Sauvage Sitdown - A Zuavi Espatier

Being a review of Faith and Empire by Carlos Carrasco

Sparks, I am tired and melancholic, put something dark and resigned.

Aye-aye Cap’n one dose of ennui, coming right up!

Ah, that’s the stuff, one long doomed retreat and forlorn-hope rear-guard against the blood dimmed tide of mere anarchy rising. Well chosen Sparks. How many light years are we past the last colony?

Over a hundred Sir.

Do you think we have gone far enough Sparks? Will the revolutionary dogs follow us into the night?

Sir, the engines can’t much more, soon it won’t matter.

True enough sparks, here’s hoping the Queen Mother and the high muckety mucks finds us a world with a proper atmo, eh?

Mighty hard to breathe nothin’ sir.

So it is, Sparks, so it is.

One Faith. One Galactic Empire. A Thousand Worlds To Convert! In the 51st century, man has spread throughout a great swath of the galaxy without having found any sign of alien life or another habitable world. Instead, mankind has splintered into a score of bio-engineered sub-species spread out across more than a thousand terraformed worlds. The Holy Terran Empire rules over three hundred of these man-made planets. Earth, the One, True World is the Empire’s Capital. The One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of Rome governs the Empire, hand-in-hand, with the Imperial Family.

Not everyone is pleased with this arrangement.

Zephyrinus Zapatas, a dutiful citizen of the Empire and loyal son of the Church is more than happy with the Co-Dominion of Emperor and Pope. At sixteen, Zeph leaves home, seeking a life of service to the two crowns, hoping to find his opportunity by earning an invitation to join the Emperor’s Own, the elite Corps of Imperial Marines.

The Corps’ training will be arduous; its moral code, exacting, but; Zeph looks forward to the trials and the strictures. The Corps will demand sacrifices. In return, the Imperial Marines offer its recruits little more than a career fraught with peril to life and limb. Zeph is eager to accept the life, however short it might prove to be, because it comes with the chance of achieving his greatest ambition: reaching the rank of Knight Defender of the Faith and Empire.

The Holy Terran Empire is a new space opera series for anyone who can't get enough sword & blaster action

Well, that’s the add copy, but does the insides resemble the outsides?

I must be honest with you, dearest readers, this was a difficult book for me review, because it was difficult book for me to finish. On the surface, as a work of explicitly Catholic archeofuturistic space opera it should be right up my alley, neh?

But right away I found the tone off-putting. Too cheerful. Too clean. Too optimistic. Where my works seek to present a cosmos ruined by revolution and the doom of men, of the nadir of glory, of Don Pelayo and his small band of loyal men huddled in the caves of Covadonga; Don Carrasco here presents us with the restoration completed, order restored, cosmic social harmony established.

But JD! There’s giant robots! And knights! And giant robots piloted by knights! And blasters and swords, and princes (but sadly, a distinct lack of princesses, even chastely clad ones) and crowned heads and space-ships blowing up real good, like fireflies winking in the night.

Yes, yes there are, but there was just something that didn’t sit right with me, at first, that took me some time to learn the enjoy the flavour of. There are tonal issues, the opening set-piece seemingly was leaning towards a gritty Galaxy’s Edge style Tom Clancian techno-thriller in spaaaace, complete with lovingly detailed descriptions and designations of all manner of far future wargear. And then we hit dirtside with the gyrines of fightin’ fifth battalion and their attached allied Principate armour and knightly host and the action is more assault on Geonosis than the Heat in the streets.

Tonal whiplash just a wee bit.

And the Imperial Espatiers (well Mr. Carrasco calls them Marines, but well, as we all know, space isn’t an ocean!) themselves at first don’t have the ring of authenticity to my ear, their dialogue sounded at first tinny to this jaded grunt, tinny and bloodless. Like the apocryphal ‘barracks of plaster saints’. They didn’t sounds like any real soldier boys I could recognise.

No cussin. No rough-housing. Not even ribald or even risque humour, nor even any grim gallows fatalism or BOHICA. Not once do we catch a lone troop, huddled in a shell crater, arty screaming in on him, earthing shaking and bowels emptying, fervently praying, ‘for what we are about to receive, oh Lord, make us truly grateful!’

At last it hit me. It is obvious on a second read through. Let me quote:

Six abreast, we made our way through the Lepanto to one of the ship’s hangar decks for a pre-mission briefing. We were in our dress uniforms, red-trimmed gray brigandines with matching zouave pants stuffed into black, long boots shined to a mirror finish.  Gold-buttoned red gaiters dressed the boots. Our waists were girded with red silk sashes whose ends dangled half way down our thighs from the ceremonial knots tied at our left hips. Our heads were topped with berets, gray with red piping and stalk.

