Conrad's Last Campaign (7 page)

All three groups rode ahead on Big People until an engineering supervisor stopped the ones in front, and put them to work on some new job. When they finished it, they rode forward until they were stopped again.

My eyeball estimate was that they would make better that a gross miles of improved roadway a day. It occurred to me that someday, we might end up putting a railroad through here.

I was making my way back when I came across Prince David, with four of his men, riding Big People.

He said, “My lord, you can have no idea how good it is to be riding a Big Person again!”

“I can relate. Not too long ago, I too was deprived of their services. It was definitely and most emphatically not good. I’ll tell you the story tonight… By the way, captain, looks like you’re short a couple of subordinates.”

“Companions, sir, not subordinates. They’re taking our horses back, relaying your offer to my father, and, with any luck, impressing him with the Big People and your weaponry. Sir Wladyclaw detailed a lance of Wolves to… accompany them.”

Bonus for you, Wladyclaw
, I thought. Captain David may be a future ally, but as of right now, his kingdom was a Mongol khanate by proxy.
Doveryai, no proveryai
, “trust, but verify,” as our Russian comrades used to say.

“Your men here are remarkably efficient and energetic.”

“Well, the Construction Corps’ motto is,
Opus Operis Perfectus
. It means, more or less,
finished without flaw
. They’re also ‘on one, off two.’ After today, red and orange companies, will rest up. Yellow and green were on yesterday, and blue and purple will be on tomorrow.”

“I wish it was possible to show him one of the aircraft. He’s never seen one. Sometimes, when I talk about flying, I’m not sure if he really believes me.”

“Perhaps, something can be arranged. One of our types of airplanes operates from some of our ships at sea. I’ll find out if we have any seaplanes near here, and if we can get a radio to your father, we can coordinate a demonstration.”

“Your grace, that might be just what he needs to change his loyalties.”

“One can always hope!”

I found a radio cart and commandeered it. My first messages were to the frigates and battleships we had on the
Mediterranean, to see if they had any seaplanes in range of us. I soon found that we had a frigate that was close enough by to give us a two plane demonstration tomorrow afternoon.

Then I contacted Sir Wladyclaw, and told him to send a company of Wolves, under a captain who was a good diplomat, to visit King Hethum. He was to take two radio carts with him, two cannons, and at least one of Prince David’s companions, as a guide and translator. Their mission was to create a favorable impression, and to show off our air power and artillery.

Then I had a message sent to King Henryk, telling him about the opportunity we had to take a Christian kingdom currently subservient to the Mongols, and bring it in on our side. Properly speaking, diplomacy was Henryk’s job, not mine.

It took us three long army hours to get the column sorted out, but by mid afternoon we were on the move again. We were only doing half the speed that we had done on the railroad track, but that was still much faster than the road ahead of us could be improved.

Later, I’d talk to our komander of engineers about the possibility of using more of our warriors as laborers. The Wolves weren’t of much use when there was work to be done, but the African Corps were useful warriors, willing and able to do just about anything.

A general rule in the Christian Army was that you just did the best you can, and pressed on regardless.

A half an hour before sunset, I once again ran into Prince David.

I said, “I’ve made arrangements to send a company of Wolves to your father, with some artillery and some radios. I can arrange a two plane demonstration tomorrow afternoon, as well.”

“Yes, your grace. Two of my companions have already left with a company of your people. I only wish that I could inspect the aircraft myself, but I thought it best to remain here with your army.”

“I’m afraid that you wouldn’t be able to inspect those planes close up in any event. Seaplanes don’t have wheels. They can only land on the water, and they need the steam catapult on a warship to take off.”

“Ah, I see, your grace. I’d hoped that these would be of the sort that you talked about earlier.”

“Sorry, but all of our land-based planes have been sent to
Poland, in preparation for the upcoming Mongol invasion.”

“Yes. A pity, that. Especially since my own country is contributing to the Mongol side of that invasion.”

“How so? I thought that you were only giving tribute, money, to the Mongols.”

“Lesser
Armenia ran out of gold and silver many years ago, your grace. Our Mongol masters are a greedy bunch. But we breed some very good horses, and they have been demanding them from us for some years now.”

“Indeed, my prince. And just how severe are their demands on you?”

“Not five days ago, we were forced to send twelve thousand fine horses north on this very road, your grace.”

