Third Lieutenant Boris Timrovich, Tim to his friends, was savoring the victory. Right up to the time he was called into the commandant's office. He had beaten Third Lieutenant Igor Milosevic in the Polish invasion scenario two weeks ago. And cleaned up on the deal. The betting had been five to one against him. Tim had been playing the Polish and he had won by ignoring Smolensk. After all, Poland already held Smolensk; They had held it since the Time of Troubles. And Poland, just like Russia, only had to worry about Smolensk if they didn't have it. Now he was trying to figure out what he had done wrong.
"The commandant will see you now, Lieutenant."
Tim put his shoulders back and tried not to gulp. He entered the commandant's office not looking left or right, stood at attention and saluted as smartly as he was able. The commandant returned the salute with a casual half wave. Then he asked him the last question he ever expected to hear. "So, Third Lieutenant Timrovich, tell me how you managed to defeat the entire Russian Army and take Moscow, in just ten weeks?"
"Sir?"
"Come now, Timrovich. It's all over the Kremlin. I understand the odds were five to one in favor of that baker's son, Igor Milosevic?"
"Sir? Are you talking about the Polish invasion scenario?" Tim was out of his depth. It wasn't one of the official war games.
"Yes, of course, Timrovich." The commandant pointed to a map on the left wall. The map showed part of Russia and part of Poland. "Show me how you did it."
So Tim did. "Russia is not Moscow; Russia is the Volga." He walked over to the map pointed where he placed his troops and how he moved them using the river Volga as the supply line. "In the Time of Troubles, Poland took Moscow but they couldn't keep it. But the Volga controls transport…" Just as Tim was getting into his description of what he'd done, he heard another voice.
"Would it interest you to know, Lieutenant Timrovich, that Polish troops took Rzhev three days ago? From the somewhat vague first reports we have, there are around ten thousand troops there now, a mixture of Slacha, mercenaries and Cossacks."
"What?" Tim spun and faced the new voice and recognized General Mikhail Borisovich Shein. Then, in a state of shock, he blurted out the first thing that come to mind. "But that's the wrong place."
"I'm relieved to hear it," General Shein said wryly.
Tim stood mute.
"Speak up, Timrovich," the commandant said. "Why do you think Rzhev is the wrong place?"
"It's too far up river, sir. The Volga is navigable at Rzhev but only barely. Tver would be a better choice, even if it is farther. You'd want to take Rzhev, too. Later. After the first strike. But if you take Rzhev first, you warn Tver and give them time to fort up and block any river traffic from going past."
General Shein looked at the commandant. "Very well. He'll do."
After that things moved quickly. Third Lieutenant Boris Timrovich found himself suddenly assigned as aide de camp to General Artemi Vasilievich Izmailov, "Third Lieutenant Boris Timrovich reporting as ordered."
"Who are you?"
"Sir, I'm to be your Cadet aide de camp."
"I asked for Milosevic! The baker's boy." General Izmailov was clearly not pleased.
"Igor?"
"You know him?"
"Yes, sir. We're friends
General Izmailov paused and give Tim's uniform a careful once over. "Let me guess. Your father is a Boyar or Duma man?"
Suddenly it clicked for Tim. "A great uncle, sir." The pride that Tim's voice usually had in that announcement was notably missing. The general had asked for the best student in the Cadet Corps, Igor Milosevic. Instead he had gotten… well not the highest in family rank. There were a lot of high family kids among the cadets. It was quite the fashion these days. No, what the general had received was a cadet of acceptable social rank and lesser skill. Even if Tim had beaten Igor once.
General Izmailov was not usually placed in independent command. For the same reason… he didn't have enough social, family rank. In fact, he was officially second in command of the army they were raising right now, placed temporarily in command of the advance column.
General Izmailov shrugged and got down to business. "I'll be leading a reconnaissance in force and-if necessary-a delaying action while the reserves are called up. The reconnaissance force is made up in part from Musketeers Prince Cherkasski has loaned us from the Moscow Garrison." Prince Ivan Borisovich Cherkasski was the chief of the Strel'etsky prikaz, Musketeer Bureau. "They're under Colonel Usinov. We have small detachments from the Gun Shop and from the Dacha. And two regiments of cavalry under the command of Colonel Khilkov." General Izmailov gave Tim a look. "Usinov has more experience but Khilkov's family is of higher rank. We have peasant levies for labor battalions. About four thousand of them. We have four brand new cannons from the Gun Shop and the Musketeers we're getting have been equipped with the new AK3s. From the Dacha we're getting the Testbed, the flying machine. I am told it is to be used only for reconnaissance. And we're getting thirty of the scrapers. There won't be time to use them much on the march, but they should help a lot with fortifications when we find our spot."
Tim nodded his understanding. The assumption was that they would meet the advancing Polish forces somewhere between Rzhev and Moscow. Meanwhile Tim was assigned fourteen different jobs, some of them in direct conflict with the others. Or at least that's how it seemed. He was to coordinate with the labor battalions, the Musketeers, the Dacha contingent as well as the Gun Shop contingent, and make sure that all the various units were in the right marching order. Except that the people in charge hadn't actually decided the marching order yet. So he was given one order and then fifteen minutes later given a different order by someone else.
By noon Tim was considering the value of getting rid of the beards, as he'd read Peter the Great had done. But in his own mind, "the beards" were the idiots who kept harping on their noble rank, regardless of their true ability at war. At this rate we'll meet the Poles thirty miles out of Moscow.
On the first day Nikita-call me Nick-Ivanovich's dirigible contingent ended up at the back of the line of march, which meant that by the time they reached the campsite it was already getting dark. Tim watched as Testbed lifted into the night sky and disappeared. All Tim could see was the rope from the wagon, climbing into a bit of deeper blackness which hid the stars.
"Of course, it could be that there simply wasn't that much to see," Nick reported a half hour later. Tim could see that General Izmailov was less than pleased. But Nick didn't seem to be worried about it. Which Tim thought was very brave or very stupid. Then he looked over at the Testbed, which the crew was still tying down for the night. He remembered the Nikita Ivanovich had been the first person to climb into it and had flown it without ropes to keep the wind from carrying it away. Tim still wasn't sure whether it was brave or stupid, but the 'very' gained a whole new level of magnitude.
"Timrovich! The Testbed will be placed near the front in tomorrow's order of march," General Izmailov gritted. Tim knew that the general had seen the demonstration at the Dacha and had been planning to use the dirigible and pleased to get it. But how were they supposed to know that it didn't work at night? Granted it was pretty obvious when you thought about it. Dark is no time to observe things.
"I don't believe this," Tim muttered. "We'll never get there at this rate." The march had put them about twelve miles west of Moscow. Worse, they were trying to move fast and doing it over good roads. The scrapers had improved the roads around Moscow quite a bit.
