Brisingr Spork Chapter 36: Insubordination (Part 2)
This is Part 2 of my spork of the chapter "Insubordination". It focuses on the battle and the aftermath, and I've finished it up with a brief discussion of what the chapter should have been.
We left off the first part of this spork, the Empire's soldiers were standing in the middle of a village, not reloading their crossbows or advancing to take advantage of the confusion they had caused in Roran's ranks, and Roran was getting his men to take their hunting bows, climb up on the roofs of nearby houses and shoot down at the Empire's soldiers while he made a dash for Captain Edric.
With a couple of days to think about the scenario, I've come to realise that there is a problem with the layout of the village and how it is used. The central area of the village is "several hundred feet" across, which means that there must be a substantial gap between the houses. I think Paolini knew this, because Roran needs to use a wagon and a pile of bodies to create a gap only 2-3 men wide. So, in the four minutes between Roran ordering his plan executed and his men being in position to carry it out, the Empire's soldiers must have seen the archers running (or riding, because they seem to have their horses behind the houses they climb) between the houses and redeployed to deal with the problem. They should also have made some attempt to advance during this period, so that their crossbowmen could deal with the Varden more effectively.
In addition to stationing men on the roofs of nearby houses, Roran has ten of the best spearmen and ten of the best swordsmen brought to him for his suicidal charge. Why he specifically wants the best of his spearmen and swordsmen is anyone's guess, because they never dismount to fight and their enemies are only going to be fighting with crossbows and spears, so bringing swordsmen to a dismounted fight wouldn't help much in any case. If this was a proper cavalry charge against an opposing body of cavalry, I could understand him having pure lancers in the front line followed by swordsmen to take advantage of the confusion after the first ranks strike. But, no, this was the situation or what Roran was calling for. He should instead have asked for his twenty best riders, because equestrian skill is what his plan requires, not skill with sword or spear.
Roran yells for his archers to fire and they stand up and instantly loose ("fire") into the soldiers, who offer no resistance and immediately begin to "howl with agony". These are hunting bows, and the Empire's soldiers are meant to be well armoured and equipped. The spearmen also have shields, which they would have had time to raise on seeing the archers rise. It takes time to stand up from a crouch/lying flat, get a good footing, draw a bow, take aim and then loose an arrow. It might only be a couple of seconds, but this will still be enough for those soldiers watching to raise their shields in time. It would also be enough time for the crossbowmen to begin loosing at the Varden's archers. Even if the crossbowmen all had windlass spanned siege crossbows, four minutes is plenty of time to reload them four times over. If they were belt spanned, the they could have been reloaded twelve to sixteen times in that period. More, they can be kept pointed and aimed at a location almost indefinitely, while bows can't be draw and held for more than a few seconds and still shoot accurately. The weapons of the groups would need to be switched for this scenario to work effectively.
On charging out from behind the house, Roran isn't greated by crossbow bolts or the sight of enemy soldiers who were attempting to outflank him. All the Empire's soldiers seem to be clumped up in the center of the village common, allowing him to ride around them without any danger and find Captain Edric and five other men fighting in a desperate clump, surrounded. Roran charges them, Snowfire acts like a proper warhorse (and is a little OP in that he can crush men's ribcages and break their arms with the same forehoof strike) and, despite the enemy spearmen and Roran's short hammer, manages to break Edric and co free from the melee. The Varden archers are also loosing into the men right near Roran and Edric which, at the range and with their light bows and relative inexperience, should mean that they're also hitting the Varden's horses and men.
Roran's warriors surround Edric's group, no Empire soldier doing a Thomas Grey and thrusting a spear into the bowels of the horses, and then back their horses up while the Empire's soldiers just stand around looking useless and no crossbowman decides to take a pot shot at any of the obviously important people (like the big man on an expensive horse who is acting like he's in command). Once clear, they turn and run, and it's only now that the soldiers try shooting them, but only manage three despite the close range.
