Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 30 Oct 2024This time we come to Episode 6 of Season 1 of ROME. This one is very much based around the City of Rome itself and places Antony centre stage. In the video we look at the actual history and how well the show reflects this. For more detail on the history, have a look at the videos in the Conquered and the Proud playlist.
May 2, 2025
HBO’s Rome – Ep 6 “Egeria” – History and Story
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QotD: The Victorian attitude toward illegitimacy
Perhaps nothing divides us more profoundly from the Victorians than our attitude towards the illegitimate child (even the word illegitimate has almost disappeared from use in this context, as being unfairly stigmatising). That the sins of the parents should be visited upon children, by regarding those children themselves as tainted, seems morally monstrous to us, self-evidently cruel and unjust. We cannot even imagine — and I include myself — how anyone could be so morally primitive as to disdain a child merely because its parents were unmarried: and this is so however much we may believe in the virtues of marriage as an institution. The idea of fallen women also seems to us now to be horribly censorious, and hypocritical into the bargain: for no one ever spoke of fallen men, though they were essential to, the sine qua non of, the existence of fallen women.
I am still shocked by the recollection that, as late as the early 1990s, there were still a few women in psychiatric hospitals in Britain who were there principally because they had been admitted seventy years earlier after having given birth to an illegitimate child. No doubt they had quickly become institutionalised and could scarcely have coped with life outside; but to think of a long human life passed in this impoverished way (the wards for “chronics” had beds so close together that they allowed for no privacy whatever) as a kind of punishment for what is now no longer regarded even as an indiscretion, reminds one of La Rochefoucauld’s dictum that neither the sun nor death can be stared at for long. One cannot fix one’s mind on such a horrible injustice for long.
Of course, it was stigma like this that gave stigma itself a bad name — stigmatised so to speak, in fact, to such a degree or effect that the very name of stigma has a completely negative valency. No one has a good word to say for it, though whether there ever was, or could be, a society completely without it, I am unsure.
Theodore Dalrymple, “The Situational Nature of Scorn and Stigma”, New English Review, 2020-04-28.
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May 1, 2025
Canada’s Conservative Party – every silver lining has a cloud
In the National Post, Colby Cosh considers the state of the party for the federal Conservatives after an election campaign that looked radically different than the one they had prepared to fight for more than a year:
Pierre Poilievre’s riding had an insane number of protest candidates registered for the election. Oddly, the same wasn’t true in any other riding in the country. This was an organized protest for electoral reform, supposedly.
The Conservative opposition is now bound to have a difficult year, with their leader inexplicably, inexcusably ejected from the Commons. Dedicated haters of Pierre Poilievre won’t find anything at all inexplicable about the Carleton disaster, but there will need to be a proper autopsy. Especially since Poilievre’s party gathered more vote share nationally than any right-wing party — or combination thereof! — has achieved since the days of Mulroney.
Even in Ontario, Poilievre’s Conservatives got over a million more votes than the hyper-critical Ford PCs did in a provincial election 60 days earlier, and they are headed toward a higher vote share within the province. So is Poilievre a generational leader potentially on the brink of a dynasty, or an unloved boob who got caught flat-footed by a change in public mood? I promise you that the quarrelling over that question is well underway.
I assume the CPC will keep its unlucky leader, which leaves only the question, “So then what?” The Liberals don’t have to call a by-election until six months after someone decides to resign to make way for Poilievre. And maybe I ought to say “if someone decides”. It’s not essential for a party leader to have a Commons seat, but it would certainly be ideal, especially with the Commons hung.
The Conservatives are bound to find themselves adopting more of a team approach to the Opposition job by default, and maybe this ought to have been considered while it was still optional. Even by Canadian standards, the CPC campaign was very leader-focused, and was obviously predicated on the idea that the people really wanted Poilievre and would like him more as they saw more of him. (And, again, this may actually have happened!) Now there’s a chance the CPC’s House leadership performs well over the next year or so — and then has to fade into the wallpaper behind the guy who already lost.