“This is a truly onerous taxation! Let us hope that your noble father decides to join with the European Christian Federation, and to make an end of this extortion!”

“One can only hope, your grace.”

“Yes. Well, don’t forget my invitation to come to my camp, this evening. Cold food, but good drink and fine entertainment will be awaiting you.”

“Entertainment, your grace?”

“It happens that I have some of the finest dancing girls in the world, who normally refuse to wear clothing. I’ll see you at sunset. Your Big People will know the way.”

I went and found another radio cart, and called Sir Wladyclaw.

That night, Prince David was indeed amazed at the dancing that my bodyguards were capable of. Those little girls could do things that would put an Olympic gymnast doing floor exercises to shame.

The evening was in full swing when Ahmed and his party showed up.

I said, “Well, Ahmed, I had expected to see you in the early afternoon. What happened?”

“I have failed in my mission, your grace. I was not able to find a single guide willing to lead us to the east shore of the Black Sea. They all feared the Mongol Horde, and they would not go against the wishes of the king, Hethum, who they say is subservient to the Mongols.”

“Indeed. Prince David, is there anything that you can do to help us with this?”

He talked a bit with the two companions that he still had with him, and then he said, “I believe we can, your grace. My friends here know the route well, since we came on that road on our way back from Poland. They would be happy to guide you as far as the Sea of Grass. One of them was once a member of your Wolves, incidentally, and the other was a qualified navigator on one of your first steam ships. He says that with the surveying instruments that your engineers have, and knowing the exact time from your radios, he can pinpoint our exact location, on any clear day at noon.”

“Well then, that’s another problem solved! Ahmed, thank you for doing your best. Get to know our new guides, as best you can. But for now, there are two of my bodyguards who have not yet danced for us!”

One of my bodyguards, Rebecca, was favorably inclined toward the prince. My impression was that the two of them had a very good time later that night.

I don’t think that such favors were offered to Ahmed.

Road improvements took up most of the next morning, with a lot more blasting, shoveling, and pick axe work being required than on the day before. Since the African Corps was now helping out, work was proceeding almost as fast as it had been going.

From what our captain of Wolves reported, King Hethum was very favorably impressed with our warriors, our weapons, and most especially our Big People.

The grand finale of the performance was the appearance of two seaplanes from the frigate
Marauder
. Her pilots strafed some sheep slated for the fall slaughter, then dropped some napalm on a harvested field. Napalm is just a two-to-one mixture of gasoline and soap. This forms a gel that sticks nicely and burns merrily to whatever it hits.

The spectators were impressed with the demonstration.

The pilots had enough fuel left to fly low over my column to give Prince David a look at their planes. While he talked to them on the radio, they did a victory roll, and then they flew their planes back to their ship. The prince later spent over an hour, talking on the radio to his father in Armenian. He told me that the king was very pleased with the Christian Army.

The company of Wolves, with a lance of mounted infantry, and three lances of artillery, stayed at King Hethum’s capital, and set up a training camp for his men.

About a week later, King Henryk told me that King Hethum was ready to renounce his allegiance to the Mongols, and to join the Christian Federation.

For the price of some arms, armor, and Big People, all of which we had plenty of, we turned an entire kingdom from an enemy into a willing ally, with not a single Christian warrior lost!

I wish that all of our battles could be won that cheaply.

The valley that our column was climbing up narrowed greatly, and became a steep-sided canyon. There was a small stream running in it, but it was obvious that during the wet season, this road would be impassable. Putting a railroad through here would require putting a major storm sewer underneath it.

Then again, there might be a good possibility of generating some hydro-electric power. Unfortunately, just now there wasn’t time to explore the idea. Still, a man must think of things.

It took a lot of blasting to get the winding, rocky trail to the point that we could get our carts up it. Even then, some sections took three Big People, and a few men, to get the carts up that steep slope.

It was late in the afternoon before we won our way to the top of a rocky plateau. But only three miles after that, we came to the fallen bridge that we had been warned about.

Our komander of engineers, Sir Eikmann, was there before I was.

He said, “This bridge wasn’t washed out by a flood. It was a wooden bridge that just rotted away.

“If you keep it very dry all of the time, or if you keep it wet, without much air getting to it, wood will last damn nearly for ever. Those wooden water pipes you used at Three Walls, almost forty years ago, are still in good shape, you know. I was one of the crew who checked them out.

