Sheepfarmer's Daughter by Elizabeth Moon

Sheepfarmer's Daughter by Elizabeth Moon

I've exhausted all of the books in Elizabeth Moon's Serrano series, so I thought I would try some of her earlier 'sword and sorcery' stuff. It's not bad, not great, but not bad. The story has a young woman running away from her father (and a future as a farmer's wife) to join the army where she learns to wield a sword and becomes a proficient killing machine, aka, a warrior. Sounds a bit improbable, but it's fiction, and she's a big girl, so we'll cut her come slack.

Much of the story is the day to day life of a foot soldier, and it's not much different from Captain Coignet's experience as a soldier in Napoleon Bonaparte's army. A lot of marching, training, standing guard and doing camp chores. I'm reading along and it suddenly struck me that we (people) have always been fighting wars. History lessons in school seem to emphasize big battles and the effect they supposedly had, and I somehow got the impression that otherwise life was peaceful. That wasn't the case. War has been a constant fixture of life since forever. Only a small percentage of people were actually soldiers, but wars and armies and weapons were always there, and for thousands of years it was basically unchanged. Only since the invention of firearms has there been a need to revise our strategies and tactics.

Because war has been a fixture of life for so long, I wouldn't doubt that it is part of our DNA. I suspect that throughout history, warriors, especially the leaders, were among the best educated people. Nothing focuses the mind like someone trying to kill you.

But then along came firearms and all of a sudden, a hundred thousand years of tradition got pushed aside. I suspect that's part of the reason the American Civil War and World Wars of the 20th Century were so devastating. Our tactics had not evolved beyond what worked before firearms came along.

I imagine that none of this is surprising to anyone who has studied history, but it's completely different from the peaceful existence I was taught to believe was the natural order of things. Peace is not the natural order of things. Peace is simply the interlude between wars. If you are smart, you use peacetime to sharpen your swords. You can't have peace without having a war. It's in our DNA.