The Battle of the Burning Plains
(Or 101 things that don’t happen in battles)
by Hannibal
Although it was not pleasant and I will have to re-read all my Sharpe novels just to regain any sense of military understanding I have gone through the battle of the Burning Plains and taken a few notes of some of the worse problems I found.
Now let’s get this over with as quickly as possible.
Eragon still has his golden helm! Gold != armour. It is week, bendable, expensive and heavy, all the things that you don’t want for armour.
Spahira kills the Empires envoy. Won’t that mean that next time you try to negotiate with them, they’ll kill yours in revenge, and they’d be justified. I thought the Empire was supposed to be the badies.
They put on Saphiras armour hours before the battle, way to go wearing the dragon out.
Angela : “Only my methods don’t involved yelling and running around with a sword.”
Except that is exactly what you did in the last battle, and we will come on to your other methods later.
They stay awake through the night, Eragon doesn’t even try to catch some sleep. (Idiot going into battle without any sleep at all.)
Huthvir is the dwarves name for Angela’s two bladed staff/sword. Except that it can’t be a dwarven weapon because a staff large enough to be wielded by a human would be impossible for a dwarve to use. The size of the staff depends solely on the size of the wielder.
Angela poisons the Empire soldiers, I have several problems with this.
1) How come she wasn’t noticed? No camp followers were described in the Empires army so how come no one stopped her wondering around there camp messing with there food?
2) How did she even carry enough poison to effect so many of the soldiers.
3) If Eragon can detect poisons through magic, how come none of the Empires mages did.
4) There has always been one major problem with poisons and that is hiding there taste. There are plenty of things that if you eat will mess you up. You’re body knows this and gives these things a horrible taste so you stop eating them. Hiding poisons taste during the medieval ages was incredibly difficult to do. So this means that Angela has to spend more time at each cooking fire and what not, and carry more ingredients to disguise the taste.
And lets look at it from another perspective, it is an form of chemical and/or biological warfare. After killing the Envoy the Varden are looking more evil by the minute.
The Battle Itself
They spend all this time fortifying there position, and then they leave! A earth ramp/wall is a great position to place your troops, and earth ramp around your camp means that you cannot be outflanked so it’s even better!
In fact since you have stopped the Empires advance wouldn’t it be even better just to sit there and wait for the Empires food to run out? You have food, your in your own territory, the enemy has to forage (hard to do when there is no food in the ‘Burning Plains’.), and you have horsemen which since they are faster than the Empires foot soldiers can ambush foraging groups at will.
They stuff there armour with rags to silence them. This also magically silences the sound of thousands of men and horses marching.
They cover 3/4th of the 2 miles between the army and then they charge. That’s 800 meters armoured men have to run to reach the enemy, they’d be lucky if half there troops ever reach the enemy without collapsing from exhaustion. Yes the weight of armour is spread around the body so it doesn’t feel like much, but you are still running 800 meters and expected to fight at the end of it. Even if they do, a group of men running tend to spread out, so there will be no power behind the charge.
And how come no one has any archers, shouldn’t the Vardens archers be shooting towards the Empire and vice versa? Has CP not heard of the traditional archery duel. (Before the battle proper, the archers from both sides would try to destroy each other so that when the foot soldiers closed in they could shoot unimpeded.)
The cavalry goes off to charge the Empires flank. They first charge off to the east, then turn and hit the Empires flank. You’d have through that someone in the Empires army would have spotted them and reacted. And why doesn’t this army of 100,000 have any of there own cavalry? 100,000 men and not a single horse!
Trebuchets are fired at the Varden army. Yet again displaying Hollywood like ignorance on the use of Trebuchets. They are siege weapons, you fire them at walls and if you miss they take a while to aim again, because of this you aim them at static objects, like the Varden camp.
The siege engines stall the Vardens advance. Even though the Varden have already charged across 800 meters of open ground and reached the Empires own lines. This means that due to the inaccurate nature of siege weapons and the fact that the two lines have closed on each other the Empire’s siege weapons will have killed lots of there own soldiers.
Secondly if the lines are already fighting it doesn’t matter if your advance stops, it’s meant to, you now have to stand there and hack away at the enemy.
Eight soldiers break through the Vardens lines. Even though it doesn’t say how they did so, or even why the gap in the lines closed up so quickly? (If a break in the line occurs and 8 soldiers break through you can bet that as many of the Empire soldiers as possible will attempt to follow them.) We also never hear of any more break through’s during the entire battle. Finally I would like to point out that this is the exact scenario that Cavalry are useful for. Also I’ve just realised that no-one mentioned reserves. Why aren’t they closing in to plug the gap the 8 soldiers went through? Ah, lets face it this was just to give Eragons body guards something to do.
Saphire breaths fire right into the middle of a melee, toasting many of her own soldiers. (I’m becoming convinced that she is evil by the minute, wouldn’t that be cool though.)
Eragon catches 12 arrows on his shield. (And it doesn’t break or become harder to use.) he then dodges the others. If the arrows are so thick that you can catch 12 of a shield, no amount of dodging is going to stop the others, it’s like dodging the rain.
