† Weltherr Gibbon writes, “There is at least no great mystery associated with this name: Weltherr must have been the Broken cognate of the ancient Germanic Waldhar, which has come down to us in the fairly common form of Walther (or our own Walter), whose constituent parts translate roughly to ‘master of the army’: evidently, this fellow’s parents had something more ambitious in mind when they named him than the composition of military maps, despite the verity, proved century after century, that the army possessed of the better maps — both of locations and topography — enjoys a distinct advantage.”
† 3:{xi:} For this final chapter of the Manuscript, we find yet another of the, for Gibbon as for, perhaps, many modern readers, maddeningly inconsistent styles of organization. Gibbon’s passion for uniform organization is well known: but it does willfully ignore the varied styles of most legends, sagas, eddas, etc., of the period, which often do not represent anything more than the manner in which these tales were told and retold (often by different authors, although not, it seems, in this case) down through the ages; and while the Broken Manuscript may be confusing, in this sense, it is entirely historically consistent. —C.C.
† “… that same misty halo … until the end of time …” Gibbon notes that, in his day, “this is indeed the case, much of the time, on the mountain called Brocken, although whether the ‘ring’ first formed during this march that saw an alliance between the Talons and the Bane is impossible, of course, to say.” We could as easily make the same remark today; however, in more contemporary times (even during Gibbon’s, although he does not mention it) this mist would add to the sinister reputation of the mountain, rather than connoting some divine blessing, as the narrator seems to imply. —C.C.
† “… allied …” This is another of those words that might sound anachronistic to many ears, because of its heavy association with the Second World War; but in fact, it comes to us from early medieval times, from Middle English, and its component parts stretch back farther than that. And certainly, the notion of allies and “allied forces” was known to the most ancient world, one of the first and most famous such having been the thousand Greek ships that sailed on fabled Troy. —C. C.
† “ponies” Gibbon writes, “Once again, I had no luck in persuading my translator to tell me what the original word for ‘ponies’ or ‘pony’ was, in the Manuscript, which is something of a pity, as it might have helped to clarify the origins of this subspecies of the horse, a ‘subspecies’ that may have a longer history than the ‘species’ itself, at least in northern Europe: for there are those who believe that ponies were animals bred and then abandoned by several migrating tribes that originated in Asia and were, like their ponies, smaller in stature than their conquerors, the Europeans and the contemptible Byzantines, with their enormous armored warhorses.” Gibbon’s disdain for the Byzantine Empire has already been noted; and although the actual word “pony” was just over a century old, in his day, the species or subspecies had many other, much older names in other parts of Europe. —C.C.
† “… the Kreikisch called the fire automatos?” Gibbon writes, “The translator used, no doubt for the benefit of his contemporary readers, the most recent form of the Greek word for ‘automatic,’ while remaining with the Broken dialect’s term for Greek itself, Kreikisch, since we have seen it before. There is no point to explaining too early what the term ‘automatic fire’ implies, as the text will do as much; but as to the question of whether or not it was a myth, it is sufficient to say that chemists have attempted to re-create this most mysterious subcategory of ‘Greek fire’ without success, although various other formulas for Greek fire have been tested with far happier results; and, as Caliphestros’s represented a particularly volatile form of the substance, we must continue to wonder, until some chemist can prove or disprove the notion, whether or not this part of the story is indeed legend, or mere myth.” While it would be unfair, yet, to say why Gibbon’s assessment is wrong, we should at least note that it is, and state that what “the sorcerer” Caliphestros was brewing was a weapon familiar in both its component parts and its assembled whole to modern armies, especially the American; and that the fact that it had disappeared from the world for almost a thousand years, in Caliphestros’s time, and would do so, following Broken’s history, for another twelve hundred ought not shock us: if there is one lesson to be learned from the Manuscript and all the details of the history of Broken, it is that the trend of civilization, as we are learning once again in our own time, is not always upward or forward. —C.C.
† “… Kafra’s infernal piss …” Here is an entry about which Gibbon could have known little, even aneċally, and even less scientifically; yet he, not atypically, chose to comment upon it because nearly every report of the scientific composition of the “fire automatos,” or automatic fire, had and has come down to us through Byzantine sources, and would therefore would have roused the great scholar’s prejudiced ire to no small extent. Thus, when he says that “this aspect of the tale of the invasion of Broken must be viewed with jaundiced eyes, to say the very least, as the types of ‘authorities’ upon which it is based spring from a society well-versed in both exaggeration and mendacity,” it is far less a statement of true fact than of those same personal prejudices. It was the Byzantines, after all, who would devise new forms of Greek fire so devastating that their use influenced battles of immense importance: see, for example, J. R. Partington’s excellent A History of Greek Fire and Gunpowder.
Within such authoritative texts, as well as within the Broken Manuscript, we find not only effective refutation of Gibbon’s willful ignorance, but tantalizing evidence as to what it was that the mysterious “missing ingredient” that separated automatic fire from more common forms of Greek fire might have been. And in this context, the account in the Broken tale is not only not to be viewed “with jaundiced eyes,” but is in fact to be taken quite seriously. For not only do all the other elements involved in the substance’s creation — everything from naphtha to asphalt — match the description that the narrator gives of the stench given off by Caliphestros’s creation, as well as of its consistency, but the manner in which it was said that those elements must be transported — in brass containers — conforms to reality as well. But it is several other aspects above all — the description, violence, and action of the flame produced — that give us an additional and, perhaps, key revelation: for the fire automatos used at Broken is described as burning primarily “white,” not the usual range of fiery colors, at the time, and as doing so into, not atop, its target. This is extraordinarily reminiscent of what we today know as “white phosphorous,” a controversial twentieth-century weapon (particularly, again, regarding its use by the United States in Third World countries), the antecedent of which, carbon disulfide, was known to have been used on more than one historical occasion: in an Irish nationalist attempt to destroy the Houses of Parliament, among others. Fire created using such elements can indeed be ignited by water, and made to burn fiercer the more one throws water upon it; and European chemists at work before science’s great suppression at the hands of the Catholic Church would have been very capable of mastering the creation of such a substance. Did they? The Broken Manuscript certainly suggests as much; and it is therefore, again, typical that we are suspended, in this key aspect, between what we read, what Gibbon originally thought of it, and what modern military history and science tell us might have been possible, if viewed without prejudice. —C.C.