Men of War

by William R. Forstchen

  Ahead the city still burned, silhouetting the spreading encampment of his army, fieldpieces lined up next to felt-and-hide yurts, a dozen warriors gathered round a fire, roasting what appeared to be the legs and arms of a human while another casually cracked open the severed skull to scoop out the brains.

  To make them modern, he now realized with grim certainty, was impossible; one could not expect them, in the span of a few short years, to leap generations. Somehow the humans were more adaptable, or was it simply more desperate. Did his own people truly realize just how desperate they were at this moment?

  He felt a twinge of fear. No, not now, I can’t lose my nerve now though the dark foreboding is ready to consume me. Victory first, then let the rest fall where it may.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sitting atop his ironclad, Vincent Hawthorne raised his field glasses, scanning the horizon to the east, which was silhouetted by the dawning light.

  “See them?” Gregory asked. “I count at least twenty-five plumes. They must have brought them up by rail during the night. And there, see it, four, make that five flyers are up as well.”

  Vincent said nothing, slowly sweeping the line of the horizon. Gregory’s eyes were undoubtedly far better, and he was trained for this through a year’s hard experience.

  “Fine then. They’re going to make a fight of it,” Vincent announced, lowering his glasses.

  A sharp rattle of rifle fire, sounding sharp and clear in the early-morning air, ignited. Directly ahead a line of cavalry skirmishers was drawing back from the opposite ridge. Ever since the men had dug into camp just after sundown, the ridge had been a source of contention throughout the night. If the bastards were allowed to deploy artillery up there, they could fire right down into the fortified camp of 3rd Corps.

  Standing up, he slowly turned. The dawning light was starting to reveal the encircling host. It was hard to tell, but he sensed that more Bantag had come up during the night. The odds were running steep, at least six to one, perhaps even seven to one, the advantage held by having thirty-eight ironclads offset by the arrival of the enemy machines.

  This day would be the day, then, and for all he knew, in the greater world beyond, the war might already be over. There was no word from Hans, not a single flyer had come back from Xi’an with a report. He was beginning to suspect that it would prove to be a very bad day.

  “Should we move up to meet them?” Gregory asked.

  Vincent shook his head.

  “Get the men digging in. We’ve got fresh water here.” He nodded to the oasis-like spring that was in the center of the camp. “Even if the water is somewhat bitter, they can’t block it off. We dig in and let them come at us. As for our ironclads, we move up onto the ridge east of here to keep their artillery back. That’s where we’ll meet their ironclads coming in.”

  “They could wait us out, you know. We’re down to five days’ rations.”

  “They don’t know that. No, I think their pride is hurt, us getting this far through territory they felt was theirs. No, once those ironclads come up the fight will be on.”

  “Wonder if this is all futile anyhow.” Gregory sighed.

  Vincent looked over at him.

  “Sorry, but word is getting around with the boys. Somehow rumors are floating about a coup back in Suzdal, that the war might already be over, and we’ve surrendered, that Hans and even Andrew are dead.”

  “And what do you think?”

  “If we surrendered, how long do you think those hairy bastards would let someone like you or me live. We know too much.”

  He laughed, shook his head, and slapped the ironclad they were sitting on.

  “We’re all doomed to die anyhow; if given the choice, I want to go down fighting in one of these. I was nothing before you Yankees came. You trained me, gave me a chance to command, gave me a machine I could master and even learn to love. That’s a pretty good life, I think, and something worth dying for today.”

  “I wish we had another corps though,” Vincent whispered.

  “Air cover, that’s what I want. What the hell do you think the Hornets were doing last night?”

  Vincent shook his head. At least twenty machines had flown directly overhead in the middle of the night. One of them had circled several times and then pressed on. He had hoped that someone would have found a dropped message streamer, but so far nothing. Perhaps they were attempting a moonlit strike on the enemy ships off-loading the ironclads. If that was their mission, the smoke just over the next hill was indicator enough that the mad scheme had been a failure.

