1635: The Eastern Front (43 page)

"It's going well, I think. Well enough, at least."

He felt a drop of rain strike his hand. Then two, then three. A little patter of raindrops hit his helmet.

"Fuck!"

Jönsson had been afraid the king hadn't spotted the storm clouds coming. As it always was in a battle, Gustav Adolf's attention had been riveted on the enemy across the field. Some part of his mind had probably noticed that it was getting darker, despite the sun still rising. They hadn't reached noon yet. But that same part of his mind would have discounted the fact. Things often got darker in a battle, from the gunsmoke pouring out everywhere. Especially if there wasn't much in the way of a breeze, which there wasn't today.

Or hadn't been. Anders felt a sudden gust strike his cheek.

This was going to be another bitch of a storm, watch and see.

"Fuck!"
repeated the king of Sweden, emperor of the United States of Europe, and high king of the Union of Kalmar.

Once again, war was respecting no person.

"Praise the Lord," murmured Stanislaw Koniecpolski. Technically, that might be blasphemy. But Koniecpolski was a Catholic, not a superstitious Protestant prone to seeing fussy rules and regulations in the way a man put on a button. He was also the grand hetman of Poland and Lithuania and one of its greatest magnates—a class of men who took a very expansive view of their rights and privileges. Much of the reason for Poland's tradition of religious toleration was because no great magnate was about to tolerate anyone—neither king nor pope nor sniveling Jesuit nor even the Sejm itself—telling
him
what he could or could not believe. He might be a Catholic himself, as most of Poland and Lithuania's magnates were, but he damn well had the right to convert to any brand of Protestantism that took his fancy, if he chose to do so.

So, "Praise the Lord," repeated Koniecpolski. Secure in the knowledge that what might be blasphemy for a peasant or a butcher was not for a grand hetman.

The storm clouds were coming fast. The Poles would start charging furiously now, while the soil was still firm enough that their horses could move across it. The condition of the ground was already bad—terribly so for cannon balls—but it wasn't bad enough that Polish warhorses would disobey their masters. A horse could handle such terrain, even if they didn't like it. They wouldn't be galloping, of course. But even a hussar charge at the speed of a canter could hammer down an opponent if they failed to stand their ground.

That was Gustav Adolf's great concern. Modern infantry could withstand cavalry if they were trained and seasoned, which these troops were—
provided
they retained their confidence. And there was nothing that would faster erode a unit's morale than the feeling they were alone, isolated, with their commanders nowhere to be seen.

The feeling, in short, that a heavy rain would bring.

The king of Sweden knew exactly what Koniecpolski would do now. The grand hetman would push his hussars to the utmost in order to take advantage of whatever period existed between the arrival of the rain and the subsequent obscuring of the battlefield and the point at which the rain turned the ground so muddy that cavalry were effectively unusable.

The morale of his troops. That was everything, now. He had to do whatever was necessary to keep them from faltering.

Without even realizing he was doing so, Gustav Adolf eased his sword in and out of its scabbard in order to make sure it would come forth easily if he needed it. Then he did the same with his pistols in their saddle holsters.

* * *

Anders Jönsson knew how to read the signs. He swiveled in the saddle and gave his little unit of Scotsmen a fierce and commanding look.

You know what's probably coming. Be ready!

Then he faced forward again. Were it not completely inappropriate in the presence of his monarch, Anders would have shouted his sentiments aloud—and been echoed by a dozen Scot throats.

Fuck!

Chapter 37

The first hussar charge was driven back with a horrible slaughter. This was the first time Stanislaw Koniecpolski had faced the new rifled muskets massed on a battlefield, and he'd underestimated their effectiveness. They could be reloaded as quickly as smoothbore muskets but had two or even three times the effective range. He understood now why the Swedes had such a seemingly-perilous dearth of pikemen. They had only one pike for every two muskets, where the usual ratio was one-to-one or even two-to-one in favor of the long spears.

But those slender ranks of pikemen were enough, given the horrific rate of fire being maintained by the riflemen they were protecting.

