Appreciate the interest. – Casey

This is a short treatment on texts that have influenced my writing in some way or another. The original document was nearing 8,000 words long when I realized it would actually be virtually endless. So if it feels terse then good. I need to stop caging the famished editor in me.

A comment on sources: information on medieval mercenaries is surprisingly not as sharp as I imagined it to be. There’s a couple of texts and books, but I’ve no interest in listing them here as I’d difficulty finding anything of sound quality. Conversely, there’s a stark rise of journals and diaries coming from the budding Renaissance era. My personal preference is for the American West. I’m of the belief that most folks are not that different regardless of era - but that civilization simply provides gentler means of ending disputes, and careful journalism brings an eye to atrocities that for ages went unknown to all but those involved.

I’m still wrangling with how the site handles text – I’ve never made a site of my own such as this so you’ll have to bear with me if this looks slapdash.

~

“The grotesque fact that murderers, brigands, gangsters, thieves, forgers, tyrants, and swindlers, in a guise that deceives nobody, have seized control of collective life is characteristic of our time. Their unscrupulousness and double-dealing are recognized and admired. Their ruthless energy they obtain at best from some stray archetypal content that has got them in its power. The dynamism of a possessed personality is accordingly very great, because, in its one-track primitivity, it suffers from none of the differentiations that make men human.” - Erich Neumann

“[Landsknechts] are a new order of soulless people who have no respect for honor or justice. [They practice] whoring, adultery, rape, gluttony, drunkenness, stealing, robbing, murdering… [They] live entirely in the power of the devil, who pulls them about wherever he wants. - Decree of August 12, 1522. Sourced by Joel F Harrington, The Faithful Executioner.

Battle Brothers’ writing is mostly borne of how I believe a bunch of unruly, presumably sex starved*1, and often drunk*2 idiots*3 would behave when they’re well compensated*4 for killing in a supremely dangerous world*5. With the art and style reflecting a quasi-medieval Germanic setting, I stick to the real-life counterpart as a sort of measure of where to take things. Most provincially: the world has as much contempt for common sin as it does for common sense.

Michael Walzer in Just and Unjust Wars actually gets to the core of how I approach the company in Battle Brothers here (and I’m truncating the argument greatly):

“A fight between mercenary armies is undoubtedly a bad way of settling political disputes, but we judge it bad for the sake of the people whose fate is being settled, not for the sake of the soldiers themselves.”

Very next sentence:

“Our judgments are very different, however, if the mercenary armies are recruited from among desperately impoverished men who can find no other way of feeding themselves and their families except by signing up.” (p.27)

The general makeup of a Battle Brothers company consists of all sorts of folks and I pay special mind to their backgrounds. Men like the Hedge Knights, Sellswords, and Raiders, etc., all seem to be perpetually standing with one foot out the door because they are. They have a tenuous at best relationship with the company and are there firstly for the dosh. You’re not the first outfit they’ve joined. But what about the Miller of Farmhand or Lumberjack? How does a laborer fall in with killers? The ludonarrative (there it is!) aspect of it is of course taking a random schmuck and building him into a hardnosed murdering machine. But the schmuck aspect of it is just that – the company is often composed of random men who have fallen on very desperate times.

“We might be our own carvers for we had no other pay,” states Poyntz, one real-life mercenary during the 30 Years War.*6

Life’s steeltoed boots dig deep into the itchy crotches of Battle Brothers’ very unworldly men. Which you can actually find reflected even today in a more nuanced sense – how many folks have seen a well-educated, supposedly intelligent individual who also happens to be eons away from their field of study, stuck working in a Starbucks or digging ditches or moonlighting some crackerjack job or other? Has anyone SEEN such an individual? WHERE COULD THEY BE-

One of the subtle ‘downer’ aspects of Battle Brothers is the meta-realization about who even constitutes your own band. Mostly in the sense that the most dangerous of the group almost certainly were not born that way but were perhaps once upon a time Fishermen or Peddlers, wholly invested in that trade until a world of awful fell on them. The coldhearted Sellsword cracks deaf jokes as he collects ears from the battlefield while the Historian over there is struggling to come to grips with putting a sword through a man’s face. But then one day the Historian kills someone, and he just about forgot he did it before his head hit the pillow that night. And then a month goes by and he realizes he stopped keeping count. And then it becomes a blur, not because he’s become the Sellsword, but because an annoying sonuvabitch Goblin has hit him with a poisoned arrow and he can hardly move because this is Battle Brothers.

