Like a Mighty Army

by David Weber

  * * *

  “All right, boys.” Captain Dustyn Baikyr’s voice was level, almost soft, like that of a man soothing a skittish thoroughbred. “It looks like they’re forming up. You’d think they’d know better than to charge formed infantry, but their cavalry’s used the fire wing against the Siddarmarkians, so they might try that here, too, instead.”

  “I wish they would be stupid enough to try that against Mahndrayns, Sir,” Lieutenant Mahzyngail said almost wistfully, and Baikyr chuckled.

  “Well, they wouldn’t head this way if they didn’t intend to try something, Ahbraim. And if it’s just the same to you, I don’t think we’ll let them tempt us into charging them.”

  All four of the captain’s platoon commanders chuckled and he nodded.

  “Looks like they’re about ready. Get back to your men and tell them I want these people’s arses kicked up between their sorry ears!”

  * * *

  Walkyr Tyrnyr rode forward, trotting out in front of his regiment to consider its alignment. His men were no longer the spotlessly attired cavalrymen with gleaming accoutrements who’d set out from Zion so many months before. Their uniforms were shabby, their armor scuffed, the leather of saddles and tack worn, but their originally natty appearance had been replaced by a certain scruffy toughness. They were veterans, leaned down and hardened, although they’d had precious little opportunity to execute the sort of tactics in which they’d originally trained. Tyrnyr was proud of them, and as he gazed at them he was conscious of his own eagerness to employ them the way they’d been meant to be employed.

  Here and there he saw troopers checking the priming on the pairs of double-barreled saddle pistols they’d been trained to use for the fire wing, which would have been called a caracole on a planet called Old Earth. The tactic had become possible only since the invention of the flintlock pistol, but it had been used effectively several times against Siddarmarkian heretics by Bishop Militant Cahnyr’s cavalry during his advance out of Westmarch into Cliff Peak. Dohlaran cavalry had used it successfully in the South March, as well, but no one had yet attempted it against Charisian heretics, and Tyrnyr had his doubts about how well it would work in their case.

  The fire wing called for cavalry to ride directly towards the enemy at a half gallop, several ranks deep. As each rank entered pistol range, it turned sharply to the left or right so its riders could each discharge one pistol into the enemy, then turned sharply in the other direction so that he could fire a second pistol before swinging away to clear the range for the next oncoming rank. The idea was to deluge the enemy with a close range, rolling hail of pistol fire which would, in theory, disorder his formation, at which point the solid block of lancers coming on behind the pistoleers would smash straight through the wavering line.

  Experience had shown it worked—as at Aivahnstyn—under the right conditions. But the Siddarmarkian regiments against which the fire wing had succeeded had been pike regiments, their missile troops equipped only with arbalests or smoothbore matchlocks. These were Charisian regulars, which meant they were equipped with rifles. Pistol fire would be a poor match for rifle fire, even if he did have twice as many men and each of his pistols did have two barrels. On the other hand, unlike the Siddarmarkians, they didn’t have pikes … and if they actually fired their rifles, they’d take even their bayonets out of play while they reloaded. Besides, that formation lacked the dense, deep ranks to present the forest of pikeheads that had made the Siddarmarkian Army so deadly against cavalry. It had to be far more fragile than the pike blocks which had bested Desnair so often, and that made this a time to take a lesson from the past and use his armored lancers to deliver the classic, decisive shock attack that broke infantry and then rode down the survivors.

  He considered the distance between his regiments and the heretics. Eight hundred yards, he estimated; the Charisians were visible only as elongated forms, the details of uniform and body shape blurred by distance, although he could make out an occasional extended arm as an officer or a noncom gestured in his direction.

