Henry's strategy was very effective, but local tactical superiority could not change the huge disparity in forces. Pen ~ fun ~ Ge www.biquge.info scholars of the past Lamanite Empire used to use this sentence when writing about wars: "They won every battle, but they lost the whole war." This sentence is so classic that the literature of the West Coast countries, whose cultural heritage is greatly influenced by them, is still used today, but it is only one sentence that encapsulates the enormous complexity and many elements of war.

In the eyes of a layman, or a self-confessed insider, the above sentence may be stupid and contradictory.

Because if you think about it by habit, how can you lose the whole war if you win every battle, but the person who would come to such a conclusion is obviously wrong about many important things.

Their way of thinking is limited to a game of chessboard and the like, where defeating their opponents is the only consideration in such a black-and-white world, so winning every battle means winning outright. But the reality is more complicated, in reality war is never an end but only a means, it is an extension of politics or interests, whether it is for power, territory, minerals or trade, war is launched to achieve a certain goal, and is usually used as a last resort.

Since this definition has been further expanded, different from the simple victory and defeat in chess games, the "loss" and "win" in reality naturally have more complex definitions.

If we take the Ottolo-Roan War more than 20 years ago as an example: the Loan people did everything possible to meet the weak forces and won many brilliant victories, but no war can be immortal, the Loan people, who were already overwhelmingly inferior in terms of strength, did not know how to preserve their strength in one battle after another, desperately pursued victory, and the final result was that when the large army of the Ottolo people approached the city, they were famous for their cavalry, and they could only rely entirely on infantry and archers to go out to meet them.

If so, this way of not thinking in the long run, not preserving strength, leading to excessive attrition and losing the war itself is one of them. In addition, there are also situations where the purpose of starting a war is to seize a certain commercial town, but in the end, because the opponent does not leave room for the opponent because of the pressing step by step, the other party burns it in despair, which is also a "failure" in terms of purpose.

When we look at war, we should not just have a simple chessboard black-and-white thinking of victory and defeat, and there is often no good end to going all the way to black. Henry and Lesky knew this, as did the inexperienced Edward and his Northland nobles, who understood the consequences of over-pursuing victory, and sometimes stepped back in order to achieve their true goals.

Unfortunately, this approach is not acceptable to everyone, and the lack of an effective military control system has caused the Northern Army to lose more troops in the process of evacuation, and even some voices in the military have questioned whether it is wise to retreat, and if it fights desperately, it may lose less troops.

Fortunately, Ashburn II had the power of the king, and Edward's side had overwhelming popularity, so with the unwavering trust of His Royal Highness in Henry and Archduke Lesky, the whole army was able to proceed efficiently according to plan.

And that goes back to our original question.

Henry's ploy could not change the disparity in forces, and it might later draw the attention of many people with a keen sense of smell to the vast war potential of the established magic, but in the current situation, it was only one part of a much larger strategic plan.

What does the Northern Army need?

It's not the right question, the real question should be: What does Avenella need?

If you just want the kind of false peace under the rule of the great powers, then this war should not be started in the first place. However, if you surrender to Ottolo, you may be able to buy a moment of peace and prosperity, and aside from the country's face problems, the internal backlog of contradictions will also be a great potential hidden danger due to the inequality between the people and the suzerain. And as a vassal state, once any change happens to Otolo, it is inevitable that he will be implicated or even become a victim and a scapegoat.

Edward's desperate pursuit of sovereignty and equality is related to tangible interests, and a country without a voice is like a slave without status, and cannot even control its own destiny. But the clash of ways of thinking eventually led to the outbreak of war, which we will not go into into detail, because war is already a given, so the question we need to ask is: What does Avenella need now, and in the future?

The wounds of war need to be soothed, and the country's development needs labour, and all this means that they must do everything possible to minimize the damage. Both the enemy and their own side are Avenella, and they fight in the land of Avenella, and the collateral damage to their own affairs and people must be minimized to the extreme.

As we have said before, a disastrous victory is not desirable, but in fact, a normal victory in a large-scale head-to-head battle is equally undesirable.

The war that has lasted since April has already taken far more casualties than originally anticipated, and any further on top of that would render their victory meaningless.

It's a difficult problem, and it's hard enough to just win a normal game, and now it's a matter of reducing casualties on both sides.

In order to succeed, the Northern Army's actions must be meticulously and strictly implemented, and they cannot tolerate any extraneous complications. There is a way to seek wealth and danger, and there is no mistake or omission in the phrase used to the current situation, but one factor that has been seriously affected by the plan of the northern army to go sideways is the problem of fault tolerance that we have been mentioning.

Rao's great East Coast empire, Padrosi, which had a connection to the dwarfs, produced precision clocks with hundreds of parts, which still had to be re-timed after a certain period of time. And this is just a simple one-way forward machine that displays time, and if we want to give other overly complex missions to a living organism like human beings with complex thoughts and individual differences, the probability of making mistakes in a certain link will naturally increase.

This is why spears and shields have always been the preferred choice for infantry, as they only need to be stabbed forward and the other to be picked up in front of them, because they are so simple to make and use to arm large armies. Simplicity means fewer mistakes, and this is true in equipment selection, but it is still the same in terms of strategic mobilization.

