You are safe behind your shields,
and the orcs are going to impale themselves
on your pointy sticks.
And then the elves just decide,
no, instead we'll jump in front of that
and put ourselves needlessly into danger.
My name is Roel Konijnendijk.
I teach ancient history at the University of Edinburgh.
You might remember me from part one.
Today, we'll be looking at ancient-warfare scenes
in modern movies and TV and seeing how real they are.
Nock!
Draw!
Loose!
Soldiers: Loose!
All these movies do this.
They all have these archers lined up.
They give these sequences,
"nock, draw, loose," over and over again,
but this never happened.
You don't order them to shoot in volleys.
When you order everyone to draw at the same time,
some of these guys are going to get really tired,
and they're not going to be effective.
Others are going to be like,
this is too slow for me.
I can shoot faster than this.
There were no orders to archers to fire in volleys.
[shields dropping]
The coordination required to do this
is completely impossible.
There were battle formations
where you would have shield walls in front
and then spears sticking out
to sort of drive the enemy back.
Obviously the Macedonian pikemen
are the big famous example.
There are Mesopotamian examples
from way back, 2000 BC.
It wouldn't work like this, though.
You couldn't really form them in a circle.
They would form up in blocks,
and they would maneuver in blocks.
And that's hard enough.
[men chanting]
Once you're fully surrounded,
I mean, there's nothing you can do, really.
You're in big trouble.
You can try to break the spears.
Persians are known to do that against the Greeks.
Their spears are longer, so they literally
went up and snapped them in half by hand,
but that's a desperation move,
and it doesn't really get you anywhere.
If you're in an encirclement like that,
of a proper pike formation,
then you're just doomed. You probably surrender.
[gasping]
Crushes in battle do happen.
But most of the time when people do get crushed
into a small space and the dead start piling up,
it's because they're trying to run away
and they can't escape, because there's a river
or a ravine or a wall, and they get stuck there.
The panic of a trample,
they do depict that pretty well.
[men shouting]
When horses turn up unexpectedly,
especially behind the infantry line,
you would give up and run.
There is almost no chance that
that formation would hold.
The very unrealistic thing in this scene
is that no one knew that cavalry was there.
It's possible to hide, you know,
small units in woods or hollow roads
or behind some geographical feature.
But a large force of cavalry
is going to throw up a lot of dust.
It's going to make a lot of noise.
It's going to, you know, scare the birds
and the animals. You know this is coming.
I think this one does an interesting job
of trying to give you the sort of
visceral horror of a battle.
And I really do appreciate that.
The tactics are nonsense,
but it does give a sense of
desperation of some of these struggles.
So maybe 5 out of 10,
6 out of 10.
[horn sounding]
That big horn is supposed to be like a morale boost.
And in that sense, it can work.
A lot of troops before battle
would try and sing songs together,
just like sports teams might do, to hype them up.
So that kind of thing would work for a horn.
That shouldn't be confused with the idea
of using it to give orders.
That's a separate thing.
The Romans were very good at that.
They had a number of different trumpet signals,
and the troops all knew, like,
if you hear this signal, if you hear that signal,
you have to do different things.
But for instance, the Greeks, I mean,
they had one big trumpet.
When it sounded, you charge.
If it sounds again, you retreat. That's it.
Why would you do that? [laughs]
Like, why would they try to get
the cavalry to slide over the shield wall
into their own formation?
You want the cavalry to stop in front of you,
because at the moment the cavalry stops
and is stuck in front of your spear wall,
they lose all their advantages.
They're not mobile anymore.
They don't have that momentum anymore.
The elves clearly have a very effective spear wall,
and then they just duck under it
and let the cavalry slide over it.
What? [laughs]
I don't know why.
I don't know what they were doing.
Both the elves and the dwarves in this one
have this double-layered shield wall.
There are battle formations where you would do that,
where you would try to stop cavalry
by building these double-layered shield walls.