  That was plenty of distance to build speed, and the flat cropland was ideal terrain. Call it fifty yards at a walk, another fifty at a slow trot, a hundred at a maneuvering trot, two hundred at a maneuvering gallop, and the last four hundred at the charge. Two and a half minutes, total, and barely fifty seconds to cross the final four hundred yards where rifle fire was likely to be effective. A muzzle-loading rifle would do well to get off two shots in that interval, especially one encumbered by the fixed bayonet which always slowed reloading, and any infantryman who didn’t fix his bayonet in the face of a cavalry charge was a dead man. The heretics’ breech-loading rifles were almost certain to do better than that, but they had to maintain an all-round facing if they didn’t want him to curl around an exposed flank. That meant there were scarcely seventy rifles actually facing his men. Even if each of them got off three rounds, not two, that was only two hundred, and he didn’t care if they were Charisians, a lot of them were going to miss, rifles or not, with six hundred cavalry coming right down their throats. And when they realized their rifle fire wasn’t going to stop the charge after all.…

  He nodded once, crisply, then trotted back to the 16th’s standard, and looked at the bugler.

  “Sound Advance.”

  * * *

  The notes of the AOG’s bugles rose high, golden, and sweet, and more than one of the waiting Charisians swallowed hard as that mass of horsemen stirred, shifted … and started forward.

  The sixteen companies of cavalry were formed into eight lines, each seventy-five yards across and three yards deep. Combined with the two-yard interval between lines, the formation stretched the next best thing to forty yards from front to back, and its frontage was twice Company A’s. It began to move slowly, but it gathered speed with a sort of stately majesty, churning dust into the warm September air.

  Early-afternoon sunlight flickered as six hundred lances came down, and a fresh bugle call sent the cavalry from a slow trot to something just short of a gallop. The sound of hooves was an approaching thunder, and then the bugles sounded once more and the thunder accelerated yet again.

  “Steady boys—steady,” Company A’s platoon sergeants said. “Wait for the word. Wait for it. We’ll tell you when it’s time.”

  Aside from that, there was silence on the Charisians’ hill, and the same sun that gleamed on Army of God lanceheads glittered on Charisian bayonets.

  The bugles sounded yet again as the range fell to four hundred yards and the horses stretched into a full gallop across the table-flat cropland. That was still long range for aimed rifle fire, even for Charisian infantry with tangent sights, and so they waited, letting the range fall still further, obeying their sergeants and waiting … waiting.…

  “Fire!”

  The range was two hundred yards, and the half-inch bullets hit their targets like Shan-wei’s sledgehammers. Horses screamed and went down, here and there men flew out of their saddles, their plate cuirasses woefully insufficient to turn those massive bullets, yet the charge never hesitated. A few horses stumbled over fallen fellows, crashing to the ground, rolling over their riders, leaving gaps in the lines. But most of them avoided the obstacles, the gaps closed up, and the survivors were galloping at over four hundred yards per minute.

  “Fire!”

  A second volley crashed home with even more accuracy, creating bigger holes in the tight formation, and the bugles were sounding, sounding, driving the 16th and 53rd Cavalry towards the enemies of God and the Archangels on the wings of the Jihad.

  “Holy Langhorne and no quarter!” Both regiments took up the cry, riding with it in their ears, eyes hard and hating as the enemies of God came into their reach.

  “Fire!”

  A third volley roared, and thirty percent of the 16th Cavalry was down, dead or wounded, but the survivors leaned forward, lances at the thrust, screaming their war cries, with the 53rd right behind them.

  “Present bayonets!”


  Those glittering bayonets steadied, presenting a thicket of steel … and Colonel Tyrnyr’s battle plan came apart.

  The great romantic fallacy of cavalry warfare was that cavalry charged. That its effectiveness lay in mounted men’s ability to ride down infantry, ramming home an attack with cold steel, driven by all the weight and momentum of horse and rider alike. That heavy horse shattered infantry by the sheer, ferocious impact of its charge.

