by David Weber
They couldn’t have a great many of them, given rifles’ slow rate of fire. No weapon whose tightly fitting ball had to be hammered down the barrel to force it into the rifling could possibly be fired as rapidly as a smoothbore. That was the reason no field commander could sacrifice that much firepower from his regular line units, no matter how accurate rifles might be. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean the tactic couldn’t be hellishly effective, and his jaw clenched as his immediate flash of fury receded just a bit and he recognized what the loss of so many officers was going to mean for unit cohesion and morale. The steadiness of an infantry company, its ability to stand the pounding of combat without crumbling, was hugely dependent on its officers. On their knowledge of their human material, their awareness of who would be towers of strength and who would have to be watched carefully when the pressure came on. And, perhaps even more, on the confidence of the men in their leadership. They knew their own officers. They listened for their voices in combat, read their own fate and the course of the battle in the tone in which orders were given.
Now what should have been a source of strength had been transformed into a source of weakness, and the men those dead and wounded officers had commanded would recognize as well as Myllyr that what had happened had been a deliberate, well-planned, brilliantly executed tactic . . . designed to do exactly what it had.
Colonel Zhanstyn’s mouth stretched in a tight, teeth-baring grin as the scout-snipers decimated the other side’s junior officers. Had he known the thoughts passing through Phylyp Myllyr’s mind at that moment, he couldn’t have disagreed with a single one of them. It had been a deliberate assassination, and while Zhanstyn was no more eager to kill people than the next man, he would have done it again in an instant.
The Corisandians’ meticulously dressed lines were no longer as neat as they had been. Here and there—especially where some company commander had been miraculously missed—individual subunits had continued advancing at the same steady pace. Other units had stumbled to a halt as their commanding officers went down. Others had continued to move forward, but more slowly, almost hesitantly, as the men in the ranks waited for one of the company’s platoon commanders to take over the unit. Unfortunately, quite a few of those platoon commanders had also become casualties.
The portions of the line which had continued advancing halted abruptly when they realized so many of their compatriots had fallen behind. They stood where they were, waiting for the disorganized units to get themselves fully back under control, which happened, among other things, to give the scout-snipers the time they needed to make good their withdrawal to their own lines.
The camouflage-clad marksmen came filtering through the line companies’ ranks, sliding adroitly through the openings without impeding their comrades’ steady advance. Here and there, someone took a hand from his own rifle to slap the returning snipers on the back, and Zhanstyn himself nodded in greeting when Sergeant Major Sahlmyn led Sergeant Wystahn up to the command group.
“Good work, Sergeant. I’m glad to see you made it back in one piece.” The colonel gave Wystahn’s shoulder a congratulatory squeeze. “And I believe you timed that just about perfectly, too.”
“I hope so, Sir.” The scout-sniper sergeant shook his head, his expression grim. “Begging your pardon, but I’d just as soon not be doing that again anytime soon. Shooting rabbits and mountain lizards is one thing. This, though . . .”
“We can hope, Sergeant.” Zhanstyn squeezed his shoulder again. “We can hope.”
Their eyes met for a moment, and then Zhanstyn looked back at the steadily narrowing gap between the two forces and shook his head.
“Now that you’ve done your job so well, Sergeant, I suppose it’s up to the rest of us to do ours.”
Gahrvai was too far behind his advancing regiments to see what had happened. He’d seen the sudden white puffballs springing up out of the wheat fields like loathsome toadstools, and he’d realized instinctively that his troops had just encountered a screen of dispersed skirmishers. What he didn’t realize was that there’d been over four hundred of them, and that they’d just inflicted shattering damage on the command structure of altogether too many of his leading battalions.
He was a little slower than Myllyr to realize the skirmishers in question must have been rifle-armed, as well. Mostly because his position so far to the rear made it hard to judge the range at which the shots had been fired . . . and even more so because he had no idea how devastatingly accurate they’d been.
