Conrad's Last Campaign

by Leo A. Frankowski

  I rode back to join the troops we left behind while the Mobile Infantry checked for wounded Mongols and helped them end their suffering. The warriors would be busy for hours doing cleanup work. A later count showed we had killed almost ten thousand Mongols in that one battle. That meant that there were twenty thousand recurve bows and five to ten thousand rifles and muskets out there. Each bow took a year to make and the rifles were probably hand manufactured, taking months for each one. There were a few thousand man years of weapons and equipment out there that could come back to kill us if we let the Mongols recover them. So, the men would work their way back to camp smashing bows, collecting rifles, and cutting purses off the Mongols. For this work, they men were allowed to pool the purses and share the contents with everyone who fought in this part of the battle. It made them diligent in their searches.

  By the time I returned to the battle line, the ranking officer, Komander Nalchick, had everything well organized. I passed by the main battle site to see crews doing the same cleanup work there as was being done out on the tundra.

  The gun crews and their supporting rifle men were now dug in behind individual dirt and grass barriers surrounding a square camp big enough to protect the wounded and provide working space. Inside the makeshift camp, the largest area was given to the medical corps treating the wounded. There were separate triages set up for wounded troopers in one area and wounded Big People in another.

  There were a lot of wounded. The grape shot and explosive shells had been effective. We hadn’t taken this kind of casualties since the Mongol invasion. Over three hundred troopers lay dead and double that were seriously wounded. Five hundred Big People were wounded but most were walking wounded as was hard for an arrow of rifle bullet to penetrate something the size of a Rhino. Unfortunately, it was “most” not all. In one field the Big People were silently praying over the twenty of their comrades killed by explosive shells and lucky shots.

  I found Nalchick sitting on the ground eating lunch surrounded by his officers. Around them the rest of his command had been ordered to dismount, rest, refresh and recharge their energy. He was smart enough to know that tired troopers made lousy fighters so everyone not on duty was ordered to rest.

  As I approached, I heard him order several lances to dig temporary latrines just outside the perimeter. I dismounted and squatted near him, “You seem to have everything under control here.”

  “I’ll feel better when Sir Wladyclaw rejoins with his force. My main problem is that I’ve got almost eight hundred wounded and dead troopers and hundreds of limping Big People that I can’t abandon and can’t move. We didn’t bring a single wagon with us and there are no trees we can make stretchers or travois from. We’ve got about two days of supplies and we’re stuck here.

  If we’re going to be here more than a day, I need to get crews out butchering horses. It’ll make the Big People uncomfortable but they’ll help to keep their troopers fed."

  I stood up to stretch my cramped muscles, “As soon as my men eat and stretch, I’ll take them back to where we left the wagons. It should be less than ten, fifteen miles west. You stay put and we’ll try to rejoin you here. Today if they haven’t had any trouble. Tomorrow at the worst.”

  I still had not seen the main Mongol force and had no idea where the bulk of my army was. I started the day with over forty thousand men in a well supplied, cohesive force and ended up with the army scattered in four places and hundreds of casualties that tied us down. They Mongols were probably attacking our supply train as I rode back. If they succeeded, this campaign was over, and the ranking officer in the supply train was Captain Ivanov, a steady, unimaginative officer who had never led a battle charge. If anyone ever writes a book on how to lose a war, this will be one of the chapters.

  It was easy to find where we left the baggage train. Eighty thousand thundering hooves leave a clear path on the tundra. A couple of times we saw small groups of Mongol horsemen moving east, but they weren’t looking for a fight and we ignored each other.

  As we approached the camp, we began to see Mongol ponies grazing aimlessly. Most were still saddled and I saw one in the distance that carried a dead rider.

  One of my knights rode up beside me, “It must have been a Hell of a battle if they didn’t even have time to recover their ponies – or their dead.” As he moved out to his point position, he added, “I wonder how we did.”

