Not feeling in my depth writing about armor, the best I could come up with today was something about emotional armor. Montaigne didn’t like the fact that French noblemen of his time didn’t don their armor until shortly before the battle was engaged:
The vile and thoroughly enervating practice of our noblemen today is never to don their armour until the very last second when absolutely necessary, and to throw it off as soon as there is the slightest sign of the danger being past. This results in chaos. What with everyone rushing about calling for his armour at the very moment of the attack, some are still lacing up their breast-plates after their companions have already been routed.
Ok, the “lacing up their breast-plates” part actually reminds me of an embarrassing incident I had over the weekend at the gym. A couple things you should know about me first—I’m obsessively early for everything. I hate being late. It’s not rational, there’s something downright weird about it, but that’s me. Second, I get overly upset by minor acts of discourtesy. Most times I just ignore it, but in a certain mood, I can get annoyed and, in very rare instances, feel compelled to say something. It never goes well and I always feel shame over having done it afterwards … and, well … judge the current incident for yourself.
I’m at the F45 gym on a Saturday and we’re doing a workout called West Hollywood, that has 27 stations in follow-the-leader format, meaning there is always just one person at every station at a time. The person in front of you finishes, you move on to the next. So the person in front of me all workout long is a rather attractive, fit young woman who seems to know one trainer and is talking to her constantly through the workout. Because of this, she’s lagging, which is making me a little late to start my routine.
But that isn’t what bothered me … rather, it’s the stationary rower. This woman is on the small side and has tiny feet … so when she finishes her row, she doesn’t loosen the foot straps to take her foot out, she just slides them out. Now, there are only 15 seconds between stations. So me, having probably wider than average feet, have to spend about 10 seconds loosening these foot straps, something that would only take a second if the person seated had loosened them while still on the machine.
We do two laps and she didn’t loosen the first time around, which made me aware that she was oblivious this way. So when we approached the rowers on the second lap, I decided I was going to finish my shoulder raises station early and meet her at the rower to request she loosen the straps. Except I didn’t arrive quite on time, she’d already slipped her feet out, so my request sounded rather aggressive and insane, like I was lecturing about something she’d never considered before in her life, and now I look like a sweaty nut confronting a young woman.
But it gets worse, because a few stations later, I notice the trainers standing next to each other and I ask them if they could please at the start of workout ask people to loosen the straps when they finish the rowers, because otherwise no one would know to do this. And they kind of agreed and nodded. But I didn’t even leave it at that, I then went to Starbucks and got on my phone and emailed the manager, asking her to instruct the trainers to instruct the clients to please loosen the foot straps on the rowers on future days when we use the machines.
Yadda yadda yadda, it’s several days later and I feel fortunate that they haven’t kicked me out of the gym. And the worst part of it is that it’s really so out of character for me to do this. I honestly do not know what got into me on Saturday.
Phew … glad I finally got that all out … now does this relate at all to armor? I’m just going to jump right to the next Montaigne quote and hope it sticks:
Although we do see a man killed occasionally for want of armour, we hardly find fewer who were killed because they were encumbered by it, slowed down by its weight, rubbed sore or worn out by it, struck by a blow glancing off it, or in some other way. It would seem indeed, given the weight and thickness of our armour, that we have no thought of anything but defending ourselves, and that we are not so much covered as laden with it.
Hmm, so maybe I was carrying some kind of defense mechanism gone haywire with my aggression about the rowing machines, and it didn’t protect me at all. The question is, should I try to drop the defense mechanism or look for a stronger one? The invention of gunpowder was already, in Montaigne’s day, changing the rules of warfare and he predicted it would lead to a whole new class of defensive garb for soldier to wear:
Now that our musketeers are so highly prized, I think that we will discover some new invention to wall us up against them, making us drag ourselves off to war enclosed in little forts such as those which the Ancients made their elephants carry.
True, but it actually took centuries for the modern flak jackets and body armor to become useful enough to wear. The First World War answer to the lethality of small arms was trench warfare. It’s really only been in the post-Vietnam era where protective gear has had some renewed value.
To close, Montaigne makes a case for military men who are hardened and who lack the desire for more comfortable quarters and any armor at all. Maybe Montaigne is speaking to me and saying that I need to harden myself more to ambitious whimsy at work and the minor discourtesies of West Hollywood F45 members:
It is wonderfully instructive in this connection that a Spartan soldier was criticized for having been seen sheltering in a house while on a military expedition: they were so trained to hardship that it appeared shameful to be seen sheltering beneath any roof but the sky, no matter what the weather. Scipio the Younger, when he was reforming his army in Spain, commanded his soldiers to eat only on their feet and to eat nothing cooked. We would not get our men to go very far at that rate!
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