The false realism of battle scenes

Spartacus, Game of Thrones and why famous battle scenes are often very bad.

HBO thinks you’re stupid. But at least they have a press kit I can use images from.

The great power of cinema is its ability to make you take leave of your senses, using editing to gloss over things that patently don’t make sense. This becomes a problem when a film or television show portrays itself as representative of mimetic reality.

And no type of scene is more susceptible to the seductive promises of mimetic realism than the battle scene.

The trouble with this is that the writers and directors who present battle scenes as mimetic reproductions of real experiences are, typically, very bad at doing so, and use a gritty and violent visual shorthand in place of deep research or logical construction.

This week and next we will cover two very famous battle scenes, one brilliant enough that, though it is old enough to collect Medicare, it still evokes a powerful emotion in me. The other, though less than a decade old, has been immensely influential in how film and television approach violence.

The first is the final battle in Spartacus (1960), a classic from the tail end of Hollywood’s golden age. The second, The Battle of the Bastards (2016) is a technically competent and transporting scene that becomes logically incoherent on closer examination, and repellant when considered in relation to Game of Thrones’ late season quality collapse, of which it was the herald.

Spartacus, you see, is mimetically faithful—or at least the liberties it takes are plausible or due to limits in historical knowledge when it was produced—and it is thematically coherent. The Battle of the Bastards is ridiculous in its physical, tactical, operational, strategic and thematic components. Kubrick liked historical accuracy, but his movies subordinated that accuracy to other aesthetic senses: Thematic drama in Spartacus, frustrating futility in Paths of Glory, alienating formalism in Full Metal Jacket, comedy in Dr. Strangelove. David Benioff, D.B. Weiss and (though less directly involved) Miguel Sapochnik, presented Game of Thrones to the general public as a rigorous exploration of how the past really was, in all its brutality, and the public took their show as an intervention on behalf of medievalism and against ignorance.

We’ll start this week by examining the adherence of both texts to documented historical reality and next week we will discuss why thematic/symbolic depictions of the past succeed better than those that make a fetish of technical competence.

I think it’s worth holding both of these films to a high standard of realism for three reasons. First, both go to great lengths to keep things like the movement of armies, the problems of finance and high politics relatively plausible.* In fact, this was a major marketing point for the first six seasons of Game of Thrones. Second, both works employ a lot of visual signifiers of realism: They do not shy away from blood, from agony, from dirt. The Battle of the Bastards in particular is shot in a visual style—combinations of longer duration shots of chaotic action with intensive closeups of characters undergoing particularly harsh physical ordeals—that owes much to Saving Private Ryan’s extremely influential D-Day sequence (we’ll talk about that god damned movie one of those days, but Spielberg made the hell out of that sequence). Little things like lances breaking on contact, or the ground growing muddy as a battle progresses, or men being wounded and meaningfully disabled or panicked by those wounds, all show that the filmmakers want us to understand this battle as a real event that really happened to real people. (also this is really long, sorry for any typos).

The Problem of the Real:

In both battles the protagonists are trying to solve the same problem: How, as social outcasts, can they defeat a more technically sophisticated and better organized enemy army?

Spartacus is the great captain of an army of gladiator rebels and disaffected agrarian slaves, by the summer of 71 B.C. they have been betrayed by erstwhile allies and hemmed in by the Legions under Marcus Licinius Crassus, the first famous insurance magnate.

The slave army is composed of the entire adult population of the regions in revolt: Men, women, youths. They are armed haphazardly, with gladiatorial weapons, equipment taken from defeated Roman armies and weapons made or found along the way, including fairly large shields and the ubiquitous Mediterranean iron omni-spear. On the day of battle, they draw up in a single mass of infantry with the cavalry on one flank and improvised inflammable devices in front of them.

They face Stanley Kubrick’s interpretation of a late Republican Roman army, in a (for the early 1960s) passable facsimile of Roman kit: big shields, body armor, helmets, pila, gladius.