Carrasco, Carlos. Faith and Empire: Book One of The Holy Terran Empire (p. 5). Kindle Edition.

These aren’t steely eyed mercenary killers at the walls of Vienna, cursing the priest’s blessings as the holy water is sprinkled over them as they hurriedly reach to cover their slow matches and twelve apostles from the wet, these are not jocular colonial marines using humour to fend off the terror of a combat drop…

Nay. These are Zouaves.

Papal Zouaves.

To quote Le Wik:

The Papal Zouaves were a corps of volunteers formed as part of the Army of the Papal States. The Zouaves evolved out of a unit formed by Lamoricière in 1860: the Franco-Belgian Tirailleurs.^[35] On January 1, 1861, the unit was renamed the Papal Zouaves.^[36]

Jules Marie Deluen (1849–1918) in Papal Zouave uniform in Nantes, France

The Zuavi Pontifici were mainly young men, unmarried and Roman Catholic, who volunteered to assist Pope Pius IX in his struggle against the Italian Risorgimento. They wore a similar style of uniform to that of the French Zouaves but in grey with red trim. A grey and red kepi was substituted for the North African fez.^{[citation needed]}

All orders were given in French, and the unit was commanded by a Swiss Colonel, M. Allet.^[37] The regiment was truly international, and by May 1868 numbered 4,592 men including 1,910 Dutch, 1,301 French, 686 Belgians, and 240 Italians.^[38] A total of three hundred volunteers came from Canada, the United States and Ireland; while the remaining 155 Zouaves were mostly South American.^[39]

The Papal Zouaves assisted in the notable Franco/Papal victory at the Battle of Mentana on November 3, 1867. They suffered the brunt of the fighting, sustaining 81 casualties in the battle, including 24 killed (the Papal forces suffered only 30 dead in total).^[40] The official report of the battle prepared by the French commander, General de Failly cited the bravery of the Zouaves.^[41] They were also mentioned in Victor Hugo's poem Mentana.^[42]

The Papal Zouaves also played a role in the final engagements against the forces of the newly united Kingdom of Italy in September 1870, in which the Papal forces were outnumbered almost seven to one.^[43] The Zouaves fought bravely before surrender,^[44] inflicting losses on the Bersaglieri of the regular Italian Army as the latter stormed the Porta Pia.^[45] Several Papal Zouaves were reportedly executed or murdered by the Italian forces following the surrender.^[46][47]

These Imperial Zuavi Espatier are to the Templars and Hospitallers and the rest of the military orders as the lay tertiary confraternities are to the primary and secondary religious orders of monks and nuns.

Or to put in terms the kids will understand, these are Inquisitorial Sturmtruppen, not Astra Militarum regulars. Not Astartes or Sororitas, but darn tootin’ close enough for gubmint work if on the receiving end. Well equipped, trained and drilled to perfection, highly motivated, fully indoctrinated, and committed and faithful believers.

So that’s Faith and Empire, one big dirtside shindig and ice cream social, full of sound and fury and dholes, and the aftermath, parade, and promotions, along with a flashback and meditation on the price paid for the vocation of arms in service to Faith and Empire, the vow of celibacy involved. Again, I found the poodle skirts and Man in the High Castle cleanliness of the civilian world on Old Dirty to be a bit off putting, a little stale and flavourless. But that’s my hangup, not our Author’s. I’m sure the vision is someone’s cuppa tea.

I found my favourite characters in the ‘back in the world’ portion were only mentioned in passing. Le Trinite Terrible sound like my kind of Catholics.

Le Trinite՛ Terrible (pronounced with the cheesiest Cajun accent one could muster) or the Trudeau triplets, as they were more commonly known, hailed from Saint Leo the Great Parish. The threesome had a diocese-wide reputation for truancy and all around trouble-making.

Carrasco, Carlos. Faith and Empire: Book One of The Holy Terran Empire (p. 103). Kindle Edition.

So my dear readers, to answer the question, is the juice worth the squeeze?

Yes my dear readers, for me it was. If you like swords and blasters and spaceborne infantry, you’ll find this work worthy of your study. And if it perhaps is not as full bodied and bitter as other brews in the same genre, I for one look forward to seeing what Don Carrasco has on tap for us in the promised sequel, which is teased at the end of my copy.

The sequel is coming yes? The action against the rebels therein already reads better than the piracy suppression action we get in this first volume.

So lay on MacDuff, hail and read!

Sparks, I’m done here, play us out!

Aye-aye Cap’n!