The Battle of Oxcross

Robb Stark did the thing no army in living memory had done ÔÇö he took the war into the Westerlands, and killed a Lannister host before it was awake.

Why it came to this

After the Whispering Wood and the relief of Riverrun, Robb Stark held the initiative and a captured Kingslayer, and had to decide what to do with a war he was winning battle by battle without getting any closer to a settlement. Killing Lannister armies in the riverlands was not translating into anything permanent, because Tywin could always raise another and the warÔÇÖs centre of gravity ÔÇö the throne, the gold, the Lannister power base ÔÇö lay far to the west, in country no enemy army had entered in living memory.

So Robb did the audacious thing again. Rather than sit in the riverlands trading battles, he took his fast, mounted host and drove west, over the hills and into the Westerlands themselves ÔÇö into the LannistersÔÇÖ own rich, unravaged home country, the source of the gold that was paying for the whole war on the other side. It was a raid at the scale of an invasion, and its purpose was as much economic and political as military: to show the realm that the Lannisters could be reached in their own heartland, and to force Tywin to turn away from the riverlands to defend his own gates.

Waiting in the west, sort of, was a new Lannister army. Ser Stafford Lannister ÔÇö TywinÔÇÖs uncle by marriage, an unremarkable man given an important job because of his name ÔÇö had been raising fresh troops around Casterry Rock and Lannisport to replace the losses of the war so far. This army was large but green: newly levied, half-trained, not yet properly formed into a fighting host, and camped in the false security of country that had not seen an enemy in generations. It did not expect Robb Stark, because nobody expected an army to come that far that fast.

The ground and the hosts

Oxcross lies in the hills of the Westerlands, on the approaches to the heart of Lannister country, and the groundÔÇÖs only real significance is that Stafford LannisterÔÇÖs army was camped there in the belief that it was safe. A camp is not a battlefield; it is an army at its most vulnerable, spread out, unarmoured, its horses picketed and its watch thin, and the whole disaster of Oxcross turns on Robb catching Stafford in exactly that state.

RobbÔÇÖs host was the mounted arm of his army ÔÇö the same fast striking force that had won the Whispering Wood ÔÇö men who could cover ground quickly and hit hard, unencumbered by the slow foot that Bolton had spent at the Green Fork. Against a formed and ready enemy on good ground they would have had a hard fight. Against a sleeping camp they were a catastrophe waiting to be delivered.

StaffordÔÇÖs army was numerous and worthless in equal measure, at least on that night. Raw levies in camp, unready and unwarned, are not really an army yet; they are a large number of individual men who have not learned to act as one, and the one thing that turns a crowd like that into a fighting force ÔÇö time, drill, a competent commander who has prepared them ÔÇö was exactly what Robb denied them by arriving before they were ready. The show and the books agree closely on the essentials here; the show simply compresses the campaign around it.

How it was fought

It was a night attack on an unprepared camp, and those are not battles so much as slaughters with a thin excuse. RobbÔÇÖs host got in among StaffordÔÇÖs army before it could form up, and the result was exactly what a surprise assault on sleeping, half-trained troops always is: no line, no order, no chance to bring numbers to bear, just a camp full of men trying to find their weapons and their feet in the dark while mounted northmen rode through them.

RobbÔÇÖs direwolf, Grey Wind, is a real factor in the accounts of Oxcross and not merely a flourish. The wolf went through the horse lines and the men in the dark as something the Lannister levies had no way to fight and no experience of imagining ÔÇö a large, silent, purposeful predator killing sentries and hamstringing horses ahead of the riders. Part of what made the surprise total was that the things meant to give warning, the pickets and the watch, were being killed before they could raise the alarm. It is one of the clearest instances in the story of the direwolves being genuine weapons of war rather than pets.

The green army never had a battle to fight. It was overrun where it lay, and its numbers ÔÇö which should have been its strength ÔÇö became its undoing, because a large body of untrained men packed into a camp in a panic is a mob trampling itself in the dark. By morning Stafford LannisterÔÇÖs host had ceased to exist as a fighting force, at a cost to Robb that was trivial by comparison. It is the cheapest major victory of RobbÔÇÖs whole war and the one that did the Lannisters the most direct economic harm.

What it cost

It cost the Lannisters a whole army ÔÇö the reserve of manpower Tywin had been raising to replace his losses ÔÇö destroyed before it could take the field, and it cost the Westerlands their sense of safety. RobbÔÇÖs host then spread out across the west and did what an unopposed army does in rich, undefended country: it raided, burned, and plundered the Lannister heartland, taking gold, cattle, and prisoners, and doing real damage to the economic engine of the enemyÔÇÖs war effort. The gold that paid the crownÔÇÖs debts came from these hills, and for a season an enemy was loose among them.

It cost Tywin Lannister the initiative and forced exactly the reaction Robb had wanted: Tywin had to break off from the riverlands and turn west to deal with the Stark host loose in his own lands, which relieved the pressure on RobbÔÇÖs allies and rearranged the whole strategic map of the war. For a while, on the field, everything Robb touched turned to victory.

What it did not do ÔÇö and this is the tragedy embedded in RobbÔÇÖs whole run of brilliance ÔÇö is bring him any closer to winning the war. Oxcross was a triumph that produced plunder, prestige, and a strategic headache for Tywin, and none of those were the same as a settlement. Robb kept winning battles; the war kept not ending; and the gap between the two is where his story turns to ruin.

What it changed

Tactically it confirmed Robb Stark as the most dangerous field commander in the war and the direwolves as real assets in it, and it demonstrated that the Lannister heartland was not the sanctuary everyone had assumed. That demonstration had a political value beyond its military one: it damaged the aura of Lannister invincibility at exactly the moment Tywin most needed it intact.

Strategically, though, Oxcross is one of the battles that shows why Robb ultimately lost. He was operating deep in the west, far from his own base, at the end of a long supply line, winning battles that did not compel a surrender ÔÇö and while he was doing so, the political ground beneath him was shifting: the Tyrells were about to come into the war on the Lannister side, his own bannermen were beginning to tire, and events at home in the North were moving against him. A war of brilliant raids can only be won if the enemy breaks, and the Lannisters did not break.

Oxcross belongs, in the end, to the same lesson as the Whispering Wood and the Green Fork: that Robb Stark could win any battle he chose to fight, and that winning battles was not the same as winning the war. He proved it here at the enemyÔÇÖs own doorstep, and it still was not enough.

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

Ser Stafford Lannister died at Oxcross, killed in the destruction of the army he had been raising ÔÇö a man remembered almost entirely for having lost it, which is an unkind but not inaccurate epitaph. His death and the loss of his host were a real blow to Tywin, who had counted on those men.

Robb Stark came out of Oxcross at the very height of his fortunes: undefeated, loose in the enemyÔÇÖs heartland, holding the Kingslayer, called King in the North by men who believed in him completely. Everything after this point is the slow reversal of that height ÔÇö the loss of Winterfell, the breaking of a marriage promise to House Frey, the defection of Roose Bolton ÔÇö and the reader who knows where the road ends reads Oxcross with a particular kind of dread, because it is very near the last of the good days.

Grey Wind, whose work in the dark at Oxcross made the surprise total, went the whole way with his master, and shared the end that came to the Starks at another manÔÇÖs wedding on the Green Fork ÔÇö an end told in its own entry, and one that the triumph at Oxcross does nothing to soften and everything to sharpen.