His friend and fellow student at the Cadet Corps, Pavel, nodded in agreement. "Bad enough the delays because of the confusion. But Colonel Khilkov and the fit he threw when we were setting out and he discovered that we were ahead of him in the line of march was just plain stupid."
Tim figured the flare up was at least half Usinov's fault with all the gloating he was doing. But he didn't say so. Pavel was Colonel Usinov's cadet aide de camp, and thought quite highly of him. "Just wait till he hears that General Izmailov is going to put the Testbed near the front of the line tomorrow." Tim threw his arms up and pretended to be having a fit. "Never let it be said that mere military necessity should trump social position in the Russian army. 'My cousin is of higher rank than your uncle, so of course my company must be ahead of yours in the order of march.'" Tim spat on the ground. "Idiots. We're all idiots. If we go on like this we'll be defending Moscow from another Polish invasion and we'll be doing it right here. You can bet that the Poles aren't sitting on their asses in Rzhev arguing about who should be first in the line of march."
Pavel could have bet that, but he would have lost. Because sitting on his ass arguing was precisely what Janusz Radziwill, the commander of the Polish forces, was doing. Not about the order of march, but what they should do now. Janusz, in his early twenties. was already the Court Chamberlain of Lithuania. That was a high post in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth which he had gotten because of the influence of his cousin Albrycht Stanislaw Radziwill, Grand Chancellor of Lithuania. Janusz was sitting with his two main subordinates discussing the lack of the arms depot that they had been expecting. It was a rerun of several discussions they had since they had gotten to Rzhev and discovered that the Russian invasion Janusz' spy had informed him of was not nearly so near as they had expected.
"Ivan Repninov has confirmed everything?" Janusz insisted again.
Mikhail Millerov, commander of his Cossacks snorted. "You can't depend on anything that rat faced little bureau man says. I've questioned many men and his sort is the hardest to get the truth out of. Not because he's a strong man, but because he's weak. He'll tell you anything you want to hear and change his story five times in as many minutes."
"Yet what he said makes sense and fits with what the agent reported," Eliasz Stravinsky, the commander of the western mercenaries disagreed. "Ivan Petrovich Sheremetev is as crooked as a dog's hind leg."
"Yes!" Janusz exclaimed. "That by itself explains the situation to anyone familiar with Russia. Ivan Petrovich commits graft as other people breathe, with very little thought and continuously. And as the nephew of Prince Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev, the third power behind Cherkasski and the patriarch.
"Fourth, if you count the czar." Mikhail Millerov corrected.
"I don't," Janusz insisted "Mikhail Romanov is his father's puppet and everyone knows it. In any case, Ivan Petrovich has ample opportunity for that corruption. He got the contract for the depot and pocketed the money."
Millerov nodded a little doubtfully, and Janusz continued. "My agent in the Muscovite Treasury Bureau spent considerable time putting together the pieces. Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev was clearly in charge of making the arrangements. And naturally shifted contracts to where they would do his family the most good. Corrupt, every last one of them." It didn't occur to Janusz to wonder what someone on the outside might think of the Polish nobility.
"Possibly… or possibly your man misinterpreted a scam of the Sheremetev family and the only place the depots were ever intended to be was in the pockets of the Sheremetevs." Millerov shrugged. "At this point we'll likely never know for sure and it doesn't matter anyway, because we are sitting here in Muscovite territory. They aren't going to apologize. They're going to deny and the depot isn't here. They'll demand reparations. Granted, the Truce of Deulino expired in July of 1633. His Majesty has refused to give up his claim on the Russian throne and Russia hasn't given up its claim to Czernihow or Smolensk. So legally Poland is at war with Muscovy, but up to now it's been a pretty phony war. Little fighting and even less talking. The war is going to get a lot more real now, one way or the other. So it would be best to win it. Yes?"
Eliasz Stravinsky nodded. "If we go back now, we'll look like idiots. Not real good for the career, that."
Janusz Radziwill nodded almost against his will. He was still convinced that the reports had been accurate. The Muscovites were planning to take Smolensk and much of Lithuania, just like they had tried in that other history. But probably-as had happened before-corruption in their ranks had interfered. Still, the Cossack was right. It didn't really matter now.
"Men coming in," the scout said as he rode up to the general.
"That'll be the mercenaries from Rzhev," General Izmailov said, then looked at Tim. "Take word the column is to halt. Officers Call at the front."
"Halt the column. Officers Call, sir, at the leading unit," Tim told the commander of each unit as he rode down the line.
It was the third day of marching toward Rzhev. And this halt would probably cost them two miles. When he got back to the front, Tim saw that General Izmailov was speaking to the sergeant leading the mercenaries who had sent the riders to inform Moscow of the invasion.
"So tell me, Sergeant," General Izmailov was asking, "why did you abandon your post?"
"What post, General? We were ordered to Rzhev to guard a supply depot. When we got there, there was no supply depot. No quarters and no pay. My people were living in tents outside Rzhev. You can't guard what isn't there, sir, and we were never assigned to guard Rzhev." The sergeant pulled a set of orders out of his pack and handed them to General Izmailov.
General Izmailov looked over the orders and snorted. Then he handed them to Tim and went on to the next question. "Did you keep in contact with the invading force?"
The burly sergeant shook his head. "No. We didn't see any more of them and I don't have the men to spare."
"Are the invaders coming this way? Heading to Tver? Did they even continue on past Rzhev, or did they stop there?"
"I don't know, sir," Sergeant Hampstead admitted.
Tim read over the orders and information in the packet, and stopped. Ivan Petrovich Sheremetev. Well, that explained why the foreign mercenaries had had been sent off to guard a nonexistent supply depot. It was almost funny. Sheremetev's greed had, for once, worked to Russia's benefit. If the mercenaries hadn't been in Rzhev the Poles might have bypassed the place altogether and headed straight for Tver. With no warning to the Kremlin until they had already taken Tver.
General Izmailov turned to a discussion with the dirigible's pilot. After discussing the dirigible and its capabilities for a few minutes, the pilot, Nick Ivanovich, said, "General, if we loose the tether, we can see more. I can usually get twenty miles an hour when I use the engines, assuming the engines work. And if the wind isn't bad when I get up there."
"When they work?" Izmailov looked dubious. " When they work?"
"They do… mostly," Nick said. "The engines aren't really the problem. Sometimes there is considerable leakage in the steam lines. If the steam isn't leaking too bad, I can stay up for ten hours or so. If everything goes right, I can get from here to Rzhev and back before dark."
Izmailov thought for a few moments. "All right. We'll try it. But at the least problem abort the mission and get back here." He turned back to the mercenary. "Sergeant, your officers were delayed in Moscow but we expect them to be joining us in a day or so. You and your men are to fall in at the end of the column as we pass."