Now here are some sources and inspirations.*7

~

*1, on ‘sex starved men.’ Most military companies of this time period actually had a retinue of women serving one job or another. Many of these were actually spouses, as demonstrated by Peter Hagendorf’s diary where his whole family is alongside him. Others would be menial labor workers, cooks, and prostitutes. In more disorganized companies, they would be sex slaves. Usually momentarily so. In even more disorganized bands such as a criminal ones, they would be accomplices and frequently pregnant ones at that. The Glanton Gang is depicted as taking the former, at one time raping captured Mexicans before murdering them to cover the crime; a pair of thieves is depicted as the latter in executioner Franz Schmidt’s diary. One such bastard baby had its hand removed and buried as a superstitious sapling, there rooted eight days before recovered to fashion a hand of glory. The infant’s throat was then slit. This particular pair wore necklaces carrying purses of gunpowder believed to make them bulletproof. Such powers remained untested as they were executed with heated tongs and dangerous levels of 16th century buttplay.

I should add that in Samuel Chamberlain’s memoir there are frequent mentions of military concubinage during the Mexican-American War. One rather eyebrow raising event occurred between a Prussian soldier-musician and his commander. The Prussian’s camp woman was found in bed with the commander which led to a fight between the men. The Prussian was then hanged for confronting his commander. Chamberlain dedicates an entire chapter to military executions for one event or another, yet states there’s almost no care given for the atrocities happening.

*2, on alcoholism. In researching topics on criminality, barbarism, and mercenary work, alcoholism appears in virtually every instance of outrageous violence or at the very least as a precursor to it. For example, it almost seems ceremonial for slaughters and massacres of the American West to be precipitated by a good drink imbibed by either party. In Samuel Chamberlain’s writings, he’s either drunk or half-drunk in most the tales. Having the socially derided role of executioner, Franz Schmidt swore off alcohol to raise his prestige and fight back the negative connotations of his vocation – meanwhile, clergy, governors, noblemen, the whole sort are getting drunk all the time because what else would you do besides mooch the benefits of having a title. Generally speaking, many of the crimes in Franz’s journal are bracketed with drinking. When reading war tales, I also at times came across minor mentions of large kegs being somewhere in the supplies, often highlighted for importance. When pillaging towns for supply, the companies of the 30 Years War would often target alcohol. A good drink was also a cheap both as a source of entertainment and as a remove from the rigors of a hard life.

*3, on idiocy. One event in Battle Brothers has the characters debating about how far away the sun is. A careful distinction is made in this event. Not only are these men idiots to us, but they are idiots of their own time as they rapidly shoot down the only person anywhere in the ballpark of a correct answer. Of course, I use the term ‘idiot’ pretty loosely. I myself once had a conversation about the distance of the sun to which the other party stated it being 93-million miles away “felt wrong.” I share similar skepticism when it comes to English grammar and treat its zealots as the heretics they is. We’re all idiots in some regard or other, the good lot of us just don’t run around with swords, thankfully. But maybe someday.

“Cunz Nenner similarly threatened arson on account of some pigeons taken from him.” - The Faithful Executioner, 149, on crimes of arson, and Franz Schmidt’s journal.

*4, a sellsword’s compensation. The scalphunters of Texas found Apache and Comanche scalps averaged $50 in Sonora general and more locally $200 in the desperate city of Chihuahua. For comparison, a good rifle in the late 1840s Texas would cost about $5-$10. After the Cherokee annihilation, armaments flooded into Comanche territory and they were snapping them up to sharpen their raids into Mexico and west Texas. You’d get $50-$200 for a scalp because Comanche raids were so absolutely devastating one contemporaneous Mexican referred to northwest Mexico as a land of a “thousand deserts”, and one modern Comanche historian stated that the attacks neared on genocide of a Western people.

Many ‘sellswords’ in history were paid in loot. For example, when Andrew Jackson enlisted the Cherokee to fight the Red Sticks he paid the leaders what he paid his own officers, and he paid the warriors in booty. By the end of the campaign there were Cherokee fighters walking about with herds of cattle, horses, and slaves. In a grim nuance of early 19th century America, white commanders had to chastise their native mercenaries and ensure that black slaves were returned to their proper owners.

