Conrad's Last Campaign

by Leo A. Frankowski

Overall, we had done amazingly well, but not because of my brilliant planning. Apparently the Mongol commander was convinced that his trap was still undetected and he had ordered that no campfires be lit for fear of giving himself away. Our night fighters crept into a totally dark camp where even the guards were having a hard time staying awake. If the camp had been normally lit, they would have had a real fight, but, as it was, half of the Chinese died before they even knew they were under attack.

  There were about a thousand Chinese foot soldiers and engineers manning the cannon and most of them had the good grace to die quickly and easily. Hand-to-hand was not their field, and the best they could do was to wound a few of the night fighters.

  There were also over a thousand Mongol troops in the two camps. We killed about half of them before the other half got to their horses and escaped down the canyon or just stumbled away hidden by the darkness.

  They were alert fighters, and as the Wolves quickly learned, their rifles could penetrate our armor close up. We even lost two Wolves to sword thrusts through the joints in their armor. We lost about fifteen killed and more than twenty seriously wounded.

  When full morning broke, we spent a few hours destroying the Mongol weapons and disabling the cannon. For a big heavy piece of metal, a muzzle-loading cannon is amazingly easy to destroy. The vent hole where the power is ignited enlarges over time, causing the cannon to lose power. To counter this, the vents are removable and replaceable. If you blast or pry the vent out and then enlarge the vent hole with a chisel, the gun will never fire right again.

  I had planned to ambush the relief column when they came down the canyon, but the escaping Mongols would certainly have blown that chance for me. When the rest of the column caught up with us a few hours after dawn we moved out down the pass.

  I rode near my radio cart and asked the operator to contact Wanderlust. It turned out that she was over the other end of the pass and in visual range of the Mongol relief column. They reported that the Mongols were moving back toward the Mongolian plateau. They must have found out that the ambush failed and decided wait for a better time for battle. It made sense. To cover all of the possible routes that we could have taken, they would have had to split their forces. Once the ambush failed, the best strategy would be to avoid battle until they could consolidate their forces.

  I suspected that our vacation was nearly over. The loss of most of their horses, assuming that we had successfully killed them, would explain the eerie calm over the winter, but the months of winter would also give them time to replenish their stocks by importing horses from China. It would take months to import and train them, but they had months while we sat hunkered down in sod huts. Thinking back, I realized that allowing for draft animals for the cannon, the Mongols only had about the same number of horses in the camp as there were soldiers. Since the Mongol warriors normally took four of five horses with them on campaign, they may not be up to full strength yet.

  Soon, we would find out if I was right, but for now we had at least fifty miles of clear road ahead.

  From the Secret Journal of Su Song, Part 5

  We are now at the twenty year mark on our project, and we continue to change the world.

  Progress has hastened since our Emperor established partial dominance over the Song Dynasty border lands. Even though the Song still hold their positions there and live in their palaces, they answer to Mongol overlords for every important decision and send half of their tax revenue to my masters.

  The additional income has paid for a new capital city, huge new palaces for the Emperors relatives and thousands of miles of railways hosting hundreds of the new mobile steam engines.

  My own reward has been considerable. I now live in a small palace surrounded by a hundred acres of fruit trees and gardens, and my wife now spends her time directing dozens of servants and household workers. She insisted that I take a second wife and chose a particularly attractive young woman of noble Chinese birth to, “Keep me relaxed and able to concentrate on my work.”

  The empire has grown richer and the fast communications provided by the railways have enabled the Emperor to have much firmer control over his dominions. In an emergency, no major point in the empire is now more than five days away from the capitol.

  Once the peasants and even the regional governors would say, “As the sun is high in the heavens, so the Emperor is far away,” but now the Emperor’s mail box and his troops are next door.

  As a bonus we learned who the Polish genius was. The Emperor of Song had trade relations with Europeans who brought with them a book of knowledge purported to be written by a Polish genius. Except for the fact that he is of very advanced age, we do not have his real name or description. We know that he uses the grandiose pseudonym that translates Conrad, Protector of the Heavens or Conrad, Guardian of the Stars. Of course, the name could designate either an individual or a group of engineers and scholars.

  The book is divided into thirty-five topics, each shorter than the usual textbook. Some of the passages are arcane because they were originally written in Polish then translated to Latin or Greek by church scholars and finally translated into Mandarin by Chinese merchants who traded with the Romans and Italians. It is sometimes difficult to know if some terms apply to new concepts or are simply garbled because the translator did not know the term in the new language.

  It took awhile before we realized that the math was garbled. Some of the terms were in base twelve, which means that Conrad either was polydactyl and counted on his fingers, or just had a wicked sense of humor.

  The quality of the chapters varies widely. There is nothing on pharmacology or math and very little on alchemy. The book on bridge building is interesting, but smaller than the one I wrote before joining imperial service and it is missing basic fundamentals. You could not build a good stone bridge with it.

  There are several chapters related to invisible lightning power. Each chapter seems simple, but it will take years before we understand it enough to use it.

