The Massacre at Hardhome

The moment the war everyone was ignoring arrived in front of witnesses.

Why it came to this

Jon SnowÔÇÖs policy as Lord Commander rested on a single unpopular proposition: that every free folk man, woman and child left north of the Wall was not a rival but a future enemy soldier. The WatchÔÇÖs eight-thousand-year quarrel with the wildlings had been, in strategic terms, a quarrel over grazing land. The actual enemy did not care who owned the land and recruited from both sides equally, by killing them.

So the Watch went north to bring people home. Hardhome was the largest concentration of free folk left in the world ÔÇö a ruined settlement on a cove of the Shivering Sea where thousands who had not marched with Mance had gathered, and the only place they could be lifted from in numbers, because it had a harbour. Jon took a small party of brothers, a fleet of ships hired from a captain who wanted paying, and Tormund, without whom no wildling would have listened to a crow at all.

The negotiation on the beach was the difficult part and by any reasonable measure it succeeded. It was not universally accepted ÔÇö the Thenns in particular would not go ÔÇö but enough elders agreed that the boats began loading. What the plan could not accommodate was that the enemy had a schedule of its own and had arrived at the ridge above the town.

One point of fact worth stating clearly: this engagement exists on screen only. The novels have Hardhome as a place of ill fame and a botched rescue, with a ranging sent by sea and letters coming back describing dead things in the water, but the battle depicted here is the showÔÇÖs invention. It is also the single most useful thing the show ever did for the storyÔÇÖs stakes, because it took an abstraction and showed a room full of people what it costs.

The ground and the hosts

Hardhome sits on a cove beneath a high ridge, with the sea in front and a wall of rock behind. In a fight against an ordinary enemy that is defensible ground: one approach, a natural funnel, and a line of retreat by water. Against this enemy every one of those features became a liability. The high ground belonged to the attacker from the first minute. The sea meant the defenders could not disperse. And the funnel merely concentrated an assault that did not need to be concentrated.

The free folk had raised a timber palisade with a gate, which was adequate against raiders. There were several thousand people inside it, most of them not fighters ÔÇö families, elders, children ÔÇö with a fighting element of perhaps a few hundred and a handful of NightÔÇÖs Watch. There was one giant, Wun Wun, who was worth a company on his own.

The attacking host had no formation, no commanders in the ordinary sense, no supply and no need of any. It had four things the living did not: it did not tire, it did not fear, it did not need to be told what to do, and every casualty it inflicted became a reinforcement. Above it, on the ridge, stood a small number of White Walkers ÔÇö the intelligent, armed and articulate part of the enemy ÔÇö and the figure the show calls the Night King.

Against all of that the living possessed exactly three effective weapons, and only two were present. Fire kills the risen dead. Dragonglass shatters a White Walker. Valyrian steel does both, and there was one such sword in Hardhome that night, on Jon SnowÔÇÖs hip, and neither he nor anyone else yet knew what it could do.

How it was fought

It began with weather, which is how it always begins. The wind turned, a wall of snow came down off the ridge, the dogs went frantic, and the light failed in the middle of the day. Then the ridge above the town moved. What came down was not a charge in any recognisable sense ÔÇö no line, no wedge, no shock ÔÇö but a landslide of bodies that fell down a cliff face, broke on the rocks, and got up.

That was the first tactical lesson and it was delivered in about ten seconds: the terrain damage that would destroy a living army does nothing at all. A drop that kills men merely delivers wights. From that moment the defenders were not holding a position, they were holding a door in front of a rising flood, and the flood had no bottom.

The gate held briefly, and the fight at the palisade is the only phase in which the defence functioned as a defence. Fighting men held the line, the giant broke the pressure wherever he stood, and the elders drove the noncombatants toward the boats. But a shield line works by making an enemy pay to advance, and this enemy had nothing to pay with and no reason to stop. Behind the palisade the killing was in the alleys and the huts ÔÇö close, unformed, individual, the worst possible ground for men in armour and the best for an enemy with no interest in survival.

