Maybe it happened
After He, She or It — let’s say He — created the cosmos, the quiet might have bored him, so He gave His creatures survival instincts, at least on planet Earth. To keep it they had to fight. Animals and then humans going at it, no boredom there.
Hundreds of millennia later, fights are still going on. Survival — self-defence — is invariably the reason given. In fact there are a variety of causes. Historians are hard put to find the correct one. Perhaps Homo sapiens has an atavistic streak that is satisfied by war, claims of being peace-loving notwithstanding.
When the conquistadors arrived in the New World, they found its tribes engaged in wiping one another out. China’s internecine wars slaughtered millions. Europe experienced war after war, on land and sea. Japan’s clan wars lasted centuries: wars of religion, of succession, of unification.
Julius Caesar conquered a Britain too busy fighting among itself to unite to oppose his legions. The Romans ultimately left not because they were forced out, but because by threat of the barbarians they were needed. Wars were Britain’s way of life.
Pirates came — Saxons, Danes, Norsemen. No King Arthur and Camelot, though. William the Conqueror later in the day. Bernard Cornwell is a Brit penning historical novels of no one period. He’s best known for his lengthy Sharpe series, set during the Napoleonic Wars.
Warriors Of The Storm focuses on the pre-Hastings years of the war with the savage pirates (all sides were bloodthirsty). Whether the battle actually took place is a moot question, yet it’s vividly described here. The author’s approach is to mix fact and fiction in a who-says-it-couldn’t-have-happened-this-way?
Readers of war stories, past and present, form clear mental pictures of battlefields strewn with dead and dying, yet overlook one essential: the smell, sickening and nauseating, of bowels falling out. That awful sight and odour completes the picture.
Yet wars go on.