Union Forever

by William R. Forstchen

  "That's what I was hoping for," Andrew replied. "The mere fact we were coming on so hard was the pressure on them I wanted.

  "We paid a price, though. We've got just over nineteen thousand effective in the city," Andrew stated, looking down at the latest roll-call reports. "Kindred reports four thousand at Hispania, with fifteen guns. We had five hundred at the Kennebec bridge, two hundred each at the Penobscot and Volga, and another five hundred spread out at the tank stops. Counting our casualties, we've still got over a thousand men somewhere out there on the road.

  "Gentlemen, that doesn't leave us much, when you consider our new situation."

  "What about the legion?" Emil asked.

  Andrew looked over at Marcus.

  "I've disbanded it," he said sharply. "They're politically unreliable."

  "Don't throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater," Emil replied.

  "I'll sift through them. The tribunes are under arrest. The rank and file can be used to train the new regiments as they form up." He paused. "Once we get weapons."

  "That'll be some time," Vincent interjected. "We've got to get Suzdal secured first. But for right now you should start training new infantry units without delay. Arm them with pikes, with anything. There's no promising that Cromwell won't be back after we leave."

  "Leave? I've pledged an alliance. Now you're going off again and leaving us hanging out here. I need support."

  Andrew looked over at Marcus.

  "If Suzdal falls, we might as well burn everything and head into the woods," Andrew said quietly. "There'll be no stopping them then. The battle has to be fought there. Everything we can give you is back there."

  "So he has outmaneuvered you," Marcus said, his voice almost sad.

  "He certainly has," Andrew replied bitterly.

  "Then how do you propose to turn it around?"

  "I'm still not sure," Andrew admitted. "That's why I've called this staff meeting. All I can think of now is moving the army back to Hispania, entraining, getting to the ruins of the Kennebec bridge, and then marching the rest of the way back."

  "It'll damn near be impossible," John Mina interjected.

  "How come, John? I need to hear this."

  John held up a sheaf of telegrams and papers.

  "Several reasons. We moved up here with twenty-five days of supply, and we've used eight of them. I've already checked the warehouses here. The Roum campaign against the Tugars destroyed a lot of livestock. Fields didn't get planted. These people barely squeezed through last winter. We can get grain, even move what little beef and pork they have up the rail line. But that's where the problems start."

  He held up a telegram and started to read.

  "From Kindred. 'As per your orders a recon train was sent up the line. Repeated cuts in telegraph line fifty miles east of Kennebec. Train stopped thirty miles east of Kennebec, reports line of fires on tracks. Contact severed, no report since.' "

  "Damn them," Andrew cursed, slamming the table with his fist.

  "We can assume," Mina continued, "that they've disrupted maybe upward of sixty miles of track by now, so the line stops a good two hundred and fifty miles east of our inner frontier. That's the minimum distance we'll have to walk to get back."

  "At a standard march of fifteen miles a day, we could still cover that in less than twenty days," Emil said hopefully.

  "Let's assume we try that," John said, warming to his subject. "The army's going to need nearly thirty tons of supply a day to keep moving. We can't turn these boys into packhorses loaded down with eight days of food. Soldiers always act like soldiers—they'll eat it up or throw it away, especially if it gets hot. And there's precious little to forage. That steppe is as good as a desert for infantry.

  "For one day's march away from the railhead we'll need thirty oxen wagons just for the bread supply. I've already checked—the Roum don't have many heavier two-team wagons, and horses are too damn precious and few. Going with oxen will mean our rate of march will be limited to ten to twelve miles a day, because the beasts can't do much more than that. Now, assuming we bring the meat up on the hoof, for two days' march away we'll need sixty wagons."

  "I don't follow that," Vincent said.

  "Simple. The wagons for the first day have to turn around, and it'll now take them a day to get back. But you see, it'll get worse the farther we go. When you're four days away, they'll be four days' worth of wagons moving up, and four days' worth coming back, and we're still only forty-five to fifty miles away. We're talking over two hundred wagons at this point. Start talking about a wagon supply line two hundred and fifty miles long and you start to see the nightmare of it."