Everything didn't go right for Nick Ivanovich. It was the winds. They were southerly and fairly strong at five thousand feet. Weaker, but still southerly, at five hundred. The Testbed didn't have a compressor; it couldn't lift the weight. So it couldn't pump hydrogen out of the bladders then get it back. Once the hydrogen was gone, it was gone. It did have a couple of hydrogen tanks so it could go up and down a little bit.
Nick ended up using more fuel than expected to keep on course. There was some steam leakage but it wasn't too bad. All of which meant that he might have made it to Rzhev and back. Or, if he went all the way to Rzhev, he might run out of fuel or water before he could get back.
"I was forced to abort, General." Nick shook his head. "Wind was awful and kept blowing me off course. But I did get a bit better than halfway and didn't see the first sign of the Poles. No advancing troops, not in this direction."
Izmailov turned to the mercenary sergeant. "Did your scouts see the entire army. This so-called ten thousand man army?"
"No," Hampstead admitted. "My scouts saw the leading elements. About three thousand men. And that's still more than my five hundred could face with any hope of victory."
"How do you know it was the leading elements? Not the whole force?"
"The formation was spread out like a screening element. Why put a screening element out when there's nothing to screen?"
The answer to that seemed obvious to Tim… to hide the fact that that was all you had. To bluff. Still, the sergeant's point about the size of his force was well taken. Why bluff against a force of only five hundred men? Tim could think of two reasons. If the attacking force didn't know how big the force in Rzhev was, they might try a bluff to get a force of a thousand or fifteen hundred to retreat and avoid a battle against an entrenched opponent. Two to one odds aren't that great when the enemy is behind walls.
Or it could be that the bluff-if it was a bluff-was intended not for the sergeant but for… well, them. The relieving force. Tim looked over at the wagons holding the deflated Testbed and smiled.
General Izmailov was shaking his head. "There are a lot of reasons why you might arrange your troops in a pattern that will, at first sight, look like a screen…"
The commander of the Polish invaders had not, in fact, formed his force into a screen. He had split his force into three columns of a thousand men to facilitate gleaning. The scout had spotted the center column and swung wide around it which had taken him right into the second column. He had assumed that the two columns were the ends of a large screening element but hadn't checked.
There were four wagons in the dirigible contingent. One carried the dirigible, sort of. The wagon acted as an anchor for the dirigible while on the march. The dirigible floated about fifteen feet above it, and was cranked down to ground level and tied down with spikes driven into the ground at night or in bad weather. That wagon also carried a pump which weighed just under two tons. The pump was used to compress hydrogen gas for the canisters. Another wagon carried equipment and materials for the production of hydrogen gas. A third carried equipment for field repairs and the fourth carried the repair crew. After the aborted trip, they spent two days worth of breaks on the march doing maintenance before they felt safe with the thing untethered again. General Izmailov was not pleased.
"I'm sorry, General," Nick Ivanovich said. "But there is a reason we call the dirigible 'Testbed.' It's an experiment designed to test concepts in aviation. To the best of our knowledge, nothing quite like it has ever existed in this or any other history. The engines are handmade by Russian craftsman, as are the lift bladders, the wings." Nick hid a grin.
The designer would hate him calling the control surfaces "wings." They weren't designed to provide lift, but control. In fact, they provided a bit of both. The "wings" acted as elevators at the tail of the dirigible. More were located between the gondola and the motors. They didn't provide much lift, but by pointing the dirigible's nose up or down, he could gain or lose a little altitude without having to dump ballast or gas. Or use the emergency tanks to refill the lift bladders.
"They were well made, but by people who had no way to do more than guess about the stresses they would face. It's steam powered and if they had steam powered dirigibles up-time, we haven't heard about it. That's why they built it-to see."
"So why don't we have an improved version or one of the airplanes that the up-timers have?" Izmailov sounded impatient and gruff.
"Engines, sir. Ours are both heavy and weak They wouldn't get a heavier-than-air craft off the ground. There is one engine in Russia that might lift an airplane off the ground. That engine is in the car Bernie Zeppi brought to Russia." This wasn't entirely true, as Nick well knew. The engines they had built for the dirigible would get an airplane off the ground just fine. It was the added weight of the water, the boiler and the steam recovery that had so far made down-time-built steam-powered heavier-than-air craft imposable. Without the recovery system, a steam powered aircraft would work fine for a few minutes before the water was all used up. Water weighed a lot.
"So I will have the intelligence you can gather from your Testbed only when and if everything goes right? If nothing breaks on your toy and the weather is just right?" The general glared, then visibly shook himself. "All right, Captain. That's all."
The cavalry were equally unimpressed with the intelligence gathered by Nick. And more than a few of the cavalry were resentful. Scouting was a part of their function and, as far as they were concerned, the infantry was looking to take away the other part. They rode out almost gaily for the two days the dirigible was being repaired.
But, just like the dirigible, they found no traces of the enemy.
Sixty miles as the crow flies from Moscow, Nick was ready to try again. Mostly because they were launching from closer to Rzhev, but also because it was, luckily, a still, calm day. Nick made it to within five miles of Rzhev. At five thousand feet, he feathered the engines so he would have a stable platform, pulled out his telescope and started counting outhouses and camp fires.
"Three thousand men, General, more or less. They haven't burned the town, but it's not big enough to hold them all. They have built a camp next to it. No walls, not much in the way of defensive fortifications."
"Did they see you?"
Nick shrugged. "I can't say for sure. The Testbed is big and quite visible, but I was five miles away and a mile in the air. It depends on where they were looking. No one took a shot at me and they didn't seem disturbed when I looked at the town."
"Three thousand? Is that all?" Colonel Ivan Khilkov said. "Hell, General, we've got almost that many cavalry. Send us ahead; we'll ride them into the ground." The colonel was not a fan of the new innovations in warfare provided either by Western Europe or the up-timers.
General Izmailov hesitated and Nick knew why. Ivan Khilkov was young, but from a very old family. A very well-connected family, since one of his relatives was Patriarch Filaret's chamberlain. The general could deny him once or twice, but if he did it too many times, Izmailov would find himself relieved of command, and his career ended. Nick prudently kept his mouth shut.
Four days later, General Izmailov could no longer say no. Colonel Khilkov had sent mounted scouts directly to Rzhev.
"They are fortifying the town, albeit slowly. By the time the full column reaches Rzhev, the town will be fully fortified," Khilkov said. Then he sniffed. "Send us, General. We can get there quicker than this-" Khilkov waved an arm at the wagons. "-torturous mess. The cavalry can get there in two days. By the time you can get all this there, we'll have taken the town."
There was no way to avoid it, Izmailov knew. Against his better judgment-and with a tiny bit of worry for his future-he agreed. He might very well be sunk either way it went. If Khilkov won, he'd look bad. If Khilkov lost, his angry relatives would blame Izmailov.
"Khilkov and his forces are about ten miles from Rzhev, sir," Nick Ivanovich reported.
