December 18, 2024 Warrior Wednesday Review Post
The history of the world, is a history of warfare. It used to be that British schoolchildren were required to learn the dates of a whole series of battles. (I’m not sure that British schoolchildren are required to learn anything, nowadays.) This was not (or at least not merely) because British schoolteachers and children were enamoured of blood and killing; but because battles, and the wars they were fought in, tended to represent clashes of civilisations and civilisational ideas.
My goal for these posts is to create a place where authors, if they wish, can have their works showcased. I make no claim to having read them, reviewed them, etc… although that is something I might end up doing here.
Warrior Wednesday
Warrior Wednesday (or WW for those feeling lazy) is a group of Substack authors who tag each other every Wednesday (or some Wednesdays, or a few Wednesdays a few months ago) in order to promote their ‘Warrior’ stories. Fiction is a hard go on Substack, and we need all the help we can get.
I would encourage anyone who likes ‘warrior’ stories to send me their tag address (which is not an easy thing on Substack!) and I will add them to my list. This can be because you like to write Warrior stories, read Warrior stories or, hopefully, both :)
If your ‘Sword Saturday’ fits in this class I will try to also list it… but probably on Wednesday or, occasionally when I get busy, Thursday.
I have pasted (a very awkward affair) my ‘tag list’ at the bottom of this post. If you wish to be added or taken off this list, please DM me or comment below. If you wish me to add a little blurb about who you are and what you write, DM me.
The Library
“The Library” is a great place to go to find Substack stories to read. “The Writings” also has a list of Christian authors and editors. I’m willing to paste more and more specific links if someone wishes to DM them to me.
Current Stories
For the purposes of this ‘review’ post, I am compiling the Warrior stories that have been sent to me. These do NOT need to be recent. I will obviously not post a dozen selections from any one author, but if you wish, this week, to promote the first chapter in your story you wrote ten years ago, go for it. Send it to me.
I have NOT read through all of these. Or even most of them. Some weeks maybe even none of them! So no endorsement should be assumed. Nor should the listing of someone’s story here imply that they approve of me or my work.
I’m going to try to separate these words into various categories. So far I have: Essay (talking about warrior stories), hist-fict, sci-fi, and fantasy. Let me know if there are more types, or if I have misfiled you.
I did not get sent ONE story for Warrior Wednesday this week so… here’s what I got for Sword Saturday:
https://talesofcalamityandtriumph.substack.com/p/sword-and-saturday-week-50-rain-in
Warning: Usually Substack lets me post the rectangle box with the little summary. Sometimes it will only let me post a link. I have no idea why. No, I wasn’t paid more by the people with the rectangle summaries.
My Stuff
I don’t tend to write ‘Warrior’ fiction… in that there isn’t much space in my books for actual combat. However my goal in all of my fiction is that it be about warriors… about people who fight, sometimes against themselves, and sometimes against others… sometimes in armed conflict and sometimes in political struggle… for truth and righteousness, for family and faith. Some of them are even in the military! And kill aliens or dragons!
Article 17
“This month at our book club we will be studying Martin Chillia’s famous book ‘Leader Tomirosh’. This book was written three years after Hero Tomirosh’s death and is a highly fictionalised account of his early career, at least as concerns his personal life and personality, of which very little is known. We are reading this book for, among other reasons, gaining an understanding of the early dictatorship years.
Ld. Tomirosh was not the only hero of those years but he was among the most famous and certainly one of the most colourful. When you read this account, you need to keep in mind that Ld. Tomirosh’s contemporaries knew, at the beginning of his career, almost nothing of who he actually was…"
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She was pretty, popular, snobby, and a planetary governor’s daughter. He was the son of shopkeepers, a social misfit, and a decorated hero. She thought she was there to dance. He had other ideas.
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Article 17 is a military science fiction story with aliens and romance. It is set in a future reminiscent of Napoleon era Britain. The war was going very poorly until the military installed a dictator. This story follows one of the dictator’s great men: Cladin Tomirosh, Leader, and thrice decorated hero.
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Island People
Island People is a series of stories about a young prince who is kidnapped, gets free and wins a war, then decides to launch a settlement project on the nearby mainland. To do it he will need men and families from all of the various races that occupy his island: Farmers, Dwarves, Horsemen, Fishermen, Elves, Trolls, and Marshmen. Luckily they can all transform into each other.
The current story in the series is ‘Dwarves and Dragons’. Five years after Seth and his crew started settling ‘The Day’, colonists are still coming and still settling the new land. One of these colonists is young Dwarf Heinrich, who seems to spend most of his time sitting at the front of the ship wondering what the new land will be like, and whether Dwarves would ever be allowed to swim.
Dragon Corps
Imagine World War I… with dragons. Not magic dragons, not fire-breathing dragons… just… dragons. Fly around on them, scout out the enemy, drop an occasional bomb… that kind of dragon.