Sidenote: Sir Thomas Grey the Elder was a legitimate badass. William Wallace's men left him for dead when Wallace made his first attack on the English, but he got better. The Scottish tried to kill him with a springald (medieval derivation of the ballista), but he survived a bolt through his upper jaw and woke up just as they were about to bury him. He once heard of a large group of Scottish cavalry intending to ambush him, so he ordered the non-combatants of his household to carry a banner like infantry, charged the ambush with his few men-at-arms and utterly routed the Scots. And, when a young knight came to him seeking fame, he sent the knight off into a group of 20 Scottish knights, then followed with his men-at-arms on foot, killed the Scottish horses with spears, then went and got his own horses and chased down the survivors.
Once clear, Edric asks Roran why he isn't committing suicide like everyone else was supposed to but, while he doesn't approve of Roran's plan (or else is angry or embarrassed at not having done so himself), Edric doesn't reprimand Roran. Even Paolini has sense enough to know that this wouldn't end or reflect well on either of them and avoids making Edric completely useless as a commander. Edric's next command, though, that they charge, isn't actually a bad one.
The most common medieval procedure for destroy an enemy infantry force who held out against a cavalry charge was to bring up archers or crossbowmen and let them shoot away at the formation until it was broken enough for a cavalry charge to succeed. This was the plan at Coutrai, but the French didn't count on the poor terrain, and it was used twice in Edward I's Welsh wars and then once again during the Battle of Falkirk. The French wanted to use it at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, but the circumstances of those battles prevented it. So, it's not a bad plan. It's very much a "cavalry officer" plan, with the heavy emphasis on the superiority of cavalry, and it might not work if Roran stripped enough archers to make a sufficient body of cavalry, but it's not a terrible plan per say. A better plan would be to retreat and harass the enemy into submission, however.
In any case, Roran decides to disobey Edric's instructions in the interests of saving his own men. He, very selfishly, gives no thought to the fact that, by not supporting Sand's attack, he might very well be condemning those men to death. Although we don't know how many troops Sand had at this point, the fact that he and Edric lost 150 men between them, and that Edric led only 10 men to Sand, but there was a total of 24 survivors at the end, suggests that Sand still had a reasonable number of men, maybe 40 or 50 before the charge. Properly supported, with a similar number charging from Roran's side, the attack could have worked. The number of men surviving the attack might not have changed significantly, but the Varden might still have carried the day. Of course, they might not have won either, but with Roran ignoring his orders Sand and Edric was doomed even before they started.
I think this needs to be emphasised very strongly: when Roran is punished for insubordination, it's not because he was intelligent and creative and cared more about his men than Edric did, it's because he disobeyed orders, cared more about his own glory and reputation and got men killed who might otherwise have survived.
Having decided to disobey orders and convinced Carn to do so - which then forces any holdouts to join him for fear of being denied magical protection and heeling - Roran and the others ride around the village and back to the section of the village held by his men. He arms the five men on foot with bows and sends them up on another roof to shoot at the Empire's soldiers. Then he has Carn cast a spell of deflection on the ten mounted men (but not their horses). Carn has some difficulty casting the spell, so Roran has him look directly into his eyes. This calms Carn down and gives him the confidence needed to successfully cast the spell. Can you say Hoo Yay?
At this point, there are around 500 surviving soldiers of the Empire, and they're not having much luck against the archers. Why this is the case isn't explained - as we learn later there are at least 30 crossbowmen in a single group, and they could easily take care of a group of archers on a single roof. Apparently they "struggled" to load their crossbows but, well, loading a crossbow isn't that difficult. Even with archers taking pot shots at anyone who peeks over their shield to loose, they seem to be protected when in cover behind them, much as they would if they were pavises, so the crossbowmen should still have minimal dfficulty reloading their crossbows and shooting at the rooftop archers.
You could argue that this disorganization is due to their leader being killed, but any semi-organised army will have some form of veteran soldier leading a particular group of men, or junior aristocratic commander. There won't be a total collapse in leadership, and veterans and/or NCOs (I know that's a fraught term, but vintenars and centenars were essentially NCOs) will keep control of their assigned men and try to steady any nearby soldiers who have lost their leader. The level of disorganisation shown here should not be happening, and the Empire's soldiers should be fighting back much more effectively.
