Advance and Retreat wotp-3

by Harry Turtledove

  Sergeant Thisbe led Gremio’s old company. Thisbe wasn’t the only sergeant in charge of a company in the Army of Franklin, either-far from it.

  “Ask you something, sir?” Thisbe said now, coming up alongside of Gremio.

  “If you’re rash enough to think I know answers, go ahead,” he replied.

  “If you don’t, sir, who does?” Thisbe asked. The answer to that, all too probably, was no one. Before Gremio could say as much, the underofficer went on, “Once we get down to Ramblerton, Captain, what are we going to do there?”

  “Why, capture the town, of course. Storm the fortifications. Slay the southrons, and drive away the ones we don’t slay. Go sweeping south into Cloviston. We’ll see the Highlow River in a couple of weeks, don’t you think?”

  That was what Lieutenant General Bell had had in mind when he left Dothan for Franklin. Maybe, if he’d crushed John the Lister at Summer Mountain instead of letting him get away, his dream might have come true. Now? It wasn’t even a bitter joke, not any more.

  Sergeant Thisbe sent Gremio a reproachful look. “That isn’t even a little bit funny, sir. The way things turned out-” The underofficer stopped.

  “Yes. The way things turned out.” Gremio liked that. It let them talk about what they’d just been through without really talking about it. If Thisbe had called it the catastrophe, that would have been just as true and more descriptive, but they both would have had to remember the dreadful fighting in the trenches and their failure to dislodge the southrons from around that farmhouse. Even their mages had failed. If that wasn’t catastrophe for the north, what was? But Gremio had to mention some of what had happened there, some of what had left him in charge of a regiment and Thisbe a company: “Half a dozen brigadiers dead, Sergeant. More wounded. Gods only know how many colonels and majors and captains and lieutenants.”

  “And soldiers, sir. Don’t forget soldiers,” Thisbe said.

  “I’m not likely to,” Gremio answered. “We lost one man in four in the fight by the River of Death. That’s what kept Thraxton the Braggart from properly besieging Rising Rock-we’d got shot to pieces. Here we’ve lost a bigger portion than that. We must have. But Lieutenant General Bell is going on.”

  “Thraxton should have gone on,” Thisbe pointed out.

  “Yes. We had the enemy licked, and he held back,” Gremio agreed. “Did we lick John the Lister? Bell says we did, but I doubt it. And speaking of doubting, how many more men has Doubting George got in Ramblerton? They aren’t licked. Most of them haven’t fought at all. They’re just waiting for us.”

  Thisbe muttered something. It sounded like licking their chops. Gremio thought about asking, then changed his mind. He didn’t really want to know. Licking their chops seemed much too apt for comfort.

  But then Thisbe spoke aloud: “Everything you said is true, sir, every word of it. So what can we do when we get to Ramblerton?”

  “I don’t know, Sergeant. I just don’t know,” Gremio replied. “I don’t see anything. Lieutenant General Bell must, or we wouldn’t be going forward.”

  Up till now, Gremio had always been a man who wanted to know answers. He’d wanted to learn what would happen next before it did. That way, he could try to wring the most advantage from whatever it was. Now… now he didn’t want to know. All he wanted to do was go on putting one weary foot in front of the other. As long as he did that, he was doing his duty. No one could possibly complain about him. And whatever was going to happen-would happen.

  Every so often, he marched past a wrecked wagon or a twisted corpse in gray: proof the Army of Franklin had hit hard as well as being hit hard. He needed the reminders. Whenever he thought back to the Battle of Poor Richard, he remembered nothing but northerners falling all around him.

  Cold, clammy mud came in between the sole and upper of both shoes now. Still, he remained luckier than a lot of his men. Some of them had managed to take shoes from the bodies of southrons during the fight. Many more, though, were barefoot.

  And I’m ever so much luckier than the ones who didn’t come out of the fight. Gods damn Lieutenant General Bell. He yawned. He didn’t really want to keep marching. He wanted to sleep, with luck for weeks. As happened so often in war, what he wanted and what he got weren’t going to match.

