by Eric Flint
A Polish gunner lay on the ground, blown off his feet but otherwise uninjured, shaking his head less to clear it than in confusion. The Russian guns were half again out of a cannon’s effective range. But even as he lay there, he heard another boomcrack and the gun carriage of one of the six Polish nine-pound sakers was struck and damaged by another Russian round. The gunner, after due consideration, decided that where he was, was a rather good place to be. Much better than standing up next to the guns.
Aleksander Korwin Gosiewski was not so sanguine. In the midst of disaster, he saw what he wanted to see. The Russians had opened a breech in their wall to allow their cannons to fire. He decided that if he moved fast enough he could exploit the breech. He rapped out orders to Colonel Bortnowski and sent off the messenger. “Attack now. Go for the breech. Charge, curse you! Charge!”
Much against his better judgment, Colonel Bortnowski charged. In a manner of speaking, the charge of a pike unit is rather akin to the charge of a turtle. Slow and steady. Which may win the race and may even win a battle when it’s charging another pike unit. But when charging a wall two hundred fifty yards away and when that wall is manned by troops with rifled chamber-loading AK3’s that can be fired, have the chamber switched, then fired again several times, the charge of a pike unit becomes an organized form of suicide. Eventually, of course, the pikes broke. But not nearly soon enough. Their casualties were much worse than the casualties the Russian cavalry units had suffered just weeks before. Colonel Bortnowski was among the dead. They really should have used the Cossack cavalry, but it was in the wrong place.
The Polish force withdrew, but it was only temporary, as General Izmailov knew quite well.
“Gentlemen, our situation is untenable as it stands,” General Izmailov said. “We must take Rzhev and soon. Tim, I want you to coordinate with the unit commanders, start tightening the collar again. Get us salients as close to the to the walls of Rzhev as you can…”
The general described what he wanted and work began again. The plan was to get several points right up against the walls of Rzhev. That would still leave the problem of defending against a potential attack by the Polish relief force while using most of his force to breech the defenses of Rzhev. To attack effectively-and just as important, quickly-they would need overwhelming force against the troops occupying the town. To get that, they were going to have to virtually strip the outer golay golrod of fighting men. And like any fortification, no matter how temporary or permanent, the walking walls needed to be manned be effective.
Two weeks later they were in position and as ready as they were going to get. At the closest point the inner golay golrod was only twenty feet from the makeshift walls around Rzhev and there were five points where they were within fifty feet.
Nick gave a bit more steam to the right side engine to turn Testbed left. The winds were gusty. He had gotten word a week before that they would be making the attack on Rzhev today. His job was especially vital because to make it look real they had to know where the Polish forces were attacking long before it happened. He looked out and noted the position of a Polish cavalry unit.
Rrrrriiiipppppp!
Nick looked up and swore.
The gas bladders on Testbed were made of goldbeater skin. Those were made from the outer membranes of the intestines of large animals, usually though not always calves. Goldsmiths used them to beat out gold leaf. For goldbeater skin, the intestines were cut open and glued together a couple of layers thick. The sheets of goldbeater skin were mostly self-adhesive and formed into short, fat sausage shapes rather than round balloons. It had never occurred to anyone to wonder what would happen if you applied steam.
Granted, by the time the steam reached the steam bladder it had cooled quite a bit. On the other hand, the steam bladder on Testbed had by now been slow-cooking for several weeks. A little bit of extra steam pressure was all it took. Of course, it gave along the seams. As soon as the rip happened, the steam spread out still further and turned into mist, then started condensing onto the other gas bags in Testbed, where it did comparatively little harm. But the steam cell was gone; its lift was gone.
The gondola lurched. Nick swore again and reached for a lever to angle the thrust that remained to him.