When “looming dystopia” is the preferable scenario
Elizabeth Nickson on just how badly the great and the powerful have managed to screw up so badly that instead of opening for Anthrax at the Hollywood Bowl, “Looming Dystopia” might actually be one of the better possible futures we face:
I asked Grok to show me Looming Dystopia opening for Anthrax. This is the “in Gothic style” version.
I am a person of faith, of Christ, not a very good one, but one who has been devoted for a long time. I’m not saying I didn’t spend twenty years in the great big glittering world, where I indulged every whim, lived among the powerful, beautiful, God- hostiles, adopted their habits of speech and dress, went to every small exquisite museum, the play of the moment, the art openings, the restaurants and parties, became a sophisticate able to live within that world as handmaiden or companion. I mean, for almost ten of those years, I had a husband who never, not once, came home without a present. But even that came of prayer, of a desire fulfilled a wish granted, of prayer, as in “You want this? Ok then, you will sicken, but here it is”.
That world – the enrichment of culture that came out of the 80’s and 90’s – determines today. That life is the model and goal for many and in fact, now the design, the plan laid out by those who plan the future of the world. Humans shunted deliberately into city life, then enhanced via surgery and chip. Indulgence, consumption, fighting for preference, ambition. Cultural creatives, unmarried, oddly-sexed, politically left would determine the future, their gifts the siren call of the arts, fashion, grand bohemia, Hollywood, eat, drink and travel merrily. The end goal of life: your individuality, your woundedness, your self care, the full expression of your specific gifts. If you are lucky you too can be Lady GaGa or BlackPink and have stadiums roar when you appear. Other humans? The state will take care of them, do not worry. Maybe they will die off. Like dinosaurs.
The central banks have gamed this going forward, making the insane assumption that this social movement was permanent. Did they depend on feminism and drugs to stop the next step, ie, young people leaving the city to build families? Even if they did, they thought they could stop it. Why? Because fascist greens like John Kerry, told them that rural regions must be left to “recover”.
Therefore they gutted the suburbs of financing, because “poor land use”, and “too much car required”, which is preposterous in the Americas with all this land. What else does a young family want but trees and parks, and lawns and a neighborhood of friends, not riven with whores, crackheads and murderous migrants?
The ‘08 crash was predicated on Thatcher’s fiscal success in selling people their council houses in the 80’s. Wonderful! thought Bill Clinton’s team, let’s lead marginal Americans into housing, and lo, we still haven’t paid the freight for that insane idea. I had a paralegal friend in Florida who was foreclosing on $500,000 loans to actual crackhead whores. Clinton’s people, lost in their greed and benevolence, forgot that the British council estate dweller was homogenous, placed, as in deep roots in the area, and stable. In the U.S and Canada, idiot banks lent to just about any joker who turned up with a plausible story. Then the speculators invaded, everyone cashed out merrily, then ka-boom. And pioneering walking away with $100 million from government “service” was Jimmy Johnson, Head of Fannie Mae.
I mean, it’s stupid. The western world’s current bankruptcy (and it’s severe) was caused by Central Bank clowns. Those ridiculous, repellent, hideously expensive COP #8,789 conferences had two outcomes: banks would be compelled to lend to green, require green, require climate mitigation, and jump through DEI, ESG hoops, and governments would chunk up green regs. And prosperity would bloom! Not only that, they surreptitiously, across the world, funded actual companies that poisoned the air, water and land. And when I say “they funded”, I mean the taxpayer did. A lot of our money went into insane outfits like this:
And just like Malcom Gladwell’s tipping point – it took ten years – boom, economic activity came to a screeching halt, except for the wreckage of green energy enterprises everywhere, government debt and re-financing. For instance, the Obama-created outfit, the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility, that consists of three solar concentrating thermal power plants in California burned through $1 billion before it collapsed in February. It is one of thousands across the west, all subsidized by the taxpayer. Unwittingly. The press is so embarrassed, they don’t report the trillions lost to green energy projects.
