Conrad's Last Campaign (20 page)

Staying three or four months on the tundra is different than overnight camping. I had to build a temporary city, and there weren’t a lot of bricks and mortar around.

One purpose of the project was to fight camp fever, that morbid bored attitude that saps the will of even the best army, but it had to be done anyway. The Steppes were going to get cold and damp and miserable and a cotton tent, waterproof or not, was not the place to live through the winter.

There were some wooded areas near enough to be used, but they were too small to provide housing materials for forty thousand men, so I settled on the same material that we used for the ramparts, sod. If it could house thousands of American settlers, it could house the Army. The wood would be only used for ridge poles and sills.

Each company theoretically had two hundred and fifty-two men so we made that our standard housing unit. Each housing unit would have buildings arranged around a square. Three sides of the square would each have six soddies for the warriors and two for the knights. In the center would be a soddie for the knights banner facing one reserved for the captain.

The fourth side would be the large dining/recreation hall and two latrines would be in the corners, far enough away for sanitation and odor control.

The engineering company experimented with several designs and settled on a dozen foot wide, three dozen foot long soddie tall enough to allow the erection of two standard tents inside. The roofs sagged or collapsed on the first three they built, but they eventually came up with a solid design that could be built with three ridge poles, two sills on top the side walls, a sill for the top of the door and a lot of sod.

Windows were placed at the top of both walls, just under the sill for fresh air, light, and smoke evacuation and a door cut in the long side. The units were paired less than five feet apart with the doors facing each other. The entryways were a little claustrophobic, but we hoped that they would shield each other from the wind and share what heat escaped, and the close spacing of the houses left a lot of open space compared the usual camp layout. We would need over three thousand of the houses.

The captains got the same house but it had only their tent in it, leaving ample space for a waiting or conference room. Each unit needed a long narrow latrine made the same way, but only two yards wide and an eating/cooking/social hall big enough to seat over a hundred men at a time. Fortunately, our standard baggage included a lot of folding chairs, not enough, but a lot.

The roof was the tricky part. Even poor farmers tried to buy enough cut lumber and tar paper for a roof. If you were poorer than that just lumber would do. No lumber? Put a canvas over the rafters, stack bushes and small limbs over that, and then a thin layer of sod. No canvas? Put lots of bushes and limbs and maybe some woven grass mats over the rafters and then a thin layer of sod. That kind of roof guaranteed two things, it would admit bugs, rats, spiders, and various nasties and was one hundred percent guaranteed to leak.

We probably had enough canvas on hand to roof the big halls and the latrines, the rest of the houses would show why we erected tents inside them.

Unfortunately, my personal tent was too large to fit inside a sod structure, so I settled for three walls to buffer the wind and a canvas roof.

It turned out that boredom was not as big a problem as I feared. About half the food we had left was canned, but the rest needed to be cooked four times a day, and people needed to clean up afterward and handle the garbage. For the first month, we had teams of sod cutters going out every day making bricks for building and repair. Then the water teams had to bring water from the river to every dining hall. After the first rain, most squads sent men out to the small forest areas to gather more bushes and foliage for their roofs. By the time we had all the construction done, there were no more forest areas around, but there were still bushes and branches left over. Some troopers wove grass mats for doors and window coverings.

Exercise took part of each day and while we were too short of ammo for target practice, we had sword, hand to hand, and bayonet practice. Then there were organized sports, disorganized contests, card games, practical jokes, equipment maintenance and constant improvements to the palisade. For the first few weeks, we had the shit brigade out every day. Since the main fuel on the steppes was dried animal dung, unfortunate troopers with shovels and a wagon scanned a larger area each day for dung.

The only thing we didn’t have was gambling. It was forbidden on pain of the worst punishments that would leave a man combat capable – when he healed. I have no moral objection to gambling and damned little sympathy for someone dumb enough to gamble his poke away, but I couldn’t risk breaking camp with an army where half the men were broke and carrying grudges against the half who had their money.

We did get one major break. I had read somewhere that in the 19
th
century, the major commercial fuel in Russia was peat. It was even used for power generation for part of the 20
th
century. The crew I had sent to scout downriver had paid off. In an area where the river had once run, they found a small peat bog. Maybe enough fuel for one winter.

We dropped the shit wagons and organized crews to cut peat every day. It gave us enough fuel to cook with, heat the soddies, and boil our water.

We needed a lot of hot water to keep the men healthy. One of the major fictions in modern history is the story that Napoleon was defeated by the Russian winter. It makes a grand story and caused a lot of dramatic art work, but it just isn’t true. The weather didn’t turn really cold until he had crossed the borders out of the country. For most of his retreat, the weather was clear and about fifty degrees Fahrenheit. His men died of disease, not the cold.

Some died of hunger, thousands surrendered to avoid starvation, but two hundred thousand died from disease. Typhus was the biggest killer, a disease from which clean healthy men rarely die.

We had enough food and vitamin supplements for a few months, chemicals to sterilize water, lime for the latrines, and exercised the men regularly, but we had to keep them clean. I built several large bath houses near the river and, since sod house walls tend to run when steamed, we used some of our precious wood supply to make saunas. The men were required to strip to the skin, scrub down, and wash their clothes not less than once every five days. Tubs of hot water and toweling were available sixteen hours a day.

I brought forty thousand healthy men into this camp and intended to take the same number out.

The time passed rapidly. About six weeks after we arrived, the group I sent south returned with a large herd of cattle and a week behind them there was a smaller herd of sheep. They had gotten as far as the edge of the Cuman Sultanate when they found estates with herds for sale. The owners were probably nominally subjects of the Mongols, but the conversation was limited to hand gestures, grunts, and head shaking and did not lend itself to irrelevant political talk. Gold, as usual, was the real ruler.