Here is how Appian, one of the sources on the Servile Wars, describes the entirety of that battle:

The battle was long and bloody, as might have been expected with so many thousands of desperate men. Spartacus was wounded in the thigh with a spear and sank upon his knee, holding his shield in front of him and contending in this way against his assailants until he and the great mass of those with him were surrounded and slain. The Roman loss was about 1,000. The body of Spartacus was not found. A large number of his men fled from the battle-field to the mountains and Crassus followed them thither. They divided themselves in four parts, and continued to fight until they all perished except 6,000, who were captured and crucified along the whole road from Capua to Rome.

The film combines this with some earlier incidents Appian notes, including Spartacus’ use of burning bundles of wood/brush to disrupt Roman operations, and has Spartacus killed after the battle rather than during it.

Despite these changes, what happens in the film makes tactical sense, and we can break it down to its constitution actions, each of which has a reasonable rationale:

1. The Romans advance in formation and throw forward several cohorts to engage the rebels and wear down their front line. The second line of cohorts forms up behind the first line in a dense block meant to push through the rebel center or to repel a flanking charge of cavalry.

2. The slaves roll incendiary devices down the hill into the Roman first line, panicking them. Seeing the Romans break before the fire devices and Spartacus and the other slave generals attack, hoping to use the flight of the Roman first line to disrupt the formations of the Roman second and third lines.
   
   Sidenote: Kubrick pays particular attention to formations here, which is admirable because it’s something Ridley Scott does not do in Gladiator. The Romans fought in formation because the formations worked. Running around willy-nilly is a great way to get killed and also a huge waste of the iron that goes into making your armor. This is why Spartacus goes to such lengths to break the Roman formation and why he follows up the first sign of its instability with a massed infantry assault.

3. Discomfited by the slave onslaught, the Romans try to hold their lines and become bogged down in a bloody scrum with the slaves. The slave momentum is checked by this determined Roman resistance.

4. In simultaneous actions, Spartacus attacks the Roman flank with his cavalry and a second Roman army, commanded by Crassus’ political rivals, arrives on the other side of the battlefield.

5. Spartacus’ cavalry charge wears down the Roman center. But before they can rout Crassus’ legions, the Roman reserves and the Roman second army attack.

6. The Romans slaughter the slaves, who offer a disorganized but stubborn resistance until the day’s end. Crassus’ aides tell him 60,000-70,000 Rebels are killed, per the Screenplay.

7. “I’m Spartacus.” (Where the movie should’ve ended).

There are a number of historical accuracy problems with this sequence. Most of the weapons and props bear only a passing resemblance to the ones used by the respective armies—some of this can be forgiven as ancient military history was still largely in a ‘Caesar said it, it must be true,’ phase and many of the advances of archaeology, experimental archaeology, philology, social history, historical geographic, economic analysis and so on, which make the ancient world legible to us now, had not happened in 1960.

Still, Kubrick’s Romans don’t really do much Roman stuff, and I suspect the device of the rolling fire logs is a classic Hollywood move to avoid the (potentially boring) spectacle of several large blocks of men slamming into each other at the speed of a slow run. (One movie that does not avoid how fucking weird pre-modern warfare looked is Alatriste, which is a bad movie for other reasons).

Kubrick gives too great a role to the Roman cavalry, and the Roman infantry never throw their pila—it’s probably a little dangerous to go throwing prop javelins around. And there’s a bit of hand-waving officer shit, what Brett Devereaux calls “Total Generalship,” meaning the ability of small gestures or muttered commands by a character to direct the movements of thousands. Militating against that, the drama of some of the gestures, the simplicity of the battle and the presence of signalmen and musicians in the Roman ranks show Kubrick has given clear thought to the constraints on ancient command. Most of Kubrick’s accuracy problems stem from concessions to actor safety or to the tendency of film to prefer dynamic, individually focused battles to grinding attrition between formations.

But in a deeper sense this movie gets the scale of ancient warfare: Hundreds of men move as one, orders must be conveyed with great shouts and gestures, or with trumpets and signals, armies fight according to doctrines that develop out of their pre-existing social relations: The complete solidarity of the slaves, the hierarchical articulation of Roman society.

