Hile Troy - What a Berk!!!

[drew]

drew and humor go hand in hand.

[hierachy]

I have said it before and I will say it again: Hile Troy rules!

[Gadget nee Jemcheeta]

Well, he ruled... I mean, he ruled Andelain for a while...you know...before
he died to resurrect Hollain

[hierachy]

Well, he ruled... I mean, he ruled Andelain for a while...you know...before
*RUNES SPOILER*

Spoiler

breaking the law of life

heh.

How is that a Runes spoiler? It happened in WGW...

[Gadget nee Jemcheeta]

Edit:removed

[hierachy]

Isn't it made clearly important in runes? I mean, really...

That's irrelevant. It happened in WGW, and is not a Runes spoiler.

[drew]

...well it woulnd't have been a Runes spoiler, until you Told everyone that it was a RUnes Spoiler

[Gadget nee Jemcheeta]

There we go. All gone.

[CovenantJr]

Hile Troy was a berk. In fact, having been reading the tactical genius of Parmenion in David Gemmell's Lion of Macedon recently, I'm tempted to revive Hierachy's topic on planning a better defence of the Land.

[Fist and Faith]

drew and humor go hand in hand.

[hierachy]

Hile Troy was a berk. In fact, having been reading the tactical genius of Parmenion in David Gemmell's Lion of Macedon recently, I'm tempted to revive Hierachy's topic on planning a better defence of the Land.

Haha, wow... that takes me back

[Edelaith]

(sighs)

I've not read all the posts in this thread yet, so pardon me if I cover something already previously discussed.
There are conflicting reports on just how many people lived in the Upper Land. A few tens of thousands? A few hundreds of thousands? Several million? We have an area of 810,000 square miles, so several millions could have lived there (it is 900 miles from Revelstone to Mithil Stonedown.)
If the answer is several hundred thousand or several million, then the Lords had access to a grim answer to the problem: a military draft.

Enlistment in the Warward was strictly voluntary, I recall. One went to the Loresraat, and if one was successful in learning the Sword Path there, one could join the Warward. I remember the warriors of the Warward as being quite capable, as you would expect of highly trained professional soldiers from what amounted to a military academy.
It is not quite clear to me what the status was of those who studied the Staff Path. I honestly believe they should have been assigned to the Warward, these Lilianrill and Rhaemarael students, and the graduates of the two Paths should have worked together as a team (the Ur-Viles did this.)
The Warward was 20,000 strong at the start of the Illearth War. Had a draft been imposed, it could have been hundreds of thousands strong. Or even millions strong. Look at the Ramen: the entire adult population of the Ramen became warriors during the Illearth War.
However, obviously, a draft would have been a horrific concept to the Lords, and probably a violation of the Oath of Peace. I do not think it would have gone over too well with the people of the Land in any event (except for the Ramen, where the draft was cultural and automatic. However, they would not leave their native Plains of Ra.)
So, Hile Troy was partially defeated by the underlying tenets of the culture he was trying to protect. Lord Mhoram himself realized the shortcomings of his culture in terms of it's ability to wage war when he realized the Oath of Peace blocked comprehension of Kevins' Lore. Hile Troy, although he did not know it, was handicapped by this blindness as well.

And yet, to have instituted a universal draft (somehow) and forced everyone to abandon the Oath of Peace, and invoking hatred and anger to feed Kevins' Lore, and to otherwise have altered the culture of the Upper Land so that it was an effective culture of war (ala Sparta) ... well, Lord Foul would have already have won, wouldn't he have?
Kevin had huge armies, and he had all Seven Wards of his Lore, and he had the Ramen and the Giants, and he still lost against Lord Foul. And Lord Foul didn't even have the Illearth Stone back then.

Hile Troy didn't have the High Lord to help out. She abandoned wisdom and sought for the Seventh Ward (it was unwise, and the Lords should not have touched this with a ten foot pole, since it had been made clear that Knowledge Unearned always turned on the Learner. Kevin knew this, hid his Wards for that reason, and the New Lords should have known better than to pursue a pipe dream.)
Hile Troy didn't have the Staff of Law. Elena took it with her, when it was desperately needed in the war.
Hile Troy didn't even have the Bloodguard. They would not leave Revelstone unguarded, and no amount of persuation was going to make them change their minds.

Lord Foul only lost a third of his force in Garrotting Deep. That according to the author in The Power that Preserves. So Lord Foul had over a million strong to send against the Lords, including tens of thousands of lore-wise ur-viles.

