The Loot Train Attack

The first time in a hundred and fifty years that a dragon was used on a Westerosi army.

Why it came to this

Daenerys Targaryen had landed in Westeros with overwhelming force and had spent the opening weeks of the campaign being comprehensively outmanoeuvred. Her advisers had counselled a war fought by proxy and by siege ÔÇö Westerosi armies besieging Westerosi castles, so that she would not arrive as a foreign conqueror burning her own future subjects. It was politically intelligent and militarily disastrous. Her fleet was ambushed and destroyed at sea, Dorne and Highgarden were knocked out of the war within days of each other, and her attack on Casterly Rock took a castle that had been deliberately emptied.

The Lannister counterstroke had been the best-executed operation of the war. While the Unsullied were being drawn west to the Rock, the main Lannister field army had marched south into the Reach, taken Highgarden ÔÇö which had been stripped of its own strength ÔÇö and turned the richest region in Westeros from an enemy asset into a supply base. Two things came out of Highgarden. The first was gold, enough to pay the crownÔÇÖs enormous debt to the Iron Bank and buy sellswords with the remainder, and it went ahead under escort and reached the capital. The second was the harvest: wagon after wagon of grain, at the beginning of winter, which is the commodity that actually decides whether a besieged city can hold.

It was the food column that Daenerys attacked, and she attacked it because she had finally run out of patience with being advised. Every clever, careful, Westerosi-flavoured plan she had been given had lost her a battle. She had three dragons and a horde of light cavalry, and she chose to use them in the only way they had ever worked.

The ground and the hosts

The column was on the goldroad, moving north-east toward KingÔÇÖs Landing across open, dry, harvested farmland ÔÇö no forest, no defile, no fortified position within a dayÔÇÖs march. That country is chosen by armies because wagons move well on it. It is the worst possible ground on which to be caught by cavalry and the worst conceivable ground on which to be caught by anything airborne.

The Lannister force was a marching army rather than a deployed one: a long train of provision wagons with escorting foot strung out along it, cavalry ahead and behind, and the whole thing several miles from end to end. Jaime Lannister commanded, with Randyll Tarly beside him ÔÇö a genuinely formidable field soldier, generally reckoned the best in the Reach, whose recent defection had made Highgarden possible in the first place. Both men were competent and neither had any doctrine for what was about to happen, because nobody in Westeros had needed one for a century and a half.

The attacking force was a Dothraki khalasar ÔÇö several thousand horse-archers with no armour, no baggage and no interest in a set-piece ÔÇö accompanied by Daenerys on Drogon. Numbers are not the useful measure here. The useful measure is that the Dothraki fight at speed on open plain, which is precisely the ground on offer, and that the dragon made every defensive formation the Lannisters knew either useless or actively fatal.

One defensive asset existed. Qyburn had built for Cersei a heavy anti-dragon crossbow ÔÇö a scorpion of enormous draw, capable of throwing a bolt hard enough to hurt a full-grown dragon ÔÇö and a prototype had gone out with the column. It was a serious weapon, and its performance that day would shape the next two years of the war.

How it was fought

The first phase belonged to the horse. The Dothraki came out of a low ridge to the columnÔÇÖs rear at the gallop, in a line miles wide and with no attempt at concealment beyond the last minute, and the sound of them arrived before they did. Jaime and Tarly did the correct textbook thing and did it well: the wagons were abandoned where they stood, the infantry was pulled off the road and formed into a shield wall facing the threat, with pikes set and archers behind. Against cavalry alone that line would have held. Steady infantry in formation beats horsemen who have nothing but bows and courage, and the Lannisters had the better troops.

That was the trap, and it was not a trap anyone had laid deliberately. Forming a dense body of men shoulder to shoulder is the answer to cavalry and the invitation to a dragon. Drogon came in low along the line from the flank, in a single pass down the length of the formation, and the shield wall that was the armyÔÇÖs protection became the reason its casualties were what they were. There was no second decision to make. Men in ranks cannot disperse fast enough, and men who break ranks are ridden down by the Dothraki waiting for exactly that.