Personally, I know of one ex-special forces soldier who got paid $40,000 for a 3month contract in a foreign land. The amount of money being paid to soldiers of fortune has always drawn prospective men to the trade, and those who are good at it can gain considerable wealth. Most famously is perhaps John Hawkwood of White Company fame. It should be mentioned that fealty is first and foremost to the coin. There are numerous accounts of companies switching sides even mid-battle/siege during The 30 Years War.

For those interested in prices,

https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/pricesandwages/1840-1849

*5, on the danger of old worlds.

“[Attacks by highwaymen] on people along the road or in their own homes look less like carefully planned heists than excuses to indulge their sadistic impulses - binding and torturing victims with fire or hot grease, raping them repeatedly, and killing survivors in gruesome ways.” - The Faithful Executioner, 150.

Based upon Joel F Harrington’s The Faithful Executioner, you had about a 50/50 shot of making it to the age of twelve in the sixteenth century. Infant mortality was high, but just as high were children either being murdered or dying via accidents. Women had a 1/20 chance of dying either in child birth or in the recovery weeks that followed. Walking the roads without protection was a fool’s notion. In fact, roads were so dangerous that banishment from one’s town was seen as an especially harsh punishment. Per Schmidt’s diary, a full one-third of convicted robbers were Landsknechts, and it stands to reason most mercenaries would be pretty good at not getting caught. Going forward hundreds of years to 1860s Texas where general lawlessness led to staggering levels of violence,

https://scholarship.law.tamu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1106&context=lawreview,

I should add that the data for 1869 is actually available thanks to a military commander’s assessment which you can find here,

https://tinyurl.com/ybjgw62l

I can no find reports of monsters in the historical record, but I have to assume that orcs, geists, and other critters would each make suitable contributions to any already dangerous world.

6*, Of further and somewhat particular interest: Johann von Werth & Torsten Stalhandske, also of 30 Years War. Unfortunately, many sources are not translated in English.

7*, an assortment of sources.

Journals and diaries.

Peter Hagendorf & Poyntz. You can find scraps of these on the internet. Hagendorf’s diary is apparently purchasable but only in German. Seems ripe for an author to bring to the English tongue.

Samuel Chamberlain’s My Confession. Samuel Chamberlain’s mid-life memoir (written in the 1850s) served as a historical bedrock for Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Unlike the novel, Chamberlain’s memoir is mostly about the Mexican-American War. The last portion of it details his involvement with the Glanton Gang and has a passing acknowledgment of the notorious Judge Holden. My copy is from the 1956 reprinting; apparently some copies are missing a portion of his involvement with the gang.

Franz Schmidt’s Journal, the journal is the basis for the nonfiction book, The Faithful Executioner by Joel F Harrington. The journal itself is obviously in German so I had to depend upon Harrington’s excellent book. It is the best book I’ve read in probably five years. Highly, highly recommended.

The Secret History of the Mongols (primary source), much like the Egyptian pharaohs well before their time, Mongolian commanders also liked to be buried alongside others. Except in the Mongolian case they preferred to be buried with one enemy beneath their feet and another being used as a pillow. Also, I can’t remember if Dan covered it in his podcast, but the way the Mongols handled the Hashishun fortress is absolutely incredible.

Isidor of Seville’s Etymologia, Isidore’s etymology is a must read, or at least something to keep on hand if you’re footing about journals, memoirs, etc. of the time. The study of words and grammar can give unbelievable insight into how people were thinking in eras alien to our own. For example, if some future historian finds a script with “l33t” on it, he’ll have a pretty good notion of the time, and he’ll have a pretty good idea of who the individual was.

Political theory and application.

Just and Unjust Wars by Michael Walzer

Moral Man and Immoral Society by Reinhold Niebuhr

Politics Among Nations by Hans Morgenthau

Morality and Contemporary Warfare by James Turner Johnson

The History of Human Rights by Micheline Ishay

The Specter of Genocide by Gellately & Kiernan

Historically interesting.

Catalogs of Assyrian Conquests – the Assyrians kept meticulous records of their conquests. They are quite grisly, employing terror and fear tactics to defeat their enemies before ever even meeting them. You can find these records online with a quick google search, though you’d best have the stomach for the details.

Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus – a work of contemporary fiction, 30 Years War.

“[The mercenaries ransacked the house.] One servant girl was so badly handled in the barn that she couldn’t move any longer. Our servant they tied up and laid on the ground and rammed a funnel in his mouth and then poured a ghastly brew full of piss down his throat. Then they started to torture the peasants as if they wanted to burn a bunch of witches.” (10)

William Wallace by James MacKay

Harem Years by Shaarawi, primary source for women’s behavior and treatment that does not involve murder and outrage. There’s plenty more to find, but I list this one because of its uniqueness.