And it captures something far less frequently depicted on film: Cowardice and moral inadequacy as common among soldiers. A whole Roman line breaks before the slaves strike a single blow, frightened by a bit of fire. At the same time, you can hear the clink of the Roman armor as they advance, and like the poorly armored slaves you know that what comes next must be defeat.

Yet as Appian wrote: “The battle was long and bloody, as might have been expected with so many thousands of desperate men.” The slaves fought because they must, they had the choice between death on the sword or death on the cross. And the Romans fought because Rome, more than nearly any other society, was structured around producing armies (not soldiers, lol, there’s a difference).

The heat, the grime, the sudden moral shocks, the periods of quiet boredom and desperate struggle, this is recognizable from ancient texts, and from contemporary life’s most similar encounters: political riots (of which I’ve witnessed several as a journalist.)

What I particularly love about this scene is that there is no complex tactical plan. The armies are both one shot weapons, before gunpowder artillery and especially before the radio this is how the vast majority of armies operated. Even a force as flexible as the Roman Legion or the Spanish Tercio confined itself largely to frontal attacks, as the tyranny of distance and the inadequacy of signals made meaningful tactical control impossible. The great battles of tactical maneuver—Trasimene, Cannae, Gaugamela—in the greater Mediterranean iron age were determined by pre-battle dispositions that took advantage of the mechanics of ancient warfare, not clever stratagems and on-the-fly changes of plan and disposition dictated by the commanding general. To the extent that such changes did occur, as at Cynocephalae, they were the result of junior officers seizing the initiative.

Two armies bang into each other. The one that’s better set up and better fed wins. Warfare, just as God intended.

So how does HBO’s flagship battle hold up? Not well.

What happens in Game of Thrones Season 6, Episode 9, does not make tactical sense, sometimes for socio-political reasons and sometimes for clearer, like, logic reasons.

But first, when and where the hell is The Battle of the Bastards? George R.R. Martin’s series, from the armor tech in it and his statements about inspiration, is meant to portray the middle 50 years of the 15th century, and the North, where this battle takes place, evokes both Scotland and northern England, rural, village societies dominated by local magnates and focused largely on the production of staple crops, with a little wool thrown in for good measure. The Starks are based quite loosely on the House of York, and this battle takes place outside their capital: So roughly the latitude of York.

The trouble with these assumptions is that HBO’s showrunners have no fucking idea how late medieval England functioned, what sorts of armies it produced, how those armies fought, or what purpose they even served. English armies of the late 15th century evolved out of the armies of the Hundred Years War, which were typically composed of a core of archers armed with Yew longbows, infantry men-at-arms of some sort, often mercenaries, and a group of warrior aristocrats who fought in plate armor, often on foot.

But during the Wars of the Roses, the geographical proximity of the armies to their recruiting bases meant that local Lords raised local bodies of infantry equipped for close quarters fighting, often using short polearms: bills, poleaxes and the like. These men would be outfitted with armor according to their personal priorities: Metal helmets and textile armor likely predominated, partial plate—cuirasses or jacks of plate or brigandines made from the recycled armor of richer men—and occasional mail would supplement this basic protection for those who could afford it. Swords, which require a great deal more metal than spears or most polearms, would be both expensive and ineffective for massed infantry combat.

An army raised and equipped like this would be a very strange looking force, with no common uniform, little in the way of an officer corps, little tactical flexibility and a close reliance on the personal leadership of mercenary captains and local magnates.

One of the good things Game of Thrones does, and one of the reasons we should hold this battle to a high standard of realism, is that Jon Snow spends much of season six putting exactly this army together. When Jon goes to Lyanna Mormont, he has to negotiate painstakingly for the participation of 62 men in his expeditionary force. It’s a rare moment where the show focuses on the political processes in the intermediate layer of Feudal politics: An old oath summons a few dozen soldiers, while personal charisma brings a few hundred tribal allies, and resentment of the Boltons drives a few bands of retainers to join Jon. This army is a retinue of retinues, as the phrase goes.

On the day of battle, Jon Snow has about 3,000 men, Ramsay Bolton about 6,000, for a total of 9,000 participants. Judging by eye, I think heterogeneously armed infantry comprises the majority of both armies, with archers and cavalry present in smaller, but significant proportions.