"Very well," Izmailov said. "Do whatever it is you need to do with your… Testbed. If he's that close, you should see the battle tomorrow." The general paused. "Take Lieutenant Timrovich with you." When Nikita started to object, General Izmailov held up his hand. "There's no choice in this. He is from a good family. If things go well tomorrow, it won't matter-but if they don't, you and I will need his report."
By this time, the main column was only about forty miles from Rzhev by air. Which, unfortunately, meant quite a few more miles on foot. Fortunately, it was short-hop range for the Testbed. Nick spent the rest of the day doing maintenance and preparing for the overloaded trip to Rzhev. The general consensus was that tomorrow he would have a ringside seat for a glorious feat of victory by Russian cavalry. General Izmailov clearly wasn't so sure, and Nick shared his doubt. There were probably a few others who were less than sanguine about the outcome. Sergeant Hampstead was one of them; his commanding officer, Captain Boyce, who had joined them on the march was another.
"I'm told I'm going with you."
Nick Ivanovich looked over at the young lieutenant. "Yes, so General Izmailov told me. That's why I'm pulling two of the four hydrogen tanks. We'll also be taking less ballast water and less fuel." Nick wasn't happy with the situation but he rather liked Tim, one of the more innovative young officers in the Russian army. And young was the word. Tim might be seventeen, but he looked closer to fourteen. "Bernie Zeppi said once that the glamour of flying would get to almost anybody. But it's bloody dangerous up there. A dirigible is a balancing act. Look there…" He pointed. "Those are the lift bladders. They pull the dirigible up but not by a constant amount. The higher you go, the thinner the air; as the air thins the bladders expand. As the bladders expand, they provide more lift."
"So the higher we go, the more lift?"
"Right. And that's part of the problem. Because the goal is to go up a certain distance, then stop going up. We can't add weight once we take off, so once we get to the height we want-actually before we get that high-I start releasing hydrogen from the bladders. Now what do you think happens when we start coming back down?"
"We get heavier."
"Right. But I've already thrown away the hydrogen that started in the bags. So to counteract that getting heavier, I add hydrogen from these tanks…" Nick pointed at the tanks in the gondola. "… if I've got enough. Or, I can turn this valve which releases water from a tank. But that water is the same water we use in the steam engines, so I can't dump it all or we run out of power. What happens if we start coming down and I'm out of hydrogen and water?"
"We crash."
"Right. Also the Testbed here has as much surface area as a three-masted schooner has sails." Well not really, Nick admitted silently, but it doesn't have a hull in the water holding it in place either. "So a sudden change in the wind and we can be a hundred yards away from where we want to be before I can even start to compensate. If we are facing into the wind, or close to it, the engines are enough to move us through the air. But if the wind is from the sides, the wind wins. If it rains on this thing, the weight of the water means even with all the ballast overboard and the bladders at capacity, we don't have enough lift. We had to drop the radiator more than once in tests at the Dacha and the aerodrome where they are working on the big one. We haven't had to drop the engines or the boiler yet but it's rigged to be able to."
Nick went on to explain about the various controls. The fifty pound weight that didn't seem like that much till you realized that it could be moved from the tip to the tail of the Testbed to adjust its balance and angle of attack. That not only the wings, but the engines at their ends rotated as much as thirty degrees, to provide last minute thrust up or down for takeoff and landing. Especially landing. The steam engines could reverse thrust with the turning of a lever, so the Testbed didn't need variable pitch propellers.
"It is a beautiful sight," Tim said. "Banners flying…" He paused a moment, then sighed. "A beautiful sight, noble and glorious. But at the Kremlin in the war games they treated pike units as fortified. Not easy to overrun. Colonel Khilkov didn't think much of the war games." In a way this was like one of those war games, an eagle's eye view. Tim had played a lot of them, and suddenly, as he watched, he could see the little model units on the field below. He remembered one of the games-an unofficial game-when one of his fellow students had had a bit too much to drink. And ordered cavalry to attack undispersed pike units. You were supposed to hit them with cannon first, to break up their formation. And he remembered those cavalry pieces being removed from the board. Igor had stood, held up one arm, wobbled a bit, lifted the arm again and proclaimed "But, I died bravely!" They had all laughed. Suddenly it didn't seem funny at all. "Colonel Khilkov thinks the Poles will break when faced with a cavalry charge… and General Izmailov didn't seem to agree."
"You're sounding a bit, ah, concerned there, Tim." Nick peered though his telescope toward the Polish forces.
Tim nodded. "Colonel Khilkov is… a bit difficult."
The Polish forces didn't flee. Three thousand Russian cavalry faced a wall of about two thousand Polish infantry, armed with pikes and muskets, as well as the Polish cavalry. The infantry stood in ranks and waited. Then they lowered their pikes and the Russian cavalry charge ran headlong into a porcupine made of men. Then the Poles fired. It was unlikely that the volley killed many men, but it was enough to shatter the Russian formation.
Then it was the Polish cavalry's turn. They were outnumbered but they were fighting a scattered unit. Colonel Khilkov tried to rally his men and almost managed it. But the Polish infantry had slowly-as infantry must-advanced while the Polish cavalry had been cutting its way through the Russians. Once their own cavalry was mostly clear, the Polish infantry opened fire again.
"It's all over, mostly," Nick said. There was, it seemed to Tim, a coldness in Nick's voice he had not noticed before. "We'd better head back to General Izmailov and tell him."
Tim nodded, tears blurring his sight. He kept seeing little cavalry units being picked up off a playing board while he looked at the clumps of bodies on the field. It was too far to tell but he knew many of the men in those cavalry units. He knew some of men whose bodies made up those clumps. "The general's not going to be happy."
The little boyars with their fine horses had left the field, those that still could. Routed by soldiers who worked for pay, not glory. Nikita restarted the engines and headed to the column.
By the time they got back to the column, it was crossing the Volga at Staritsa and Tim had himself well under control. He made his report and the general discussed the way the battle had gone. Whoever had commanded the Poles had kept his Cossacks in reserve. Which was a bit of a surprise; probably the greatest Russian weakness was in tactical mobility. Of course, a Russian army that was mostly cavalry was unusual, too.
"I am concerned about the loss of the cavalry," General Izmailov echoed Tim's thoughts. "The cavalry units were most of what tactical mobility we had. We can't afford to be caught away from the Volga. We'll need it for supply. It's a hundred miles along the Volga from Tver to Rzhev. I am going to take the main force straight to Rzhev. But I am sending Captain Boyce and his people along the river to grab up every boat they can find. You're going with them, Tim. I don't really think they'll bug out again, but better safe than sorry."
"Yes, sir. What do I do if they do bug out?"
"They won't. That's why you're going. I'm sending a squad of musketeers with you, but they are just to keep you safe. Captain Boyce knows that if his company fails in its mission, you'll take the musketeers and come tell me about it. Then he and his people won't get paid."
