by Dojyomaru
For Gaius, he was less concerned about the loss of his soldiers than he was about losing the ability to fight the kingdom. He was able to give the order without hesitation. “Advance the troops! We must hurry through to the other side of the Goldoa Valley!”
With this heartless order given, in a reversal of what they had done up to this point, the infantry began advancing first, with the cavalry advancing after them, ignoring the foot soldiers trapped in the mud as they advanced along the safe routes.
It was an awful scene.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if they had only been stuck in the mud. However, with tens of thousands of troops being ambushed, there was no way they would stay in orderly ranks. They were scattered around, so of course some tried to walk over the top of soldiers trapped in the swamp. These soldiers were stepped on and crushed by horses, dying in a way that was terrible to behold.
◇ ◇ ◇
There was a group watching that portrait of hell unfold from up among the trees on the mountain slope. That group were all clad in black painted armor, carried bows and magic wands, and had black cloth wrapped around their faces.
This group was a commando unit from the kingdom Amidonia had just attacked. There were perhaps 2,000 of them. The central figure of that black-clad group was of slight build, but her proportions made it clear she was a woman, even through that outfit.
She was the leader of the commando unit.
The people down below were making no attempt to help their comrades who had sunken into the bog. If anything, the Amidonian forces were stepping on them as they retreated.
When she thought that humans could become this cruel in order to survive, it made her shudder a little.
There are times when a king must give cruel orders, she thought. However, when he shows so little hesitation, I find myself disliking him as a person rather than as a king.
As she was thinking that, one of her subordinates came to her with a report.
“Lady Canaria, the lead group of the principality’s forces has made it through the valley. Should we give pursuit?”
In response, the leader shook her head. “Not necessary. Our mission is to disrupt and stall the enemy. Besides, we’re only 2,000 strong. Even if we pursue them, we can’t expect better results than we’ve already achieved. We’ve done plenty. Prepare to withdraw.”
“Yes, ma’am!” he called.
Once the subordinate who had brought her the report left, she removed the cloth wrapped around her face.
At just that moment, the clouds covering the moon drew back, the moonlight shining down on her beautiful blue hair.
Beautiful even in the simple act of brushing her hair back, this was the kingdom’s lorelei, Juna Doma.
When she’d appeared before Souma, she’d been the lorelei Juna who worked at a singing cafe, but in the Navy she had become Canaria, the leader of 2,000 marines, the sole unit intended to fight in amphibious operations.
Yes, the true identity of this commando unit was the Marine Corps, which reported to Excel Walter.
Juna was relieved to have successfully accomplished her task.
Grandmother handled her part well, she thought. I can’t be the one to screw this up.
By “Grandmother,” she meant the Admiral of the Navy, Excel Walter. In addition to being a lorelei and Canaria, Juna also had her face as Excel’s granddaughter. Of course, with Excel’s long life and many loves, she had birthed many children, and if she were to count all her grandchildren and great-grandchildren... well, she had enough relatives to populate a small village.
With a family that big, it would be possible to overthrow the kingdom using only her own blood relatives. That was why, to avoid needless suspicion, Excel had kept the “Walter” name to herself. When her children reached maturity, she would disown them and send them off to marry into other houses. Juna was the child of one of Excel’s sons who had married into the Doma family of merchants.
Juna, who had inherited Excel’s beautiful face, looked at the cruelly abandoned corpses of the Amidonian soldiers and frowned. “...If we leave them be, the local beasts might develop a taste for human flesh. That would be a problem. Let’s rescue the survivors and take them prisoner and bury the rest.”
“You’re going to help Amidonian soldiers?” her subordinate asked.
“After being abandoned by their own king, His Majesty King Souma, the king of an enemy state, will save them,” she said. “It could improve His Majesty’s reputation, and it can’t possibly hurt it.”
“I see.”
Like the aura she exuded, Juna’s thought process was mature, as well. After giving the orders to her subordinates, Juna looked towards the north-northwest. That was the direction she expected Souma and the others were heading in right now. After this, Souma and the others would be entering the final battle with the Principality of Amidonia.
Juna placed a hand on her ample bosom, closing her eyes in meditation. Your Majesty... Please, stay safe.
That she prayed for his safety, not his victory, was due to her feelings as Juna Doma, Souma’s lorelei, peeking through.
◇ ◇ ◇
The ambush in the Goldoa Valley largely killed the Amidonian forces’ marching speed. When they tried to reorganize themselves into ranks after leaving the valley, the 30,000 troops had been reduced to 15,000. This indicated that, in addition to those that had been lost to the ambush and those that had been trampled when they’d sunk into the swamp, there had been a considerable number of soldiers who had fled, too.
Furthermore, because the wagons had had no choice but to drop their supplies and run in the chaos, the forces of the principality were now stricken with both exhaustion and hunger.
The soldiers’ stress had reached its peak and they were ready to blow at any moment. Even if they made it to Van with 15,000 troops, and then managed to launch a pincer attack with the defenders, it would be difficult to win against the Elfrieden Kingdom’s force of 55,000.