His mouth tightened as his entire formation halted, even if only briefly, to dress its ranks and try to reorganize around the loss of so many of its key cadre. Without any way of realizing how many officers and noncoms had just been eliminated, he didn’t understand the pause. Surely a scattering of musket balls shouldn’t have caused a battle line over two miles wide to stop in its tracks!
It was a brief pause, but even small things could accumulate into an avalanche on a field of battle. He felt himself leaning forward, willing the solid lines and blocks of infantry to resume their movement. Priceless seconds dragged away into even more irreplaceable minutes, and still the lines stood in place. It looked as if his left wing was waiting for his right, and he gritted his teeth.
Sir Zher Sumyrs, the Baron of Barcor, was in command of his left. He was also the oldest of Gahrvai’s senior officers. He’d been a soldier for the better part of thirty years, but he’d seen precious little serious action in those three decades. His campaigning had been mostly against brigands, aside from a couple of forays against rebellious Zebediahans, not against trained soldiers, and he had a pronounced tendency to go by The Book. Worse, he was still attached to the old Book. He’d had more trouble than most getting his mind wrapped around the new concepts Gahrvai and his father had been introducing, yet his firmly entrenched position in the army command structure (and in the political structure of Corisande) had prevented Gahrvai from easing him out to pasture.
At the moment, Gahrvai would cheerfully have shot him on the spot, and hang the political consequences. All of his own prebattle orders had stressed the necessity of getting to grips with the Charisians as rapidly as possible. Coordination was good, and confusion was to be avoided at all costs, but speed of execution was most important of all, and Barcor’s right was firmly covered by Doyal’s massive artillery battery. He didn’t need to maintain perfect alignment with the Earl of Mancora, on Gahrvai’s right. And someone with all the experience Barcor was fond of mentioning damned well ought to be aware of the potential consequences of allowing a line of battle to lose momentum. Hektor Bahnyr, Earl Mancora, was half Barcor’s age, with a military career less than half as long, but Mancora would never have made the mistake Barcor was busy making.
But it’s still only a pause, Koryn, he reminded himself. And each wing has five thousand men in it. That’s got to be more than the Charisians’ total strength, so even if Barcor screws up, Mancora should still be able to do the job.
He told himself that with as much assurance as he could. Then his head snapped to the right as artillery began to thunder.
Langhorne! I hadn’t counted on their stopping that far out!
Sir Charlz Doyal winced in dismay as the Charisian artillerists abruptly stopped and began unlimbering their pieces.
He was reasonably comfortably ensconced in the branches of a nearoak tree, and he’d been watching their approach through his spyglass. He’d also been experiencing a deep sense of envy as he watched. Their gun carriages were significantly different from his own—proportionately more lightly constructed, and with larger wheels. Nor had it occurred to anyone in Corisande to incorporate what looked like a private ammunition wagon into each individual gun’s equipment. Each gun appeared to be paired with a much larger ammunition wagon, as well, but the bigger vehicles had been stopped well back, out of harm’s way, while the guns continued to advance.
The draft dragons weren’t actually harnessed to the guns themselves, at all. Instead, they were harnes
sed to the smaller, two-wheeled ammunition cart, and the gun was hooked in turn to the cart. Both vehicles together were little larger and more cumbersome than a single one of Doyal’s own guns, and it reduced the number of draft animals the Charisians required to actually move the gun in and out of action by almost fifty percent. Not to mention the fact that everywhere the gun went, its own ammunition cart obviously went with it.
If only Alyk and his blasted cavalrymen had realized what they were seeing, this wouldn’t have come as such a damned surprise!
Doyal had been scribbling notes to himself in pencil from the moment he first saw the Charisian equipment with his own eyes. Between notes, he’d concentrated on reminding himself that neither Windshare nor his troopers had any experience with true field artillery. Of course they hadn’t realized what they were seeing—why should they have?