  But cavalry didn’t charge. Not the way the bards described it, because horses were not fools. Nor were they predators. They were herbivores, herd animals, the natural prey of predators, and their primary defense against threats was to run away from them, not towards them. They could be trained to carry men they trusted towards a threat, but that changed none of their basic instincts, nor did it change physics. A seven- or eight-hundred-pound horse, moving at fifteen or sixteen miles per hour, would suffer significant, even catastrophic damage if it collided with a solid obstacle a quarter of its own weight. Horses’ legs were fragile, designed to withstand the vertical shock of trotting or galloping but not the lateral shearing stresses when they collided at speed with another body, human or equine, and cavalry mounts knew it. Galloping horses didn’t attempt to avoid fallen humans out of the goodness of their hearts; they did it because they knew how badly they could be injured if they tripped over those humans. And as anyone who’d ever attempted to train a horse for the steeplechase quickly learned, they would refuse to jump even light wooden rails or hay bales if they thought the barricade was too tall. In point of fact, the highest obstacle allowed in steeplechase events was only five feet, and the obstacle in front of these horses—who were not steeplechasers, and had not the slightest interest in becoming steeplechasers—averaged over five and a half feet tall.

  It was also fringed with nasty, sharp bayonets.

  At the Battle of Waterloo, on distant, long-dead Old Earth, Marshal Ney’s French cuirassiers launched charge after charge upon the British infantry squares … uselessly. Because the truth was that throughout history, “shock” cavalry depended not upon physical shock, but on the moral shock of a man on foot facing several tons of mounted, usually armored horsemen charging straight at him in a drumroll of hoof-pounding thunder. While it was true that a charging horse would be badly injured if it slammed headlong into a human being, it was a given that the much smaller human would fare at least as badly, and that didn’t even count the (usually) better armored lunatic on the horse’s back, who was bound to be waving around a sword or—even worse—a long, pointy lance. The natural reaction when faced by such an obvious threat was the same sensible response horses favored when faced by predators: run away! But infantry that didn’t run away—infantry that held its ground—discovered those same horses’ disinclination to ram headlong into a dangerous obstacle.

  Horses would cheerfully pursue a fleeing enemy. They were even willing to charge other horses and let the maniacs on their backs hack and hew at one another to their hearts’ content, as long as both formations were open enough they might hope to find a way through. But bayonet-armed infantrymen standing shoulder-to-shoulder, with no nice horse-wide gaps between them? Never.

  In conjunction with artillery or the musketry of supporting infantry, cavalry could be devastating against that sort of target. A formation solid enough to repel a cavalry charge was an ideal target for small arms, round shot, grapeshot, or canister. If the infantry stood in solid ranks, it suffered massive casualties; if it adopted a more open formation to minimize its fire casualties, it became easy meat for the horsemen.

  Unfortunately for the Army of God, it had no artillery or supporting infantry, and its horses, their ears already full of the screams of other wounded and dying horses, refused to break their legs—or their necks—against that solid, unshaken, bayonet-bristling wall of infantry.

  * * *

  “Second rank, independent targets! Third rank, grenades!”

  The second line of infantry opened fire once more. Using their weapons’ breech-loading capability to maintain the threat of their bayonets even as they reloaded, they chose their targets and fired. And the line behind them pulled the lanyards and heaved smoking showers of hand grenades over the heads of their fellows and into the cavalry beyond.

  Explosions thundered, spewing hundreds of round lead bullets, and the shrieks of wounded horses rose like hideous music. The bugle was still sounding across the bedlam of shots, shrieks, screams, and explosions, but then a grenade or a bullet found the bugler, and the martial melody died with the player.

  “Mortar platoon, engage!”

  The six three-inch mortars in the pits at the very apex of the hill began to cough, sending ten-pound projectiles into the farthest portions of the AOG formation. They were impact-fused, exploding as they hit the ground, throwing their own sheets of shrapnel balls to join the hand grenades.