Koniecpolski almost lost the battle, right then and there. He surely would have, had he followed his natural urge to hurl more hussars at the enemy. He'd won battles before with that simple tactic, and more than one of them. Hussars were terrifying in a full charge, on their immense horses and with the wings expanding their apparent size and their huge lances. They were like something out of legend. Mounted knights of fable, with the ferocity of ancient warriors.

But not this battle. The Swedes stood their ground and gunned down the Polish cavalry. Shot them and shot and shot them. Not more than twenty or thirty even managed to reach the enemy lines, and they were either killed or driven off by the pikes soon enough.

The grand hetman couldn't afford such casualties. Not even hussars could withstand losses like these, if they kept up.

"Call them back!" he bellowed to his aides. As they raced off to carry out his orders, Koniecpolski turned to the commander of his Cossack units, Severyn Skoropadsky.

"I need you to relieve the pressure, Ataman. Make no frontal attacks, you understand. Just harass them and keep them off balance for . . ."

He paused to gauge the sky. "Perhaps half an hour. Or a bit longer."

Skoropadsky had a little smile on his face, with perhaps a trace of derision. As if Cossacks were dumb enough to imitate blockhead Polish hussars! Cossacks were raiders of the steppes. Like Tatars and the Mongols before them, their style of warfare was fluid. They mostly used firearms now instead of bows, but their tactics were still basically those of mounted archers.

But if there was any derision in that smile, it was only a trace and more the product of Cossack habit than any disrespect for Koniecpolski himself. The grand hetman of Poland and Lithuania was well-regarded by the Commonwealth's registered Cossacks. Koniecpolski had played a major role in the Polish campaign to crush the Cossack rebellion in 1630 led by Taras Fedorovych. No Cossack doubted that Koniecpolski would have completely crushed the rebels had that been what he saw as his duty. But during the negotiations that finally produced a treaty in August, Koniecpolski had opposed harsh reprisals against the Cossack rebels. He'd thought that the long-standing tensions between Poland-Lithuania and the Cossack hosts would never end until the Commonwealth changed its policies toward the Cossacks.

So, whenever he went on campaign, Koniecpolski had no trouble gaining the adherence of several thousand registered Cossacks—no small accomplishment, given that there were not all that many to begin with. Many of them were no doubt unregistered, of course. In time of war, the atamans would usually look the other way if their ranks were partially filled with Cossacks from the various independent hosts who had no legal standing in the Commonwealth.

So would Stanislaw Koniecpolski. Whatever their faults, Cossacks were fighters.

Whenever a charge was broken as badly as this one had been, there was always the great danger that the retreating cavalrymen would trigger panic in the whole army. The repulse of a charge would then become the rout of an army.

Koniecpolski himself could play the most important part in stifling that danger. He was already riding toward the returning hussars, to steady them with words of assurance and his simple presence. But it would help a great deal if the army could see that the enemy was being engaged by other forces. In truth, the Cossacks couldn't do more than tear at the edges of the Swedish forces. But that would be enough to keep Gustav Adolf from launching any charge of his own. All Koniecpolski needed was enough time for the rain to begin again.

Cavalrymen didn't like to fight in a storm, even less than infantrymen did. The horses were harder to handle, and for good reason. Many of them would inevitably stumble, charging through rain and mud, and a horse fall could kill or cripple a man very easily.

Still, whether they liked it or not, hussars would have the advantage in a heavy rain. Their somewhat archaic style of war would serve them in good stead then.

A musket is hard to reload in a downpour, leaving the soldier with no better weapon than a bayonet—against a sixteen-foot lance that needed no reloading. And when that lance was lost as lances usually were in a battle, the infantryman would then have to face the hussar's saber. A man on foot armed with what amounted to a short clumsy spear, against a man wielding a long saber from atop a horse fourteen to sixteen hands tall.

It would be a bloody, muddy, mess of a battle. But Koniecpolski thought he could win it. No, Koniecpolski was
determined
to win it. This was the third time Gustav Adolf had invaded Poland. Enough was enough.

Given the pace Mike Stearns was demanding, the march had been exhausting already. Then the rain started coming down.

