On the Convenient Misremembering of the First Southern War

The latest edition of The Southern Settlement, by Professor Edric Hartrell, describes the First Southern War as an unsuccessful attempt to restore the natural political unity of the northern kingdoms. The word “restore” requires a previous union; Professor Hartrell supplies none. “Natural” requires an argument; he supplies a map. Upon that map, Grendon’s mineral country is coloured with the same agreeable ochre as the Thanedom of Sudermark, which establishes that his printer possesses ochre. I have examined the authorities cited beneath it, together with several authorities whose omission considerably lightens the professor’s undertaking. They describe an invasion, a succession of military reverses and a peace imposed by exhaustion. Since his book is already being assigned to students, the correction must extend beyond its cartography.

I began with the Drennish customs returns because Hartrell calls the annexation of Drenne a voluntary commercial accommodation. Commerce does indeed leave excellent evidence of accommodation: revised duties, negotiated exemptions and the tiresome correspondence of men who consider every additional penny a personal assault. Here the returns cease abruptly. The succeeding books employ Sudermark’s military weights, bear the countersignatures of occupying officers and record the seizure of bonded grain. When I put these volumes before Hartrell at the Royal Historical Society, he suggested that administrative continuity might nevertheless be inferred. I asked him to identify the administration which had consented. He referred me to his chapter on national destiny. I insisted upon a name. The chairman, who had hoped to conclude before luncheon, was much inconvenienced by this elementary requirement.

Sudermark’s preparations preceded its discovery of Drenne’s supposed desire for absorption. The dry southwestern thanedom had expanded its foundries, standardised its ordnance and organised supply with a speed its neighbours observed without adequately understanding. Its parliament transferred authority to the chancellor through successive grants represented as necessary to efficiency. Drenne, lying upon the inner bay, then fell almost overnight. The surviving orders show coordinated attacks upon the roads and government offices, followed by demands for submission delivered after resistance had become impracticable. With the annexation secure, parliament was dissolved and the enlarged state refounded as a military autocracy under the thane. The sequence matters: accounts which place the dissolution before the preparations conceal how much of the machinery of conquest had been furnished through parliamentary assent.

The Drennish collapse has acquired a second, equally comfortable explanation: that its people lacked the courage to defend themselves. Mistress Gudra Skell, a Dwarven lock-worker who helped close the eastern canal gates against the advance, expressed her opinion of this judgement with a precision unsuitable for the Society’s minutes. I had initially supposed that the gates had failed through defective maintenance. She made me inspect the surviving hinge sockets, then produced the repair account which my archival assistant had overlooked. The gates held. The troops assigned to cover them had received contradictory orders and withdrawn. I corrected my notes in her presence. A country may possess brave inhabitants and an administration capable of wasting them; the Drennish records contain ample evidence of both.

Grendon was the next object. Its mineral wealth supported trade with Calder and Harnwood, although its roads, revenue and military establishments remained poorly developed. Sudermark’s proclamations spoke of frontier security; its transport instructions named ore stores, assay offices and the routes by which metal could be removed. These documents permit a firmer conclusion about the purpose of the invasion than any estimate of the thane’s private temperament. I cannot establish whether he believed all the declarations issued in his name. I can establish that his officers were told to secure productive mines and that their quartermasters had calculated the draught required to carry away the contents of particular depots. An intention which has reached the stage of hiring wagons deserves considerable evidential weight.

Calder and Harnwood each came to Grendon’s defence, and each did so alone. Our patriotic schoolbooks have found this arrangement awkward and commonly describe the kingdoms as allies from the first alarm. Their armies had a common enemy; their governments had separate expectations, which reached their commanders as incompatible instructions. Caldric dispatches requested assistance which Harnwood officers lacked authority to provide. Harnwood’s stores stood within reach of Caldric formations whose commissaries could neither requisition nor purchase them on acceptable terms. Grendon’s forces, already retreating, were expected to reconcile these difficulties while losing the ground upon which reconciliation might have been useful. Sudermark overran Grendon and advanced into both neighbouring kingdoms. Its success was substantial, and any history which diminishes it makes the subsequent recovery unintelligible.

At the former crossing of the Nessel, I disputed the official account with an Elven veteran named Velith Ilyan, who maintained that his company had held the bridge until the northern withdrawal was complete. The pension statements placed the company’s departure earlier. I thought the discrepancy an ordinary improvement of memory and said so with more confidence than courtesy. Ilyan asked which bridge I meant. The military survey had omitted a timber service crossing downstream, and the pension examiner had combined two actions under one heading. We walked to the surviving abutments. His recollection was correct upon that point; his estimate of the enemy’s strength remained unsupported. I accepted the first and declined the second. Living witnesses are invaluable, particularly when they can lead an investigator to masonry, but longevity confers no general exemption from the need for corroboration.

