Whenever we open a book that records a certain period of history, no matter how great or talented the author is, there will still be some errors in certain places and certain details.
The content of the story is determined by the narrator's perspective and is bound to deviate from what actually happened. Whether the narrator has personally experienced all this, which party he is a participant in this history, his origin, experience, age and even gender will all affect what he sees and remembers. The final book influenced by these is bound to be biased, because the expressive ability of words is so poor. If you add pen, paper and the low popularity of knowledge, many human civilizations that are too long ago have only a few strokes. The historical legacy is not something difficult to understand.
Recorders of history are always faced with choices. This is a story about many people and things, and they can never record everything in an exhaustive and thorough manner. This is why heroic legends and stories of nobles are so popular. The most outstanding and shining characters are always impressive. It’s just that this general overview method has many shortcomings. Take the current incident, which is called the "Battle of Nella Forest" by later historians as an example - many articles written by later generations often fail due to insufficient information. He used his own imagination to fill in the gaps, and then excessively beautified the Northern Alliance Army.
People who have never experienced this period of history always take it for granted that the Northern Army led by Prince Edward was an extremely neat and unified army.
They beautify the ending with their own imagination, believing that people can let go of their hatred for each other, work together for a common future, and look forward to death without hesitation.
They are wrong.
Humanity is the same in every era. Even if a crisis is right in front of us, there will still be no real peace between groups that hate each other.
Everything is relative. The Northern Army does have better overall quality than the Southern Allied Forces. But this "goodness" is extremely limited. Mental exhaustion cannot make up for the gap in experience and combat effectiveness. The Northern Army, composed of Sivalier refugees, Luoan refugees, mercenaries and Avenella farmers, alone can In terms of their combat power, to be fair, they are just a ragtag group.
The truly trained veteran archers, as vanguards, had been lost in previous battles with the Otolo Legion. The remaining mercenaries and other militiamen, although under the strategy of our Mr. Sage, formed small groups to fight guerrilla warfare in the way they were good at. But in the final analysis, this is still a helpless move.
After all, they have no discipline at all. After losing veterans and supplies, they have basically lost the ability to fight large-scale frontal conflicts.
When later historians describe this period of history, they often describe the Northern Army as "an unprecedented regular army on the West Coast" and describe the entire battle as "carried out step by step according to the commander's plan." But the fact is that Rao was The Northern Army has outstanding figures like our Mr. Sage and Grand Duke Leski - there is never any pre-prepared plan that can still be effective after actually encountering the enemy.
Whether Henry and Leschi, and even Edward and all the northern nobles were excellent, the answer is yes.
But things are fickle, and the choices they face are difficult under the resource constraints of their environment. No one can come up with a 100% solution to all emergencies. The large-scale legion formed in order to defeat the opponent on the frontal battlefield was unable to resist the powerful Otolo elite. However, when the scattered small-scale guerrilla forces used their numerical advantages to divide and encroach, and saw that they could gradually weaken the Southern Allied Forces, things took a turn for the worse. There is change again.
Just like who once said.
If the god of destiny exists, he must be a malicious god.
Human history is full of such coincidences. Henry carefully planned and mobilized the militia to take advantage of his own advantages, while Ashberon II was broken after successive defeats and used high-pressure policies to suppress the conscription of soldiers into the battlefield. The Northern Army, which lost its ability to fight frontally, had to be defeated one after another and retreated again and again in the Nella Forest and Nella Forest Corridor areas.
And when this retreat occurs, people's hearts become distracted.
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If you want to describe what happened in the area near the vast Nella Forest from July 4th to July 10th, no matter what language the narrator uses, you must use words that mean "chaos".
We can hardly find any suitable sentences to fully express the reasons for all this. If we analyze it in depth, it will inevitably be redundant. Therefore, I simply summarized the cause of the chaos as simple "soldier literacy" and summarized it as "this is what happens when you let civilians act as soldiers."
To be fair, militiamen are not entirely at a disadvantage compared to professional soldiers. First of all, they don't need daily support from the royal family or lords. Secondly, they have a huge population base. But the reason why militias are replaced by professional soldiers in developed countries is ultimately due to the low fault tolerance rate of this class.
As we said before, the larger the group of human beings gathers, the stronger the influence of herd mentality. Wise leaders can induce situations to some extent and mobilize morale through speeches and the like, but that's all they can do.
The spread of the news and the low literacy rate in this country in this era cannot be ignored. Edward's speech made the blood of the farmers in the northern region boil with excitement, as well as the suffering refugees of Loan and Sivalier. The mentality of "preferring to believe it is true" followed him, but in the south, there are still more civilians who are numb. They have not tasted the taste of a good life, and dullly believe that living as usual is what they should do. matter. Those who were a little better informed had already fled to the north, and it seemed natural that those who remained would join the army at the request of their lords and stand on the opposite side of the Northern Army, which was "fighting for the people."