The centre of the column went in the first minutes. What followed was not really a battle at all: it was cavalry work among broken infantry, punctuated by further passes over anything that reformed, and the systematic destruction of the wagon train. Some of the burning was deliberate and some of it was simply what happens when a dragon operates near several hundred tons of dry grain. Either way the harvest of the Reach ceased to exist in about a quarter of an hour.

The one moment when the attack could have gone wrong was the scorpion. It was hauled into position, aimed and shot, and it struck ÔÇö the first evidence in living memory that a dragon could be wounded by something built in a workshop. The bolt did not bring Drogon down. The dragon turned on the weapon and destroyed it, and Daenerys dismounted on the field to work the shaft free, which put the most important person on either side on the ground in the middle of a burning battlefield with her mount grounded beside her.

That produced the closing episode, which was a single cavalry charge by one man. Jaime Lannister, seeing the dragon down and its rider exposed, took a lance and rode at her ÔÇö a decision that was tactically hopeless and strategically the only one on offer, since killing Daenerys Targaryen personally was the last way the day could still be won. He got closer than he had any right to. He was intercepted before the point of contact by another rider who put them both into the deep water of the river beside the road, which is the only reason the charge did not end the way such charges end.

There was no pursuit worth the name. There did not need to be. The column had been annihilated in place, and the survivors were men who had run early and far.

What it cost

The Lannister field army lost a large part of its infantry and the whole of the supply train it had marched into the Reach to collect. The crown kept its gold, which had already gone through the gates of KingÔÇÖs Landing, and lost its food, which had not. For a regime whose plan for winter was to sit behind the strongest walls in Westeros and wait, that was the more expensive of the two by a wide margin.

The Dothraki lost some tens of riders. That is not a misprint and it is the entire point of the engagement.

Something else was spent that day that does not appear on a casualty return. A dragon had been shot and had bled, in front of an army, and the men who built the weapon now knew the range at which it worked.

What it changed

It settled the military question of the war immediately and permanently. There was no combination of Westerosi troops that could meet a dragon in the field, and everyone on both sides understood it by nightfall. From that point the war in the south was not about armies. It was about walls, about anti-dragon artillery, and about whether Daenerys Targaryen could be persuaded not to use the weapon she had.

It changed the political question at the same time and in the opposite direction. Her advisers had spent a year telling her that a Targaryen who arrived burning Westerosi soldiers would be received as her fatherÔÇÖs daughter rather than as a liberator, and the first thing she did with a dragon in Westeros was burn a Westerosi army in a field. That the army was carrying stolen grain and that she had been losing without it are both true and neither is what the survivors told people.

The screen frames the whole engagement deliberately: it is the Field of Fire staged again three centuries on, but filmed from among the men on the ground rather than from the sky, so that the arrival of dragons in Westeros is experienced as a catastrophe rather than a triumph. That choice of vantage is the episodeÔÇÖs argument, and it is the same argument the rest of the story makes about her.

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

Randyll Tarly and his son Dickon survived the field and were taken with the other prisoners. Offered the choice between bending the knee and the alternative, Lord Randyll refused on the grounds that he had sworn to a Westerosi house and would not kneel to a foreign queen with a horde at her back; his son refused with him rather than let him stand alone. Daenerys had them both burned in front of the assembled captives, over TyrionÔÇÖs objection. It cost her the Tarly name, and rather more than that.

House Tarly ended there, in the field, which mattered a great deal to one man at Oldtown who was the last of it.

Jaime Lannister was dragged out of the river by Bronn and survived. What he had seen ÔÇö a shield wall burned in one pass, and his sisterÔÇÖs war lost in an afternoon ÔÇö is the beginning of the end of his service to Cersei, though it took him a long while to admit it.

QyburnÔÇÖs scorpion was rebuilt in numbers on the strength of what it had done. The proof that a dragon could be hit from the ground was the single most valuable thing the crown took out of the battle, and it was paid for later, at sea and over the walls of KingÔÇÖs Landing.