by Smith, Skye
They were now past the ambush woods, and Rob pulled off the road onto a slight rise so he could view the town ahead through his spectacle scope. It wasn't long before Waller joined him there. The River Avon was running fast and deep on their right, while the smaller River Tetbury was on their left. Ahead where the rivers came closer together, there was a neck of land. The lower, new town stretched along the gently rising neck of land that led to the wall around the higher, older town.
Except for the neck, the high town was completely surround by the two rivers. This view of the old town was impressive. It was built on a flat topped hill where the rivers joined, and so it was protected not only by the rivers, which were flooding perhaps two man heights deep, but also by the steep hill slope rising up to the plateau, and also by the stone wall built along the crest of the slope. The only possible way of attacking the old town was along the neck, so the logical place to make camp was near the manor and village of Westport over towards the River Tetbury's bank.
"This town has the best natural defenses of any inland town I have ever seen," Waller cursed, or was it in admiration?
In his youth Rob had read history at Oxford, and from memory he told him, "Which is why it is the oldest surviving town in the kingdom. It was fortified even before King Alfred fought the northern hoards, though by the look of the stone walls, they were added by the Normans."
"Well whoever built the walls knew what they were doing," Waller grumbled as he scanned the walls through Rob's looker. "A river bridge on each of three sides leading to a gate, and it seems like the only bridge to the neck is near that abbey tower. I can't see the neck's actual gate so they must have dog-legged that part of the wall so you can't aim a straight shot at the gate with a cannon ball."
"In those days it would have been trebuchets," Rob pointed out, "but the dog leg has the same effect." He rode closer in to the general so he could speak softly. "Just don't go wasting any men on those walls. This is a only a diversion, remember."
Waller's mood immediately brightened. "True. Thank you for reminding me, Rob. Well if we are going to pound it with our light field guns, where would have the most effect?"
"You mean after we take the lower town and the neck?" Rob replied as he took back his looker. "Even the lower town will give us problems. Look. The outer ring of houses all have curtain walls to keep the grazing animals out of their kitchen gardens. Taking the lower town may mean fighting house to house, ambush after ambush."
Rob focused the two lenses at where the abbey gate was hidden by the zig zag in the wall. Slowly he moved the long tube from one end of this wall to the other, and then went back to where the gate was. "I would take down the crenellations that run along the wall on both sides of the gate. Without the crenellations, their musketeers won't be able to take cover while they reload. That should convince them that you mean to storm the gate."
"And are we going to storm the gate?" Waller asked with a raised eyebrow.
"Not bloody likely," Rob said. "Like you said, whomever built these walls knew what they were doing. Inside that gate there will be a yard surrounded by an inner wall and a barricade. A killing yard."
"I agree. As you said, Malmesbury is a diversion to enable the main campaign against the new Welsh army. We just need to make a lot of noise attacking the walls to draw the royalist forces away from Gloucester.” With that Waller again borrowed the looker, but this time handed it to his other officers so they could have a good stare. He was waiting for the signal from the other parts of his army. The companies who had ridden along the other sides of the two rivers.
"There they are," an ensign eventually said pointing. The mission of these other companies was to block off the river bridges, which they were already doing by ripping out the planking on their end of the bridges. Once the bridges were well blocked by gaps, barricades, and muskets, the companies would ride along the rivers and confiscate any boats they found. The royalists would then be sealed in on three sides by the very rivers that protect the town, and sealed in on the neck side by Waller's main force.
"Right," Waller said to his officers. "Let us begin. First I want those garden walls cleared of ambushers so that we can approach Westport. And let's try to trick them into retreating to Westport rather than to the town wall."
Within the hour, the field guns had been brought up, and began pounding the garden walls to flush the ambushers. Those guns pounded the walls with balls, which was like playing bowls because the stone garden walls were of loose, unmortared stone. Meanwhile other field guns loaded with grape shot were aligned to shoot along the narrow lanes between the walls, so that if any reinforcements tried to use them, they would be viciously pummeled.
It took another hour to flush out the royalists from the garden walls, and once that was done Waller ordered some musketeers up onto the roofs of the first buildings and behind the just cleared walls. Since all the flushed men had retreated towards the town wall, the royalists holding Westport became cut off. As the army moved forward towards the manor village, Rob wondered why the town garrison would have been so stupid as to strand their own men. His suspicious curiosity got the better of him so he told his company to dismount so that they could stay low and circle wide of Westport and scout out what was on the river side of the manor and village.
What they found explained it all. There was a fourth bridge at Westport, a bridge that surely was where the Gloucester Road crossed the River Tetbury. The bridge must have been newer than the town walls because it was outside of them and not defended by bastions. Because of this, the town garrison had spent some time and effort in building a breastwork for a gun emplacement to guard the bridge. As Rob stared at the breastwork through his looker, he could see that they were busy turning the big gun away from the bridge and towards Waller's army. He sent two men to report this to Waller, while he continued to scout the rest of the area. Hopefully he would find some way of slowing down the aiming of the big gun.