  The group was silent, stunned by the contemplation of this logistical nightmare. John smiled like a schoolmaster who had just presented his students with an unsolvable problem.

  "Now you see why I preferred a line assignment to being quartermaster and industrial coordinator," he said quietly.

  "We have to assume that the Carthas are roaming this territory. If they cut out only one wagon train, the army will start to get hungry very quickly. Cut the line completely, and within three days the army will be starving. You're going to need security the length of the line. Remember how Mosby with just a couple of hundred men played hell with our supplies in '64? It'll be the same here. We've got precious few mounts. For all we know, those damn Merki supplied horses to Cromwell. There could even be Merki or Tugar raiders out there.

  "I'm therefore suggesting that we'll need a regiment and a couple of guns to guard each day's supply coming up, and at least a hundred or two to protect the wagons going back."

  "That's a hell of a lot of men," Andrew snapped. "You're talking about twenty regiments or more. Goddammit, man that's half our effective strength, just to cover our bloody tail."

  "I'd want more than that," John pressed. "We'll need to protect the rail line all the way back to Roum as well. All you need is half a dozen riders breaking in, cutting out four or five lengths of rail, or worse yet setting them up to break when a train hits, and the whole thing will unravel.

  "And there's the final point I haven't even added in yet. There's a good fifty-mile stretch without flowing water to speak of. Figuring two quarts will keep a man going for a day—"

  "That's really pressing it in this heat," Emil interjected.

  "Even at that minimum," and he paused for a moment to look at his notes, "the men can carry a couple of days' worth of water with them. But after that we'll need two hundred wagons, each hauling a thousand pounds of water, just to take care of the men. The maddening part of it is, we'll need an extra fifty wagons of water just to take care of the oxen hauling the water in the first place across the four-day march. For our horse, figure another hundred wagons of water. What makes it worst, though, is that when our supply line hits that dry stretch, the food load per wagon will drop significantly, since we'll need to load a quarter ton of water for each ox on the food-supply wagons as well. We traveled light with horses coming out here for the artillery. Going back, though, we'll need to haul all our ammunition for artillery and infantry as well if you want to fight a battle at the end of this. That'll come up to hundreds more horses, wagons for the equipment, tons of water for the animals. It's turning into a regular geometric progression.

  "Finally, just where the hell will we get all these wagons, and the draft animals? It'll take weeks to bring them in from all over Roum, and harvest time is coming up damn quick. It could cripple these people if we took their transport. Even if we found them, we've got a little over two hundred flatcars to haul them up to the railhead. That'll mean running ten trains a day up and down the line for days just to move enough wagons to get us fairly well started. We're not even counting the bulk food, the thousand of barrels for water, the wood for the engines, and marshaling the men.

  "In other words," John said quietly, "it's impossible."

  "You made it look almost easy the last time," Andrew said sadly, shaking his head.

  "I had co
ntingency plans drawn up months ago," John replied. "We were operating out of our main base. Our rations were already prepared, boxed, and stockpiled, unlike the bulk we'll be hauling this time. One train per day can haul more than a hundred wagon loads and keep our entire army supplied. Four trains operating on a secured line could supply this entire army from a base five hundred miles away. The train has revolutionized supply and mobility. Our whole plan was based upon a secure supply line straight to Roum.

  "Cromwell has destroyed that with maybe not much more than a thousand men."

  "Or Tugars," Marcus said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  "I heard somebody once say that amateur generals study tactics, professionals study logistics," Andrew said ruefully. "I was too busy fighting ever to worry about the details of this."