Roran leads his ten chosen horsemen forward, bars part of the street between houses and then orders his men to use a broken wagon to block the rest of the street. There are a couple of things wrong here. First and foremost, you don't want to be on horseback against infantry in a standing fight. Cavalry is best used in a charge (which may only be at a trot, depending on the period and society) in a single, massed body of men and horses where their mass, momentum and the terror they inspire can be best used against infantry or other cavalry. Standing still, though, horses are just a giant target, and the swords of Roran's companions and his hammer don't have the reach to keep spearmen away from their horses necks and chests.
Secondly, Roran has put himself in a position where he can be outflanked and only sought to protect his flanks after taking up the exposed position. While he did instruct his archers not to let anyone outflank him, Roran neglects to account for the possibility that the Empire's soldiers might raise their shields above their heads to protect them against arrows and simply advance in a massed body against Roran. The distances aren't great enough for the Varden to break the Empire's advance with arrows if they chose to do so.
A few quarrels are loosed at Roran and Co, the crossbowmen ignoring the archers and the horses, and no harm comes to any of them. And, fortunately for the riders, none of the deflected bolts are deflected into their neighbour's horse. Roran gives whole Shakespearean style insult monologue, identifies himself as the cousin of Eragon and tells the Empire's soldiers that they'll get an earldom if they kill him. This sends one man running (and he is gleefully shot down by the Varden) and gets 30 crossbowmen to throw down their crossbows and charge him.
Now, if I'm a crossbowman and my enemy is mounted and worth a lot of money, I'm not going to charge immediately. If I haven't already seen my bolts deflected by his wards, I'm going to test it. If I have, then I'm going to try and shoot his horse, so that he can't gallop to safety if things go badly for him. I suspect a good number of my mates would also have the same idea, which would delay the initial charge, and will probably result in a massed charge once our crossbow bolts have killed their horses. If I'm a vintenar, then I'm definitely ordering however many crossbowmen I control to do this.
As the crossbowmen howl and charge in a disorganised fashion, Roran has time to give another pep talk about how the Varden are fighting to protect their homes and families, while the Empire's soldiers are fighting only because they're forced to. They're certainly not fighting because a foreign army lead by terrorists have invaded their homeland and they're being well paid to protect their families and homes.
Naturally, the inspired Varden who are fighting for their homes and families slaughter the Empire's soldiers who are either fighting only because they're being forced to or because they also want to protect their homes and families without losing a man or a horse, and Roran laughs to see them massacred. He them orders the bodies of the dead to be piled up as a barricade to funnel the remaining soldiers which, while gruesome, is probably more palatable to most people than the historical version, which was to kill the horses and use them as a barricade, or else to tie them nose to tail and use them as a living wall. On the other hand, the historical method would probably make a taller and sturdier wall, because thirty corpses aren't going to be stacked all that high along a 6 or 7 meter line.
A second group of Empire soldiers gathers, this time a hundred strong, and gives Roran and his companions enough time to make their wall of bodies, then rush forward. Despite there being at least thirteen or fourteen meters between the houses and the wall of bodies being less of a wall and more of a minor hurdle, the Empire's soldiers are apparently crushed together and robbed off all momentum. Look, I can see how they might get pressed together in a disorganised rush and when huddling from the arrows, but they're not going to be substantially slowed or restricted when there's nine or ten meters of space to fill. More importantly, this apparent crush and lack of room doesn't effect Roran, who eventually steals a spear from an enemy, twirls it around and then does a whole duck and dodge routine as though there's no one beside him. Oh yeah, and he does at last figure out that maybe being on a horse with a hammer against spearmen might be a bad idea and sends his horse to the rear, disrupting the Varden's formation both on the trip out and his trip back to the front to hog all the glory.
Herein begins Roran's Biblical feat of killing 193 men. I'm not going to go into a blow by blow account of this and what he gets wrong, but I will address three important points.
