by Mike Carey
‘Set the powder, sir?’ Private Toltz asked Klaes.
Reluctantly, Klaes shook his head. Though it might accomplish the business in a single stroke, they could not afford the risk. They had only the three barrels. If they used them and failed, they might never dismantle the breakwater in time.
Instead he told his men to join the villagers and teach them some of the rudiments of military engineering. A good sapper worked from the bottom of a structure to undermine it, multiplying the effects of his efforts, whereas the villagers had been attacking the breakwater from the top down. He also picked his point of entry, using the natural grain of the stone and any fault lines already visible.
It remained to be seen, of course, whether the villagers would be content to take instruction. For a moment after the soldiers arrived, the Narutsiners clutched their picks and hoes and mattocks at the qui vive, drawn up in a ragged line as though they were preparing to attack.
Then Klaes held up in his left hand a wooden puppet, as Drozde had told him to do, and Mayor Weichorek stood his people down with a curt injunction not to be bloody fools. These were the reinforcements Drozde had promised, and they would make the work go easier.
But as soon as they went to it, the soldiers tentatively demonstrating the right way of working and the villagers quickly adapting to it, Weichorek sidled over to Klaes and clamped a heavy hand on his shoulder.
‘Where is she?’ he demanded.
‘She was hurt,’ Klaes muttered. ‘A wound to her left side. Under her heart. She couldn’t walk, so I left her behind.’
‘And who did you leave with her?’ This was not Weichorek but Bosilka, who had come along in Weichorek’s wake like a dory behind a battleship. Except that she seemed much more warlike than him and showed more ready for combat.
‘Nobody,’ Klaes said. ‘It was not like that, Miss Stefanu. She said she’d hide herself away, until the house was empty.’
‘And what if she’s found before the house is empty? Or what if her wound opens again, and she falls into a swoon? Do you ever stop to think, Captain Klaes, before you start throwing out orders to those around you?’
‘Lieutenant!’ Klaes cried. ‘Lieutenant Klaes! For the love of God, woman, will you dandle me up and down all the ranks of the bloody army like a dress-up doll?’
Bosilka was not to be put off. ‘Take me where she is,’ she commanded. ‘If she’s hurt, she may need tending.’
‘When we’re done here,’ Klaes said, and since it was one life against so many hundreds of lives Bosilka let it go after only a moment’s pause. But he was conscious of her watching him as she worked at his side, swinging a pickaxe with no great skill but ferocious energy.
They worked as the night paled and the sky grew luminous, so deeply absorbed that this slow kindling seemed to be a conflagration rising around them. Whenever they remembered to look it was closer to dawn, and the hour drew closer when their work would either be crowned or else be wasted.
Klaes looked at their labours and called a halt at last. He pulled Toltz and Schneider and four others from the work line and told them to bring up the barrels. As they placed them, ten strides apart, he had Meister Weichorek take his people way back down the slope of the hill, where there was a steep bank and a slightly overhanging rock wall that would offer them some shelter. He instructed his own people to withdraw too.
They had exactly three fuses, and one auger. Toltz drilled the holes, slowly and painstakingly, and Schneider placed the fuses. When all was ready, the fuses were lit with wooden spills, simultaneously, and the soldiers ran quickly down the hill into covert.
They were none too soon. The explosion sounded at their backs as soon as they were behind the bank. Three heartbeats later, rocks that had been hurled high into the air began to fall all around them – but Klaes had chosen their position well and nobody was hit.
But when they finally ventured out to inspect the results of their work, they were dismayed. One of the barrels had failed to ignite. Amazingly, the force of the other two barrels exploding had propelled it down the hill along with all the rest of the debris, without either breaching it or sparking it. Perhaps as a result, the breakwater – though it was cracked from top to bottom – had not fallen. Water spilled through in a leisurely trickle, winding its way down the hillside prettily but ineffectually. It would not do.
‘We have to begin again,’ Weichorek said.
