Fateful Lightning

by William R. Forstchen

  Appreciative laughter echoed in the tent, and the crowd of several hundred officers moved to the rough- hewn benches set up in a semicircle around the podium and the rough canvas map stretched out behind it.

  The Roum officers moved to the back section of the yurt, where a translator stood ready to repeat what was being said. Andrew moved swiftly up to the podium, the call for attention sounding out sharply, and the men fell silent, standing up stiffly. He motioned with his one hand for Father Casmar to come up and join him.

  The prelate of the church stepped up to the dais, and all in the room, Rus, Yankee, and even Roum, lowered their heads. Smiling in his usual affable way, the priest blessed them, then patted Andrew on the shoulder and withdrew without any fanfare.

  Coming from a very Yankee New England, where suspicion of popery was something of a past-time, the men of the 35th had taken to the prelate of the Church of Rus with a surprising and genuine affection. Not once had he ever attempted to proselytize, and he had gladly participated in the dedication of the various churches and small chapels that the men had erected back in Suzdal. Quite a few had gradually drifted into the Rus Church, especially the Catholics of the heavily Irish 44th New York, seeing in Perm just another name for God, and it was obvious just who Kesus was. The memory of early Russian Orthodoxy, with a good smattering of Slavic paganism, had survived in the thousand years since the Rus had first arrived on this world. Father Casmar had fully accepted Saint Patrick as a saint, and a green icon of the protector of Ireland had soon appeared on the church walls along with a stained-glass window of a shamrock to replace a window in the cathedral blown out in a bombing raid.

  “Gentlemen, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover in the next day, so I suggest we get straight into it.”

  The tent was silent except for the high distant thumping, the sound of an aerosteamer making its way westward on a reconnaissance flight up to Suzdal.

  “Tomorrow will mark the end of thirty days since the death of Jubadi, Qar Qarth of the Merki. I thought it best that we try to gather together now, since I doubt if we will have a chance to do so again in such a relaxed fashion until this war is finished.”

  The men stirred. They all knew that the strange truce, which had given them a precious month, was about to end, but it was still hard to hear it so plainly spoken. Within a matter of days they would again be fighting for their lives.

  “I just want to take these few moments to go over our plan of action in general terms so that all of us can see what will happen. Later you’ll meet with your separate corps commanders to review things in detail. I know you do not want to face what I’m presenting now, but there is no other way.”

  He paused for a moment to look over at Kal. His old friend had stood shocked when he first told him of what he planned to do, and he was still sickened by it.

  “I know all of us had hoped to hold them here in front of Kev, and perhaps we can, but I doubt it.”

  “But to lose all of Rus?”

  A brigade commander stood up, looking up angrily at Andrew. His defiance caused a stir through the meeting.

  “It’s my land too,” Andrew replied, his voice controlled, yet conveying that nothing would now change his mind. “My child was born in this land, Suzdal was my city, the soil of Rus gave all of us life. But I have no desire to have my scorched bones buried in it.”

  He hesitated for a brief instant.

  “At least not until I am a very old man.”

  A soft chuckle echoed, easing the tension but not breaking it.

  “Tomorrow the Merki will bury their Qar Qarth. They can move fifty or more miles a day starting the following morning, which means in as few as four days they will be here.”

  He pointed back to the first map, lines in red drawn in to mark the probable advance routes of the Merki columns. From here all the way back to the approaches to Vazima, every road was laden with traps, the wells were filled with rocks, the bridges were burned, the river fords were sprinkled with submerged stakes, trees were felled to block roads going through forests. Campfires at night were enlivened with laughter over some of the tricks that had been laid out. Barely a poisonous snake could now be found in the wild in all of Rus after word had spread about one angry peasant who had caught several of them and put them inside a barrel that looked like it might contain food. His trick was now imitated in nearly every barn throughout the country. Beehives had been rigged to fall over or burst open, and wasp nests had been placed under overturned buckets next to wells that looked like they still might have water.