Again, the central bankers own this.
Central bankers have become a metastatic cancer on the economy. By definition, they are late adopters on the marketing curve. By the time they notice something and make their plans upon it, it’s over and something new is growing. Today, the mega-cities everywhere are emptying of everyone over 30 with an income, even or rather especially in China, where the young have just said … nope, a pox on your Commie plans. Chinese, European, British, American, everyone is trickling back to the towns of which their ancestral memories sing, where they can root, where they can live smaller, without environmental toxicity, the rank depravity of the super-culture, the ruinous stupidity of green. The great cities are now super-dangerous for women, and that is spreading as the autocrats in power force violent young men into towns. Last week a young woman in Vancouver fought off a migrant who tried to kill her three times in Stanley Park. My modest, Christian, pioneer family who built the early city along with their community of 10,000 and neglible government, made that park in the early 1900’s; my great grandmother was the first woman to ride a bike in bloomers through that park. It was so safe for 100 years you could let kids play in it after dark, calling them home with a whistle. It is one of the world’s great urban parks, more astonishing than Central Park. This is an outright tragedy. And it is unnoticed, unreported, except on TikTok.
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The economics of migration
Lorenzo Warby wonders if an entire discipline can commit suicide:
Can an academic discipline seriously decline? Yes. Disciplines which were once mainstays of universities have either vanished or shrunk to pale shadows of their former selves.
What about a social science? One can envisage a social science disappearing. The most obvious way is it gets utterly discredited and replaced. A less obvious way is its institutional bases could disappear. A final way is its entire social basis disappears.
The West is currently marked by two entirely different discourses on migration that seem unable to interact. One is migration-as-economic-boon. This is the outlook of mainstream Economics. Migrants add to the economic activity of societies and potentially retard the effect of an ageing population by replacing absent local children with foreign migrants. This discourse invokes the authority of Economic Theory and its statistical methods.
This outlook typically treats criticism of migration as economically illiterate, socially retrograde, or morally bankrupt; or some combination of thereof. It is protected by the Self-Righteous, Knowing scoff which is such a feature of the modern professional-managerial class. They are the Masters of Knowledge, and of Moral Concern, who the plebs should defer to.
The other discourse talks in terms of social and democratic decay, increased crime, threats of violence, increased fiscal stress, even the possibility of civil war.
This is the world where, in Sweden — due to the stress on social and fiscal order from migration — it has become policy to pay migrants to go away. This is the world where highly intelligent and informed folk quietly discuss how the performance of economists on migration has been so catastrophically bad, it may bring down the entire discipline.
The adherents of the second, problems-with-migration, discourse are well aware of what mainstream Economics has to say on migration, and judge it to be obviously and demonstrably — even catastrophically — false. That it is much harder for migrants to contribute positively to a society than mainstream Economics admits, and this gets worse the higher the rate of migration. A recent Dutch study (Jan van de Beek, Joop Hartog, Gerrit Kreffer, Hans Roodenburg, The Long-Term Fiscal Impact of Immigrants in the Netherlands, Differentiated by Motive, Source Region and Generation, IZA DP No. 17569, December 2024. https://docs.iza.org/dp17569) found that:
Only 20% of all immigrants [to the Netherlands] make a positive lifetime net contribution to the public budget. Groups with large contributions come from Scandinavia, the Anglo-Saxon world and a few other countries like France and Japan.
The adherents of the first discourse seem either utterly unaware of the second discourse, or protected from even considering it by the Self-Righteous Knowing scoff. Their mastery of Theory is such, they cannot possibly be so catastrophically wrong.
The notion that migration could break a society along its existing fracture lines to the point of civil war would absolutely be treated with the Self-Righteous Knowing scoff, despite there being — as is discussed below — at least three historical examples of precisely that happening.
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Military Tactics In The Falklands
Pegasus Tests
Published 27 Dec 2024A discussion with Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons about Argentine and British tactics during the Falklands War.