  “Anyhow, the fewer men, the greater share of honor,” Gregory continued with a smile, and the two chuckled softly.

  “Well, I guess we’re the bait. We wanted a stand-up fight, and we’re going to get one. Let’s make the most of it.”

  * * *

  “Hans.”

  The voice was gentle but insistent, waking him from a soft floating dream. It was Maine. Funny, he had actually spent very little time there, but even after all these years it still haunted his memory and dreams. Pulled from the Regulars, he’d been sent to Augusta to help form up a volunteer regiment, 1030-odd farm boys, lumbermen, clerks, students, fishermen, boat builders, craftsmen, railroad men, factory hands, and a lone history professor who would become the 35th Maine. He’d arrived early in July. By the end of August they were already heading south to join the Army of the Potomac in Maryland. Less than two months, and yet somehow it had made its stamp upon his heart. He remembered the day he and a nervous and still-young lieutenant hiked their company from the parade field below the Capitol to the village of Belgrade. The lieutenant allowed the boys to strip down for a swim in Snow Pond while the two sat on a grass-covered hill and first questions were asked. “What’s the war like … how good are the Rebs” and the startling admission … “I hope I don’t fail these boys.”

  He had grown, sick of officers who only seemed concerned with rank, privilege, clawing to promotion and this shy volunteer, voice near breaking, wondering aloud if he would “fail his boys.”

  He’d been dreaming of that, but it was different. His own wife, Tamira, their baby Andrew, and with them Andrew, Kathleen, and their children. It was like a dream of heaven. No fear, a soft lazy summer day in Maine where, though the sun was warm in July, there was always a cool breeze stirring off the lake.

  Even in the dream he wondered if he was wandering in Andrew’s dream realm, for the colonel had told him of his feverish morphine-twisted visions of death, of lingering by a lakeshore with all the dead who had gone before.

  No. This was different, and he wondered if it was a foreshadowing, a dream of heaven.

  “Hans.”

  It was Ketswana, hand lightly on the shoulder, shaking insistently.

  Hans opened his eyes and saw the dark features, the shaved head, eyes that were so transparent, like windows into the soul, and the look of concern.

  Hans sat up, disoriented. He had sat down on the woodpile, the city was burning, the powder works had blown.

  He sat up, feeling light-headed, unsure of where he was. The air was heavy with the smell of burned wood, rubbish, and the ever-present clinging smell of the camps. He looked around. He was off the train, inside a brick building, roof burned off and collapsed. There was a chill; it was all so familiar in a distorted way, the foundry where he had once slaved.

  Everything was a mad scurry of confusion, men using stoking rods were cutting into the brick wall, chiseling out firing ports through the heavy wall. He was near the main doorway, dead Bantag from storming the building were dragged to one side and piled up, and had been half-con-sumed in the fire.

  He stood up. “How did I get here?”

  “You don’t remember?”

  Hans shook his head.

  Ketswana looked at him closely.

  “You all right?”

  “Sure. Now tell me what’s going on.”

  Ketswana motioned for him to follow as he climbed up a ramp that ha
d once been used by labor crews pushing wheelbarrows of crushed ore, coke, and flux up to the tops of the furnaces. Most of the heavy-beamed walkway had survived the fire but was badly charred.

  The walkway rimmed the inside of the factory walls just below the roofline and men and women were working feverishly, clearing away rubble from the collapsed roof, and to his amazement a couple of dozen were slowly dragging a Bantag light fieldpiece, a breechloader, to the northeast corner.

  “Where the hell did you get that thing?”

  “At the cannon works. A dozen of them brand-spanking-new. We even found some shells. I got one posted down by the gate, the rest of the guns are in the other compounds.” A couple of Chin, a single rifle between them, looked up as they passed, one of them holding up a half-charred piece of flesh and, grinning, nodded his thanks. Directly below, on the floor of the factory compound, Hans could see the burned remains of the Bantag he had shot yesterday, baked into the frozen pool of iron.

