by Smith, Skye
The quartermaster gave him a stubborn look, but then it turned canny. It would be better for him if this man were gone. Less risk of the nobs finding out how much he was jacking the price of their whiskey. Besides, he needed time in private to mark more of the casks with red X's. "Right then, be on your way. Fair winds and friendly ports."
Four hours later, the Freisburn dropped Daniel off in Eyemouth and he borrowed a nag to quicken his arrival at the Covenanter headquarters near the village of Duns.
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THE PISTOLEER - HellBurner by Skye Smith Copyright 2013-14
Chapter 14 - The retreat from Kelso in June 1639
"Fuck!" was the one-word reply when Daniel told Alex Leslie that Harry Rich was planning a sneak attack across the River Tweed at Kelso. The general repeated the eloquence several times over the run of Daniel's reporting of all that he had heard in Berwick. "So our ruse has backfired. Instead of scaring the buggers away from the border, it has them planning a surprise attack to capture our mythical muskets."
"Well, their attack is doomed to fail,” Daniel mumbled as he looked around to see who else was in earshot. It would be very bad news for he and his ship if a spy recognized him.
"How so?"
"They won't find the French muskets they are searching for," replied Daniel, smirking.
"This is no matter for levity. We've kept the peace between these armies by agreeing that if the English stay south of the Tweed, then we would stay ten miles north of it. This could turn the peace into a hot war. A very hot war. I didn't come back to Scotland to fight a war, I came to stop one."
"We can continue with the ruse." Daniel poured some more Red X into the general's glass.
Alex sipped some more and smiled. "This is Scottish, you say? Unbelievable. It is so smooth and clean and, and, uh... peaty. Peaty rather than malty. How do you mean 'continue with the ruse'?"
"Our original ruse was to make the English believe that we were too formidable in muskets for them to engage us. It worked. They believe that, and that is why they are making this surprise attack to try to capture the muskets. If that attack fails, and we put the run on Rich and his thousands of horse, then the ruse is proven true. Rich's only possible excuse to his King for his retreat will be that he was met with countless French muskets."
Alex sipped while he sat lost in thought. He would have called in his captains to have them throw some ideas around, but he did not want to risk the king's spies finding out who Daniel really was. "We could ambush the cavalry either at the ford in Kelso, or under the crumbled walls of Roxburgh. No. Forget I mentioned it. An ambush would kill too many sons of the aristocracy, and that would force the King's hand. He would have to invade Scotland to seek retribution or risk losing the favour and the funding of the fathers of the dead nobility."
Ambushes were what Dutch pistoleers did best, so Daniel said, "Command your musketeers to shoot to wound, or better yet, shoot to wound their horses."
"Most of this army's musketeers are untried, and there are many locals amongst them. If a local ever got one of those mounted popinjays in front of his musket he would certainly shoot to kill. The Royal army has been taking the local's food without paying, and worse, taking their women without paying."
Daniel leaned forward at this news. "They are abusing the women?"
"The bloody sons of nobility have abducted every lass for twenty miles around and are using them, you know..... using them. My spies report that those sons of bitc...er ... nobles have tied the lasses to beds and are sharing them. Covering them every hour. The arrogant fools. They've signed their own death warrants if the local clansmen ever catch any of them. By now every lass will be seeded with an English bastard bairn. God forbid what will become of them once the armies withdraw."
"So you don't trust your army to shoot to wound?"
"Not the mob of the army, no, but the three hundred who followed me back from the continent will do as I tell them. They are all professional soldiers. Tell them the reasoning, and they will make it happen." Alex walked to the door of the cottage and yelled out to assemble his personal officers and to be quick about it. His mind was now racing ahead, planning a battle. With Daniel keeping to the shadows of the room, Alex rattled off a list of instructions to the first two officers who arrived.