Hile Troy was up against the impossible.
When Hile Troy realized he was up against the impossible, he went into despair, as Lord Foul intended. Despair was Lord Fouls' mightiest weapon.
In the end, Hile Troy did what all too many of Lord Fouls' foes did: he committed suicide. ('I'll pay it. I'll pay anything! My army is being slaughtered!') Even given his loss in the Deep, Lord Foul must have laughed long and loudly at this utter defeat of Hile Troy: the reduction of all Hile Troys' hope and love for the Land, his passion to defend it, his endless work to build the best possible defense for it, into broken despair, abject pain, madness, and finally self destruction.
Yes, I think Lord Foul laughed.
And I do not know of any way Hile Troy could have escaped the trap. Even if he had somehow introduced firearms, artillery, tanks, aircraft, and even missiles into the equation, he still would have lost (Foul would simply have copied everything invented and built.) Hile Troy could not win by military force, under any scenario imaginable.

I feel sorry for Hile Troy, and more sorry for those who believed in him.
Those who knew Covenant was the only hope, were the wise ones.

Just some thoughts. Just opinions. Hile Troy thought military force was the answer. Elena thought the Earthblood and Kevin were the answer. But the only answer was Covenant. An awfully high price was paid before everyone truly realized this.

[Gadget nee Jemcheeta]

Excellent post! I think perhaps Lord Foul's laughter was a little less forceful at the loss of a giant raver to a Forestal, and the lessening of the Illearth stone, but I'm sure the despair helped ease the loss a little.

[drew]

Here's a question, why didn't anyone -like Troy- try to enlist the help of the Giants?

I mean what were they doing all that time that no one heard from them?

With those guys on your side..even if there was only 500 of them, they could have turned to tables.

They could have sailed a Drommond near Foul's Creche, just to keep an eye on things...although, maybe they did, and that's how the triplets got captured.

[Thaale]

I think everyone who has read the series has asked in frustration, “But why don’t they just…?” at various points – particularly during the prosecution of the Illearth War. And as noted by many, SRD really doesn’t seem to have much of a concept of military strategy (as opposed to tactics, which are not lacking – the problem is just that so often a wrong tactic is used by each side). But let’s ignore the meta-problem of the author’s possibly faulty strategy and look at the War from the POV of the characters only.

I sympathize with and partially agree with much of Michael’s post. I’m going to focus on some of the parts I didn’t entirely agree with.

Two general responses come to my mind to the overall themes of his post:

1) I don’t think he properly allows for further changes Foul could have made to his plans based on hypothetical changes made by Troy. It may be true to say that with Foul and Fleshharrower implementing Strategy F that Troy could have achieved better and less fluky results with Alternate Strategy X instead of his Strategy T which has been so criticized here. But Troy has to consider all possibilities, including the inevitable one that if he tries to match X up against F, Foul is going to respond with G. This is very generally stated but I think the point is clear.

For a specific example, say Troy had camped the army out at Landsdrop and waited for Fleshharrower. Well, what if Foul and Fleshharower had just waited at Foul’s Crèche? Waited for months as Troy’s army ran out of materiel and as his long supply chain grew ragged? I’m not saying that’s exactly what would have happened, just that something other than Foul and Fleshharrower obligingly sticking their head into the noose would have occurred.

2) I think Michael is too hard on Troy for not taking advantage of the time and resources at his disposal. Troy has been in the Land for five years – he hasn’t been in charge of the Warward for five years. For a while, he was like an infant, having to learn even how to see. Then he had to make a military reputation for himself, be given some minor authority, and eventually be promoted to the top job. I know all this happened “overnight” in the colloquial sense, but it didn’t happen overnight in the exact literal sense! So the time at his disposal has not been all that long (two years?) Certainly not long enough for many of the long-range suggestions Michael makes to achieve any results. Even the full five years would be but the blink of an eye in which to try to militarily “modernize” a medieval pacifist society.

Now, some specifics:

Teaching people to themselves be instructors so that they can then go out and teach farmboys how to fight is a long range plan. It may be a good one, but it’s not one that can bear significant fruit in a couple of years. Pursuing this at the cost of neglecting more immediate planning would not have been a good decision.

And keep in mind that Troy and the Lords were operating with the certain knowledge than within less than a decade the crisis would come. Foul’s prophecy made to Covenant was still operative. Some of these suggestions for Troy would make sense in an information vacuum, if you theoretically could be planning to fight Foul in 50 or 100 years, but not if you knew the battle was practically tomorrow.

I agree that Troy did not sufficiently plan for the worst or have enough contingencies in mind. At the very least, he should have prepared for every possibility well in advance so that his on-the-fly plans would not be compromised by lack of communication with his other forces. He was very fortunate that Mhoram was able to force a long-range message through.