Fortunately the Christian Army contained a large number of former farm boys who could butcher crudely but adequately.

After the first few weeks, we knew we were being watched. The Big People patrolled a twenty-mile wide area while they fed at night, and with their sense of smell, they could find a Mongol a mile away, even if he recently had his annual bath. On a regular basis, they brought in the bodies of spies either crushed or wiggling in the morning. We set up posts ten miles up and down the river to monitor boat traffic. We continued to purchase or commandeer a few useful cargoes whose owners had apparently not believed the rumors that we were here, and I am certain that many of the riverboat men reported to the Mongols.

For reasons of their own, the Mongols made no serious attempt to attack us. Either they were not certain of our intentions, or lacked local manpower, or were just waiting to set up a trap, but we did not even suffer from serious sniping all winter.

The ten weeks before the dirigible arrived passed rapidly.

I was in a staff meeting when I heard engine noises and commotion outside. Sylvia ran in from her post yelling, “Master, Master, there is a monster in the sky!” Apparently she hadn’t been at any of the staff meetings about the dirigibles. It circled overhead twice, keeping several thousand feet up, wisely out of rifle range and then dropped a canister near enough to make me jump. The message was “Meet us at the river. Bring strong, heavy men.” You could hear the engines rev up as it headed east.

It took a lot of shouting to convince thousands of medieval men that the thing was not a monster, and when that failed, that it was our monster. The barons and knights had their hands full keeping the panic down. Even the ones who had been briefed on the dirigibles hadn’t realized how big they were until that moment. Twentieth century men facing a flying saucer would have been calmer.

The captain loitered over the river until I put on my golden armor and joined a thousand men at the riverside. I knew I wouldn’t need to armor for fighting, but I wanted the captain to see where the boss was.

I sat on Silver for about twenty minutes as the captain lined up his ship over with the river and dropped large rubber hoses over a hundred feet down. He waited until the breeze was blowing toward our side of the river and started up his water pumps. The ship slowly sank as he filled the ballast tanks and floated down toward the bank. At about thirty feet, the crew dropped a dozen ropes from the cargo doors and gestured for men to grab on. It would have been easier to get them to grab live rattlesnakes, but discipline finally got enough to grab ropes to drag the ship further onto the bank as it sank.

Once he was settled, the water pumps sped up to fill the ballast tanks. I realized that he was making certain that his big gas-filled balloon didn’t get knocked around while it was beached. These people were learning a lot faster than I expected. The most common accident that killed the early zeppelins was gusts of wind that dragged them around on the ground but this captain had good feeling for his ship and a sense of how to run it.

I waited until I saw men leaving the control house and then rode over to meet the officers debarking at the front loading ramp. The captain stood in the doorway, waiting for me. He must have known that I would want the tour. As I approached the ramp, he saluted and called out, “Captain Obitz, commanding the
Zephyr
, your grace. We bring you presents, and a great new toy!”

I shouted back, “That was a hell of a landing, captain!”

“I hope I never have to do it again!”

By that time, I was standing beside him, “Maybe next time we can drop straight down on the bank and have your men drag the hoses to the river. It’s easier than waiting for the right breeze. We can land without taking on ballast, but I have to dump a lot gas to do it.

“We’ve been up there over an hour watching your camp. It was easy to follow your trail in the grass, but we didn’t expect a mud city. We weren’t even certain it was you until we saw your tent and then got low enough to see some of the flags.”

I was looking over his shoulder at the biggest enclosed space I had seen since I left the twentieth century. It was filled with cargo. “What did you bring me on the first trip?”

“Mostly Food. Captain Feliks was in charge of the cargo. His philosophy is that there’s no point in giving a man a gun if he’s too cold or too hungry to use it, so I’ve got fifty tons of rice, wheat, and dried fruit, twenty thousand pairs of socks, twenty-five thousand pairs of underwear, five thousand shirts, and a lot of toilet paper. Maybe next time I’ll be able to bring some military stuff.”

“Feliks was right, that is military stuff, but I’ll send back another list of what we need. We’ve done better with local food than we expected.

How long was your flight?"

“About thirty hours. We flew out of the new base in Anapa. Komander Osiol is having your supplies shipped there, so we won’t be going back to
Gdansk on every mission.”

Captain Ivanov already had a crew unloading the supplies, so the airship captain and I got out of the way by taking a tour of the ship. I was impressed by the Spartan layout. This thing was optimized for cargo.

The captain explained that the ground was not a good place for a
rigidible
and expressed a desire to get back in the air as soon as possible. I had a table set up for us to work at and sent for food for everyone, including both crews. He told us what he needed for landing spot, and we agreed to prepare the best we could, and have designated teams of men to help on the next trip. The crews had the ship unloaded in four hours and we sat down to a good meal of fresh bread and beef. Captain Ivanov handed over a list of critically needed supplies and then hurried off to supervise the storage of the new supplies.

The last thing offloaded was a tank of acid and a large box of iron filings. It would provide enough emergency hydrogen to lift off in an emergency.

The captain explained that he was going back to Gdansk on this trip for a post fight evaluation, but that we should see one of his sister ships in less than ten days. Then he jumped back on board grinning like a kid with a new bicycle and rose into the air.

The navy was a good as their word. A second airship showed up in nine days and in the ten weeks we waited out the winter, the four ships delivered eighty tons of supplies four times a week.