  One of those bodies by the side of the road was neither southron nor, Gremio realized, dead. It was a northern soldier who’d fallen out of the column and fallen asleep because he couldn’t take another step. Exhausted as Gremio was, he had a harder time blaming the soldier than he would have otherwise.

  “Come on, men!” Thisbe’s voice and demeanor didn’t seem to have changed at all. “We can do it. We get where we’re going, we’ll rest then.”

  Where are we going? Gremio wondered. Oh, toward Ramblerton-he knew that full well. But what would the Army of Franklin do when it got there? What could it do when it got there? Gremio had had no answers for Sergeant Thisbe, and he had no answers for himself, either.

  Here came Colonel Florizel, now mounted on yet another new unicorn. Since his sudden promotion from regimental to wing commander, maybe he knew more of what, if anything, was in Lieutenant General Bell’s mind. Gremio waved to him and called out, “Colonel! Ask you something, sir?” I sound the way Thisbe did asking me, he thought.

  “Oh, hello, Captain Gremio. Yes? What is it?” Florizel remained the picture of a northern gentleman.

  “Sir, will we make Ramblerton today?”

  “I don’t think so, Captain,” Florizel replied. “We are weary-I know how weary I am-and we have many walking wounded, and we got off to a late start this morning. I expect us to camp on the road when the sun goes down, and then reach the provincial capital tomorrow.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Gremio supposed he really should have thanked Bell, not that he felt like it. He’d figured the commanding general would push on through the night regardless of the condition of his men. Why not? Bell had pushed ahead at Poor Richard, regardless of how many soldiers fell.

  But Colonel Florizel hadn’t finished yet. “There is something I want you to attend to most particularly tonight, Captain, you and all regimental commanders in my wing.” He grimaced at that; had things gone better, neither his status nor Gremio’s would have been so exalted.

  “What is it, sir?” Gremio had rarely seen Florizel so serious.

  “Post plenty of pickets. Post them well south of wherever we do encamp. If the southrons sally from Ramblerton, they must not-they must not-take us unawares. They will destroy us if they do. Destroy us, do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir. I agree completely. I’ll attend to it,” Gremio promised. He eyed his longtime superior, his new wing commander, with more than a little curiosity. Impelled by it, he risked a more abstract question: “What do you think our chances are, sir?”

  Florizel had been hardly less eager to charge ahead than Bell himself. Bell hadn’t learned much about restraint since taking command of the Army of Franklin. Had Florizel? Gremio waited to see.

  The baron from Palmetto Province plucked at his white beard. “I think our chances are…” he began, and then rode away without finishing the sentence. That answered Gremio’s question, too.

  They did camp by the side of the road, about two thirds of the way down from Poor Richard to Ramblerton. Mindful of Colonel Florizel’s orders, Gremio set an unusual number of pickets south of his regiment. That done, he wondered what he needed to take care of next. He’d commanded the regiment for less than two days now. As Florizel had, he went from one company to the next, making sure everything was in as good an order as it could be. He was sure Florizel had more to do than that: the colonel had surely kept records and talked with other regimental commanders. But no one was there to tell Gremio just what those other duties were. No one who knew was left alive and unwounded except for Florizel himself, and he was busy somewhere else.

  Sergeant Thisbe had the same sort of trouble figuring out everything a company commander was supposed to do. The underofficer,
though, could at least ask Gremio. After Gremio had answered the third or fourth question, he said, “You see, Sergeant? You should have let me make you a lieutenant after all. You would have known more about what you’re doing now.”

  “I never wanted to be a lieutenant, and you know it… sir,” Thisbe answered. “I don’t want to do the job I’m doing, either, but I don’t see that I’ve got much choice right now.”

  “I don’t see that you do, either,” Gremio said. “I’m proud to command the regiment, but this isn’t how I wanted to do it. Too many men dead. Feels as though our hopes have been shot dead, too, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. I wouldn’t have said that, but it’s in my mind, too,” Thisbe replied. The underofficer looked around to make sure nobody but Gremio was in earshot. “I wish we were marching back to Dothan, not down towards Ramblerton.”

