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Huzzah! Great essay!
Amazing writing.
Outstanding. Thank you.
Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe is imbued with the aura of knighthood, especially in his first novel, The Big Sleep, when he finds the beautiful daughter of his client naked in his bed. He contemplates a chessboard as he tries to figure out how to get her dressed and out of there.
But, in the end, it was.
Quite a pæan raised for the boys in leather and mail.
This conversation is an entry in our Group Writing Series under September’s theme of Order. If you have something to say about order, come order up a date. We have thirteen left.
I would add this theme song.
Don’t forget the horses. No knight is a knight without his warhorse.
Good Lord those animals are beautiful.
The last hurrah of the mounted armored knight came much later than you would expect. 1683. The Siege of Vienna. Already squarely in the age of gunpowder. Both sides had cannon, over 400 in total. An Ottoman army was about to kick in the back door to Europe. The Ottoman army had besieged Vienna for two months. Things were coming to an end. The walls of the city had been undermined and the stage was set for the invaders to pour into the breeches and overwhelm the city.
Then a relief army arrived under Polish Commander John Sobieski. The iron fist of Sobieski’s army were already an anachronism. The Polish heavy cavalry. Mounted armored knights. The Winged Hussars. Their armour featured two wooden appendages, festooned with feathers, that started at their lower back and came up over their shoulders / hence ‘Winged’
I don’t think anybody, now, is certain what function they served … but it’s certainly a look. They were armed with both a curved saber and a long straight backsword. Many also carried additional weapons like battle axes or war hammers. However their primary weapon was a 16 foot long lance/pike. Like the heavy artillery of later days, they were expensive, slow, and had limited utility. They were really only good at one job. But at that job they were unrivaled. The Winged Hussars job was to break infantry.
Sobieski’s army arrived in the nick of time for Vienna. Sobieski’s infantry engaged the Ottoman army in the morning of 12 September 1683 outside the walls of Vienna. They fight went on all day without advantage to either side. Then, in the late afternoon, the Winged Hussars came up. It may have been the largest charge of armored knights in history. It was certainly the last. The day long battle and two month siege was over in 15 minutes. They hit the Ottoman infantry like a brick hitting a pane of glass. They broke the Ottoman army and swept the it from under the walls of Vienna, sending the survivors to flight. Vienna and Europe were saved. They captured the Ottomans’ tents and baggage and supplies – including coffee. It was the first time Europeans in large numbers were introduced to coffee. The gleeful bakers of Vienna crafted celebratory pastries from the captured flour and shaped them into crescents like the crescent moons on the Moslem Ottomans’ flags – what we know today as croissants.
So next week, on the 12th, have a coffee and some croissants and say thanks to the last of the mounted armored knights.
You’ve been watching Sir Jason’s series? It is pretty good.
By the way, a fantastic book about Don Juan of Austria, Emperor Charles V’s illegitimate son, is The Last Crusade by Louis de Wohl.
I read it at the end of the spring. Really enjoyable (anything by de Wohl is fun reading, I’ve found).
Only since this morning! So beautiful…
My kids did a riding camp last week and their boots still stink of the stables, but we are still high on borses. My friend’s camp is the Tom Sawyer model… she has parents pay her to send her their kids to muck out her stables and ride a bit. So beautiful…
Heh, must be a new drug. Don’t know about you kids these days.
The earliest hussars were Hungarian, and were light cavalry.
The Polish version was definitely heavy cavalry by the time of Vienna. Eventually most of the armies in Europe adopted the unit type, and those hussars were all light cavalry.
There’s a poem too. :)
My poor phrasing. I meant to reference the wings. I don’t think anyone is sure what purpose the feathered wings served. Were they defensive? Did the whirring noise made by the feathers when riding at speed frighten opponents’ horses? Were they just decorative?
They were there to scare the bejabbers out of people. “Aw, nuts … it’s them again!”
Are you saying they’re wingnuts?
In Russia they are considered a picture of evil and the Polish Hussars are considered a real source of evil and even a stand in for fascism in some writing. This was to do with the Polish’s Commonwealth’s great influence in Belarussia and Lithuania at the time when the Russia was in chaos for lack of a king in the 17th century. All of which was put right by the coming of the Romanovs.
As for me whenever I see a picture of them all I can think about is Vienna and how the Poles saved Europe.