Worth noting here that the named characters do the Hollywood thing of not wearing extremely conspicuous, expensive armor that would make them immediately identifiable to their followers. This is a realism problem because such armor serves purposes beyond personal protection: In an army commanded to advance the political interests of one man, it generally makes sense for that man to be visible. And big, expensive, colorful armor serves an important intimidation purpose. A guy with peacock feathers sticking out of a big ass bascinet helmet is going to look a lot scarier than Kit Harrington. Why Hollywood discarded the extravagant armor tradition after it entered the western canon with, like, Achilles, I do not know. But sometimes a little “small d” democracy makes for bad realism.

So Jon gets his retinue of retinues to York/Winterfell and prepares for battle. Here’s how that goes:

1. Jon and Sansa, together with the commanders of the subordinate units of their army, meet Ramsay Bolton to negotiate the terms of battle. Such pre-battle parlays were common throughout pre-modern history. Ramsay mockingly offers Jon surrender terms, Jon challenges Ramsay to single combat. The political stakes of the battle are set: The extinction of House Bolton against the surrender and destruction of House Stark. The thematic conflict is also set: Jon and Sansa are better at the game of Feudal politics, which is based on ties of reciprocal obligation and elite friendship, while Ramsay operates as something of an absolutist, incapable of making or maintaining alliances except through fear.

2. Off-screen, Sansa has managed to enlist the Knights of the Vale of Arryn, a couple thousand mounted cavalry. Unbeknownst to Ramsay and to Jon she has managed to bring them into the theater of operations without meaningful detection—have no talking ravens spied the army? What of the peasants from whom the Vale men have requisitioned grain? She does not tell Jon, or the other lords, about this even though revealing the presence of such a force would likely induce substantial defections from Ramsay.

3. At a council of war, Jon and friends discuss the problems of the field. Jon reveals they have dug trenches to protect their flanks against cavalry, which—not longbowmen—account for Ramsay’s distinct advantage (field engineering, we love to see it). Davos Seaworth proposes that they entice Ramsay to attack their center, then concentrate their efforts on killing Ramsay and his elite knights, on the assumption that this will lead to the disintegration of his army. Sansa tells Jon not to let Ramsay get the better of him emotionally.

3. Jon immediately lets Ramsay get the better of him emotionally, rather than challenging him to single combat in front of both armies. Ramsay manages this by releasing Rickon Stark, Jon’s half-brother** and the legal Lord of the North. Jon and Rickon run towards each other. Ramsay, having set burning Xs every 40-50 yards as range markers (hooray for field engineering) kills Rickon with a bow. Jon, alone, charges the Bolton army.

4. Davos, dismayed that Jon might die as well, abandons the defensive plan and orders the cavalry forward at the same time that Ramsay releases his horsemen. The northern infantry follow in behind their horse. The two bodies of cavalry collide and prove equally matched? Sort of? At the very least the Bolton horse does not easily carry the center of the field, so like why did they need to fear Ramsay’s cavalry anyways lol.

5. Because this is Hollywood, Ramsay begins ordering his archers to ‘knock-draw-loose.’ Roel Konijnendijk and Brett Deveraux, among other historians, have noted that this sort of musket-drill style of archery is not attested in primary sources. A simpler way to tell it’s bullshit: Get a bow, knock, draw, aim and then…hold for ten seconds. Try doing that sixty times in the span of an hour.
   
   Anyways, this immediately begins killing both sides alike, instantly negating the Bolton advantage in cavalry and killing off a huge portion of the elite of the entire North, wasting all the time, labor and money that went into equipping, training and feeding them. Dumb dummy bullshit that’s done to demonstrate Bolton is a sadist, as if the penile flaying, rape and dishonesty weren’t enough.
   