1) No one can fight for as long as Roran did without a break. Just watch any professional sport where they don't rotate an entire team off and on every time the play changes (looking at you Gridiron). Even rotating a small number of players throughout the game and with breaks in play for penalties, etc, both teams are exhausted by the end. Sometimes, if the play is particularly intense for ten minutes or so, you can see the quality of the play drop on both sides and see how the side with the least endurance is almost wrecked by the time the intense period is broken up by a penalty, conversion or the like. What Roran is doing is fighting non-stop for hours at a time. The human body cannot physically do this!
2) Despite receiving several wounds that bleed heavily and would inevitably kill him if not treated, Roran is still able to kill scores of men. It's one thing to fight when wounded in a desperate situation, perhaps fueled by adrenaline for a few minutes and unable to feel the pain, but eventually you're going to put too much weight on a wounded length and find that it can't support you any more or be prevented by a wound to the shoulder from lifting your shield high enough to stop an incoming blow in time.
3) Have you ever tried fighting on a pile of dead bodies? Okay, well, I haven't either, but humans are squishy and full of liquid. Dead men are going to bleed and lose control over their body functions in the moments before death, meaning that there is going to be a lot of liquid covering the bodies, which will make them slippery. And, being soft and squishy, they're going to give and have movement. Even if they don't shift and send you tumbling down, there's a good chance that they might shift and trap your ankle at the wrong moment or some shift of the pile will put an arm or leg in a position where you will trip or stumble on it. The pile will also almost certainly collapse a little if the sides become too steep for the weight. In short, a pile of dead bodies provides poor footing and is likely to trip you up or send you tumbling down sooner or later.
sigh
Rather than being horrified at the scale of the slaughter, the Varden all laugh at Roran's joke about only needing another 7 kills to reach an even 200 (then again, I probably would laugh at anything Roran said at this point, just to save myself). About the only person not impressed with Edric, who is understandably pissed that Roran disobeyed orders and didn't support his charge.
Edric and the twenty three other survivors who weren't with Roran seem to have hidden in among the bodies of the dead or else formed up some kind of defense behind one of the houses - the text really isn't clear on where they were and what they were doing - and come out of hiding once they're told that the Varden have won the day. Edric, on seeing Roran, instantly asks for his weapons and, despite encouragement from his men to rebel even further, Roran does the first sensible thing he has done all day, surrenders his weapons and submits to Edric as a prisoner. Edric, for his part, also has the good sense not to treat Roran harshly and has him work with the rest of the Varden to collect what can be salvaged from the dead and pile the bodies onto a pyre in the center of the village. Where they got all that wood I don't know, but I'm going to assume Edric had Roran's men tear down the houses for the wood to cool them down and keep them occupied and distracted from Roran's arrest. Snowfire returns and, in a surprising display of practicality, Roran realises that it might not be a good idea to ride a wounded horse and deigns to ride a lesser horse home.
What the chapter should have had
Thematically, this chapter is a wasted opportunity. This was a chance for Roran's idealism to come into contact with the harsh reality of war, for him to suffer a major defeat because of his idealism, and for others to suffer because of him. This should have been a turning point for Roran, where he realises that he isn't some great, heroic military leader and that sometimes you have to let people suffer in order to fulfil your goal. I know, not the most positive message, but it is a true one so far as war is concerned.
This chapter was also the perfect place to begin setting up Lord Barst as a credible threat.
We should have been treated to his brutal destruction of Surda's towns and villages, and seen his cunning ruthlessness as he destroyed the Varden as soon as Roran made a mistake.
This is the chapter that should have set up a rivalry between Roran and Barst which would make Barst relevant and give some real emotional weight to Roran's eventual defeat of him.
Instead, the only character development that Roran undergoes here is that he becomes even more blood thirsty and righteous, even when he has no cause to be. Done well, this could have been turned into a plot thread about Roran's descent into brutality and the negative consequences of this. Instead, it's just all about making him seem as much a badass as possible, and does so in such an exaggerated fashion that it has no impact. Roran is merely a cartoonish exaggeration of a heroic warrior from legend, not a real person.
