The Forest Laird(175)

Then, late one night, I listened to the two of them debate the propriety of the hit-and-run battle techniques advocated by Murray as opposed to the “honourable” and time-honoured system of chivalric warfare championed by Will. That confrontation, mild though it was, provided me with further cause to shake my head over the incongruities and contradictions of their alliance. Andrew, born to the nobility and to the strictures and traditions of chivalry and the feudal ways, and trained for years in the customs and the lore of the chivalric code, should have been the champion of the status quo in warfare, calling for things to be done as they had always been done and looking for ways to bring the Scots forces as close as might be feasible to parity with the English. Instead, he declared that to be impossible and committed himself to the idea of training his fighting men to use every possible advantage they could find in the terrain and the topography of the countryside to outwit, outmanoeuvre, and ultimately outfight and destroy the armies brought against them. He refused even to pay lip service to the old, “honourable” style of warfare, calling it suicidal and immoral. A man forced to fight, he said, should fight as though his life depended upon winning, because it did. Winning, he said—victory and survival—was the only measure of success in war. Everything else was failure since, even if it did not result in death, it involved defeat and the loss of liberty, which he maintained was worse than death.

My cousin, on the other hand, argued strongly in favour of formal battle between ranked armies as the most legitimate and generally accepted means of resolving conflict. He ignored Murray’s immediate heaping of scorn on that notion, holding his peace as the other denounced the rampant folly of sending hundreds or even thousands of poorly trained and equipped men to die needlessly against superior formations when far more success could be achieved, at far less cost, by using much more versatile methods of isolating, stranding, and then defeating depleted enemy battalions. When his opponent fell silent, Will merely nodded and acknowledged that the other might be right, in fact, but from the viewpoint of political reality, he believed that was ultimately unimportant. His primary concern lay, he maintained, with legitimacy and the appearance of propriety. I blinked when I heard that, and for the first time in many hours of discussion I interjected.

“Are you serious, Will? The appearance of propriety? What bearing does that have on throwing the English out of Scotland? Forgive me, but that strikes me as being the most mindless thing I have heard.”

I thought he was going to give me the rough edge of his tongue, but then he twitched his shoulders in the beginnings of a shrug. “Mindless,” he said. “You think speaking of propriety is mindless? No, Jamie. Let me tell you what mindlessness is about. Mindlessness is the ability to accept things without thought simply because they are familiar. Mindlessness is the condition of going through life without ever questioning the right or wrong of general custom. It is seeing things that frequently are wrong in the moral sense and ignoring the wrongness purely because it has become so familiar that we are no longer aware of it—or because, were we to notice it and pay attention, we would be forced to do something to change it. That is mindlessness, Cousin.” He sucked at something caught in his teeth.

“And then there is another kind of mindlessness,” he continued, “comparable perhaps, but different. The mindlessness of seeing something happen and being able to deny that it is happening—and not only that, but going ahead then and basing a set of expectations on that denial of what you actually saw.” He nodded in the direction of Andrew. “If our friend here will forgive me, I will point out to you that the group to which he belongs subscribes to that. A knight is not required to be literate or educated, except in the ways of war. The knightly code requires only adherence to the laws of chivalry. It makes no demands otherwise. It ignores logic, by and large, and it expects no moral judgments. And yet judgments are made all the time, based on the expectations it engenders, irrespective of logic. Do you have any idea what I am talking about?”

I shook my head, and he shook his in return, his mouth twisting downwards. “Aye. Well … What I am saying is that every ignorant, thick-skulled, witless bully capable of carrying a sword or swinging a club, be he knight, pikeman, or man-at-arms, will condemn us as brigands and barbarians for not fighting in accordance with their rules of combat.” He saw my lips quirk. “Don’t laugh! There is nothing even mildly amusing in what I am saying.” He paused, looking from Andrew to me and back to Andrew. “No matter how hard we fight in this struggle, no matter how many men we mobilize against them, no matter how long we fight against them or how many of them we kill, these people will afford us no legitimacy until we meet them face to face on the field of battle and defeat them according to the rules of chivalry.”