down on travel time or to outflank an enemy and set up a future pincer movement. These sound like good ideas on paper, but Gwynne vastly underestimates the number of ships needed for these manoeuvre and, for the Tarbesh campaign, also forgets about the logistics of the originally intended land campaign.

Let's start with the Tarbesh campaign first. Nathair's father, King Aquilus, sends him to help King Rahim of Tarbesh as part of the alliance he is building. As Nathair's friendship with the Vin Thalun raiders had become a political liability he was forbidden to continue interacting with them, but he nonetheless arranges to meet with them on the coast and board this ships. This was to cut the travel time by a moon of "hard riding" so that he can search for a hidden city from a prophecy. This works out successfully, and it's only several months after Nathair returns that Aquilus' suspicions about Nathair's true route are confirmed.

There are a couple of issues with this. First and foremost, Nathair traveled for a ten-night south-east along the line of a river towards Ripa, rather than east towards Ultas and the passes into Tarbesh. This alone would have been a noticeable sign that Nathair was up to something, as eight hundred mounted men are a considerable burden on any villages or holds they pass, requiring as much grain as (approximately) 2800 men each night, in addition to all the extra meat, vegetables, hay, cheese, wine, etc. While not an excessive burden for a single night if the village is large enough, it is the kind of thing where payment would be demanded and messengers sent ahead of the army to arrange for supply, especially in areas with small or no villages. These factors should have made it apparent to Aquilus that Nathair was pulling a fast one even before he embarked on the Vin Thalun ships.

The second problem is that it takes a lot of ships to transport 800 horses and horses don't travel well by sea. A large cargo ship of the type likely to exist in the world of The Faithful and the Fallen could carry about twenty-five horses, give or take a couple, while a smaller cargo ship could carry six to eight horses⁷ . If all the horses were carried on the larger style of ship, more than thirty would be needed, while more than a hundred would be needed if they were of the smaller style. We don't know how many ships were involved in this journey, but Lykos could only muster 40 ships for the Carnutan campaign and at least some of those were galleys rather than cargo ships, as they're used to raid the coastline, so it seems unlikely that enough ships were available to transport Nathair and Veradis' army.

A second problem is that horses don't like abrupt changes to their environment or food, much less ten days aboard a rolling ship. A horse can require five days to recover after even a single day onboard a ship, and those onboard for a month require at least three months of rest before being used for war. While Nathair might have gotten away with a week or two of rest for his horses after disembarking before moving them any distance and riding them to war, he could still expect to lose some of them to sickness and exhaustion if he didn't properly rest them⁸ .

Horses aren't the problem in the later Carnutan campaign, as few are transported, but the campaign itself is poorly timed. By choosing to attack when the passes were still closed, the overall commander (Peritus) risked the possibility of Mandros being reinforced by part of the much larger army that was gathered around Tarba or, for that matter, Mandros having already gone or being part way to Tarba when Tenebral's army landed. Either option could have thrown a considerable spanner in the works and, in a world where the shieldwall doesn't allow you to walk almost unscathed through ten times your number, ended in disaster⁹ . The plan would have had a much better chance of working if the pass had already been open and Mandros was unable to take reinforcements away from the pass.

The danger of Mandros joining with his main force and then deciding to abandon the pass while it was closed in order to crush the smaller force at odds of near enough to 3:1 to make no matter, and then to face the other force while also outnumbering it, is also a real possibility. While Calidus' spies report that Mandros had "fled" to Dun Bagul, Peritus observes that he isn't a fool or craven and has doubts about the overall reliability of Vin Thalun intelligence. He should have factored this possibility into his plans, and having the passes open in order to create an immediate threat would be part of this.

I think there are also questions about why a naval landing was needed and a force couldn't just move through the coastal plain between the Agullas mountains and the sea. Perhaps the map is wrong and the mountains are supposed to extend right into the sea, but it looks to me like there was a significant gap there that could have been exploited. Three thousand mounted men could have caused a hell of a lot of damage and panic, drawing off men from the mountain pass as the Vin Thalun raids kept coastal reinforcements from joining the fray. It would also be more easily able to choose when and where it stood to fight if that was necessary.

The final example of strategy that I want to discuss is more of a writing issue than an error, because it seems to be out of character for king Brenin. When Owain executes his messenger and Brenin declares that they will wage war first with Owain and then queen Rhin, he does nothing to actually prepare for what he clearly understands will be an attack by Owain. He doesn't send messengers to Badun to order increased patrols or send men to Dun Maen to tell Dalgar to hurry up, since he intends to leave within a ten-night and needs Dalgar's forces to bring his army up to strength.