  “Can’t be helped, Sergeant,” Gremio said, and Thisbe nodded. Gremio yawned. He went on, “The other thing is, we’re both bone weary. This whole army is bone weary. Things may look brighter once we get a little rest.”

  “Maybe. I hope so, sir.” Thisbe still sounded dubious. “Other question is, when will we ever get a little rest? We’ll sleep tonight-we’ll sleep tonight like so many dead men-but then we’ll march again. And after that… after that, it’s Ramblerton.”

  “I know. There’s no help for it, not unless we’d want to go back toward Dothan without orders or give up to the southrons the first chance we get.”

  “I’m no quitter, sir,” Thisbe said. “I aim to stick as long as anybody else does, and then half an hour longer. But I wish I saw some kind of way of getting a happy ending to the story.”

  “After the war-” Gremio began.

  “No, sir.” The sergeant gave a shake of the head. “After the war is after the war. That’s not what I’m talking about now. I’m talking about a happy ending to this campaign and to the whole fight.”

  “Oh.” Gremio shrugged. “In that case, I don’t know what to tell you.”

  He did sleep like a dead man that night, and woke the next morning still feeling like one. The nasty tea the cooks brewed up pried his eyelids apart and lent him a mournful interest in life.

  “Come on, men!” Thisbe called when the soldiers moved out after a meager breakfast. “We’ll go on to Ramblerton, and we’ll whip the southrons there.”

  “That’s right,” Gremio said. “We’ll chase the southrons all the way down to the Highlow River. We walloped ’em at Poor Richard. By the gods, we’ll wallop ’em again.” He did a barrister’s best to mask his pessimism.

  After every other fight in which he’d taken part, the men of his company-the men of the whole regiment-had always been ready for more, no matter how roughly the southrons had handled them. He’d expected them to raise a cheer now. They didn’t. They got to their feet and they marched. They didn’t complain. But something had gone out of them. Maybe it was hope.

  Whatever it was, Gremio wished he could put it back into the soldiers. To be able to do that, though, he would have had to find hope, or something like it, within himself as well. Try as he would, he couldn’t.

  Hope or no hope, the Army of Franklin reached Ramblerton about noon the next day. The wan sun of late autumn, low in the north behind Lieutenant General Bell’s men, sent their long shadows toward the capital of Franklin. At Bell’s orders, relayed by trumpeters and runners, his blue-clad soldiers formed a line along a ridge not far north of the city.

  As soon as Gremio’s men reached their assigned place, they started digging trenches and throwing up breastworks in front of them. Bell, Gremio knew, looked down his nose at fieldworks. Gremio didn’t care. He’d seen how many lives they saved, and urged the diggers on.

  While they worked, he got his own first good look at Ramblerton’s fortifications. Had he had much hope left, it would have died then.

  VI

  Ned of the Forest had been up close to Ramblerton before. He’d never had so many men at his back as he did now. All the same, he’d never felt less cheerful about his army’s chances.

  “What’s Bell going to do, Biff?” he demanded, pointing south. “What can Bell do, going up against… that?”

  “Gods damn me if I know, Lord Ned,” his regimental commander replied. “Those aren’t just fieldworks. That’s real fortcraft on display there: real castles, real stone walls, engines everywhere, ditches out in front of everything so we can’t even get at it, let alone over it.”

  “I know.” Ned scowled and kicked at the muddy ground under his feet. “When I joined up with the Army of Franklin, I reckoned it was pretty good-sized. I figured it could do something worth doing. But it’s just asking to kill itself if it goes up against works like those there.”

  “Other side of that copper is, the Army of Franklin’s a deal smaller now than it was before it got out of Poor Richard,” Colonel Biffle said. “What the hells was Bell thinking, going at that place that way?”

  “I told him I could flank the southrons out,” Ned said. “I told him and told him. He didn’t want to listen-fools never do want to listen. He stole half our men, too, the son of a bitch. He thought he could smash right on through, and look what it got him.”

  “Me, I don’t much fancy the way the footsoldiers look right about now,” Biffle said. “They haven’t got a hells of a lot of spunk in ’em. If the southrons were to sally from those forts…” He didn’t go on. He didn’t need to go on.