  On the other hand, the chapters on steam power, production tools, steel production, and optics have saved us years of research. We cut fuel consumption and startup time dramatically in new steam engines by adopting the tube boiler shown in the book, and the section on steel production will allow us to triple the production of high quality steel within a few years.

  Our independent efforts have also born more fruit. The stationary steam engines have cut the cost of machining dramatically and allowed us to build more of the Polish rifles and shells. Every city now mounts at least a few of them on its walls. Hand crafting the ammunition is still expensive, but with the stamping process and hydraulic press shown in Conrad’s book, ammunition should soon be cheap enough to make it a common weapon.

  As the weapons we have are sufficient to dominate all of our enemies, there has not been great incentive to improve them, but one of my teams has produced a practical breech-loading rifle for the troops.

  He did it by cutting the barrel into two pieces. The shooter uses a lever that runs along the right side of the barrel to pull back a short breech section, just long enough for a charge of powder and a bullet, and swivel it up. He pulls the lever back slightly to release the breech from the main part of the barrel, pushes down to swing it up, drops the charge into it, pushes up on the handle to lower the breech. When breech is aligned, he moves the lever forward and down into a strong clip to clamp the joint tight.

  Sometimes there is a very slight leakage, but the gun will fire ten rounds a minute through a rifled barrel, and it is cheap enough to give one to every soldier.

  In truth, my lord Kublai has lost some of his drive for conquest as a result of our progress. He now controls the richest and most powerful nation in the known world and has real wealth beyond imagining. He still plans to consolidate his conquest of the Song Empire, still battles with the Koreans, and occasionally sends small raiding parties south and west, but the returns from such ventures are small compared to the taxes he now collects.
He battles now only for honor and glory, not for profit.

  As we learn more about Europe from the Song traders, he has also lost some of his concern about the Polish army. We now know that the entire population of Poland would fit into one of our larger cities and leave room for the population of a small town to visit. They may be wealthy and powerful, but there are just too few of them to be a serious threat. He is content to leave the Kipchak Khanate, the Golden Horde, as a sufficient buffer between us.

  The War on the Tundra

  I was wrong about the fifty miles of clear road. We weren’t even clear of the mountain pass before the harassing attacks started. Less than two hours later, we were moving at a good dozen miles an hour through the pass when gunfire sounded ahead of us.

  We were moving with a pair of forward flankers on the left and right and two pairs of scouts straight ahead of us when the Mongols managed to hit the left flankers and both pairs of center scouts at about the same time. Two dozen Mongols appeared out of camouflaged holes in the ground, firing rifles and arrows at close range. Two warriors died instantly from rifle shots, one was mortally wounded by a hail storm of arrows, and no one was unscathed. All but one of the Mongols died during the battle and the Big People ran down the one escapee and finished him off.

  I had never even considered the possibility of such a sneak attack by Mongols. Hell, they were light cavalry and supposed to ride into battle. We changed the order of march and replaced the pairs of scouts with lances of scouts and pressed ahead. Speed was still our best protection.

  An hour before nightfall, we were past the low mountains and out onto the Mongolian steppes. The men were exhausted, but I drove them to build a simple palisade before we bedded down. We ditched around the entire camp and built a four foot sod wall around the twenty mile perimeter before settling down for the night. War was really here now.

  Two days later I received an early morning call from the captain of Wanderlust.

  “We’ve been watching a sizeable enemy camp for about two days. They moved out this morning and are headed in your direction with about twenty, twenty five thousand men. The way you’re closing, you could run into them well before nightfall.

  “The formation is odd. They’ve got about ten thousand men in a group out front, but the main force is trailing a few miles behind. Maybe they’ll be moving out to flank you.”

  I had read about this often repeated Mongol tactic. “Wanderlust, the Mongols are famous for rope-a-dope tactics. They engage a larger force head on and then pretend to retreat. They lead the enemies on until his horses are tired, and then they switch to fresh horses, join their reserves and wheel around to attack. They beat European armies again and again with that tactic.

  “Watch for any signs that they are going to try that with us.”

  “Yes, your grace. Now that you mention it, we can see that the main force is leading a large number of spare horses.

  “Hold it. Hold it. Damn! I’m looking down at an airplane, and it isn’t one of ours.”

  “Are you certain of that, Wanderlust?”

  “I’m the only Christian Army thing flying within a thousand miles. I’m at sixteen thousand feet and I’m looking down at a bright red airplane at maybe six thousand feet. Hold it… I’ve got my spyglass now. It’s not an airplane. There’s no engine or prop. It must be just a damned good glider.

  “Wait a minute. Correction. It is powered! The damned thing just lit off a rocket engine. Shit! It’s a damned rocket plane, and it’s coming up in our direction!

  “Emergency dump all ballast!! Open all hydrogen fill valves! Full ahead! Bow elevators full up. Rig for altitude. Let’s get out of here.”

  The last think I heard before he remembered to key the mike off was the sound of alarms going off in the airship cabin.

  The radio was silent for several minutes. When the captain came back to the mike, he was almost laughing with relief.