  Ketswana, knowing what he was thinking, shook his head and laughed.

  “I've had crews working all night. We found a herd of horses. I ordered them slaughtered and, using the wreckage of a barracks compound, we roasted tons of the stuff.”

  He grimaced.

  “Well, most of it was damn near raw, but I remember a time when you and I wouldn’t have turned down raw meat, as long as we knew what it was. That was the lure, word spread, and we must of had them coming in by the tens of thousands. Anyone who could do anything we organized off with their compound leaders, village elders, even some of their princes.

  “We fed them and made it clear, if they ran off, everyone would be slaughtered come dawn. Hans, they all know that. Did you hear who’s here?”

  “No, who?”

  “Tamuka.”

  Hans said nothing.

  “Word is he’s the one that fired the city. They went crazy yesterday, started murdering everyone, as word spread that we had taken Xi’an and were coming this way.”

  Hans nodded, but said nothing. There was no hope of trying to turn these people into a trained cadre, that’d take weeks, months, and months of simply feeding them right as well. Though it was hard to believe he felt they actually looked worse than what he had experienced a year ago. The simple knowledge of what was coming that day would give them the courage to go down in a final mad frenzy.

  “Hans, they were organizing for this day, did you know that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You think we were the only ones?” Ketswana chuckled, as he reached out and moved Hans aside as a work crew, carrying a crate of ammunition for Bantag rifles, slowly moved past, pausing by the pair consuming their meal so that they could grab several dozen cartridges before moving on.

  “Hans, they had a whole network put together. Word of our breakout a year ago spread from one end of the Chin realm to the other. They say even the people up in the Nippon lands knew about it. The ‘wind words’ are that rioting is erupting in Nippon as well. The Bantag couldn’t stamp it out. Hans, you’re something of a god around here.”

  “What?”

  “Legends that we would return, that we wouldn’t let them be massacred. They’re right, you know.”

  “Yeah.” He sadly gazed at the skeletal crew laboring to roll the fieldpiece into position so that it wouldn’t recoil right off the platform the first time it was fired.

  “So they had a network, every compound linked together by the railroad crews and track laborers. Telegraphers kept the leaders informed of everything the Bantag did. With rumors that the Republic had surrendered sweeping the city, they were actually going to try and stage a mass rebellion even before we flew in to Xi’an.”

  “Madness.”

  “Well, what else could they do? Even if they traded lives a hundred to one, it would have stirred things up at the end. They knew just as well as we did that once the war was over they’d all be slaughtered. Some were talking about moving on the encampment areas south of here.”

  “What?”

  “The old ones, their women and children.”

  He said nothing, the dark thought repulsive.

  “They say there’s a hundred thousand yurts less than thirty miles from here.”

  The way Ketswana spoke chilled Hans, and he shook his head, silencing him.

  Ketswana motioned Hans forward as the last of the ammunition carriers hauling up shells for the fieldpiece passed. Gaining the corner of the foundry building, Hans stepped up onto a raised observation platform and sucked in his breath.

  The enemy host was coming. They were still several miles off, but in the cool morning air they stood out sharply. These were not mounted archers, aging guards, cruel slave drivers who could whip a terrified Chin to death but might step back from one armed with a stoking rod or pick. They were coming on slowly, deliberately, open skirmish line to the fore. Somehow Ketswana still had a pair of field glasses, and Hans took them, fumbling with the focus. One of the twin barrels had been knocked out of kilter, so he closed one eye.

  These were good troops, Hans could see that, black-uniformed, rifles held at the ready. A scattering of Chin were drawing back, refugees who had wandered out into the fields northwest of the burning city. The Bantag were not even bothering to waste a shot on such prey. If their steady advance overtook one, the victim was simply bayoneted and left. There was no looting, tearing apart of bodies, just a cold dispatching and then continuing on.