"There it is," Rob mumbled to himself as he spotted a blind spot caused by an orchard planted where the banks of the river came closest to Westport's manor house. He sent another two men to tell Waller to keep the royalists in the manor busy in the front, while he tried an attack from the rear. He then sent a squad scrambling down the river bank to see if they could sneak their axes close the bridge by keeping to the cover of the thick bushes along the river bank.
"Don't show yourselves until you hear our dragons roar," Rob told them, "but then put your axes to work on that bridge and create a gap in the decking too wide for a horse to leap. The last thing we need while we are attacking the backside of this manor, is to be surprised by a royalist flying squad coming across that bridge."
With men gone to the bridge, and men gone to Waller, he was short handed, but it was still worth a try. "Leave anything but weapons here, and make sure none of your guns are cocked," he told his twenty remaining men. "I don't want any noise to give us away." He waited impatiently for them to remove their packs and gear, and when they were ready he led them towards the orchard.
They must have been cherry trees because they were pruned low and were already in full bloom and very pink. It seemed almost blasphemous to be sneaking through tunnels of pink love on their way to do violence to other men. They waited in the depths of pink snow until all hell broke loose from the main army on the other side of the manor, and then they ran towards the manor house. By keeping close to the wall and ducking under the level of the windows, they kept out of sight as they made their way to the breastwork end of the building.
They almost shit themselves when a cannon round shook the very wall they were sneaking along. It must have flown through a front window and through the rooms of the house to hit this back wall. "Calm down," Rob hissed at his men. "Waller must have brought his drake cannon forward to put the royalist gun out of business.” As that message got passed down the line of men, Rob peered around the corner of the house. The breastwork was a half circle built around the side wall of the manor. The
gunners were out of dragon range, but well within carbine range. "Carbineers forward," he hissed to the men behind him.
Ten men came forward, and Rob told them, "Check your primes and cock your flints now. You must all walk out from behind this wall at the same time, choose a gunner, and all fire at the same time. Take enough time to aim, but it must be done as quickly as possible. Got it. Who's the slowest aim?"
"I am," a lad no more than eighteen admitted.
"Then you will call the shot when you are ready. Call it and squeeze the trigger. Then all of you duck back behind the house. Got it?"
"Aye, Cap'n."
"Ready. Do it!" Rob hissed.
The carbineers stepped out from behind the wall. There was a moments hush, then a call, and then ten explosions. Rob had to step forward out of cover and pull two of them back, because they were just standing still with mouths open, staring and trying to see if they had hit anyone. While he was pulling them he had a glance himself. The lads had done pretty good. All of the gunners were down, some screaming and holding themselves, some trying to crawl to cover, some not moving. He ducked behind cover just in time because another ball from Waller's drake smashed into the breastwork and sent shards of rock ricocheting all around them.
The musket fire from the front of the house slowed, became sporadic, and then stopped completely. Rob dared another peek around the corner. Three of the gunners were standing on the broken breastwork with their hands in the air. "Right you lot," he hissed at the lads, "now we take over the gun position, and for Chri'sake keep low, and keep me covered while I go and show myself to Waller.” He walked up behind the gunners and then climbed up on the breastwork to stand beside them and wave his white kerchief.
As he watched he could see dust rising off to the rear of Waller's army. It was from the wrong direction for Waller's supply carts to be catching up to him, so he pulled out his looker and stared above the mass of men and horses and equipment spread out in front of him. Waller was in a slight dip of land so from the vantage of this breastwork Rob could handily see above them all. He cursed and then stared hard again, just to be sure. Whatever was kicking up the dust was moving too fast to be carts.
He leaped down from the broken breastwork and began to run across open land towards Waller. The front line of musketeers was about a hundred yards away, and Waller a hundred behind them. After barely a dozen steps he heard the sound of shots behind him, and he leaped sideways and spun around to see who was shooting. A royalist musketeer was doubled up on the roof of the manor, and then he lost his footing and fell from the roof. Standing on the breastwork the eighteen year old carbineer still had his gun aimed at the roof.
The lad saw him looking and yelled to him, "Just doin' my job, cap'n. Keepin' you alive."
Rob waved and then continued his run. Waller's line of musketeers were now moving forward to secure the village, but he ran right through them. Out of breath from the mad dash, he interrupted Waller mid sentence to say, "Large flying squad coming in fast to your rear," and only then did he allow himself to suck deeply of the air.
Waller dropped what he was saying and turned to a fully armoured man next to him, his second in command Arthur Haselrig, and told him, "Arthur, this is a job for your London Lobsters. Ride man, ride."
Arthur looked down at the panting Blake and asked, "From which direction do they come?"
"From Cirencester way," Rob panted back. "To the north of the road we came by. When you get out of this dip you will see their dust.” He kept panting while Arthur clipped his helmet visor with his gloved hand and then spurred his armoured charger to a run and was followed by his company. They were Parliament's only regiment of heavy cuirassiers. Their full length armour was layered in sections like the tail of a Lobster. It took a big man and a big horse to carry all that weight and still run and fight.
