Warren Ellis: Crécy

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Not exactly Simon Schama...

From one of my favorite GNs of the past few years, Warren Ellis and Raulo Caceres' Crécy from Avatar/Apparat.

I have posted my favorite pages, but to remain under the limit they're not consecutive mostly. Afraid you'll just have to read the whole thing after this, and it's still in print so do that.



A few words about arrowheads. And the Welsh.



And because the French would not allow commoners in the army and got unprepared mercenaries instead, and because the English had an army of trained commoner longbowmen, this happened. After the battle, we tie off loose ends, and learn the origin of a certain English gesture.


The reason for the gesture was that when archers were caught, those fingers were cut off. It was proof you could still fire an arrow.
All story and artwork (c)2007 Warren Ellis and Raulo Caceres

Comments

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

I think though that they probably realized that shit and filth can cause sickness when it's in your blood, regardless of what the reason was that they thought it did that. A soldier on the battlefield would understand wounds get infected and that had nothing to do with demons but with a piece of metal entering the body. So it wouldn't be a big step to think, "Filthy sword will make them sick." Just as the barbarian hordes might not have realized what the plague was or its root cause, but they did know being around the corpses could get you sick. Because they knew enough to throw them over the city walls to kill the people inside.

There's all kinds of things we do that work despite our not understanding the real reasons. Tech often precedes science in that respect. Now, that Ellis is phrasing it in a modern way, I'll grant that, but that's kind of the whole tone. This isn't really a character so much as a narrator, not different from Larry Gonick except in personalizing it.

[kitty_tc_69.insanejournal.com]

That would be believable except for the fact that when actual scientists discovered germs and started recommending measures like clean hospital rooms and that doctors wash their hands prior to surgery, there was significant resistance from the medical sector who dismissed it as nonsense.

If DOCTORS disbelieved germ theory when it was first proposed several centuries after the events we're discussing here, what makes you think much more primitive people would have just figured it out?

[kitty_tc_69.insanejournal.com]

And to clarify, it's not just that they disbelieved that sickness was caused by little tiny nasties too small for the eye to see. It's that they literally insisted that it was nonsense that cleanliness and infection had anything to do with one another at all, and wouldn't so much as bother to wash their hands prior to surgery. This is as recent as the american civil war.

The concept of dirt and filth causing infection simply was not known prior to the 19th century. It just wasn't. That is documented fact. Sorry to burst the bubble.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

didn't say they understood germ theory, just that sickness seems to cause more sickness. The Mongols made that connection, why not the English?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_warfare#The_ancient_world

"During the Middle Ages, victims of the bubonic plague were used for biological attacks, often by flinging corpses and excrement over castle walls using catapults. In 1346, the bodies of Mongol warriors of the Golden Horde who had died of plague were thrown over the walls of the besieged Crimean city of Kaffa (now Theodosia). It has been speculated that this operation may have been responsible for the advent of the Black Death in Europe."

This is a pretty well-known fact and that was the very same year. (apart from the last sentence which is only, as it says, speculative) What I said was that you don't have to know HOW something works to make it work.

[kitty_tc_69.insanejournal.com]

Because they didn't. As I said, when the recommendations were first made to keep hospital spaces clean and for doctors to wash their hands prior to surgery, the idea was met with resistance. Not only did they not know, they actively disbelieved it when it was told to them. Again, documented fact.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Okay, so the Mongols were just lucky, then?

Because they did do that and other armies did too. Why did they do that if they didn't think it would harm the people inside? They were generous and sharing meat?

[runespoor7.insanejournal.com]

Apparently the Mongols made an observation that others did not, and the knowledge might have get lost.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Seems it was pretty common to know that sickness and shit would be deadly inside the body. From the same article:

"During the 4th century BC Scythian archers tipped their arrow tips with snake venom, human blood, and animal feces to cause wounds to become infected..."

Granted, they were trying a bit of everything, and Europeans did do things like use cowshit to build homes. (No, seriously--watch Tony Robinson's WORST JOBS IN HISTORY, which if nothing else, shows that shit was apparently quite important back then) But it doesn't take science to know that shit is foul, and that foul things might cause harm. I never said(that was Ellis) that they knew WHY.

An example that might illustrate what I'm saying here: Bleeding has, in certain specific cases, health benefits. As they didn't know why, though, they used it for most everything, and unsurprisingly most of the uses they put it to were inappropriate.

As Ellis lurks here, I really wish he'd settle this by explaining what his source is on that fact.

