Starting the Defence Review

Yesterday, after a day's journey from Sanvell we started passing through some smaller towns and villages.  This part of the mission isn't really about my reorganising the defences.  Gallanarre has been banging the drum a little, rousing the locals to spur volunteers to head back to Sanvell and a weapons muster.  He can be quite inspiring.  He's been trying to raise ten or twenty young warriors from each of the towns – and he's done that easily.  We dropped in on five settlements yesterday, and another two this morning.  I forget the names of these places as we seemed to pass through so quickly.  He talked to groups of young Gnaeblin at gatherings, while I spent most of the time chatting to the senior figures in the town.  At first this was by accident, but last night and even more so  this morning I sought them out to discuss general defence tactics with them just in case it's needed.  I've kept the advice light and as generic as possible as all we'd need from these village seniors is to be defensively prepared if they were attacked.  If the Gurgam broke this deep into Gnaeblin territory, the defensive strategy for the entire army would change – there'd be senior Gnaeblin defence commanders here with significant forces, including several thousand Dzarraf.

Our job changed this afternoon as we approached the Gnaeblin region known as the  'borders', which is a string of settlements that runs along the edge of the mountain entrances.  We are no longer raising an army, we are now doing work that I'm here to do – the discussion of formal defences.  We stopped at three towns this afternoon and finished quite late in the evening.  This has now developed into hard work.

In each case we had the local seniors take us around the defences, and we moved things around pretty much in the way I'd discussed with Banneghenn, but taking into account the size of any defensive structures or terrain.  We even gave advice to that last village, Wimmet I think it's called, about shoring up the banking they have behind the wide tunnels that lead into their caves.  We've also increased the production of arrows and crossbow bolts, short-swords, hand axes and shields for use in the defences.  Gallanarre has been involved with all this.  Out here the objective is to defend better and still provide one or two extra troops for the attack force.  These extra troops are no longer being sent to Sanvell either – now we're sending them to the surface town of Demmol, as per Gallanarre's instructions.

In general we've been welcomed – some are quite pleased to see us.  But it's not the same from all the people we visit.  Many of the younger generations don't fully understand the Gurgam problem, and they seem to think that fighting isn't the solution.  It's likely that they don't want to fight and die against the Gurgam, and that peace is only a negotiation away.  They're blinded by a mix of cowardice and ideology.  They do not yet realise that fighting is something they will probably end up doing that anyway – the Gurgam are coming to them.  And they aren't keen negotiators, and they don't stop to agree truces.