"Lawrence Watt-Evans - Dus 3 - Sword Of Bheleu" - читать интересную книгу автора (Watt-Evans Lawrence)

The tents were apparently placed at random, wherever their owners' whims
had chosen; most were clustered loosely about a large, square-framed one that
Garth assumed must serve as a command post. Some were not set up properly;
pegs were left hanging or lying on the ground.
There was no sign of any central supply; it appeared that each tent held
its own stocks of food and water and its owner's own weapons and armor.
In short, the camp displayed all that was worst in the behavior of
overmen. Garth knew from his studies of the history of the Racial Wars that
the humans had not won solely because they had never outnumbered his kind by
less than five to one; they had had superior organization, as well. Humans
were naturally social animals; though they tended to be careless, sloppy, and
stupid, they were able to function well in groups. A single competent military
commander could organize a thousand humans and get them to fight with some
semblance of efficient cooperation.
Overmen, unfortunately, were less gregarious. Each, when pressed, would
invariably put his own well-being before that of anyone or anything else,
including the very survival of the species. They resented taking orders, and,
in fact, usually wouldn't obey even direct commands without an explanation of
why they should. An army of overmen didn't function as a single unit, but as a
collection of individual warriors, each ferocious enough in his own right, but
with no sense of loyalty to his comrades, and prone to go off on solo
adventures at the first opportunity.
What little cooperation overmen did display had been forced upon them by
events, and its forms had usually been learned from the humans they despised.
Marriage was a human invention that overmen had adopted because it simplified
family responsibilities and inheritances. Cities facilitated trade and
government-but even so, the overmen had only one in all the Northern Waste,
and it sprawled over several square miles of coastline and hill with a
population of less than five thousand, the houses strewn randomly about the
countryside rather than laid along streets.
 For that matter, nobody actually knew what the population of Ordunin or
of the Waste was, as, there had never been sufficient cooperation to conduct a
census.
This camp, then, seemed typical of overmen when there was no strong
organization and leader forcing them to behave. He knew, from his own military
experiences in battling the pirates who occasionally raided Ordunin, that
overmen could be made to form a coherent fighting unit-but it was
extraordinarily difficult. Where one human officer might reasonably hope to
manage a hundred soldiers in an emergency, each overman had commanded no more
than ten, at the very most; three was better. Every two or three officers then
needed a commander.
And here, sixty overmen were under two co-commanders with no
intermediate organization apparent.
Had the expedition been set up properly, there would have been a supply
train accompanying it, including a herd of goats to feed the warbeasts and a
good stock of replacement armor and weaponry. There would be three captains,
he thought, each with two lieutenants, each with two sergeants, each with
three or four soldiers. The tents would have been set up in some pattern and
the warbeasts tethered in a ring around the camp, to serve as the first line
of defense.