  It lasted eleven minutes from the moment the two cavalry regiments accelerated to a full gallop. One minute to reach the Charisian front line, three minutes of shrieking madness in a cauldron of devastation, and seven minutes for the terrified survivors to get out of range of the vengefully pursuing mortar bombs—time-fused now, to shower the deadly cones of shrapnel from above.

  Of the six hundred and nineteen cavalrymen who began that charge, two hundred and fifty-three—an astonishingly high number, really, and almost half of them still with horses—survived to fall back in its wreckage.

  Colonel Walkyr Tyrnyr and Major Ahrthyr Wyllyms were not among them.

  .VIII.

  HMS Powerful, 58, Jahras Island, Gulf of Jahras, Desnairian Empire

  “Be seated, gentlemen.”

  The dozen senior captains and commanders in Admiral Payter Shain’s day cabin settled into chairs around the round, polished table. Zhak Haukyns, Shain’s flag captain and HMS Powerful’s commanding officer, sat directly across from his admiral and laid a folder on the tabletop in front of him.

  Sunlight through the cabin’s windows sent patterns dancing across the low overhead as it reflected off the waves while the ship lay to her anchors off Jahras Island. The Imperial Charisian Navy had seized the island—little more than a vast sheep farm, five miles across—as an advanced base in the gulf of the same name. The shepherds who lived on it had been too wise to offer any resistance, and they’d been astonished to learn that the invaders actually intended to pay for the sheep they carried off. The island offered a source of water and good holding ground for anchors, but precious little more. Still, it was a place where men could go ashore, stretch their legs, and get a little exercise, and the mutton made a worthwhile addition to their normal rations.

  The skylight was open, as were the quarter windows, admitting what breeze there was. There wasn’t a great deal of it, which was unfortunate, since the day was blisteringly hot, as might be expected less than seventy miles above the equator. Shain’s servant bustled about, making certain each of his guests had a filled glass, then bowed his way out with smooth efficiency.

  “I don’t expect the subject of today’s meeting to come as a vast surprise to any of you,” Shain said with a slight smile as he picked up his own wineglass. He sipped appreciatively and leaned back in his chair. “Our orders have arrived. We’ll commence active operations throughout the Gulf the day after tomorrow, with instructions to take, burn, or sink everything we find, with special emphasis on privateers and the shipyards building them.”

  His smile grew broader—and colder—as he let their stir of reaction circle the table before he continued.

  “The delay,” he said then, “was occasioned by our wait for our latest arrivals.” He gestured gracefully to where Captain Symyn Mastyrsyn, the commanding officer of HMS Rottweiler, sat side-by-side with Captain Bryxtyn Abernethy, HMS Earthquake’s CO. “I expect they’ll make themselves useful.”

  Abernethy was one of the increasing number of ICN officers who’d grown to adulthood as the subjects of someone other than King Haarahld of Charis. In fact, he was a Taroti
sian, which still inclined some Old Charisian officers to be prejudiced against him, given King Gorjah III’s betrayal in the Group of Four’s initial attack on the Kingdom of Charis. Shain wasn’t one of them, partly because he realized Abernethy—who’d served as a lieutenant aboard one of the few galleys to escape the battles off Armageddon Reef—had had no choice but to obey the orders of his lawful superiors. And, if Shain was going to be completely honest, partly because his emperor and empress had made it very, very clear that not just Chisholmians, but Emeraldians, Tarotisians, and even Zebediahans were all Charisians now. Their officers and enlisted personnel were to be treated accordingly, and Payter Shain, who had a closer acquaintance with both his monarchs than many a serving officer, was far too wise to argue with them.

  There were still relatively few non-Charisians or Chisholmians in command of major warships, but that was primarily because there’d been fewer senior officers in any of the Charisian Empire’s other member states when they became member states. Numbers were growing, however, and non-Old Charisians were becoming more and more thoroughly integrated into the junior officer corps. Within another few years, there’d be plenty of Tarotisian and Emeraldian accents in a meeting like this one.