We left off the first part of this spork, the Empire's soldiers were standing in the middle of a village, not reloading their crossbows or advancing to take advantage of the confusion they had caused in Roran's ranks, and Roran was getting his men to take their hunting bows, climb up on the roofs of nearby houses and shoot down at the Empire's soldiers while he made a dash for Captain Edric.
With a couple of days to think about the scenario, I've come to realise that there is a problem with the layout of the village and how it is used. The central area of the village is "several hundred feet" across, which means that there must be a substantial gap between the houses. I think Paolini knew this, because Roran needs to use a wagon and a pile of bodies to create a gap only 2-3 men wide. So, in the four minutes between Roran ordering his plan executed and his men being in position to carry it out, the Empire's soldiers must have seen the archers running (or riding, because they seem to have their horses behind the houses they climb) between the houses and redeployed to deal with the problem. They should also have made some attempt to advance during this period, so that their crossbowmen could deal with the Varden more effectively.
In addition to stationing men on the roofs of nearby houses, Roran has ten of the best spearmen and ten of the best swordsmen brought to him for his suicidal charge. Why he specifically wants the best of his spearmen and swordsmen is anyone's guess, because they never dismount to fight and their enemies are only going to be fighting with crossbows and spears, so bringing swordsmen to a dismounted fight wouldn't help much in any case. If this was a proper cavalry charge against an opposing body of cavalry, I could understand him having pure lancers in the front line followed by swordsmen to take advantage of the confusion after the first ranks strike. But, no, this was the situation or what Roran was calling for. He should instead have asked for his twenty best riders, because equestrian skill is what his plan requires, not skill with sword or spear.
Roran yells for his archers to fire and they stand up and instantly loose ("fire") into the soldiers, who offer no resistance and immediately begin to "howl with agony". These are hunting bows, and the Empire's soldiers are meant to be well armoured and equipped. The spearmen also have shields, which they would have had time to raise on seeing the archers rise. It takes time to stand up from a crouch/lying flat, get a good footing, draw a bow, take aim and then loose an arrow. It might only be a couple of seconds, but this will still be enough for those soldiers watching to raise their shields in time. It would also be enough time for the crossbowmen to begin loosing at the Varden's archers. Even if the crossbowmen all had windlass spanned siege crossbows, four minutes is plenty of time to reload them four times over. If they were belt spanned, the they could have been reloaded twelve to sixteen times in that period. More, they can be kept pointed and aimed at a location almost indefinitely, while bows can't be draw and held for more than a few seconds and still shoot accurately. The weapons of the groups would need to be switched for this scenario to work effectively.
On charging out from behind the house, Roran isn't greated by crossbow bolts or the sight of enemy soldiers who were attempting to outflank him. All the Empire's soldiers seem to be clumped up in the center of the village common, allowing him to ride around them without any danger and find Captain Edric and five other men fighting in a desperate clump, surrounded. Roran charges them, Snowfire acts like a proper warhorse (and is a little OP in that he can crush men's ribcages and break their arms with the same forehoof strike) and, despite the enemy spearmen and Roran's short hammer, manages to break Edric and co free from the melee. The Varden archers are also loosing into the men right near Roran and Edric which, at the range and with their light bows and relative inexperience, should mean that they're also hitting the Varden's horses and men.
Roran's warriors surround Edric's group, no Empire soldier doing a Thomas Grey and thrusting a spear into the bowels of the horses, and then back their horses up while the Empire's soldiers just stand around looking useless and no crossbowman decides to take a pot shot at any of the obviously important people (like the big man on an expensive horse who is acting like he's in command). Once clear, they turn and run, and it's only now that the soldiers try shooting them, but only manage three despite the close range.
