In games and history books and military science lectures, teachers and old warhorses and other scholarly types lay out diagrams and stand-up models in neat lines and rows. They show you, in a methodical order, how this division forced a hole in that line, or how these troops held their ground when all others broke. But that’s an illusion. A real struggle between combatants, whether they number dozens or thousands, is something inherently messy, fluid, difficult to follow. The illusion can show you the outcome, but it doesn’t impress upon you the surge and press of bodies, the screams, the
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