  When we finally topped a little rise and could see the camp, it looked like a small town with wooden walls. We could see the full width of it, but it stretched back past the horizon. The outer walls seemed to be two wagons wide, surrounding a clear area with several more rows of wagons stretching out of sight.

  Whatever happened here hadn’t been over for long. Smoke was still rising from inside the camp and from spots around the horizon, and I could see a dead trooper still slumped over his gun. As we approached, two wagons moved aside to let us through the wall. Inside most of the troopers were sprawled out on wagon tops or blankets, with the blank look of total exhaustion on their faces. They barely moved their heads to watch us as we rode by. As we approached the center of the camp, more and more of the exhausted troopers dragged themselves through work details, moving the dead, tending to the wounded, throwing dirt on burning wagons, eating with hands like lead weights, all moving painfully slow, and eyes to the ground.

  Captain Ivanov was no exception. He was at the center of the formation, sitting on a wooden ammo crate, leaning forward, hands on his knees. He was breathing slowly, his chest moving in an out like a runner recovering from a race, staring at the ground and only raising his head to give orders to the men who came up to him.

  He made a motion to stand up when he saw us approaching. I immediately jumped to the ground and told him, “At ease, Captain Ivanov. You’ve obviously had a harder day than me.” Looking over my shoulder I said, “Someone bring the Captain a drink. A real one.”

  He was quiet for a moment then, “Well, your grace, it wasn’t too bad. I’m afraid that we have expended a lot of your ammunition, and the water wagons are empty. It will be a dry dinner tonight, and we lost about fifty wagons of supplies. I haven’t had a chance to inventory the lost wagons yet…”

  “Captain! I appreciate your dedication to our supplies, but I need to know how the battle went. What happened here?”

  “As I said, Sire, it wasn’t too bad. We moved out this morning in a defensive layout and maintained it all day. We had all the mobile machine guns in the outer layer, interspersed with durables like rice and flour wagons. Baron Kowalski arranged his artillery in the second layer. He wasn’t happy out spreading his command out like that, but he kept a good order. All the tender breakables were in the center of the formation.

  When you left us to chase the Mongols, we just pulled the formation tighter, released the Big People, backed some artillery wagons into the gaps on the outer wall, and waited. We had plenty of time. The Mongols didn’t attack for maybe a half an hour. Oh, during that time, the men piled dirt up under the wagon and in the gaps. It’s amazing how fast eight thousand men can dig when their lives depend on it.

  You know, Mongols are pretty stupid."

  That had certainly not been my experience that day. I wanted to ask something like “What??” but I just waited for him to go on.

  “I learned in Sarai that Mongol families and craftsmen often follow their armies. Their wagons are driven by men too old or boys to young for battle or women or slaves. They must have thought that we did the same. They certainly came over those hills like they didn’t have a care in the world.

  I must say, your grace, that your supply decision on bullets was a very sound one. After food and boots, they are the most important thing. I’m glad you ordered a lot of them. We used a lot of them today.

  Anyway, instead of the few thousand old men and boys that the Mongols expected, we had four thousand drivers, radio operators, medics, and other personnel all trained troopers and all with your excellent ten shot rifles. Of co
urse we also had the four thousand troops that Baron Ryszard brought with him. They were very helpful. Everyone who didn’t have a machine gun or artillery station was either lying on top of or behind a perimeter wagon.

  As I said, Sire, they were very stupid. They hit us from three sides at once. You know that you ordered more than one hundred wagon mounted machine guns? They pretty much wiped out the first wave before the riflemen got off a shot. The second wave was right behind them and things got a little dicey then. There were just so damned many of them that they got close in a couple of places. Not hand to hand, but damned near. We took some loses.

  The third wave was different. They took their time coming. They concentrated on the south wall and started by pushing wooden barriers in front of them. They were about as tall as man, a little wider than that and had wheels on them. Three or four Mongols would push them forward while one of them fired a swivel gun through a slot."

  “A swivel gun? One of ours?”