And it wouldn’t have made that much difference, anyway. There wouldn’t have been anything you could have done about it in the last fifty-two hours, even if they’d described every last detail to you!
That thought chased itself through the back corridors of his brain as the Charisians brought their pieces to battery. They went about the task with a polished efficiency, and the peculiar cart-and-carriage arrangement clearly speeded the evolution. Despite the fact that their guns’ six-foot barrels were almost twice as long as those of his own weapons, they had the guns fully deployed in little more than two-thirds of the time his own crews would have required.
His jaw tightened as he contemplated the range at which they were doing that deploying. Without his glass, he would have been hard put to pick out individual limbs, but belts and packs were still visible, and the division between the Charisians’ upper and lower bodies remained relatively clear. That put the range at more than five hundred yards but less than seven. In fact, it looked to be at least six hundred, although he might be being at least a little pessimistic. He hoped he was, at any rate, because six hundred yards was right on the very limit of his stubby twenty-six-pounders’ effective range. In fact, it was outside that range. His gunners might just be able to reach them at maximum elevation, especially given his height advantage, but he wouldn’t have cared to bet any substantial sums on the probability. And even if they could reach the Charisians, “inaccurate” would be a grossly inadequate description of their ability to actually hit them.
The question, of course, was whether or not that would be true for the Charisians, as well.
Well out in the wheat field, invisible to Doyal among the three-foot stalks, were the thirty men of Lieutenant Alyn Hathym’s specialized sniper platoon. The marksmen of that platoon were the elite shots of an elite outfit, and they knew it. Most platoons consisted of only twenty men, but the sniper platoon was divided into fifteen two-man teams. Every man was a trained and deadly marksman, but normally only one of them was assigned the shooter’s role while his partner used a spyglass to identify and pick out targets.
Which was precisely what they had been doing for the last quarter of an hour or so.
Doyal never heard the shots. Nor was he looking in the right place to spot the rifle smoke. The snipers were actually beyond and to either side of the deploying Charisian artillery, which—by definition—meant they were far out of any range at which small arms fire could possibly threaten Doyal’s guns.
His gunners knew that as well as he did, and many of them had climbed up out of their gun pits, craning their necks to get a better view of what was going on to either side of them. Which meant they were totally exposed when fifteen rifles with fifty-eight-inch barrels, loaded with what an inhabitant of Old Earth would have called spitzer-pointed bullets, specially formed in compression dies, fired practically as one.
Doyal’s eyes flared in astonishment as eleven of his men went down virtually simultaneously. Two of them had obviously been hit at least twice, and his brain seemed to freeze for just an instant as it registered the fact that both of them had been officers, with the distinctive sashes and hats which indicated their rank. In fact, all but two of the casualties were officers, which meant that somehow musketeers he couldn’t even see were picking individual targets with deadly precision.
It took an instant or two for the unwounded gunners to realize death had just come striding through them. Then, as if a single hand had reached up and grabbed them by the ankles, they disappeared back into the protection of their gun pits, leaving eight dead men and three wounded ones grotesquely sprawled behind them.
“Commence firing!” Major Dahryn Bryndyn shouted on the heels of Lieutenant Hathym’s snipers’ volley. The one real drawback to the snipers’ specialized weapons was that they were long and clumsy. That made it unlikely they would have time to reload before their targets took cover, so it was up to his men now, and a solid wall of smoke erupted as the twelve field guns of his two batteries bellowed.
At five hundred and fifty yards, they were a good hundred yards outside what would have been effective canister range for his twelve-pounders. At five degrees of elevation, they could throw a solid shot almost seventeen hundred yards, but maximum canister range was no more than a quarter of that.
Grapeshot, now, though . . . that was another matter entirely. Instead of the thirty one-inch-diameter balls of a canister round, a stand of grape consisted of only nine miniature round shot. But each of those shot was two inches in diameter and weighed almost eight times as much as a ball of canister. And they could carry five hundred and fifty yards quite handily from one of Baron Seamount’s twelve-pounders.
