A Band of Brothers

by William R. Forstchen

  Pat rushed up to the door, ducking low as a rocket streaked straight down the middle of the street and disappeared. Going through the doors, he stepped over wounded who were sprawled in the corridor and went into the vast open room of the baths. Regimental surgeons were at work, a pile of limbs lying out in the open for all to see, and Pat turned to one of the few orderlies who had managed to keep up, shouting for the man to find a nurse and get the limbs hidden.

  Seeing a knot of officers gathered in what had once been a steam room, Pat strode in, barely acknowledging the salutes. Schneid looked up from a map, breaking off an angry burst of curses directed at one of his officers.

  “O’Donald, what the hell are you doing here?” Schneid asked. “Goddammit, they said you were back at headquarters. I’ve sent six runners back to you so far.”

  “Well, I’m here,” Pat replied. Stay calm, he told himself, they’re on the edge of panic. Andrew could be as cool as ice no matter what—never raised his voice, never cursed.

  Pat took a deep breath and walked up, putting his hand on Rick’s shoulder, his look conveying that their staff officers were to withdraw.

  Pat waited for a long moment, saying nothing, gazing down at the map detailing Schneid’s sector of the front. It looked as if a child had been playing with blocks and thrown a temper tantrum; the red and blue markers were all in a jumble. Rick had thirty regiments under his command, and nowhere on the map was there any alignment of those regiments. They were scattered about, red blocks representing reported Bantag regiments of a thousand spread out in every direction, one of them already over the inner wall. He felt a stab of fear. My God, if they’re through the inner wall it’s over.

  He struggled to reassure himself. How the hell would Schneid, without a telegraph, know what was going on a mile away? Even as he wondered, a terrified lieutenant came running in, shouting that his regiment had been overrun and annihilated. A staff officer grabbed the boy, who started to sob, and pulled him from the room.

  Schneid looked at Pat, taking a deep breath.

  “It’s out of control,” Rick finally said.

  “I know, that’s why I came up here. Had to see it.”

  “The damn telegraphs are useless. We ran those damn lines through the sewers, figuring they’d be safe from shellfire. People must be down there running, knocking into the lines and tearing them loose. We should have thought of that.”

  “I know.”

  “And then 9th Corps, they broke, Pat, just broke.”

  “I think they might be saying the same thing about you,” Pat replied.

  Rick started to bluster, then lowered his head.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Pat said nothing for a moment, wanting the pain to sink in. Let him go down a bit further, let him realize what was happening to everyone and how it had to be stopped.

  Rick clenched his fist and slammed the table, the blocks bouncing, scattering.

  “I don’t know what the hell is going on,” he said slowly, dragging out each word. “Pat, they came out of the snow, tens of thousands of them. And did you hear about the grenades?”

  Pat shook his head.

  “They had thousands of ’em. Rained them into the battlements, just lobbed them up over the wall, then came scrambling up. Some of our artillery only fired off a couple of rounds before they were wiped out. You couldn’t see thirty yards up there. Everywhere, Pat, they were everywhere.”

  The edge started on his voice. Pat said nothing, staring at him, and he calmed down.

  “Tried to reestablish a line with 9th Corps a couple of blocks back. Sent in my entire reserve. We were holding the street corners, but those bastards were smashing their way through buildings, coming out in the middle of the street. Boys started to panic, firing in every direction. Men were dropping from each other’s fire. Somehow word broke that they were already over the inner wall, and units just started to melt away.”

  “What do you know you’re holding, Rick?”

  Rick laughed, again the struggle for control. “Here, this bath. One more block up toward the wall, five, maybe six blocks to the north, one or two to the south, and maybe three deep back. I had a report a half hour ago that we still held about two blocks along the wall itself and a bastion with four guns.”

  “11th Corps, or 9th—any contact?”

  “Just the units from them that got jumbled in with mine when they cracked us on both flanks.”

  A burst of cannon fire caused Pat to look up and out toward the street. The gun facing to the east was firing. Crews raced to reload, several men going down from unseen fire. Again they fired. Pat looked back at Rick.

  “So what are we going to do, Pat?”

  He had been so busy trying to brace up the best corps commander in the army that the question caught him off guard. He was as in the dark as anyone else in this army, he realized. For all he knew, at this moment 9th and 11th Corps could be thrashing the enemy, though he doubted that. They might already be into the old city, but he doubted that as well. 4th Corps had been in relatively good order when he passed through the inner wall.

  Chancellorsville. Strange how that suddenly came to mind. He remembered the breaking of the right by Stonewall Jackson’s flanking march. It had been a mad night of confusion, so confusing, he later learned, that old Stonewall had been gunned down by his own men.

  One corps had broken, but what was infinitely worse was that in the confusion Joe Hooker, the commander of the Army of the Potomac, had broken as well. The morning after the flanking attack, he had looked at the map, seen Stonewall’s corps on his right and believed another corps was on his left, and ordered a retreat. He never walked to the other side of the map, never seen it from the other side. His opponent’s army was numerically weaker, and only later was it learned that the left wing had less than ten thousand men and that Hooker was firmly entrenched between their two wings. Though all his corps commanders had begged to go over to the offensive, to smash Jackson while his men were isolated, Hooker panicked and retreated … just as Lee had expected him to.