"I want each of my continentals to carry three muskets and a pistol." Leslie explained. "Tell them to choose two pikemen each to carry and load the muskets. Tell them to choose local pikemen. Men who know the game trails and have a grudge against the English nobs. I want them all rested, fed and ready to march an hour after sunrise. Food for three days. Pack animals only."
After the aides raced off, Daniel asked, "Your three hundred, plus six hundred pike? But that is less than a thousand infantry. Besides, I thought you said the locals would ignore your orders and shoot to kill."
"The locals will not be firing the muskets, just loading them. If the cavalry are stupid enough to charge into our ranks, then I won't mind the locals skewering them with their pikes. I won't mind at all. The locals are so pissed at the English nobs that they will stand and fight and protect my professionals. If any of my men have to make a run for it, the local pikemen will know the best trails to reach safety."
"Rich may be leading all five thousand horse. You will have less than a thousand infantry, and only three hundred shots at a time."
"My men are crack shots and horses are large targets. Think of the effect of say five hundred injured and panicking horses after we put the first three rapid salvos into them, especially when they are ridden by amateur huntsmen. I can only hope and pray that it will be enough to turn them back across the border."
"But you have ten thousand infantry in this camp. I still don't understand why you are meeting the cavalry with but a thousand."
"Because the bloody Tweed has to be defended in case the crossing at Kelso is a ruse, so the rest of the army must be held in reserve. You're a pistoleer. You know how quickly the cavalry can retreat, reform, and take the battle to somewhere else. Besides, I can't believe that even an English earl could be so stupid as to commit the cavalry without the support of his infantry. Where will the English infantry be crossing, eh? I don't know? Do you know? No one knows."
"So you will use a thousand men as skirmishers to turn the cavalry back from Kelso ford, and then withdraw from the border again?"
"Hopefully. And hopefully without a slaughter. I suppose it is too much to hope that a man like Harry Rich will be leading his cavalry from the front. I can't risk letting a few hundred cavalry across the ford in hopes of getting a clear shot at Rich. Too bad, for one musket ball in his chest armour would save a lot of lives."
"I though you weren't shooting to kill?"
"Dent, not kill, dent. Rich will be wearing the finest of steel plate over his chest. Give him a trophy to show off to his king to explain why he ordered a retreat. Charlie will be so impressed by a dent over his heart that he'll give him a medal for retreating."
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Although Daniel had once sworn to Alex that he would not fight for him, nor command his musketeers, he could not keep himself from marching through the early morning light with Alex's troops. It all felt so familiar, like the months he had spent mounted and wearing his chest armour while patrolling the Dutch border with Spanish Flanders. He kept company with Alex's professionals, who were quick to accept him once they learned that he was an experienced Dutch pistoleer.
Normally a march so dependent on stealth and ambush would have left before sunrise to be in position at first light. At this time of year in Scotland, however, there was little dark night and a very early dawn. Hopefully the English cavalry would have been drinking faux-Bushmills all night, and would be late rising.
After a three hour march they reached the ruins of Roxburgh on the north side of the River Tweed across from Kelso. There was no sign of the English cavalry or their scouts so they created blinds in the bushes just north of Kelso's ford
and waited to spring an ambush. The river was wide and shallow here and the obvious place to cross because further upstream there was a great and deep pool that marked the join of two rivers.
Five men were waiting for them behind a ruined wall, but they were some of Leslie's scouts. With them was Alex Hamilton. Ham was Leslie's artillery officer, so he had been scouting the area to find the best location to place the field guns for defending the ford. After he had made his report to Leslie he noticed Daniel off to the side, and rushed over to grab him by the hand.
"It was a good thing you got the Freisburn away with half those muskets,” Ham said, "for the other half was snatched away from me by the very Edinburgh Campbells I had roused to help me secure them. They won't even give them up to Argyll, and he is the clan chief."
"They are still Argyll's then,” Daniel replied. "So I'll just help myself to more casks of his whiskey in payment for them." Ham turned to go and see to his precious cannons which were now arriving bouncing behind horses, so he followed him. It was then that he was introduced to the two loves of Ham's life.
