Soldiers after the war: The Company, by K.J. Parker

 Peace, the cliche goes, is little more than a temporary pause between the wars.  We are prone to focus on the large scale effects of wars, the political shifts, the numbers, the forest rather than the trees.  After the wars, we ask "what now?"  What of the result?  The benefit of distance is the privilege to ask the abstract, bird's eye view questions.  At the ground level, the survivors find ways to move on, but what of the soldiers?  This morning, we consider another K.J. Parker novel, The Company, in which a group of soldiers fail to find life in peacetime.

As with Parker's (Tom Holt's) other novels, the book takes place in a non-magical alternate world, pre-industrialization.  Faralia was involved in a long-running war with some enemy, it does not matter who nor how it started nor why, because this is the soldier's perspective.  A group of Faralians head off to War College, and because they are extraordinarily intelligent and adept, they wind up becoming essentially a special forces unit in a medieval warfare system.  It's actually a little backwards, because their position is a suicide mission, making this rather a waste of intelligence and skill, which one could call a plot hole.

Since this is medieval warfare, there are battle lines of pikemen.  Someone needs to break the line so that cavalry can ride through the pikes.*  Linebreakers, as they are known.  The group, known as A Company, is a group of linebreakers who charge the pikemen and through a combination of luck, badassery and suicidal fearlessness, break a hole in the pikes that their side can exploit.  It is, as indicated, essentially a suicide mission, and most groups of linebreakers do not last very many assaults.  A Company, though, is SEAL Team 6, and they wind up going on a variety of missions.  They survive mission after mission.  When the war ends, with only one member dying, Kunnessin stays in the army, rising to become a general.  The rest retire, and head home to Faralia.  Kudei goes back to his family farm, Muri becomes a useless drunk, Fly goes on a drinking binge that lasts years until he settles down, gets married and starts teaching fencing, and Aidi, being the only one with any business sense, gets a store going, and makes money.

Yet Kunnessin always just wanted to get away.  Kudei's farm was originally his family farm, but Kudei would never sell back.  Kunnessin embezzles fuckloads of money with the plan of buying an island, which still requires cheating on the paperwork, so that A Company can head off and found a farming colony there, and just retire together, make their own way.

Predictably, it goes badly.  They need to bring in help, which they do in the form of both matchmaker-chosen wives and indentured servants.  One of the wives is bonkers, and a murderer whose chosen weapon is poison, and the indentured servant issue becomes an issue when they strike gold.  Eventually, the military shows up, because in addition to embezzling the money to buy the island, Kunnessin cheated on the paperwork.  Kunnessin manipulates the indentured servants into attacking the military to get rid of them, Muri's crazy/murderer wife poisons everyone with rhododendron honey (I had to look this up, and it's pretty much bullshit), the other wives die, A Company, being SEAL Team 6, survives and escapes while the military hunts them, burning down their hideout, and the protagonists escape on a sloop that they had built earlier.  What happens then is described in terms of legend and myth.  They hide out on a volcanic island, fighting each other constantly, like mythological gods, because they provoked each other with longstanding grudges.  Aidi sold out their side while captured and interrogated, Kunnessin embezzled from everyone, including A Company, everyone loses their shit because they are bonkers ex-soldiers.  They are burned out, figuratively and literally.  They are incapable of living in society.

A Company is viewed by Faralian society with a cognitively dissonant combination of reverence and revulsion.  They are, after all, violent, dangerous and recklessly indifferent even to their own lives.  The particular combination of traits they possessed made them useful for Faralia during a brutal war, but it also made them, to varying degrees, difficult to integrate into society after the war, with the most integrated being Aidi, the traitor.  The coward.  The one who lost it.  Indeed, one could argue that his cowardice-- the very trait that made him break under interrogation with only the treat of torture and dismemberment-- was precisely why he was the one who could integrate back into Faralian society.

Kunnessin is regularly noted by his preternaturally observant wife to be an especially dangerous predator.  He may not be the smartest, nor the most meticulously skilled fencer, but beneath the surface is an animal who will kill anyone faster than the blink of an eye if a rapid calculation in his predator brain says that his safety demands it.  And he's the general, with the placid face.  The rest are varying degrees of crazy.

They are the product of war and their country's military, which is also the consumer of their skills and aptitudes.  We do not know if Faralia is in the right, as we see the ground view rather than the bird's eye view, with the point being that from the soldier's perspective, it does not matter.  Their position is the same, whether their country is the aggressor or defender.  Once the war begins, the perspective of the soldier is the same because the battle is the same.

The Janus-like faces of peace activists-- the authentic humanitarian and the partisan masquerading as a peacenik because it is easier than admitting to sympathy for a losing but indefensible evil-- are irrelevant here.  Yes, people die in war.  No, it's not the same.  One side will often, if not always, have a stronger moral claim, and so long as war was forced, the inevitability of death simply is.  Win, and make no apologies for winning, if your cause is just.   The Union was right.  The Allies were right.  (Further, whoever's cause is the extermination of the Jews is wrong.  When you are fighting them, you are right.)  Fight and win.

Yet the soldiers must be tallied among the cost.  The more brutally they fight, the more damaged they are when they emerge.  Can they re-enter society?  That question is hardly new.  Parker gives us soldiers whose tactics are terrifyingly suicidal, from which no one can emerge whole, from which no one can emerge capable of re-entering society, and so Kunnessin and The A Team Company seek, instead separation, which may be a good idea, yet even aside from the complications of Muri's crazy wife, the discovered gold, the military arriving, and all of the twists, they are still so wrecked that they wind up, by legend, fighting each other in perpetuity on a volcanic island.

Call it the smaller, and less visible cost of war.  Would a world without war be nice?  Like a world without any shortages, yes.  Exactly like that, and just as realistic.  Hence, is the notion justification to surrender to evil?  No.  Evil must be confronted, sometimes with force, and defeated.  Yet it would not be a challenge were there no cost.  Some costs are visible, and some images tug at the heart.  Broken soldiers don't tug at the hearts of certain activists.  Yet such prosperity we have.

How is that?

Did A Company fight on the right side or the wrong side?  Would it change your reading?  Suppose they did fight on the wrong side.  Isn't there a similar group on the right side anyway?  And if they were on the wrong side, then by being a traitor, Aidi helped the good guys.  See my point?

One way or another, yes, the bird's eye view matters, but so does the ground.

Jim Hurst & Missy Raines, "The Hero," from Synergy.

*Historically, pikes were what ended cavalry facing each other in battle, but let's let Parker have this for the sake of the story.