As a result, Badun is taken and a messenger fleeing the fortress only arrives minutes before Brenin's scouts, while Dalgar arrives days later than Brenin seems to have been expecting. None of this is inexplicable or implausible per say, but it creates an impression that Brenin isn't doing anything. It would have been easy for the messenger who brings word of Badun's fall to have been the one originally sent with new orders by Brenin, having encountered an exhausted messenger from Badun hotly pursued by Owain's scouts, and note that Owain had taken Badun at the same time as he sent the first messenger's head to Brenin. Similarly, some mention of Dalgar being delayed would go a long way to explaining why Dalgar wasn't already at Dun Carreg when he was supposed to be.

Supplying War

From the later books it's clear that we're meant to imagine camp followers in every army, even if they're not mentioned in Malice, and Gwynne mostly sticks to plausible distances men can travel without resupply (eg 5 or 6 days each way during the attack on Haldis), although he also greatly overestimates how much a "wain" will help with supply issues. Peritus and Veradis' invasion of Carnutan, for example, only had 20 wagons supporting it and this would be only enough for 3 or 4 days rations in the best case scenario, and would be unlikely to get them to their destination without looting at least one village for food¹⁰ .

Perhaps a bigger issue is that we never get a good idea of general population numbers or densities. The world as presented in Malice suggests that almost every man over 16 is a warrior and would be called up to fight whenever war occurred, and later books seem to confirm this¹¹ . This creates a sense that any kingdom has at most 100 000 inhabitants total, somewhere between a fifth and a tenth of the population density of somewhere like medieval Ireland (which is roughly the size of Tenebral), and suggests a scattered population of small settlements. Given this, it's hard to imagine that some of the large warbands, numbering nine or ten thousand, could remain stationary for not inconsiderable lengths of time without completely exhausting the local food sources, especially as every warrior appears to have a horse.

This may simply be a writing issue and the population density should be imagined as much higher, so that none of the biggest warbands are in anyone one place for long enough to completely exhaust local food sources, but it has bothered me as the series progressed. Other logistical issues also crop up in later books, but are outside the scope of this review of Malice.

A Late Edit

You know, it took me so long to write this review that I completely forgot about the logistical issue that bugged me the most: Nathair having a thousand short swords made in secret. If you already have a billet and don't have to consolidate a bloom, it takes almost 37 hours to complete a gladius using Roman era techniques. Even if experienced smiths and their apprentices could make two short swords each week, it would take 19 teams to produce a thousand short swords in six months, not mention the teams of men needed to make the scabbards and fittings for the swords. That's not the kind of thing you can keep secret, if only because you need to pay these teams and for the materials they use¹² .

Final Thoughts

When I started reading Wrath I didn't expect to be writing such a negative review, and I didn't set out to have my first military fantasy review in a long time be so negative. In truth, I understand what Gwynne was trying to do, to show warfare evolving rather than already being in a set form that doesn't change throughout the course of the series, and it's not a bad idea. Unfortunately, changing the nature of warfare is something that's hard to write well, and there's the understandable temptation to slow down the response to major changes in warfare because of the perception that older warriors are inherently resistant to changes, and these command. History doesn't quite bear this out, but it's an understandable view¹³ .

The hesitancy to have opponents change their tactics too fast then runs the risk of the author falling into a rut and stereotyping their battles. Gwynne, unfortunately, does tend to fall into this rut with his battles and what was initially an innovation becomes "One Weird Trick" and only Veradis seems capable of innovating on it to a very, very, minor extent. Naval logistics, for all that they're of the Trick variety in Wrath, do get better as the series goes on and the Vin Thalun are used as a military force rather than a logistical one, so that is one area in which Gwynne avoids falling into a rut.

Ultimately, The Faithful and the Fallen is a fun series for all that I found the military parts lacking. If you want to see Good triumph over Evil while rejecting expedience in favour of moral conviction, with a cast of familiar but well written characters and some very hard times for the protagonists, then this is the series for you. It's a very comfortable read, and I'm more than half way through the sequel series as of posting this, but it's sadly not the kind of series I'd hoped it would be.

Notes

¹ This has most recently been advocated by Gareth Williams, on the basis of his reenactment experiences, in his Osprey books, but I believe it date sroughly to the early 1990s, when Heinrich Härke was writing on the archaeology of Anglo-Saxon shields and Germanic seaxes. It was not common amongst British re-enactors, wargamers and academics in the late 1970s, and re-enactor and academic authors of the late 90s/early 00s (eg: Richard Underwood, J. Kim Siddorn and I.P Stephenson) similarly don't give it this role. I suspect that Härke is the ultimate origin of the misconception, with authors like Bernard Cornwell popularising it at the same time as it became the new "meta" for some re-enactment groups.