To supplement their rations, the Musketeers with their new AK3s went hunting between villages. Russia was sparsely populated compared to the rest of Europe and there was quite a bit of game. Captain Boyce and his sergeant were impressed with the guns. When they asked Tim about it, he called on one of the musketeers to do a show and tell.
Daniil Kinski set the butt of the AK3 on the ground and the tip of its barrel came not quite to his nose. If any of them had been familiar with the up-time weaponry, they would have noticed a marked similarity to a Kentucky long rifle. But that similarity was not complete. Like the long rifle, the AK3 was a flintlock with a long, rifled barrel. It was forty inches long, if you didn't include the chamber, which was four inches long. Daniil then lifted the AK3 and showed them how the chamber was removed. "The chamber, as you can see, is a steel case, not including the quarter inch lip that inserts into the bore of the barrel. Behind the lip, the front of the chamber is flat and supposed to fit flush to the bottom of the barrel. It doesn't always fit as flush as we'd like, so we made some leather gaskets." He pulled the gasket off the chamber and showed them. "We still have the flash from the pan and the touch hole, but that's no worse than any flintlock."
Daniil stuck the gasket back on the chamber and the chamber back in the rifle primed the pan, cocked, aimed, and fired.
Crack!
Then he pulled the chamber out, stuck it in his pouch, inserted a loaded chamber with a gasket already on it into the AK3, primed the pan, aimed, and fired again.
Crack!
Relative to muzzle loading a musket it was very fast. Plus, since both shots had been aimed, they had both hit the tree that was his target… some eighty yards away from where they were standing.
Daniil pulled the second chamber from the AK3 then leaned the rifle against a tree while he showed them how to reload the chambers. Daniil filled the chamber with a measured amount of black powder then pulled out a lead cylinder "It doesn't use a round ball, it uses a Krackoff ball." Which an up-time observer would note had a certain resemblance to a Minie ball, in that it was a cylinder with one flat end and the other rounded. But it fit snugly into the chamber. "Push down till the Krackoff ball is flush with or a little below the lip of the chamber," Daniil said. The chamber wasn't cylindrical on the outside. Instead it was designed to fit into the AK3 only in such a way that the touch hole lined up with the flint lock on the side of the rifle.
A week later, while Tim and his crew were still collecting boats on the Volga, the Russian force surrounded Rzhev. In a way, General Izmailov was surprised. His force seriously outnumbered the forces in Rzhev and he had half-expected the commander of the Polish mercenary force to realize that and withdraw.
Janusz Radziwill had considered doing just exactly that. His officers had suggested it. However, Janusz was a young man who had already thrown the dice. If he retired from the game now, things could get really bad at home. Besides, the ease with which they had dispatched the cavalry suggested that they could hold and break the Russians against their recently built ramparts. So he allowed General Izmailov to reach the town, hoping to bait him into to another rash attack.
General Izmailov didn't take the bait. Instead, he surrounded the Polish encampment and started fortifying, using the golay golrod. Now it came down to a question of who would be reinforced first.
"What are those things and what good are they?" Tim looked up at the badly accented Russian. It was the sergeant from the mercenaries. Ivan-no, John was the English form-John Charles Hampstead. He must not have been near Moscow during the testing. The army had been encamped around Rzhev for about five days when they arrived.
The mercenaries of Captain Boyce's company had done a decent, if not spectacular job. " Golay golrod. Walking walls, you might say, or walking forts."
Hampstead said, "Fine. That's what they are. What good are they?"
A group of peasant draftees were pushing one of the golay golrod into position. Tim pointed at them. "They are made of heavy plywood. They let us build fortifications very quickly. In winter we can even put them on skis for ease of movement. Right now, of course, they're on wheels…" Tim's voice trailed off. He thought a moment.
It was heavy plywood. The panels were a good three inches thick. The wheels could even be turned a little bit. And that's what the workers were doing now. They were pushing the wall back and forth to maneuver it into a gap in the wall. One of the things that had come out of the testing was that the walls were a lot more likely to stop a bullet if it hit them at an angle, so they were being set up at an angle to the city wall around Rzhev. Since the workers were filling in a gap in the wall, they were quite prudently staying behind the wall they were moving. Even if they had been in effective range of the Polish muskets-which they weren't-all the Poles would be able to see was the wall. Not that the workers seemed convinced of that. They were peasants, not soldiers of any sort. They weren't armed and weren't expected to fight, but were here to carry supplies, set up camp, and other support roles.
Tim realized that the workers were right. If they had been on the other side of the golay golrod, they would have been shot at and, if unlucky, hit. But the way they were doing it they were, if not perfectly safe, close to it. There was a narrow gap, less than half a foot, between the bottom of the wall and the ground. But to hit a target that size with the kind of muskets Hampstead and his men had, would take a lucky shot at ten yards.
That's when the plan began to come together. Not all at once, but in pieces. Tim could see the walls being shoved, one in front of the other… making a partial wall between their present position and Rzhev. But how would they get back? More walls. It came together in his mind. A slowly shrinking siege wall. A tightening noose around Rzhev. As the noose got tighter, the dead zone between the siege walls and the city walls would get smaller. He forgot, almost, that this was real, not a war game played at the Kremlin. Forgot, almost, that he was the most junior of aides to the general. Almost… but not quite. So it was with great humility and trepidation that he approached General Izmailov.
The general listened. Why not? It was a siege and he had nothing else to do at the moment. Except for smoothing over disputes of precedence or paperwork that his secretary could do better. After due consideration, he decided that it was the beginnings of a possibly very good plan. They would have to take into account that the golay golrod were less than completely effective when hit face-on by enemy fire. So rather than a tightening noose, it would be more like a spiked collar with the spikes on the inside.
Back in Moscow, things were not going well. The same people who would have wanted General Izmailov's head for denying Colonel Khilhov the opportunity to rid Russia of the Polish invaders now wanted his head for "ordering" it. Calls for his removal were brought up in both the Zeminsky Sobor and the Duma. Others were afraid of offending the Poles and bringing about a repeat of the events of the up-time Smolensk War by squandering resources. Still others pointed out that the size of the invasion had been grossly overestimated. The close to ten thousand men that General Izmailov had should be plenty. Between the three factions, they blocked any attempt to send reinforcements. And almost blocked resupply.
Crack!
Janusz Radziwill ducked behind the Rzhev city wall, cursing the Russian forces. He wasn't a happy camper. He didn't like that the Russian guns could reach father than his. He didn't like that the golay golrod seemed to be being used in a brand new way. Most of all he hated the Testbed. "I hate that damned thing. Every time it's up there, it's watching every move we make and telling the Russkies just what we're doing."
Colonel Millerov looked up then nodded. "I'm none too happy with it myself. I feel like I'm being watched every minute of the day. But-" He pointed. "-I'm just as worried about the walls they're pushing inwards. And what's going to happen if the Rus get here and get in before our reinforcements get here."
