03 - Call to Arms

by Mitchel Scanlon - (ebook by Undead)

  The Scarlets made short work of them, swords stabbing again and again into the confused enemy mass. Having learned a lesson when fighting the last group of wolf riders, Dieter was careful this time to always strike for the wolf first and not the rider.

  Even as he joined in with the others, his sword stabbing mechanically back-and-forth as blood sprayed into the air and fell to drench the hard earth, he was amazed at how quickly he had become accustomed to the grisly nature of warfare. He had never been squeamish, but once he might have felt uneasy at having to slaughter an enemy who had no chance to escape, to hear their dying screams, to feel their slick blood underfoot.

  In the face of war with the greenskins, all his kinder emotions had left him. It was not so much that he hated them, though in common with most people in the Empire he believed it was the destiny of orc and man to be eternal enemies. He was moved by a simpler, less complex imperative. He killed them because it was the nature of war; kill or be killed.

  More quickly than he would have thought possible, it was over. As the last of the enemy fell, the Scarlets walked among the fallen bodies of wolf and goblin, making sure they were dead and dispatching any that were not with quick, merciless strokes.

  Following the lead of his comrades Dieter joined in with their work, but he had no real stomach for it. Now the heat of combat had left him, he felt queasy about such tasks. He recognised that any enemy left alive might later try to strike them down, but it was harder to kill in cold blood—even when the target was a goblin. It was the way of war between human and greenskin. Neither side took prisoners. No quarter was given, nor was it asked for. For all that though, Dieter found it hard to be the one who had to do the bloody work of killing a wounded enemy.

  Looking for some mental respite, he gazed at the forest around him. It occurred to him that the section of trail where the Scarlets had made their stand was particularly narrow. At the same time, the trees on either side of the trail were thicker and positioned more closely together. Realising that Sergeant Bohlen must have intentionally chosen the best place for his men to take a stand once the wolf riders were spotted, Dieter was filled by an admiration for his sergeant.

  “Look lively,” Sergeant Bohlen said, his voice snapping Dieter out of his reverie. “There’s more of them.”

  Another group of goblins had appeared at the end of the trail. This time, the enemy were on foot. There were more of them as well. Several dozen were in sight already, with more in a long line snaking away in the distance along the trail.

  “They’re not scouts,” Gerhardt said. “It’s a goblin mob, could be a thousand strong or more. And, if they’re here, the rest of the army won’t be far behind. It’ll take more than ten men and a shield wall to deal with that lot.”

  “What do we do, then?” Dieter asked. He looked to the faces of the men around him. “If that’s true, they’ll have us outnumbered a hundred to one. How do we hold them back?”

  “We don’t,” Sergeant Bohlen said. “We’ve done our best, held back the enemy scouts long enough for the rest of the regiment to escape. But that lot there will roll over us like a grinder over oats. We’d last maybe ten seconds against them. We’ve done our duty. Now, we run.”

  That night, and for many nights afterwards, the next hour would serve as a source for Dieter’s nightmares. Where earlier the Scarlets had jogged along the trail trying to maintain an even pace, they now ran as fast as they could.

  With the goblins behind them, they ran for their lives.

  Lungs burning, his breath rasping like sandpaper through his throat, Dieter tried to keep up with the others. He had thought himself in good shape, full of youthful energy and vigour, but before they had covered barely three hundred paces he found himself flagging.

  His body was bathed in sweat, soaking through his clothes, the salt of his own perspiration itching at his skin like acid. The weight of his weapons, shield and armour seemed unbearable. He wanted to cast them away, to lighten his load, but he saw the other Scarlets still carried theirs.

  He refused to do anything that might make him seem weak or unable to meet the same demands as the others. He would rather face death than dishonour. He would not do anything that might give cause for anyone to whisper he was unworthy to be a member of the regiment. He realised his pride might end up killing him, but he took comfort from the thought he would die as a Scarlet.