This chapter is kind of from the middle. A little action!
September 8, 1914
In the air over Kaisershock, Belgium
All I really cared about were the dragons coming after me, and there seemed to be nine of them. They were standard German night dragons, mostly black but with wings of grey. The markings would be awe inspiring if they weren’t coming after me.
They were at least two hundred feet below us, but labouring higher. They flew in three formations of three, or perhaps I should say a formation with three parts made up of three dragons each. They were labouring up but also they had to come closer as, at the first hint of trouble I had turned our dragon away from them and the transport was continuing that heading.
It was tempting to start shooting but I new the distance was too great so I contented myself with merely looking back over my shoulder from time to time and keeping my body low to minimize drag.
It was about ten minutes before I put the Bird Wing up and started shooting. I had thought about it and had decided to alternate who I shot at, hopefully getting them all nervous and, if I did hit one but I couldn’t tell, I would starting shooting another soon enough. But I started with the man closest to me and fired off an entire round of bird shot, apparently without effect.
I switched guns… handing the bird shot to the pilot for reloading, and started in on the man in the front of the wing to my left. This time I seemed to have succeeded a bit anyway as, after my third shot, his dragon twitched. Still, he didn’t seem to stop coming after me, so I emptied my rifle in his direction.
For the next half an hour I was shooting alone. The dragons after me were concentrating on keeping after me, no doubt waiting till they go closer. But then, almost to a man, they got out their own bird wing and the bullets started whizzing around me. I heard three bullets come close with their first shot.
“I’m going to take us higher,” transport huffed out. He sounded winded but, then, I was breathing kind of hard myself.
As we went higher I got lucky and hit two of them. It was a lot easier for me, as I could concentrate on shooting and they had to ‘fly’ their dragons. But one of them dropped his gun, and the other must have gotten hit on his leg as he had trouble controlling the dragon… it kept trying to go off to the left.
Just then transport yelled something at me and our dragon made a dramatic turn to the right, coming back straight at the others. I grabbed a dragon defender and transport must have too, as seconds later we had plunged between the German dragons and we were firing right and left. The Germans got theirs out too, but weren’t able to fire while we were between them. One of them got a good hit on our dragon right afterward, though, I saw a chunk of flesh fly off from his back.
It didn’t seem to affect his flying though. Right after we went through them transport took us back up and I don’t really remember much of the fight after that. I started having a harder and harder time breathing, and everything seemed a bit fuzzy. I just remember shooting and shooting and shooting.
And I remember getting hit. Somehow a German had gotten behind us and the first I knew of it was when a bullet hit me in the backside. I cursed. I would never live that down.
I turned but he was already moving past me, underneath, and I shot at him several times. I think I missed the rider, but I know I hit the dragons wing… I could see a bit of shredding and he winced away from me. He didn’t get too far before I heard the roar of a dragon defender and the other wing suddenly opened up with holes and then tears, and then the dragon was gone, spiraling down to the ground.
Which left us only eight attackers and I kept firing. Eventually I noticed that three of the men I was shooting at were passed out over their saddles… whether from my shots or the lack of air I didn’t know. I also felt transport leaning against me, so I figured that he, too, was low on air.
I moved my legs down gratefully but I didn’t do much in the way of controlling the dragon, I just kept firing.
I ran out of bird wing ammunition and I was all but deaf from the roar of Dragon Defenders in my ear, so for a few seconds I seemed to have nothing to do. Then I suddenly realised that if I just stayed there we would both be killed and thinking frantically I lowered my arms, gripped on tight, and moved my legs up and down in the ‘emergency dive’ signal.
But the dragon and I had different ideas of what that mean for, while he mostly folded his wings and definitely dropped, it wasn’t toward the ground but toward a dragon below us. The knight on that dragon was firing at one of our dragons below him and totally missed our attack.
Our dragon hit the back of the other dragon with a jarring shock and I was even more shocked when my head whipped back up and I saw that he had bitten the head off the knight.
The dragon we had landed on was turning his own head toward us so I grabbed my dragon defender and let loose. I happened to be pointing right down at his rider, so the shells ripped through his headless corpse and into the spine of the dragon.
Which, itself, began to plunge down toward the ground.
I again gave the ‘emergency down’ signal and my dragon must have wanted to breath as well as I did, for this time he took me very literally and we dropped like a stone. Indeed as we got closer and closer to the ground I panicked and began trying to get him to flatten out. But he must have figured he knew better than me, cause he waited the longest time and then flared out just over the treetops, and then swooped into a clearing and stopped.
I sat in my saddle, trying to figure out why I wasn’t doing something. But my brain didn’t seem to be able to process anything in that way. So I just sat there until, finally, I heard someone yelling, and turned to see a farmer and what must be his family getting down from a wagon.