The war turned after Calder and Harnwood allied and merged their commands. Later writers have attributed the change to a sudden renewal of national spirit, which may be admired without explaining how an army obtains flour. The combined command established common priorities for transport, reconciled ammunition supply and acquired authority to move troops across the old boundaries without conducting a miniature diplomatic negotiation. Grendonic guides and surviving local formations gave it knowledge of roads which the invaders had learned chiefly as lines upon requisition schedules. These measures took time to become effective. There were still disputes, failures and officers whose attachment to precedence exceeded their usefulness. Nevertheless, the armies could at last concentrate their available strength. Sudermark was driven from Caldric and Harnwood territory, then from Grendon.

Hartrell describes the ensuing southern withdrawal as a voluntary limitation of military objectives. Sudermark’s own accounts offer a less accommodating explanation. Of approximately one hundred and forty-six thousand troops committed to the northern campaigns, they assigned fifty-seven thousand to death, thirty-eight thousand to captivity or continuing incapacity, and twenty-four thousand to garrisons and communications. Approximately twenty-seven thousand remained for field operations. The precision belongs to the accounts; the underlying conditions were considerably less tidy. Men reported missing might later return, and continuing incapacity covered very different prospects of recovery. Even with those qualifications, an army which has lost so much of its effective strength requires no subtle political motive to explain its retreat.

The northern victors were also gravely depleted. Their establishments listed one hundred and twelve thousand soldiers, of whom thirty-nine thousand were fit and present. I have seen the larger number used to demonstrate that they could readily have conquered Sudermark had their ministers possessed sufficient resolution. An establishment is an authorised body of men; its absent members cannot be marched by an energetic choice of adjective. Fighting ended upon Drenne’s ground because Sudermark’s military capacity was exhausted, while the victors’ remaining strength imposed severe limits upon further operations. Sudermark retained Drenne and holds it still. That retention records the boundary at which the war ended, though it supplies no retrospective consent from the people whose kingdom had been annexed.

The mortality of the northern population must also be rescued from the uses to which both parties put it. Before the war, the three kingdoms contained approximately four million eight hundred thousand inhabitants. The best reconstruction places deaths above ordinary mortality at about three hundred and forty-four thousand: two hundred and forty-two thousand Humans, seventy-one thousand Dwarves and thirty-one thousand Elves. A defensible range extends from roughly three hundred and twenty-six thousand to three hundred and sixty-three thousand. Those limits reflect missing registers and uncertain estimates of the population exposed. I have rejected higher totals printed in Caldric commemorative works because several count displaced households as dead. A false addition remains false when inscribed beneath a handsome monument.

Losses clustered along the campaigning roads and in the grain districts subjected to requisition. This distribution helps explain why military casualty lists cannot describe the full destruction. Grain taken during one passage of troops was unavailable when the next army arrived; breeding stock slaughtered in autumn could provide no increase in spring. In comparing temple registers with estate accounts, I found districts where deaths rose after the principal formations had departed. The surviving records support hunger and associated disease as substantial causes, although they seldom permit confident diagnosis in individual cases. My knowledge of physiology does not entitle me to identify a fever from a clerk’s entry of “taken ill”. I would welcome equal restraint from historians whose medical education appears to consist of recognising the word pestilence.

The subsequent unification of the surviving governments has encouraged the fiction that a single northern nation entered the war. Unification was an outcome requiring political construction. Calder’s royal line continued, joined by marriage to Grendon’s; Calder’s parliament became the greater kingdom’s parliament, augmented by the House of Lords of Harnwood. Tarnis, the trade hub where the three borders had met, became the capital. Each arrangement answered practical questions of succession, representation or access. The kingdom carries Calder’s name, but that name must not be allowed to swallow the separate governments whose choices shaped the early campaign. I have objected to this practice in our own lecture rooms, where the objection is received with less enthusiasm than my corrections of Sudermark’s publications.

The ruling party in Sudermark continues to teach that its nation is the greatest upon earth and that Calder is a brutish cousin properly subject to southern government. Claims of excellence can be tested in particular matters; an efficient foundry may furnish excellent guns under an execrable administration. The supposed right to govern a neighbour receives no assistance from such measurements. Sudermark’s repeated attempts to re-enter the Caldric lands have sought Grendon’s mineral country and have repeatedly been rebuffed. Their recurrence supports the conclusion that the original territorial appetite survived defeat. It cannot make that appetite a title to possession, however often schoolmasters are instructed to confuse the two.

No Human now living remembers the First Southern War. Dwarves and Elves who endured it can still answer questions, and we are wasting that opportunity whenever we invite them merely to endorse a prepared account. I have arranged for the testimony collected in this inquiry to be deposited with copies of the relevant records, including the passages which required me to amend my own conclusions. Hartrell may consult them, and I shall gladly assist him in locating the evidence his next edition will need. He will find a rapidly armed state which conquered Drenne, invaded Grendon, defeated divided opponents and was subsequently driven back by their combined forces. He will also find ample evidence of northern incompetence, civilian suffering and the limits of the victory. An honest account has room for all of it; I expect his revised volume to require rather more paper.