Getting into your Stonehenge book. It's a good deal different from your stories of historical wars. What a thoroughly unpleasant bunch of people. Cahill, in his "How The Irish Saved Civilization" referred to an Irish army before a battle, speaking of "child warriors", tough fighting men with a child's view of the universe. Your Stonehenge book captures the otherness of the societies of the time. I cannot recall the author who wrote of the ancients as trembling in terror at every breeze for its portents. A neolithic cemetery has recently been unearthed which showed that half the residents had died of violence. That is, the skeletal remains showed it. Some number of others may have died of soft-tissue wounds, bleeding out, or of sepsis, or peritonitis. So it would have to be more than half died of violence. In Churchill's biography of Marlborough, he tells us that the great field marshall frequently put his redcoats--sometimes a minority of the allied army--at the point which had to be broken. He could depend on the British soldier to take the hits and prevail in a killing match. The rest of the allies could then exploit the initial success. Which I recalled reading Sharpe's Fury. Think of an armed, trained, disciplined English soccer mob.
Last. Were you aware that Rosemary Sutcliff had written a historical novel called "Sword Song"" If you've read her, what do you think of her young adult novels? Dorothy Dunnett? Sincerely, Richard Aubrey
I often do think of an armed, trained, disciplined English soccer mob!! That's my apprehension of Wellington's army . . they came from a very violent civil society, but, given discipline, became formidable! AS for the Stonehenge . . . . I think your observation is entirely accurate. They were just as clever as us, but were faced with apparently insoluble questions . . . why crops failed, why their children died . . . . and the only answers a pre-technological society can adopt is supernatural. That makes them very different. They truly were religious!
To my shame I didn't know that! And I'm afraid it's so long since I read either of those authors - - but I do remember enjoying both!