“Over the next two days, we will decide what supplies we will purchase from you. If anything you have is of value to us, we will pay full value plus a seventy-five percent inconvenience fee.
“The payment will be in zinc chits on the accounts of the Christian Army and will be redeemable for immediate cash at full value at any of our outposts.”
There was an uproar at the mention of chits. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, I know you would prefer gold, but a chit on the Christian Army is as good as gold anywhere in the world, and you are being paid well for the inconvenience of visiting one of our offices. Of course, if you prefer, we can just burn everything here as contraband found in a Mongol town, but I think this is better.
“I suggest that you hope we like your merchandise. Anything that we do not purchase and which is deemed to have value to the Mongols will be burned without recompense.
“As I said, there are no questions. You have about seven hours to produce your inventories and bring them to this room.
“I suggest you hurry. Dismissed.”
I should tell you how much I regretted having to ride roughshod over the merchants, but I’d be lying. We needed stuff in a hurry, and I didn’t need arguments, and sometimes it feels good to just cut through the crap and get people to do what you want.
We spent the afternoon discussing what we needed. Eventually, we listed the absolute minimum that we had to have and decided we would scan the inventories for opportunities.
Fifty five thousand warm coats (one per man plus spares)
Ninety thousand pairs of gloves (two pair per man)
Ninety thousand pairs of warm socks. Christian Army boots are waterproof and strong but lightly insulated for a Mongolian winter
At least four thousand tons of food. (Four pounds per man for forty-five days)
Axes, shovels and other hand tools for the engineers
All of the explosives that the Mongol garrison had. (Black powder was weak stuff and useless for our guns, but it made decent blasting powder for the engineers and was useful in grenades.)
Cooking pots for forty-five thousand men. We would be out of canned food in less than three weeks and then we have to cook. In fact, we would be cooking from the start and saving the canned goods for later.
Several thousand board feet of lumber for the engineers. We wouldn’t see a tree for a while and they needed something to build with.
Wagons for most of the food, all of the powder, all of the cooking pots and whatever else we were taking.
Fuel for cooking.
The great grass sea was short on fuel and we didn’t have time to scrounge for enough dried animal droppings to fix dinner.
The wagons were going to be a problem. We were going to need several thousand and every one was going to be a boat anchor slowing us down. Unburdened, the Big People are fast. Mongolia was about thirty-five hundred miles east of us. Silver and I could be there in less than two weeks, and be dead in fourteen days since we’d only have my sword, a rifle, and a day’s worth of food left. If the first fifty Mongols we met didn’t kill me, I’d starve on the way home.
So, we had to go packing a lot of gear.
We were already down to a hundred miles a day because no matter how good your engine is, there are no roads around here and the wagons can take only so much jostling. A radio cart dragged over rough ground at thirty miles an hour is soon a cartload of broken tubes.
This was a major caravan route and there were thousands of wagons in town, all of them 12th century wagons designed to move about one mile an hour. Half of them didn’t even have pivoting front axles.
I had no idea how we would use them, and decided it was stupid to speculate without all the facts, so I called in Sir Eikmann, a komander of engineers. “In a few days, we are going to leave here with at least four thousand tons more food than we have now and probably two thousand tons of engineering supplies, clothes, cook pots, ammo, and miscellaneous stuff. By tomorrow, I need you to tell me how to do it.
“I suggest that you send your best men out immediately to canvas all of the available wagons. Figure out what you can modify to keep up with us and let me know tomorrow morning, no, tomorrow noon how you’re going to pull it off.”
In the old days, I would have pulled out a drawing board and done it myself, but that’s what staff is for, and I had trained a good one.
By morning, the inventories were in. In addition to the quartermaster, only myself, the two counts, the heads of artillery and engineers, and their assistants were present. The rest of the officers were still busy with cleanup skirmishes, and the thousand details of bivouacking and feeding their men and handling police duties.
We had well over a hundred pages of inventory in front of us, and I had forgotten to specify that they had to be in Polish, so many of the merchants had prepared the lists in Italian, Dutch, or Byzantine Greek, and one bastard turned in a list in Chinese. I was tempted to pillory the bastard just for being a smartass, but I settled for sending a messenger to find the merchant and make him come in NOW for translation.
The rest of the lists we divided up by language and started going through them. As we went through the assistants translated the descriptions into Polish and made margin notes.
One of Sir Eikmann’s assistants made the first find. “Merchant out of Novgorod, has twenty-four thousand fur coats, mostly bear, in stock. In transit to a company in Constantinople.
We soon realized that there was no list of Mongol military supplies. I had forgotten that there were no living Mongol officers. I sent one of my assistants out to find at least a company of men to search the city for Mongol material. It was a big place for a medieval city, and three hundred men wouldn’t be enough to cover it in one day. We also sent out a command for all personnel to be on the lookout for military stores and to report any found to my office.
The traditional personal looting would have to wait for later. The men didn’t have space for much booty anyway.