Sidenote: Sir Thomas Grey the Elder was a legitimate badass. William Wallace's men left him for dead when Wallace made his first attack on the English, but he got better. The Scottish tried to kill him with a springald (medieval derivation of the ballista), but he survived a bolt through his upper jaw and woke up just as they were about to bury him. He once heard of a large group of Scottish cavalry intending to ambush him, so he ordered the non-combatants of his household to carry a banner like infantry, charged the ambush with his few men-at-arms and utterly routed the Scots. And, when a young knight came to him seeking fame, he sent the knight off into a group of 20 Scottish knights, then followed with his men-at-arms on foot, killed the Scottish horses with spears, then went and got his own horses and chased down the survivors.
Once clear, Edric asks Roran why he isn't committing suicide like everyone else was supposed to but, while he doesn't approve of Roran's plan (or else is angry or embarrassed at not having done so himself), Edric doesn't reprimand Roran. Even Paolini has sense enough to know that this wouldn't end or reflect well on either of them and avoids making Edric completely useless as a commander. Edric's next command, though, that they charge, isn't actually a bad one.
The most common medieval procedure for destroy an enemy infantry force who held out against a cavalry charge was to bring up archers or crossbowmen and let them shoot away at the formation until it was broken enough for a cavalry charge to succeed. This was the plan at Coutrai, but the French didn't count on the poor terrain, and it was used twice in Edward I's Welsh wars and then once again during the Battle of Falkirk. The French wanted to use it at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt, but the circumstances of those battles prevented it. So, it's not a bad plan. It's very much a "cavalry officer" plan, with the heavy emphasis on the superiority of cavalry, and it might not work if Roran stripped enough archers to make a sufficient body of cavalry, but it's not a terrible plan per say. A better plan would be to retreat and harass the enemy into submission, however.
In any case, Roran decides to disobey Edric's instructions in the interests of saving his own men. He, very selfishly, gives no thought to the fact that, by not supporting Sand's attack, he might very well be condemning those men to death. Although we don't know how many troops Sand had at this point, the fact that he and Edric lost 150 men between them, and that Edric led only 10 men to Sand, but there was a total of 24 survivors at the end, suggests that Sand still had a reasonable number of men, maybe 40 or 50 before the charge. Properly supported, with a similar number charging from Roran's side, the attack could have worked. The number of men surviving the attack might not have changed significantly, but the Varden might still have carried the day. Of course, they might not have won either, but with Roran ignoring his orders Sand and Edric was doomed even before they started.
I think this needs to be emphasised very strongly: when Roran is punished for insubordination, it's not because he was intelligent and creative and cared more about his men than Edric did, it's because he disobeyed orders, cared more about his own glory and reputation and got men killed who might otherwise have survived.
Having decided to disobey orders and convinced Carn to do so - which then forces any holdouts to join him for fear of being denied magical protection and heeling - Roran and the others ride around the village and back to the section of the village held by his men. He arms the five men on foot with bows and sends them up on another roof to shoot at the Empire's soldiers. Then he has Carn cast a spell of deflection on the ten mounted men (but not their horses). Carn has some difficulty casting the spell, so Roran has him look directly into his eyes. This calms Carn down and gives him the confidence needed to successfully cast the spell. Can you say Hoo Yay?
At this point, there are around 500 surviving soldiers of the Empire, and they're not having much luck against the archers. Why this is the case isn't explained - as we learn later there are at least 30 crossbowmen in a single group, and they could easily take care of a group of archers on a single roof. Apparently they "struggled" to load their crossbows but, well, loading a crossbow isn't that difficult. Even with archers taking pot shots at anyone who peeks over their shield to loose, they seem to be protected when in cover behind them, much as they would if they were pavises, so the crossbowmen should still have minimal dfficulty reloading their crossbows and shooting at the rooftop archers.
You could argue that this disorganization is due to their leader being killed, but any semi-organised army will have some form of veteran soldier leading a particular group of men, or junior aristocratic commander. There won't be a total collapse in leadership, and veterans and/or NCOs (I know that's a fraught term, but vintenars and centenars were essentially NCOs) will keep control of their assigned men and try to steady any nearby soldiers who have lost their leader. The level of disorganisation shown here should not be happening, and the Empire's soldiers should be fighting back much more effectively.
