//------------------------------//
// The Passing of Ages 
// Story: Memoirs of My War 
// by Antiquarian 
//------------------------------//

Interview Excerpt: Princess Celestia, Diarch of Equestria

 

Having a dozen centuries’ worth of experience to call upon certainly has its advantages. No pony can ever fully master a skill, after all, but the luxury of taking a few hundred years to hone them has allowed me to excel at statecraft, teaching, diplomacy, speech, negotiation, and so on. Ponies sometimes interpret my seemingly effortless handling of certain crises as nigh-omniscient. This notion is as incorrect as it is embarrassing. In truth, I’ve simply had a great deal of time to practice. 

But there are areas where my agelessness has yielded bitter fruit. One such area is warfare. 

Do not misunderstand; I am not saying that there are no benefits to a millennium’s experience on the battlefield. After all, the fundamentals of war are immutable. Ponies, and creatures in general, will always fight for the same basic reasons. In every war the same standard considerations apply when motivating a population or army to fight, as well as when forcing one to surrender. The underlying drives of both war and peace echo unchanged across the ages. Only the particulars differ from conflict to conflict. 

And it is in these particulars that the problem lies. 

They say that the devil’s in the details, and that has certainly been my experience. Intellectually, I knew that this war would be unlike any other. Yet I failed to account for just how different it would be. And, as a result of my mistake, many ponies lost their lives.

When the Equalists invaded, it was decided that I would lead the 1st Army into battle against them while my sister continued to rule from Canterlot. The citizenry needed the reassurance of having one of their princesses present, and, as I was more familiar with modern weaponry than my sister, this was the logical choice. After all, I had ordered the development of the new generation of firearms, been present for their testing, and even done some stress-testing against my magic. Whereas Luna had only a scant few years to learn not only modern weaponry but modern living in general, I’d war-gamed with my generals for the last several decades, concurrent with the development of these new weapons. And, while no other pony was alive who remembered the conflict, I’d fought in the Boar War, the last true war that Equestria had fought on her own soil, where we’d made heavy use of cannons and harquebuses. 

I was soon to learn, however, that there was a world of difference between those primitive guns and modern weaponry. 

The Boar War might have been fought with guns, but it was far closer to the days of sword and lance than to the Great War. In the old days, the power of an alicorn had been sufficient to turn the tide in a battle. If the enemy general was my equal, or even in some cases if he was my superior, the raw devastation that I could bring to bear and the defensive spells I could conjure were sufficient to offset most any advantage that the enemy might have. More than once I single-hoofedly snatched victory from defeat. In my naiveite, I did not realize that this had changed.

I learned this lesson the hard way at Braying Brook. I wielded the magic of the sun to ravage the Equalist left flank in the hopes of driving them from the battlefield and claiming the hill they held. And my attack was devastating. What I had not accounted for was that it would make my position a target, and that the Equalist artillery was a far cry from the cannons of old. 

My magic is powerful, but not limitless. Even with the aid of other unicorns to bolster me, a shield can only do so much against concentrated shelling. 

One hundred and fifty-seven ponies of the Third Solar Regiment perished in that barrage for my mistake. 

It was not the first time that ponies had died because I’d made a grave error in battle. And, in all likelihood, it won’t be the last. No commander, however skilled, will ever be flawless. If one fights for long enough, the mistakes and the deaths that follow are not an if. They are a when. 

At my age, I can safely say that I’ve made more mistakes than any other pony in history. 

I do not tell you all this out of any sense of personal hate. As I said, mistakes are inevitable. Even if a general was flawless by some miracle, ponies would still die. That is the nature of war, and the burden of command. As an ageless diarch, it is my burden more than most. I made my peace with this a long time ago.

That day I learned that the world had irreversibly changed; that I could no longer fight as I once had. But my burden, my duty, remained. So I learned, I adapted, and I fought on. 

It sounds callous, but a commander cannot allow failure and loss to break her. If it does, then all the deaths accomplish nothing. In order to truly honor the dead, a commander must push on without them. She must turn their sacrifice into victory. She had to make it mean something. Even when it hurts her. Especially when it hurts her. To do any less… that would be truly callous.