Tactics for Dummies: The Importance of Keeping Reserves

Moving on from the “Moving People on A Battlefield is Hard” series, this time I’d like to address a related subject: reserves. And for that, we’re going to break the old series’ rule on not having the enemy in the picture, because keeping (and using) reserves is mostly a matter of how our force interacts with the enemy’s. Let’s have two opposing forces fighting each other in line.

Now, with both sides equally matched like this, the two would just have to duke it out until one of them breaks through exhaustion, attrition, or whatever. In any case it’s going to take a long time and the winning side might be too exhausted to pursue by the time the battle is decided. So let’s get creative, shall we? We’ll start by zooming in to the situation on the right flank (from the blue side’s perpective).

Here we have both sides in four ranks, a little jostled around by the ebb and flow of the hand-to-hand combat between their respective first ranks but otherwise in generally good order. But somebody among the blue ranks (let’s mark them off as magenta) sees that the fight isn’t going anywhere, so they take the initiative to gather up people from the unengaged rear ranks.

Reading Diary, mid-2021-ish

This month I finally finished Christopher Allmand’s The De Re Militari of Vegetius: The Reception, Transmission, and Legacy of A Roman Text in the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2011). I may have started reading it as early as June, and was certainly planning to finish reading it by mid-July at the latest, but it turned out to be a much tougher text than I thought — not because of the writing style or anything, but because I kept trying to chase down the references in the footnotes. But then maybe I should have expected that all along since I was reading it to gather background information for my much-delayed attempt to translate Philip of Cleves’ Instructions de toutes manieres de guerroyer tant par terre que par mer for my own use. And in this sense it has been pretty useful since the book informed me of two other French treatises from roughly the same era, namely Robert de Balsac’s La nef de princes et des batailles and Berault Stuart’s untitled thingy. I’ll go and check them later once I’ve had a long enough break from medieval/Renaissance European military history stuff, I guess.

However, there’s an interesting distraction that has been occupying my mind. On pp. 194-5, Allmand mentioned an anonymous German translation of Vegetius’ work from the early 15th century, a few decades earlier than the much better-known translation by Ludwig Hohenwang (first printed in 1475 but probably finished some time earlier). He said this earlier translation had an interesting addition about the importance of wrestling in training soldiers (something Vegetius didn’t mention), and also “the need to practice regularly in the use of weapons, whether swords or knives.” No doubt that’d sound quite familiar to people who have studied late-medieval and early German sources in HEMA, particularly since these three things appear in very close proximity to each other in the Zettel (mnemonic verse) attributed to a certain “Johans Lichtenawer.” Let’s just use Dierk Hagedorn’s transcription of the Rome version here:

Ringes guet fesser

Glefen sper swert | und messer

Mandleich bederben

So naturally I got curious about what the actual words were in the Vegetius translation. Unfortunately Allmand attributed this information to personal communication with Frank Fürbeth, the discoverer of the manuscript, and as far as I can tell none of Fürbeth’s transcriptions of the marginal notes and/or addendum in the translation have been published thus far. And that means I might have to resort to one of two possibilities: contacting Professor Fürbeth directly to see if he could share the transcription with an uncredentialled amateur researcher, or going straight to a digitised copy of the manuscript (apparently known as the Seitenstetten Codex 65 or something like that) and squinting at the thick handwritten pages individually until I could identify the one that actually contains the relevant passage(s), and then transcribe those passages manually if I want to bring them up for discussion. And like I said before with the French military treatises, this will have to wait until both my brain and my eyes are less stressed than they are right now. (Update below)

In the meantime, I’m moving on to Vera Mironova’s From Freedom Fighters to Jihadists: Human Resources of Non-State Armed Groups (Oxford University Press, 2019) — a fascinating study on Syrian rebels from the rather unusual perspectives of labour market and business organisation theories. I learned about the book last year from the MWI’s Irregular Warfare podcast but haven’t quite got around to procuring and reading it until quite recently. It has been a fun read so far and I think I can recommend the book already even though I’m still far from finishing it.

Important update on the German Vegetius thing as of January 2022:

Seems like I hadn’t been chasing down the footnotes as systematically as I should have, since it turns out that large chunks of the transcription of the additional notes about wrestling have been published already in a paper ALL THE WAY BACK IN 2002. Here’s the citation for those who’d like to look it up.

Fürbeth, F. (2002). Die ›Epitoma rei militaris‹ des Vegetius zwischen ritterlicher Ausbildung und gelehrt-humanistischer Lektüre. Zu einer weiteren unbekannten deutschen Übersetzung aus der Wiener Artistenfakultät. Beiträge Zur Geschichte Der Deutschen Sprache Und Literatur (PBB), 124(2), 302–338. doi:10.1515/bgsl.2002.302

I’m not going to copy and paste the whole transcribed section here since most people who’d be interested enough in looking it up probably have the resources to get a copy anyway (look for the transcription in pp. 319-322). In any case, it’s not a terribly detailed or technical text, but it provides an interesting catalogue of some holds and basic techniques used in contemporary wrestling (such as “Also wenn ich dy mitt fass vnd mein prust vnder dy sein fueg [sic], ich mit der nydern leichtlich erhebn in vnd beweg von stand zu ruk vnd wirff in mit eyner handt vyber meyn rechte huff“) and even includes some brief description of “dirty” fighting techniques (“dy hend im har gekrewczigt“, “dy fynger im schopff verwikelt vnd mit dem dawmen dy augen im mawl vnder der czungen“). But what I find hilarious is the couple of places where it makes comparisons with “Britanisch” wrestling, such as “Dy Britan welln ob der guertel fassen [64r] vnd vnden mit den fuessen mit ringen” or “Dy Britan fassen im gollir forn vnd hinden, auff den axselen, auff den schult[ern], vndern vyxsen, forn an der prust.” I might be misreading it and these comparisons might have referred to Breton wrestling instead (the predecessor to gouren?), but that sounds like a stretch to me (if I’m allowed to judge with my limited knowledge of linguistics and all). I’d be really surprised if “Britan” here isn’t, you know, Britain.

That leaves the other matter — the mention of the sword and (Langes) Messer. Now, this is what Allmand said in his book:

Second was the need for the same man to practice regularly in the use of weapons, whether swords and knives. What becomes apparent in this translation is the emphasis given to weapons not normally associated with the knightly class (‘unritterlich’)

Allmand (2011), p. 195

But the discussion in Fürbeth (2002) doesn’t mention this directly; instead, the paper seems to discuss the sword and Messer in the context of late-medieval duelling culture, even referring to the manuscript most commonly known in HEMA circles today as the “Codex Wallerstein.” Of course this doesn’t mean that the subject isn’t mentioned in the anonymous 15th-century German translation of Vegetius — just that I’m back to square one and would have to check the manuscript directly (and of course transcribe it in the process) in order to see where (or even whether) it mentions the need to train with these weapons in a manner reminiscent of Liechtenauer’s Zettel. And that’s probably not going to be in the near future, to judge from how short my attention span is right now.