Food wouldn’t be so easy. When we left the railroad, we stepped back into the 13th century. Without 747s and steamships, food was pretty much a local matter and I didn’t expect to find a lot of it in the warehouses. Eight hundred years earlier, Romans in Italy fed on rice and wheat from Egypt and the Romans in York fried in olive oil from Lebanon, but they had better roads, fewer bandits, fewer borders, and much better wagons.
I had no compunction about raiding the city stores and stripping every farm in the area. It was certainly less trouble than the Mongols brought with them. However, it was time-consuming to go from farm to farm packing up barnloads of food, and I was short on time.
Fortunately, rice was still considered a luxury food in Europe, worth importing from North Africa, so there were two shiploads of it on storage. That gave us about a thousand tons of rice, and there were plenty of spices to go on it. Nutmeg, pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and salt were all luxury goods worth shipping. I noticed dried fruit, nuts, and other items on the inventories. We might get most of what we needed.
We ate while we worked when the staff brought in platters of roasted mystery meat, bread, and beer. The canned goods would have to be kept for the trip. By noon, all of the lists were translated and we were through a hundred pages of inventory. We’d found most of the supplies we would need. We had found another ten thousand coats, enough blankets to make another ten or fifteen thousand ponchos, twenty tons of lumber, two thousand axes, five thousand shovels, and almost two thousand saws. We were still desperately short of food and clothes, but it was enough to survive on.
There were a thousand other things we’d like to have, everything from tent canvas to rope to cooking pots, but that could be left to the Sir Eikmann’s engineers and the Quartermaster Corps to pick out.
During lunch, we discussed strategy. We decided that anyone that we did not find a coat for would be issued two extra wool blankets and sewing supplies. The men could turn than into simple ponchos in a few minutes and then improve them with sleeves, buttons, and hoods du
ring their down time. The spare wool from cutting the blankets down could be used for mittens or boot padding.
Sir Wladyclaw suggested that we find local talent to sew for the men. I agreed it was a good idea, but since the population was pretty much in hiding, I didn’t have much faith in the plan.
After lunch, we sent all of the assistants away. The quartermaster staff would set up a central office where they and the other staff could examine the thirty pages of inventory that we skipped, and where they could receive reports from the field.
Then we got down to the most important problem: how to move all the supplies. By this time, I know that I could handle almost anything. If we ran out of artillery, I’d build trebuchet out of tree logs and fire boulders at the enemy. No ammo, we’d build crossbows and puncture the enemy to death. We could handle almost anything, but the nearest place to get a pneumatic tire was a thousand miles west, and you can’t build a good shock absorber out of a tree trunk. We needed to move at least a hundred tons of stuff three thousand miles in thirty days.
Sir Wladyclaw, Captain Ivanov, and I looked expectantly at Sir Eikmann. He shuffled papers for a few moments. “We don’t have a final answer yet. We’re good, but we’ve had less than a day to work on it. First, we may have a partial solution.” Looking at me, he asked, “Lord, may I ask what is the real capacity of our carts is? Oh, I know that the manual says that they can handle twelve tons each, but I also know that every cart carries two complete spare wheels with tires underneath and that there’s two sets of spare harnesses in every cart.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I know that you personally designed the basic army cart and I’ve seen your other designs. You, lord, believe in reliability, strength, simplicity, and spare tires.
“That tells me there’s a big safety margin in the design. I believe we can safely load the carts to at least fourteen tons and maybe a little more.”
He was a smart little bastard, and I hate having other people analyze me, especially if they’re right. “There is a safety margin. I had them tested up to fifteen tons, but the carts tend to waddle and vibrate when they get over twelve tons, and they stress the track too much in rail mode.”
He had the good manners, or enough regard for his own safety, not to wear a knowing smile. “That’s about what I suspected. That’s our first resource. We have about six thousand standard carts with us. They were all loaded close to capacity when we set out, but we have been eating, drinking, and shooting for about three weeks. So, we’ve burned off part of the weight. With an extra two tons per wagon and filling in all of the space we’ve emptied, that will give us about fifteen thousand tons of capacity.
“After that, we have to look at local resources and the news is not as good there.
“Over by the north palisade, there is about a square mile of wagons. This is major caravan terminus with thousands of wagons and over a hundred repair businesses. Unfortunately most of them are totally useless for us.
“Your grace, you specified that we will be doing over a hundred miles a day, so we need wagons that can handle eight miles an hour over unprepared grasslands. That’s about four times the speed that most of these wagons were designed for.
“The most common are European wagons and they are totally useless. It’s just like the crap we had in Poland twenty years ago. They don’t even have steerable front axles. They just use oxen to drag them around corners. All of the bearings are wood on wood splashed with lots of grease. When they do have suspension, it’s chains. We’d be better off carrying stuff on our backs.
“The second type might be useable. There are over a thousand two-wheeled wagons around. The locals and the merchants both use them for smaller loads. The wheels are larger than the four-wheeled wagons and they’re built stronger. They derive from farm wagons so they’re crude and heavy ox carts and some don’t have any suspension at all. Some have solid wooden wheels, but if we band them with iron, they’d probably hold up. Given a little time, we could reinforce the boxes, add tops, and make them useable. Problem is that they only hold about two or three tons and they’re going to ride rough. You don’t want to put the family china in one.
