Mercenaries in popular culture
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
|
Related e |
|
Featured: |
Mercenaries in popular culture. Like piracy, the mercenary ethos resonates with idealized adventure, mystery, and danger, and appears frequently in popular culture. Many are called adventurers, filibusters, soldiers of fortune, gunslingers, gunrunners, ronin, and knights errant.
Books
In "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow", from Washington Irving's "Knickerbocker Tales", the infamous Headless Horseman was said to be the ghost of a Hessian who had been decapitated by a cannonball during the American Revolution.
- During the 1880s, Colonel Thomas Hoyer Monstery wrote or co-wrote a series of dime novel adventure stories said to have been inspired by his own activities as a mercenary in Central America and South America.
- Richard Harding Davis wrote an 1897 novel Soldier of Fortune
- Davis later wrote a non fiction Real Soldiers of Fortune in 1906. The account featured true stories of Major-General Henry McIver, Baron James Harden-Hickey, Winston Spencer Churchill, Captain Philo Norton McGriffin, General William Walker, and Major Frederick Russell Burnham, chief of scouts.
- The novel The Dogs of War by Frederick Forsyth and the film (1981) with the same name, which go into some detail about an actual if fictionalized mercenary operation in Africa in the 1960s.
- The novel The Wild Geese by Daniel Carney and the film (1978) with the same name. The plot is that a global British financial syndicate seeks to rescue the deposed leader of a central African nation. It hires a band of mercenaries to do the job.
- The male protagonist in G.B.Shaw's play Arms and the Man is a Swiss mercenary.
Both the titles Dogs of War and The Wild Geese are derived from other sources. Cry Havoc, and let slip the dogs of war is from Julius Caesar (III.i), a play by Shakespeare. After the signing of the Treaty of Limerick (1691) the soldiers of the Irish Army who left Ireland for France took part in what is known as the Flight of the Wild Geese. Subsequently, many made a living from working as mercenaries for continental armies, the most famous of whom was Patrick Sarsfield, who, having fallen mortally wounded on a foreign field, said "If this was only for Ireland".
An episode in With Fire and Sword (Ogniem i mieczem), an 1884 historical novel by the Polish author Henryk Sienkiewicz, set in the 17th century Khmelnytsky Uprising, depicts a band of German mercenaries with high professional ethics, who prefer to fight to the death against impossible odds rather than betray their contract to the King of Poland.
At the end of Micah Clarke, a historical novel by Conan Doyle, the protagonists - hunted in England for their part in the failed Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 - set out to be mercenaries in Europe, until conditions in their homeland change.
Science fiction and fantasy
Mercenaries have featured in a number of science fiction novels. The well-known author Jerry Pournelle has written several books about science-fiction mercenaries known as Falkenberg's Legion. Also, author David Drake has written a number of books about the fictional hovercraft armored regiment Hammer's Slammers. Both series of books are brutal in their portrayal of complex low-intensity warfare despite technological advances. Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai!, part of his Childe Cycle, includes the planet Dorsai with a society structured like that of Switzerland. Like the old style Swiss mercenaries who hired themselves out to the Italian states, Dorsai hire themselves out to other planets. A series by Mercedes Lackey concerning mercenaries is the Vows and Honor Trilogy (The Oathbound, Oathbreakers, Oathblood). Barry Sadler formerly of the U.S. Army Special Forces and singer of Ballad of the Green Beret wrote a series called Casca series about Casca Rufio Longinius, a soldier in the Roman legions who is cursed by Christ on Golgotha for driving a spear into him.
There have been a number of books based on the fictional universe developed for the board game BattleTech and in which mercenaries feature: Robert Thurston, The Legend of the Jade Phoenix; Loren L. Coleman, Patriots and Tyrants and Storms of Fate. The mercenary industry in the BattleTech universe is also depicted as a booming profession, with mercenaries being accredited for work through an interstellar body called the Mercenary Review and Bonding Commission.
Also George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire an epic fantasy series, feature mercenary characters known as "sellswords", who are portrayed as greedy, unscrupulous and cowardly. Similarly, Glen Cook's The Black Company series focuses on the adventures of an elite mercenary unit.
The South African mercenary, Christian Rindert is a principal character in Hugh Paxton's 2006 novel "Homunculus" published by MacMillan in paperback (March 2007, ISBN 978-0230007369) which features mercenary operations and the testing of horrific new bio-weapons during the civil war in Sierra Leone.
The Star Wars series, particularly the Expanded Universe, features many mercenary and bounty hunter style characters, such as Kyle Katarn and the infamous Boba Fett.
In the Ashes series by William W. Johnstone, the main character of Ben Raines is mentioned as having worked as a mercenary-for-hire in several African armed conflicts after leaving the U.S. military (having served during the Vietnam Conflict. During his service time, he was a member of the 'Hell-Hounds', a military unit that is said to be the closest version to a mercenary group that the U.S. has ever fielded in battle.