#forgottenweapons
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QotD: The Eurovision Song Contest
The Eurovision Song Contest has never quite recovered, but oh, you should have seen it in its glory days, when the rich national cultures that gave the world Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, Purcell, Debussy, and Grieg bandied together to bring us “La-La-La” (winner, 1968), “Boom-Bang-A-Bang” (1969), “Ding-Dinge-Dong” (1975), “A Ba Ni Bi” (1978), “Diggy Loo Diggi Ley” (1984), and my personal favorite, “Lat Det Swinge,” the 1985 winner by the Norwegian group Bobbysocks. The above songs are nominally sung in Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, and even English, but in fact it’s the universal language of Eurogroovy: “Ja, ja, boogie, baby, mit der rock ‘n’ roll”.
Mark Steyn, “Waterloo”, Steyn Online, 2020-05-17.
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April 30, 2025
After the votes were counted
John Carter suggests that votes should be allocated to reflect the costs imposed on the voters by taxation, that is to ensure that those with the most “skin in the game” at least have their votes weighted more than those who pay little or no taxes but can still vote themselves more benefits:
Have you ever noticed how election results are regularly broken down geographically, as well by the demographic categories of age, sex, and – depending on the country – race, yet we almost never see the results separated into taxpayer vs taxeater status?
So anyhow.
For my American readers, in Canadian elections the Liberal Party is denoted by red, as the Devil and Karl Marx intended.
It is absolutely no surprise that Ottawa voted solidly for the Liberal Party of Canada, whose base consists of three primary groups: migrants, public sector workers, and baby boomers, all of whom are regime client groups, and all of whom are tightly packed into the nation’s capital.
Perhaps it’s that it’s tax season and I’m in a grumpy mood because I just got the bad news, but I can’t help but wonder about how electoral politics would change if only taxpayers were allowed to vote. It’s common for “taxpayers” to be used as a synonym for “the voting public”, but this is a bit of linguistic legerdemain which obscures a core dynamic rotting the heart out of every liberal democracy: most of the population are not, in fact, taxpayers. First there are those who don’t earn enough to pay taxes, such as university students; then there are those receiving direct welfare payments of one form or another; then there are public employees, who although they pay tax on paper, are clearly net recipients of government largess since their paychecks come from taxes in the first place.
The most successful parties in country after country are the parties that mobilize client groups by promising to steal money from productive citizens and transfer that wealth to their non-productive clients. This dynamic is baked into the cake of any universal suffrage democracy, which is why Universal Suffrage is a Suicide Pact. Parties need client groups for electoral support; wealth can only be plundered from the productive; therefore the only available relationship is to cultivate non-productive clients.
The problem, of course, is that over time this destroys the economic productivity of the liberal democracy, because the productive groups will become less productive because what’s the point, or they’ll just look for the exits, while the client groups will swell, becoming simultaneously too expensive to maintain and to electorally heavy to dislodge.
I suspect you could fix all of this by simply tying votes to tax receipts, with only those who are net taxpayers being given the franchise in any given election. At a stroke this would disenfranchise the welfare underclass, government bureaucrats, and university students, all of whom should be prohibited from voting as a matter of principle. If you wanted to be really fancy, you could implement a tax-weighted vote: the more taxes you pay, the more your vote counts.
In addition to the salutary effects of reducing the electoral weight of female voters (since men tend to pay more in taxes), weighting votes by tax receipts would lead to a very interesting incentive structure. On the one hand, everyone hates paying taxes, and wants to minimize the taxes they pay; if only taxpayers were voting, this would place a strong downward pressure on taxes and, hence, on the size of government (thus forcing states to find other ways of funding themselves, via e.g. tariffs or service fees). On the other hand, people like to vote, so there would be a strong incentive not to evade taxes. On the gripping hand, since paying more tax means your vote counts for more, there would be a countervailing incentive to pay as much tax as you can afford. One might imagine a state functioning as a sort of de facto oligarchy, with the billionaires happily paying obscene levels of tax in order to gather as much political power to their class as possible, and enforcing their tyranny by voting to keep taxes on everyone else to the absolute bare minimum. This would be a truly dystopian brier patch to be thrown into.