The steam bladder, when filled and functioning properly, provided about five hundred pounds of lift to Testbed. The semi-rigid airship had just gone from neutral buoyancy to five hundred pounds negative buoyancy. Which didn’t mean it dropped like a five-hundred-pound lead weight. It was more like a five-hundred-pound feather. The steam bladder was located three-quarters of the way to the front of Testbed, just above the gondola, so naturally it nosed down. Which meant that the engines were pushing down as well. Airships dive like they do every other maneuver. Slowly. A similar disaster in an airplane would have given the pilot less than two minutes to fix the problem, as the plane nosed over and accelerated to over a hundred miles an hour straight down. Nick had a good five minutes before he would hit the ground.
First, reverse thrust on the steam engines. Nick shifted a couple of levers. Then, angling the thrust-he shifted more levers as he continued to lose altitude. Shift the trim weight. More work. He had to crank it back to the tail of Testbed. In doing these things, Nick lost about two thousand feet of altitude.
“It’s coming right at us!” one man screamed.
The big balloon looked to the Polish troops on the ground like it was making a slow-motion dive-bombing run-not that they had ever seen a dive-bombing run of any sort. The nose of Testbed was pointing straight at them and it was billowing white smoke. Steam, actually, but they didn’t know that.
“Fire, you bastards! Fire!”
Chaos reigned for minutes. Some of the men decided to be elsewhere, but a surprising number stood their ground and started shooting.
Testbed was still out of what could reasonably be considered effective range of a seventeenth-century musket. At that range a seventeenth-century musket couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn. But Testbed was significantly bigger than the broad side of a barn. Even a big barn. Inevitably, it got hit several times. Bladders filled with hydrogen were struck by musket balls. And nothing much happened. To get hydrogen to explode takes three things, hydrogen, oxygen and a spark. The hydrogen and oxygen need to be mixed together fairly well to get any kind of significant flame. But the crucial issue here was the lack of a spark. The lead shot back from the muskets was indeed still quite hot, but not that hot. Besides, there was all that steam condensation on the bladders and the skin of Testbed.
“Nothing’s happening! It’s still coming!”
By the time Nick had Testbed leveled out, it had a couple of dozen holes poked in the skin and three of its four hydrogen bladders had been punctured. But it took a long time for the hydrogen to leak out of a balloon forty feet across. Testbed continued on, as best anyone on the ground could tell, totally unaffected by the shots fired at it.
As best anyone on the ground could tell.
“Stupid fools,” Nick said. Testbed was losing lifting gas and was already negatively buoyant. Further, it was not recovering any of the steam it was using to run the engines. So while Nick had hours of fuel left, he had five or ten minutes of water and when that ran out, he would lose power. Nick headed for base.
He didn’t make it. He literally ran out of steam just over halfway there. Absent the engines that had been holding him up, he started to sink, fairly slowly, to the ground. Nose first.
Back at the battle, Gosiewski saw his opportunity but had some difficulty exploiting it. After the disastrous attack of the first day there wasn’t a lot of enthusiasm for frontal attacks on the golay golrod. It took a while to get things organized.
Chapter 60
Sergeant John Hampstead looked over at his captain. “They’ll be coming, sir. Now that the balloon is gone.”
“I know.” The captain nodded. “But where?”
Hampstead shrugged. “Maybe on the left. There are some gaps on that side. Sure
as hell, we can’t be everywhere.” Their unit had been left on the outer wall to stiffen the peasant levies which were unarmed, just there to make it look like the wall was manned. The peasants had sticks painted to look like rifles and muskets, because the Russian government wasn’t keen on arming peasants. Armed peasants tended to turn into Cossacks or bandits. Not that there was much difference between the two.
So Sergeant Hampstead and Captain Boyce had been assigned to go to wherever the Poles attacked and shoot so that it looked like the whole wall was manned by armed troops.
Captain Boyce nodded again. “It’s as good a place as any, John. Start shifting the men.” They could hear shooting from behind them. The Russians were in Rzhev and would be occupied for hours cleaning out the Polish troops in the town. If the outer wall was to hold, it would be them that held it.