‘We can’t!’ Bosilka exclaimed, waving her arms in exasperation. ‘Look at the sky! Drozde said we should be done before cock-crow, and the cocks must have crowed an hour ago!’
‘We’ve one barrel left, sir,’ Private Toltz offered.
‘But no way of setting it off,’ Klaes said.
‘Might it be done with a musket ball?’ Master Weichorek asked. ‘Fired from the bottom of the slope?’
‘Aye, if this were a story told to sots in an alehouse,’ Klaes said glumly. ‘No, there’s nothing else for it. We’ll work with picks for as long as we …’ But he stopped, because he had chanced to look down at his feet. His days in the engineer corps came back to him, suddenly, and he thought of another, more outrageous proceeding they might try. ‘Private Toltz and Private Schneider,’ he said, ‘put the barrel back in place.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘And lever off the lid of it.’ The two men hastened to their work, while Klaes went down on his knees in the grass.
Under the astonished gaze of the villagers and soldiers, he began to pick flowers. They watched him for a little while, bewildered and uneasy. Then Meister Weichorek enquired of him – meaning no disrespect, and asking only to obtain a fuller understanding of the situation – whether he had gone mad.
‘Not a bit of it,’ Klaes muttered. And he held up, with something of triumph, a fistful of feathery green stalks.
‘That’s dill,’ Bosilka said. ‘You can cook with it.’
‘Yes,’ Klaes agreed tersely. ‘You can also blow things to high heaven with it.’
He walked back up the slope toward the barrel, but stopped and turned when he realised that he was being followed. ‘This will not be safe,’ he said. ‘You should take cover.’
‘What will you do?’ Bosilka demanded. ‘How will dill help you?’
Klaes held the plants up for her to see. ‘It will help because it has hollow stems,’ he said. ‘When black powder is used in mining and quarrying, the men seldom bother to cut a proper fuse. They pour a little of the powder into a tube made of paper, or into the stem of a reed, and light the end of it. The tube, or the stem, works in the same way a fuse does. The problem is that the powder in the tube tends to spark, and also it burns at an uneven rate. You have to apply the fire and then run, as quickly as you can. There’s no telling how long after that the explosion will come.’
‘Then that’s madness!’ Bosilka exclaimed in horror. ‘You might just as well sit on the barrel and strike sparks from a flint until it goes up under you!’
‘Perhaps we’ll try that next,’ Klaes said, in a ghastly attempt at humour. Nobody laughed, or even smiled. ‘I really would get back under cover,’ he added, more soberly.
They all ran pell-mell to do so. Bosilka cast a wild glance backwards over her shoulder at him, but Klaes was at a loss to guess what that might portend.
He walked the rest of the way up the slope, to where Toltz and Schneider had already broken open the barrel. Scooping up a handful of the powder, the lieutenant held his closed fist over the plant stems and let it trickle into them. Most of it missed, of course, but he repeated the procedure again and again, hoping that at least some of the grains would lodge down inside far enough to be efficacious. You didn’t need a continuous trail of powder, but the grains had to be close enough so that one would spark the next, all the way to the far end where the last grains would ignite the barrel. Dry reeds would have been far better than green stems, but green stems were what he had.
When Toltz saw what the lieutenant was doing, he shook his head. ‘That’s a fool’s
trick, sir, if you don’t mind me saying so.’
‘I’ve been playing fool’s tricks for much of my life,’ Klaes said. He replaced the lid on the barrel and stood his cluster of stems upright in the touch hole like a posy. ‘Go on, Toltz. Schneider. Give me that spill there. I’ll wait until you’re at the bottom of the hill before I set it to the fuse.’
‘That there is not a bloody fuse!’ Toltz opined. Klaes made no reply, but he raised his eyebrows meaningfully with the spill only an inch or two from his home-made substitute. The two privates retreated at the double march, or possibly a little faster.
Klaes watched them down the hill and out of sight. Then he touched the flame to the stems and took to his heels. He hadn’t gone ten feet when the air barked like the mouths of Cerberus and a great exhalation lifted him off his feet.