"Help should be on his way from Smolensk." The last messenger had arrived just days ago. He had to swim down the Volga at night and sneak up the bank. But he had reported that the Smolensk garrison was coming.
"They need to speed it up," Millerov said. "Once those forces get here, we'll have them between us and the relief. And there's no way out for them." He paused. "If they get here in time, that is."
"General Izmailov, sir." Nick paused to think about his report for a moment. "A force of about eight thousand men is approaching from the southwest. From Smolensk, as near as I can tell. They'll be here in a week."
The general looked grim. "Well, we knew it was inevitable."
He began issuing orders. "Tim, now that we've tightened the noose around Rzhev, we've got plenty of wall sections. We'll use them to build our own fortifications between us and the oncoming force. Arrange it." It wasn't a good solution but it was the best he could do with what he had. One thing he didn't want to allow was relief of the siege of Rzhev. Instead his force would be both besiegers and besieged.
"Yes, sir." The young lieutenant-who was looking older by the day-took off toward the peasants and soldiers who were used to move the walls.
Work on tightening the noose around Rzhev was halted while the Russians set about making their own defensive wall. To General Izmailov this was looking more and more like a carefully-laid plan where someone had jumped the gun. Tim was right about the Volga, or at least he might be. If the Poles got a base on the upper Volga, they would be in a much better position to press Wladislaw's claim to the czar's throne. If the enemy got Rzhev and Tver and held them for a while, they could build up supplies and equipment to make a rapid advance by way of the Volga. They wouldn't need to take Moscow, just cut it off from the rest of Russia. Besides, if they held the Volga to Novgorod, they held the mouth of the Muscovy River. Apparently, someone in Poland had realized that Moscow was a false key to Russia.
It was the rivers that controlled Russia, not Moscow. Especially if the Poles had their own up-timer somewhere to make them steam-powered river boats. Russia had steamboats, they were running up the Volga daily bringing supplies. What they weren't bringing were reinforcements. Izmailov wondered if the people back in Moscow were crazy.
Meanwhile, everyone was working to get a second wall up about fifty feet outside the first and to get all their supplies between the two walls. That would give them a corridor that would stretch from the river on one side of Rzhev to the river on the other side. Rzhev was located on both sides of the Volga, but a bluff on the north side of the river commanded the lower city on the south side. For now, Izmailov would cede the lower city to the Poles. He could take it back easily enough once they had the upper city in their hands. There had been a ferry between the two, but that was easily dealt with. The Volga here was a bit over a hundred yards wide, making it impossible to occupy both sides of the river without dividing his force. The good news was the volley guns and small cannon placed at either end of the corridor, could prevent the Poles from resupplying Upper Rzhev by crossing the Volga. That same bluff gave the Russian guns an advantage when protecting their resupply.
"All right, Nick. From now on you base out of Staritsa. I want you well away from Cossack patrols." Starista was about thirty miles as the crow-or the Testbed-flew, a bit over fifty miles along the river. And it had enough defenses to keep the Testbed safe. "Do you really think the blinker lamps will work in daylight?"
"They should, General. The lamp on the Testbed is located in shadow, so as long as we stay out of the sun, you should be able to see the flashes. You have the grid map and we got a good enough look at their army to give a good read on their units. They have been designated A through K. We'll send an offset for the code wheels at the beginning and end of each message."
"What about us sending you messages?
"Should work about the same. Blink at us from a shaded spot." Nick said. "What really worries me, General, is… well, they will know that we are telling you their locations. And we can't stay up all that long. They can just wait for us to leave, then move their units and attack where you're not expecting it."
"Pity about that," Aleksander Korwin Gosiewski said. In general, Gosiewski was quite pleased with the way things had gone since his forces left Smolensk. He wouldn't have done what Janusz Radziwill had, but since Janusz had opened the way Gosiewski was fairly sure that he was safe from the political repercussions. And if it increased the size and power of Lithuania within the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, that was all to the good.
"Our eight thousand and three thousand in Rzhev…" He felt confident that he could rout the Russians. His force was a modern army, six thousand infantry, two thousand cavalry. "But I would have liked to capture that balloon. I doubt it will return; I suspect the Rus commander has sent it away to keep it out of our hands."
He nodded to his subordinates. "But it doesn't matter that much. There is a time for subtlety, gentlemen, and a time for more direct means. This is the latter."
"Sir!" Colonel Bortnowski said.
"As soon as their balloon is out of sight, Colonel, you will take the Seventh Fusiliers…" Gosiewski continued with a list of units designated to attack the east downriver edge of the wall. "We will hold here until the artillery has produced a breach in their golay golrod. You will then advance. Our situation is simple. Once we get within their outer wall, at any point, they are done and we can roll them up. The Russian soldiers don't have the stomach for a standup fight. They carry walls with them, so they'll have something to hide behind. Take that away and they're like sheep among wolves."
It took another hour to work out all the various details, including a skirmish against the upriver edge of the wall to pull the defenders away from the planned breach point.
"General, the Poles are moving," Tim said as he entered the tent.
"What?" the general had been taking a nap. He sat up on his cot. "Their cannon?"
"Not yet, sir."
"Very well. Give me ten minutes."
By the time General Izmailov got to the walls, the Russian corridor was acting like a disturbed ant bed. Izmailov didn't rush. He strolled. Exhibiting no hurry, he listened to reports as he went, stopped and greeted people. And, to an extent, the ant bed calmed. Actions became less frantic and more purposeful. When it was reported that the Polish cannon were moving into position, he quickened his pace and started giving orders.
"Get those guns in place!" The small, rifled, cannon of the Russians were moved into position, set up and loaded behind sections of wall. Ropes were attached to those wall sections so that they could be quickly moved out of the way.
"We'll give it to them now, boys," General Izmailov shouted. "Before they realize what hits them."
The order was given while the Polish cannon were still out of effective range. Their effective range-not the effective range of the rifled breach-loading Russian guns.
The men on the ropes strained and the walls moved out of the way.
"Aim them! Don't just point them randomly!"
The gunners took a moment to refine their aim.
"Fire!"
Boomcrack! Boomcrack! Boomcrack!
The small cannons sounded like they couldn't make up their mind whether they were cannon or rifles. The rounds they fired were small, just under an inch across and three inches long. But they exited the Russian guns in a flat trajectory and went precisely where their gunners told them to go. Two rounds hit the outer wagon of the Polish gun train. The third missed; it hit a wagon wheel which was shattered. Pointlessly, since the exploding powder wagons would have destroyed it a tenth of a second later anyway.
A Polish gunner lay on the ground, blown off his feet but otherwise uninjured, shaking his head less to clear it than in confusion. They were half again out of a cannon's effective range. Even as he lay there, another boomcrack and the gun carriage of one of the six polish sakers, or nine-pounders, shattered as a smaller but faster round ripped though it. The gunner, after due consideration, decided that where he was, was a rather good place to be. Much better than standing up next to the guns.