  Andrew looked over at Mina with a renewed appreciation. He could sense that they were far more alike than he had originally thought. At night sleep would often come hard as he imagined all the possible situations he might one day face on the battlefield, and how to get out of them. John most likely did the same thing, juggling numbers, and forever tormented with just how thinly stretched they really were. Why the hell didn't I contemplate this possibility? he thought ruefully. Cromwell was the loose cannon. But he had always assumed the bastard had simply sailed south and disappeared. Never in his worst nightmares had he imagined Cromwell selling out to the Merki, arming their lackeys, and creating a fleet of ironclads to be used against him.

  "Before the railroad, it was really rare for an army to operate much more than fifty miles from its base of supplies," John said. "Any farther and it starts to become unmanageable. The only alternative is to forage for nearly everything, the way Billie Sherman and Napoleon did. We're going to have to go five hundred miles, and there ain't more than a couple days' forage in that whole blasted distance."

  "Is there any hope General Hans could be forcing his way up the rail line? The break might only be sixty miles across if he did that," Emil said.

  "I can't run my army out on a limb based upon a hope," Andrew replied. "He's got only one fully trained division on hand. And besides, we stripped the rail yard clean of everything we had.

  "So that's it, gentlemen," Andrew said wearily. "Our first alternative is out. Cromwell must have figured this one out quite nicely. Now we've got to think a better way to do it."

  A knock on the door interrupted the conversation. Andrew smiled as Chuck Ferguson came into the room, walking rather stiffly with Lieutenant Bullfinch by his side.

  "Pleasant trip?" Andrew asked, smiling at Ferguson's discomfort.

  "Sir, I've never been on a horse in my life, and then you order me down here from Hispania in less than a day. I'll never go near one of those beasts again as long as I live."

  Going over to an empty chair, he gingerly lowered himself down, a grimace cutting his features as his backside finally hit the hard wood.

  "Anyone got a drink?" he groaned.

  Emil looked over at Andrew, who nodded approvingly. Reaching into his jacket pocket, Emil pulled out a flask and slid it across the table. Chuck tossed back a shot, and seeing Andrew shake his head he refrained from a second.

  "That's a bit better. I thank you, sir."

  "I'm going to pour the rest of that on your butt as soon as this is finished," Emil said, taking the flask back, to a round of gruff laughter breaking the tension that had followed Mina's depressing report.

  "Other suggestions, gentlemen?" Andrew asked.

  "How about swinging north, and running along the edge of the forest?" Emil asked. "It'll only add sixty or so miles to the march. The forest will be easier on the men than the open steppe, and we might be able to cut the water-supply problem if we sent out advance teams to locate some streams for us."

  "The forest would be hell if they've sent some guerrillas up there," Andrew interjected. "At least out in the steppe we can see them coming. And besides, we'll still need some type of bridge to get across the Kennebec and Penobscot.

  "I was afraid Mina would kill my first idea," Andrew said. "John, what would it take to run some rail up, rebuild the track up to the Kennebec, and bridge the river?"

  "We've got a good forty miles of rail stockpiled at Hispania," John replied. "We could lay several miles a day if we said the hell with proper gauging and crosstying. The bridge, though—that's the problem. We'll need to cut another several hundred thousand board feet. We could be talking months, and that's just for the Kennebec. We'll have to assume the Penobscot is down as well. Back home, General Haupt had his bridging material stockpiled in precut sections. We haven't had the luxury of time for that.

  "The alternative would be to not worry about the bridge and man-haul a couple of locomotives across along with the rolling stock to make up the supply trains. The army can still march."

  "That sounds crazy," Emil interjected.

  "Not that hard, really," Mina replied. "But it'll still tie us up for weeks, and all the time they could be tearing holes in the track faster'n we can fix 'em. Don't forget there's still the question of protecting the entire rail line. As for that bridge, it'll be several months before we see a train rolling across that river again. The worst part of it now is that every single locomotive is on this side of the river.

  "And once we get far enough west, our entire rolling stock might be vulnerable. Lose those precious locomotives now and we're truly doomed."

  "One if by land, two if by sea," Ferguson said quietly.

  "What do you mean?" Andrew said, the beginning of a smile lighting his features.