   To the extent that this makes any sense at all, it’s as a way for Ramsay to kill off many of the men-at-arms of houses loyal to him that might, one day, be strong enough to oppose him. The trouble with this is that medieval Lords weren’t idiots, and a nice, clean victory over the Starks would establish that illusive phenomena which binds the followers of an upstart ruler to his house: Dynastic charisma. Nothing, so the aphorism goes, succeeds like success. House Bolton is simply too weak to control the whole North singlehandedly. Post-war, Ramsay would need a group of Lords bound to him by deeds on the battlefield to, like, impose hegemony throughout the North and prevent every two-bit mercenary from setting himself up as warlord in this corner or that, or every moderately intelligent traditionalist from declaring himself The Real Rickon Stark, or some such shit. Killing most of those guys is a terrible way to do that and a great way to ensure the ones who live fucking hate him.
   
   The other reason for this order is that it is in keeping with a Hollywood tradition going back to the First World War, that equates war primarily with senseless death and sees the depiction of senseless mass death as the only way to realistically portray warfare. Because film (and later television) evolved at the same time as industrial total war, the lethality of total war is legible to these media as the default realist setting. Modern medicine and the extended length of battles during the World Wars meant that some major battles saw casualty rates in excess of 100%, meaning some men recovered from their wounds, returned to the field and were again wounded, while other battles saw literally millions of casualties.
   
   But outside of sieges—which sometimes saw the massacre of an entire urban civilization—pre-modern battles were not necessarily all that lethal. One way to illustrate this problem is to look at the casualty figures for battles in the middle ages that sources tell us were exceptionally bloody. Towton, a winter battle during the War of the Roses that bears some semblance to The Battle of the Bastards, was both the largest battle of that war and possibly the bloodiest. The total casualties for Towton add up to about 13,000 out of 50-60,000 participants, meaning three quarters of the soldiers present on that very bloody, very notable field survived without disabling bodily harm. This is decidedly not the case outside York/Winterfell.
   

6. The Bolton arrows kill enough guys to create a heap of corpses about ten feet high, somewhat broader at the base and a couple hundred yards long. The massing is irregular, in some places it’s quite taller and quite broader than in others. But let’s be generous to the show runners and say the whole thing is about 400 yards and about ten feet high—an army of three thousand men might have a frontage significantly wider than that, but I’m trying to give Benioff & Weiss & Sapochnik the benefit of the doubt. And let’s assume that every casualty is concentrated in that heap. To find the number of casualties we calculate the volume of a cylinder: 1,200 feet * pi * 10^2, then divide this by two since it’s resting on the ground, for a volume of 188,490 cubic feet. If we assume about half that volume is horses (generous, most of the men we see die are on foot) we get 94,000 cubic feet.
   
   A Harvard database of useful biological numbers puts the average volume of a human at about 65 liters, or 2.3 cubic feet. Let’s be stingy and assume that the addition of armor and weapons bumps that volume up to 3 cubic feet. That means Ramsay’s archers have killed, by my estimate, about 31,000 men in several minutes, roughly 3.3 times the total number of combatants present in the entire battle according to the dialogue of the characters. And if we give the showrunners an even more generous assumption—for air pockets, the volume of armor and so on—that the average volume occupied by one casualty is 4.6 cubic feet and no casualty is ever compressed, then Ramsay’s archers have still killed about 20,000 men, more than twice the number of total combatants. (Spartacus neatly avoids this problem by having the casualties spread out across the field in an amorphous sprawl depicted on a large matte painting.)
   
   Impressive archery.
   
   Where did the extra 11,000-22,000 men come from? I don’t know, fuck you, it’s Kino, baby.
   

7. Jon survives the slaughter along with some large number of Stark infantry, who finish killing off the unhorsed and dismounted Bolton men-at-arms on their side of the corpse pile and then try to venture over the bodies of all their comrades and the equivalent of the entire late-medieval population of the city of York.

8. However, Ramsay Bolton orders in the infantry, a composite mix of retainers armed with swords and axes and a backbone of pikemen with bigass shieldbearers, formed in a formation about four to six ranks deep.
   
   There is, put simply, no historical precedent for this pikeman-with-shieldbearer type of thing. Early modern pikemen fought without shieldbearers, trusting to a hedge of pikepoints projecting from a thick formation to prevent all but the most enterprising men from coming within a sword’s thrust of them. Even the Macedonian phalangists carried their own shields and fought in blocks 16 ranks deep (thinner or thicker as necessity requires.)
   

