Bridge

A bridge is typically a portable wooden structure, over thirty feet long, and eight feet wide. It slopes down at the front and back, and has no railings. The wood is thick, with the largest boards for support through the center.
A very light wood is used for the bridges, but they are still heavy, and smell of oil and sweat.
There are no wheels on bridges because porters are much faster in moving them over the rough terrain of the Shattered Plains.
There are about thirty-five to forty men per bridge, with room for five men across - three under the bridge and one on each side - and eight deep.
To move a bridge, the men hoist it up high and then step underneath it. Other men fill the middle slots down the length of the structure, and slowly they all set the bridge down on their shoulders. There are rods on the bottom they use as handholds.
To place a bridge across a chasm, the men first lift it off their shoulders, then drop it and step aside, the bridgemen underneath taking handholds at the sides. It is awkward and difficult, but with practice, the men keep the bridge from toppling as they set it on the ground. They then push at their handholds on the side or back of the bridge, and shove it across the rough ground. When the bridge thumps into place on the other side of a chasm, the men draw back, allowing the army for which they toil to cross the bridge.
Portable bridges are sometimes twice as long as the width of a chasm. There are also permanent bridges that connect the plateaus of the Shattered Plains where the chasms are easiest to span.
Bridge Four's old bridge had been repurposed for moving people around the plateaus closest to Narak. They'd thought it lost, but a salvage party discovered it wedged in a chasm. Dalinar agreed to have it hauled up, at Teft's request. Given what the old bridge had been through, it is still in good shape.
When Rock and his fellows later take up their mobile bridge, it smells of memories. The wood, the stain used to seal it. The sounds of several dozen men grunting and breathing in the enclosed spaces. The slapping of feet on plateaus. Mixed exhaustion and terror. An assault. Arrows flying. Men dying.
After Rock is reunited with his family on the Plains, together the men carry their mobile bridge on one final run - reverently, as if it was the bier of a king, being taken to his tomb for his eternal rest.
==Notes==
According to Ben McSweeney, scouts will pole vault across chasms where they cannot leap them. Bridge crews portage and push (lift! run! drop! push!) their bridges across.
The maximum chasm width a Sadeas bridge can cover is about 15 feet, perhaps a bit more with the right staging. This doesn't sound like much, until one considers that the goal is to move an army. Even small gaps of as little as 3-5 feet need to be bridged when one is going to march a few thousand men and material across them and one doesn't wish to get held up.General Reddit 2022, 1/1/22
During bridge assaults, multiple bridge crews are sent in at the same time in order to divide enemy response. Parshendi will fire at the crews with arrows, but they need to withstand covering fire at the same time (with little coverage of their own) and they're not carrying a wealth of arrows (fletching and shafts being hard to source on Roshar, especially without Soulcasting) so they do run out of ammunition.General Reddit 2022, 1/1/22
And still, running a bridge crew is considered a death sentence. It's incredibly dangerous, deadly work. And it's meant to be, so Sadeas uses it as a punitive threat for discipline in his own warcamp and considers the bridgemen to be human shields, absorbing arrows that might otherwise be shot at someone useful (by his standards).General Reddit 2022, 1/1/22
The main advantage to a Sadeas bridge is speed of deployment. He can get his troops out and across the Plains faster than almost anyone else using any other method (Dalinar's siege-bridges are much safer for the troops and engineers, but they advance at a painfully slow pace). And this speed of action is of the greatest importance, when one considers that the goal of the Shattered Plains war is not the elimination of Parshendi, but the acquisition of gemhearts.General Reddit 2022, 1/1/22
==Q&A with Brandon==
Q. The concept of bridge warfare and the life of a bridgeman was one of the most horrific things I've ever heard of. Was that inspired by something specific or ... ?
A. So, there's a couple of inspirations. One is some of the first-hand accounts of World War One I read, where tactics changed so dramatically that people were being thrown into battle not understanding that this was just terrible tactics, you know, charging machine guns, that's, turns out, bad idea in a lot of situations. And the other half of it is being inspired by actual siege warfare.DragonCon 2019, 8/29/19
==References==
Category:Objects