Aleksander Korwin Gosiewski was not so sanguine. In the midst of disaster, he saw what he wanted to see. The Russians had opened a breach in their wall to allow their cannons to fire. He decided that if he moved fast enough he could exploit the breach. He rapped out orders to Colonel Bortnowski and sent off the messenger. "Attack now. Go for the breach. Charge damn it! Charge!"
Much against his better judgment Colonel Bortnowski charged. Sort of. The charge of a pike unit is rather akin to the charge of a turtle. Slow and steady. Which may win the race and may even win a battle when it's charging another pike unit. But when charging a wall two hundred and fifty yards away and when that wall is manned by troops with rifled breach-loading AK3s that can be fired, have the chamber switched, then fired again several times, the charge of a pike unit becomes an organized form of suicide. Eventually, of course, the pikes broke. But not nearly soon enough. Their casualties were much worse than the casualties the Russian cavalry units had suffered just weeks before. Colonel Bortnowski was among the dead. They really should have used the Cossack cavalry, but it was in the wrong place.
The Polish force withdrew, but it was only temporary, as General Izmailov knew quite well.
"Gentlemen, our situation is untenable as it stands," General Izmailov said. "We must take Rzhev and soon. Tim, I want you to coordinate with the unit commanders, start tightening the collar again. Get us salients as close to the to the walls of Rzhev as you can…" The general described what he wanted and work began again. The plan was to get several points right up against the walls, such as they were, of Rzhev. Which would still leave the problem of defending against a potential attack by the Polish relief force while at the same time using most of his force to breach the defenses of Rzhev. To attack effectively-and just as important, quickly-they would need overwhelming force against the troops occupying the town. To get that, they were going to have to virtually strip the outer golay golrod of fighting men. And like any fortification, no matter how temporary or permanent, the walking walls needed to be manned be effective.
Two weeks later they were in position and as ready as they were going to get. At the closest point the inner golay golrod was only twenty feet from the makeshift walls around Rzhev and there were five points where they were within fifty feet.
Nick gave a bit more steam to the right side engine to turn the Testbed left. The winds were gusty. He had gotten word a week before that they would be making the attack on Rzhev today. His job was especially vital because to make it look real they had to know where the Polish forces were attacking long before it happened. He looked out and noted the position of a Polish cavalry unit.
Rrrrriiiipppppp!
Nick looked up and swore.
The gas bladders on the Testbed were made of goldbeater skin. Ever have knockwurst? Well, goldbeater skin is basically the same stuff they put around the sausage, the intestines of large animals. For goldbeater skin, the intestines are cut open and glued together a couple of layers thick. The sheets of goldbeaters skin are mostly self adhesive and formed into short, fat sausage shapes rather than round balloons. It had never occurred to anyone to wonder what would happen if you applied steam.
Granted, by the time the steam reached the steam bladder it had cooled quite a bit. On the other hand, the steam bladder on the Testbed had by now been slow cooking for several weeks. A little bit of extra steam pressure was all it took. Of course, it gave along the seams. As soon as the rip happened, the steam spread out still further and turned into mist, then started condensing onto the other gas bags in the Testbed where it did comparatively little harm. But the steam cell was gone; its lift was gone.
The gondola lurched. Nick swore again and reached for a lever to angle the thrust that remained to him.
The steam bladder, when filled and functioning properly, provided about five hundred pounds of lift to the Testbed. The semi-rigid airship had just gone from neutral buoyancy to five hundred pounds negative buoyancy. Which didn't mean it dropped like a five hundred pound lead weight. It was more like a five hundred pound feather. The steam bladder was located three-quarters of the way to the front of the Testbed, just above the gondola, so naturally it nosed down. Which meant that the engines were pushing down as well. Airships dive like they do every other maneuver. Slowly. A similar disaster in an airplane would have given the pilot less then two minutes to fix the problem, as the plane nosed over and accelerated to over a hundred miles an hour straight down. Nick had a good five minutes before he would hit the ground.
First, reverse thrust on the steam engines. Nick shifted a couple of levers. Then, angling the thrust-he shifted more levers as he continued to lose altitude. Shift the trim weight. More work. He had to crank it back to the tail of the Testbed. In doing these things, Nick lost about two thousand feet of altitude.
"It's coming right at us!" one man screamed.
The big balloon looked to the Polish troops on the ground like it was making a slow-motion dive-bombing run. Not that they had ever seen a dive-bombing run of any sort. The nose of the Testbed was pointing straight at them and it was billowing white smoke. Steam, actually, but they didn't know that.
"Fire, you bastards! Fire!"
Chaos reigned for minutes. Some the men decided to be elsewhere, but a surprising number stood their ground and started shooting.
The Testbed was still out of what could reasonably be considered effective range of a seventeenth-century musket. but it was significantly bigger than the broad side of a barn. Even a big barn. Inevitably, it got hit several times. Bladders filled with hydrogen were struck by musket balls. And nothing much happened. To get hydrogen to explode takes three things, hydrogen, oxygen and a spark. The hydrogen and oxygen need to be mixed together fairly well to get any kind of significant flame. But the crucial issue here was the lack of a spark. The lead shot back from the muskets was indeed still quite hot, but not that hot. Besides, there was all that steam condensation on the bladders and the skin of the Testbed.
"Nothing's happening! It's still coming!"
By the time Nick had the Testbed leveled out at about twenty five hundred feet above ground, it had a couple of dozen holes poked in the skin and three of it's four hydrogen bladders had holes poked in them. It takes a long time for the hydrogen to leak out of a balloon forty feet across. The Testbed continued on, as best anyone on the ground could tell, totally unaffected by the shots fired at it.
As best anyone on the ground could tell.
"Damn it," Nick said. The Testbed was losing lifting gas and was already negatively buoyant. Further, it was not recovering any of the steam it was using to run the engines. So while Nick had hours of fuel left, he had five or ten minutes of water and when that ran out, he would lose power. Nick headed for base. He didn't make it. He literally ran out of steam just over half way there. Absent the engines which had been holding him up, he started to sink, fairly slowly, to the ground. Nose first.
Back at the battle, Gosiewski saw his opportunity but had some difficulty exploiting it. After the disastrous attack of the first day there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm for frontal attacks on the golay golrod. It took a while to get things organized.
Hot Shot Hampstead looked over at his captain. "They'll be coming, sir. Now that the balloon is gone."
"I know." The captain nodded. "But where?"
Hot shot shrugged. "Maybe on the left. There are some gaps on that side. Sure as heck we can't be everywhere." Their unit had been left on the outer wall to stiffen the peasant levies which were unarmed, just there to make it look like the wall was manned. The peasants had sticks painted to look like rifles and muskets, because the Russian government wasn't real big on arming peasants. Armed peasants tended to turn into Cossacks or bandits. Not that there was much difference between the two.