Doyal was still trying to come to grips with the preposterous accuracy and range of the Charisian musketry when the enemy gun line vanished behind its own muzzle smoke and the first patterns of grapeshot came screaming into his position.
Some of his subordinates had thought he was taking caution to the point of timidity when he’d insisted they dig proper gun pits. They’d known they had the Charisian guns outnumbered by a factor of almost three-to-one, after all. But despite some grumbling, they’d carried out his orders, digging each gun into its own individual pit so that its muzzle just cleared the shallow wall of spoil thrown up on the side towards the enemy by the excavators’ spades.
The Charisian snipers’ brutally unexpected harvest had driven his uninjured personnel back into those pits in the instant before the twelve-pounders fired, which meant Doyal’s “timidity” had just saved quite a few of those subordinates’ lives.
For now, at least.
The sound as the grapeshot came slashing in was like wind rushing through leaves. A sort of sibilant, many-voiced hissing that ended in the heavy thuds, like a vast fist, punching the ground, of the shot plowing into their targets.
Some of those targets were not the low earth berms protecting the gun pits, and fresh screams started.
In actual fact, the Charisian gunners’ accuracy was considerably less than pinpoint. Unlike a specialized sniper rifle, grapeshot was an inherently inaccurate projectile, and even for the longer-barreled Charisian guns, five hundred and fifty yards was a stretch. But grapeshot also had the advantage of buckshot; someone firing it didn’t really need pinpoint accuracy to achieve lethal results.
Most of the individual shot buried themselves harmlessly in the dirt. Of those which didn’t, only two actually hit human beings. One man’s head simply disappeared; the other jerked to his feet, screaming as he stared at the shattered, spurting ruin of his left arm. But horses and draft dragons were much larger targets than human beings, and Doyal realized instantly that he hadn’t had them moved far enough to the rear when he deployed his own guns.
At least half a dozen horses went down in the first salvo, most of them shrieking like tortured women at the sudden unexpected agony they had absolutely no way to understand. The sound twisted a man’s nerves like pincers, yet the dragons were worse. The high-pitched, agonized howl of a wounded dragon was indescribable. The whistling, ululating screams seemed to fill the universe, and injured beasts lunged frantically against their pickets.
Doyal shoved his notepad into his pocket and came slithering down the tree in a shower of bark splinters. He hit the ground already running, charging into the battery’s central gun pit.
“Draw the charges! Draw the charges!” he bellowed. “Load with round shot! Load with round shot, damn your eyes!”
Some of his surviving division officers and gun captains had already anticipated his instructions. He’d ordered his guns loaded with grapeshot because musketeers would have to come into his effective range if they were going to be any threat to his battery. Despite his own insistence on digging the guns in properly, he hadn’t really expected the Charisians to embark upon an artillery duel, unsupported by infantry, when they had barely a third as many guns as he did. Grapeshot and canister were the most effective anti-infantry ammunition any artillery piece had, and he’d never imagined that any infantry in the world could engage effectively from outside grapeshot range. Now, even as he cursed and goaded his men into reloading, he made a mental note for the artillerists’ manual he was still drafting. Rule Number One: Never load your weapons until you know—positively know—what type of ammunition is going to be required.
Oh, shit! he thought suddenly. What the hell am I doing wasting time drawing charges? Why didn’t I just order them to fire the damn grapeshot to clear the guns?!
Because, he realized, he was experiencing his own version of panic as he registered just how badly the Charisians outranged his own guns. That wasn’t going to help anyone, and so he made himself pause and suck in a deep, steadying breath, even as the second and third salvos of grapeshot came hissing, whistling, and thudding into his position.
Slow down, Charlz! At least you’ve got the right idea, but slow down. Good ideas are fine, but you’ve got to think long enough to make the right decisions, as well!
