Once the opposing
armies reached each other on the battlefield it followed a rough sequence of
events. Linda Schele and David Friedel
suggested that Meosamerican warfare included ritualistic pre battle
insults. These activities followed an
“honorable precedent” that went back 20 katuns ( about 400 years) or more.[1] Real life battles, even as the armies were
advancing, was a confused mélange that recalled the floor of the New York stock
exchange, with screaming warriors bellowing battle cries, commanders attempting
to shout orders, battle drums, gongs, trumpets, or cymbals, the braying of
pack animals or cavalry horses, and the pounding of one’s own heart thumping in
their ears, quickly added to by the screams of the dying and thousands of
clashes of metal. Moreover, the rush of adrenaline triggers physical stimuli
that make battle notoriously difficult to reconstruct.
“Studies have
found that at least half of participants [in battle] will experience the event
in slow motion, a fifth in faster than normal time; two-thirds will hear at ‘diminished
volume’…a fifth at amplified levels; about half will see…with tunnel vision and black out everything not directly ahead and the other half with amazingly
heightened clarity. Most individuals will suffer memory loss, while others will
‘remember’ events that never occurred.”[2]
Schele and
Freidel’s recreation of Mayan battle then fails to take into account the impractical
nature of trying to understand each other during this kind of physical stress
on a chaotic battlefield.[3]
As other historians have suggested when examining pre battle insults, this is
much more likely a stylized recreation of the account embellished far after the
battle rather than a faithful recreation of events. Some kind of pre battle yelling and insults
probably did happen but instead of ritual communication between groups it was
far more likely they were spontaneous outburst to strengthen the shouter’s
morale and nearby comrades than any type of cross army communication (Alma
43:49-50; 3 Nephi 4:8-9). We should expect that writers with military
experience such as Mormon and Moroni would avoid stylized after action accounts
in favor of more realistic descriptions.
[1]
Linda Schele, David Freidel, A Forest of
Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya (New York: William Morrow and
Company, 1990), 151.
[2]
Rose, Men of War, 72-73.
[3] Karl
Friday, Samurai Warfare and the State in
Early Medieval Japan, (New York: Routledge Press, 2004), 145-149.