The two field guns and the gunners that Ham commanded were Leslie's only artillery. They were very small cannon, four pounders that in England would be called sakers, but of a slightly larger caliber, perhaps four inches. It was hard to tell the bore exactly because of the flared muzzles.
They looked all the world like overgrown blunderbusses and Daniel wondered why Leslie had even bothered to bring them along. Such small cannon could not possibly make much difference in a battle against five thousand horse. Perhaps it was just because they could keep up with the march. Each was less than a ton of brass and was towed by but two horses.
Daniel watched Ham fuss about his two cannons and he had to ask, "Ham, why did Leslie even bother bringing them? He has three hundred crack shots carrying nine hundred muskets. These cannon make no sense."
Ham's gunners laughed aloud and mocked the pistoleer's words. Ham told them to be more respectful of a well-armed Dutch, but it was a jest. Finally he explained them to Daniel, "Just as the six hundred local pikemen are here to protect the musketeers, so are the three hundred musketeers here to protect these two cannon. These two cannons are as important to this battle as all the musketeers combined. Before the general was allowed to bring them to Scotland he had to swear to Axel Oxenstierna, the Regent of Sweden, that he would not allow their capture and that they would be returned."
"You jest,” Daniel replied. "As if a general-regent as powerful as Axel would worry about the return of two tiny cannons."
"He doesn't want his enemies to find out how they work,” Ham said as he walked towards what looked like a stack of fat scroll pipes. He hefted one of the pipes and plonked it into Daniel's arms. Daniel staggered at bit at the unexpected weight of the pipe and placed it quickly down onto another stack. A stack of what looked like socks filled with seed corn.
"Not there, burke,” called one of the gunners pointing to the other stack, "keep it away from the powder socks. Put it over with the other shot canisters. Carefully, we don't want them dented."
Since Daniel used measuring cylinders to speed the loading of his pistols, he was not surprised that these professional gunners did the same thing with the powder socks for these cannon. The surprise was that the heavy pipe Alex had shown him was filled with shot rather than powder.
"The Field Marshall don't want us to kill anyone,” the gunner explained, "just scare 'em good and proper, so we've emptied the canisters of pistol balls and refilled them with bird shot."
For a few moments Daniel stood and stared at the nine foot long brass cannon and at the stack of paper canisters, until he realized that they were serious. The cannon was shaped like a giant blunderbuss, so why shouldn't it fire bird shot instead of pistol balls? It was not fired by fuse or by torch but by yanking on a lanyard attached to a flint hammer. It could be reloaded quickly because the powder and the shot were pre-measured in socks and canisters. He remembered the weight of the canister. How much bird shot was in just one of them? Thousands?
He chuckled at his mental vision of someone using this cannon to hunt flocks of geese, and downing an entire flock with one shot. He tried to do the arithmetic to turn the weight into a count of the bird shot. Then his vision turned into a nightmare at the thought of what such canisters would do to men if they were filled with pistol balls rather than bird shot. Not a flock of geese downed with one shot, but a flock of men.
Ham was busy positioning his precious canons and organizing his gunners, so Daniel walked back over to where General Leslie was giving orders to the rest of his officers. "Spread out along the ford to make sure none of the cavalry make it to Scottish soil. Keep to the bushes and well hidden until you need to aim. And for heaven's sake, try not to kill any of the bloody English unless you are saving the life of a Scot. Aim for the horses, not the men. The rump would be best."
"Hard to hit the rump of a horse that is charging towards you, general," a voice called out. The men all laughed, including Alex.
"We'll open fire with the cannons once the lead cavalry are halfway across. The cannon fire will be staggered, one cannon at a time, so they can protect each other. That much birdshot will cause the cavalry to turn tail and retreat. Once they've turned, help them on their way by aiming at the rumps of the horses." Alex's reply was met with more laughter and a lot of rude remarks connecting the words assholes and aristos.