² Popular history books, such as Peter Connolly's Greece and Rome at War, Duncan Head's Armies of the Macedonian and Punic Wars and Nick Sekunda's Republican Romany Army, as well as academic and semi-academic books, such as Adrian Goldsworthy's The Roman Army at War, 100 BC-AD 200 and The Complete Roman Army, agree on this. Disagreements about whether the Romans maintained the 6ft spacing for the whole of the battle or whether they initially skirmished with a 6ft spacing before closing to a 3ft spacing for the hand to hand fighting continue to exist, but no one argues that they fought rim to rim or solely relied on thrusting.

³ Ammianus Marcellinus refers a couple of times to what could be translated as "overlapped shields" and Maurice's Strategikon does mention limited use of overlapped shields while also advocating the use of long swords. The use of long swords is mentioned in both popular history (Greece and Rome at War and Simon MacDowall's Late Roman Infantryman) and more academic works (Pat Southern and Karen Dixon's Late Roman Army and J.C. Coulston and M.C. Bishop's Roman Military Equipment).

⁴ For the "boar's head" formation and the volley of missiles preceding it, see Vegetius III.19. For the use of javelins and archery in Early Medieval warfare, see Paddy Griffiths, The Viking Art of War; Richard Underwood, Anglo-Saxon Weapons and Warfare; Bernard S. Bachrach, Early Carolingian Warfare: Prelude to Empire; Guy Halsall, Warfare and Society in the Barbarian West; J. Kim Siddorn, Viking Weapons & Warfare; I.P. Stephenson The Late Anglo-Saxon Army. Siddorn is the most explicit in the value of having skirmishers to counter opposing skirmishers, but examples where one force either lacked light armed infantry or didn't have enough to avoid their light infantry being routed, such as the destruction of an Athenian force by Aetolian skirmishers in 426 BCE or the eventual breaking of the Anglo-Saxon formation at Hastings.

⁵ To be clear, even New Guinea tribesmen who rely heavily on skirmishing and missile combat and, in some cases, do not have much in the way of shields, will close up to close order when the time comes to actually fight in massed hand-to-hand combat. Only very specialised (and sometimes only well disciplined) troops operate within a light/heavy or open/closed order binary. Most warriors in the kind of society that has "warbands" as the core of an army instead were capable of operating as either, depending on what the circumstances were.

⁶ I honestly have trouble suspending my disbelief at the fact that, faced with raids by giant humanoids, some of whom ride giant lizards or bears, only a single region of the Banished Lands has thought of using missile weapons to even the odds against a bigger, stronger, faster enemy, and that's less a region than a single family and their employees. I'd expect the warriors of Tarbesh, for instance, to use long, thick shafted spears with equally massive spearheads in order to withstand the draigs as well as either javelins or heavy bows to break up the charge in the first place. Those of Isiltir or Narvon might equally have adopted javelins with long, narrow heads designed to penetrate heavy mail and penetrate deep within the body of a giant, weapons that also work well against a dense wall of shields.

⁷ I recently wrote about naval logistics in the context of the Battle of Hastings if you want to know more about the topic.

⁸ See Ann Hyland, The Medieval Warhorse, and Matthew Horace Haynes' Horses on board ship

⁹ I'm not joking about this. 840 of Veradis' men go to fight ten times their own number in the second book and win. They had allies on their wings to prevent them being outflanked, but it's Veradis' force that breaks an army ten times his own number.

¹⁰ The classic work is Donald W Engel's Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, and Jonathan Roth's The Logistics of the Roman Army at War, John Haldon's Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World and John H. Pryor's edited volume Logistics of Warfare in the Age of the Crusades greatly refine Engels' work. They all utilise his formula for calculating the logistical range of a force, and broadly agree that 5 days is the normal distance an army can travel without resupply.

¹¹ For example, Edana's observation in Wrath that more than half the men of Ardan were likely serving Rhin

¹² See Iron for the Eagles by David Sim and Isabel Ridge and The Celtic Sword, by Radomir Pleiner

¹³ If you look at the Hundred Year's War, for example, it's a story of constant French innovation in an attempt to defeat the English, with mixed success. In most periods where significant changes occurred in warfare, similarly quick attempts to counter the new tactics can be seen.