  The thirty days had given them the chance to go back and do the damage, and also to retrieve quite a few thousand tons of food that had been abandoned in the initial evacuation. Seed stocks had even been retrieved as well and shipped to warehouses in Roum or moved up into the northern woods and hidden away for if and when they ever returned. The last of the peasants who had been moving east on foot had been sent on to Roum. Even now, crews were working to tear up the track starting east of Vazima, working backward toward Roum. At a hundred tons to the mile, several trainloads a day were now heading back east, the precious metal heading to the cannon and rifle works or stockpiles to be used for emergency repairs.

  They had pulled it off. And it was still not enough.

  “What we’ve done, surely it will slow them down,” the brigadier replied.

  Andrew looked over to Bob Fletcher, who stood to one side of the dais. He came up to join Andrew.

  “You know that victualing the army is my job,” Bob said, speaking slowly to choose his Rus words carefully. “We can surmise certain things about their forces from our own experiences.”

  He stepped back to the map and with upraised hand pointed across the length of Rus.

  “Our land between the sea and the forest, from the Neiper to here, is something over thirty thousand square miles, just about the same size as Maine.

  “For the last thirty days, the Merki have been moving their people up the roadbed of our military railroad, and up the old Tugar road, as you used to call it, west of the Neiper. Those bastards have been forced to funnel several million of their people and at least a million and a half horses and maybe upward of half a million head of other animals up those two paths. From what Bullfinch’s ironclad reconnaissance up the Neiper has told us, they’re still at it and most likely will be for another month.

  “They’ve got to eat, and we have decided not to cooperate.” He snapped out the last words, cold and angry, and there was a bristle of defiance in the room. Andrew looked at the men with pride. Five years ago they had been terrified peasants who would have lowered their heads and gone into the slaughter pits, would have offered their open barns, the years of food stockpiled for the horde’s arrival.

  Now they were soldiers.

  “They’ve picked the best time to campaign, and in some ways the delay of a month has helped them in the short term. The grass here in Rus is at its richest; an acre of prime pasture can support several dozen horses for a single day’s cropping.

  “When the Merki advance, they’ll have over a million horses with them. I estimate for right now they’ll need a hundred square miles of land per day for their horses, a thousand square miles per week, that’s not counting the need for water or for the food of their own army. We figure that if need be they’ll start to eat their remounts to keep going.”

  He paused and looked back up at the map.

  “In other words, for right now, their army should be able to cross Rus on a front forty miles wide, one umen per mile of front, and be able to move at nearly full speed.”

  “So they’ll hit us with full force, then,” Rick Schneid, commander of the Second Corps asked, shifting the cigar he had been half smoking and half chewing.

  Andrew nodded.

  “So why the hell have we been tearing up our own country?” the Rus brigade commander asked.

  Fletcher smiled.

  “It’s what comes behind the advance. Oh, they’ll move fast, all righ
t, but I daresay that around Suzdal it’s getting damned crowded and forage is short. It must be a logistical nightmare moving those people through a hundred miles of forest at most likely not more than ten to fifteen miles to the day. That entire horde will be moving behind the army, funneling through fords in the rivers, and it will be spread out wide and there’ll be no willing humans to give them their food as they advance. It’ll start to get tough. Those who are moving along the northern edge of the forest or down along the sea will have other problems.”

  He looked over at Andrew.

  “Bullfinch’s people will mount harassing raids. If they see a chance, they’ll land some detachments, kill some, and pull back out. We’ve left a scattering of volunteers in the forests. They’ll sweep out at night to raid and pull back in at dawn. The harassing will force them to contract in toward the center, giving them less forage.”

  It also meant, he realized, that he had given orders to kill Merki noncombatants. That had been a tough one, which to his surprise Kathleen had pushed for with the cold statement “They’re on our land.”