Once the laughter quieted, Alex continued. "If things go wrong, then make an orderly retreat to Roxburgh ruins up the rise there. No cavalry in their right mind will follow you into narrow lanes between the ruined walls. I repeat... orderly retreat. You must give us time enough to hitch up the cannons and get them up there to safety."
Once Alex had finished speaking, he gave the officers the nod to get their men into position and carry his orders to them. Only then did he walk over to stand beside the pistoleer. "A favour, Daniel."
"I will not fight for you."
"Aye, so you've said, but I need you to lead my scouts. They will have a special mission during the battle. If the bloody king is brave enough to ride with Harry Rich and his cavalry, then my scouts will try to capture him and bring him safely to me." Alex put his hand on the Daniel's shoulder. "I wouldn't ask you if I had a better man for the job. I've listened to your stories of the Dutch flying squads of pistoleers, and that is exactly the skirmisher tactics that will be required to capture Charlie."
Daniel sighed. Alex was right. If the King did make an appearance then it would be foolish not to capture him. Capture, not injure, and not kill. Both he and Alex had agreed last night that the best outcome for both Scotland and England would be to have the king safely under lock and key. Then the religious nuts in control of Scotland could force him to change the way of things in both kingdoms. "So be it. I'll go and organize your scouts."
The ten scouts that Alex had assigned to him were all mounted because capturing the king would be the work of a mounted flying squad. A few days ago two of them had spied on the English camp near Berwick and they swore to him that they could recognize both Charlie and Harry Rich, even at a distance.
They told him that Charlie often wore a Spanish-style, wide-brimmed floppy hat with a white plume jammed into the band. The floppy hat hid a skull cap, a steel helmet that was closely fitted inside it. Daniel had seen the Spanish cavaliers in Flanders wear the same kind of hats.
The flying squad rode up to the high ground of Roxburgh castle ruins so that they could take in the lay of the land and the river. "If everything goes to plan,” the lead scout said, "neither the King nor Harry Rich will ever get their feet wet. They will be watching the crossing from the downstream bank. If we are to capture the King, we will have to find another place to cross the river downstream from the ford. Another place well away from the center of the battle, that we can use to cross in both directions, and in a hurry."
"Wonderful." Daniel sighed. "Even if we capture him, we will be shot down by our own muskets as we c
ome back across the river."
"Nay. We'll make it back across all right, but any English giving chase will be gunned down. Keep in mind that the locals are here to load the muskets, not to shoot them. Only our professionals will be taking aim, and I have fought alongside them for a decade. They will recognize us and cover our backs. Now let's get down off this skyline in case we are seen. We should scout downstream from here and find another way to cross this river."
They had just finished testing the depth of a sandbar when the call came along the bank that there were English scouts coming along the southern bank from Berwick. The squad rode their horses into the cover of some high bush and tied them off, and then crept back to the edge of the bushes to keep watch on what the English scouts were doing.
The Scottish scouts stared open-mouthed as Daniel pulled his Dutch 'kijker', his 'looker' from its holster and twisted the two pipes of it further apart so that the spectacle lenses at each end would bring the other bank close in and clear. They all had to have a turn with the looker. The lead scout whistled as he looked through it, and then moved his hand in front of the far lens to test the distance. "It makes things seem close, like we were half way across the river. Amazing. So do the spectacles pop out of each of the pipes so you can use them for reading?"
"Not yet, but a good thought for when my eyes age," Daniel replied as he took the kijker from him and had another turn himself. It was just two leather pipes fitted one inside the other with a spectacle lens at each end. By pushing the outside tube further away, or closer, ever so slowly, while looking through the narrow end, what you were looking at came into focus and seemed much closer. "They are the latest rage in Rotterdam. Every ship's captain wants one. Mine is clumsy in comparison to the expensive ones the Dutch Navy is using."