@omegapaladin and <span class="atwho-inserted" contenteditable="false" data-atwho-at-query="@bossmongo“>@bossmongo Thank you both so much I take your comments as high praise indeed.
Huzzah is a word I thought to use at the end of my essay instead of Excelsior but I could not resist the marvel comics reference.
Thank you so much Mama Toad.
Indeed. And that it infuriates Muslims enough that their militants commemorated the anniversary with the biggest terrorist attack ever on American soil. A teachable moment, for both the honor of the Poles and the perfidy of Islam.
Maybe not everyone’s cut of tea, but I like this…
https://youtu.be/9mGPnud_IjE
Thank you for a very nice post. I like the reminder that we face a foe that we have faced before.
Although Western Civilization had initial and occasional successes against the muslims, in the end the muslims won. They still hold Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul and until very recently they also held Jerusalem.
Why did they succeed? I suspect a big part of the reason is that western civilization passed on fighting and left the fighting for the orders of knights. The war was not waged as an institutional all out total war against islam, but was passed off to these quasi-religious mercenaries. Brave as they were, they were no substitute for all out national efforts.
And that same mindset is reflected anew in your comparison to special forces:
I have nothing but the greatest respect for special forces (although I think the Marines should have continued to resist adding them to their ranks). Cheney and Rumsfeld did a great disservice to this country and to the war effort by convincing G W Bush that we could win the war using special forces. They erred, badly.
What are special forces good for? They are great at small raids, reconnaissance, and deep, limited strikes, support roles, etc. They are not good for waging war, as we have seen in the unending efforts we’ve had in Iraq and Afghanistan.
There are many reasons those wars continue on, among them the unit rotations, the unwillingness to send in a large enough force (two battalions to start the war in Afghanistan!), an unwillingness to recognize that the cause of the war of the crusades has resurfaced, and many, many others. But a big part is the mindset that all we need to do is send in a very few elite forces, assassinate a few key leaders and the enemy’s will to fight will crumble.
We face the same problem against the muslims that our forefathers faced before. A religious-political enemy driven by holy command and united around their dogmatic and murderous ideology cannot be defeated without a united and total effort by western civilization. If we cannot learn this then we are doomed to lose again eventually. It is not trivial that Europe has imported fanatical muslim populations, and the US seems inclined to do so as well.
Special forces are indeed great men, who should impress us individually and as military units. But we should not make the mistake again that they should or can win wars.
What a great question! I disagree a bit with the premise. Europe put forth a huge amount of treasure, time and manpower into the Crusades and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. After the first crusade tens of thousands maybe more than a hundred thousand people tired to reach Jerusalem and live in the Kingdom of Jerusalem but the Turks stopped nearly all of them. The military orders were probably the best way available for Europe to project force into the Middle East but it simply was not enough. The manpower difference, the distance and existing technology all worked to the Muslim advantage. The fact the Muslim found it so difficult to win and ultimately failed is itself remarkable.
As to the modern day, yes winning the war on the cheap dragged things out. A Special Forces can do a lot but they don’t win wars on their own. But we won in Iraq, we didn’t lose the war we lost the peace. It was no different really than if we had beat Nazi Germany and then immediately left Western Europe to face the Soviet Union alone. The result of that withdraw would have made us regret World War II greatly, but it would have been wrong to say we didn’t beat Nazi Germany.
I like it.
<span class="atwho-inserted" contenteditable="false" data-atwho-at-query="@skyler“>@skyler: FIFY.
And I would humbly submit that the reason for the pivot to SOF as the main effort is the lack of imagination, competence and selfless service within General Purpose Forces.
I agree with you, here. I’m just saying that picking SOF as the force-of-choice was not done without due consideration.
I would also submit that the reason that two of the most important Knights in the current administration/chain of command are Kelly and Mattis is because Devil Dog leadership comprises the only senior leaders that hewed to the warrior code through previous administrations.
Some of the poem:
Man I love that part.
Perhaps, but those doing the “due consideration” were also repeatedly telling the commander in chief that they needed fewer and fewer forces to fight the war, that it was all but over right before the massacre of those mercenaries in Fallujah were killed and hung from a bridge, that we didn’t need to worry about keeping Iran afraid, and that we should turn over control of Iraq and Afghanistan to the host nation before the bullets and air strikes and artillery barrages were even close to being silenced.