  The goblins were hard on their trail, dogging their tracks. Dieter heard a cacophony of shrill whoops and war cries as the goblins egged each other on. The enemy seemed to be right behind them, breathing down their necks. It seemed impossible they would not catch them.

  Afterwards, he could not have said how long the pursuit lasted. It felt like it went on for hours, but it could not have been more than half an hour at most. The men were perhaps only a league away from their encampment. Ordinarily, it was the kind of distance a man might run in eight or nine minutes. Encumbered by armour, hampered by the broken, uneven terrain of the forest, it took the men of the file considerably longer.

  In the end, Dieter supposed that fate—or even Sigmar—played a role in their salvation. If there had been any more wolf riders with the goblins chasing them, if Dieter and the others had not already killed them, the enemy would have been able to run them down. As it was, the Scarlets managed to stay ahead of the goblins by the skin of their teeth. Running as though all the powers and principalities of the damned were on their trail, the men finally found their way to the edge of the forest.

  “Come on!” Gerhardt breathed hoarsely. Seeing Dieter catch his ankle and stumble over a tree root, he caught him and pulled him to his feet. “We’re nearly there! They won’t dare keep chasing us once we’re past the tree line.”

  Following numbly in Gerhardt’s wake, it was all Dieter could do to keep going. The last part of the pursuit was the worst.

  Ahead, he could see sunlight breaking through the trees. The tree line, where the forest met the open ground of the clearing in which their army had made its encampment, was only a couple of hundred paces away. They seemed the slowest steps Dieter had ever taken. It felt as though he was running underwater, his legs leaden and unresponsive. Behind them, the screams of the goblin mob were terrifyingly loud.

  In his nightmares, this would always be the moment when he realised he was no longer making any progress. Looking down, he would see his legs flailing uselessly in the mud, unable to make progress or gain any purchase no matter how hard he ran.

  Thankfully, in this case, reality diverged from his dreams. Given an extra boost of acceleration by the fact he was so close to escape, he emerged out of the forest and into the clearing with a speed that belied his exhaustion.

  Breaking into the open, he staggered a further handful of steps before casting a nervous glance over his shoulder to see whether Gerhardt was right. He could no longer see them clearly through the trees, but it was apparent the goblins had halted their pursuit. Wary of being caught out in the open within sight of the human encampment, they stopped, glowering angrily after the men who had escaped them.

  “What in the name of Sigmar…” Dieter heard Sergeant Bohlen’s voice, its tone raised by a note of astonishment. “What the hell happened here?”

  Looking around him, Dieter was glad to see that the other men of the file had survived—even Krug and Febel. At first, he was at a loss to work out what had caused Bohlen’s astonishment. When he turned toward the encampment he thought that everything was as it should be.

  It was clear the army was in the middle of packing up. Even from a distance, Dieter could see the camp fires had been doused and the tents were in the process of being packed away, ready for transit. It was no more than he would have expected. With such a large army and so many supplies to be transported, it was best to get a jump on things so that when General von Nieder gave the order to break camp everything would be ready.

  Then, looking at the camp more closely, Dieter realised something was missing. There should have been a perime
ter of wooden pickets set around the camp, guarded by sentries. The pickets had been there last night, but this morning there was no sign of them. Appalled, Dieter realised the pickets and their sentries were not the only parts of the camp’s defence that were missing. The cannons he had seen in emplacements last night, designed to support the pickets, were nowhere to be seen.

  Without pickets, sentries or artillery to guard its perimeter, the camp was left open and unprepared. Turning back to look at the forest, he wondered how long it would be before the orcs they had seen crossing the river arrived at the clearing and realised the human camp was ripe for attack. With thousands of orcs potentially about to come screaming from the tree line, the Hochlanders’ camp was next to defenceless.

  Dieter found he was wondering the same thing as Sergeant Bohlen. When the Scarlets had left in the pre-dawn light to sweep the woods, they had left behind an encampment that was ready to face an enemy attack. In the meantime, inexplicably, the camp had packed away its defences, all but inviting the orcs to attack them.