This is based on a late Roman infantry formation,
where you'd put your infantry close together at the front
and double shield wall or even triple shield wall.
But in most battles, it's such a static formation,
it removes all your opportunities
to maneuver or to move.
You wouldn't want to do that
unless you were absolutely sure
what the enemy was going to do
was going to be running straight into you.
If there was anything else they might do,
you want to keep your flexibility
by keeping your lines separated
and just rely on a single wall of shields,
because that will do most of the time.
If you've got a static defense,
you have your spear wall,
the orcs are charging straight into it
with no sense of self-preservation,
that's exactly what you want them to do, right?
You are safe behind your shields,
and the orcs are going to impale themselves
on your pointy sticks.
All you wanted to have
is for that to be exactly like that
until the orcs stop coming.
And then the elves just decide,
no, instead we'll jump in front of that
and put ourselves needlessly into danger
so that we can fight these orcs hand to hand.
It makes no sense. It serves no purpose.
[shouting]
Wedge formations are debated
because, on the one hand,
we have a lot of sources saying that
wedge formations existed, mainly for cavalry,
but it's not entirely certain how that would even work.
Because most of what you're doing
is just putting one guy at the front
who's going to be exposed
to everyone in the enemy line.
So unless you've already made a hole,
that wedge is not going to give you any advantage.
It's just actually going to put you
in a really dangerous position
where you're feeding your men
one at a time into the enemy.
With cavalry, it's not clear whether it even works.
It's showing you some interesting heavy-infantry formations,
but otherwise, like, 4 out of 10.
So, this is Kubrick trying to visualize
a real Roman battle formation,
which is this three lines in a checkerboard,
which, going into battle,
they would actually try and form some kind of line.
We're not actually sure how this worked.
It's also possible that they actually fought
in these checkerboards, which would give them room
to sort of withdraw between the ranks of the others
and sort of maneuver in and out.
When the front was getting tired
or when it was suffering too many casualties
and when it couldn't get through,
you'd just pull them back and send in the second line,
which would consist of more experienced troops.
And then they would have a go.
This is just an enormous mob of guys,
much too deep to serve any purpose.
Like, get in formation!
Oh, no, it landed on him!
[laughs]
Like, it bounced over the one
and landed on the other guy.
Oh, I hope he got his paycheck.
[laughs]
Killed by a massive flaming corn dog.
Excellent work.
Hollywood just likes fire.
They just want to have fire in their battles.
They want to throw big balls of fire,
and they want to have rollers of fire
and balls of fire to disrupt formations.
It seems to work in theory,
because you want these orderly formations disrupted.
In that sense, it makes tactical sense.
The casualty rate of these battles
in Hollywood is ridiculous.
The result is always that everyone dies.
This is just not how battles work.
You have a certain number of men in a formation,
and when they start to see
that things are going against them,
or especially when they realize they've lost order,
they're going to retreat.
They're going to get out of there,
and then they'll see what happens next.
Or if the enemy is running away
and they're being chased by cavalry,
that's when you see the real casualties pile up.
But in these formation battles,
most of the time casualties would be quite low.
6 out of 10 for trying.
It must've been an enormous effort
to try and get all these extras trained to do this.
And then they get rolled over by a flaming corn dog.
That's a missed opportunity.
That poor guy. I hope he's well.
I hope he's still around.
Hold the ranks! Hold the ranks!
I kill you myself!
Battles on ice did happen.
There's, very famously,
there's the Battle on the Ice,
which is a battle in which
the Republic of Novgorod
warded off the Teutonic Knights.
And so there was a battle fought on the ice,
because, obviously, in many parts,
if you're fighting in winter,
the ice offers a nice flat space
where you can maneuver easily.
I mean, archers would have different ranges
based on what kind of bow they were using,
what kind of arrow they were using,
and of course their individual experience and skill.
Any kind of effective missile is not going to be
too much affected by the wind.
It doesn't necessarily matter that much
where they end up, as long as they still have
some force when they land.
