The reasonably dry ground in front of Stohnar’s entrenchments was heaped with the bodies of men who’d died assaulting the earthworks. There were a lot of bodies out there, Green Valley thought with bleak, grim satisfaction. More than there should have been, although it was hard to fault Wyrshym or his divisional commanders.
They’re still making it up as they go along, and it’s not their fault they’re making mistakes. They’re not making as many of them as I’d wish, for that matter. And one of those mistakes they’re not making is how important Serabor is to them. They don’t like losing men any more than anyone else, even if they do believe every one of them’s going straight to Heaven, but they know they have to have the Sylmahn Gap if they want Old Province this year. They’re willing to pay the price to get it, too, and unless something—like Second Brigade, perhaps—changes the equation, they’ve got more than enough manpower to grind Stohnar away and take it. They’re in the same position Grant was at Petersburg, and the fact that they don’t like it hasn’t kept them from doing it anyway. But at the same time, they’re determined not to lose any more men than they have to, and their learning curve’s a hell of a lot steeper than Europe’s was in 1914. The only question is whether or not it’s steep enough because the truth is, both sides still have a lot to learn. Which shouldn’t surprise anyone, when you think about it.
Neither Siddarmark nor the Army of God had been given any yardstick by which to measure the lethality of rifles and combat until they actually used them for the first time. So it was hardly surprising they’d extrapolated from their experience with smoothbore matchlocks, treated the rifles as simply more rapidly firing, more reliable versions of the weapons they already knew and understood. But rifles weren’t smoothbore matchlocks, and both sides’ doctrine of standing in the open in close formation, pouring volleys at the other, had resulted in enormous casualties.
Faster learners than their officers (since personal survival tended to be the fastest teacher known to man), the infantrymen on both sides had discovered the wonderful virtues of the shovel, although neither the Army of God nor the Republican Army had yet evolved anything like the Imperial Charisian Army’s policy of digging in every single night in the field. In the final analysis, though, a man armed with a muzzle-loader had little choice but to stand upright if he was going to fire at the enemy, and officers on both sides had been trying to figure out how to do that and survive.
Well, we’ll just have to show them, won’t we? Green Valley thought. It’ll be interesting to see how willing they are to learn the lesson, though. Our tactical doctrine puts an awful lot of the responsibility on noncoms and junior officers, and senior officers have a problem when it comes to giving up tactical control of their own units and trusting some nineteen- or twenty-year-old lieutenant to make the right call. Hard to blame them, really, and there were enough Chisholmians Ruhsyl had to boot before we got it right, for that matter!
Up until a few five-days ago, he’d have given odds Siddarmark would accept the new reality more quickly than the Army of God, but he’d acquired a very healthy respect for the Temple Loyalists’ adaptability after watching through the SNARCs as they forged across western and northern Siddarmark in a tide of fire. They were tough-minded, those division-commanding bishops, and a lot more willing to think critically about their own doctrine than he’d expected. Probably because so many of them had played major roles in evolving that doctrine in the first place in conjunction with Allayn Maigwair.
And Maigwair’s been an unpleasant surprise, too, Green Valley admitted. Everything I ever heard about him suggested he should still be trying to figure out how to shoot pikes out of twelve-pounders, but he’s put a lot of thought into equipping and organizing this Army of God of his. And given the fact that he doesn’t have Merlin and Owl as advisors, he’s done one hell of a job, too. He made mistakes, but they were smart mistakes, more often than not.
In fact, the baron admitted grimly as the mooring lines were made fast and he stepped across onto the rickety dock, if not for Charis, the Army of God would have swept across Siddarmark like the scourge of God before first snowfall. There was no question in his mind of that … or that something like it might still happen.
They’d play hell holding the Siddarmarkians down, especially with all the hate-fodder the Inquisition’s generating, but Merlin’s right. Left to their own devices, with no one interfering on either side, they’d reach Siddar City by the end of September.
