by David Weber
A war in which cavalry was reduced solely to a scouting force, capable of occasional hit-and-run raids but helpless against any unshaken infantry position? Nonsense. Ridiculous! Unthinkable! Yet vehemently as Windshare had rejected the notion, he couldn’t free himself of a gnawing suspicion that Gahrvai had a point.
Even at an extended gallop, a typical cavalryman could cover less than five hundred yards in a minute. Against slow-firing smoothbore matchlocks, with a maximum effective range of no more than a hundred yards, that meant musketeers would have time for only a single shot each before the horsemen were on top of them. But these damned Charisian rifles fired four or five times as rapidly as matchlocks, and to four or five times the effective range. Which was the reason the skirmishers deployed to screen the oncoming infantry columns were able to keep Windshare’s scouts at a distance. By the same token, the skirmishers had to stay close enough to their columns to fall back on them if they were threatened by a cavalry charge, but the ability of an infantry force to move virtually at will, even in the presence of superior numbers of cavalry, seemed like a perversion to an old-school trooper like Windshare.
Well, Koryn may have a point, Windshare granted unwillingly. I still think he’s overreacting to what happened at Haryl’s Crossing, but I’m willing to admit I could be wrong about that. Even if I am, though, those bastards don’t have a single pikeman. If they’ll just come close enough . . .
“My Lord.”
Windshare shook himself up out of his introspection as Galvahn trotted up beside him.
“Yes, Naithyn?”
“They have two battalions on this side of the woodline. Another is just beginning to emerge, but they’ve allowed the marching interval between it and the other two to widen to over three hundred yards.”
“They have?” Windshare’s eyes brightened, and Galvahn smiled.
“Yes, My Lord. And their lead battalion is heading straight towards us. Our pickets are falling back in front of it as you instructed. That’s the firing you can hear.” He twitched his head in the direction of the whip-crack rifle shots. “They’ve kept the range open, too, just like they were supposed to, and we haven’t lost very many men. We’ve got over a dozen horses down, but I think we’ve only had two or three men hit.”
“Good!” Windshare slapped his gauntlets against his thigh. “Good, Naithyn!”
The earl climbed back into his own saddle and looked around at his staff.
“Gentlemen, I believe it’s time we discouraged these people,” he said.
Merlin Athrawes found himself hoping Brigadier Clareyk wasn’t being overconfident.
His two lead battalions—Colonel Zhanstyn’s First Battalion and Colonel Raizyngyr’s Second Battalion, which together made up the Third Brigade’s First Regiment—marched straight along the royal highway towards Green Valley in time with the battalion pipers and with rifles slung. Although their battle casualties had been ludicrously low, sickness and injury had reduced both battalions from a nominal strength of five hundred men each to a combined total of just over eight hundred. Which, for any animal-powered army Nimue Alban had ever studied, was an incredibly low sick rate. Traditionally, back on Old Earth, especially in preindustrial armies, attrition from illness had vastly exceeded combat losses. It hadn’t been until the period of World War I that deaths from enemy action had actually outnumbered deaths from disease, but “the Archangel Pasquale’s” teachings had produced a level of hygiene and preventive health measures which created a very different situation here on Safehold.
None of which changed the fact that Zhanstyn and Raizyngyr were outnumbered by roughly five-to-one by the cavalry waiting just on the far side of the hill.
Merlin glanced at Clareyk as the brigadier rode along, seemingly without a care in the world. He’d stayed with Zhanstyn’s command group, and if he was particularly concerned about Windshare, his expression showed absolutely no sign of it.
The Earl of Windshare sat in his saddle watching his retreating cavalry pickets withdraw up the hillside towards him exactly as Major Galvahn had described. The long, gradual slope behind them was dotted with the bodies of dead and wounded horses who’d obviously been brought down by the skirmishers moving fifty or sixty yards in advance of the main infantry column, but he saw only a very few human bodies out among them.
His spyglass showed him the Charisians, marching with their rifles slung. To his considerable surprise, they were marching with fixed bayonets, as well, which was more than simply odd. Bayonets were musketeers’ last-ditch defense, and a clumsy substitute for proper pikes, at best. Worse, men with the circular hilts of bayonets shoved down the muzzles of their muskets could neither fire nor reload, so what in the world could the Charisians be thinking of?
Deep inside, a little voice suggested to him that someone like Gahrvai might have been able to come up with an answer short of assuming that his opponents had succumbed to lunacy. It should, perhaps, have occurred to him that none of his earlier reports had mentioned anything about bayonets. On the other hand, that wasn’t the sort of detail cavalry scouts normally included in their reports, and at the moment, Windshare had other things on his mind. Like the fact that, bayonets or no, they were coming hard, concentrating on covering ground as quickly as they could without exhausting themselves, and the way they’d allowed themselves to become more spread out indicated that they weren’t spending a lot of energy worrying.
No reason they should be, he thought grimly. We’ve been shadowing them—and they’ve been killing and wounding my men—for hours now, and I doubt their maps are as good as ours. As far as they’re concerned, this is just more of the same, and they probably don’t even know what the ground looks like between here and Green Valley. No reason for them to think I could have over four thousand cavalry hidden away.
