Conrad's Last Campaign (11 page)

“A devilish idea, lord, if you will pardon me a moment.” He dismounted and went toward the beach and I decided to pull my lance back out of sight as well. I stayed to watch thirty surprised Mongols meet their maker after they passed by our hidden warriors. Yes, we shot them in the back after they passed our positions, but as the western hero said, “Of course, I shot him in the back. His back was to me.”

Then I left final instructions for the komander, “This will be your responsibility. If they do not send any more men over by evening, billet your men in one these warehouses and leave only watch on the beach. The men will fight better with sleep and we could have real fighting tomorrow. You know where the headquarters is. Send a messenger there if they come in force.”

The word from the barracks was that everything was going slowly, but progressing, so I rode to Sir Ryszard’s position. He was still wasting time taking pot shots at Mongols hunched behind the walls in a large courtyard, so I called him over for a conference. “Baron, I realize that you don’t want to kill innocent people, but I need these men dead and I have an idea that will satisfy both of us. As I see it, most of the men are in that courtyard and on the rooftops of the building behind it. We assume that the women and children are in those connected buildings at the back of the courtyard.

“Now, you will bring over some cannon – I don’t care where you get them - look on the palisade walls – and blow some holes in this side of that courtyard wall. Make an obvious escape route for anyone desperate enough to take it.

“Then, go about a block up wind of these buildings and start the biggest fires you can. The Mongols will see, smell, and hear the fire coming. When it gets too close, they will panic and try to escape. The opening you make will be the only obvious exit for warriors and civilians. Kill those armed or armored as they come through and capture the women and children.”

We both knew that it wasn’t going to work that cleanly, but it gave him an excuse to carry out the attack without being
immoral
and gave me a way to get him moving without humiliating him.

The rest of the battle was routine. The troops on the island never attempted to relieve the city. We eventually bombarded the fort with all of the Mongol cannon and ball we could salvage and reduced it to rubble, without expending a single item of our modern ammunition. We did loose some buildings and suffered a few casualties when they returned fire, but, eventually, we won the duel. When the final troops tried to leave the fort, we changed to grapeshot and continued firing. They were so demoralized that our invasion of the island a few days later was only a cleanup operation.

Sir Gorski showed up a few hours before dark, driving an angry mob of armed Mongols in front of him. He was damn near forcing the Mongols to flank us with a counter attack. Fortunately, the baron was able to send a Big Person ahead to warn us. By the time the Mongols got the gate, they were in crossfire from warriors firing from the homes that lined the road near the gate. Not one got through.

The baron did report that it would have been harder, but most of the Mongol horses and a few of their guards had died in a vicious wild animal attack several nights before.

Street patrols and house-to-house searches over the next two days led to small skirmishes, but the city was effectively ours the first day. As the fighting diminished, more troops were sent to the warehouse area with orders to billet there and maintain a tight blockade.

By the time night fell, my bodyguards had cleaned Batu’s bedroom and set up my quarters in the former khan’s palace. The bastard had converted to Islam, so there weren’t any cigars or booze around and the servants, even the pretty maids, had all run away. I spent my victory night in a soft but cold bed comforted only by a little wine found in the Italian quarter and the warm bodies of my bodyguards snuggling on each side. Victory deserved more.

The next day, we got down to real work. The city was calm enough to allow a staff meeting. We met in the same town hall meeting room as the day before. The military part was quick and simple, but we needed to start working on the next part of our mission.

My original intent was to just sweep the grasslands, killing every horse we could find, since a Mongol without a horse was just a smelly little man with a bow and some arrows.

What we had learned during the trip caused me to rethink that decision. The Mongols were decades ahead of where they should be technologically, even considering that they had seen our equipment in Poland and the manufactory of the rifle we found indicated that they had conquered a large part of China and maybe even the Song dynasty. If so, they had plenty of resources and spare horses.

That meant that killing their horses and burning a few supply depots wasn’t going to be enough to discourage them. We needed to make a big statement that it was dumb to screw with the Christian Army. After all, the Christian Army was basically a pacifistic organization, and the best way to get peace was to kick the crap out of your enemies.

We were going to have to go Mongolia, and since Mongol armies often moved in the winter, we had to go now.

The next day, I sent out an invitation to all of the trading houses to send representatives to at meeting a
noon in the town hall. I might have saved my breath, most of them were already there bitching, complaining, moaning and demanding loudly. By the time we let them into the meeting hall, I had two large iron rings mounted about two meters high on one wall, with handcuffs hanging through the rings and whips hanging on the wall next to them.

I began the meeting as diplomatically as possible by shouting, “Shut the hell up! This meeting is not an open forum and there will be no question and answer period.

“I have no patience for traitors who trade with the Mongols and my first impulse is to lock you all up in your warehouses and set them on fire. Unfortunately, that would cause a certain amount of unpleasant talk back in Poland, so I am going to do business with you instead.

“By nightfall tonight, you will present my quartermaster with complete inventories of all of your trade goods and supplies. Tomorrow, he and his representatives will inspect the merchandise in every warehouse and store in this city. They will verify the accuracy of the inventories.

“As we have no time for lawsuits, courts, explanations, or recriminations, the penalties for lying to or misleading our representatives will be as follows: Any warehouseman guilty of lying to us will be cuffed to those rings you see on the wall to your left and be given twenty lashes. The merchant who employees him will be cuffed next to him for twenty lashes and the hidden merchandise will be confiscated without payment.

