Remember the last post where I overanalysed the treatment of reconnaissance in a chapter of the Valkyria Chronicles? To be honest, I think I have a weird attachment to that chapter and the associated combat mission in the game since they’re full of low-hanging fruits for discussion. When we left off the last time around to go on a tangent with the whole reconnaissance thing, there were three officers — Captain Varrot and her two platoon leaders, Welkin and Faldio — gathered in an orders group. Immediately afterwards, the game ended up sidestepping the need to discuss the Gallian Militia’s reconnaissance doctrine (or the lack thereof) by having Alicia — one of the three sergeants in Welkin’s platoon — simply barge in and interrupt the meeting. And that’s hilarious. I mean HILARIOUS.
But why? Well, first, the fact that she could make an unimpeded and unnanounced entrance at the orders group implies that there was no security at all in Varrot’s command post, not even a sentry posted outside the briefing room. So they’re lucky that it was just Alicia who barged in, not an enemy infiltrator with a grenade or something. This is one of those small things that could really annoy readers with military experience (or even readers who don’t have any military experience but have read enough stuff about daily life in real-world military forces), and the lesson here for fiction writers is please make sure that your fictional command posts have security. Except, of course, if the lack of security is the whole point of the thing and you want the characters inside the command post to suffer for it. You know the drill.
The other thing that stood out to me is that Alicia didn’t make any overt displays of military courtesy — no saluting, not even standing at attention and offering a formal greeting. Now, this is a slightly more complicated subject, so let’s break it down into several smaller issues.
First of all, why should she perform a display of military courtesy? I don’t mean the simplistic explanation of “because everybody else in the room outranks her.” No, it goes deeper than that and into what those ranks represent. In our real world, the status of commissioned officers grew out of the military entrepreneurship system in late medieval and early modern Europe, where officers often obtained their status by paying for the recruitment and maintenance of a certain number of combat personnel, and the sovereign employer gave them a commission to command those people they had recruited and organised. This basically makes the commissioned officer a subcontractor in the sovereign’s military enterprise, and the multiple levels of the subcontracting scheme formed the basis for the hierarchy of units and ranks as we understand it today. In the simplest example of this, a captain would have raised a company of men and signed on with a colonel who would gather a number of companies and set them up together as a regiment, and then offered that regiment’s service to the sovereign (or to a general who would gather a number of regiments together and offer their service to the sovereign, and so on). But that’s sort of beside the point — the most important thing to understand from this subcontracting scheme is that it makes the commissioned officer a representative of the sovereign employer. This can be most easily explained with the mnemonic “salute the rank, not the person.” When a subordinate salutes a superior — especially if that officer is a commissioned officer — they’re not saluting the officer as a person, but the sovereign authority of the king or queen or republic or whatever political entity the military force serves under. So if they fail to salute (or render an alternative form of military courtesy) when they are required to do so, they’re not just disrespecting the superior, but also the sovereign authority of the monarch or country they represent. This is why a refusal to salute has historically been treated pretty seriously in armed forces that follow the European tradition. Such an offence could be prosecuted as a mutiny, lese majeste, or even outright minor treason. Of course that’s just the theory, and the practice on the ground doesn’t always line up too neatly with these principles. But in the real world, refusal to render military courtesy is a pretty serious matter and subordinates would seldom do it out of mere laziness or boredom — it’s usually just a step short of an outright mutiny or a fragging incident.
To me, there are two possible interpretations of what this implies about the Gallian Militia. The first possibility is that their discipline was really bad and officer-enlisted relations were at an abysmal level similar to what the United States military experienced in the closing stages of its involvement in the Vietnam War. The second is that Gallia must have had a very different historical process by which it arrived to its equivalent to our world’s military rank and unit hierarchies, and this process somehow led to a lack of emphasis upon visible displays of military courtesy. So which one is it? I honestly have no idea because the game actually gives plenty of evidence that can be interpreted either way. More importantly, think about how these dynamics would play out in your fictional army with its fictional history in its fictional setting.
Now we get to the next issue, about when it would be appropriate to render visible displays of military courtesy. The game is set amidst the Second Europan War, roughly the equivalent of our world’s Second World War. By this time our world had experienced a transition into 20th-century industrial warfare in the First World War, and one of the major changes in military courtesies during that war was a prohibition against saluting or otherwise rendering visible displays of military courtesy to superior officers within a certain distance of the front for fear that such overt displays would help enemy snipers or artillery spotters identify high-value targets (not only individual officers but also command posts or other static installations where multiple officers would gather on a regular basis). So one might argue that Alicia didn’t have to salute since they were pretty close to the front line. Against that, I may argue that the house where the command post was set up doesn’t seem to have been fortified in a manner consistent with a front-line command post expected to get involved in serious combat; the curtains weren’t drawn, furniture wasn’t rearranged defensively, there were no sandbag revetments (or anything similar) to “harden” the post against incoming fire, and so on. The house itself might have not been that far away from the FLOT (forward line of own troops) or line of contact in terms of straight-line distance, but it was probably far enough away and/or had enough other buildings shielding it from the real action that it could function as an unhardened command post. Thus, it’s also safe enough from enemy observation and fire that I think Alicia should have rendered some form of military courtesy by our world’s standards. The other alternative is that the Gallian Militia simply had rubbish security procedures as we’ve discussed before, in which case it probably wouldn’t have made any difference whether Alicia rendered visible military courtesies or not.
This brings up the last point, which is how she would/should have performed the display of military courtesy. In real-world armies that follow the European model, there’s often a distinction between how to do it “covered” (while wearing some form of military headgear, whether a cap or a helmet or whatever it might be) and how to do it “uncovered” (bare-headed, without military headgear). For instance, in the Anglo-American tradition, Alicia — being unarmed — would have performed a hand salute if she was outdoors and wearing some form of cover, but she would have come to attention and said a verbal greeting (along the lines of “Good afternoon, Sir”) if she was either indoors or had no cover on. Other traditions may treat it differently; for instance, Indonesian armed forces personnel and even uniformed civilians (including schoolchildren!) always perform a hand salute to render courtesy to an appropriate authority when they’re unarmed, regardless of whether they’re covered or not (and even indoors in many situations). Either way, I’m not entirely sure whether the Gallian Militia in the game made any distinction between saluting covered and uncovered, and Alicia’s habit of wearing her bandanna all the time makes it rather hard to judge whether she’s covered or not since it’s obviously not a regulation item of military headgear — although the evidence from other scenes in the game indicate that Militia personnel rendered hand salutes even when uncovered. There’s even some evidence from the anime television series adaptation that they gave the hand salute even when uncovered and indoors. Once again what’s really important here is that when you’re writing a fictional military force based on the modern European-influenced model, it’d probably be a good idea to think about how these issues would play out in that fictional force.
So I guess that’s enough navel-gazing for tonight. I know I should be telling you to go off and write now, but you can go ahead and read my other articles if you want to procrastinate a little more. It also reminds me that I haven’t really addressed the subject of how soldiers saluted before the modern European way of doing it was established towards the end of the 18th century. Maybe that’ll be a subject for another time.
sillynewsboy 