9. The Bolton foot surround the Starks easily, making their way through convenient canyons in the corpse cylinder, which suggests that they have drilled this very move many times over, despite the presence of no filer closers, no visible NCOs or junior officers, no drummers and trumpets to keep them moving in lockstep. They just sprint right into line. This is, simply put, impossible.
   
   Police frequently do kettle protesters in a way that resembles the compression of the Stark infantry, but cops have tightly controlled field hierarchies, ride bicycles, have radios and spend millions of taxpayer dollars training to do exactly this. And when their efforts are even modestly disrupted the balance of forces in a confrontation can swing rapidly in favor of the protesters. We hear a guy in the Bolton army shout some orders.
   
   (Also, I went ahead and counted the shields in one half of the formation and got about 70, for a total frontage of about 140-150 men * 6 ranks = 900 men, so like a pretty small fraction of the Bolton infantry, but actually a quite reasonable number for the foot attached directly to the Bolton house, assuming the other 3,000ish foot are retainers, but Benioff, Weiss and Sapochnick clearly mean for us to take these men as the vast majority of the total Bolton foot.)
   
   Still, despite the wonky command mechanics and the stupidity of the big shieldbearers, I actually like what happens here quite a bit: the Bolton retainers seal off one end of the pocket and the pikemen push forward. Lacking discipline and polearms, the Starks et. al. are shoved into an ever smaller space, unable to use their weapons. We have reports from Polybius that a crowd crush like this occurred during Hannibal’s double envelopment of the Romans at Cannae (notably there were 130,000-140,000 total men on the field that day, not 9,000). But even at Cannae, the sheer pressure of men compressed into a tight space broke—in places—the Carthaginian lines and some thousands of Romans managed to escape.
   
   At Roosebeke in 1382—a far closer analogue for this battle in time—a French army of 10,000 used its superior cavalry to envelop a Flemish army of 40,000, resulting in the destruction of more than 2/3rds of the Flemish infantry. Again men were pressed together so closely they could not use their weapons and many suffocated or were killed upright but defenseless, so the Chroniclers say. So though it happens in the most absurd way possible, this part of the sequence is terrifying and a fairly good attempt at depicting what it must’ve felt like in those crushes.
   

10. As things look bleakest, a horn blows! Here come the Knights of the Vale! Where from? Don’t know! Unobserved by either army, despite the Bolton’s having political control of the North and Jon Snow’s training as a light infantry reconnaissance officer? Yep. How? Fuck you, that’s how.
    
    The Knights of the Vale break the encirclement and ride down the Boltons.
    
    Why didn’t Sansa tell Jon about the Knight of the Vale? So that she could see his army attrited down to nothing and she would be the dominant military force in the North after his victory? Maybe. But this poses the same political problem as Ramsay having his archers massacre his cavalry: the Starks need that intermediate layer of the nobility to serve as the actual political administration of the North. And telling Jon about the Knights of the Vale and integrating them into the army would’ve reduced the influence of Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley after the battle.

Note discrete steps and command decisions have to go exactly right for Ramsay to win the battle on his own terms: Jon must take his bait; the Starks et. al must follow Jon; the arrow barrage must create an impermeable barrier of dead men; the Bolton infantry must successfully seal off a (numerically superior) body of infantry and then push them onto the blades of their retainers; Jon must not escape this encirclement. And where would Sansa go, assuming there were no Knights of the Vale? Why would she not fly at the first sign of defeat, gaining precious time to escape her environs with a small band of retainers and the army’s paychest to painstakingly reassemble an anti-Bolton coalition? If any one step of Ramsay’s plan fails, the Starks will break the back of his military power and/or escape personally with their lives.

And how stupid do the Starks and their allies behave? Rushing uphill into arrow fire, when letting Rickon get killed in front of everyone would demonstrate Ramsay’s unfitness for feudal authority. Dumb dummy bullshit for dumb dummies. When this came out, some critics called it the greatest episode of television of all time.

