Conrad's Last Campaign

by Leo A. Frankowski

  “Reserve about a fifth of your men to guard the baggage train, artillery and wagon mounted guns. They’re going to get left behind if the battle goes as planned and we don’t want them left without defense.

  “Baron Kowalski, you’ll take command of your artillery and all the wagon mounted guns. Sir Wladyclaw will leave you a contingent of mounted infantry. When the Mongol chase starts, your job will be to guard our baggage train. Don’t try to keep up. Circle the wagons, set up a strong defensive perimeter and then use your best judgment to decide when, or if, to move forward to join the rest of us.

  “If the Mongols act as they usually do, there will be a frontal attack early in the day. The Wolves will take them on. Sir Grzegorz, try not to kill all of them, as we want them to think that their plan is working. You must impress on your men that this part is play acting, very important play acting. The Mongols will break off and seem to retreat. The Wolves will lead the chase. Keep close enough to them to discourage their artillery but carefully do NOT catch up to them. If you catch them before they rejoin their main group, we’ll be chasing Mongols for weeks. Scream, yell, shoot guns, and look as if you are hell bent on battle, but no not catch them.

  “Sir Wladyclaw, your men will follow. They must not intermingle with the Wolves because they have a different job to do. Stay close enough at first to look as if you are trying to keep up, but immediately begin to drift back until there at least three gross yards between your men and the Wolves. Try to look tired, in case the Mongols are watching.

  “If the Mongols are true to form, they will link up with their main force, jump on fresh horses and counter attack. At that moment, two things have to happen simultaneously. The Wolves must put up a token resistance and then retreat. Behind them, Sir Wladyclaw’s men will dismount, assemble their machine guns and set up a fire line over as wide an area as they can cover.

  “The Wolves will lead the Mongols right back to you. As soon as the Wolves pass the fire line, the machine guns can open up on the Mongols. Take lots of bullets. You’ll have a lot of targets. Everyone will pull up behind the fire line and wait for the machine guns to do their work. When they are done, we counterattack. The Wolves will sweep right, half the mounted infantry will sweep left, and I will lead the rest of the infantry up the center.

  “The two flanking columns have the most important job. They need to move fast, surround the remaining Mongols and kill them before they can scatter.

  “When the battle is over, I want to move on quickly to Karakorum before they have time to react. It is a hard gross miles ride, but if the battle goes well we can do it tomorrow.

  “Now you gentlemen have a hard night ahead of you. This entire operation must be coordinated without radio wagons or runners or even signal flares. Every officer must know his part perfectly before he beds down tonight.

  “Drill them in the moves. The Wolves fight the Mongols initially while the Mounted Infantry holds back. Everyone chases the Mongols, but the Wolves take the lead while the machine gun carriers hold back enough to give themselves time to set up a firing line. The Wolves try to look surprised then the main force attacks them and pretends to retreat. No one fires a weapon until the Wolves are safely behind the fire line.

  “Sir Grzegorz, you have the hardest job tonight. The Wolves will lead the attack because they are our elite force and they have earned the honor, but they are not good at holding back and have had no practice even pretending to retreat. You must convince them that this is a clever and honorable trick. Stress the humor in the situation, talk about the look on the Mongol faces when they run into the machine guns, but convince them any way you can to follow the orders.”

  Sir Grzegorz managed to look mildly insulted, “The Wolves will follow orders, my lord. They know neither cowardice nor rebellion. They will do as they are ordered.”

  I nodded in his direction, “I do not doubt their honor in any way.” In fact, it was their honor that worried me. I looked around the fire, “The plan seems simple. Does anyone have a question?”

  Sir Wladyclaw spoke up, “Sir, we are going to do this without signals, but would it be possible for one of the Wolves to carry something like a signal rocket to tell us when they wheel about?”

  “I considered that, but we don’t want the Mongols to know anything is different than a normal charge and retreat. A rocket might spook them.”