“A wooden bridge needs either a good coat of paint every other year, or it needs a roof built over it to keep the rain water off of it. This one never got either one of those things, and it’s gone.”

I said, “You might have learned that from a book I wrote some years ago.”

“Yes, sir. Thinking about it, I did. I’m too used to explaining things to these kids. Sorry about that. However, your grace, our job of replacing the bridge won’t be all that hard. The masonry abutments here are still in decent shape, and we can use them again. It will be a good, permanent job, if you can talk the local king into giving the ironwork a coat of red lead paint every few years. We’ll have the new bridge up by this time tomorrow, if we work all night on it.”

I said, “I’ll hold you to that time schedule. We’re in a hurry. About maintenance, if nothing else, we’ll send King Hethum some paint, brushes, and instructions.”

“Thank you, sir. I hate to see our work wasted. One last thing, if I may. You invented this bridging system, I understand. You’ve called it a
Bailey
bridge. Now, a bailey is the land between the inner and outer walls of an old-style castle. What does that have to do with a bridge?”

“Well, first off, I didn’t invent it. I’d heard about it, and it was invented by a man named Bailey, or maybe by a company of that name. I just adapted it to our standards, and made it all fit properly into our standard containers.”

“I see. Thank you, sir. It’s a fine system, no matter who invented it.”

“True.”

The Bailey bridge was a system of prefabricated structural members that permitted a wide variety of bridges to be assembled on site without needing much in the way of heavy equipment, cranes, or special engineering. Furthermore, it let a bridge be assembled from one side of the river only, which let you go where you had not gone before.

There were two basic types of members. One was a side rail, six yards long and a yard and a half high. Eighteen of these fit snuggly into one of our standard carts or containers. They could be bolted end to end, or one above another, or side to side, as the particular length and load required. A small book in every cart contained charts and diagrams for dozens of possible truss bridges. It was simple cookbook engineering to assemble one.

The other member was a floor board, three yards wide and a yard and a half long. They came thirty-six to the container. There were also some light weight stringers to connect the side rails on particularly tall bridges, and of course, lots of nuts, bolts, and washers, all carefully galvanized. If we’d been building a railroad, we would have had rails that bolted to the floorboards, but we weren’t, so we didn’t.

The components were very carefully made. Rolled steel channel iron and I-beams were precision cut in jigs; the parts were assembled in other jigs, and welded together with Metallic-Inert Gas (MIG) welders. That’s sort of like an arc welder that uses a continuous wire rather than a straight stick, while a flow of inert gas, carbon dioxide, kept the metallic arc from oxidizing.

Our welding rigs took three men to operate one. One man to control the wire feed and the gas, another to take care of the electrical generator, and a third to do the actual welding. Our industrial controls weren’t up to those of the late
20
th century, yet. I’d have to work on that, if I ever got back.

Following a trip to heat treating, the assemblies were shot peened, with thousands of ball bearings dropped on them from thirty yards overhead. This puts the surface of the metal under compression, and increases the strength of the thing by a factor of three. Metal failure usually starts with tiny surface cracks growing larger under tension. With the surface under compression, those cracks don’t occur.

Following this, they were put into a drilling jig, and all of the bolt holes were precision drilled, to fit exactly with everything else.

After that, they were pickled in an acid bath, galvanized by deep dipping them into a tank of molten zinc, and finally dipped into two sequential tanks of paint. They didn’t rust easily.

It wasn’t a cheap process, but it gave us a strong, lightweight bridge that could be put together in a hurry.

Only two tools were required for assembly, besides wrenches, crowbars, and jacks. One was a roller that was four yards wide. It had a ratchet mechanism built into it that permitted it to be turned slowly. The other was a much smaller roller that supported the bridge from the other side while it was being built.

The bridge went up fast. It was assembled on one side of the gap and then rolled over to the other side. The wagons had wheels mounted on the beds to facilitate rolling out the parts. When you dropped all the sides down, the wagons formed a wheeled ramp. The framework of the bridge was light enough to be tipped up, rolled up, and dropped to the other side. In World War II, army engineers did the deed under heavy enemy fire and often had to patch the roadway or add a second level to the bridge to compensate for the holes the Germans made. Fortunately all of our troops and carts were light enough to cross the standard bridge.

