I called my knights together after dinner one day, along with their wives.
"Gentlemen, we are starting to get it together," I said. "We now have most of the raw materials that we need. We now have the beginning of a factory system that can take those raw materials and turn them into useful products. We now have workmen trained to use those factories and the tools in them."
"We also have the biggest, best trained and best lead army in the world coming at us in five years."
"What we don't have is an army of our own! At present, we have no way to save our country from absolute destruction. You've all heard Cilicia's story about the obliteration of her native city. That could happen here!"
"It will happen here, unless we do something about it!"
"Our factories can easily be converted from making civilian products to war production. They were designed with that thought in mind. We can turn out arms and armor at a rate that will astound you. Better armor than the world has ever seen, and weapons of awesome power will be ours when we need them."
"But the weapons are worthless without the men who will use them! I can promise you that we will be better equipped than the Mongols, but if we are to win, we must be better trained and better lead as well. That's not going to be easy!"
"The Mongols have been diligently practicing the art of mass murder and total destruction for over fifty years, and so far they have never been defeated!"
"But they are going to be beaten here and we are going to train and lead the army that will do it! You four gentlemen are going to do most of it, since I'll have to spend half my time on production."
"It won't be the kind of training that you have been used to, because this won't be the kind of war that you have been used to. You have become accustomed to treat war like a game, where polite, Christian gentlemen settle their disputes according to well-defined rules."
"Well, the only rules the Mongols know are 'obey orders' and 'win the war.' They are not Christian nor are they gentlemen. They are greasy, smelly little bastards who can fight like all the demons of hell! They are hard and tough and cruel. The only way that we are going to beat them is by being harder and tougher and crueler than they are!"
"You are used to a kind of warfare where only the nobility fights. That too must come to an end. The Mongols will come to us with every single man of theirs under arms. To meet them, we must do the same. Our factories will be able to equip every adult mate in Silesia and Little Poland. We must be able to train that number of men. It will be difficult, but not impossible. I can show you techniques that can turn a farmer into a fighting man in six months. Training leaders will take longer, and training the men to train them will take longer yet."
"In the spring, we will be building a training base in the northwest comer of my lands. We have already fenced off a dozen square miles of land there, using Krystyana's roses, so we'll have plenty of privacy. I've asked Count Lambert to send me a gross of volunteers right after the spring planting. Those peanuts will be our first class."
"The training period will be eleven months and we will be working at training not warriors, but trainers of warriors. I'll be happy if three dozen of them survive the education we give them."
"After that, you gentlemen will be administrators, and they will be doing all the grunt work. But for the next year and a half, you will all be going through hell yourselves! That's why I invited your wives to this meeting, to explain to them that you won't be seeing much of them for a while, that you will be working for me and not playing around with Count Lambert's harem at Okoitz."
"I know that you are all in fairly good, strong physical shape. You should be, living the healthy, outdoor lives that you do."
"But you are not 'run twelve miles before breakfast' healthy and you're not 'do two hundred push-ups' strong. We will be working on that this winter, and it won't be fun. All I can promise you is that I will be going through the same pain that you will."
"We start physical training tomorrow morning, and we will also be spending two hours a day here in my office doing skull work. Any questions?"
"Too many to remember them all, my lord," Sir Vladimir said. "But the one that sticks in my mind is 'what is a push-up'?"
"You'll learn, my friend. I promise you, you'll learn."
"This running and other physical training you mentioned," Sir Gregor said. "I don't understand the need for that."
"We will be training an infantry force, and some artillery, which I'll explain later. There is no possibility of getting enough war-horses to equip our army. That many horses don't exist! Also, Poland already has a sizable force of cavalry in the conventional knights. I'd estimate that we have thirty thousand of them, plus we should get some help from France and the Holy Empire when the time comes."
"What of the Russians and the Hungarians?" Sir Gregor said.
"The Russians, or rather the Ukrainians, will be largely wiped out in the next three or four years. I don't think that we will find it possible to give them any significant amount of help in that time. As to the Hungarians, well, they'll be attacked at the same time that we are, and will have their hands full with their own problems. It is more likely that we will be able to aid them than the opposite happening."
"This land that you have set aside for training," Sir Wiktor said, "A dozen square miles seems like a lot. And what is this need for privacy? Much of the reason for having a strong military force is to make an enemy think twice before attacking you. Why try to hide it?"
"The Mongols are coming whether we're ready or not," I said. "They won't believe what infantry can do until we show them on the battlefield. There are two reasons for the seclusion of our training grounds. The first is that I don't want our training techniques on public display. They are one of our major secret weapons."
"The second reason is more important, and more subtle. In the course of training, we will be doing two things to our soldiers. The obvious one is that we will be building up their bodies and teaching them how to use weapons. The other is psychological. We will be tearing their minds apart and then putting them back together in a newer, stronger way. It helps to have them in an isolated, alien environment."
"How does one tear apart the mind of another?" Sir Vladimir asked.
"That too is something that I'm going to have to show you, and you won't like it. I trust that you gentlemen know that I have the highest regard for you as individuals and as my vassals. I won't like being rude to you, especially when it's not deserved. But in order to teach you how to train others, I'm going to have to treat you the way you'll be treating the peasants you'll be training. I won't be polite. In fact, I'm going to be as rude as possible. I don't know why this helps to make men absolutely obedient, but it does."
"If there are no further questions, I'll see you all at the gate tomorrow at dawn. Be in full armor with good shoes. We'll start off with a three mile run and then I'll teach you about marching."
It was snowing, but they were standing out there at dawn, and with them was Piotr Kulczynski.
"Piotr, what the hell are you doing here?" I said.
"My lord? I am your squire and when you called out all your knights, I thought-"
"Well, you thought wrong! I need you as an accountant. I don't need you as a training instructor! Now get the hell out of here!"
Piotr left, almost in tears.
"Aren't you being a little rough on him, my lord?" Sir Vladimir said.
"Shut your face, Vladimir! When I want your opinions, I'll tell them to you!"
That set the tone of our training. Such rudeness wasn't needed with my knights, and certainly not with Piotr, but it would be with the peasants and workers we had to train.
Sir Vladimir had repeatedly followed me into battle and fought like a hellion. I had no doubts about the three Banki brothers, either, and I thought that Piotr would walk through fire if I asked him to.