“Over the next two days, we will decide what supplies we will purchase from you. If anything you have is of value to us, we will pay full value plus a seventy-five percent inconvenience fee.

“The payment will be in zinc chits on the accounts of the Christian Army and will be redeemable for immediate cash at full value at any of our outposts.”

There was an uproar at the mention of
chits
. “Gentlemen, gentlemen, I know you would prefer gold, but a chit on the Christian Army is as good as gold anywhere in the world, and you are being paid well for the inconvenience of visiting one of our offices. Of course, if you prefer, we can just burn everything here as contraband found in a Mongol town, but I think this is better.

“I suggest that you hope we like your merchandise. Anything that we do not purchase and which is deemed to have value to the Mongols will be burned without recompense.

“As I said, there are no questions. You have about seven hours to produce your inventories and bring them to this room.

“I suggest you hurry. Dismissed.”

I should tell you how much I regretted having to ride roughshod over the merchants, but I’d be lying. We needed stuff in a hurry, and I didn’t need arguments, and sometimes it feels good to just cut through the crap and get people to do what you want.

We spent the afternoon discussing what we needed. Eventually, we listed the absolute minimum that we had to have and decided we would scan the inventories for opportunities.

Fifty five thousand warm coats (one per man plus spares)

Ninety thousand pairs of gloves (two pair per man)

Ninety thousand pairs of warm socks. Christian Army boots are waterproof and strong but lightly insulated for a Mongolian winter

At least four thousand tons of food. (Four pounds per man for forty-five days)

Axes, shovels and other hand tools for the engineers

All of the explosives that the Mongol garrison had. (Black powder was weak stuff and useless for our guns, but it made decent blasting powder for the engineers and was useful in grenades.)

Cooking pots for forty-five thousand men. We would be out of canned food in less than three weeks and then we have to cook. In fact, we would be cooking from the start and saving the canned goods for later.

Several thousand board feet of lumber for the engineers. We wouldn’t see a tree for a while and they needed something to build with.

Wagons for most of the food, all of the powder, all of the cooking pots and whatever else we were taking.

Fuel for cooking.

The great grass sea was short on fuel and we didn’t have time to scrounge for enough dried animal droppings to fix dinner.

The wagons were going to be a problem. We were going to need several thousand and every one was going to be a boat anchor slowing us down. Unburdened, the Big People are fast. Mongolia was about thirty-five hundred miles east of us. Silver and I could be there in less than two weeks, and be dead in fourteen days since we’d only have my sword, a rifle, and a day’s worth of food left. If the first fifty Mongols we met didn’t kill me, I’d starve on the way home.

So, we had to go packing a lot of gear.

We were already down to a hundred miles a day because no matter how good your engine is, there are no roads around here and the wagons can take only so much jostling. A radio cart dragged over rough ground at thirty miles an hour is soon a cartload of broken tubes.

This was a major caravan route and there were thousands of wagons in town, all of them 12
th
century wagons designed to move about one mile an hour. Half of them didn’t even have pivoting front axles.

I had no idea how we would use them, and decided it was stupid to speculate without all the facts, so I called in Sir Eikmann, a komander of engineers. “In a few days, we are going to leave here with at least four thousand tons more food than we have now and probably two thousand tons of engineering supplies, clothes, cook pots, ammo, and miscellaneous stuff. By tomorrow, I need you to tell me how to do it.

“I suggest that you send your best men out immediately to canvas all of the available wagons. Figure out what you can modify to keep up with us and let me know tomorrow morning, no, tomorrow noon how you’re going to pull it off.”

In the old days, I would have pulled out a drawing board and done it myself, but that’s what staff is for, and I had trained a good one.

By morning, the inventories were in. In addition to the quartermaster, only myself, the two counts, the heads of artillery and engineers, and their assistants were present. The rest of the officers were still busy with cleanup skirmishes, and the thousand details of bivouacking and feeding their men and handling police duties.

We had well over a hundred pages of inventory in front of us, and I had forgotten to specify that they had to be in Polish, so many of the merchants had prepared the lists in Italian, Dutch, or Byzantine Greek, and one bastard turned in a list in Chinese. I was tempted to pillory the bastard just for being a smartass, but I settled for sending a messenger to find the merchant and make him come in NOW for translation.

The rest of the lists we divided up by language and started going through them. As we went through the assistants translated the descriptions into Polish and made margin notes.

One of Sir Eikmann’s assistants made the first find. “Merchant out of
Novgorod, has twenty-four thousand fur coats, mostly bear, in stock. In transit to a company in Constantinople.

We soon realized that there was no list of Mongol military supplies. I had forgotten that there were no living Mongol officers. I sent one of my assistants out to find at least a company of men to search the city for Mongol material. It was a big place for a medieval city, and three hundred men wouldn’t be enough to cover it in one day. We also sent out a command for all personnel to be on the lookout for military stores and to report any found to my office.

The traditional personal looting would have to wait for later. The men didn’t have space for much booty anyway.

Food wouldn’t be so easy. When we left the railroad, we stepped back into the 13
th
century. Without 747s and steamships, food was pretty much a local matter and I didn’t expect to find a lot of it in the warehouses. Eight hundred years earlier, Romans in Italy fed on rice and wheat from Egypt and the Romans in York fried in olive oil from Lebanon, but they had better roads, fewer bandits, fewer borders, and much better wagons.

I had no compunction about raiding the city stores and stripping every farm in the area. It was certainly less trouble than the Mongols brought with them. However, it was time-consuming to go from farm to farm packing up barnloads of food, and I was short on time.