As for the long-range suggestions regarding the transformation of the Land’s populace into a cadre of military reservists, it is more than just time that would make this impractical. Remember that the Land’s current society was founded on the Oath of Peace in the aftermath of the Desecration. Troy is not a military dictator. I am sure that the Council of Lords would never have allowed him to in effect “draft” the entire populace of the Land into the army or army reserve.

Moreover, he would have little effect if he had so tried, as the Land’s inhabitants themselves are in general sincerely committed to peace. Yes, there are many who choose to serve in the armed forces – but there are also many who don’t and never would.

It would be like trying to turn a society of Quakers into Spartans in a couple of years. It couldn’t be done and wouldn’t even be attempted.

Troy’s keeping the Warward at Revelstone particularly seems to bother Michael. But Troy explains his reasons fairly well. In the ancient past, the Old Lords’ forces had usually met Foul at Landsdrop, far from their food and other supplies, and had always been driven back after suffering costly losses. The Lords and his colleagues saw Troy’s point; it’s not like he forced some capricious decision on them.

Yes, he could have taken the Warward from Revelstone and not gone to Landsdrop, but how would that have been an improvement? The supply problem would still exist.

Now some of Michael’s specific suggestions regarding some using mounted forces as antennae to detect Fleshharower’s attack seem sensible to me.

I think the criticisms regarding not using more supply wagons, etc. are unwarranted and miss an important point: Clearly horses are in short supply. The army is mostly on foot and people mostly carry their own supplies. They just “don’t have the horses” to have even a few hundred more wagons. They only have ~5,000 mounted soldiers in the entire force! And they in fact did use the last couple hundred horses for cartage, as Michael wants them to.

But all this is a drop in the bucket compared to what would be needed to adequately supply tens of thousands of soldiers and defeat hundreds of thousands of foes. It’s not Troy’s fault that the Land is as deficient of the tens of thousands of horses he would need to fight an ideal war as it is of the tens of thousands of additional soldiers he would need.

Even if he had started prompting the Lords to urge the breeding of massive numbers of horses several years ago, (as perhaps he did), the Land’s inhabitants clearly lack the means to indefinitely support large numbers of horses to be used in a future war. Mithil Stonedown lacks dozens of spare horses for the same reasons every other small agrarian community always has and always will. And again Troy’s available timescale was far too short for a horse breeding program to have a significant impact by the time of the War.

As for the Giants, Troy desperately hoped they would be heard from and show up, but he couldn’t count on it. Part of the reason he didn’t want to meet Foul at Landsdrop was that unlike in past ages, the Land’s defenders couldn’t be sure this time that Foul would be blocked by the presence of the Giants from looping north through the Sarangrave, around a force camped at Landsdrop. Troy’s reasoning and caution were completely correct here.

As I said at the beginning, I agreed with much of Michael’s post and I appreciate the thought he put into it and the fact that he has successfully provoked so much discussion. There’s just a tendency in responding (for me, anyway), to take most of the points of agreement for granted rather than chiming in repeatedly with “me too”s, and to concentrate more on the areas of disagreement.

Now, here are some further points: Troy’s strategies were flawed ones, but he was certainly not alone! He enjoyed flawed opposition and very flawed support.

If Troy can be said to have wasted much of the past two to five years, what of Mhoram? He’s had forty years to prepare. I use Mhoram as shorthand for the Land’s brain trust. What have they been up to? Yes, they’ve started unraveling the second ward, they’ve strengthened the Council, they’ve apparently increased the Warward (from almost nothing, as befits a pacifist society with no enemies prior to Foul’s return) to a modest size. But they also haven’t done any of the things Michael suggests that actually could have borne fruit if instituted 40 years back, such as trying to teach the average Land inhabitant to wield a spear or assemble a cavalry and a large number of dray horses.

And although the success of Troy’s desperate Garrotting Deep gamble smacks of deus ex machine, it was at least based on something vaguely realistic, however tenuous a chain of hopes it was. Troy knew that Mhoram could somehow get him an “in” with the Forestal; he knew that as much as Wildwood resented all who were responsible for the diminution of the Forest, that his hatred for Ravers was on another level entirely; and he knew most importantly that Garrotting Deep was the one possible thing strong enough to defeat Fleshharower.

The #1 screw-up isn’t Troy or Mhoram – it’s Fleshharower. Why did he lead his entire army into the Deep?! Oh, because he saw that Troy’s force wasn’t being killed right away and because the Forest seemed to let his army in too without immediately killing them. Therefore the Forest must be dormant and Wildwood must be sleeping or dead and it must be smart for a Raver to go into Garrotting Deep. Now that was “brilliant”! It couldn’t possibly be a trap, after all.