Aim for the wings of the ranks.
Make them cluster.
I really like it, actually,
that they use the arrows to drive them together.
So they use these arrows around the edges
to drive the enemy into a narrow space,
where his numbers are negated.
That would genuinely have been used in battle.
So we say 6 out of 10.
OK, so you've got a huge line at the back,
and then there's another line much closer.
So, there's, like, a mile between those two.
What is the line in the back even doing?
It's going to take you 15 minutes
just to walk into the battle.
This is the worst example of a Hollywood fight.
You have big armies, but they don't act like armies at all.
Slashing left and right.
No one knows what's going on.
There's no formations.
It seems like there has been no preparation,
no planning whatsoever.
Everybody just gets together in a big mob
and then slams into each other.
This is such a weird scene,
because you see heads being split left and right,
and then suddenly, when the plot needs it to happen,
there's a nice little pause,
and nobody will bother her for a little bit
while she mourns this guy.
It's very nice of them to let her do that.
If you turn away from the fighting
and drop your weapon in this kind of melee,
somebody's going to shank you.
This is obviously something they do for plot reasons,
which is totally understandable.
It's 1 out of 10.
It's a complete disaster of a depiction of battle.
I don't want to keep belaboring this point, but --
You should be digging ditches!
Many ditches.
Once your first ditch is ready, build another one.
Dig many ditches.
Just lots and lots of ditches.
Again, where is your ditch?
Where is your ditch?!
You've got to have a ditch!
It shows the strength of this kind of fortification,
because the horses aren't going to try
and go into those ditches.
They're going to try to avoid that difficult terrain,
and that allows you to force the enemy
into where you want to fight them.
So that is actually a very, very good demonstration
of how ditches are supposed to work
and how a very simple thing, like digging a pit,
can actually help you enormously.
Come down here! Straight through!
Any way you can!
This is an absolute massacre.
This depiction of the battle,
it's reasonably accurate,
according to the accounts that survive.
So, we know that this was fought
in a deliberately narrow space.
They chose a place that was surrounded by marshes
so that the enemy cavalry, which was very strong,
would have to funnel itself
along one small, narrow causeway.
If you're a cavalry, you want flat ground,
because then you can move quickly and move freely.
In the movies, everybody slams together,
and then it's just a huge melee.
Obviously in real life,
there's only a few men who are able to fight,
and the rest are just kind of
waiting for their turn, more or less.
And especially if you're in a battle like Loudoun Hill,
where you're funneled into a narrow terrain.
So they chose their terrain really well.
And that meant that even though
the English had numerical advantage,
they couldn't use it.
Retreat!
There's no winning here!
For this kind of battle, it is realistic,
in the sense that they're just shouting
and hoping that the men around them will hear it
and then those men will sort of pass it on.
This is obviously not a perfect system.
So he would just hope that everybody
would follow his example most of the time.
So it explains the tactics, the principles,
but there are some other problems.
All the infantry has too much armor,
and all the horses have not enough armor.
7 out of 10.
So, this is Alexander's battle
against the Indians at the Hydaspes,
which is in modern-day Pakistan.
It wasn't fought in a wood,
it was fought on the banks of a river,
which Alexander had crossed in the night.
So, for Alexander in particular,
his cavalry is his trump card.
He wants to be able to use his cavalry.
And that means he wants to fight in open spaces.
He wants to be able to maneuver them easily,
and he wants them to be able to run freely.
In a wood, there's too much for them to trip over.
You can't maintain your cavalry formation very closely.
Effective heavy cavalry also works
in quite tight formations.
Like, these horses are shoulder to shoulder.
If you want to use that effectively,
you can't obviously go through trees.
So he would try to avoid them.
All of his major battles tend to be fought
on the banks of rivers or in open plains.
This was the big battle
where Alexander first encountered elephants.
And they're depicting this,
you know, part of this, really well.
Horses don't like animals they don't know.
