I nodded once to the guards, returned their salutes, and turned to leave. There were a million and one things that needed to be done. First, however, we had to bury the fallen. After that, we could start to heal.
Chapter Twenty
Learning from defeat is easy — the gods of Darwin see to that. Learning from victory is a lot harder, yet it remains the most important task of a victorious army.
Two weeks after the city had fallen and peace — of a kind — returned to the planet, we gathered once again in the conference room on the spaceport. The room was decked out in black banners, a reminder of those who had fallen in the recent battle, but none of us needed the reminder. We’d held the funeral service yesterday and I had cringed, inside, as the bodies were systematically lowered into the graves we’d dug for them. It was so little for so much; the men and women who’d died on active service had deserved much better, but what else could we give them? They couldn’t go home again.
The names and faced seemed to shimmer in front of my eyes. We’d lost forty-seven infantrymen, nine tankers and five support staff… and all of them were effectively irreplaceable. B Company had suffered the worst losses, but we’d all been scarred by their deaths; the fallen ones would be sorely missed. There was no one on the planet who could take their place, not without heavy training; the local soldiers didn’t quite come up to our standards, yet. They’d suffered worse than we had in absolute numbers, yet they had far more to lose than us. A single highly-trained soldier from the Legion, one with several skills beyond fighting, was worth more than a local who knew nothing, but fighting. I’d had to throw them into the meat grinder and they’d been… ground.
I was quietly pleased with the local soldiers, but they’d lost over two hundred men in the fighting and it would have been worse, if they hadn’t been heavily supervised. Some of them had the knack for being warrior leaders and had learned fast, but others had gotten themselves and their men killed for lack of experience. Several units had been wiped out and others had been decimated, not always by the enemy. Two soldiers had been shot by others for taking the oldest revenge on some of the Communist women. Others were currently cooling their heels in the guardhouse until the argument over who should have jurisdiction was settled. The only consolation was that none of my people had gotten into trouble this time.
The words of the funeral service echoed through my mind. I’d spoken about each and every one of the fallen, in turn, while the drummers had tapped out the last drumbeat and we’d lowered them into the grave. There hadn’t been a dry eye or a resentful scowl among the men, either; they knew that it could quite easily have been one of them lying there dead on the ground. Some of the men had had families back on Botany, or local girls, and they’d be taken care of, but the others had nothing, but the Legion. We weren’t called the Legion of the Dispossessed because someone had thought it was a cool name.
“We’re clean,” Peter said, finally, as we sipped our coffee. The local coffee was much better than the UN-brand — which wouldn’t have been that difficult — but we still drank the original whenever we met in conference. It helped remind us of where we’d come from, something that seemed to grow more and more important as the years slipped by. “No one’s managed to slip a bug into the room, sir.”
“Good,” I said, calling the room to attention. My inner circle sat up in their chairs and came to a version of attention that would have had a drill sergeant in tears, before he expressed his displeasure in very loud words. “Two weeks ago, we liberated Pitea from the Communists and cleared the remainder out of New Copenhagen. We won, in short, but it won’t be the last challenge we face.”
My gaze swept the room. “Who would like to go first?”
Ed leaned forward, seemingly reluctantly. “The infantrymen are generally pleased with their performance, as am I,” he said. “The deaths were… unpleasant, but they accepted them and silent wakes” — an old UN tradition among the enlisted men — “were held last night in their name. They can be safely said to have been avenged. The downside is that we are down in numbers and we don’t have replacements that can be thrown into the Companies without needing heavy training.”
I nodded. “You don’t feel that the locals can replace them?”
“I doubt it,” Ed said. “Every one of my men is a long-lifer who has at least five to six years of experience in the infantry, either with the UNPF or one of the planetary armies. There are few people on Svergie who can claim the same length of service and few of them served with the UNPF or anyone else. I think we’re either going to have to slot in some of the trainers or send back to Botany for replacements. Either way, we’re going to need more exercises.”
“I know,” I said, juggling priorities in my head. We had a rule that everyone in the Legion had to be qualified as an infantry rifleman, if nothing else, but the support troops were generally needed elsewhere. I could throw in a few dozen support staff for a short period if I had to, but doing it permanently would leave dents in my roster. There were a few who would want to transfer, and that could be arranged, but others wouldn’t be too keen on the idea. It’s a bad idea to force a man to take such a position if he doesn’t want it. “Put out a call and see who volunteers, then put them through the training course. If they don’t make it, we’ll send back to Botany for replacements.”
I paused. “Is there anything else?”
“Nothing that needs to be discussed in council,” Ed said, after a moment. “There are some concerns about the quality of the local mortar teams and artillery gunners, but that can wait until they have proper training.”
“Which leads nicely to my part,” Russell said, blowing a smoke ring from his cigar. He shot Ed a quick grin and carried on, puffing out smoke. “The local soldiers generally did very well, or at least as well as could be expected, given the limited nature of their training and how they were tossed right into the worst field of war. They’ve actually refused to accept the disbanding of the shattered units and are insisting that we refill them with new recruits, something that I wouldn’t have expected to see in the locals for quite some time.”
We exchanged glances. A unit — a company, or a regiment, or a division — outlasts everyone who has every served in it. The Legion would go on after my death and the new recruits would be told that they had joined a proud tradition started by one Andrew Nolte. There were UN units that had lasted for hundreds of years, proudly carrying their battle standards from planet to planet; hell, I didn’t know a single planetary army that didn’t have such a tradition. The soldiers might have fought for their planet, but they would die for their comrades… and with such baubles soldiers are led.
“I see no reason to disband them, even if we do have to rebuild them from scratch,” I said, seriously. The table murmured agreement. “Do you have any specific concerns?”
“Discipline was generally good, although there was some… ah, reluctance to jump right into the fighting,” Russell said. “They weren’t too trusting of the body armour at first and frankly that’s not a bad attitude for them to have. Body armour is good, but it’s far from perfect. A handful of soldiers broke down completely and had to be helped off the battlefield…”