  The land is still rich enough now to support them,” Fletcher said. “However, they’ll be tightening their belts a bit and going slow. The prime grazing lands used by the army will have been cropped over, and there are no stockpiles for the rest.”

  “Yet the army will still be here within the week,” Schneid said.

  Andrew nodded.

  “If we tried to, we might be able to hold them here as we talked about nearly a month ago. If we could stop them for two weeks, better yet a month, they’d be in trouble, forced to disperse a good part of their horses and all remounts just to keep them alive.”

  He hesitated.

  “However, I’m not expecting us to do that anymore.”

  There was a stirring in the room.

  “We’ve got four corps here for a front of forty miles,” someone from the back of the tent stated. “Hell, we tried to hold twice that length of the Potomac with only three.”

  “And we lost the Potomac,” Andrew replied, “along with over ten thousand men, fifty-four guns, and over a million rounds of small-arms ammunition. The truth is that we have little more than three corps here after casualties over the last seventy days, and at best we took out maybe less than ten percent of their numbers.”

  He hesitated.

  “I’m not making the same mistake twice. You men and those you command are too precious to be wasted in a futile stand here.”

  “We’ve fortified the hills out there for a month,” a young brigadier said, pointing toward the White Hills, which were visible behind Andrew through the open rear flap of the tent.

  Andrew nodded.

  “Was that for nothing, then?” the officer continued. “The hands of my men have been bleeding since last fall with all the digging we’ve been doing, first on the Potomac, then the Neiper, and now here.”

  “And we’re going to keep on digging,” Andrew replied. “If digging will save lives I’ll have all of you dig right down to the pit of hell.

  “The Merki expect this to be our place of last stand. Their aerosteamers have penetrated this far five times over the last month, and they’ve seen the work we’ve done. They’re going to come on hard and expect to wrap up this campaign in a fortnight.”

  He hesitated for a moment. The men had been gearing for a showdown fight, a grim Alamo-like stand on the edge of their territory. He had been arguing this point with Kal and the senators for the last month. He had to admit that he had been lying to them from the first day that he had conceived of this mass evacuation and the assassination of Jubadi. Kev would not be the final fallback position—he had from the beginning felt that it would be impossible to hold. He could sense as well that the Merki now believed that they could rush forward for the knockout blow. He would leave them only thin air to strike at.

  “Tonight, army artillery reserve and corps artillery reserve for all five corps will be evacuated back to Hispania. Tomorrow night and the night after, all available trains will evacuate Third Corps and First Corps back to Hispania, where you will start to dig in at once. At the end of four days the only formations left here will be a brigade from Pat’s corps and the newly formed mounted light cavalry units.”

  He waited for a moment for the angry confusion to die down.“That’ll leave just over two thousand men and a couple of batteries of the four-pound guns to cover the entire White Hills front,” Schneid said.

  Andrew nodded.

  “It’s a question of mobility. It’s always been mobility,” Andrew replied. “We’ve got thirty-eight trains, and from the work they’ve been doing we’ll be lucky to have thirty engines up and running by the end of the week. If we meet the Merki here and they break the line, we’ll be able to evacuate only two corps at most. That’ll mean thirty thousand men get left behind with all equipment, to be surrounded and wiped out by horse-mounted Merki warriors. It’ll be the end of any hope of winning.”

  “Winning?” the angry brigadier replied. “Hell, you’re telling us to abandon what little of our country we have left. I’m going to die, we all are going to die, we knew that two months ago, and I want to die on my own soil, the land of Rus.”

  Andrew felt a flicker of anger at the brigadier’s defiance but let it pass. This might be the army, but it was the army of a republic, and he was telling these men that they had lost their country and were going into exile.

  He stepped off the dais and went up to the brigadier, who looked nervous at his commander’s approach.

  “Mikhail of Murom, isn’t it?”

  The man nodded.

  “Barry’s corps, bloody second division,” the man replied.

  “I know you. You’ve been in the army from the beginning, haven’t you.”