  "Well, sir, I've been doing some thinking."

  "That's all he ever does," John said with an approving laugh.

  "Now, I ain't no student of military thinking. Engineering is what I was studying in college before this war got started. But you haven't even talked about the strategy of what we're facing against Cromwell."

  "Ferguson, are you actually about to propose what I think you are?"

  Ferguson smiled and nodded in Andrew's direction.

  "That's why I wanted him with me at this meeting," Andrew said, visibly relaxing now that he sensed Ferguson had indeed come up with a solution.

  "Just what the hell are you two bantering about?" Emil asked. "Frankly, I still like my forest march idea."

  "I think our Mr. Ferguson is saying we should build a navy," Andrew said quietly.

  He had been hoping against hope for this idea. He had ordered Ferguson up from Hispania with orders to consider the problem. The question now was if it was within the realm of the possible.

  "Cromwell has all the advantages, and he's outmaneuvered us at every stage so far," Andrew stated.

  The letter still was a sore spot. Cromwell's threat to his wife and Vincent's he took as a low blow which he hoped even Cromwell would back away from. But that single word "checkmate" had seared him. Cromwell had always been in rivalry with him from the moment they had met. Now that he could actually play that rivalry out, Cromwell had bested him at every turn. The note bothered him far more than he was willing to admit to himself.

  "Gentlemen, he expects us to march back—that's the only way we can go. If we do that, he's laid his plan out accordingly. We have to do the unexpected."

  Vincent, who had been quietly translating the combined Rus and English conversation for Marcus, interrupted.

  "And there's no guarantee that once we get back to Suzdal he simply won't just turn around and come straight back here."

  "Roum can't take another attack like this last one," Andrew replied. "We have to guarantee Roum's safety even as we try to save our own hides, and don't anyone forget that. The only way we can block his navy is to somehow build a counter."

  Marcus smiled openly as Vincent translated.

  Andrew could see the man start to relax. He could understand the tension there. After all, it had looked as if the army was simply going to turn tail and run home again.

  "A navy?" Mina asked. "Chuck, I've always liked your work. Hell, it wa
s you that thought up the railroad, and you've designed most of the machines we've got around here. But by God this is entirely different."

  "Let's hear him out," Andrew said. "Then we'll see if this boy is insane or not."

  "I sent a telegram down to John Bullfinch here before I left Hispania. He checked and told me we've captured over a dozen Cartha galleys. We also have eighteen Roum galleys and a couple of dozen transport ships as well. Those transports are big grain carriers, fat and beamy."

  "Damn fools should have burned them all," Bullfinch said with a smile.

  "The free people of Roum stopped that," Andrew said, looking over at Marcus and smiling.

  "The Cartha ships are fairly good—two banks of oars with two men on each blade, a couple with three banks," Bullfinch continued. "The larger ones will take two hundred rowers, and carry maybe an additional twenty or thirty men each. All total, we've got enough ships to carry maybe four thousand men."

  "We could use them to run down to the Kennebec or Penobscot and take the supplies up that way," Mina said excitedly.

  "One ironclad parked off either river would end that right quick," Andrew replied. "Cromwell's navy could blow those ships out of the water."

  "So what good are they?" Emil asked.

  "We use them to make our own navy," Ferguson announced triumphantly.

  "How?"

  "Now, my history isn't so good. But I had to take a couple of courses in it, though heavens knows why an engineering student needs to waste time on such things."

  "Remember, I was a history professor before the war," Andrew said quietly, "so let's not get into that debate, because, son, you square-headed engineering types will lose it."

  The room exploded into laughter at Ferguson's embarrassment.

  "As I was saying, sir," Ferguson continued, "they were the best damn courses I ever took."

  "That's better," Andrew said approvingly, in his best professorial tone.

  "Well, sir, I remember how these Roman fellows," and he nodded toward Marcus, "were fighting a war, I can't remember which one, though, they always seemed to be fighting."

  "First Punic War," Vincent said in Latin.