"Well, fuck a duck," said Colonel Jeff Higgins. Wishing, before long, that he was a duck himself.

At the front of the column, Mike and his aides had called another halt. They had no choice, really, since the division was getting spread out too thinly again. There was only one passable road in this area and you could only safely march three men abreast. That meant the Third Division stretched for more than two miles between its head and its tail. If you didn't make periodic stops, that stretch got even worse. The division was like a giant caterpillar moving across the Polish landscape.

A wet caterpillar—and from the looks of the sky, it was going to get wetter before the day was over.

"How far, do you think?" he asked his aides.

Duerr shrugged. "In miles? Somewhere between two and four. Probably around three. In hours? As long as it may take."

Long made a face. "That's about the truth of it, sir. In decent weather, even on a road like this, we could make it in an hour or two hours. Be wiser to take the two, though."

Leebrick nodded. "There's no point coming to a battle so quickly that you're in no shape to fight." He pointed with his thumb to the army stretched out behind them. You couldn't see the end of it from here, and probably couldn't have even in good weather. "You show up at a battle strung out like this, cavalry will eat you alive. Hussars won't even bother to salt you first."

Mike listened for the sound of cannon fire. The battle must have started by now. If they were only two to four miles away from the battle, you'd expect to hear the guns.

He couldn't anything at all. But with this sort of heavy rainfall, he had no idea how much the noise of a battlefield would get suppressed.

Five minutes later, the march resumed.

Anders Jönsson was having no trouble hearing the guns. But he wasn't paying much attention to them, because it wasn't cannon fire he was worried about at the moment. He squinted through the rain, shielding his eyes with a hand. The helmet he was wearing was designed to shed bullets and sword blades, not raindrops.

You could barely see the enemy any longer, the downpour was so thick. Surely the Poles wouldn't try—

The huge shape of a winged hussar came into sight, followed by dozens more—hundreds on either side were now visible—no, that must be at least two or three thousand—

Miserable be-damned Poles. Fighting hussars was like fighting armed and armored lunatics.

For a moment, Jönsson felt a fierce yearning for some of his own lunatic ancestors. A field full of berserks charging the other way would be nice, right about now. Swinging great swords, wearing nothing but bearskins, biting their own shields in a fury.

Not much different from hussars, really, except for the wings and not being quite as dumb.

"Again!"
Koniecpolski roared. "No mercy on the Swedes!"

Three times he'd sent the hussars against the front ranks of Gustav Adolf's army since the rain began. Three times they'd been driven back. But each time, they returned with renewed fury rather than despair. The hussars were suffering heavy casualties, but they could sense their enemy weakening.

Meanwhile, Koniecpolski kept the Cossacks in the fight. He'd never let them rest once since he first launched them at the enemy's flanks. They couldn't get around those flanks, of course, because the Swedes were backed up against the lake. But they could keep Gustav Adolf pinned where he was.

The Swedish king was completely on the defensive now. He was outnumbered, unable to maneuver, and had lost all of his advantages. The superb rate of fire of his artillery had vanished. There was no way to reload a cannon quickly in a downpour. The same for reloading a musket. Rifled or smoothbore, it mattered not. The rain equalized everything. The men handling breechloaders in the Swedish army could still maintain a fairly decent rate of fire, but there weren't that many of them. And as for the accuracy of the rifles, what did it matter if you could hit an enemy soldier at three hundred yards? You can't shoot something you can't see. Between the rain and the gunsmoke, this battlefield was almost as obscured as it would have been in a fog.

A gust of wind cleared aside the gunsmoke, allowing Gustav Adolf to see most of the field for the first time in ten minutes.

He felt a little shock of horror. A gap had opened up between the Västergötlanders and the Green Brigade. It wasn't a huge gap, but hussars wouldn't need much to start rolling up the lines.

Outnumbered as he was, he hadn't kept much of a reserve, and he'd already used up what he had. He'd sent Colonel Hepburn and his men to shore up his right very early in the battle. What he'd had left was just the Orange regiment. Ten minutes ago, he'd sent them to bolster Winkel. They couldn't be called back in time.