‘Call to Arms’ – Mitchel Scanlon (Black Library)


Having an HBR (Has Been Read) pile is a nice thing to have, from where I’m sat anyway, but can become a problem if you leave it for a while and end up forgetting what you’ve read… ‘Call to Arms’ was on that pile and hadn’t quite reached that point but wasn’t far off so I thought I’d dig out and give it a post all of its own here 😊

I’m enjoying the ‘Age of Sigmar’ books more and more but have still have a little soft spot for the Old World so have been dipping in and out of the ‘Empire Armies’ series every now and then. ‘Call to Arms’ was a book that I read way back in the day, long enough ago though that it felt like I was picking it up for the first time. Let me tell you all about it…

Dieter Lanz is a young recruit to the 3rd Hochland Swordsmen, otherwise known as ‘the Scarlets’. His regiment is called into battle when an Orc army starts to rampage across the countryside, and when the Scarlets are defeated, Hochland is threatened with collapse.

Desperate times call for desperate measures… Legendary general Ludwig von Grahl is brought out of retirement – he is the last hope to stem the vicious green tide…

I liked reading ‘Call to Arms’, it has a high stakes opening to get you invested in the book and then proceeds to build on that, giving those high stakes a more personal edge as we look at the ongoing war through the eyes of the Scarlets; it’s a very easy book to get into and keep reading.

Going back to the Scarlets though… Now I love a fantasy book where the main focus is a group of soldiers just trying to make it through against the backdrop of a wider conflict. That’s what has seen me through the ‘Black Company’ books and a large chunk of the Malazan series, amongst other books. With the ‘Scarlets’ on a constant fighting withdrawal through most of Hochland, there is plenty of time for Scanlon to give us an interesting contrast between Dieter’s expectations of the regiment and the regiment itself. We all know how it’s going to go and it does, Scanlon may not give us any surprises but we do get a decent cast going through those motions. The payoff for us though is watching Dieter Lanz temper those expectations and slowly but surely, become a key part of his unit; he’s good in a fight but is also able to ‘read the room’ and that is vital.

Looking at the book in a wider context, the battles are appropriately stirring although a personal preference of mine would have been to have the Scarlets fight something other than Orcs; we’ve seen Orcs already in this series and although the series is about ‘Empire Armies’, a little bit of variety in their enemies wouldn’t have hurt. That’s a personal preference though, Scanlon handles these moments well, giving us the fight scenes we’re all after as well as giving us a little lesson in what the units of the Empire Armies are best at etc (which I suspect is the whole point of the series).

And that’s about it really, ‘Call to Arms’ is also very much a book that goes out and does its job with the minimum of fuss and bother, so may not be your thing if you’re after something that likes to take it’s own time and see where it ends up. Ultimately though, it was a good read; maybe not the best in the series (so far) but still worthy of its spot.

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