  “Perhaps a blunderbuss, then. We captured a couple of large bore muskets months ago and the men used them for amusement during the winter. The barrels are a big as a small fist and you can load anything into ’em. I think the original owners fired rocks and scrap metal. The point is that they make a loud booming sound when you fire ’em. The sound carries about half a mile and no soldier would confuse it with a modern rifle sound. The Wolves could fire off a couple of them when they see the real Mongol force.”

  I considered it for moment. “If you think it will help, give two of them to the Wolves, but remember how noisy a charge is. Forty thousand charging horses with forty thousand clanking knights and screaming Mongols could drown out the God’s last trumpet.”

  “Good point, sir. I’ll load them with lots of smoky powder and ashes. If they are fired upward, they should make a big cloud to go with the big bang, and as you point out, we will keep a sharp eye on the Wolves anyway.”

  We went around the fire one last time as each man summarized his duties for the following day, and they left to conference with their officers. Me, I went into my tent for a drink and a cigars and some companionship. The brisk spring air might be bracing for a few minutes, but the warm flesh of a female companion is forever delightful. It forever amazes me that people who watch the same boring television show every day or play bridge every day for years can wonder how, after all of these years, I still like to end the day watching a naked girl dance.

  My work, after all, was done. I had formulated a beautiful plan. Unfortunately, in the back of my mind, I kept thinking about Custer charging the Indians because he was afraid they’d get away.

  We broke camp slowly the next day, making certain that each unit took its proper place in the line of march. I wore my brightest golden armor and rode at the head of the column with a retinue of shining companions. I insisted that Sir Grzegorz, likewise dress brilliantly and be surrounded by gleaming, banner carrying companions. We were bait and needed to be seen.

  It took an hour for the entire army to start moving and two more boring hours passed as we ambled down the road. The army stretched out of sight to left and right and stretched back miles behind me. I felt like I was leading an army of ants on a food quest. Frankly, boredom was a real problem. My armor itched and my right foot was going to sleep. I tried watching Terry’s butt for awhile as her figure was always delightful, but even that couldn’t keep my attention. I was keyed up for killing and still having a hard time keeping awake.

  Thank God, someone finally tried to kill us.

  They appeared in the distance as a line of black dots and became a line of men trotting in our direction. For a diversion, they looked like a pretty big force. Their line was only a few men deep, but it stretched almost as far across the horizon as we did, and they made a lot of noise. They screamed a lot and who knew that Mongols blew on horns when they charged. About a hundred yards out, they drew their bows and launched a flight of arrows. I raised my shield above my head and Silver’s and ignored the volley. Twenty yards later, they fired their guns and bullets clanged off our armor, still too far away to penetrate. Fifty yards closer and we could smell the filthy bastards.

  I raised my sword above my head and led the charge. I knew the damned thing was useless these days, but it looked good. It also felt good to skewer the first Mongol I met before changing over to the Sten gun. He was an officer who could afford actual chain mail and a real sword and he looked very surprised when my sword cut through him. I switched to the sten, flipped the selector to single fire and used the gun like a pistol at close range.

  It was hard to find a t
arget. Around me Mongol and Christian were firing and flailing at each other in close quarters and the ground was becoming littered with bodies, mostly Mongol. Then after only a few minutes, a gong sounded from behind the Mongol lines and they broke off in seeming disarray.

  We followed, leaving our dead and wounded behind, knowing that the wave a few minutes behind us would care for them, and assist any surviving Mongols in finding their God.

  We could have caught them easily, but we kept a deliberately ragged line scattered out behind them. I noticed that some of the Wolves even hammed it up, bouncing around in their saddles or pretending to whip their Big People as if they were going all out.

  It was fun, for the first half hour, but it got old eventually. I knew that the Mongols historically had done the fake retreat for any time from less than an hour to up to two or three days. I figured that they wouldn’t be able to keep it up long here because after a couple of hours we’d be in Karakorum. They had to turn soon.