  What the hell had happened?

  From

  The Testimony of General Ludwig von Grahl

  (unexpurgated text):

  …In all the annals of battle in Hochland, it is hard to think of a more disastrous decision. For reasons best know to himself, General von Nieder ordered his army to break camp without first waiting to hear the reports of the units he had sent to sweep the surrounding woodlands for greenskins.

  Granted, von Nieder was not to know the entire orc army was within a few leagues of his encampment. But, by refusing to wait until the woods had been completely scouted and pronounced clear, he needlessly exposed his forces to danger.

  By the time the first messengers arrived with news the enemy were on their doorstep, the pickets and other defensive measures designed to protect the camp from attack had already been removed and packed away. Similarly, the army’s artillery had been taken from their positions and prepared for transit.

  Worse, earlier in the morning, von Nieder had sent all his cavalry— including his knights, outriders, pistoliers, mercenaries and other assorted mounted troops—on ahead in advance of the rest of the army.

  With the greenskins about to attack, there was no time to recall the cavalry, nor to re-deploy the artillery and pickets. Although the infantry hurried to deploy in battle formations, the situation left the entire encampment severely exposed.

  Afterwards, in an attempt to explain his decisions, von Nieder would claim he had been badly advised. He would insist he had checked with his staff and they had told him the woods had been cleared. Given such circumstances, he argued the decision to break camp was entirely reasonable.

  Obviously, von Nieder’s story was a tissue of lies designed to deflect blame on to others. For myself, I suspect his decision to break camp was largely based on a misreading of orc intentions. Despite the scale of the invasion, von Nieder assumed the enemy had come to Hochland as raiders. Accordingly, he expected them to move comparatively slowly as they paused to pillage every village and township along the way.

  The reality was different. The greenskins moved swiftly. No one would ever know the reason, but it seemed Morgoth Ironfang was intent on utterly destroying Hochland—not by inflicting piecemeal devastation, but by striking southwards to the very heart of the province. Perhaps Ironfang saw himself as some re-embodiment of the great orc warlords of old, come to sweep away mankind and reclaim the orcs’ ancestral homelands. Perhaps he was just a greenskin with a grudge. Who can say why an orc does anything?

  Whatever the case, through his premature decision to break camp, von Nieder had played right into Ironfang’s hands…

  CHAPTER SIX

  BATTLE LINES

  By the time Dieter and the others sprinted across the open ground that marked the boundary between the edge of the forest and the beginning of the encampment, it was clear matters were worse than they expected.

  Inside the perimeter, the entire camp was in a state of pandemonium. Everywhere Dieter looked, confusion reigned. Officers and sergeants shouted contradictory orders. Messengers ran in every direction. Soldiers raced around like headless chickens.

  Clearly, news of the greenskin presence had come before them, but there seemed no coherence to the army’s response. Much of the artillery was already packed away, but as Dieter watched he saw some gunners hurrying to unpack their guns while others continued to make their artillery ready for the road as though nothing had changed.

  In front of his disbelieving eyes, Dieter saw two captains of artillery come to blows as they argued the point. Soon, a gaggle of gunners had gathered around them, cheering their respective captains as they wrestled in the dirt. Despairing of splitting them apart, a master engineer fired a warning shot from his repeater pistol into the air. It was to no avail.

  “Idiots,” Hoist rumbled angrily once he saw the fight. “An army of orcs about to break from the trees and our artillerymen are fighting amongst themselves.”

  Abruptly, a familiar figure arrived to adjudicate the matter. Pushing his way toward the combatants through the cheering throng of gunners, Captain Harkner kicked one of the struggling officers in the groin and punched the other in the face. Having got their attention, he remonstrated with them swiftly, before turning back to the crowd of gunners.