In response to this situation, Gaius VIII first had the captain of the wagon teams take responsibility for the loss of their provisions. He decapitated the man in order to pacify the other soldiers.
Next he gathered provisions from the nearby villages and towns, drafting their people into service to bring his total troops up to 25,000. Of course, this caused some resentment, but with the very existence of his country on the line, Gaius didn’t care.
While this had let him secure the number of troops he would need, his forces were gathering provisions and soldiers as they advanced, so they moved slowly. It had been some days since the retreat had begun, but they still had no idea when they would arrive at Van.
After spending yet another day, the Amidonian forces finally came close enough that they would likely reach Van within the day. However, the Amidonian forces had been making a fatal mistake all this time.
They’d rushed their advance too much.
You may question what’s wrong with that, or you may even think that Sun Tzu himself said that “Soldiers value haste.”
However, when Sun Tzu speaks of a “soldier,” he means “war.” In the original text, it says, “Thus, though we have heard of stupid haste in war, cleverness has never been seen associated with long delays.”
What he means by that is: “War (because it’s a thing that exhausts countries) is most beneficial when resolved quickly, and there is no country that has benefited from a lengthy war.”
That was why the principality’s armies should have paid heed to the following words in The Art of War’s chapter “Maneuvering”:
“Maneuvering with an army is advantageous; with an undisciplined multitude, most dangerous. If you set a fully-equipped army in march in order to snatch an advantage, the chances are that you will be too late. On the other hand, to detach a flying column for the purpose involves the sacrifice of its baggage and stores.”
“Maneuvering” is the competition between two forces over which will claim strategically important loca
tions first.
In the case of the Battle of Yamazaki between Hideyoshi Hashiba and Mitsuhide Akechi, that had been Mount Tennouzan, while in the Russo-Japanese War, it had been 203 Hill.
Certainly, if you can secure those important points before your opponent, the battle will be to your advantage.
However, Sun Tzu says developing a fixation on those points and competing with your opponent over them is dangerous. If you send your entire army, you’ll likely arrive too late, but if you send a fast unit ahead to do the job, they’ll end up leaving the team that carries their supplies behind.
If that happens, even if you do capture the point in question, it’s pointless.
Furthermore, Sun Tzu says that if you march one hundred li while maneuvering, only one-tenth of your army will reach their destination, and the leaders of all three of your divisions will fall into the enemy’s hands. If you march fifty li, only half of your army will reach the destination, and the leader of your first division will be struck down.
In other words, if you exhaust your soldiers trying to seize strategically important points, and you lose your supplies in the process, there’s no point.
If you look at what the armies of the principality had done, you’ll see that they had grown overly fixated on the strategically important capital city, Van, abandoned their supply wagons, and needlessly exhausted their soldiers.
In other words, they’d done exactly what Sun Tzu cautions against.
What the army of the principality found when they reached the open plain ten kilometers south of Van was a fresh army from the kingdom waiting for them.
When Gaius saw the forces arrayed before him, all of the power left his body and he nearly fell from his horse. “This is absurd... You can’t mean to tell me Van has already fallen...?”
There was no one who could respond to his mutterings.
◇ ◇ ◇
To jump straight to the conclusion, no, Van had not yet fallen at this point.
When the forces of Elfrieden under Souma arrived a day before the Amidonian forces, they didn’t do anything stupid like try to attack the 5,000 elite soldiers holed up in Van. They split off 10,000 troops to monitor those soldiers, while the main force moved to the open field ten kilometers south of Van, waiting for the main force of the principality’s army which would no doubt be coming.
Souma’s target had been the main force of the Amidonian army from the very beginning. This was why he had told Gaius the target of their attack, something that should normally be kept secret.
By first saying he would attack Van, he would lie in wait for the principality’s forces to rush there, and then he would destroy them.
It was a plan that fell under Thirty-Six Stratagems’s sixth stratagem, “Make a sound in the east, then strike in the west,” but he was also reenacting the Battle of Maling, from which the words of the second stratagem, “Besiege Wei to rescue Zhao,” came.
This was the strategy that the second Sun Tzu, Sun Bin, had used to defeat his rival Pang Juan. Gaius had never stood a chance of seeing through it.
While he did have 25,000 troops at his command, in comparison to those exhausted troops which had lost most of their supply wagons, the kingdom’s forces had enough rations from Poncho to feed the whole army, and had spent the day resting on the field and waiting, so they were eager to fight.
55,000 kingdom soldiers in top condition vs. 25,000 exhausted principality soldiers.
The battle had been decided before it even began.
In the main camp in the center of the Elfrieden Kingdom’s forces which had taken the crane wing formation, Souma rose from his camp stool, raised his right arm high, then swung it down towards the forces of the principality.
“““Yeahhhhhhh!””” A victory cry rose up from the forces of the kingdom.
With that as the signal, the final battle between the Elfrieden Kingdom and the Principality of Amidonia began.
Elfrieden Historical Idiom Lessons: Number 4
“Let them attack the countryside to take the capital.”