The Varden are forced back to there camp, which of course means they now have that nice earth ramp/wall at there backs blocking there escape. And how are they pushed back two whole miles? (I have never heard this happening in a medieval battle, <Well the Mongols did it on purpose>) So now the Varden have walked in armour one and a half miles, ran half a mile, fought of several hours, and then fought backwards another two miles, these men should be exhausted.)
A human thrown javelin goes through a inch worth of steel armour on Saphira! I mean, come on, at least say one of the Emperors ballista’s did it instead, that’s slightly more plausible.
“And the sun began it’s decent towards evening.” Bloody hell, they’ve been fighting for over twelve’s hours (at least since the Varden attacks at dawn.) No medieval army fought that long, especially one that is made up of conscripts, they would simple disentangle themselves when they became tired and fight on the next day. And wouldn’t they all have died of thirst by now, shouldn’t there be water and food being brought up.
“The dwarves are here, the dwarves are here.” Dammit that sounds familiar, I could have sword I’ve heard it before.
Hrothgar is still wearing gold armour! For crying out loud!
“Carn’t let that ship land if it’s bringing reinforcements.” The empire’s army in 100,000 strong and your worrying about a ship that couldn’t possibly have more than 200 soldiers on board.
A sword bounces of Eragons grieves. Swords don’t just bounce of armour, and it still hurts even if there made of steel.
The Empire army takes prisoners. Again I thought they were the bad guys.
“And the day passed into late afternoon” even though we reached the Evening several pages ago. It must have been Eragons time travelling abilities.
Hrothgars breast has been smoted! (I hate that word more than any other word ever!)
Ballista’s are fired from Rorans ship. So even though it’s getting dark he’s still firing wildly into a melee. And he knows how to use and aim them.
The Ballista’s are firing flaming arrows now! To create flaming arrows (which is entirely possible) you sacrifice reloading time, range (since it’s heavier) and accuracy (since the wind catches the arrows more.) When will CP (and Hollywood, and Rome Total War) realise that setting an arrow on fire is pointless, no matter how you do it you still can not set a man on fire, and if the arrow has hit him, it doesn’t need to be on fire to take him out.
And where the hell was the kings cavalry in all this? They just vanished once they did there charge, never to be heard of again.
One of my biggest problems of this battle is that no one dies! I’m not talking about characters dieing but rather people in the army. I’m trying to make two points here so I will separate them,
Firstly, people should be dieing all around Eragon. They should be dieing in painful and horrific ways. This isn’t a pushing match we’re in, this is a full blown battle. Yet not once does CP describe how men die, they are not cut down in droves by arrow fire, they are not hacked apart, they don’t scream as spears push through there bodies. CP is romanticising war, making it a glorious thing where no one dies painfully, where no one screams for there mother as they are gutted by a sword, where no one lies on the battlefield for hours slowly bleeding to death. This wasn’t a battle, it was a group of men running around playing soldier.
Secondly, no one breaks and runs and neither force is whittled down by the fighting. It’s a battle that lasts for almost 20 hours (How the hell they fought that long I will never know.) and yet both sides are still fighting at the end of it, neither has run out of men.
The Vardens army are far less than the Empires so why are they just not overwhelmed in battle? At Canne Hannibal’s army of 56,000 killed over 60,000 Romans in a day. So why can’t a force twice that size kill half that number? If this had been a real battle the Varden would have charged, and then there flanks would have been turned and they would have been surrounded and slaughtered.
Why doesn’t CP learn that people die in battle, and that as people die the armies get smaller and the soldiers moral falls until one army either breaks or is destroyed utterly, that’s how battles are won, the Varden should have been overwhelmed. Lets face it, fighting on an open plain against an army that out numbers you is utterly stupid.
CP could have done many valid things to allow the Varden to win. They could fight with secure flanks (Thermipolie 480BC). They could deploy on a defendable hill (Crecy). Or fight from a cities wall (Siege of Venice). They could try to trap and surround the enemy (Canne). They could be better trained (British and Hanoverian troops at Miden). They could have better equipment (Arras counter attack); or they might simply be better motivated (Prussian Guard at St Private, Assaye) but from the book the Varden do none of these things.
Yet again CP has fallen into the trap of creating two armies and having them ‘fight’, only for the good guys to be saved at the last moment. Tolkien was able to get away with ‘reinforcements arriving in the nick of time’ for several reasons, mostly because it didn’t diminish the horror of battle. If you read the last part of Pelannor Fields then you will see that even with the arrival of Aragorns men the battle continues for hours, and at the very end you are given a glimpse of the amount of suffering that has been caused as the deaths of a dozen characters are listed in mournful song.
Again CP doesn’t really do this, and we are treated with yet another ‘The XYZ’s are coming.” Ending to a battle. I would suggest to any reader who is interested, and any writer who will use a battle in there work, that they go out, read a history book, and find out the reasons why battles are won and lost.
It was rare, very rare that reinforcements magically appeared during a battle to save the day. So rare that I can only think of two examples, the first was the Battle of Marignano, which lasted several days. (And yes the soldiers did stop to rest), and the battle of Bosworth Field, where the Stanly force literally sat on the sidelines before deciding who to support. Undoubtedly there are a few more examples, but they are drowned out by the many battles that were won by equipment, training, discipline, skill and the bravery of soldiers facing horrific deaths without any magical powers or Deus Ex Machinma to save them.
