It wasn’t really 100 000 fighters. It was 100 000 people, including the elderly, non-fighting women, the infirm and children.
The Wildling army, i.e., the actual fighters numbered perhaps 20 000 or maybe 30 000. But a lof of them just ran.
. Still a sizable majority compared to Stannis’ puny army of 1000 or so.
But Stannis’ men were
- better armed.
- Other than the bronze-age Thenns, most of the Wildlings still live in the Stone Age. They don’t mine, they don’t make weapons. The best weapons and armor they have are stolen or looted from vanquished Night’s Watchmen. They armor themselves in wood or leather or bones. They fight with sticks or mauls(a stick with a rock on top of it) or stone axes, for the most part. Stannis’ knights, by contrast, have chain and plate mail, fight with quality iron-forged swords and lances.
- better trained
- Being a wildling is tough; you got to fight to survive. But being a knight in Westeros means you train under a professional eye for your entire life from childhood on. YOu train with sword, you train with lance, you train with axe and mace and dagger and…whatever else is handy and deadly. Your typical drunken-ass trailer-trash Wildling — with some exceptions, like, again, the Thenns — might very well bash your head in with a rock, but he doesn’t train. That’s for kneelers. OK, some might and Mance Rayder does seem to be trying to start some training program going in his camp. But it’s too little, too late.
- disciplined.
- They ride in formation. They lower their lances as one. And unless you are standing in a strong shield-wall with your own spears and pikes and sharpened stakes sticking out to cow the horses, they are going to kill you. Each mounted knight when you consider horse, armor and weapons is nearly a ton. Without iron discipline and common sense tactics(and the Wildlings have niether) your choices are pretty much stay put and die or run and die. The idea of discipline beating numbers is reiterated again and and again and again in A Storm of Swords. Indeed it is the main reason why the Wildlings have never established a toe hold south of the Wall for millennia. YOu’d think they’d learn.
- Mounted. What’s tougher than a trained warrior armed to the teeth, encased in steel armor and coming at you to kill you? The same warrior on a a biting, fighting, armored vicious beast. I don’t know about you. But I would run. And probably die.
- Had the element of surprise.
art by Tomasz Jedruszek
Written December 15 2016
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