  They outnumber us, that is certain, but what then? Their supplies are strung out across five hundred miles of frozen prairie; we fell back on to ours. The bombardment of the last two days must have burned up several trainloads of shells and powder. The big difference, though, is that we live in cities, they don’t. We know the ins and outs of Roum, even the difference in buildings. We have the maps of this city, they don’t. All they know is a general direction.

  If we’re confused, then dammit they have to be even more confused at this moment. Though our own formations are cumbersome for this type of fighting, theirs is far worse, ten regiments of a thousand to an umen or division. Ha’ark has to be as in the dark as we are, with no idea of what he’s taken, what is still holding. They won’t run, their precious souls would be laughed at, but they must be damn confused.

  He continued to look at the map, and then his gaze finally came back to Schneid.

  “Look at the map,” Pat said, his voice soft, barely above a whisper.

  Rick reluctantly gazed down at the jumble of blocks made worse by his angrily slamming his fist on the table.

  “What do you see?”

  “Chaos. Defeat, Pat, defeat.”

  “Now come over here,” and he pointed to the other side. Rick, giving Pat a look as if he didn’t have time for some ridiculous game, did as he was ordered.

  “Now, what do you see?”

  “The same damn thing. Why?”

  Pat smiled, pulling out his last two cigars and tossing one to Rick.

  “Think, man, think. This isn’t some game I’m playing.”

  Rick finally nodded and looked back up. “So he’s as confused as we are. We’re still falling apart.”

  “Does he know that? They’re lost in this damn city. This isn’t the open range, them bastards mounted on horses they were damn near born on. We’re afraid of gettin’ caught out in the open by them, and we should be—that’s where they wer
e born to fight, and we weren’t. Now it’s our field. We’re forgetting that—this is our field, not his. Damn all, we should have come straight back here the day after we got out from the Rocky Hill. Let ’em get in here, let ’em get a taste of fighting in the streets with modem weapons.”

  Pat started to pace back and forth, lighting his cigar and stopping for a moment to light Rick’s.

  “Let him get in here, let him get his whole damn army in here. Forget lines. Dig in wherever we still stand right here in the outer city. We’ll form a blocking line with 4th Corps and 12th to keep ’em back from the riverfront, but the rest of us, you, the 9th, the 11th, and I’ll bring up what I can from 3rd from the other wall, will dig in right where you stand.”

  “I still think we should pull out while we can.”

  “To where? The river? You fight right here. This is your headquarters. Hold it.”

  “Pat, how the hell am I to coordinate this? Hell, I can’t even find any of my division commanders and only two of my brigade commanders.”

  “You got a bunch of damn staff officers out there thicker than fleas. Get them out. This damn city is laid out like a grid of blocks. Number the blocks, give each one a map, get them the hell out, and find who’s at each block. I want the order passed: no one to move, get into the buildings. Once inside, smash holes between each of them, link the whole block together like a fortress, dig in, and hold on.”

  “Fine. And ammunition, food? What about that?”

  Pat felt his plan starting to disintegrate even before it formed. If the Bantag could isolate a block, a couple of hours of fighting would deplete the ammunition, and in a hand-to-hand fight a human stood little chance against an eight-foot giant weighing three hundred pounds. But then again, he thought, most of these damn buildings didn’t have ceilings much over six foot. They’ll be damn near on their hands and knees inside. It will be like us fighting in a city made for leprechauns or dwarfs.

  But the ammunition.

  “The sewers,” Rick said. “The damn stinking sewers. The big ones under the main thoroughfares, you can almost walk upright in them. That’s where we ran the telegraph wires. There must be thousands of people down there in them now.”

  “And they empty into the river, below the waterline,” Pat replied, and then realized that the telegraph crews had come up through the cellars of buildings along the riverbank. Smash in the cellars, get gangs of men moving ammunition, and a couple of regiments spaced out in the sewers could move hundreds of boxes an hour.

  “The sewer coming up into this bath is huge,” Rick said. “They used to flush them pools out every day, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water,” and he motioned toward a doorway that led out to the cold-water baths, which were already half empty.

  “This is your anchor point, then. I want you to pass the word out now—everyone stand and hold, and for now the hell with trying to make sense of it, just dig in and kill the bastards! I’m heading back to headquarters. I’ll detail off a couple of regiments to get underground, try and make connection that way. Get your people out, and send a map back to me of what you know you’re holding. Not what you think you’ve got, but what you know you’ve got, and no mistakes.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause once we know where our people are, I’m ordering the artillery on the inner wall to start smashing down everything else.”

  He started to button his greatcoat, ready to leave and head over to try and find 9th Corps, and then he stopped. What would Andrew do?

  I’m in command, he realized yet again. Andrew hasn’t sent me out here to find out what’s happened, I came here myself, and back at headquarters it must be chaos. I have to go back and calm headquarters down, stop the panic before it destroys us. I’ve done all I can do up here.

  He called for their staffs, gathered them around, shared the plan, and quickly detailed runners to find the other headquarters and pass the word.