Except, he told himself harshly, that that wasn’t going to happen.
“General Green Valley?” an exhausted-looking lieutenant greeted him with a salute.
“Yes.” Green Valley touched his own chest, acknowledging the salute, and the lieutenant seemed to sway for a moment.
“Lieutenant Dahglys Sahlavahn,” he said. “I’m General Stohnar’s senior—well, I guess I’m his only aide, now.” He smiled mirthlessly. “He sent me ahead to greet you. He asked me to tell you he’ll be here in about another hour and a half. He should be on his way back from consulting with Colonel Pruait by now.”
“I understand.”
Green Valley looked back over his shoulder to where the second and third barges in the convoy were gliding towards shore. Then he looked back at Sahlavahn.
“I’ve got the better part of thirteen thousand infantry and eighty guns coming ashore in the next two or three hours, Lieutenant. I need someplace to put them.”
“Yes, Sir!” Lieutenant Sahlavahn’s exhausted face was transfigured. “I don’t know how we’ll be able to get all of those guns to the front, Sir—we’ve only got about six or seven thousand yards of frontage—but by God, they’ll give those bastards a headache when we do! And I’ve got someplace you can park them and mate them up with their draft animals in the meantime. Uh … you did bring draft animals, didn’t you, Sir?”
“Yes, Lieutenant, we did,” Green Valley assured him with a faint smile.
“I figured you had, Sir, but—”
The young man shrugged, and Green Valley nodded.
“Always better to make certain,” he agreed. “Now, there’s one other thing I’m going to need, as well as to meet with General Stohnar.”
“Yes, Sir?”
“I need someone who knows the lizard paths above the Gap. I’m going to have to get some of my men up there to make this work the way I have in mind.”
“Up in the mountains, Sir?” Sahlavahn looked dubious, and Green Valley nodded again, more firmly.
“Trust me, Lieutenant.” He showed his teeth, a white gleam reflecting the artillery muzzle flashes bouncing off the clouds. “If it sounds crazy to you, it’ll sound crazy to them. But I think you and General Stohnar are going to like the way it works out a hell of a lot more than they will.”
.IV.
North of Serabor, The Sylmahn Gap, Old Province, Republic of Siddarmark
Gorthyk Nybar scowled as he considered the morning casualty report. Langhorne Division was at two-thirds strength, but that was only because Bishop Militant Bahrnabai had drawn heavily on the replacements who’d been brought along in the Army of God’s advance. Vicar Allayn had known they were going to take casualties, so each army had been assigned a pool of unassigned but trained replacements equal to twenty percent of its paper strength.
They hadn’t had sufficient rifles and pikes to give each of those men weapons, but there’d been more than enough of those from men who no longer needed the ones they’d been issued, Nybar thought bitterly. And there weren’t as many of those unassigned men as there had been, either. In fact, if he simply looked at the number of replacement bodies, Langhorne had taken one hundred percent casualties. Almost half his original men were still with him; the other half had been replaced not just once, but twice.
It’s these frigging frontal assaults, he told himself, looking up from his paperwork to listen to the continually pounding guns. Our artillery ammunition expenditure’s three times what we figured, and we still have to hammer straight ahead into the
se bastards’ teeth. And by now, everybody they’ve got left has a Shan-wei-damned rifle of his own!
Unfortunately, understanding why his division was bleeding to death didn’t change the situation. Their spy reports about troop movements behind the heretics’ front were a lot less detailed than he would have preferred, but according to the information he did have, the first Charisians couldn’t be more than another couple of five-days from Serabor. The Army of God had to punch through and take that town’s ruins—and blow up those damned dams to drain the Gap once and for all—before that happened. He didn’t even want to think about what would happen once the Charisians got here. Servants of Shan-wei or not, they’d had longer to think about these new weapons than anyone else in the world, and what their navy had accomplished was enough to make him acutely nervous about what their army might be able to do.
