I've been re-reading the novel "Caught in the Crossfire" by David Drake. It's one of the Hammer's Slammers novels about a futuristic mercenary force. Drake is an excellent writer and I'd highly recommend these novels - as well as the books called "The Reaches" which are even better and will really get you in the mood for playing EVE.
Drake's preface to Crossfire is an essay about mercenaries - copied below. If you read it, please buy the book :)
There's reason enough to the dislike of mercenaries: they've taken on a job that the people who hire them can't or won't do.
If it's the ability that the citizenry lacks -- top-of-the-line hardware (whether crossbows or aircraft), and the training to use the hardware properly -- then the mercenaries are feared. If it's stomach for the job that's missing -- the willingness to do whatever it takes to win, to kill and assuredly to die -- then the mercenaries are loathed.
Indeed, mercs are loathed in either case.
But that's purely a personal problem. It's never kept rulers and nations from hiring outsiders to do their formalized killing for them.
Why does anybody want the job?
In large measure, because it is a job; and its required skills have very little application to civilian life. Trained combat soldiers know things that civilians don't --
But when the lads who went to become soldiers return, they find they're not as satisfactory farmers, clerks, stone-masons--whatever--as the fellows who stayed home.
The longer a war lasts, the greater the atrophy of civilian skills among the men who've been doing the fighting. By the time Europe had settled down in 1815, there was nothing in England for Wellingtons' veterans except beggary. Outside England though...
Bolivar and San Martin led the armies that freed South America from the Spanish crown. The men who stiffened those rebel troops in pitched battle (a verty different thing from sniping from behind fences, as Americans learned to their cost at Bunker Hill), were paid-off British veterans.
Because they believed in the cause of freeedom from the yoke of Spain? Nonsense--they were men who'd battled on behalf of the Spanish Monarch for the past decade. But fightin was the only work they knew.
So they faced the Spanish regulars as they'd faced the French; and they showed in South America what they'd proved in the Penninsula: nobody in the world knew their work better than they did.
The term mercenary covers two categories of soldiers: bands of armed men under their own chosen leaders; and individual men, often grouped with other outsiders but organized and led by officers of the nation hiring them.
The first category is rarely a good idea for their employers; often it is a disastrously bad one. Ariovistus' Germans, the Condottieri against whom Machiavelli inveighed, and Les Affreux of Bob Denard are all examples of mercenary units who've proven more dangerous than the threats they were hired to oppose.
In the second category there are more success stories, perhaps more success stories than failures.
Mercenaries under local officers have a history of standing when the fighting gets tough. They're more likely to know their job than conscripted soldiers are; and they don't have the option that conscripts frequently have, of running home if things go badly. The Greeks who marched from the Cunaxa to the Black Sea were neither the first not the last mercenaries to learn how far away home can be if the side that's paying you loses.
Not infrequently, the loyalty and skill of mercenaries can have historic consequences. When King David grew old, the national army of Israel deserted him for his son Absalom. Joab led David's mercenaries, many of them Philistines, against the usurper and his Hebrew followers. The mercenaries crushed the revolt; Joab himself slew Asalom as the youth hung from a tree.
David never forgave them for it. But for good or ill, he died a king and passed on his crown as intended to Solomon.
David's mercenaries were loyal to him. Sometimes mercenaries give their loyalty to something as simple as duty, to going where the guy in charge tells them to go--even though they don't understand the situation, and they're pretty sure they wouldn't like it if they did understand.
That can change the world also.
In AD 532 the situation in Constantinople got out of the hands of the authorities. Rival street gangs brawled with increasing violence, despite the efforts of the police. Finally the gang leaders combined. What had been a public order problem became an open revolt directed at the government of the young Emperor Junstinian.
Mobs burned the police officers and surged through the streets crying "Nika!--Conquer!" Justinian attempted to mollify them by removing unpopular ministers. The riots continued.
The civil authorities could do nothing. Units of the regular army in Constantinople would do nothing, standing aside "until matters had worked themselves out." Nobles slipped from the palace to join the rioters-- who crowned a young man from an old imperial family.
Two top military officers, Belisarius and Mundus, chanced to be on business in Constantinople when the insurrection broke out. They were accompanied by their personal bodyguards--mercenaries they paid themselves, most of them Huns.
Belisarius and Mundus were loyal to Justinian, but they couldn't raise any support among the imperial troops in the city. At last--and after a false start--they went out in separate sorties against the rioters, leading only their mercenary bodyguards.
The rioters--the insurrectionists--were gathered in the Hippodrome, the chariot-racing stadium, preparatory to making a final attack on the nearby palace. Belisarius tried to lead his group through the private tunnel to the imperial box, hoping he could end the revolt by capturing its leaders. A unit of the regular army guarded the door and wouldn't let Belisarius past.
In desperation, Belisarius launched his mercenaries in a sudden attack on the assembled crowd.
Mundus and his men were still stumbling around in the charred rubble left by weeks of rioting. When they heard the sound of fighting, they found their own route into the Hippodrome, through the ground-level gate that served the arena rather than the stands.
The rioters were caught from two directions by bands of mercenaries. Perhaps a few of the citizens tried to fight, but they hadn't a prayer of winning against heavily -armed veterans who knew their only chance of survival was to kill everyone they saw. Most of the crowd tried to run, but there wasn't any place to run, either.
According to Pocopius (who was present), the discipline and heavy armor of the mercenaries drowned the Nika Insurrection in the blood of thirty thousand citizens. Justinian ruled for another thirty-three years and died is his bed.
Was it worth it?
Certainly not for the slain. But I've stood in the magnificent vault of Hagia Sophia; and I've read portions of the codified and digested Roman law that is the basis of so much European social interaction. Neither of those monuments would exist today if Justinian had been deposed in AD 532.
And it was worth it to the mercenaries, because they were the ones still standing when the day was over...
/David Drake
