One side of each cart had enough armor to stop an arrow, and the top of the cart could be slung six yards out to act as a yard and a half high shield for the men pulling it. It was armored, too.
If the men were well trained, and if we could get the Mongols to attack us, or if we could somehow surround them, they were dog meat. But there wasn't much we could do about their mobility. The typical Mongol had several horses and, in a race, they could easily beat us.
Communications can make up for speed, to a certain extent. No matter how fast your troops are, you must get a message to them before they can move. If we had radios, our effective speed would be doubled. I didn't have a radio yet, and wasn't sure I could do it, our materials' technology being so low, but I set up a crew to learn Morse code over short telegraph lines. If we could make radios, the operators would be ready.
There isn't much to making a telegraph. Electricity goes through a wire and a simple coil of wire makes an electromagnet which clicks or rings a bell. We had wiredrawing equipment and almost any two metals in ajar of vinegar makes a battery. But years ago, I'd tried to string a line between Three Walls and Okoitz and never did get it up. The price of copper was so high that seeing so much of it hanging on the trees was too much for people. Thieves stole the wire faster than we could string it up! We couldn't guard it all, and every time we caught a thief, three more sprung up to take his place. I finally had to give the project up and Sir Vladimir said he'd told me so.
But we could string wire around inside Three Walls, and we did so, mostly to train operators but also for internal communications.
A better line of defense was the Vistula River. We had steam engines running in the factories and paddle-wheel riverboats were well within our capabilities. A fleet of armed and armored riverboats could stop the Mongols dead, especially if the boats had radios.
The rub was that the invasion would happen on March seventh, at which time the river might or might not be frozen over. With the river frozen, the boats would be useless, so we did not dare put all our hopes on them.
But all this was the easy part, for me at least. It just meant nine years of long hours of hard work for me and a few thousand other men and women.
The hard part was training the army itself.
In thirteenth-century Poland, there were no trained, professional fighting men except for the knights, whose concepts of honor and fair play made them fairly useless, except in the polite sort of conflicts that they were used to fighting. By their lights, it was more important to fight nobly than to win, a nice rule for a playing field but not the thing to do when the Mongols were planning to murder every man, woman, child, and household pet in eastern Europe!
I had to train a modem army from absolute scratch. There were no old sergeants left over from the last war. Things had been fairly peaceful for years, despite the fact that the country was rapidly disintegrating because of duchies being divided up among the heirs of the previous duke. Such wars as had been fought were more like sporting events than serious combat. And there wouldn't have been sergeants, anyway. On the rare occasions when the peasants fought, they were given no training at all, and often no weapons except for such agricultural implements as they might own.
Once I knew that we would have the industrial ability to arm an army of fifty to one hundred thousand men, I had my liege lord, Count Lambert, send me a gross of misfits and troublemakers from his other knight's estates, since my experience in the service had been that the best sergeants were misfits at heart. Maybe I was wrong, but it seemed to me that most of them would not have done well in the civilian world. To function well, most of them seemed to need the surrounding structure that the military provides. Anyway, nobody minded giving me their problem children.
We put them through absolute hell. The program was designed to keep them on the very edge of physical exhaustion, near the ragged boundary of insanity. And a lot of them didn't make it.
I deliberately killed two dozen men in that first class, and I don't think that my soul will ever be truly clean again. But I had to have leaders that were absolutely tough and reliable and I didn't have twenty years to nurture and train them. If they weren't good enough, we could loose thousands of men in battle, and maybe the whole country besides.
But it hurt. It hurt like hell. And often, after a funeral service, I cried myself to sleep. Me, a supposedly mature man of thirty-six.
FROM THE DIARY OF PIOTR KULCZYNSKI
We were constantly under supervision, with never a moment to ourselves except on Sunday afternoons. Then, one could walk away from the barracks and spend a little time absolutely alone, and it was wonderful.
It was a month before I had the opportunity to speak privately to Sir Vladimir, for I found him sitting alone on a log in the woods.
"How are you doing, Piotr?" he said, as though we were back in Sir Conrad's great hall.
"Very good, sir!" I said, involuntarily bracing.
"Relax. Nobody can see us here."
I tried, but it was difficult to do so. For years, he had treated me like a younger brother, but for the last month he had been as brutal as the others.
"Thank you, Sir Vladimir." I sat down on the log next to him.
"You've surprised us, you know. None of us expected you to last a week, especially Sir Conrad."
"Indeed? But don't you see that I have to? If I fail here, I wouldn't have anywhere else to go. My position is gone and I am no longer a squire."
"Maybe, maybe not. Myself, I think it likely that if you went to Sir Conrad and asked for them back, you would get them. Sir Conrad was annoyed that you circumvented his wishes, but he is not an evil man. I think you need only apologize and admit your failure here."
"The apology is his, had I but a chance to give it. But I have not failed this school. Not yet, anyway."
"Well, if you can take it, you might as well stick with it. Eventually, all of Sir Conrad's men will be attending this school, so you might as well get it over with."
"Then why was Sir Conrad angry with me for wanting to attend it now?"
"Because this is not the regular course! This first class is intended to teach the teachers. The later classes will not be as difficult as this one. We are hoping that one-quarter of you will survive this training. We must have first-rate instructors to train the others. After this, at least half will make it through. Sir Conrad was annoyed at you wasting his time by going through early."
"That's some relief, anyway. When do you think we will be knighted?"
"Knighted? Who told you that? There are no plans to knight anybody! In fact, it is my private thought that Sir Conrad would eliminate knighthood if he thought he could get away with it! I know that the separation of nobility and commoners displeases him, and that it doesn't exist in his native land."
"Then all that I have done has been for nothing, Sir Vladimir. I'd hoped that if I could be knighted, then Krystyana would look differently on me."
"So that's what it was all about' I was curious what it was that made you disobey your lord's wishes. May I speak frankly? Piotr, you and Krystyana are two crazy people! She wouldn't accept you if you were a duke! She wants Sir Conrad, even though she knows that she'll never get him. And you keep chasing after her even though she kicks you in the teeth every chance she gets! There are plenty of pretty girls out there, and you'd have a good chance with any one of a hundred of them."
"Many girls, but only one Krystyana."
"Piotr, you are digging a hole for yourself, and if you insist that you be buried in it, there's nothing I can do. It's time we were getting back. You go ahead. I don't want the others to think that I have been doing you any special favors, even though I suppose I have, or at least I've tried to."