  Then red flares began dropping beyond the Mongol line. They were coming down from too high to be rocket launched, and they kept coming down every fifteen seconds or so. The only thing that could be that high was the Zephyr. She must have returned but I had to figure out what she was signaling. Red flares were for danger and a lot of them meant a lot of danger. Suddenly I was certain what she was saying. The Mongols were not going to counterattack! The Zephyr saw something else coming, something bad, but how do you turn around eight thousand galloping men when most are out of earshot and some even out of visual range? Medieval warfare is a bitch.

  I slowed down and grabbed a bugler. “Sound retreat! Now! Ride down the line and get everyone to sound retreat!” I caught the eye of one of the men carrying a blunderbuss and gestured for him to fire it. I must have looked stupid, holding my hands up in the air and pantomiming pulling a trigger, but everyone would look stupider dead.

  I stopped Silver and over the next few minutes, most of the line started moving rearward. The second blunderbuss was fired and I joined the retreat when I saw that I had the attention of most of the men near me on the line. It wasn’t fast enough.

  As I turned to lead the fake retreat, the Mongol line ahead suddenly split into neat columns that ran through the spaces between their camouflaged cannon and our fake retreat turned into a deadly real one as they opened up with grape shot and explosive shells.

  In a truly modern army, it wouldn’t have been as big a disaster. The Mongols had fired all their cannons at once so we had over a minute before they could fire again, plenty of time to cover the distance to the cannon and kill the cannoneers, but I had eight thousand men galloping the wrong way and no way to turn them again.

  We’d have to spend that precious minute getting out of range. My mind was racing. Big People can sprint maybe forty miles an hour or more. One minute at forty miles an hour was about two thirds of a mile, call it thirty five hundred feet, over a thousand yards, maybe fifteen hundred. Oh, Hell. Might as well slow down. Grape shot is only effective out to three or four hundred yards.

  I guess Mongols also knew that grape shot was limited and they took time to switch all their cannon to explosive shells. The second volley came slow, was all shells, and was not as intense as I expected.

  What I didn’t know at the time was that Sir Grzegorz and Baron Ryszard didn’t suffer from my over thinking syndrome. They immediately noticed that the mounted Mongols had overrun their own lines and were in no position to defend the cannons. Not knowing that they couldn’t turn an army that fast, they led their lances straight at the Mongol line and were racing up and down behind the row of cannons gleefully shooting cannoneers. Other lances had done the same, and on both ends of the line, the commanders realized that they were in position to flank the cannon line also attacked.

  After a few minutes, the Wolves remembered that they were, after all, supposed to LOSE and joined the general retreat that I was leading, stopping only to pick up their comrades who had fallen to the cannon fire.

  It was not a good day. I never led a retreat before, and I didn’t like it.

  Our forces straggled back past the machine gun line that the Mobile Infantry had set up. It wasn’t quite the noble scene I had pictured. Instead of a wave of disciplined troops galloping by the machine guns with Mongols hooping and hollering behind them, the units came by in a ragged line, some carrying their wounded, and the Wolves followed last and later.

  For the moment, there wasn’t a Mongol in sight.

  Ten minutes later, there still wasn’t a Mongol in site or sound of us. That’s when I saw the rocket burn a few thousand feet above us. It went on and on, slowly pushing that damned spy plane back to the Mongol headquarters. The Bastards knew exactly where we were and they weren’t coming to play with the machine guns!

  But I knew where they were. We were just being diverted from their main goal. I sent a messenger to Sir Grzegorz “Forget the flanking move. Get your men back to the baggage train immediately. Make all haste. They are probably under heavy attack.”

  I personally found Sir Wladyclaw. “The Mongols aren’t coming in force. Pack up half the machine guns and prepare to move out to cover the baggage train. They may make another diversionary attack, so place the other half of the guns in a wedge to cover both forward flanks and keep enough troops inside the wedge to provide cover for the wounded and kill any Mongols that get through the first line. Send half your troops back to the baggage train. If the Mongols don’t attack in the next hour, pack up and move west to cover our backs.”