We didn’t cross right away. I wanted a big ceremony to impress the troops and our hosts and needed to get the order of March right before we started, so that we wouldn’t be held up once we crossed.

I sent four scouts across with instructions to scout the next fifty miles and report back in the morning. My three carts, personal troops, and messengers were near the front of the column. However, this time a company of Wolves and artillery pieces went first. The engineers that were not needed on the bridge went right after me.

There wasn’t much I could do about the rest of the column. Most of them were passing time in a ninety-mile long narrow valley. Rearranging them would be difficult in that terrain, so I left them alone. By chance, most of the front of the column was made up of the regular Christian Army. The Christian Knights, new recruits, and African Corps were mostly near the rear of the column.

Then it started to rain. Torrential rain. Buckets and barrels of rain. Miserable, cold, windy, down-the-front-of-your-shirt and soaking-your-boots rain.

Of course, the Christian Army could move in any weather. We could march a hundred miles through a hurricane and then attack a fortress in the middle of a blizzard. But, the fact that you can do something doesn’t mean that you should. The men had settled down to wait for the bridge to be finished. It would take a few hours for everyone to re-pack, mount up, and move off.

I had a miles-long column of men, horses, Big People, and carts strewn out over miles of boulders, rocks, bare riverbeds, with water now sheeting down on them. If we moved, there would be injuries. Horses and men would break their legs, and even the Big People might have trouble with their footing on wet rocks. In normal battle conditions, a Christian Army can be on the move in less than an hour, but these were far from normal conditions.

So I seethed. I sent word down the column to dig in, get comfortable, and get the hell off of the valley floor. The rain, so far, looked as if it was going to bring a foot or two of water to the old river bed. Even a single foot of fast-running water is enough to sweep a man off his feet – and kill him if he doesn’t get help.

After a few hours, I realized that I had made a terrible mistake. The rain wasn’t letting up. It was getting worse, and the entire run off from the hills was running down to my army. For the men in that narrow valley, this could be worse than the biblical flood.

I sent word for the column to decamp now! The men in the first ten miles from the summit were to move forward as much as possible. There was a good chance that they could reach safety. That meant crowding the summit area, but it was safest for them. The men in the next ten miles were to head for the high ground. “Tell them to get as high on the walls as they can and dig in hard. They are going to get very wet. No one should be a hero to save a cart or equipment.” The message for the rest of the column was, “Advance to the rear with all possible dispatch!” In other words, “Run like hell!”

I wanted to ride down the column to help, but my mind kept reminding me that it was stupid to compound a mistake by getting myself killed. The men under my command were smart and resourceful. They would cope as well as anyone could without my help.

Troops and carts began to crowd the summit area. I ordered that everything that didn’t breathe was to be cleared out to make room for troops. The extra bridging elements, the equipment carts, my tent, my cigars, and even my whiskey disappeared over the edge. As more troops and carts showed up, we began sending them across the untested bridge in the rain. It was a dangerous last resort. I told them to make as much room as they could on the other side without getting themselves killed.

Down valley, things were getting bad. Five miles down the valley, the water was two feet high, rushing and rising. Ten miles down it was over four feet deep and people farther from the summit than that were too busy surviving to report to any jackass in headquarters.

It rained for two more days. In that time, twenty thousand troops with a random selection of carts and equipment had straggled up to the summit and were scattered over the hills on both sides of the bridge. The reports downstream were bad.

It became so crowded on our side of the bridge that I crossed to the other side myself on the second day. I found a clear place to pitch a standard tent, my nice blue silk one being at the bottom of the ravine, and waited for the radio messages to come. All I could do was to wait. There was no point in giving orders to men who knew their situation better than I could.

When the rain stopped, the staff conference was grim. I asked the quartermaster, Sir Ivanov, how badly we were hurt.

“The fatalities were rather light, considering the situation. The Big People managed to get most of the men to safety. They abandoned the train, mounted everyone on their backs and headed down the valley. Almost everyone mounted on a Big Person lived. Among the regular army, the fatality rate was about ten percent from riders falling off the Big People, hitting rocks, or not finding their mounts. About twice that many have broken bones, contusions, and concussions. About fifty Big Persons suffered broken bones, but they will all survive. Several groups emptied out carts and used them for boats. One Big Person could save several humans that way and some of the men actually poled themselves through the rapids.