Dr. Bret Devereaux

It's a river until you're breaking the hundreds of thousands.

Riverine logistics, basically unlimited.

That is so long as you have the river boats and the rivers navigable.

Yeah.

So a shield wall at two ranks deep is pretty thin.

But obviously, he's quite badly outnumbered.

So that may explain the desire to run thin.

And it's also worth noting that formation depth in these kinds of formations is not usually about, like, it is not a shoving match.

you don't need the depth to like resist being pushed is mostly about morale and cohesion so a very elite force of very dedicated soldiers who can't flee anywhere anyway uh he might be willing to to run the line pretty thin

So, yeah, so a shield wall, there is a fair bit of scholarly argument over exactly what we should understand by shield walls.

There's certainly they show up in, you know, beginning in old English literature.

This is a phrase that appears it appears in Beowulf.

a shield whale.

I'm going to utterly blow my old English.

Sorry, guys, I do Latin and Greek, but a sort of thing.

But quite a lot of cultures stumbled upon the idea that if you've got a whole bunch of guys that are using really big shields and you put them all basically next to each other, you can create a really strong formation that way.

And this is evidently what's taking place.

But I would encourage people when they're thinking about a shield wall,

Hollywood often gets this quite wrong in that it both places the men much too tightly.

Now, we're told here the ranks are serried.