[arilou_skiff.insanejournal.com]

Partially that was due to lack of experience though: There was a general idea that water was filthy. (Which made some sense, remember, no plumbing, and water that has been standing around for a bit is not particularly healthy)

There was known the idea that sick things caused more sickness, but mostly it was connected to ideas about bad vapours and such. (hence why people cleaning things usually involved burning stuff nearby)

[seawolf10.insanejournal.com]

There's a difference between figuring out "hey, sicknesses are spread by little dinky creatures too small to even see -- cleaning your hands before handling wounds kills a lot of them off, and makes it less likely that they'll get into the wound in large enough quantities to infect the patient" and figuring out that "hey, some sicknesses seem to spread easily from sick people to healthy people, regardless of the environment"

Hell, Vlad Tepes III -- the actual Vlad Dracula/Vlad the Impaler/Kaziglu Bey ("Lord Impaler" in Turkish)...whatever you prefer to call him, so long as you're clear that we're discussing the actual historical figure, not the fictional vampire -- figured the latter one out.

When he was fighting the Turks in the 1400s, he sent sick peasants with all sorts of diseases into the Turkish army's camps. If any Turks died from the same thing the plague-bearer had, that peasant got a reward...assuming he or she didn't die of it as well. (Though Dracula might have paid the reward to their families in that case. Man was real big on rewarding peasants who served him well -- the other side of his "incredibly tough on crime/disloyalty/" attitude.)

Can't cite a primary source, but it's in here:

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Dracula-Prince-of-Many-Faces/Radu-R-Florescu/e/9780316286565

And also

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

People have been quarantined during epidemics since forever. If they didn't think it could be spread that would not have happened. In Britain under Henry VIII the king would not leave his home because of the "sweating sickness." To this day we do not know what that was. They did not. But they knew enough to see cause and effect. Sick person comes near, others get sick. We are only pretty sure it's HIV that causes AIDS, but it's the most credible candidate and we proceed on that because so far, targeting it seems to work. But even before we knew that we knew ways to protect yourself against it, or at least minimize its danger.

If people didn't think sickness could be contagious, why did they send away lepers? Why did lepers have to warn people when they passed through?

They understood that sickness can spread from person to person. I'm sorry, but I just cannot imagine the human race would have survived if people didn't understand the concepts of infection or contagion on a basic level. To say they attributed everything to evil spirits is simply not true, and I should also point out that a foot soldier would know that's crap; there's nothing as practically-minded as the soldier on the ground and illusions get killed quick in battle. They were, as it says above, not stupid, they simply didn't have our accumulated knowledge.

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

Well, it appears Warren was asked directly about this and responded:

http://freakangels.com/whitechapel/comments.php?DiscussionID=1377

Authormoheinous:
A number of times in the book the narrarator described using dirt or shit applied to their arrows and swords to cause wounds to become infected. Yet the Germ theory of disease wasn't understood until the 1800's. At the very earliest it may have been inferred during the black plague of the 1400's. Medieval medicine actually involved applying mud to wounds to speed healing.
So is there some historical basis for the tactic or just some enjoyable literary liberty being taken by Bill?

warrenellis:
I think anyone half-awake will assume that smearing shit in an open wound isn't going to be good for the woundee. It is actually recorded that blades would be wiped in shit before big battles -- the first instance I remember being told of was the Siege of Berkeley Castle, 1645-ish. So the germ theory may not have been understood until whenever, but it's my understanding that soldiers believed there was a link between them wiping their blades in the latrines, and sticking their arrows in the ground, and people getting sick from those adulterated wounds...
Hold on, hold on -- why did the Tartars catapult plague-infected corpses into Kaffa, back in the 1300s, if they didn't have a grasp of the idea? I mean, I know that as late as the 1800s people were still saying "all smell is disease," but there was certainly an understood correlation between shit and sickness.
I also seem to recall some bastard, maybe Lithuanian, using trebuchets to fire heaps of shit and corpses into a city, around 1430..."

"orwellseyes:
The Muslims used plague dead on besieged cities as early as the conquest of Egypt, 642 AD or so. The mongol sack of baghdad, 1260, Hulagu Khan flung corpses into the city ahead of his army to bring pestilence and drive people out into the Horde's waiting armies. Word of that, and it's effectiveness, surely spread.

Sanitation was pretty well understood, remember the Romans built entire architectures for the purposes of moving waste and water around. People might not have had standards of cleanliness, but they knew a bit. Packing wounds with linen and herbs was common practice since before Christianity rose in Europe."

I would submit, too, that what the Mongols did was hardly something obscure nobody noticed.

More on the place of shit in history

[jlroberson.insanejournal.com]

That WORST JOBS IN HISTORY series I mentioned:

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=79242C442EDCB935