He scowled again and checked his watch as the bombarding artillery began to build towards a crescendo once more. Another ninety minutes, he thought, and then he got to send his men into the meat grinder all over again. His eyes went bleak and hard at the thought of the losses to come, but the frigging Siddarmarkians had to run out of ammunition—and men—sooner or later. If he had to run them out of bullets by giving them bodies to shoot, then he’dby God do it … and afterwards, when Siddar City lay in flames, the bastards would pay in spades for every man he lost in the process.
* * *
The skies were clearing, Kynt Clareyk observed. That was a pity. He’d have preferred rain, since his men’s caplock Mahndrayns fired just as reliably in a thunderstorm as in clear, dry weather.
Don’t want much, do you? he asked himself sardonically. You’ve already got a big enough advantage. Except, of course, that there’s no such thing as an advantage that’s “big enough” when you’re talking about things that can get men under your command killed, is there?
Perhaps not. But it was about time to find out how well the doctrine he and Ruhsyl Thairis had put together worked out in practice.
He drew a deep breath and looked at the young lieutenant—but they were all young, weren’t they?—standing next to him.
“All right, Bryahn. It’s show time,” he said simply.
“Yes, Sir!”
Bryahn Slokym saluted, reached into a belt pouch, withdrew a Shan-wei’s candle, and rasped it across the buckle of his sword baldric. The strike-anywhere match burst into sulfurous, stinking life, and he touched it to the length of quick match.
The quick match flared almost instantly, the flame racing away from them at three hundred feet per second, and the signal rocket fifteen yards away from Green Valley’s command post hissed into the heavens on a rushing, gushing tail of flame. It rose high into the clearing morning sky, and then it burst in brilliant splendor.
* * *
“What the—?”
Gorthyk Nybar’s eyes narrowed as the … whatever it was climbed into the heavens above the heretic entrenchments. He felt a brief flicker of something entirely too much like fear for his comfort, but it fled as quickly as it had come, and his nostrils flared. Of course. The heretics had used … “signal rockets,” that was the term, in the past. He simply hadn’t seen one yet, and he watched it soaring higher and higher. Then it burst, shooting out dozens of tendrils of light that were pale in the morning sunlight but would undoubtedly have been spectacular in the dark.
“What is it, Sir?” one of the division runners asked in a sharp-edged voice, and Nybar snorted.
“They call it a ‘rocket,’ I think, Private,” he said. “Pretty, I suppose, but nothing to worry about—just a way to send signals.”
“Oh. Uh, I mean, thank you, My Lord!” the runner said hastily, his face turning red as he realized he’d just interrupted the commanding bishop’s thoughts. Nybar saw his expression and chuckled, but then his chuckle faded as he thought about his own words.
A signal, he thought. Now who in Shan-wei’s name could Stohnar be sending signals to … and why?
A moment later, he found out.
* * *
Lieutenant Hairym Clyntahn, Imperial Charisian Army, had been hazed unmercifully over his last name from the first day he’d enlisted.
He didn’t suppose he could blame anyone for it, not that understanding had made the experience any more enjoyable. And he’d been deeply disappointed when he was turned down as a cavalry officer for no better reason than that he looked like a particularly untidy sack of potatoes in the saddle. Then he’d discovered he wasn’t even being assigned an infantry platoon. Instead, they’d told him he was going to command something called a “support platoon” and tried to make it sound like it was going to be something special. He’d known better, of course, but he was a Chisholmian. He loved his Empress—and now his Emperor—and he loved the Church. Not the Church Zhaspahr Clyntahn represented, but the Church of Maikel Staynair. And because he did, he’d been prepared to serve in whatever capacity the army could find for him.
And boy, was I wrong! he thought now, turning to his platoon sergeant as the rocket burst overhead. Cavalry?! Hah! You can keep it!
“Two thousand yards, fused for airburst!” he snapped.
