Battle between the Tharks and Warhoons

The Battle between the Tharks and Warhoons is a brutal encounter in which John Carter’s aircraft is shot down into the fighting, forcing him to choose between death and joining the melee. Its decisive consequence is personal as well as military: Carter saves Tars Tarkas from being killed, and the two fight together through the long afternoon. In a society where combat and death are ordinary, the battle makes friendship legible through action rather than custom or speech.

Causes and Setting

The clash erupts across a plain beyond a great dead city of ancient Mars. Carter, flying low over the ruins around noon, comes upon several thousand green warriors already engaged in a fierce battle. The combatants are too occupied with their struggle to notice his approach until they fire on his small aircraft; their accuracy leaves it a ruined wreck, descending erratically toward the ground.

The opposing force is identified through the men fighting Tars Tarkas: they are Warhoons. The violence allows no protected distance between observer and combatant. Carter falls almost into the center of the fighting, where warriors wield long swords on foot and sharpshooters on the outskirts shoot down anyone briefly separated from the tangled mass.

Carter’s Fall and Tars Tarkas’s Rescue

As the damaged aircraft sinks among the fighters, Carter understands that he must fight if he is to survive, though survival remains uncertain. He reaches the ground with his long sword drawn. Nearby, Tars Tarkas is fighting three opponents at once. Carter recognizes the Thark but is initially behind him and unseen.

Tars Tarkas quickly kills one attacker, then stumbles over a dead body as he steps back to thrust. The Warhoons close on him while he lies helpless. Carter springs in front of the fallen warrior and engages them; after Carter has killed one, Tars Tarkas regains his feet and dispatches another. The rescue is immediate and practical: Carter’s intervention keeps the battle from ending in Tars Tarkas’s death.

Tars Tarkas recognizes his rescuer and tells him that, though he would scarcely have known him, no other mortal on Barsoom would have acted as Carter did. He says that he has learned friendship exists. The brief exchange gives the battlefield a second kind of turning point: the Thark names a bond that neither shared ancestry nor political alliance has established, but that Carter’s choice has made real.

The Battle’s Course and Cost

There is little time to dwell on that recognition. The Warhoons press in, and Carter and Tars Tarkas fight shoulder to shoulder through the remainder of the long, hot afternoon. Their cooperation lasts until the battle turns against the Warhoons; the surviving force falls back to its thoats and flees as darkness gathers.

The scale of the encounter is stark. Ten thousand men have fought, and three thousand bodies remain on the field. Neither side asks for quarter or offers it, and neither attempts to take prisoners. The retreat therefore marks the end of the immediate fighting, not a negotiated settlement: the battle is conducted as a contest in which the defeated withdraw and the dead are simply left behind.

Aftermath and Significance

On returning to the city, Tars Tarkas goes directly to his quarters, then leaves Carter there while he attends the customary council that follows an engagement. The battle thus ends with the victor’s public obligations resuming, while Carter waits alone. Yet its lasting consequence is already apparent in the change between the two warriors: they entered the encounter on opposite sides of an earlier history of capture and conflict, but on this field Carter chooses to save Tars Tarkas, and Tars Tarkas answers by acknowledging him as a friend.

The episode sets that personal recognition against a culture of merciless combat. Earlier, Carter had learned that the green Martians’ common amusement could include prisoners’ agonizing deaths; here, the battle itself produces thousands of dead and no prisoners. Against that background, Tars Tarkas’s gratitude is not a softening of the battlefield’s rules so much as a new relationship forged within their violence. The battle’s military result is the Warhoons’ retreat; its more consequential change for the narrative is that the former adversaries can now act, and be named, as allies.