There were signs of a collapse in the first wave of contact.
The scattered guerrillas lacked effective means of unified command and communication. After the hundred-man brigade at the front was massacred by the unstoppable Southern Allied Forces, out of instinct, the Northern Army militiamen ran out of the woods that no longer belonged to them. Holding together in the vast corridor of Nella Forest, trying to gain a slight advantage with their numbers.
And this, amid the chaos, played into the hands of Ashberon II.
They were driven out to gather and dispersed; they were driven out to gather together again and were dispersed again.
Under the command of Ashbern II, who had no legionary combat experience, the Southern Allied forces had no tactics or strategy at all, and this was the saddest part. They directly suppressed the past with a force that far exceeded their opponents. In order to fight guerrilla warfare, the Northern Army, which was too dispersed, had no way to regroup without the means of communication, even if it had a better commander and officer system. Rise up and form a force that can fight back.
Destiny always likes to play nasty jokes. By July 11, 192 in the Avenela calendar, when the Northern Army had been defeated for a week and had retreated more than 82 kilometers, both sides on the battlefield, inside and outside, There were dramatic changes.
Since the two sides started this war in early April, the overall morale of the Southern Allied Forces has surpassed that of the Northern Army for the first time due to a series of mistakes.
Edward, who loves his people, has excellent commanders, reliable nobles and our wise man, is unable to change the fact that the militiamen under his command have lost their fighting spirit. On the contrary, Ahibern II, who did not care about the lives of the people, commanded the Southern Allied Forces to advance with great success, defeating the Northern Army in succession.
All this seems absurd, but the reason is actually very simple.
Spiritual passion and sense of identity could not be used as food rations. After losing the supplies, they could only rely on the mountains and forests for food. After the defeat from the Duke of Dehat, the material support from the southern villagers was also cut off. Even an army like the Otolo Army will decline once it starts to starve, and this coupled with the continuous mental setbacks, except for the beginning of the battle in Daowulfberg, there is no battle. It's easy. Pressure has been building up, and the series of defeats that occurred in July gave it a gap to burst out.
Everyone longs for success. Even if the victory does not belong to them, for the farmers of the Confederate Army, the taste of victory is still good.
Because it at least means they're still alive.
His Highness the Prince is on the side of the peasants. They have vaguely heard of this fact, but it cannot change the fact that the two armies are hostile and they dare not resist Ashberon II, so "it is better for them to die than for us." This idea has become a subconscious consensus. And in the successive victories, they experienced the pleasure of dominating the lives of others, which more or less gave these people who had been oppressed a channel to vent.
It is so ironic that the Southern Allied Forces were under tremendous pressure that almost engulfed itself. Conflicts between the nobles and peasants were about to break out. However, when Ashbern II once again exerted high pressure to force the entire army to move forward, it passed. The successive victories were alleviated; it is so ironic that Edward worked hard for the interests of the farmers and the future of Avenella, but on the contrary it was these farmers who could not understand his difficulties because of their stupidity and servility, and became the biggest problem before him. of enemies.
The Northern Army was disheartened.
When the people of the Southern Allied Forces began to judge the enemy and ourselves by the accent of Avenela, they began to specifically select those mercenaries who joined the Northern Army for money, as well as the refugees from Roan and Sivalier, who were easy to identify in appearance. , voices of mutual accusation inevitably sounded within the Northern Army.
The result of the outbreak of the already existing internal conflicts was that the entire army was further divided. The mercenaries defected and never returned, followed by many refugees from Sivalier. No one had the energy to count the number of people after each defeat. How many people fled, because just keeping the remaining people from leaving was already a headache.
The principle is simple. The top brass of the Northern Army can easily deduce the ins and outs of why all this happened. But the painful part is that even if they know it, they don't have enough power to change everything.
Everything collapsed.
The Southern Allied Army marched straight in, and the nobles held their chests high with pride. In their eyes, the Northern Army was already a grasshopper after autumn, and could not hop around for a few days.
——But is this really all the facts?
On July 12, after retreating to a place 120 kilometers away, the trees had gradually begun to thin out in the forest.
It was clear that they had experienced successive defeats, but our Mr. Sage, Prince Edward, and Grand Duke Leschi and other senior officials who actually issued the orders did not have much sadness on their faces.
There is only peace and calm.
"Is the raven coming?" Henry looked at Edward, who nodded. The sage responded with the same action, and then clicked his finger on the map made of vellum.
"Then it's here." (To be continued.) m.