  Of course, it didn’t work like that. In an army our size, some of the men were almost a mile away and without radios. It took half an army hour just to pull them back into a tighter formation. We sent a cohesive force back to the baggage train, but it left us disorganized looking as the men scrambled around to get into new positions.

  Thank God, the Mongols helped at last. Seeing that we were splitting our forces, the Mongol commander decided this was the time to counterattack. We had just finished pulling in the machine guns to the tighter formation when Cynthia banged on my helmet and pointed to the horizon. A few minutes later, we all began to feel the deep vibrations in the ground that had alerted Cynthia. The sound of thousands of horses reached us when the Mongols were still too far away to see as anything but a blurry dark line on the horizon. It seemed to take forever for them to reach of and we couldn’t do a thing about it.

  From a two mile wide front, we had shrunk to a triangle less than a quarter mile on a side, packed with too many targets. Our real strength lay in the gun emplacements and we had to draw them in a close as possible before we fired. I lowered my shield in front of my two bodyguards, sheathed my sword and waited. There was very little movement among our troops as they waited for the Mongols. At two hundred yards, the Mongols fired a volley from their guns. I heard bullets pinging off armor, but only a few lucky shots found flesh instead of metal. Then they began to fire armor piercing arrows in a high trajectory. Like everyone else, I moved my shield above my head. On the ground, the gun crews hunched down under their shields. Most arrows pinged on armor, but there were too many thunks as arrows found flesh, mostly on Big People whose mailed rumps were too large a target.

  The warriors waited until the Mongols were close enough to smell and then opened up. We had a machine gun nest every fifty yards and four or five riflemen stationed between each nest to pick off individual targets. It was like cutting grass. There was nothing for the men inside, including me, to do except keep our heads down and pass ammo and barrels up to the front line.

  When we did look up, all we saw was greasy little men in leather armor fall off of horses or fall with their horses. They turned back as soon as the guns opened up, but the men had let them get very close, so they were in range for a long time.

  The firing was continuous. I had remembered from World War II reports that the only two things that stopped a good machine gun from firing were a lack of ammo and overheating barrels, so every one of our guns shipped w
ith three quick change barrels and we brought lots of bullets. It was a gunner’s dream party.

  When they got out of range, Sir Wladyclaw called “Cease Fire” and the mounted troops swept out in two columns to finish the job. Well, not exactly “swept”. The Big People tended to be fussy about stepping on dead horses and there were a lot of dead horses out there. Even Silver did a prancing gait while we moved through the field of dead enemies. I decided to ride with the right hand column because I was just tired of not killing anything.

  We could do double their speed and within minutes we were coming up on the stragglers. The machine guns had spooked them so bad that most of them never even looked back. The men took out their pistols and began to pick off riders from the back as they came up on them. We pressed them so hard that there was no time for the Mongols to stop or rally, but some of them were good enough to turn in the saddle and send arrows back at us. Christian troops that got too close found out that Mongol arrows were, in fact, armor piercing at close range and capable of going through exposed chain mail like it was paper.

  Still, our loses were small and we were leaving a path of Mongol bodies behind us. I decided it was time to bring this battle to an end. I raised my sword, useless now as a weapon, but a bright golden beacon for the troops to follow and urged Silver to speed up. As the troops followed I passed the Mongol leaders and we began to turn them like a stampede. It’s easy to pick out the Mongol leaders. Most commoners only have leather armor or leather with metal plates sewed to it. Only the leaders can afford chain mail, metal helmets, or plate armor. A big fellow in full plate smiled at me and pointed his rifle in my direction. Then we opened up again with the Sten guns and he was nearly unhorsed by his own troops trying to get away from us.

  The Mongol column came to a halt with the Mongols crowded together too close to dismount or even fire their weapons effectively.

  There were probably two thousand of them alive when they stopped and fifteen minutes later there were none. I shot the big guy myself.