Then came the second lesson, which was worse than the first. As the free folk fell, the enemy commanders raised them where they lay. There was no interval, no burial, no chance to burn the bodies. A defender who went down became an attacker inside the line, behind the shields, among the families, immediately. This is the mechanic that makes the war against the dead insoluble by ordinary means: every unit of force the living commit is a unit of force loaned to the enemy the moment it fails. Attrition does not favour the side that starts with more men. Attrition does not favour anybody but them.

The one thing that went the livingÔÇÖs way happened almost by accident. Jon Snow was caught by a White Walker in the hall where the dragonglass had been stored and, having lost the obsidian, met the blow with his own sword ÔÇö and the Walker came apart like ice under a hammer. That single exchange changed the strategic picture of the entire war: Valyrian steel, of which a small and countable number of blades exist in the world, works. It was information bought at the cost of a town, and it was the only thing worth anything that came out of the night.

The withdrawal was the last phase and it was a withdrawal in name only. Boats were rowed off the beach loaded past their marks while thousands were still on the shore and there was neither time nor space to come back for them. The rearguard fought to the waterÔÇÖs edge and got aboard by yards. What the survivors watched from the boats was the enemy commander walking down to the shoreline, raising his arms without hurry, and the whole population of the town ÔÇö everyone who had not reached the water, including the ones who had died in the boatsÔÇÖ own shadow ÔÇö standing up together to face them.

There was no pursuit, because none was necessary. The enemy had gained several thousand soldiers in an afternoon and lost, so far as anyone could count, one.

What it cost

The free folk lost the last large concentration of their people outside the Wall, and the NightÔÇÖs Watch lost most of the party it sent. The ships got away with a fraction of those they came for ÔÇö enough to matter politically, nowhere near enough to justify the trip.

The greater cost was to the enemyÔÇÖs advantage rather than the livingÔÇÖs loss, and it is the same number counted twice: thousands subtracted from one side and added to the other, which is a swing of double the casualty figure. No campaign in the histories works like that.

There was a political cost as well. Jon Snow returned to the Wall having spent brothersÔÇÖ lives to save wildlings and having failed to save most of them, which to a garrison that had spent its whole career killing wildlings looked less like strategy than like proof.

What it changed

It ended the argument about whether the threat was real, at least for the men who were there. Everything the Watch had been saying for years and everything the realm had been dismissing as northern superstition was demonstrated in front of a few hundred witnesses, several of whom were free folk chieftains who had been on the other side of a war a season earlier.

It also converted the free folk into allies in fact rather than in policy. People who have watched their own dead turn on them do not need to be persuaded about who the enemy is, and the alliance that eventually stood at Winterfell is founded on that beach.

And it established the two rules that every later engagement with the dead had to be built around: kill the commanders rather than the host, and never let your own casualties lie where they fall. Both rules would be forgotten at least once when it mattered.

What became of it ÔÇö if an ending is written, it is here. Spoilers.

Karsi, the chieftain who had spoken for the boats and put her own children on them first, was the last of the elders holding the line and did not get off the shore. So did the Lord of Bones, killed earlier by Tormund in the argument over whether to trust a crow at all, and the Magnar of the Thenns, who had refused to board and was among the first taken.

Most of the NightÔÇÖs Watch party sent with Jon Snow did not return. Those left on the beach were raised with the rest, which meant that the men who came back watched brothers they had eaten with the previous week stand up on the shore and look at them.

The dragonglass stores brought north for the evacuation were lost in the town, which set the supply of the only cheap weapon against the enemy back by a year.

Jon Snow carried the news of what Longclaw had done back to Castle Black, and it was received by an order that had already decided he was a wildling in a black cloak. The mutiny that followed happened for many reasons, and his insistence on this one was chief among them.