  “No Sire, not one of ours, but a damned good copy. Looked like one of ours. The mechanism was a little different, but it was obviously a copy, same caliber and just as nasty. They concentrated on the machine gunners and it was damned hard to hit ’em back through those little slots.

  While they was hitting our gunners, other Mongols moved up small siege towers. They were only twenty or thirty tall, but they gave the Mongols enough height to shoot down at the troopers lying on top of the wagons with swivel guns and small cannons. Zephyr warned us they were uncovering a lot of equipment from camouflaged valley, but we never expected siege towers in the middle of nowhere.

  While they kept us pinned down, the rest of them attacked again, all from the north. That time it did get down to hand to hand. They got past the first line of wagons Baron Ryszard got his men there to repulse them. He rallied several lances with Sten guns and pushed ’em back."

  That was when I noticed that there was blood mixed in with the grime and dirt on his tunic. I suspect he was minimizing his own part in the battle.

  “Baron Kowalski was really the hero that time. His men concentrated all of the field pieces on the siege towers and mobile bunkers. By the time the troopers killed all of the Mongols in the compound, the towers were gone. We re-manned the machine guns and cut most of them down as they retreated.”

  “Things got quite for a long time. The Mongol commander was directing the battle from a platform on top a hill in that direction. Kowalski wanted to take him out with a five pounder, but Baron Ryszard asked him not to. He said that if we killed the commander, the Mongols would go away, and it was a lot easier to convert Mongols to righteousness when they brought themselves to the ceremony.

  It was quiet so long that I would have thought they left if that commander hadn’t been still standing on his platform.

  Then a big bag of flaming oil landed right in the middle of the camp and its five bothers followed a few minutes later. Whatever they used, it burned like the fires of Hell and stuck to everything like Greek Fire. That’s where the water went, and a lot of the blankets and other stuff.

  I figured they weren’t using cannon because they didn’t know how tough we were and they wanted to capture the supplies, not destroy them, but I can’t figure out why they brought trebuchets. Where the Hell were their cannon when they decided they weren’t going to capture us and decided to destroy anything?"

  “Actually, Captain the cannon were shooting as us. I guess they figured they weren’t going to need them here.”

  “Oh, well, they lucked out. They could lob into the camp on a high arc, but the trebuchets were in a little valley and we couldn’t get a good angle on them with the artillery. They were too close to drop shells on.

  The three of us, Ryszard , Kowalski and I had a little conference. I know, your grace, that you told us to only fight standing off from the enemy, and we always respect your orders, but sometimes you just have to out and kill your enemies face to face.

  Zephyr told us the main body of Mongols was in one formation north of us. It took us almost half an hour to prepare the sortie, but Baron Ryszard led all of his men out of camp at about the same time the second volley of fireballs came in. Same time, Kowalski’s men took out the Mongol commander with a volley of five pounders. There’s a big hole in the ground up there where his platform used to be.

  Baron Ryszard was barely out of sight when the Baron Grzegorz showed up with the relief column. We didn’t need him here, so he took most of his men and followed Baron Ryszard .

  I haven’t heard from either one of them since, but it’s getting dark soon, so they should be on their way back.

  Guess we should get some campfires going."

  An hour later, in the increasing darkness, Barons Ryszard and Grzegorz led their tired troops back into camp. Captain Ivanovs’ men had campfires going and food cooking by then. The sound of bubbling stew and the smell of baking bread raised everyone’s spirits. The wounded troops had been moved to a treatment area, the dead to a temporary morgue area, and the fires were still being fought. Captain Ivanov himself was busily accounting for the supplies that had been lost. They had fought a battle, killed thousands of Mongols, and fixed dinner. There are no words for them.

  Starting with his investment ceremony the next day, Captain Ivanov was now Baron Ivanov, with a rank of Kolomel.