The heat of the explosion set his jacket and trousers on fire.
But the waters of the Mala Panev, roaring through the shattered stone, put him out again only a second later.
And four miles downstream, and a few minutes after that, Lieutenant Dietmar, staring into the declivity of the Drench, looked up and to the right as the sound of rushing water reached his ears far too late to be of any use to him.
Swollen by the winter rains, the Mala Panev was a torrent. It was finding its ancient course again, and Dietmar most unfortunately had placed himself full in its way. The wall of water took him and his horse both, pitched them over the edge into the gulley and rolled them over and over. The horse struggled and thrashed and managed to find its feet again. Dietmar, lying face down, did not, and was carried away out of sight in the space of a few seconds. His neck had been broken in the fall.
To the soldiers watching, it was as though the hand of God had struck him down. Some would later say that they had seen a woman’s face in the spray, but since rivers do not have faces their testimony can be discounted.
There was too much water for the Drench to hold. It filled the channel in seconds and spread out to either side of it in a broad, frothing apron. Colonel August bared his teeth and snarled at the sight of it. Coming up from the rear to ascertain why the column had stopped, he had not seen Lieutenant Dietmar’s death, but he took in at once the broken bridge and the turbulent floodwater and knew it for what it was. Sabotage, well planned and carefully executed. He had been right – of course he had! – not to underestimate this enemy. Delenda erat Carthago! The village must be excised from the map, and the spot where it had stood cauterised to prevent reinfection.
However, that had just been made a great deal more problematic. Without the bridge, it was certainly not possible to get the guns and their limbers to the far side of the water, and from here there was no clear line of sight to Narutsin. The steeple of the church, though, was visible over the tops of the trees. Would it be possible to mount a bombardment using that as a ranging mark? Mathilde’s reach was a great deal more than a mile, after all, and Narutsin could not be more than a mile away. Dietmar would know.
August turned to Sergeant Strumpfel, who was standing at the head of the column staring dazedly into the water. ‘Strumpfel,’ he snapped, ‘bring Lieutenant Dietmar here.’
Strumpfel pointed down into the Drench. ‘But Colonel,’ he said, ‘Lieutenant Dietmar is in there. I – I think he’s dead.’
The colonel came close to repeating the word with a questioning inflection, in which case he would have sounded like a querulous old woman overtaken by events. He held himself back from it, despite the shock and dismay he felt. Dietmar had been his strong right arm, but all that meant was that he would have to complete this venture one-handed.
Lieutenant Tusimov approached him running, and Pabst came up at a fast trot a moment later. August explained to them both what the detachment would do next.
The power of the flood had abated as soon as its front began to widen, and was abating still. Though it was still strong, it was certainly not strong enough now to pull a man off his feet or to topple a horse and rider. True, at the centre there was a deeper stretch – corresponding to the location of the Drench – which would need to be negotiated with more care. But even here the water would not exceed four or five feet in depth. The soldiers would wade, holding their muskets over their heads, and reform in good order on the further side of the river.
‘What about the cannons, sir?’ Tusimov asked anxiously.
‘Put them under a light guard,’ August said, ‘and leave them here.’ But even as he said it a better idea came to him. ‘Sergeant Jursitizky. Is he here? Bring him to me.’
Sergeant Jursitizky presented himself. ‘Bring Mathilde around and unlimber her,’ the colonel told him. ‘I want you to take the range of the village from that steeple – do you see? – and launch a few balls in that direction. Vary the declination a little to increase your chances of hitting something. I want that place in pieces when we march on it.’
‘Sir,’ Jursitizky said with a smart salute. And he went to work.
A few minutes later, with the sun now climbing free of the horizon and full daylight coming quickly upon them, Mathilde spoke. She spoke most harshly. A cheer rose from the men when they saw her muzzle belch smoke and thunder. Fire seemed a suitable answer to the flood that had laid itself across their path. A second shot followed, and then a third. August signalled to Jursitizky to stand down, and then to Tusimov to resume the march.