You run your elephants at them,
and if they haven't seen them before,
if they haven't gotten used to each other,
then the horses are going to run away first.
You can see these elephants sort of
barging into these heavy-infantry formations,
and everybody's like, "What are these?
How do we stop these?"
But actually, Alexander won this battle quite handily.
The fact is that once you're over the initial shock
and you have troops that are battle-hardened,
it's quite easy to drive off elephants
simply by throwing missiles at them,
trying to get rid of their riders,
and panicking them so that they'll turn around
and run and trample their own men,
which is very often what would happen with these elephants.
But at least, you know, the equipments,
the tactics of the individual warriors
and all that is accurate.
7 out of 10.
So, hollow square is a real formation.
It would be used on the march.
If you were afraid that
the enemy might ambush you or might attack you,
they would be able to turn at a moment's notice,
depending on where the threat was going to come from.
So, chariots are a feature of mostly Bronze Age warfare.
They're meant to carry around
people who are shooting arrows,
who are throwing javelins,
and usually in very large numbers.
But as soon as you have mounted cavalry
and you've mastered the art of
firing missiles from horseback,
the chariot is essentially obsolete.
It has no real advantages over
just having lots of men on horseback,
because they're more flexible.
So chariots in the course of antiquity
just kind of go out of style.
I would give it, like, 5 out of 10.
Take position!
It's actually nice to see a bit of diversity in this scene.
The Roman empire obviously stretched
across the Mediterranean into Africa,
all over Europe.
So you would actually have people, you know,
different skin colors, different backgrounds.
So, they dug a ditch, and then they hid it.
It does happen.
It can be done.
There is at least one battle in Greek history
where the enemy has a cavalry storming at the defenders,
and the defenders have prepared the ground
by burying these pots in the ground,
just big vases,
and then hiding them,
so that when the cavalry charges,
they fall into the pots and they break their legs.
So this kind of hidden trap
isn't completely unheard of,
but it couldn't be done on this scale,
because you would see it. Right?
I mean, the effort it would take
to hide a ditch on that massive scale
is just incomprehensible.
And they would know that these works were going on,
because you didn't just show up on that battlefield
that day and started digging, right?
The Roman side would have seen them doing it.
[laughing] Goofy scene of a bunch of gladiators
first making a nice defensive ditch
and then ignoring it and jumping over it.
You've made all that effort.
You've neutralized the enemy.
That was your goal, right?
Why did you then go back over it?
If that was your plan all along,
why dig the ditch in the first place?
It's just a silly, silly big fight.
1 out of 10.
Don't run!
We hold formation!
These are shields that are designed
for shield-wall formations.
They were even standing shields,
so tower shields which are meant to be set down
in battle to form a static line of infantry.
Usually you would use that to set up
your defensive barrier, your bulwark,
behind which you would then have archers,
for instance, to fire at the enemy
and try to get them to attack you where you want them.
So there are lots of different cultures throughout history
that have used these kind of shield-wall tactics
with very large, very heavy shields.
And then in the medieval period,
they become more popular because of the rise of crossbows,
where you start to get --
your armor and your small shields are no longer adequate.
So you need these big barriers to protect you
when you're doing things like
reloading your own crossbow.
So you get these kind of pavises,
these big tower shields.
Fire!
They're setting up a catapult, or a trebuchet.
Like, very slowly, inevitably,
because it's very heavy and difficult to position.
And then you have to move these big balls,
and they actually make a point of showing
how heavy they are.
You're not going to be able to fire those very quickly.
Like, it's going to have a very slow rate of fire.
All that time, they're just exposed,
and you're standing there.
If you get hit by these balls,
you have no one to blame but yourself.
[laughs]
It's giving you every opportunity
to do something about it,
but instead, you're just going to stand there.
Well, tactically, it's very bad.
[laughs]
They do have some of the equipment right.
4 out of 10.
Thanks very much for watching.
I hope you enjoyed that.
And if you did, you can watch my other video,
which you can find here.