Alas, we do not inhabit such a political experiment. Returning to the ostensible topic of yesterday’s Canadian election, however, it would probably not be an exaggeration to posit that if we did inhabit such a system, Canada’s Conservative Party would have rolled the Liberals in this and, in all likelihood, almost every other election.
That is not, however, what happened.
The high-level outcome is that, after running the country into the ground for the last decade, the Liberal Party has been elected for the fourth consecutive time, with a mandate to complete the project of crashing the plane of Dominion with no survivors. It brings me absolutely no pleasure to report that I predicted the Liberals would win before the election was even called. The Liberals are four seats short of forming a majority in parliament, meaning they cannot quite form a stable government on their own. This is not a problem for the Liberals, however. Despite the glorious collapse of the New Democratic Party – which plummeted from 25 seats in the last federal election to 7 in the current election, by far their lowest in 30 years – the NDP retains just enough seats for them to form a stable coalition government with the Liberals. In other words, the outcome of this election is that Canada will be in essentially the same situation it was in before the election, with the only meaningful difference being that the Liberals have a few more seats than they did before.
The Korean War Week 45 – The Chinese Spring Offensive Begins! – April 29, 1951
The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 29 Apr 2025This is a week of nothing but battle action as the Chinese Spring Offensive crashes down on the UN forces like a tidal wave — literally hitting them along all of the front lines across the whole Korean Peninsula.
Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:46 Recap
01:59 The First Night
07:25 The Next Day
10:19 The Eastern Sector
13:56 The Kapyong Road
15:57 The Gloster Surrounded
19:48 Flight of the Glosters
(more…)
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Low-energy Europe
Depending on who you read, it appears that the massive power outage in southwestern Europe nearly expanded across the continent, as Spain and Portugal went dark taking parts of other neighbouring countries’ networks down as well. James Price explains that this sort of thing is likely to be a recurring phenomenon as Europe leans ever more heavily on unreliable sources of electricity:
In his 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray accused Western European nations of Geschichtsmüde, being weary of history. President Trump might translate this by recycling a sobriquet he used against Jeb Bush — being low-energy.
This is now literally the case in both the United Kingdom and Germany, who have the most expensive energy costs in the developed world. The consequences have been catastrophic, in economic, political, environmental, and even geostrategic terms.
The true tragedy is that so much of the pain is self-inflicted, the result of bad, rushed policy designed to make people feel warm and fuzzy inside, rather than actually keeping people warm.
Net Zero
The commitment in Britain to “net zero emissions by 2050” was signed into law in the dying days of Theresa May’s premiership, as an attempt to give her a “legacy” after three painful years as Prime Minister. That legacy is likely to be lost, like the works of Ozymandias, as the world comes crashing back to economic reality.
The debate over the introduction of net zero was conducted during the Conservative Party’s leadership contest to succeed May, and therefore all attention was away from what would prove to be the most impactful economic decision of the year. The debate lasted all of 90 minutes.
The results have been completely devastating for Britain’s economy in all sorts of corrosive ways. For one, 169 years after Henry Bessemer worked out how to mass-produce steel in Sheffield, Yorkshire, Britain almost lost its ability to make the stuff here in Britain. Global factors like Chinese dumping play a part, but the extent of environmental regulation on British industry is making it impossible to sustain any kind of heavy industry. And now, British Steel has been nationalized once more, lumping the taxpayer with the losses and liabilities, but without doing anything to address the root causes.
But the government meddling does not stop there. In agriculture, a cruel, ideological attack on farmers (over whether farms can be charged inheritance tax) is going to spur more prime farmland to be turned into solar panel fields in a country where the sun often doesn’t shine.