  “We’ve got to keep ’em too busy to even think of it,” Ned said. “I hope we can bring it off, I truly do.”

  Colonel Biffle noticed his unhappy tones. “You… hope, sir?” he said. “As long as I can remember, you’ve made things happen. Now you just hope they do?”

  Gloomily, Ned nodded. “You saw what happened when we bumped up against those southron unicorn-riders. They’ve got crossbows we can’t hope to match. Only ones we can get are the ones we take from their dead. We don’t make anything of the sort our ownselves. We ought to, but we don’t.”

  “We can only use the bolts we get from dead southrons, too,” Biffle said.

  “I know.” Another, even gloomier, nod from Ned. “They’re clever bastards, no two ways about it. These crossbows have a skinnier groove than the regular sort, so our standard quarrels won’t fit. Takes a sneaky son of a bitch to think of that.”

  “Sure does,” Biffle agreed, and sighed. “Well, the southrons have folks like that, and that’s the truth. We could use some of our own right about now, and that’s the truth, too.”

  “We could use… a lot of things right about now.” Ned of the Forest went no further. Saying anything more wouldn’t do any good. Lieutenant General Bell had courage and to spare. Asking the gods to equip him with a real working set of brains to go with it was a prayer unlikely to be answered. People had been asking for that for a long time, with no luck.

  “You know what worries me most, Lord Ned?” the regimental commander said.

  “Tell me.” Ned hoped it would be the same thing he worried about most himself. That way, no new worries would go on his stack.

  Biffle said, “What worries me is, Bell still thinks we won the fight at Poor Richard. We advanced afterwards, and the southrons left behind a lot of their wounded, and that makes it a triumph to him. He doesn’t look at the state the army’s in.”

  That came close to matching Ned’s concern about Bell, but didn’t quite. He looked toward Ramblerton’s formidable works once more. “You don’t reckon he wants to try and storm this town, do you?” Very few things had ever frightened Ned of the Forest. The idea of hurling the Army of Franklin at Ramblerton’s fortifications came closer than anything that had happened lately.

  “He’d better not!” Biffle exclaimed. “If he does, you have to talk him out of it-that or bang him over the head with a rock, one.”

  “I will,” Ned said grimly. “By the Lion God’s tail tuft, I don’t know how he can do anything for a little while. We’ve got a colonel commanding a wing, captains in
charge of regiments, sergeants leading companies… Nobody knows what the devils he’s supposed to be doing.” He eyed the scraggly ranks of Bell’s army, then laughed a bitter laugh. “He likely figures we’re laying siege to Ramblerton.”

  “I wish we were,” Biffle said. “I wish we could.”

  “So do I, both way,” Ned replied. “But I know we’re not. I hope Bell does, too. I better go find out, I reckon.”

  He swung up onto his unicorn and rode off to find Bell’s headquarters. The general commanding had set himself up in a farmhouse a little behind the line. As Ned rode up, Bell was talking to a young major: “You should think yourself a made man, heading up a brigade at your tender age.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the junior officer said. “If it’s all the same to you, though, I wish I were still second-in-command in my old regiment. I’d know what I was doing there-and we wouldn’t have so many men above me dead.”

  “We go on,” Lieutenant General Bell said. “We have to go on. What else can we do? Turn around and run back up to Dothan? Not likely!” Pride rang in his voice. When he tossed his head to show his scorn for the southrons, he caught sight of Ned of the Forest. “You may go, Major. I have business to talk with Lieutenant General Ned here.”

  The major saluted and hurried away. Ned saluted, too. As usual, he wasted no time on small talk. “What are we going to do now that we’re here?” he demanded. Very much as an afterthought, he added, “Sir?”

  “I aim to give John the Lister and Doubting George another whipping of the same sort as they had at Poor Richard,” Bell declared grandly.

  “One more ‘whipping’ like that and you won’t have any army left yourself,” Ned said, his voice harsh and blunt.

  Instead of answering right away, Bell took out his little bottle of laudanum, pulled the stopper with his teeth, and swigged. “Ahh!” he said. “That makes the world seem a better place.”