Type: Proverb
Meaning: To accomplish something with minimal effort.
Origin: During the One Week War, Souma used the country town of Altomura as bait, then used the opening that created to enable an attack on the capital of the Principality of Amidonia.
Synonyms: “Lose the battle to win the war.”
Chapter 9: The Final Battle
It seems that in later years, many dramatizations of this era have depicted Souma Kazuya as a wise and courageous ruler. They depict him as a ruler who took to the battlefield, as slaying many powerful opponents in single combat, as having confounded enemy armies with his ingenuity, and as having brought happiness to the people with his excellent policies.
However, the historians dispute that appraisal of him.
To begin with, in all his life, Souma only fought enough foreign wars to be counted on one hand. He had very few opportunities to show that sort of military prowess. Nearly all of the achievements he is remembered for were actually accomplished by those who served under him.
As for the ingenuity that let him toy with his enemies, there is no proof that he came up with any of those ideas himself. In the era in which he lived, there were many people, foremost among them being the prime minister, Hakuya, who were masters of such ingenuity, so Souma may only have been implementing the best plans offered by such people.
Certainly, he had many excellent policies, but it is questionable whether he led all of his people to happiness.
From time to time, there were signs that Souma’s position caused him suffering. If all of his policies had been having their intended effects, he likely wouldn’t have suffered so. Thus, Souma’s abilities were not so great as the dramatizations depict. That was the consensus reached by historians.
...However.
Even with that said, there are few who claim Souma was not a great ruler.
Another point of consensus among historians is that “Souma was good at gathering people and using them well.” Souma had no great abilities himself, but he was a genius in how he placed capable people where they were needed, and could deploy the necessary number of troops to where they were required.
The event that first spread Souma’s name across the continent, his victory in the war with the Principality of Amidonia, was largely a result of this gift. He had a firm grasp of what he was and was not capable of, and was able to delegate the things he couldn’t do himself to others.
It could be that this is the most important quality for a ruler.
◇ ◇ ◇
“They’re more stubborn than I expected...”
As I watched the battle develop from the main camp of the Elfrieden Kingdom’s army, I was surprised by how good a fight the forces of the principality of Amidonia were putting up.
It was 55,000 kingdom soldiers in high spirits vs. 25,000 exhausted principality soldiers. The outcome should have been apparent to anyone, but the forces of the principality were holding out well. No, maybe it was that our forces weren’t fully able to attack.
First, the kingdom’s and principality’s wyverns were dogfighting in the skies above. Because they hadn’t been hit by the ambush at Goldoa Valley, the Principality of Amidonia’s wyvern unit was the most energetic unit in the principality’s army.
There were fewer than 500 knights, but if they stayed on the defensive, even the Elfrieden Wyvern Cavalry, who boasted twice their numbers, would struggle to attack them. If we could seize air supremacy, that would decide the outcome of the battle, but it didn’t look like that would happen for a while.
In the end, the battle had been left for the forces on the ground to decide.
The kingdom’s army had deployed in the crane wing formation. In the center was the Royal Guard led by Ludwin, plus a total of 20,000 troops, including 10,000 from the troops that reported directly to me in the Forbidden Army and 10,000 from the Army. In the left wing there were roughly 15,000 Arm
y troops led by Glaive (Halbert and Kaede were in this unit as well). Lastly, in the right wing there was a force of roughly 15,000 troops led by Liscia which consisted of Army troops and auxiliaries from the dark elf village.
I wanted Liscia to stay in the main camp, but she said, “This is the final battle. Let me do what I can, too,” and forced me to let her have her way.
Partly because she was currently the only person who could still keep the confused forces of the Army together, I hesitantly accepted it.
She had been something like an idol during her time with the Army, after all. Thanks to Georg’s training, there was also no issue with her ability to command troops. I made the decision figuring that she would meet little resistance.
I did, at least, send Aisha with her as a bodyguard, though. She was a princess, after all, and I didn’t want her being too reckless.
Anyway, since I was in the main camp, to the rear of the central force led by Ludwin, the only person I had to talk to was Carla, who I was keeping close at hand as a hostage.
While Carla was a hostage, her hands and feet weren’t bound with chains. She was wearing a slave collar, so it would strangle her the moment she attempted to flee or harm her master. It was supposedly safe leaving her like this. It seemed to me that if she just seized a sword from one of the guards or stabbed me with those sharp claws of hers, she could kill me pretty easily, but... I guess that was just how the collar worked. Then again, Carla didn’t seem to have any intention of harming me anymore.
I tried talking to her. “So, what do you think? I thought they’d break more easily.”
“...No one goes to war wanting to lose,” she said. “They’ll desperately try to avoid defeat.”
“Yeah, I guess they would.”
Maybe Carla had gotten bored just standing by my side, because she responded surprisingly easily. As a former commander of the Air Force, she must have had a better grasp of the situation than I did.
They’re being stubborn because of their inferior numbers, huh. That could be a little troublesome, I thought.