What he should have done was either sent in nobody, or else sent in part of his force to chase Troy out the other side, while he circled around the Forest. Worst case scenario: the long head start allows a wearied Troy’s army to limp back to Revelstone and be besieged there, where Fleshharower inevitably would have won.

Note that this all-time blunder is not an authorial misstep – Fleshharower is described as having been led into doing something incredibly stupid by blood-lust and an ambition to achieve an immediate crushing victory.

There are other possible criticisms of Troy, most of which I’ve seen debated here before. For instance, it’s hard to immediately bring an army’s and society’s entire mindset and habits forward in a few years, but what about the immediately technological advances Troy could have instituted? Gunpowder, the crossbow and longbow, Greek Fire - even caltrops, a very primitive “advanced” weapon - are all lacking and all could have proven instantly decisive

Ob answers: the Lords and Land don’t want such things, they don’t want to become as bad as their enemies, Troy doesn’t even suggest such things because he either anticipates the no’s or because he doesn’t want to be the guy who saved the Land via the magic of napalm, the new technology would quickly be copied by Foul and would be used to defeat the Land’s defenders a few years later, etc.

[theDespiser]

[drew]

...Well if you're going to put it THAT way...

[MrKABC]

Here's a question, why didn't anyone -like Troy- try to enlist the help of the Giants?

I mean what were they doing all that time that no one heard from them?

In TIW, the Lords had tried to get to Seareach to see how the Giants were doing, but the Lurker of the Sarangrave had turned the warriors and Lords back.

[CovenantJr]

TOPIC BUMP for that deranged Troy-lover jwaneeta.

[wayfriend]

And it doesn't take a military genius to recognize that making a 1000-mile march in an impossibly short time, with inadequate supplies, into a foodless desert, pursued by an enemy of unknown but certainly superior strength, is not a winning strategy.

Whoa. I don't think that that was the initial strategy. That was plan, like, F.

To the best of my recollection, that was the strategy all along, except for the desert. The retreat to Doriendor Corishev and the subsequent flight to Garrotting Deep were unplanned, but the insanely long and punishing march was the original strategy.

Oh yeah. A refutation I left dangling. I will refute now, to contribute to bumping this thread. (I am so noble.)

The insanely long and punishing march was soooo not the original strategy:

"All right," Troy said, rising to his feet. His heart labored with anxiety, but he ignored it. "I understand that you don't know the size of Foul's army. I accept that. But I've got to know how much head start he has. Exactly how many days ago did you see his army leave the Shattered Hills?"

The Manethrall did not need to count back. She replied promptly, "Twenty days"

For an instant, the Warmark regarded her eyelessly from behind his sunglasses, stunned into silence. Then he whispered, "Twenty days?" His brain reeled. "Twenty?" With a violence that wrenched his heart, his image of the Despiser's army surged forward thirty-five leagues-five days. He had counted on receiving word of Lord Foul's movements in fifteen days. He had studied the Ramen; he knew to a league how far a Manethrall could travel in a day. "Oh, my God." Rue should have been able to reach Revelstone in fifteen days.

He was five days short. Five days less in which to march over three hundred leagues! And Lord Foul's army would be in the Center Plains ten days from now.

In this passage, we can see that Troy's initial plan was laid aside even before the forced march began. The forced march to Doom's Retreat was plan B.

The initial plan was something similar but with a managable timescale and distance.

"Most of you know generally what I had in mind. As far as I can learn, the Old Lords had two problems fighting Foul the simple attrition of doing battle all the way from Landsdrop, and the terrain. The Center Plains favor whichever army is fresher and larger. My idea was to let Foul get halfway here on his own, and meet him at the west end of the Mithil valley, where the Mithil River forms the south border of Andelain. Then we would retreat southwest, luring Foul after us across to Doom's Retreat."

Not only were there five more days in the original plan, but it was far less than 300 leagues before he engaged Foul's armies. (300 leagues is the distance to Doom's Retreat; The Mithil Valley is much closer.) Engaged them with all his forces, as well.

(What, then, does Hile mean when he thinks "Five days less in which to march over three hundred leagues". It must be he was already thinking about marching directly to Doom's Retreat.)

So it is unfair to judge Hile Troy on the merits of his plan to march directly to Doom's Retreat as if that was his plan all along.

BTW, this is just the kind of attempt at twisting the facts and misrepresenting the story that ... well ... that I love replying to. So keep it up.

Them's fightin' words. I am neither twisting facts nor misrepresenting anything. If you really want to challenge me on that, I will prove my point by exact and extensive quotations, to the limit allowed by copyright law. If you are not prepared for that kind of argument, I suggest you retract your accusation.

I've provided my extensive quotations. I look forward to yours.