He smiled hungrily, watching the enemy approach.
It was going to be ticklish getting his men up and over the crest line. Not only was there the slope to consider, but the terrain would be constricted until they crossed the crest, where the fan-shaped prospective battlefield began to open out once more. No trooper liked to start a charge headed uphill, for a lot of reasons, and in this instance, they were going to be packed like apples in a basket, forced to adopt a deeper formation than he would have preferred, until they cleared the top of the slope. On the other hand, there were those bayonets. Even if the Charisians’ muskets were loaded, they’d still have to remove the bayonets before they could fire, and his troopers would have the downslope on the far side to help them build and maintain speed once they got started. The trick was going to be timing. He needed to start the charge soon enough to give his men time to come over the hill and gain speed, but at the same time, he wanted to give the Charisians as little time as possible to react.
Still, he thought, studying those slung muskets, surprise is bound to keep them from reacting instantly.
Merlin had deliberately looked away from Clareyk. In fact, he’d turned in the saddle to look back down the length of the column behind them to where the first battery of twelve-pounders had just come through the belt of trees in road column. It probably wasn’t strictly necessary, but he wanted to make it clear to any potential observer that he wasn’t even thinking about the brigadier at this particular moment.
Of course, he wasn’t really looking at the column, either, as he waited, watching and listening through his SNARC.
“Now!” Windshare snapped, and Major Galvahn stood in the stirrups, waving the red signal flag vigorously.
Merlin might not have been watching Clareyk, but the brigadier had been very attentively—if unobtrusively—watching him. Which was why the Marine saw the bodyguard reach up and remove his helmet in order to wipe sweat from his brow.
“Now, I think, Bryahn,” he said crisply.
Major Lahftyn looked at him for just a moment, then glanced up the slope before them. Obviously, he couldn’t imagine what had prompted Clareyk to give the order at that precise moment, but it was an
order he’d been expecting. He hesitated for no more than a heartbeat, then nodded to the bugler at his side.
“Sound ‘Form square,’ Corporal,” he said.
Windshare’s massed horsemen started up the slope. First, at a walk, but moving rapidly to a trot, with the smoothness of years of experience and the demanding training Windshare had put them through ever since assuming command of Gahrvai’s cavalry.
The lead squadrons reached the crest in an eight-deep line, moving at a hard trot, covering just over two hundred yards per minute, and the front two ranks accelerated rapidly. By the time they’d covered another forty yards, they were moving at a full, extended gallop, hooves showering clods of moist earth, lances and sabers glittering in the sunlight, while the next two ranks thundered along thirty yards behind them. About them and behind them came the music of bugles, the drumming thunder of sixteen thousand hooves, and a deep, baying cheer as they turned on their enemies at last.
Windshare himself came over the crest with the third double-line, sixty yards behind the first. He rode in the exact center of the line, his standard snapping and popping in the wind of his passage, and his eyes glittered with fierce satisfaction.
But then those eyes widened in astonishment.
The men of Clareyk’s first two battalions had been waiting for the bugle call, and they responded instantly. Both battalions unraveled, moving with the speed and precision only endless, brutally demanding drill could have instilled. They spread out, First Battalion moving to its right while Second Battalion moved to its left, forming not a column, not a line, but a single hollow formation. It wasn’t literally a “square”; the ground was too uneven for that, and it was more of a rectangle than a square, anyway. But that compact, steady, unshaken, unsurprised formation bristled with bayonets, facing outward in every direction, and, in direct contravention of every standard safety regulation, the rifles upon which those bayonets were mounted had been carefully loaded and primed before they were ever slung.
Windshare couldn’t believe it.
He’d never seen infantry move that quickly, that precisely, even on the drill field. Surely there was no way they could have responded that instantly! It wasn’t possible!
Yet the Charisians had done it, and it was too late for him to change his own mind. Half his total force—including Windshare himself—was already at a full gallop, pounding downhill towards the enemy at over seven yards a second in a series of lines which were each a hundred and twenty-five men across. His lead elements had little more than a hundred and fifty yards to go, and the front rank of the second half of his force was already moving up and over the crest line behind him, ready to exploit his charge’s success.
And the bastards still have their damned bayonets fixed, too! he realized, and grinned savagely. They may think that’ll keep my lads from closing with them, but they’re about to find out just how wrong they are!
Brigadier Clareyk sat his horse in the middle of First Battalion’s square, watching the enemy come. His expression was as calm as ever as he glanced over at Merlin.
“I suppose this is where we find out just how clever I really am,” he remarked.
The front of his square, where it faced uphill, was three ranks deep, instead of two. The front rank knelt on one knee, rifle butts braced, bayonets thrusting up and out at a sharp angle . . . right about at chest height on a horse. The second and third ranks waited, rifles cocked. The temptation to fire as soon as possible was almost overwhelming as they watched two thousand cavalry thundering towards them, but they didn’t. They waited.
Colonel Zhanstyn waited with them. His battalion formed the long side of the square closest to the enemy, and he’d dismounted to stand beside the battalion standard, sword in hand, his eyes on the enemy.