Roran leads his ten chosen horsemen forward, bars part of the street between houses and then orders his men to use a broken wagon to block the rest of the street. There are a couple of things wrong here. First and foremost, you don't want to be on horseback against infantry in a standing fight. Cavalry is best used in a charge (which may only be at a trot, depending on the period and society) in a single, massed body of men and horses where their mass, momentum and the terror they inspire can be best used against infantry or other cavalry. Standing still, though, horses are just a giant target, and the swords of Roran's companions and his hammer don't have the reach to keep spearmen away from their horses necks and chests.
Secondly, Roran has put himself in a position where he can be outflanked and only sought to protect his flanks after taking up the exposed position. While he did instruct his archers not to let anyone outflank him, Roran neglects to account for the possibility that the Empire's soldiers might raise their shields above their heads to protect them against arrows and simply advance in a massed body against Roran. The distances aren't great enough for the Varden to break the Empire's advance with arrows if they chose to do so.
A few quarrels are loosed at Roran and Co, the crossbowmen ignoring the archers and the horses, and no harm comes to any of them. And, fortunately for the riders, none of the deflected bolts are deflected into their neighbour's horse. Roran gives whole Shakespearean style insult monologue, identifies himself as the cousin of Eragon and tells the Empire's soldiers that they'll get an earldom if they kill him. This sends one man running (and he is gleefully shot down by the Varden) and gets 30 crossbowmen to throw down their crossbows and charge him.
Now, if I'm a crossbowman and my enemy is mounted and worth a lot of money, I'm not going to charge immediately. If I haven't already seen my bolts deflected by his wards, I'm going to test it. If I have, then I'm going to try and shoot his horse, so that he can't gallop to safety if things go badly for him. I suspect a good number of my mates would also have the same idea, which would delay the initial charge, and will probably result in a massed charge once our crossbow bolts have killed their horses. If I'm a vintenar, then I'm definitely ordering however many crossbowmen I control to do this.
As the crossbowmen howl and charge in a disorganised fashion, Roran has time to give another pep talk about how the Varden are fighting to protect their homes and families, while the Empire's soldiers are fighting only because they're forced to. They're certainly not fighting because a foreign army lead by terrorists have invaded their homeland and they're being well paid to protect their families and homes.
Naturally, the inspired Varden who are fighting for their homes and families slaughter the Empire's soldiers who are either fighting only because they're being forced to or because they also want to protect their homes and families without losing a man or a horse, and Roran laughs to see them massacred. He them orders the bodies of the dead to be piled up as a barricade to funnel the remaining soldiers which, while gruesome, is probably more palatable to most people than the historical version, which was to kill the horses and use them as a barricade, or else to tie them nose to tail and use them as a living wall. On the other hand, the historical method would probably make a taller and sturdier wall, because thirty corpses aren't going to be stacked all that high along a 6 or 7 meter line.
A second group of Empire soldiers gathers, this time a hundred strong, and gives Roran and his companions enough time to make their wall of bodies, then rush forward. Despite there being at least thirteen or fourteen meters between the houses and the wall of bodies being less of a wall and more of a minor hurdle, the Empire's soldiers are apparently crushed together and robbed off all momentum. Look, I can see how they might get pressed together in a disorganised rush and when huddling from the arrows, but they're not going to be substantially slowed or restricted when there's nine or ten meters of space to fill. More importantly, this apparent crush and lack of room doesn't effect Roran, who eventually steals a spear from an enemy, twirls it around and then does a whole duck and dodge routine as though there's no one beside him. Oh yeah, and he does at last figure out that maybe being on a horse with a hammer against spearmen might be a bad idea and sends his horse to the rear, disrupting the Varden's formation both on the trip out and his trip back to the front to hog all the glory.
Herein begins Roran's Biblical feat of killing 193 men. I'm not going to go into a blow by blow account of this and what he gets wrong, but I will address three important points.