We’re so far into this post we’ll have to do thematics next week, but I want to offer, first of all, what a more mimetically real version of this campaign might entail. I am working here from a number of primary and secondary sources, but ultimately I am assuming that Jon Snow has the brain of John Hawkwood (Giovanni Acuto for my Italian readers) a late 14th century English mercenary who fought continuously in France, Italy and other states for his entire adult life. William Caferro’s book on Hawkwood is practically a manual for the management of late-medieval armies.

Jon convinces Sansa they will march on Winterfell. Sansa, knowing Jon will seek and lose a battle, tells him that she has at least two thousand mounted knights up her sleeve and Jon, elated because he’s an operationally experienced soldier, tells her to summon them. As they unite with the Vale Knights, Jon sends a letter to all the Northern lords informing them that he has six thousand men (or more to exaggerate a bit) and branding Ramsay a traitor to the Starks and to the old gods, he reminds them that an eleven year old girl with a force of 62 men has answered the call to arms. Then he marches on Winterfell, seizing villages and granaries along the way. He proclaims a general amnesty for houses aiding Bolton and specifically threatens to waste the lands of any who remain loyal to Ramsay once Jon reaches Winterfell. Jon demands Ramsay turn over Rickon, Winterfell and renew his ties of fealty to House Stark in exchange for legitimation as Lord Bolton.

Jon then marches on Winterfell and camps directly within sight of the walls, trusting to the superiority of his combined cavalry to prevent a breakout. His men ostentatiously feast, drink and party in front of the walls, as Hawkwood’s men did in front of many Italian cities, to show theatrically that they are unafraid.

Awed by this, some houses that considered joining Bolton do not. Some that sought to sit out the conflict go over to the Starks. Jon raids the countryside surrounding Winterfell to deprive Ramsay of forage, then embarks on a grand tour of the North with his army, peeling off Bolton houses one-by-one and wasting the lands and castles of those who do not come over. He makes public shows of forgiveness for the Lords who defect to him and then turns back to Winterfell to face a weakened, outnumbered Ramsay.

Ramsay, meanwhile, declares the Rickon Stark in his custody is an impostor and that the real Rickon is dead, killed by Theon Greyjoy. He has Theon confess this publicly, and then executes Rickon for being an impostor and Theon for murdering Rickon, simultaneously depriving Jon of a legitimate Lord and solving several of his own political problems. When this does not stop the hemorrhage of support he sallies out, hoping to best Jon in the field, while Smalljon Umber remains on his side.

The two armies meet. Unmotivated, the Bolton allies flee or dilly dally and some maybe even go over to the Starks. Jon wins, but not decisively. Ramsay escapes back to Winterfell, Jon announces he will grant the Wildlings all of the Umber lands. Secretly, Smalljon Umber reaches out to Jon/Sansa and agrees to leave his section of the Winterfell defenses unmanned in exchange for his life and lands. The Starks take Winterfell by subterfuge, thanks to Smalljon, and in the confusion Ramsay is killed and a picked force of Stark loyalists assassinate the remaining traitor Lords. Jon forgives Smalljon, gives him a nice title and some silver and sends him off to be the first Lord killed when the wights breach the Wall. This saves the lives of most of the soldiers, almost all of the nobility and 11,000-22,000 unfortunate bystanders.

What I want to emphasize here is that Feudal warfare is the clearest expression of the Clausewitzian maxim about war as the continuation of politics. Feudal societies move smoothly from war to peace, using ritual and oaths and elite marriages to signal the ends of conflicts. If you read something like Richard Vaughan’s The Dukes of Burgundy, you see how frequently and how strangely this process unfolds. In a well managed medieval conflict, very few people need to die.

Next week: Write themes good to avoid bad battle scenes. Or maybe a paywalled post on superhero movies.

-30-

*I am, by training, a medievalist—my undergrad degree was in pre-modern Eurasian history. I can read and write in English and (less so now than some years ago) German and was once passably literate in Latin, with limited skills in Spanish and French. I have read a wide swath of Medieval and antique primary sources, sometimes in their original tongues but more often in translation, from Polybius to Philippe de Commines and from Caesar to Las Casas.

But I don’t think that level of expertise is quite necessary to identify the flaws in most Hollywood battle scenes. Simply talking through the literal events on screen will usually do it.

**as far as Jon knows.