“Form the men just inside the wall! We’re going to wait right there.”
“What about the firing ports, Captain?”
“I’m getting sneaky, John,” Captain Boyce told his sergeant. “As important as holding this part of the wall is, convincing the Poles that we are just one of the units manning them is just as important. We need to give them a reason why the other parts of the wall aren’t shooting.” Then he turned to the peasant levies. “Who’s in charge here?”
Having identified the man, Boyce explained what he wanted. “Tie ropes onto the golay golrod. When I give you the word I want you to pull these two sections apart. As quickly as you can. Then when I tell you, push them closed again.”
Then man nodded and started giving orders. It would give them a roughly twenty-foot front. “John, two ranks only and keep the pike men in reserve. Have the men fire as the golay golrod clear the breech. Then fall back as soon as they have fired. Reload and reform as the walls come back together.”
It didn’t go like clockwork. Unless you were talking about a clock with a busted arrester gear.
“Open!” The walls started coming back with dozens of men pulling each wall. The troops started firing. Blam Blam, Blam Blam, and the walls retreated. And they did a credible job at first of retreating behind the golay golrod but then things went awry. Some men kept going, others stopped too soon and the walls caught up and passed them, leaving them exposed to enemy fire. Almost no one had time to reload because they were too busy moving. Then there were the Polish troops-who had been taking sniper fire from those walls for weeks. As best Boyce could tell, no one gave the order but the Polish formation went into a charge as the walls opened. They took casualties, lots of them, since Boyce’s troops were firing from pointblank range. But the Poles saw the breech and ran right over their fallen to get to it.
Boyce ordered the wall to close before it was all the way opened. But it wasn’t soon enough. The walls didn’t close all the way; they were blocked by Polish troops.
Boyce on one side and Hampstead on the other, they struggled to reform the men and close the breech. They weren’t alone. The Russian peasants, armed with whatever was handy, were right there with them.
Ivan didn’t really know why he’d been assigned to this wall section, or even why he’d been pulled away from his farm. But one thing he did know was that Polish forces loose in Russia were a bad thing. He’d been hearing the stories all his life, how the Poles had decimated his village and killed his grandfather.
He didn’t have one of the fancy guns the soldiers had, but he did have an ax he used to cut wood for the walking wall. If nothing else, he and his peers could use their axes against the Poles. And they would, he knew. Nobody wanted the Poles in charge again. The boyars were bad enough.
So he stood in the shadow of the wall, waiting for the inevitable rush of men trying to get inside. Then he swung the ax, the blade flat because he didn’t want it to get stuck in bone or armor. The Pole dropped to the ground and Ivan swung at the next one. Misha was swinging just as frequently. Some of the Poles got past, of course. An ax doesn’t have much chance against a sword, a pike, or even a flintlock pistol.
Still, they kept swinging.
“Get a message to Izmailov,” Boyce shouted across the breech. “Send a man, now!”
Hampstead grabbed the nearest man and sent him inside Rzhev. “Tell the general we need more men. And we need them now, if he doesn’t want the Poles up his backside!”
In a sense, Boyce’s trick had worked.
To the Poles it did look like one more weird Russian maneuver using the golay golrod, but their commander thought that this one had backfired. It was clearly poorly planned and not drilled nearly enough. At least, not at the place the Polish force had attacked. It might work better at other points along the line, but that didn’t really matter. They had a breech and poured everything they could into it. The unsupported peasants at other places along the wall were not attacked. And the maneuvering to bring forces to the breech cost the Poles time.
“Back to the walls,” Izmailov roared. “These pigs are well stuck.”
Janusz Radziwill was dead, and most of his officers. The remaining force inside Rzhev were rounded up and under guard. “Back to the walls,” Izmailov roared again. Tim gathered the men he’d been leading and headed back to the breech in Rzhev’s walls.
“There’s nothing there but peasants and sticks,” Gosiewski shouted. “You’re not turning back from peasants, are you?”