“English, English,” they were yelling as they came up. Which was true enough, but didn’t seem to require a response. I felt rather than saw them unstrapping transport from behind me. I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t seem to…
“English, English, you bleed,” a boy said and I turned to stare at him.
“You bleed!” He repeated, pointing at my backside.
“Bullet… a bullet…” I said, slowly. “A German bullet.”
“You bleed! My Vater, he bleed!” He said and, moments later I felt arms lifting me down.
They set me down in the wagon and I looked over to see Transport. He was wheezing and coughing up blood. “You… you got hit?” I asked him.
“No… no, it was the air. I have weak lungs… injured years ago.”
“Are you… will you be all right?”
“Not my first time,” he said. “But… it might be my last. I passed out up there… I don’t know how long. How is the dragon?”
“What dragon? Oh. Our dragon? It’s over… over there… I think.”
“What’s wrong with you?” He coughed out.
“They shot me,” I said, reaching my hand toward my backside. “It doesn’t hurt, though.” I reached back, “Ow,” I said. “It hurts when I mash on it.”
“Don’t mash on it!” He said.
A few minutes later the wagon turned into the drive of a farm house. If you can call a one hundred foot pair of mud ruts a ‘drive’. The farm house was typical: whitewashed wood with thatched roof and heavy wood timbers. About ten foot by twenty foot, if that, one chimney.
The farmer stopped the wagon and leapt down, followed by his wife, talking volubly but, in my confused state, not very understandably. So I was surprised when he suddenly lifted me down and carried me inside and laid me on a table.
The next hour was one of the most bizarre of my life. The inside of the house was very smoky, so I could barely see. The mother carved at my backside with a knife, and kept pouring something over the wound which stung almost more than the carving. The father and the son held me down. And then finally I heard an exclamation and turned my head to see her holding up a bullet.
I naively thought I was done, but she got out a spool of thread and a simply enormous needle and I had to survive at least as long as she sewed me up. And then, still lying on my stomach on her table, covered by a heavy woolen blanket, she spooned small beer and soup into me until I thought I would pop. Then, finally, she left me alone and, despite the waves of pain coming all the way up and down my leg, I fell asleep.
I awoke twice that night, both times the son of the family helping me get outside to do my business. The first time Transport, who was sitting just outside the door, hailed me. “Will you live?” He asked me.
“I think so,” I said. “I think I lost five pounds of flesh as she dug around to get the bullet out.”
He laughed, but I saw him watching me as I walked out and then back, leaning on the boy.
“Can you still feel your leg?” He asked me.
“Can I? It hurts like all billy oh!” I said.
“That’s good,” he said. “Better that than it being all numb.”
“True,” I said. “I hadn’t thought of that. Are you coming in?”
“Not me,” he said. “I would cough my lungs up entire with all that smoke. I’ll be fine out here.”
Caveats etc.
Last of all he said, "Lucy, Eve's Daughter," and Lucy came forward. He gave her a little bottle of what looked like glass (but people said afterwards that it was made of diamond) and a small dagger. "In this bottle," he said, "there is a cordial made of the juice of one of the fire-flowers that grow on the mountains of the sun. If you or any of your friends is hurt, a few drops of this will restore them. And the dagger is to defend yourself at great need. For you also are not to be in the battle."
"Why, sir?" said Lucy. "I think- I don't know- but I think I could be brave enough."
"That is not the point," he said. "But battles are ugly when women fight.”
CS Lewis
I reserve the right to refuse to post any work that I find objectionable, for any reason, at any time. And vice versa… if you don’t want your work featured here, by all means tell me!
Beta Reading
I love beta reading. I won’t read just anything, but I am a very harsh critic. So if that’s what you’re looking for, feel free to DM me, or comment below, and maybe we can arrange something.
Thank you for reading Von’s Substack. I would love it if you commented! I love hearing from readers, especially critical comments. I would love to start more letter exchanges, so if there’s a subject you’re interested in, get writing and tag me!
Being ‘restacked’ and mentioned in ‘notes’ is very important for lesser-known stacks so… feel free! I’m semi-retired and write as a ministry (and for fun) so you don’t need to feel guilty you aren’t paying for anything, but if you enjoy my writing (even if you dramatically disagree with it), then restack, please! Or mention me in one of your own posts.
If I don’t write you back it is almost certain that I didn’t see it, so please feel free to comment and link to your post. Or if you just think I would be interested in your post!
If you get lost, check out my ‘Table of Contents’ which I try to keep up to date.
Von also writes as ‘Arthur Yeomans’. Under that name he writes children’s, YA, and adult fiction from a Christian perspective. His books include:
The Bobtails meet the Preacher’s Kid
and
Arthur also has a substack, and a website.
Thanks again, God Bless, Soli Deo gloria,
Von
Tag List
Here is my current list:
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