Randomiser wrote:Jeff
The problem is it takes an awful lot of Cadre to train 640,000 riflemen over one winter. I've just never been able to see where the AOG could have got hold of enough non-coms and junior officers with the requisite experience of new weapons and especially tactics back that far behind the front at all, and certainly not early enough in the winter, to do a decent job of training that number of troops. We have so far seen one example of how it's supposed to work, but have no idea how it's taking across the whole army. Any of you guys with military experience like to hazard an educated guess how many instructors would be needed, and where they might have come from?
I certainly have little to no idea, but from what informed sorts in the books have been saying, it sounds like they
have had enough training cadre to do the work pretty well, judging by how worried they are about the Mighty Host being effective.
I'm curious
how they've managed to get that effective training cadre there, but I'm going to take it as safe to assume given the reactions in-universe
that they have.
I can't see that many of these peasants would be excellent sneakers and poachers, for the simple reason that having any distance weapon other than a sling is a capital offense for a peasant back home. They don't have liberty to train with bows and are too dirt poor to afford an arbalest.
Starving to death is a form of capital punishment nature - often with human assistance, but in Harchong, too many can count on that - will levy too, and having a bow and knowing how to use it may be the way a lot of those serfs have avoided it. And if you're going to have a bow there, you've got reason to be very good at sneaking to avoid the sight of the authorities even more than the dinner animals. I do take the point about the arbalests though.
It may be very hard for the Mighty Host to get the serfs with those sorts of skills to reveal them though, what with them being evidence of experience committing capital crimes back home....