Tusimov was a veteran and a man of sense, but these manoeuvres resembled no military strategy he had ever heard of. Consequently, although on another occasion he might have sent a small squad across to the other side of the river first, to make a beachhead before the body of the company crossed, it did not occur to him to give such an order. Instead he transformed the column into as wide a line of march as he could manage, had them draw up at the edge of the water, and then at his signal wade in.
The men had not anticipated how cold the water would be. There was much muttered cursing and complaint, quickly suppressed by the sergeants. ‘It’s bath night, you stout lads!’ Strumpfel bellowed. ‘Don’t forget to wash behind your ears!’ and the witticism was passed on down the line. Someone asked for soap, and someone else said they should boil another kettle.
They were only up to their knees, at first. Then they reached the mid-point, and the ground fell away beneath their feet as they descended into the Drench. The water rose to their thighs, their waists, the middle of their chests. Men yelped involuntarily as the chill bit into them, or swore aloud as their feet slid on the sloping bank. But at the same time, they took it for a good sign. If the deep channel marked the middle of the newly remade river, they were already halfway across.
The footing in the Drench was treacherous, and with most of their bodies submerged the current pushed at the soldiers more insistently. Few of them could swim. But Strumpfel’s joke still rang in their ears, making it hard for any of them to acknowledge the danger they were in.
And then they were climbing up the further slope, exposing shoulders, chests, bellies to the cold air. And then they were on the level, trudging knee-deep towards dry land. Their uniforms hung on them like lead cerements, heavy and stiff, but the worst was over.
‘The cleanest band of little angels as ever was seen!’ Strumpfel cried gaily, to cheers and catcalls.
They were the last words he spoke.
A line of infantry in good order could resist a cavalry charge. It wasn’t even rare for them to do so. Certain factors were known to make it more likely. If the cavalry made a direct charge and the infantrymen had time to get off two or three good volleys of musket fire, making gaps in the opposing ranks. If the terrain was broken, so that the riders were randomly slowed and did not arrive all at once. If the infantry line was partially masked by skirmishers or buttressed by flanking fire from one side or both. All of these things would blunt the terrible impact and diffuse the demoralising effect of being cut down from above by fighters moving too quickly to counter.
Colonel August’s detachment had none of these advanta
ges. Horsemen were suddenly upon them, among them, without announcement. They were light cavalry, hussars, mostly armed with sabres specifically designed for fighting from the saddle. But there were some uhlans too, with their lances at the drop: a broad, sweeping line of tapering spears longer than a man’s body. Had they been on the road their horses’ hooves on the gravel would have raised dust and noise. But they came out of the trees, silent until the first of them reached the water and raised a thunderous splash, and by then they were engaged.
And the colonel’s men, it should further be observed, were not in good order. They were in no order at all. Trudging out of the Drench into the shallows, testing the ground ahead one step at a time, each man kept his own pace at a speed where duty and dexterity reached equilibrium with discomfort and timidity. The line of march had become a sparse and broken and largely notional thing.
And the Prussian Braunschweigers threshed them like wheat.
Ermel had tried to describe this engagement to Drozde, and had succeeded thus far:
It was the strangest battle I ever fought, and the saddest. And it was the first, of course, so even if it hadn’t been strange and sad it would probably still have seemed so to me.
We came to what was meant to be the border, but nothing was as it was meant to be. There should have been a milestone on the road indicating that we were seven leagues from Estingen. It was not there. There should have been a stand of oak trees called the Mile Reach, the southernmost point of the Hunzerwald. But there were none. And to name the biggest thing last, there should have been the Mala Panev, the river that marks the border at that point and for ten miles on either hand.
But the river was gone. There was a bridge, indeed, where our captain’s map said a bridge should be – but it was a bridge over nothing! There was only a field of mud there under the coping, with puddles and meres all about, as though the river had shrunk in the heat of a long summer. But this was dead December, so we knew that couldn’t be.