Such heavy cavalry were now almost a thing of the past, because each one represented a fortune in gear and horse. Still, however, it was the only force that could charge into grape shot, musket shot, and sabres and still press their attack home. They were so heavy and well armoured that the only way of stopping them was by stopping the horse. It was a bit of battlefield irony that the enemy that the heavy cuirassiers feared the most was often the poorest man on the field. The rare pikeman who did not flinch as a ton of charging flesh and metal skewered itself upon his grounded pike. Once a Lobster was unsaddled, he was finished as far as fighting was concerned.
While the Lobsters rode away to protect their flank from what on closer inspection was a hoard of royalist cavalryers, Waller ordered the prisoners from Westport rounded up and tied, and his own camp set up with the captured manor as his headquarters. Once all that was in motion, he turned his field guns, his dragoons, and his own attention towards clearing the lower town of royalists. This didn't take as long as he thought it would. It was as if the fall of the breastwork at Westport had made those setting up ambushes in the narrow streets of the lower town realize that the logical place to make their stand was at the town wall and not amongst the houses outside of it.
Within an hour Waller had moved the largest of his field guns, his drakes, close enough to the wall to be completely accurate. His dragoons now controlled all of the houses just outside the town wall and from those sheltered positions they could easily protect the drakes from any sortie out from the gate. Only then did the bombardment begin in earnest. It was unrelenting for an hour, and then two hours while every crenellation along the sections of the wall on each side of the abbey gate were pulverized. The tower above the gate was pulverized. The four hundred year old stone walls were stout, but the mortar was old and could not hold the stones in place against the power of modern cannon balls.
And it wasn't just the wall that was taking a beating. Because the balls were targeting the crenellations that topped the walls, many a stray or half spent ball careened into the abbey's towers, or on missing them, into the old town. For hours the garrison and every person in the town must have huddled in fear in the cellars or behind the stoutest of walls. The bombardment continued through the night, and then suddenly, just after midnight, the cannons went still. Soon after that, the musketeers who were targeting any royalist musketeer foolish enough to be up on top of the wall, also stopped shooting.
Rob was woken out of his slumber by the sudden quiet, and raced to the manor to find out what was happening. He got to Waller just as the general hissed to his quartermasters, "What do you mean we are out of shot, and almost out of powder?"
"You told us to leave some of the carts under heavy guard at the fork in the road that leads through the Cotswold Hills to Stroud. You said it was senseless to haul it all this way just to haul it back again.” Everyone was speaking in hushed terms. Running out of munitions was not the type of news you wanted to spread about.
"Well we obviously left too much of it there," Waller said in a gentler tone.
"Sir, you have been bombarding the town for hours and hours using your biggest guns. The musketeers have been firing at shadows on the wall. That is what has depleted our supplies to almost nothing."
"You should have told me this hours ago, and I would have slowed the bombardment." Waller went suddenly silent. In his own mind he was cursing himself for getting so involved in this siege, because it was supposed to be just a diversion. "Well I suppose I should order the drakes pulled back away from the wall. If we are so low on munitions, then we don't want to risk them to a surprise sortie. How many hours until dawn?"
"About three, sir. Everyone in camp will be relieved by the quiet. No one was getting any sleep. Major Haselrig was just here complaining. He says that he chased the royalists halfway back to Cirencester before they gave up, so his men need to rest."
"My men also," Rob spoke out from the other side of the room. He had been wandering about the command room to see if there were any hot drinks being served up for the officers on night watch. "Sorry to interrupt. I'll be gone as soon as I pour myself some of this mud the cook swears is
kofe."
"Liar," Waller called to him, but in a friendly voice. "You came to find out why the sudden silence. Come closer so I can tell you.” And he did.
After listening to the problem and then thinking a while, Rob told his general, "If this sudden silence has our officers wandering the camp wondering what is happening, then what do you think the garrison officers are doing. They'll be up on the walls, gingerly taking a peek. You certainly can't just haul the drakes away while they watch, else they'll assume you are being attacked on the flanks again, and successfully attacked this time. That would certainly cause them to sortie out in force."
"In that case I certainly can't leave the drakes there to be captured," Waller said thoughtfully, and then is face brightened and he called out to his officers, "Rouse every man and send them all forward towards the wall. With that many men outside the abbey gate, they won't dare sortie out."
"Sounds good, though your men won't thank you for rousing them. They will have only just gotten to sleep."
"Poor babies," Waller said with a smirk. He hadn't had any sleep for almost a full day. "But point taken. In that case rouse them with trumpet and drum." He called over his ensign messengers and sent them out into the night to spread the word.
Rob followed the messengers out of the manor, and then walked around to the back of the manor and down the slope to the bridge. His men were sleeping in what once must have been the toll house next to the bridge. They had been charged with the duty of guarding the bridge since it was they who earlier today had ripped up enough planking to create an eight foot gap in it. No, that wasn't today, not any more. That was now yesterday.
"Do we have to answer the call to arms?" Fodder asked.
"I don't think so," Rob replied. "This is an important bridge so it must be watched."
"But the gap?"
"The gap can be filled in easily enough, and quickly."
"How?" Fodder asked disbelieving.
"Simply wheel a cart with a ten foot bed up to the gap and then push it across. The wheels will drop down the gap, but the cart bed will bridge it."