Applied Mathematics 2

Another poem from my collection Guerrilla Country. The initial idea came from Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1808 statement that in war, three-quarters of an army’s strength turns on moral factors, and only a quarter on its manpower, materiel, etc. (À la guerre les trois quarts sont des affaires morales ; la balance des forces réelles n’est que pour un autre quart.) Meanwhile a lot of commentators on the war in Ukraine were repeating the maxim that attackers need three times the strength of defenders, to prevail.

Applied mathematics 2

I. Success

For every 100 kilometres we advance
across this 100 kilometre front
we gain 10,000 kilometres squared
we must supply, control, administer, defend
from outside and from in;

look back towards.

We’re simply winning,
until we start to lose.

II. Under siege

The roads are closed
and foraging for water, food and fuel’s unsafe.
But there’s a way.

Each day we’ll halve
the rations that remain,
use half, and store what’s left.

Then in the morning,
halve again.

III. Probability

There must be traitors in a war.
If you don’t know their names
arrest the ones from where
betrayal would, most likely, occur:
women and men whose mothers and fathers
we likely arrested before.

IV. Rectilinear

On straight and narrow roads
through forest,
marsh or mud

the target zone’s
as wide as
the convoy’s long

and when the road is blocked,
the convoy’s speed
is none.

V. Threes

A rifle,
a magazine, three spares,
in the hands of a soldier knowing only what they’re for

are worth
the same times three
in the hands of a soldier knowing why he’s there;

and in defence,
compared with attack,
worth three times more.

So what’s the worth—
compared with silence, drumbeat and
the calculus of harm—

of a voice,
a call for peace
and the courage of those who stand apart?