The Trail of Tears by John Ehle – History of Cherokee before and after their extermination.

The Thirty Years War by Wedgwood, there are numerous books on the 30 Years War. I’m not studied enough to make any hearty recommendation of one over others, just only that which I know. From what I understand there are ‘arguments’ pertaining to the destructivity and conduct of the conflict which are far beyond my scope. I’ll just say my main interest was seeking out the mercenary side of the war, and in doing so I did find a ton of info, including that the term ‘marauder’ comes from a sort of over rambunctious recruiter by the name of Morder of this era. There are also many tales of mercenaries behaving well, and others of them behaving like savages. I should add that the mercenaries of this era are, at an organizational level, nothing much like those found in Battle Brothers. Most of these men brought their families along and were more like armies paid by whole regions instead of by a sole or handful of benefactors.

The Dustbowl by Donald Worster

Misc. writings by George Ruxton – 19th c. adventurer in line with Chamberlain, but with more mountaineering.

The most useful by far.

The Faithful Executioner by Joel F Harrington (see below)

My Confession by Samuel Chamberlain (see below)

Fiction stuff:*

Stephen King

Richard Matheson

H.P. Lovecraft

Clive Barker

William Faulkner

Cormac McCarthy

*Fiction stuff, just what I like to read. I’ve always had a mind for the ‘horror’ genre. Not much to expound on these authors that isn’t already known. As a humorous note, I guess I can add that I used to put papermache over my Lovecraft books as the covers are absolute bedlam and I didn’t want my peers thinking me insane. Or worse, a weirdo.

Light examinations of two texts.

The Faithful Executioner by Joel F Harrington

My Confession by Samuel E Chamberlain

The Faithful Executioner by Joel F Harrington

Based upon the journal of a 16th century German executioner named Franz Schmidt, this is one of the best books I’ve ever read. Not to sound too ‘giddy’, but it gives absolutely ridiculous primary source insight into an interesting vocation – the executioner, the professional killer, the hangman, the carnifex – and in the peripheral of this tale lies a diorama of the day-to-day life of 16th century people.

Despite the subject matter, there is a lot of endearing elements in this book. Perhaps I overvalue familiarity, but when I read that the executioners’ children were bullied at school it brings an enriching sense of bond between times and places that may otherwise, or frankly should otherwise, seem alien. So much of history is lost to the greater picture – battles, campaigns, edicts and declarations, the doings of the great men and women – that we lose sight of the personal realities of ordinary folks.

But Schmidt’s world is one of superstition and fear, wreathed in wild climatic changes and economic instability, all set in a place of grinding resource scarcity where the time and place of one’s next meal is oft uncertain. Alcoholism and gambling are as rampant as unerring religiosity (Schmidt himself is, coincidentally, about as straight edge as an executioner’s blade, and keeps himself at arm’s length from anything religiously provocative). The open roads are so wildly dangerous that some would rather face torture (“interrogation”) than ‘banishment’ from one’s hometown. The ubiquitous currency, for man or woman, rich or poor, was that of honor, and either sex would rather die than lose it.

I was very enthralled by the world of Franz Schmidt. Some of it is the dark humor of even 16th century criminals having street names like Stretch and Brains (48 Hours would be proud). Some of it is the déjà vu found in the crimes themselves. As Schmidt ages he starts to catalog crime with greater detail and you find in those descriptions a commonality with the crime of today. Schmidt shakes his head at the wastefulness of folks being murdered for handfuls of florins. The slapdash manner in which these crimes occur lends itself to an air of unescapable desperation combined with a low regard for human life. You’ve business acquaintances killing one another, friends shanking and robbing friends, you’ve an unhinged thief stunning a peddler with a throw of a rock then, as the peddler regains consciousness, the thief is startled and hurriedly stabs his victim to death. Another case is that of a servant woman who, so belittled and beaten by her employer, took up a fire iron and stove his head in as he slept.