  The tent was silent, the Roum translator in the back speaking in a hushed whisper.

  “I started as a private in Hawthorne’s company, served on your staff during the Tugar siege, was promoted to lieutenant colonel after St. Gregory in command of the 1st Murom, and to brigadier with a Medal of Merit for holding the Ford on the Neiper.”

  The man rattled off his record with pride.

  “And you were a peasant before the wars, before the republic?”

  The man nodded, looking about at his comrades, who, like him, had risen the hard way, through skill, intelligence, and more than a shade of luck.

  Knowing it was melodramatic, Andrew reached down and scooped up a handful of dust from the tent floor and stood back up. He held his hand out and let the dust trickle out between his fingers.

  “This is nothing,” he shouted.

  He flung the rest of the dust down and then stepped forward and put his hand on the man’s shoulder.

  “And you, you are everything.”

  The brigadier blinked nervously.

  Andrew looked away from him.

  “You men here, you are everything, you are the hope of Rus, the only chance for a future we shall ever have. It is your blood, your hearts, your minds, and your strong right arms that will win this war. The soil, the land, it will be here now and forever. It cares not. It is unfeeling. It is the land. It will wait for us and we shall have it back!”

  The men stood silent, gathering in around him to hear his words.

  “An army can fight only as long as it lives. You, my friend,” and he pointed back to Mikhail. “You think that this war is about the land. That is often how some think of war—a moving from place to place, victory counted by who holds what land, what town. I tell you that is not the way this war now is. It is about armies. Their goal is not to conquer the land, their goal is to destroy this army, just as our goal is to destroy theirs by whatever means possible.

  “I need your flesh and blood to stay alive, and I have only thirty-eight trains to do it with. When they break the White Hills line—and there is no doubting they will do it—I will not have one man more here than I can evacuate in a single night. That means that nearly all our strength will already b
e far to the east.

  “Our fight here will not be to the death because we are not yet ready and they are too strong.”

  He turned away, went back up to the map, and pointed to the vast stretch of open steppe between Kev and Hispania.

  “We will give them this place if they come on strongly. We will fall back to the Penobscot, the Kennebec and then finally back to the Sangros. All the time falling back, destroying what they can use. Perm willing, if the grass of the steppe dries we’ll burn it. We’ll leave them nothing but ashes.”

  He looked back over to Bob Fletcher.

  “What the colonel’s getting at,” Fletcher explained, “is that the farther they come after us the tougher it’ll get. We’ll pull out by rail but they’ll be following on horse, a million horses to feed. The area east of the Penobscot for nearly eighty miles is damn near a desert, and a month from now there’ll be precious little water if the rain holds off. The ground between the Kennebec and the Sangros is high prairie grass—at best eight or nine horses per acre per day can graze there, maybe even less, especially in the heat of summer. What the colonel here and I are figuring on is that we can let the land help us, slow them down, wear them out, make them pull their belts in tight. If we hold the Sangros line, within a matter of days they’ll have to start picketing their horses thirty or forty miles to the rear to keep them alive. That’ll cut their mobility down, which has always been their biggest advantage over us.”

  “And sooner or later we’ll have to stand,” Mikhail said, his words sounding now more like a question than defiance.

  Andrew stepped back up to him and put his hand on the man’s shoulder.

  “Yes, in the end we’ll stand. But they will have advanced across five hundred miles of barrenness to reach us and we will have fallen back all the way to Hispania.”

  He looked over to the center of the pavilion where Vincent stood.

  “And two fresh corps under General Hawthorne will be waiting there to join us, armed with the new weapons that even now are being produced again in the factories we took all the way from Suzdal to Hispania and Roum. There’ll be a hundred additional field pieces, millions more rounds of small-arms ammunition. We’ll have an army of near seven corps, over one hundred thousand men, rather than half the survivors of a massacre who retreated pell-mell with the Merki on their heels.