  Kolomel Ivanov had been right. We were lucky that the Mongols acted stupidly. If the Mongol commander had waited for his equipment to be ready instead of being overconfident and hurried, he might have done serious damage. As it was, his first wave was slaughtered on the way in and the second wave so close that both groups blocked each other. The first wave couldn’t retreat and the confused second wave stumbled over the dead bodies of the first.

  By the time he had his equipment ready for a real attack, half of his men were dead. Baron Ryszard’s men found the engineers around the trebuchets virtually undefended. They were still mopping up engineers, guards, and ground troops and burning equipment when Baron Grzegorz rode by in search of Mongols.

  There weren’t any. With half of their number dead and the commanders gone, the Mongols had split into small groups dispersing into the countryside. Any one group was an easy kill, but Grzegorz would have had to split forces a hundred ways to chase them. Unwilling to set his men up for ambushes, he settled for helping Ryszard destroy the Mongol camp and equipment.

  We didn’t make it to Karakorum that day. The next morning, we sent out wagons and escorts to bring the wounded from the stranded Mobile Infantry camp and reunite the army.

  We set up camp in a protected canyon, tended our wounded, buried our dead and counted our loses. Numerically, we had done well. We lost five hundred dead and had over a thousand wounded bad enough to side line them. Most of the casualties were from the two cannon volleys that hit my pursuit team and from the one successful incursion into Ivanov’s camp.

  The Mongols had started with perhaps forty thousand men. They had lost the entire bait team, maybe around ten thousand men, and most of the men who had attacked our supply wagons, perhaps as many as ten thousand more. Twenty years before, they had defeated the Hungarians by being on the other side of figures like that.

  It took two days to stabilize our wounded, repack our gear, and start again for Karakorum.

  Karakorum at Last

  Our guide told us that Karakorum sat in the Orkhon River basin, on a flat plain about thirty miles wide, surrounded by steep mountains. Three major roads converged on it. From the west the caravan trail from Europe wound through river gorges and mountain passes. The road to the south was flatter, wider and ended up in what is now Beijing. To the east, a third caravan trail led to Eastern China and Korea. When we resumed our march, I decided to follow the caravan trail to the city. The mountains left us little choice. The trail was not designed for forty thousand men. Despite our best efforts, we were scattered along a twenty-mile long path.

  Sir Grzegorz rode beside me for a moment as I made my way to the head of the column. “H
ow considerate of you, your grace”, he said, “to relieve the scouts of the tedium of their work. Shall I inform the cook tents that you will be by later to prepare dinner for us?”

  “No.” I answered, “But I intend to be one of the first to see Karakorum. If you’ve run out of sarcasm, you’re welcome to join me.”

  “I’ll gather up a couple of lances and catch up to you. We can’t afford for you to be too exposed out here.”

  We traveled long the Orkhon River for about an hour. Some time during the trip I moved close to Grzegorz. “Your concern is appreciated, but your comments now border on the insubordinate. I know what I am doing.”

  He kept his eyes ahead. “I was with you, my lord, twenty years ago when you forbid your liege lord, the king, to enter a fire pit. You insisted that, as his liege, you could not allow him to injure himself trying to walk on fire like the recruits.

  “I now ride beside my liege lord, who is endangering himself, and I will continue to remind you that if you should get killed doing someone else’s job, forty thousand men will have wasted a year of their lives and given your their loyalty for nothing. That is my responsibility.”

  The insubordinate bastard really pissed me off, by quoting my words back to me, but I’m the damned hetman and I go where I want.

  The plain was broken by hills to the north and west of the city, as we were riding by one of them, I heard gunfire from the top. Before we had time to look for cover, we realized that most of the gunfire was from Sten guns with only a few reports from the larger caliber Mongol weapons. We were still looking up to see the source of the gunfire when two troopers came riding down the side of the hill. When they reached us, the one in front gestured behind him and said, “There’s a good place to see the city from up on top this hill, your grace.”

  I asked, “What was the fight about?”

  “Oh, some Mongols were sitting in your seats. We had to move them over.”