“Why longbow?” Suwisa asked. “Crossbow is easier to train.”
“Hmmm… a lot of reasons,” Edmund replied. “Both of them have their pros and cons and you have to understand, despite the last week or so I’m talking with Sheida fairly often. I’m starting to get a grasp of what the strategic situation is and how it might fall out. So I’m thinking in terms not of days or weeks but of years of war.”
“Shit,” Phil said. “I’d hoped…”
“You’d hoped this would be over quick and we could go back to our lives. I don’t think that’s what’s going to happen. I’m not too sure we’ll be able to go back to our lives even after the war is over. But we were talking about longbows.”
“Okay.”
“Longbows and crossbows both have their pros and cons. Some of them are universal and some of them were specific to the conditions. Okay, here’s one: what’s the only wood you can use for a longbow that is made in Ropasa?”
“Yew,” Suwisa answered. “Well, okay, yew and ash. But you can use hickory… oh.”
“Right. One of the reasons for longbow rarity in Ropasa was the lack of materials. Which meant a longbow cost a lot. And towards the end the Britons had to import all their yew from the Continent, which was a critical strategic fault in the system. But in Norau hickory makes an excellent longbow and it is widely available. Here, longbows can be made by anyone with a knife and some knowledge.
“Cons of the longbow are rarity of materials, we covered that, difficulty of training and the fact that you have to have very physically able persons to use it. That is, they have to be physically strong and in good shape, not sick.
“Taking the last first, we’re not dealing with medieval peasants. The human of today, even those who are not Changed, are the result of multiple generations of tinkering. Do you know what ‘dysentery’ is?”
“Only from history,” Phil said. ” Diarrhea. ‘Runny guts’ as they used to call it.”
“Right. The most common reason for dysentery was water that was contaminated with the giardia cyst. On the way here, did you drink from streams?”
“Sure, we always have,” Suwisa said. “Why?”
“Did you get diarrhea?”
“No.”
“That’s because you’re immune to the effect of giardia. Also the common flu, typhoid, syphilis and a host of other bacteriological and viral infections. We’re born that way; it’s bred into us. Just as greater strength, both for men and women, is innate. Women of today have the potential to be as strong as the average man was in the thirteen hundreds. And men have the potential to be enormously stronger. Furthermore, the basic… human material we have, now, from the refugees, is so much better than the average medieval peasant it doesn’t bear discussion. Taller, stronger, healthier, everything that you need for the baseline of a decent longbow archer.”
“Most of that relates to crossbows as well,” Phil said, stubbornly.
“Except for height, yes,” Edmund replied. “But the point is, it takes away one of the ‘cons’ of longbows. The next one is training. Well, I’ve seen people train to be competent, not expert but competent bowmen in four to six months. And as they continue to train they get better and better. By next fall I want to have a small but growing longbow corps. And in a few years I want it to be a large and growing longbow corps.”
“But none of that touches on crossbows,” Phil replied.
“Okay, what are the pros of longbows? They have a higher rate of firepower, for the same training, than crossbows. That is, they can put out nearly twice as many arrows in an hour and more for short periods. They are easier to manufacture; a trained bowyer with seasoned wood can turn out a longbow in an hour. And their training is identical to that for compound bows.”
“You mean ‘composite’?” Phil asked. “I’m not sure you want to use those. The glues we’d have to use to make horn-bows are hydroscopic. They’re really only good in very dry conditions.”
“Phil, I’ve been doing this for nigh on three hundred years,” Edmund said, letting the first sign of exasperation through. “Give me the benefit of using the right term. No, I mean compound, the ones with the pulleys. You can use a bow that is nearly twice the ‘standard’ strength of a longbow with compound bows because the archer only takes the full weight of the pull for about ten percent of the draw and the ‘hold’ strength is a fraction of the full strength. But, right now, we don’t have the logistics to produce them in quantity. However, in time we will. And then we’ll have archers who can be easily cross-trained to bows that have five times the potential, in combination of pull and rate of fire, of any reasonable crossbow.”
“Hmmm…” was Phil’s reply.
“Maneuvering is another problem with archers,” Suwisa interjected. “Less so with crossbowmen.”
“Not really, they both have the same problem,” Edmund said. “Resupply. Archers going into battle have to have crates and barrels of arrows. Also spare bows and other things. I’ve got some ways to fix that as well. We’ll use modern training techniques for them and for the line infantry and a four-thousand-year history of maneuver that wasn’t conceived of for most of history and generally lost even after it had been developed.”
“You’ve thought about this carefully,” Suwisa said.
“As carefully as I can. There’s more to it than that.” He paused and wondered if he really knew Suwisa well enough to cover the rest but then shrugged. “Have you realized that this might be a multigenerational thing?”
“No,” Phil said, then blanched. “That long?”
“If Sheida wins, and that’s a big if, it might not be soon. I’m not even sure how to win this war, and I’ve studied every war in history. I’m having to juggle ‘now’ constraints while thinking about what the long term effect will be of everything we do. Take crossbows versus longbows. A longbow, as I said, can be made by anyone with a knife and some knowledge. There’s plenty of game, so in a few years every farmer in the area will be trying his hand at bringing in the odd deer. I want them to have a template for the weapon to use. Because if we have a solid and large yeomanry of trained bowyers, having any sort of ‘aristocratic’ class arise will be difficult.”
“Hard to be a lord when any serf with a grudge can knock you off the horse,” Suwisa said. “Tricky.”
“I’m trying as hard as I can to replicate postindustrial republics,” Edmund admitted. “Making crossbows, especially good ones that can kill a knight, is a hell of a lot harder than making longbows. Or even compound bows. I want it to be understood at the core of the society that the right to weapons is a fundamental right. As long as you have a relatively law-abiding society, weapons in general ownership and use prevent tyranny from taking hold. Nothing else in history has ever managed it.”
“There’s a difference between a professional bow-man and a farmer who kills the occasional deer,” Phil argued.
“Sure, but it’s a difference of details, not the quantitative difference between a knight in armor and a serf with a pitchfork.”
Phil shrugged reluctant agreement to that, then grinned. “You won’t mind if I build crossbows, will you?”