The Weekly Warfare   Musings martial from across the SCA

As was the way of things (and a great way it was), the morning on Thursday was devoted to the rapier warpoint battle: The field battle.

It was a good set up: say lay-on, and then it’s last man standing, best of five.  These are the things the way they should be.

For this one, Her Majesty Brianna took the field with us.  I love any royal who takes the field with the rapier fighters.  I especially love any queen or princess who does so (I think Gertie may be the only other, at least that I can remember).  I even more especially love Her Majesty for doing so: she suffers from fibromyalgia and was afraid of receiving a blow that would cause her excruciating pain, but choked down the concern and stepped out with us.  Greylond and a couple of other big guns were guarding her, though, to make sure anything that came at her never got there, and she retired from the field each time without getting struck.

Run 1: We formed up, Atlantia on the left, Aethelmarc on the right, allies in the middle (I think; Hawke, do you recall it otherwise?).  The plan was to stay near our start line, let them do the walking, and meet them in a line.  The line wouldn’t stretch across the whole field, so we also posted strong flank guards.

At Lay On we advanced a few paces and then stopped to await the enemy.  Then Aethelmarc advanced a few more paces.  We started pulling Atlantia forward to reform and eliminate the gap, but that led to disorder in our ranks that didn’t get entirely sorted out by the time the enemy got to us.  Also, pulling that far forward put a greater burden on our flank guards.  I don’t recall if the center broke or the left broke, but we ended up getting squeezed and crushed.

It was pretty clear that we were thoroughly outnumbered and there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about it.  We were standing around talking with Celric and I said, “Tell them ‘Sure, we’ll let you have Wistric’.”  I was really hoping for that chance, not out of a very civil sentiment, but it didn’t arise.  Oh well.

Run 2: The second run we shifted uphill to our right to form square with our allies (So they became the south face, we became the east face, and the edges of the world were the north and west faces).  But again they advanced too far, which meant disordered and a strung out face.  I’d been hoping we could get Atlantia to form a pike wall, but our front was too large and Atlantia hasn’t trained that enough/at all.

I took station behind our left, sergeanting along until I saw Miguel die, leaving a hole in the Hawkwood unit.  Hawkwood was our far left unit, and made up entirely of scholars (four of them, including Miguel).  They were getting hit by a pretty strong force that well out-numbered them.  I fell in to reinforce and we had a good long fight of it (with me just standing there being scary most of the time, and them doing all the heavy lifting), until somewhere to our back/right the line breached and it was over.

Run 3: This time at Lay On we again formed square, with Aethelmarc tucked in tighter so that we were a little more solid.  As the enemy approached, though, the plan was to perform a counter-charge.  Aethelmarc initiated, and Atlantia fired a second later, but… well, as has been discussed here, “Charge” leads to “Hold.”  Simultaneous to Atlantia yelling “Charge,” the marshals along the Aethelmarc zone were yelling “Hold.”  Our charge was a couple of steps from contact with the enemy before the Hold trickled over to us, and then we had to reset our line.  Possibly muttering “Sonofabitch” while we did.  At “Lay On” we called “Charge” again, this time against a prepared opponent, and still punched through them.

We wiped out what was in front of us and turned right, hitting the flank of the units attacking Aethelmarc.  But they had sufficient numbers left over to throw forces against us.  I went out somewhere in here.  We ended up losing, but it was a much closer run than previously.

Then it was off to the Armored Woods.

Have I mentioned I love me the heck out of the new woods?  At least, the ones the armored fighters fight in, where you can’t see one flag from the other.  The rapier woods… eh…

The woods has two rough trails, one going up the left side (from the Allies’ perspective), the other on the right.  There were six flags, laid out in two lines across the field, two along each path and two in between.  To break past a tie you’d need to grab a flag nearer to their rez point.  Thought the Allies, “Who could we get to go for that?  Oooohhhh right… Hey Atlantia!”

The Queens Spears formed up near the head of Atlantia because, well, we like to run.  Atlantia had the left side of the field.  At Lay On the Spears took off at a trot down the path with the front wave of Atlantia.  After a few hundred feet we blew past the near left flag.  A hundred or so feet more and we blew past the far left flag… and kept going.

We eventually came up against the enemy and fell in to line about halfway between the far flag and their rez point, and there we ran in to Blood Guard.  Then both sides spent the next half hour or so cycling back to rezzes, though, as you can probably figure out, our rez runs were taking longer than theirs, which meant a lot of hard fighting.  There was some pushing back and forth, but eventually Brand-new-Sir Turgeis and some others pulled us back to a dozen yards in front of the far flag.  We formed line there, behind a couple of fallen trees (yay making use of terrain!), and hung out.  I was blown from all the running back and forth to rez and fell in behind the guard along the fallen tree.  We stood there, looking scary, and they pressed us very little.  So I spent the second half of the battle not going back to rez.  My first woods battle followed exactly the same pattern.

Somewhere along the line we secured at least another flag, because the eventual score was a 3-3 split.  Terrain and training do negate some numbers disadvantages.  Just a bit.