  “And make it damn clear this is a direct order. Not one more step of retreat. Cut off, threatened to be cut off, or holding intact, everyone digs in where they are. Do you understand me?”

  There were nods, and to his delight the terror was beginning to subside.

  “Now that they’re here, it’s not them that’s got us, it’s us that’s got them. Now hop to it. I want grid maps made up. Take them, decide among yourselves who heads where. Once you get through to your assignments, make your way back to headquarters. For those of you lads that make it back before sunset, a bottle of vodka and a warm bed await.”

  “Any lasses?” a freckle-faced boy asked hopefully, and the others grinned.

  Good, they can joke again, Pat realized.

  “Hop to it, boys. I’m heading back.”

  Turning to Rick, he wanted to say something else, one final word of encouragement, and saw that his old friend was already back at the map, sweeping the blocks off.

  Pat headed for the door. Again the artillery fired, guns recoiling. Huddled in an anteroom adjacent to the foyer he saw his escort from O’Leary’s regiment still waiting. He wanted to compliment the young officer but then realized that the boy would have been a fool to wander off—they had a safe hole for the moment, the reassurance of being inside a corps headquarters building defended by artillery.

  “All right, lads, out we go,” Pat announced. “There’s a battle to fight.”

  With the coming of late afternoon the storm abated, and Ha’ark the Redeemer rejoiced, for it seemed as if the gods of the winds had finally decided to cooperate. When the cloak of the storm was needed it was there, and now that he needed clear weather that was coming. Occasional squalls of near white-out intensity came boiling up from the south but then as quickly lifted, and for brief moments the entire city was again in view.

  Vast sections of it were burning, and dark roiling clouds hanging low to the ground tumbled across the skyline. Flashes of light rippled from one end to the other as hundreds of shells burst every minute.

  He gazed down at the map and then over at Jurak.

  “The inner wall?” he asked.

  “We got over it at one point, but they were ready. We lost the position, though I had a report that two regiments were still fighting in there.”

  “And the rest?”

  Juraka pointed down at the map, tracing out the positions. “We have the entire outer wall from the bastion guarding the river to the south up to the bastion guarding the river on the north side, except for one small section held by soldiers with the circles on their hats.

  “Within this half,” and his hand swept across the northeast quadrant, “it is hard to say what we have. Some of the main streets nearly to the inner wall are firmly in our control, the rest is confusion. In this quarter of the city, they have one large pocket of resistance, maybe ten blocks on a side, but in the rest it is hard to tell.”

  Ha’ark nodded.

  “Fine. Then we bring up fresh troops during the night, consolidate what we have, and crush what’s left.”

  “What about attacking the other side of the city, as you planned?”

  Ha’ark gazed at the map and shook his head. “They will expect it, and besides, we will not have the cover of the weather tonight or tomorrow. We’ve yet to get a bridge across the river farther up to move our supplies. Let us draw the battle in here, force them to fight, bleed them out.”

  “They’re bleeding us out too,” Jurak replied. “I think we lost well over thirty thousand today.”

  “And he undoubtedly lost the same.”

  “That I cannot say. We gained the wall with fewer losses than I expected. In fact, I saw them panicking. But now we have to dig them out, and it will cost.”

  “The rise of ground in the outer city—did you take it?”

  “Part of it.”

  “Fine. I want every available mortar up there tonight. Start shelling their riverfront come dawn. I want our artillery that was positioned to support this attack moved to smash down the bastion guarding the approach to the river.
We cut their ships off and they starve and run out of ammunition.”

  Jurak nodded in agreement.

  “At least there’s food waiting inside the city for us,” Ha’ark announced. “That is motivation enough to dig them out.”

  Jurak’s features wrinkled with disdain.

  “Still think it’s barbaric?”

  “Worst than barbaric,” Jurak snapped. “These are the enemy, not animals.”

  “Tell that to my loyal barbaric subjects. They believe the humans to be soulless cattle. Worse, they are cattle driven mad by demons who must be rooted out and annihilated. Drive the demon mad with pain, then devour the heart and kill the demon. That is why they fight.”

  “And not for your empire?” Jurak asked quietly.

  Ha’ark said nothing. Again his companion from the old world had taken a liberty he was no longer willing to allow. The Bantag had not acknowledged the others who came through the tunnel of light as the Redeemer. They had selected him because he had acted first, understanding first where they were. That was fate, that was the will of the ancestor gods, and Jurak would have to learn that if he was to survive once this war was finished.

  “No matter what they do, we will bleed them out. We’ll have the city in ten days, before the next moon feast. And then what a feast it will be!” Ha’ark announced with a grin.

  Chapter Eight

  “You saw the latest dispatches?” Admiral Bullfinch asked, coming into Vincent Hawthorne’s office and collapsing in the chair before his desk.

  Vincent wearily nodded. Standing, Vincent reached up to the kerosene lamp and turned it down. Pulling back the curtains, he rubbed the frost-covered windowpane and looked outside. Dawn was breaking across the old city of Suzdal. Down in the square below, the faithful, almost all of them older women, walked hunched over against the bitter wind, making their way to the cathedral, where Metropolitan Casmar was offering morning mass.