But it is not all ridiculous. Some of it is plainly barbaric. Schmidt is aghast and can hardly make sense of the crimes which carry such brutality they beggar description. One of the worst accounts is that of a pair of robbers and a stock of ‘whore’ women they’d kept as perpetual company. When one of the women bore a child, the men threw it into the air and let it fall and strike a table, making insane religious declarations at the height of its ascent and laughing mockingly at its descent. Another bastard child had its hand removed and buried as a superstitious sapling, there rooted eight days before recovered to fashion a hand of glory. The child’s throat was thereafter cut. Upon capture, the men were tortured with fire pincers and torn bottom to top. (In a rare show of emotion, Schmidt seems happy with these results, insomuch as a straightfaced executioner can be on another day at the job.)

Horrors aside, there is the scheming and craftiness of some crimes that you can’t help but laugh at. For example, a pair of men who employed ‘whores’ on the road in a blackmail trap. The women would fetch the attention of high-status men and then the miscreants would jump out some bushes and start threatening the marks with revealing their moral decay.

Finally, I should also add that Schmidt’s journal has a note that one-third of captured robbers were Landsknechts. It is also a common thread among most readings I’ve done that the line between sellsword and highway robber was extremely thin, with fighters passing between one or the other with ease. Given the lack of communication and travel, it was also easy for a murderer to slip from one place to the next, taking up either mercenary work or further criminal ventures. There’s a reason why most folks in Battle Brothers treat the player and his company with contempt or reluctancy. It also needs stating that the core of The Faithful Executioner is Schmidt’s “quest for respectability.” People did not like to fraternize with someone in constant contact with criminals, much less someone who was a ‘professional murderer.’ Now imagine how folks would feel if they’d come across a band of men hired for the direct purpose of killing on a large scale, almost all of them drunk or wishing they were, and altogether they pursued their already violent objective with no oversight whatsoever…

My Confession by Samuel Chamberlain

I’ve been playing poker off and on for a number of years and in that time have seen some – to be frank – crazy shit. A couple weeks ago I took a road trip east and made a stop in Shreveport, Louisiana where the game is legal. There I played a couple hours of cards. And in those couple of hours there was friendliness, hostility, and uncinched anger. At one point, a player had gone all-in and another contemplated calling it. While he sat in thought, an uninvolved player exaggerated a yawn and asked where the action was. The thinking player stared at his cards for a good ten seconds, then suddenly stood up and said, “What the fuck did you say? I’ll show you some action!”

I don’t think it would be a stretch to think that if you removed a sense of law, or any law altogether, and introduced firearms, knifes, and machetes, and removed the FDA approved healthiness of the drinks we were imbibing and replaced it with ad hoc manufacture, and put most entrants on an empty belly with little sight of the next meal, and removed air conditioning and brought in a host of flies and other nuisances, and put us all in a barren land where sweat is silver, then those two men very well may have drawn upon one another.

Which brings me to My Confession by Samuel Chamberlain. Due to its rarity it is a bit of a personal prize for myself and also precisely the sort of history I adore – a primary source and coverage of 1800s American frontier. The memoir follows one Samuel Chamberlain, a soldier and scalper of the late 1840s. The memoir starts with Chamberlain trying to scrape out some sense of a life as a young sixteen year-old kid, and though there’s no doubt some embellishments, I do get a feeling he’s being outright honest with much of what he writes (he openly admits to crying himself to sleep, for example, not something oft shared by gruff men portraying ahistorical bravado; there is also a stark decline in personal fanfare as his adventures descend into seen and eventually enacted barbarity).

Chamberlain bounds his way into Texas through this misadventure or that. Damn near everyone is drunk all the time (a common theme in most of my research of these time periods), and damn near everyone is a hair trigger away from losing it. This leads to numerous stories of tempers flaring, some to hilarious ends, others culminating in violence and retribution. The bulk of the book follows the Mexican-American War, a strangely understudied conflict when you place it amongst the events that gave the United States its shape. I lost count, but there seemed to be endless examples of criminal violence by all parties involved, and as far as the American military went the most of theirs went ‘unreported.’ Most violence was reciprocal and outside of the scope of ‘proper’ battles. However, my focus on Chamberlain was on something else entirely:

The Glanton Gang, a notorious scalp hunting outfit in the employ of the city-state Chihuahua, Mexico. Why would Mexicans hire foreigners for this purpose? Well, for background, the Comanche tribe kept raiding Mexico so furiously that it was leaving dead towns and stricken landscapes all across its northwest stretches. One Mexican referred to the region as the land of a “thousand deserts”, and one Comanche historian referred to the tribe’s aggression as quite possibly a genocidal campaign. The Comanche would attack settlements, torture and kill all the men, slaughter infants and children, and rape or enslave the rest. Everything that couldn’t be taken as loot would be burned. Descriptions of these assaults are harrowing, with one eyewitness stating they thought a horse trader was coming into town, only for the Comanche riders to have been riding belly-side and swinging up into their saddles at the last moment and driving upon the town with lances, arrows, and muskets all the while whooping and hollering. One deposition, perhaps glomming onto familiarity, referred to these screams as a ‘Florida-whoop.’

