Not a very polite thing to do, I suppose, but it wasn't as though we had invited them to Poland!
The amount of booty collected was simply fabulous, but I had known how that would go since before that battle on the east riverbank. We were told that once the loot was all collected and divided out, we would all be rich.
I had to think about that, because I wasn't really sure just what "rich" meant. Did it mean I could have a castle like Lambert's?
But then who would live in it with me? Who would do all the work that it took to keep the place up? I mean, every man I knew was now in the army, and so every one of them would be getting at least as big a share of the loot as I was.
Somebody would still have to plow the fields, or we'd all starve, that was plain enough. And somebody would have to bake the bread, and I knew that that somebody would be my father and his family.
That had to be the way of it. If everybody was rich, then nobody was rich. All it meant was that we'd all have lots of pretty gold jewelry and things, but we'd still be working people all our lives.
I tried to explain my reasonings to the other guys around me, but none of them believed me. They called me a pessimist and went on talking about their big houses, their vast fields, and their numberless herds of cattle. In an hour they all had fine horses, beautiful wives, and dozens of even prettier servant girls.
As if the Mongols had brought a few million extra pretty girls with them from wherever it was they had come from!
Any fool could see they had brought the gold and silver they had stolen from the Russians, and their swords and other weapons, and that was about it.
Well, they had brought their ponies, too, and those that were still alive had all been relieved of their saddles and released for lack of anything better to do with them. We didn't have the harnesses we'd need to hitch them to our war carts, and anyway, they would have slowed us down. With men pulling the things, we could keep going around the clock, and no horse except Anna's kin could possibly do that.
I supposed that come spring, a lot of poor peasants would be using Mongol ponies to pull their plows instead of making their wives do it. That would doubtless be an improvement, but I wouldn't call it "rich."
But a pony wasn't of any use in a bakery, so I stopped thinking about it and went to sleep.
The next morning the battlefield was cleaned up. It is amazing how much work a sixth of a million men can do when they are organized properly.
One komand of six companies was being left on the battlefield to take care of the wounded and keep an eye on things, half of the rest were going back with the booty to get the factories going again, and the remaining seven battalions would be going east of the Vistula to see about cleaning up the mess we'd made over there.
A few million unburied dead bodies lying around can start a plague, they told us, and there was probably more gold over there than had ever been brought to this side of the Vistula.
And since the River Battalion knew where all the bodies weren't buried, we would be going back to show the rest what to do. Apparently, we would not be among the idle rich for a while yet.
The first problem we faced was that we couldn't find the riverboats to take us across the river. It seemed that the rains and thunderstorms of the last week had made our radios not work, somehow. The boats had to be out there, somewhere, but they didn't know we needed them.
Fortunately, someone found some big barges at the docks of Sandomierz and a lot of rope in one of the warehouses. With these things, they made up six of the sort of ferryboats that Lord Conrad had invented ten years ago.
The idea was that you tie a boat to the bank with a long rope, with the centerline of the boat at an angle to the river. The force of the river's flow will then push the boat across, the way the wind moves the sails of a windmill. Change the angle around, and the boat will go back again.
I know this works because they decided that the River Battalion should be the ones to work them. Since this was a task far preferable to stripping and burying dead Mongols, we took on the unfamiliar job with alacrity.
By night we had all seven battalions east of the Vistula. A company from the River Battalion was left with the ferryboats, but it wasn't mine.
We spent two days doing the dirtiest jobs imaginable, stripping, decapitating, and burying the Mongol dead. Once we had carried away the top layer of them, we discovered that the dead bodies below were packed so tightly they were stuck together!
We had to get a rope around each man and each horse, and then twenty men would drag the dead body out for another group to process while we went back for another corpse. Ugly work.
Then we got shocking news.
Cracow was burning!
We dropped what we were doing and recrossed the Vistula as fast as we could. Since we all had to use the same ferryboats, it was like trying to empty too big a bottle through too small a neck.
We worked quickly, but everything took so much time!
Troops were sent south on the railroad in company-sized units, rather than waiting until we could move together.
Days before, when the first half of the army was heading south, they had lightened their loads when they heard about the Mongol attack on Cracow. They had thrown out everything they didn't absolutely need to fight with and took off at a run to save the city.
Scattered by the side of the road were tons of food, clothing, and even radios, but more important, tons and tons of booty. Fabulous amounts of gold and silver coins and precious jewelry were lying all about, and the last company in line had been left to guard it.
Every platoon had to take its cart with it, and these carts were difficult to remove from the railroad tracks. So when the troops from across the Vistula finally came along, the guard company, now rested, had left in their van, and the last company in each group had taken over the guard duty for a bit, until they in turn were relieved.
And since we were the people who were operating the ferries, my company was the very last one to head south.
So we were the ones who got stuck with guarding I don't know how many tons of useless gold. We completely missed the Battle of Cracow, the Slaughter of East Gate, and the Battle of Three Walls!
The world is sometimes most unfair!
It was weeks before we were sent enough men and carts to move all of the booty to Three Walls. We were allowed but one night there to have a beer and hear about everything we had missed before we were ordered back across the Vistula to finish up with the dirty cleanup job that had been interrupted.
Eighty thousand other soldiers were there with us doing the same dirty job, but that didn't make us feel any better about it!
The worst of it was when we got to those Mongol catapults, and saw all the bodies around them. Back when we were killing them, we had wondered at the way the Mongols didn't seem to care if we killed them or not, and at the way the catapult crews fell so easily, as though they had no armor at all.
Now we found the reason for it. The people pulling those catapults weren't Mongols at all. They were Polish peasants who had been captured and forced to help the enemy! Those had been our own people we were forced to kill!
And all we could do was bury them.
I don't think that I ever felt guilty about killing the enemy, but up until that time, I didn't really hate them, either. Now I learned to hate the Mongols, and hate them I still do.
After a week spent cleaning up the killing fields where the riverboats had wreaked such havoc, we split into smaller groups, back into the countryside, to bury the dead who had not taken the army's advice about evacuating the area.