  “This is an army, not a tavern,” he said, his voice carrying despite the fact he spoke quietly. “And you are soldiers, not a bunch of drunkards. Any man who fights his comrades is derelict in his duty, as is anyone who stands by and watches them fight without trying to stop it. You all know the punishment for dereliction.”

  He stared the gunners down, allowing his words to sink in.

  “Get back to work. Get those guns unlimbered and set them to cover the tree line. The orcs are coming, and it could be the artillery is all that will stop this camp from being overran.”

  Cowed, the gunners hurried back to their duties, their bruised captains lagging shamefacedly behind them. Satisfied, Harkner turned away.

  “So, you made it then?” Harkner said, greeting Sergeant Bohlen as the men of the file rushed to meet him. “And you, Gerhardt. And Hoist and Rieger and the rest. I see even our new recruit Lanz made it. Good job, all of you. As you can see, you came back just in time.”

  “What in the name of Ranald’s arse is going on?” Bohlen asked. “You’ll have to excuse my language, sir, but we arrived back here to find it looks like the whole camp has gone mad. Where’s the pickets? Who ordered the artillery packed up? There’s a horde of greenskins about to break screaming from the trees and the camp is next to defenceless.”

  “Ranald’s arse is right, sergeant,” Harkner replied darkly. “Somewhere, the trickster god must be laughing his guts out over this mess. By the time I arrived back at camp with the rest of the regiment, I learned orders had been issued for the army to break camp while we were still in the forest.”

  Seeing Bohlen was about to comment, Harkner raised a hand to quiet him.

  “I know, sergeant, you needn’t say it. It is rank stupidity. What’s the point of sending men into the woods to scout for the enemy, if you don’t wait for them to report back before you break camp? No doubt someone’s head will end up on a pike by way of atonement when all this is over. But, in the meantime, we have more pressing business. How far away were the greenskins last time you saw them?”

  “Right on our heels,” Bohlen answered. “We didn’t see any orcs, but the woods were thick with goblins like flies on a cow’s backside. They eased off when we reached the tree line, but they’ll still be there, watching us. And you can bet with the goblins here already the orcs won’t be far behind.”

  “Then we’ll just have to make sure we have a warm welcome waiting for them,” the captain said. “I’ll warn you now, our position is even more exposed than you may have gathered. If the orcs do attack, we won’t have any cavalry to help us. General von Nieder sent the knights and other mounted units on ahead first thing this morning. They
are supposed to be scouting the trail for the rest of the army to follow. Naturally, the general sent messengers to recall them when he heard about the greenskins. Though whether they’ll get back in time to help us is anybody’s guess.”

  “No knights?” Bohlen shook his head in disbelief. “Just when I was thinking things couldn’t get worse…”

  “I wouldn’t worry too much, sergeant,” the captain smiled, trying to make light of the situation. “Everyone knows it’s the infantry who wins the Empire’s battles. If anything, we should thank whoever it is that sent the knights away. Finally, we have been granted an opportunity to show our true character.”

  “By facing off against an army of greenskins without any cavalry to help us and with most of our artillery still packed away? Frankly, sir, I have always preferred showing my character in less arduous circumstances.”

  “Agreed.” The captain shrugged. “But the situation is what it is, sergeant. We will have to make the best of it we can.”

  He pointed west, to an area further along the encampment’s perimeter.

  “I left the rest of the regiment over there, plugging a gap in the line between two units of spearmen. Take your men to join them. You’ll be in command in my absence, Bohlen. Seeing as no one seems to be doing much to prepare the army against the enemy advance, I intend to do what I can to get things organised. I’ll return to the regiment when I can.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Saluting, Sergeant Bohlen made to turn away, only to pause and glance back at his captain.

  “Sir? I’ll see you later. Sigmar willing.”

  “I’ll see you later too, sergeant,” Harkner nodded. He looked toward the trees and the hidden horde of greenskins sheltering somewhere out of sight, before he turned to the men of the file.