There are now many statutory requirements to push environmental policies in all sorts of areas, to the complete detriment of other requirements, namely economic prosperity, that would otherwise be carefully balanced. So new homes in Britain have to have small windows, to increase insulation efficiency.
HS2, a much delayed and hideously over-budget high speed rail line between London and Birmingham, is building a one-kilometer-long tunnel to prevent bats being harmed by high-speed trains. The tunnel will cost over £100 million to build. Not only is there no evidence that the trains would interfere with bats, but there is also some evidence that the bat tunnel may actually be a bat-killing tunnel.
Hinkley Point C, the only nuclear power station being constructed at the moment in Britain, is having to construct a “fish disco” at huge costs to push fish away from being sucked into the cooling system.
This kind of environmental “everythingism” is not just holding back progress, not just costing huge amounts; it is corrosive of every attempt by people who just want to get on with building and growing — even “green” enterprises. Orsted, an offshore wind company, had to fill in forms five times longer than Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and had to wait nearly three years for a decision to build one farm.
And specifically about the Spanish situation that nearly triggered a Europe-wide blackout, from the social media network formerly known as Twitter:
SPAIN BLACKOUTS: AN ANONYMOUS EXPERT VIEW
From a deep groupchat, last night, translated from Spanish, written by an expert in transmission and distribution of power. Not my words.
“What has happened on April 28 has a well-located origin: the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, which is one of the most important electric highways in Spain. There is not only the electricity produced by our solar and wind farms in the northeast, but also the electricity that we import from France. This international interconnection, although weak (it can only contribute 3% of our demand, well below the minimum of 10% that marks the EU), in times of stress is essential to balance the network.
“At 12:32 p.m., in that Aragón-Catalonia corridor there was an electric [shake]. What exactly does “shake” mean? It means that suddenly and abnormally, the power that flowed through those lines began to vary violently, rising and falling in a very short time. Such abrupt variability can be due to three main causes:
“1. That a relay or transformer on that electric highway detects an abnormal flow of current or voltage (higher or lower than expected) and automatically disconnected to avoid burning or [being] destroyed. This is called that “opens” a relay or switch: it jumps and cuts the passage of electricity to protect itself.
“2. That the enormous concentration of renewable energy in that area (mainly solar and wind) has created an electrical resonance: electronic inverters, which synchronize current, can sometimes be amplified between them if a small voltage alteration (for example, due to clouds, strong wind or a slight failure) extends like an echo to all devices, causing widespread oscillations.
“3. That a wrong control order has been sent (by mistake or attack) from the SCADA systems, disconnecting or reducing the generation of multiple hit plants. There is no confirmation of this possibility yet, but it is being investigated.
“What is known is that as a consequence of that shake, the interconnection with France jumped: we were isolated just at the worst time, when the peninsula needed external support to stabilize.
“Without that French help, the frequency of the peninsular network (which should always be 50 Hz exact) began to drop quickly. The frequency is like the heartbeat of the network: if it falls too much, the systems understand that the patient (the network) is collapsing and automatically disconnected so as not to self-destruct. Thus, in just five seconds, the solar and wind farms were turned off — [they are] very sensitive to frequency variations — 15 GW of power was lost suddenly (60% of all the electricity generated at that time), and the network could not take it anymore: it collapsed completely, showing the Redeia Platform (REE) a “0 MW” nationwide. That does not mean that all the turbines were physically turned off, but there was no generator synchronized at the common frequency of 50 Hz. It was, for practical purposes, a country [turned] off.
“To [restart] a completely dead network, one essential thing is needed: plants that can start in black, that is, without receiving energy from anywhere else. Spain has identified five large hydroelectric jumps capable of doing this. However, and here is one of the great negligences that are coming to light, three of those five groups were stopped in scheduled maintenance, by business decision supervised by the administration. Only two were operational. That made the recovery much slower and weaker than it should be in a normal contingency plan.
“The result is that, after almost 10 hours, only 35% to 40% of the national supply has been recovered, and there are still large areas in the dark or under scheduled cuts.