“I did see a couple of Byzantine wagons parked out there, and the boys are out looking for more. They are almost identical to the Roman wagons from a thousand years ago and a real find. They’re closed boxes with steerable front axles and a leather suspension. The axles and running gear are wood, but there are iron bearings on all the moving parts. I would estimate that they hold over five tons of cargo. I don’t know if they can handle the speed without some modifications, but they’re our best bet. It’s strange that a thousand-year old Roman design is the most modern thing around.
“We also saw a few hundred Chinese wagons. They seem to be similar in quality to the Byzantine design, but we haven’t had time to evaluate them yet.”
My patience was growing thin, “Sir Eikmann, time is the one thing we don’t have. You keep talking about modifying hundreds of wagons. That could take weeks and if we aren’t on the road in a few days, the road will end in our graves.”
He didn’t back down, “Your grace, if we can’t feed the troops, it will be a grave full of starving men, and I do have a plan to do the modifications quickly.”
He was, of course, right again. Over the next few months, Sir Eikmann and I would save each others lives more than once and I would promote and reward him generously - but you can understand why I would never like him.
He went on confidently, “I’ve got several teams of grunts out counting and listing wagons. We’re limiting ourselves to the types in the main yards, because we don’t have time to go from house to house looking for wagons.
“I’ve already got, as of an hour ago, five teams of engineers working over farm wagons and five working on Byzantine models. They are being helped by the owners of the ten repair shops we paid generously to help us.
“If we find enough of the Chinese models or any other promising types, we’ll start doing the same for them.
“I’m certain that by the end of the day we will have complete plans for at least the farm models and soon after the modifications on the Byzantines.
“Then, tomorrow, we find every wagon repairman in this caravan town and get them down to the wagon yards. We demonstrate the modifications and offer them triple the usual pay rate for each wagon they modify and deliver. We’ll pay them with that good Mongol gold we liberated and provide every shop with all of the extra craftsmen we can find in the Christian Army. Our boys are pretty handy bunch.
“There are over a hundred wagon repair shops in this town. With the incentive pay, the help, a simple upgrade plan, and clear instructions we could get as many as five hundred to a thousand carts ready every day.
“We could be ready to go in a week.”
Silently, I calculated Murphy’s Time Factor into that week and decided it the week would be at least ten days long, but it was the best plan we had.
“I’ll have an order prepared for the purser instructing him that you have unlimited use of any captured gold and a general order giving you the authority to co-opt any soldier not engaged in combat or scavenging for the quartermaster.
“Now, gentlemen, I think that we have made a good start. I will be available whenever you need me, and I expect to be kept informed of your progress, but now I have a long trip to prepare for.
“Unless there are other items we need to discuss, this meeting is adjourned.”
There were difficult to decisions that only I could make, and I lot of them I didn’t like.
We had several hundred Chinese prisoners. They weren’t a big problem. Most of them didn’t want to work for the Mongols and refused to fight as soon as they found out they could surrender. The ones not smart enough to hide out or run for the hills were housed in a couple of surviving barracks and lightly guarded.
We were burdened with twenty-two Mongol officers that had been captured before they had a chan
ce to fight to the death, and my inexperienced troops had allowed over two hundred Mongol fighters to surrender – against my orders.
The officers were no problem. No one felt sorry for enemy officers. This afternoon I would declare them guilty of war crimes and have them executed.
The Mongol soldiers were a problem. Ordering an army like the Christian Army to carry out mass executions could hurt morale. Even Hitler had learned that the hard way. The Wehrmacht carried out his orders to execute every Jew they found for only a few months before morale dropped precipitously and they refused to do more executions. Noble soldiers see a difference between killing in combat and killing civilians and I had built a noble Christian army.
I decided to recruit the Chinese soldiers to carry out the executions of the Mongol soldiers because they would probably enjoy doing it as much as I would enjoy ordering it. After all, morality applies only to people and these were Mongols.
Before I returned to my temporary palace, I penned an order for all foreign merchants and all warehouse owners, or their representatives, to present themselves two hours after dawn each morning at the city hall for orders and questions.
I also sent out orders: all komanders were to identify Mandarin-speaking troops and send them to the city hall tomorrow morning for translation duties; detailed my adjutant for find whatever passed for a real estate agent in this town; and, find out what a fully equipped wagon repair shop was worth.
The last item was a personal note to Captain Ivanov reminding him to fill at least one of the wagons with wine for our staff meetings and rugs for the executive tent. I also needed a new tent and one or two wagons for it. If one couldn’t be found ready-made, we would have to scrounge material for it.
I ate what my men ate, went were they went, recited the oath every morning, and curried my own Big Person, but in this world a leader had to keep up appearances. My tent also functioned as a meeting hall and a sleeping quarters for my bodyguards. I also needed something to sleep on.
Conrad's Last Campaign Page 12