“Two thousand yards, airburst, yes, Sir!” the platoon sergeant responded, and turned to glower at the closest squad. The order came back, repeated by each of the platoon’s squads in turn, and Clyntahn nodded.
“Fire!”
Support Platoon, 1st Battalion, 3rd Regiment, consisted of four squads, each armed with three three-inch mortars. They were unlovely weapons, with a four-foot barrel mounted on a steel plate, supported by a bipod fitted with a wheel to control the tube’s elevation. Each projectile weighed ten pounds and terminated in a short rod. It was fitted with studs which engaged in the tube’s rifling grooves as the mortar bomb was muzzle-loaded into the tube, and a felt “donut” of gunpowder was wrapped around the rod. A sidelock at the base of the tube was fitted with a percussion cap, and when the hammer fell and the cap detonated, the bomb left the weapon at approximately six hundred and fifty feet per second. That gave it a minimum range of three hundred yards … and a maximum of twenty-five hundred, depending on the tube’s elevation.
At the moment, Clyntahn’s platoon was high on a mountainside on the western side of the Gap and well behind the Army of God’s front line. The total weight of each of their weapons was two hundred and thirty-four pounds, and it broke down into six separate pieces, the heaviest of which was the base plate, at a hundred and fifteen pounds. That made it man-portable—although Pasquale pity the poor bastard with the base plate!—but the platoon had been assisted in this instance by the pack mules it had brought along all the way from Chisholm. Sure-footed and smart, the mules had followed Clyntahn’s men and their guide along the narrow, serpentine, treacherous trails to their present positions before dawn, carrying not simply the mortars but the crated ammunition, as well.
Twenty-five hundred yards was only a mile and a quarter, and the Sylmahn Gap was over five miles wide at this point. But the high road down which every bit of traffic must travel, thanks to the flooding, passed within less than a mile of Clyntahn’s mortars, and he watched through his spyglass as the explosions began to blossom below him.
“Too much fuse!” he announced. “Either that, or they’re burning long. Elevation’s on, but cut the fuse for eighteen hundred yards!”
Responses came back, and the next covey of mortar bombs went booming into the air, shrilling towards the enemy with the peculiar, warbling whistle the rifling studs imposed.
The projectiles fell almost vertically, and this time the fuses were the right length. The bombs detonated perhaps forty feet up, spraying canister in a lethal cone. The balls hit the high road, and the water, and the mud—and half a hundred soldiers of the Army of God—in a pattern that looked like pelting hail where it pounded into the ground. But this “hail” was made of lead, and it was traveling at over six hundred feet per second.
The consequences when it met flesh instead were ghastly.
br /> * * *
Each battalion in 2nd Brigade had its own support platoon, and there were twelve battalions—each one three-quarters the size of an Army of God division—in the reinforced brigade’s three regiments. Only one other platoon had been sent forward to support Clyntahn; the others were still available to accompany their parent battalions in the advance. But if all those other mortars weren’t available at the moment, the two “angle-gun” batteries Green Valley had brought from Chisholm were.
The angle-guns—or just plain “angles”—of the Imperial Charisian Army were a lighter, land-going version of the navy’s weapons. They fired rifled, six-inch, sixty-eight-pound shells at high elevations to a range of almost eight thousand yards, and there were eight of them in each of Green Valley’s batteries.
Sixteen six-inch shells came warbling down out of the heavens, and they were equipped not with time fuses, but with impact fuses. It was a very simple, rudimentary design, and it had a failure rate of almost twelve percent … but that meant it worked perfectly eighty-eight percent of the time, and the shells driving into the ground each carried almost twelve pounds of gunpowder.
A pattern of volcanoes erupted across the Army of God’s position, hurling mud, water, and bits and pieces of bodies into the air. The angles couldn’t fire as rapidly as a standard field gun, but they could still manage a peak rate of fire of three rounds every two minutes and one round a minute thereafter as their barrels heated, and the concussion of their shells marched across the Temple Loyalists’ artillery positions in flaming, hobnailed boots.