To reduce casualties, the command of the army must be cautious. The purpose to be carried out is too complex, and the requirements for the soldiers themselves are naturally higher - and this is the biggest problem that our Sage Man faces: the only people who can be considered professional soldiers in the Northern Army are the knights and sergeants, but they are few in number. The veterans and reliable commanders trained after the Battle of Acasta were lost in the clashes with the Otolo hoplites at the front, and the remaining improvised militia and Roans, despite their courage, were mostly illiterate.

This may seem inconsequential, but as we have mentioned in the past about the spread of knowledge, so do the military orders.

The Northern Army was more than half as numerous as the Southern Coalition Army, but it numbered several thousand, and the vast majority of them were illiterate peasant refugees. The only way to communicate with them is through oral communication, and we all know that the difference in the ability to understand the ability to communicate orally is likely to end up being very different from the original model text, and its efficiency is far from being as convenient as a letter that can be passed back and forth - especially when there is a shortage of manpower.

Of course, if the Northern Army still has the same standardized and effective officer and non-commissioned officer system as before, all this will not be a problem, but the entire army has been repeatedly broken up and organized, and now they have to run to explain to those militiamen one by one what they should do for half a day, and neither manpower nor time is allowed.

After all, they are just amateur militia, not to mention tactics and strategy, if they are replaced by a Northland Arvinella nobleman who is already quite close to the people, it will be very difficult to communicate with them in ordinary ways.

Their social status and cultural origins determined their ability to understand, and even if they also spoke Avenella, the more formal and normative language of the northern aristocracy would seem obscure to the ears of the peasants. You have to understand their slang, their cultural background, what to say and how to use metaphors to understand what you mean -- in layman's terms, you have to be "down-to-earth" -- and that's our turn to be a sage.

He quickly made the militiamen understand his thoughts in a tone that made Edward wonder if he was an impostor, and a fluent and even vernacular dialect. The militiamen didn't know the tactical planning it meant to go 200 meters east and then turn west for 500 meters, but they knew the land and knew that 200 meters to the east was John Smith's house, and 500 meters away was the farmer's farm.

Edward's way of communicating with the militia was an eye-opener for Edward and the others, saying that it was better to say something that both knew than to force an explanation of something they had never touched—but despite knowing all this, they could only sigh without the knowledge of a sage.

It's hard to figure out how important Henry's role was in this campaign, even though he wasn't really the one to lead the army, and the Northern army would have been difficult to form without Edward, and if the Northern nobles were just as bad as the Southern nobles, even Edward and Henry would have been powerless in them. We can only say that this war in this period of history is inevitable caused by a series of accidental factors, and the fate of hundreds of thousands of people is in the hands of these few key people at this moment.

Things came to the most critical moment.

Long-term preparation, forbearance, and steady planning have come to this final step.

Based on the words of Henry Mayer, the initiator and executor of the entire plan, the civil war, which lasted for more than three months, finally came to an end.

"A frontal conflict is undesirable, our forces are far inferior to those of the Southern coalition. Even if it is lucky enough to win, and does not retain enough strength to face the potential hidden dangers in the future, the country will not have any future. Henry pointed to the map of the Neila Forest area that had been left with a lot of dirt due to the evacuation: "Unfortunately, although Yavenella is known as a mountainous country, the connection point between the north and the south, the long Neila Forest Corridor area is mostly plains and forests. Even the undulating terrain is only a stream of hills, and there is no strong pass that we can hold on to with our weak forces. ”

"But we are not at a disadvantage, and retreating to the vicinity of the Dordogne means that we can finally get some supplies. The flat terrain and the wide range of trails in the Nera Forest area make it difficult to hold on, but if you think about it, it's a point you can take advantage of. Henry said this, and all the high-ranking members of the Northern Army listened attentively.

"The victory of the Southern Coalition relied on the tremendous impact of consecutive victories. They are overly tight strings that collapse on their own once they exceed their threshold, and the problem we are facing now is that we don't have enough troops to do all this. Henry said, and the others nodded knowingly, and Prince Edward added, "And even with enough troops, we must do our best to avoid more casualties." ”

"But there is no castle in this world that cannot be defeated, and everyone has their own weaknesses. Henry said this, then turned to look at Edward, "Is the raven coming?"

Edward nodded in response, "Well, the horses and mules that were urgently dispatched have arrived around here, just waiting for us to pick them up." ”

Henry walked back to the map, stretched out his finger, and pointed somewhere in the distance over the area where the two armies were marked with wooden markers.

"Then this is it. ”

The paths on both sides of the Nera Forest are twisting and winding, but just as you can always find the trunk by following the tree's root system, they all lead to a common end.

"All we need is an opportunity for the peasants further south to side with Ahiburne II because their homeland has not yet been caught up in the war, and what we need to do is to keep them out of it. ”

"As cruel as it sounds, we have to pull these people into this muddy water. ”

Henry said this, and on the day of July 12, the Northern Army, contrary to habitual thinking, faced with an enemy twice their size, they also made the decision to divide their forces.

A part of the elite generals, carried by the remaining outstanding officers of the Northern Army, took those militiamen who knew how to ride horses, and rode on various vehicles urgently transferred from the Dordogne, spreading out from both sides like an isosceles triangle, avoiding the sharp edge of the southern coalition forces in the central Nera Forest corridor area, and pointing directly at the political center where the southern forces were drained.

At the same time, under the covert operation of our treacherous and cunning Sage Gentleman, some peasants from the local south were selected and began to quietly approach the chaotic Southern coalition army with lines that had been practiced many times.

A few rumors, like a pebble thrown into the water of a pond.

The ripples tickled the tight strings again and again.