FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD STARGARD
In front of us, like on a movie screen, the Polish nobility was slugging it out with the Mongol horsemen. Our men were hopelessly outnumbered, but they were giving a good account of themselves. They had some advantages.
They were generally bigger and stronger than their adversaries, and had much better arms and armor than the enemy. Most of them had been equipped out of my factories, and the poorest page had at least a full set of chain mail, doubtlessly a hand-me-down, but better than what many knights wore ten years ago. The Mongols, on the other hand, were wearing whatever they could steal or scavenge off of various battlefields, and many of them had no armor at all.
The Polish horses were considerably larger and more powerful than those of their adversaries, and in shock combat, this counted for a lot.
But mostly, the western knight was trained to fight as an individual, both on the tourney field and in battle. This was often to their disadvantage in combat with the more sophisticated easterners, but it wasn't that way today. The Mongols were showing none of their vaunted organization and discipline. If anything, they seemed more disorganized than we were. Perhaps Ilya's men really had fragged every Mongol officer.
Furthermore, our men could come to our lines when tired or thirsty or wounded. Any Mongol who got close enough to offer a clear shot was killed.
Our men had some advantages, but they weren't enough to offset a numerical disadvantage of twenty-to-one.
One by one, the pride of the Polish nobility was dying.
Chapter Twenty-three
The slaughter in the cold rain went on for hours, and watching it and not being able to do anything to help was one of the most frustrating things that I have ever done. It was equally rough on the men of the army who were looking helplessly on.
A group of women came by driving mules that were pulling a standard army tank cart filled with beer. They filled all our cooking pots with it.
"Compliments of the Sandomierz Whoremasters Guild," one saucy wench said. "Just be sure and save half of it for them fine young knights out there doing all the fighting!"
"What is the Whoremasters Guild doing with an army tank cart?" I asked.
"Oh, they was just sitting around, going to waste, when all them handsome knights was thirsty," she said. "We figured we'd do us a public service, being in that business, you know. Servicing the public, that's our job!"
"They? How many of my tank carts did you take?"
"Oh, there was maybe two dozen of them, and the mules wasn't being used either. But your carts? Then you must be that Count Conrad they talk about. You're the size they tell. Say, you ain't mad about this beer, are you? I mean, it ain't like we stole it to sell or something."
"No, I guess I'm not mad, and I suppose the men need a drink. But look, once you share out the beer, come back with that thing filled with water, all right?"
"Right-o, your lordship. Say, why don't we never see you around any? A man your size would be a fun one!"
"I'm happily married. But by the same token, what are you doing being a prostitute? You know the army is always hiring women as well as men. You could get a good job and maybe find a real knight of your own."
"What? Leave the guild? Say, my master'd whup me for even thinking about it!"
"You don't have to put up with that sort of thing! No whoremaster ever dared beat a member of the army!"
"What? Not whup me? Then how'd I know he still cared about me? Whoops! The cart's four places down already! Got to run, your lordship! Ta-taaa!"
And with that, she waved and ran away. I don't think I'll ever understand some people.
Well, at least I could understand the men around me. They wanted to go out there and kill somebody! Some of them had been training for this day for years, and now there was nothing they could do! We had over twenty thousand swivel guns pointed at the enemy, and they were useless! A bullet fired would go right through the Mongol it was aimed at, and kill some Christian who happened to be fighting behind him! It was all my fault, too. I made those guns too powerful! I'd had visions of Mongols charging at us six ranks deep, and our guns ploughing furrows through them. I never imagined anything like this!
One of my men looked up at me from the ranks in front of my cart and shouted, "Dammit! Do something!"
He was as insubordinate as hell, yet he had expressed the common feeling, and I had to answer him.
"Do what? What can we do? If we advance, we'd only squeeze them closer together, and our knights need room to fight in! If we shoot, we kill our own men as well as the enemy!"
"They're dying anyway!" another man yelled.
"Then better they should die at Mongol hands and not ours! If the knights would just get out of there, we could end this in minutes! This is their decision! There's nothing we can do!"
That didn't satisfy anybody, but there was nothing they could answer. I looked away from the slaughter and saw a strange thing.
A knight rode along the backs of our carts, not in the trap at all. He wore gold-washed chain mail of good quality but of the old-style. His barrel-type helmet was goldwashed as well, with trim that looked to be solid gold.
He was staring at the war carts and guns like a country peasant visiting the city for the first time. But what really caught my notice was his horse. It was pure white, but aside from that, it was absolutely identical to my mount Anna! The same gait, the same facial features, the same everything!
I had my face plate open when I said, "Can I help you, sir?"
He looked at me and I thought for a moment that he was going to fall off his horse! After a bit, he said in very broken Polish, "What ... what this all is? Guns and plate armor! Here? Now! How?"
Now it was my turn to be startled, for he spoke with a strong American English accent!
"Just who are you?" I asked.
"I am Sir Manuel la Falla," he said.
"In a pig's eye!" I said to him in Modem English.
He almost fell over again, but a commotion out on the battlefield distracted me from talking further with the man.
Count Lambert was coming toward me with the battle behind him. There was a Mongol spear in his gut, one of those sharp, thin, triangular things that could pierce our armor. He was swaying in the saddle, and his horse was staggering as well. As I watched, horse and man collapsed to the ground not a hundred yards in front of me.
I jumped down from the war cart and pushed my way through the pikers. Tapping two of the front-rank axemen and motioning them to follow me, I vaulted over the big shield and ran to Lambert's aid.
I swear that my only intention was to drag my liege lord back to safety. I never meant to cause what happened. But that strange, crazy foreign knight, whatever he was, ran out after me, waving at the lines to advance and shouting in English!
"Come on you apes! Over the top! Up and at 'em! Chaaaarrrrrge!"
Somehow, the man had gotten one of our red-and-white surcoats. I suppose they thought he was obeying my orders, for I was out in front of him ' They couldn't have understood a word of what he said, but his meaning was clear and it was what they all had wanted to do for hours!
From a hundred thousand voices came a roar!
"FOR GOD AND POLAND!"
All along the lines, a hundred and twenty thousand pikers and axemen went up and over the shields and staged an impromptu infantry charge on three times their number of cavalry!
Interlude Five
Tom hit the STOP button.
"Yeah, that was me! I think I led the biggest infantry charge in history, right there!"
"To me it looked like a damn fool thing to do!" I said. "An infantry charge on cavalry? That's unheard of!"
"It was when I did it, but it happened another time maybe three hundred years later, during one of the wars between the English and the Scots, for about the same reason and with about the same outcome."