“The situation reveals a very serious underlying problem:
“Spain is still an energy island: it only has 3% foreign exchange capacity compared to its total demand.”
Part 2:
“The network depends a lot on variable renewables, which are disconnected quickly in the face of any instability.
“The lack of physical inertia reserves (i.e. large rotating masses such as thermal power plants or classic hydraulics) prevents the disturbances from damping.
“And poor maintenance planning left without enough hydraulic muscle to respond to a crisis.
“The most likely causes, with current data, are:
“A combination of technical failure in protection or in synchronization, added to a serious lack of operational forecast and maintenance (probability ≈ 40%).
“The possibility of an intentional cyber-physical attack remains in analysis (≈ 25% estimated probability).
“Other factors such as human error, punctual atmospheric phenomenon or mixed causes complete the rest.
“In short: an initial shake at the most sensitive point of the Spanish network — the Aragón-Catalonia corridor, door to Europe — left the peninsula isolated and vulnerable. The network could not sustain its own demand because it did not have sufficient assistance, nor stable physical reserve, nor enough bootable plants in black. Three of five hydroelectric jumps were out of service when they were most needed.
“For this reason, Spain went out in five seconds, and that is why it still continues to light little by little, fragile, slow and exposed.”
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QotD: The experience of the infantryman through the ages
Well, here is where we come back to the note I made earlier about how “warring” and “soldiering” were different verbs with different meanings. After all, while soldiering implies these difficulties, warring doesn’t, necessarily. And it isn’t hard to see why – the warrior classes in these societies, often being aristocrats, generally didn’t do a lot of these things. It is, for instance, noted in the Roman sources when a general chose to eat the same food as his soldiers, because most Roman aristocrats didn’t when they served as generals or military tribunes. The privileges of rank and class applied.
And that’s something we see with medieval aristocrats too. On the one hand, Jean de Bueil talks about the “difficulties and travail” of war, but at the same time, Clifford Rogers notes one (fictional and lavish, but not outrageous) war party “suitable for a baron or banneret” included a chaplain, three heralds, four trumpeters, two drummers, four pages, two varlets (that is, servants for the pages), two cooks, a forager, a farrier, an armorer, twelve more serving men (with horses, presumably both as combatants and as servants), and a majordomo to manage them all – in addition to the one lord, three knights and nine esquires (C. Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives through History: the Middle Ages (2007), 28-9).
Jean le Bel (quoted in Rogers, op. cit.) contrasts the situation of the nobles in Edward III’s army (1327), where “one could see great nobility well served with a great plenty of dishes and sweets – such strange ones that I wouldn’t know to name or describe them. There one could see ladies richly adorned and nobly ornamented” while in the camp proper an open brawl between the regular soldiers from England and Hainault broke out and eventually turned into an open battle in which 316 died, but so segregated was the camp that, “most of the knights and of their masters were then at court, and knew nothing of this” (Rogers, 66-7). Likewise, except in fairly extreme positions, most of the ditch-digging, camp-building duties would fall to the common soldiers (and, as Roel Konijnendijk can quite accurately tell you, ditches are important! When in doubt, dig some ditches – or make others dig ditches for you).
That said, these differences are not merely confined to the high aristocrats. Marching under a heavy load is often given as one example of the quintessential “soldier experience”, but it seems that many Greek hoplites went to war with a personal slave or servant to carry their equipment for them, despite being infantrymen. The Romans carried equipment and supplies something closer to what a modern soldier might (both in terms of weight and also, apart from ammunition, in terms of what was carried), but then non-Roman sources like the Greek writer Polybius (18.18.1-7) or the Jewish writer Josephus (BJ 3.95) appear quite stunned with the amount of tools and equipment the Romans carry (and Polybius, by the by, is writing before Marius’ mules). Evidently the Roman impedementia was quite a bit heavier, though even the Macedonians carried much more than a Greek hoplite army (Note Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, 1978 on this).