  “We’re out of danger. We grabbed our masks and bounced up to about thirty thousand feet before the plane dropped off. The damned thing climbed straight to about fifteen thousand and the pilot lit off another rocket booster, but he never got close. He fired an explosive rocket when he peaked out, but it made nice fireworks about a thousand feet below us.”

  I asked for a description of the strange plane. “It was a high wing monoplane, fabric covered and designed with very large glider-type wings. I would guess that the rocket engines are strictly for emergency boost. The thing was too slow and clumsy to reach much over twenty thousand feet.

  “They had to know that we were here. We’re so high up that we’re damned near invisible from the ground. Also, I don’t think the thing is normally armed. It carried a rocket in a tube attached to the side of the fuselage that looked like a slapped up job.

  “My guess is that they had reports about us and they tried to kluge up a reconnaissance glider to take us out. As long as we maintain altitude, it isn’t a big danger for us.

  “However, while the thing is obviously too small to hold a radio, it could over fly you and then drop a message on its headquarters, so don’t assume that the enemy is unaware of your location.”

  There was another long silence.

  “My first mate just told me that they have succeeded in taking us out of action for awhile. We had to dump all of our ballast for the emergency climb. By the time we dump enough hydrogen to get down to a normal altitude, we’ll be too low on gas to stay here. We’re going to have to return to base now or risk being stranded on the tundra.

  “Captain Helman should have the Zephyr here late tomorrow, but I’m afraid you’re blind until then. Good luck, lord.”

  Good luck? I thought things were bad enough when the Mongols came up with rifled muskets. Now they had aircraft. I wondered what else they had cooked up. In a year or so, would they be bombing Poland with nuclear bombs made from cast bronze and rice paper?

  Secretly, I was happy. My doubts were gone. This proved that we had to take them out now, before they became a bigger threat. I knew now that the expedition was the right decision.

  I decided to postpone the battle until morning.

  We camped for the night in a mountain valley, surrounded on three sides by mountain walls and by a palisade on the fourth side. I stationed troopers on the mountainsides to watch for intruders and sent out nighty-night squads on the open side. Normally the Big People provided all of the watchdog duty we needed, but in combat zones, I often sent out some of them with night riders. The riders would nap in the saddle or on the ground near where the Big People were grazing and if the Big People detected any incursion bigger than they could handle, they would nudge the troopers awake to provide firepower where needed. Traditionally, the teams would announce themselves to intruders with the phrase nighty-night before they fired. The sounds of short bursts of firepower in the night were actually soothing to those of us in camp.

  I decided to move the staff meeting outside into the fresh spring air. We met even before the camp was established, but night had come early and was just cold enough to require cloaks as we sat around the fire on logs and boxes munching our dinners and drinking fresh brewed beer. I was enjoying the beer, the fire, and the cool breeze that tickled the exposed skin under my fur cloak, but not the companionship. The boss gets respect, get listened to, and gets obedience, but the boss never gets to hear the latest jokes and if he wants to hear the latest gossip, he has to hire spies. It is the greatest price of leadership.

  As the eating slowed down and the drinking sped up, I announced, “Gentlemen, our scouts tell us that we are only a gross miles from the Mongol capitol. Tomorrow we will have a delightful battle with the Mongols and tomorrow night we will camp under the walls of Karakorum.

  “The Mongols are going to execute a strategy that has worked well for them against the European knights in the past. They will seem to attack viciously and then retreat. In battle after battle, they got the knights to chase them until their horses were exhausted, their battle order in d
isarray, and the knights themselves tired. Then the Mongols would meet up with their reserve forces, jump onto fresh horses and counterattack the exhausted Christians. It worked in battle after battle.

  “It also worked fast. As you who have been cavalry in the days of standard horses, you know that when you load a horse with two or three gross pounds of knight, armor, saddle, and weapons and then run it at full trot, the horse tires quickly. Within a few miles, they are useless in fighting the Mongol counterattack.

  “Of course, we won’t have those problems tomorrow. Our Big People can run any Mongol horse to death and have enough energy left to dance on its grave all night. Sir Grzegorz, it will be your men’s job tomorrow to hide that fact. Your Wolves will have the key role tomorrow.

  “Your Wolves could easily defeat any Mongol force that faces you man to man, or perhaps horse to Big Person, but then we would only get the diversionary force. The main Mongol force will scatter if they think they are losing, and we don’t want to be chasing them all over Mongolia engaging in small firefights, so tomorrow we will bait them into chasing us.

  “This meeting will be a short one, but you each face a long evening because your orders for tomorrow require careful coordination and once the attack starts, we will be moving too fast for radio carts to keep up and even too fast for message runners. Tomorrow depends upon everyone knowing his job and doing it on time without orders.

  “The order of march tomorrow will be a little different than usual. We’ll move as one unified body spread out across the landscape. The Wolves under Sir Grzegorz will lead the way. All of the Wolves need to travel together spread across the front of the column. As I said, they are the key to our success.

  “Sir Wladyclaw, your mounted infantry will follow the Wolves. Place all little space between them and the Wolves. Intersperse enough mobile infantry between the machine gun carriers to provide support and cover when the battle starts. I would suggest about ten men to support each gun.