The Polish forces pushed toward the breech again.
“Here they come!” Tim’s voice cracked on “come.”
But it didn’t matter that he was only seventeen. The men followed him readily. Nor were they the only group. Russian troops were turning over their prisoners to anyone handy and heading back to the walls. Unit cohesion ceased to exist. But by then most of the Poles in Rzhev were unarmed and most of the citizens of Rzhev weren’t.
Suddenly Tim stopped dead in his tracks. They had reached the outer wall but the Poles weren’t actually coming at them. They were nowhere near the breech. The Poles were crossing in front of them, not preparing to attack. He looked around trying to make sense out of the confusion and chaos that was battle.
Rzhev had been retaken. The volley guns and cannon that had been preventing resupply were no longer needed in that role. They hadn’t been moved in preparation for the battle because the general didn’t want the Poles across the Volga making a dash to reinforce Rzhev while the assault was still going on. But now, what purpose were the volley guns serving? He turned to find a man with an AK3 near him.
“Can you hold here with what you have?”
“I should be able to. Besides, more men are coming all the time. What you have in mind?
What Tim had in mind was far above his authority. “Never mind. You men! Stay here.” Then Tim ran. By going inside the inner wall, he shortened the distance he had to travel considerably. It still took him ten minutes to reach the volley guns. And considerable shouting to get them to pull away the wall section. “The general’s orders! Bring the volley guns and follow me.”
Of course, they weren’t the general’s orders; they were Tim’s orders. And if the general decided to make an issue of it, Tim was going to be in a great deal of trouble. But somewhere during the battle the career of Lieutenant Boris Lebedev had decreased in importance. What was vitally important was getting the volley guns where they were needed.
Tim stood on the volley gun platform, which was being pulled by two steppe ponies. It wasn’t a grand gesture; he needed the height to see over the wall to locate the breech. “That way!” He pointed. “Another hundred yards.”
Tim and the gun crew were inside the inner walking wall. Just on the other side of it was a mob scene, packed with Poles slowly pushing back. The Russian defenders were spread along the wooden trench made by the two walls. Carefully, they lined up the volley guns at points where wall sections met.
That was when Tim realized the flaw in his magnificent plan. The golay golrod were made up of wall sections that could be latched together. But the latches here and now were on the other side. They could
n’t open the walls. They knew where the latches were; there was one near the top one and near the bottom. Tim cursed himself for a fool. “We’ll have to move the volley guns to where we control the walls.” He climbed back up on the gun platform and looked over the wall again, almost getting shot for his trouble. “Over there.” He pointed back the way they’d come. “Three wall sections.”
When they got to a section that the Russians mostly controlled, Tim used the volley gun platform and scaled the wall. This time he almost got chopped up by a Russian peasant with a bloody ax and covered with gore. “Open the walls! Open the latches! Let the volley guns through!” And, surprisingly enough, that’s just what they did.
The Russian version of the volley gun was an outgrowth of the same technology used in the AK3. The plates were loaded with AK3 firing chambers and were ignited by a quick fuse. They were slower firing than the ones in the west, but Russia was still having trouble with primers. They had twenty-four barrels arranged in three rows of eight. If all went well, the preparatory work was done on the chamber plates before the battle started, so all that was needed to reload was to pull a chamber plate and replace it with another before lighting the fuse. They were cranked, but only for traversing.
The last Russian slipped from in front of the volley gun. The gunner lit the fuse and started cranking. Crack Crack Crack Crack.. twenty-four barrels in order. Then the gunner pulled the plate, inserted another and did it again. The gunners for the volley guns were big men. The plates weighed upwards of thirty pounds.
The volley guns wouldn’t have been enough by themselves, but they took the pressure off the Russian troops long enough for a semblance of organization to occur. Unarmed peasants retreated to be replaced by armed Streltzi carrying AK3’s, and the weight of fire shifted. The battle for Rzhev was effectively over.