Meanwhile, Jonathan Roth is quick to note (in The Logistics of the Roman Army at War (264 B.C. – A.D. 235) (1999)) that despite either bad or insufficient rations being a common complaint of soldiers, such complaints appear absent from Roman sources, even in the context of legionary mutinies. Indeed, the evidence suggests that Roman soldiers ate quite well, with fairly ample rations. In camp the Roman soldier’s diet was not so different from what he might eat in peacetime (especially once we get into the imperial period with legions stationed in semi-permanent bases); on the march they had to make do with bucellatum, a hard biscuit something like hardtack. But for many Italian peasants, the diet doesn’t seem to have been much worse – or much different – from what they ate in peacetime.
By way of sharp contrast to the plodding, heavily loaded but surely very lethal Roman legionary, the impis of the Zulu traveled fast, light and sometimes somewhat hungry. Zulu warriors generally carried only their equipment on the march, while supplies were carried by udibi, boys serving as porters. Even then, such supplies were minimal – the Zulu force that arrived at Rorke’s Drift (1879) had only been out six days, but none of the warriors in it had eaten in two. Such minimally supplied flying columns, moving fast and with considerable stealth (one cannot read anything on the Anglo-Zulu war without noticing how, even with cavalry scouts, Zulu impis seem so often just to appear next to British forces) were the norm for Zulu warfare. And to be clear, this wasn’t some “primitive” or underdeveloped form of war – the light and fast operational movements of the Zulu were intentional (much of it was a product of Shaka’s reforms) and very effective – albeit not so effective as to offset the massive advantages the British possessed in population, economic capacity or military technology. Nevertheless, not even every sort of common soldier was the heavily loaded, slow moving, well-fed ditch-digging sort like the Romans. The “soldier experience” needs to cover the lightly loaded and armed, fast moving, hungry, non-ditch-digging Zulu experience too.
And then of course when we consider nomadic peoples, we find that in many cases their lives on campaign were not that much different from their lives at peacetime, involving many of the same skills and activities.
In short, the experience of the drudgery of war – the bad food, long toil, heavy encumbrance and so on was all still quite contingent (or we might say “dependent”) on the society going to war. Social divisions mattered. Expectations about masculine behavior mattered. Military systems mattered. Yes, modern armies in the European tradition expect their soldiers to do a lot of labor and drudgery, but remember where that military system came from: it was the system of the common soldiers serving under the aristocrats who most certainly did not do those things but who did impose sharp, corporal discipline. Which, to be clear, doesn’t make this system ineffective – it was clearly effective. The point here is that it was socially contingent – a different society would have come up with a different system. And they did! The Early Modern European system is only one way to organize an army and historically speaking not even the most common.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
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April 29, 2025
The US Cancels Tariffs and Saves the World – W2W 025
TimeGhost History
Published 28 Apr 2025After seeing the devastating effects of the trade war that ravaged the global economy between the world wars, in 1948 the US is determined to usher in an age of free trade and global cooperation that will last until the spring of 2025.
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1984 and the Politicizing of Language
Feral Historian
Published 16 Aug 2024A dive into 1984 in relation to modern politics can’t be done without pissin’ in everyone’s Froot-Loops, so grab a tall glass of Victory Gin and let’s talk about how The Party functions, how doublethink makes us crazy, and how it’s not just those nutters on the other side that do it.
I take a few jabs at current sacred cows of the Left and Right here. Hopefully the comments won’t look like Hate Week.
00:00 Intro
01:46 Thoughtcrime and Doublethink
12:27 War is Peace
17:46 Oligarchal Collectivism
22:12 MiniTruePost-release edit: It’s been pointed out that I grossly oversimplified the military analysis later in the video, which is true. Man-portable air defense systems and maneuver warfare are a lot more complicated than this video implies. As for that one particular doublethink example mentioned so very briefly, some of the counterpoints have been … impressive contortions of language in their own right. But not interesting enough to discuss the matter further.
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