  Behind the double rank of skirmishers he could see the main body of troops, advancing in open order of columns, well spread out, half a dozen paces between warriors so that each regiment of a thousand occupied a front a half mile across and a hundred yards deep. Gatlings had finished the days of shoulder-to-shoulder ranks, and Jurak knew that, as he seemed to know far too many things.

  Sweeping the advancing columns he could see their left flank, his right, reaching all the way to the walls of the still-burning city, while their right flank overlapped his left by at least a mile or more. Several thousand Bantag were mounted, ranging farther out into the open steppes. These troops were not black-uniformed, many wearing older style jerkits of brown leather. He caught a glimpse of a standard adorned with human skulls.

  It was a Merki standard.

  He lowered the field glasses, looking over at Ketswana, who nodded.

  “The bastard is here, Hans. During the night he pulled to the west, organizing the survivors of yesterday’s fight.”

  Hans raised the glasses again, but the standard had disappeared in a swirling cloud of dust.

  There was nothing to anchor his own left flank on; it simply ended at this factory compound. It was obvious that within minutes after the start of the fight the mounted Bantag would be around his left and into the rear.

  Moving with the advancing host he picked out half a dozen batteries of fieldpieces, and several dozen wagons, which were undoubtedly carrying mortars. Except for a few pathetic guns such as the one mounted next to where he stood, they had nothing to counter that. Worse yet, though, in the middle of the advancing line half a dozen land ironclads were approaching as well, while overhead several Bantag aerosteamers were climbing, passing over the infantry and coming straight for him.

  As for his own aerosteamers, there was nothing left. The wreckage of his air fleet cluttered the field, bits of wicker framing, scorched canvas, and dark lumps of what had once been engines all that was left of the air corps of the Republic. He spared a quick thought for Jack, wondering if any of them had even made it back to Xi’an.

  Turning his field glasses away, he scanned the position Ketswana, his few veterans, and the Chin had attempted to prepare during the night, and he struggled not to weep. The rail line, cutting straight as an arrow from west to east, heading toward the burning city, was the rally point. During the night track had been torn up, crossties and ballast piled up to form a rough palisades.

  The dozen compounds that were strung along the track were the strong points; unfortunately, most of them had be
en severely damaged in the fighting. The powder works, several miles to his right, was still smoldering.

  What made his heart freeze, though, was the humanity huddled and waiting. Along the palisades he could see the occasional glint of a rifle barrel or someone holding a precious revolver, but most were armed with nothing more than spears, clubs, pickaxes, iron poles, a few knives, or rocks. And there were hundreds of thousands of them.

  Terrified children wailed, old men and women squatted on the ground, huddled in fear, their voices commingling into a mournful wail of forlorn terror. Looking to the south, he saw tens of thousands who, with the coming of dawn, were already quitting the fight, heading out across the open fields, moving through what had once been prosperous villages and hamlets but had long ago been abandoned as the Bantag drew off the populace for labor and for the pits. They were heading God knew where, for there was no place to hide, and once the mounted riders were into the rear they would be hunted down like frightened rabbits.

  He knew with a sick heart that his coming had triggered the final apocalypse. After what had happened the day before, Jurak would not suffer a single person to live. They had killed Bantag, they had destroyed the factories that were the sole remaining reason for their existence. They would all have to die.

  One of the Bantag aerosteamers lazily passed overhead, the pilot staying high enough to keep out of range of rifle fire. He banked over, making several tight turns. Hans looked back over the wall and saw a sea of upturned faces, hands pointing heavenward.

  Now it was not the ships of the Yankees, coming like gods from the heavens, bringing a dream of freedom. It was the dreaded Horde, and as if to add emphasis, the bottom side of the machine was painted with the human-skull standard and there were cries of fear. Yet more Chin started to break away. There was a scattering of rifle shots, a few of his men posted to the rear, holding their weapons overhead, firing not at the ship but to scare the refugees back into the line. Some turned about, but he knew that once the real fighting started, there would most likely be a panic.