So apparently I’m less done with this godawful series than I was promised before, so, let’s keep going to at least get done with this book.
In games and history books and military science lectures, teachers and old warhorses and other scholarly types lay out diagrams and stand up models in neat lines and rows. They show you, in a methodical order, how this division forced a hole in that line, or how these troops held their ground when all others broke.
How does Harry know about this? He can’t play videogames and he doesn’t appear to be involved in the miniatures scene. He was apprenticed as a teenager at the oldest, so he wasn’t in high school getting lectured on history. I don’t think he’s referenced a single book he’s read, and he similarly has never referenced going to some free lecture down at the library or the local college. This all sounds a lot like it’s referring to the sort of things you see in documentaries, but Harry can’t watch TV.
Anyway, Harry’s presumably thirdhand knowledge of what other people say war is like is, he insists, totally inaccurate because, and you may need to sit down because Harry has one hell of a hot take on this, real fighting is messy, fluid, difficult to follow, and also it’s scary and people scream a bunch. Thank god Harry is here to explain this to us. (more…)