1) No one can fight for as long as Roran did without a break. Just watch any professional sport where they don't rotate an entire team off and on every time the play changes (looking at you Gridiron). Even rotating a small number of players throughout the game and with breaks in play for penalties, etc, both teams are exhausted by the end. Sometimes, if the play is particularly intense for ten minutes or so, you can see the quality of the play drop on both sides and see how the side with the least endurance is almost wrecked by the time the intense period is broken up by a penalty, conversion or the like. What Roran is doing is fighting non-stop for hours at a time. The human body cannot physically do this!
2) Despite receiving several wounds that bleed heavily and would inevitably kill him if not treated, Roran is still able to kill scores of men. It's one thing to fight when wounded in a desperate situation, perhaps fueled by adrenaline for a few minutes and unable to feel the pain, but eventually you're going to put too much weight on a wounded length and find that it can't support you any more or be prevented by a wound to the shoulder from lifting your shield high enough to stop an incoming blow in time.
3) Have you ever tried fighting on a pile of dead bodies? Okay, well, I haven't either, but humans are squishy and full of liquid. Dead men are going to bleed and lose control over their body functions in the moments before death, meaning that there is going to be a lot of liquid covering the bodies, which will make them slippery. And, being soft and squishy, they're going to give and have movement. Even if they don't shift and send you tumbling down, there's a good chance that they might shift and trap your ankle at the wrong moment or some shift of the pile will put an arm or leg in a position where you will trip or stumble on it. The pile will also almost certainly collapse a little if the sides become too steep for the weight. In short, a pile of dead bodies provides poor footing and is likely to trip you up or send you tumbling down sooner or later.
sigh
Rather than being horrified at the scale of the slaughter, the Varden all laugh at Roran's joke about only needing another 7 kills to reach an even 200 (then again, I probably would laugh at anything Roran said at this point, just to save myself). About the only person not impressed with Edric, who is understandably pissed that Roran disobeyed orders and didn't support his charge.
Edric and the twenty three other survivors who weren't with Roran seem to have hidden in among the bodies of the dead or else formed up some kind of defense behind one of the houses - the text really isn't clear on where they were and what they were doing - and come out of hiding once they're told that the Varden have won the day. Edric, on seeing Roran, instantly asks for his weapons and, despite encouragement from his men to rebel even further, Roran does the first sensible thing he has done all day, surrenders his weapons and submits to Edric as a prisoner. Edric, for his part, also has the good sense not to treat Roran harshly and has him work with the rest of the Varden to collect what can be salvaged from the dead and pile the bodies onto a pyre in the center of the village. Where they got all that wood I don't know, but I'm going to assume Edric had Roran's men tear down the houses for the wood to cool them down and keep them occupied and distracted from Roran's arrest. Snowfire returns and, in a surprising display of practicality, Roran realises that it might not be a good idea to ride a wounded horse and deigns to ride a lesser horse home.
What the chapter should have had
Thematically, this chapter is a wasted opportunity. This was a chance for Roran's idealism to come into contact with the harsh reality of war, for him to suffer a major defeat because of his idealism, and for others to suffer because of him. This should have been a turning point for Roran, where he realises that he isn't some great, heroic military leader and that sometimes you have to let people suffer in order to fulfil your goal. I know, not the most positive message, but it is a true one so far as war is concerned.
This chapter was also the perfect place to begin setting up Lord Barst as a credible threat.
We should have been treated to his brutal destruction of Surda's towns and villages, and seen his cunning ruthlessness as he destroyed the Varden as soon as Roran made a mistake.
This is the chapter that should have set up a rivalry between Roran and Barst which would make Barst relevant and give some real emotional weight to Roran's eventual defeat of him.
Instead, the only character development that Roran undergoes here is that he becomes even more blood thirsty and righteous, even when he has no cause to be. Done well, this could have been turned into a plot thread about Roran's descent into brutality and the negative consequences of this. Instead, it's just all about making him seem as much a badass as possible, and does so in such an exaggerated fashion that it has no impact. Roran is merely a cartoonish exaggeration of a heroic warrior from legend, not a real person.