Which brings us back to Chamberlain and his joining the scalp hunters. The Glanton gang had been tasked with stemming the flow of native raiders. $50-$200 a scalp was the highest reward, which by my own calculations was a considerable amount of money (for reference: the flood of Cherokee refugees into Oklahoma brought with them a surplus of firearms which could be bought for $5 a pop, coincidentally many of which were bought by Comanche warriors). Chamberlain partook in the hunting and scalping, though there’s nowhere near the festiveness found in his writings about it as you’d find in his pre-war descriptions. The financial incentive of a cruel task somewhat overrides any sense of distinguished soldiering.

It doesn’t take a genius to see where Chihuahua’s plan would go haywire. Though native scalps were fairly easily recognized (usually by hairline and ear), many people actually living in the region were of mixed ethnic backgrounds. Thusly and cynically, the Glanton gang turned to scalping anyone they could find, most notably Mestizos who’d ‘look the part’ so to speak. (It should be noted that this is somewhat ironic as Glanton fielded a pretty diverse set of killers, including an Apache; I should also note that Glanton is written as the most ferocious Indian-fighter ever seen, in part because, per Chamberlain, his wife was kidnapped, raped, tortured, and murdered by a Native gang. Chamberlain himself had a love taken away and ‘outraged’ and murdered during the closure of the Mexican-American war.)

With the hunt unwinding into senseless killing, the Glanton gang lost their contract with Chihuahua who sniffed out the false scalps and put out a bounty for the murderers. A reward on their heads, the crew fled west. They commandeered a ferry on the Colorado river and there descended into further atrocities, extorting travelers willing to pay and ambushing those who would not. When a group of native Yumas built their own ferry downriver, Glanton had it destroyed and its entrepreneur – an Irishman – bound and tossed into the river.

Outraged, the Yumas attacked the Glanton gang. Multiple depositions of the assault are in the records, most of which tell it something like this: a handful of Glanton men were out cutting trees when the Yumas attacked. Those men fled by boats, cut south, returned to camp to find Mexicans unwilling to help them, then fled again, this time west – Chamberlain was one of these men, barely escaping with an arrow in his leg, and scattering out into the desert toward San Diego. The rest of the gang was slaughtered in the ferry-side abodes. Glanton is described as being caught asleep and either having his head stoved in with a rock, or split to his neck with an axe. The leader’s body was then thrown into a bonfire. Every deposition remarks that a number of dogs related to the gang were also tethered to their owners and heaped upon the flames. Many of the gangmembers’ bodies were mutilated beyond recognition.

In all, reading memoirs like this give a fascinating glimpse into the past. Chamberlain himself went on to write his memoir, join the Civil War, and eventually be a warden for a prison. Another one of the gangmembers became a super intendent. Another stabbed a man to death in a stable livery, was found out, and hung from the neck. (An interesting tidbit, the mayor responsible for his hanging stated that he’d resign from office if the criminal wasn’t executed. When a stay of execution arrived, he resigned and handed the prisoner over to the furious public. After the prisoner’s prompt lynching, the mayor was then reelected to office.) Other stories just seem so nonsensical – Chamberlain disembarks a boat and finds entrepreneurial daytalers fistfighting over helping passengers, to which Chamberlain gladly sits half-drunk in a wheelbarrow and watches. Another has a group of American soldiers getting drunk in a pub. Suddenly, a Mexican stabs one of the soldiers in the side and runs off. Hearing the commotion, another soldier stands up on a stool and sees the Mexican slipping toward the door and levels a pistol and shoots it over the heads of the entire crowd, killing the stabber outright. In one particularly bizarre story, a drunk American soldier tethers a church bell to his horse and goes riding through a Mexican town. No doubt bouncing and twisting around, the bell clipped (and possibly killed) a Catholic priest. Upon apprehending the soldier, the town flayed him alive. And left him alive there until the return of the soldier’s unit. There he was shot by his commander in a ‘mercy killing.’