There wouldn’t be time to reload before the first wave was upon them, whatever happened, and he had no intention of wasting the shock value of a massed volley by firing too soon. It wasn’t just a matter of range or accuracy; it was also a matter of timing, of hitting those cavalrymen not simply with the physical impact of his Marines’ bullets, but with their morale effect, as well—and doing it at precisely the right moment.
The Corisandian cavalry thundered downhill, opened up into proper double-lines. Now the leading troopers tightened in the saddle, bracing for impact as they hurtled straight at the Charisian formation. The hedge of unwavering bayonet points glittered wickedly in the early-afternoon sunlight, but at least they weren’t pikes. In another few seconds—
The universe came apart in a sudden, thunderous roll of rifle fire.
There were roughly eight hundred men in the Charisian square, with four platoons—roughly eighty men—in each of its short sides, covering either flank. Another hundred men formed its rear face, facing downhill, covering the backs of the two hundred and twenty men in its front face, and a forty-man reserve stood ready in the middle of the formation, prepared to reinforce any weak spot. Its long face was roughly a hundred yards from side to side, barely a third of the oncoming cavalry’s frontage, and it looked impossibly frail in the face of such a threat.
If the Charisians in that square realized that, they gave no sign of it.
As Windshare’s cavalry charge poured down the hillside like a river of horseflesh and steel, the hundred and fifty rifles in the square’s second and third ranks flamed as one.
The impact of that deadly volley was staggering, and in more than one way. Every man in Windshare’s charge had seen those bayonets, and because they’d never heard of “ring bayonets,” which mounted around a rifle’s muzzle instead of being shoved down into the weapon’s bore, they’d known that the musketeers behind them couldn’t possibly fire. The surprise when they went right ahead and fired anyway was total. Even if those bullets had inflicted no casualties at all, the sheer shock of experiencing yet another surprise at Charisian hands would have dealt the cavalry’s confidence and determination a deadly blow.
And, unfortunately for Corisande, the Charisian bullets did inflict casualties, as well.
Horses were big targets; men were relatively small ones. No more than twenty or thirty of Windshare’s troopers were actually hit by the Charisian fire. Those who were hit went down hard as the massive bullets smashed through breastplates and the fragile bodies beneath them, yet they represented only a handful of that onrushing wave’s total numbers.
But the horses were another matter. Holes appeared abruptly in the center of the Corisandian line as screaming horses smashed to earth. Riders were flung out of their saddles, only to find themselves in the path of the second line of troopers behind them. Ordinarily, a horse will do almost anything to avoid colliding with a human, but there was no way these horses could. They were moving too fast, with too much momentum, with too many other horses right behind them, and they trampled the dismounted cavalrymen into bloody mud.
The bodies of the fallen horses were a more serious obstacle, and the face of the charging formation splintered as the horses still on their feet tried frantically to avoid the tangled wreckage of their dead and wounded fellows. Many of them failed, plowing into the barrier, shrieking as legs broke, riders went flying, and fresh, thrashing bodies were added to the heap.
Zhanstyn had timed his volley almost perfectly. There was time enough to break the cavalry’s momentum, distance enough for the leading edge of the charge to spread out around the sudden obstacle and lose cohesion, but too little time for it to begin to recover. And, just as horses will instinctively seek to avoid trampling a downed human, they have a pronounced aversion to charging straight into the solid barrier of a glittering wall of sharpened steel. With their momentum broken, their ranks staggered, their riders unnerved, they refused the challenge. Instead, they split around the square, flowing down its short sides, and fresh rifle volleys ripped out as their momentum carried them across the flank platoons’ field of fire.
Then they were past the square . . . and its rear wall fired a deadly volley into their backs.
&nbs
p; There wasn’t time for Windshare to even begin to analyze what had happened to his first wave before his second wave came thundering in, ten seconds later.
Those ten seconds hadn’t been quite long enough for the firing ranks to reload, but the kneeling front rank hadn’t fired against the first wave. Now, the second rank advanced its bayonets at the thrust, reaching well forward over the heads of the front rank, while that front rank raised its rifles and fired its own vicious volley at point-blank range.
It was only half as heavy as the volley which had broken the first charge, but it was enough to stagger the second, especially with the writhing drift of dead and wounded horses and bodies from the first double-line’s wreckage to help disorder the Corisandian formation, and the surviving horses of the second wave were no more eager than their fellows had been to thrust themselves against those waiting bayonets. They fought their riders, and even as they did, the square’s third rank finished reloading, leveled its rifles, and fired at a range of less than thirty feet.
The carnage was incredible, yet even in the midst of the blood, the smoke, and the screams, some of Windshare’s troopers actually managed to close with the Marines. Lances crossed with bayoneted muskets, swords flashed, and blood splashed across the grassy hillside, and then the third wave plowed into the melee.
In most places, the square held. Unshaken infantry in tight formation and under firm tactical control stood an excellent chance against cavalry. It was broken infantry, or an unsteady formation, which formed cavalry’s legitimate prey, and the Charisians refused to be broken. Yet the Corisandians were just as determined, and Charisians began to die, as well.