So Sergeant Hampstead and Captain Boyce had been assigned to go to wherever the Poles attacked and shoot so that it looked like the whole wall was manned by armed troops.
Captain Boyce nodded again. "It's as good a place as any, John. Start shifting the men." They could hear shooting from behind them. The Russians were in Rzhev and would be occupied for hours cleaning out the Polish troops in the town. If the outer wall was to hold, it would be them that held it.
"Form the men just inside the wall! We're going to wait right there."
"What about the firing ports, Captain?" Hot Shot wanted to know.
"I'm getting sneaky, John," Captain Boyce told his sergeant. "As important as holding this part of the wall is, convincing the Poles that we are just one of the units manning them is just as important. We need to give them a reason why the other parts of the wall aren't shooting." Then he turned to the peasant levies. "Who's in charge here?"
Having identified the man, Boyce explained what he wanted. "Tie ropes onto the golay golrod. When I give you the word I want you to pull these two sections apart. As quickly as you can. Then when I tell you, push them closed again."
Then man nodded and started giving orders. It would give them a roughly twenty foot front. "John, two ranks only and keep the pike men in reserve. Have the men fire as the golay golrod clear the breach. Then fall back as soon as they have fired. Reload and reform as the walls come back together."
It didn't go like clockwork. Unless you were talking about a clock with a busted arrester gear.
"Open!" The walls started coming back with dozens of men pulling each wall. The troops started firing. Blam Blam, Blam Blam, and the walls retreated. And they did a credible job of retreating behind the golay golrod but then it went to hell. Some men kept going, others stopped too soon and the walls caught up and passed them. leaving them exposed to enemy fire. Almost no one had time to reload because they were too busy moving. Then there were the Polish troops-they had been taking sniper fire from those walls for weeks. As best Boyce could tell, no one gave the order but the Polish formation went into a charge as the walls opened. They took casualties, lots of them, since Boyce's troops were firing from pointblank range. But the Poles saw the breach and ran right over their fallen to get to it.
Boyce ordered the wall to close before it was all the way opened. But it wasn't soon enough. The walls didn't close all the way; they were blocked by Polish troops.
Boyce on one side and John Charles on the other, they struggled to reform the men and close the breach. They weren't alone. The Russian peasants armed with whatever was handy were right there with them.
Ivan didn't really know why he'd been assigned to this wall section, or even why he'd been pulled away from his farm. But one thing he did know was that Polish forces loose in Russia were a bad thing. He'd been hearing the stories all his life, how the Poles had decimated his village and killed his grandfather.
He didn't have one of the fancy guns the soldiers had, but he did have a shovel he used to flatten ground for the walking wall. If nothing else, he and his peers could use their heavy painted sticks against the Poles. And they would, he knew. Nobody wanted the Poles in charge again. The boyars were bad enough.
So he stood in the shadow of the wall, waiting for the inevitable rush of men trying to get inside. Then he swung the shovel, blade out. The Pole dropped to the ground and Ivan swung at the next one. Misha was swinging just as frequently. Some of the Poles got past, of course. A shovel doesn't have much chance against a sword, a pike, or even a flint-lock pistol.
Still, they kept swinging.
"Get a message to Izmailov," Boyce shouted across the breach. "Send a man, now!"
Hampstead grabbed the nearest man and sent him inside Rzhev. "Tell the general we need more men. And we need them now, if he doesn't want the fucking Poles up his backside!"
In a sense, Boyce's trick had worked.
To the Poles it did look like one more weird Russian maneuver using the golay golrod, but their commander thought that this one had backfired. It was clearly poorly planned and not drilled nearly enough. At least, not at the place the Polish force had attacked. It might work better at other points along the line, but that didn't really matter. They had a breach and poured everything they could into it. The unsupported peasants at other places along the wall were not attacked. And the maneuvering to bring forces to the breach cost the Poles time.
"Back to the walls," Izmailov roared. "These pigs are well stuck."
Janusz Radziwill was dead, and most of his officers. The remaining force inside Rzhev were rounded up and under guard. "Back to the walls," Izmailov roared again. Tim gathered the men he'd been leading and headed back to the breach in Rzhev's walls.
"There's nothing there but peasants and sticks," Gosiewski shouted. "You're not turning back from peasants, are you?"
The Polish forces pushed toward the breach again.
"Here they come!" Tim's voice cracked on "come."
But it didn't matter that he was only seventeen. The men followed him readily. Nor were they the only group. Russian troops were turning over their prisoners to anyone handy and heading back to the walls. Unit cohesion ceased to exist. But by then most of the Poles in Rzhev were unarmed and most of the citizens of Rzhev weren't.
Suddenly Tim stopped dead in his tracks. They had reached the outer wall but the Poles weren't actually coming at them. They were nowhere near the breach. The Poles were crossing in front of them, not preparing to attack. He looked around trying to make sense out of the confusion and chaos that was battle.
Rzhev had been retaken. The volley guns and cannon that had been preventing resupply were no longer needed in that role. They hadn't been moved in preparation for the battle because the general didn't want the Poles across the Volga making a dash to reinforce Rzhev "while we're trying to take it back." But now, what purpose were the volley guns serving? He turned to find a man with an AK3 near him.
"Can you hold here with what you have?"
"I should be able to. Besides more men are coming all the time. What you have in mind?
What Tim had in mind was so far above his authority that it wasn't even funny. "Never mind. You men! Stay here." Then Tim ran. By going inside the inner wall, he shortened the distance he had to travel considerably. It still took him ten minutes to reach the volley guns. And considerable shouting to get them to pull away the wall section. "The general's orders! Bring the volley guns and follow me."
Of course, they weren't the general's orders; they were Tim's orders. And if the general decided to make an issue of it, Tim was going to be in a great deal of trouble. But somewhere during the battle the career of Lieutenant Boris Timrovich had decreased in importance. What was vitally important was getting the volley guns where they were needed.
Tim stood on the volley gun platform, which was being pulled by two steppe ponies. It wasn't a grand gesture; he needed the height to see over the wall to locate the breach. "That way!" He pointed. "Another hundred yards."
Tim and the gun crew were inside the inner walking wall. Just on the other side of it was a mob scene, packed with Poles slowly pushing back. The Russian defenders were spread along the wooden trench made by the two walls. Carefully, they lined up the volley guns at points where wall sections met.
That was when Tim realized the flaw in his magnificent plan. The golay golrod were made up of wall sections that could be latched together. But the latches here and now were on the other side, they couldn't open the walls. They knew where the latches were; there was one near the top one and near the bottom. Tim cursed himself for a fool. "We'll have to move the volley guns to where we control the walls." He climbed back up on the gun platform and looked over the wall again, almost getting shot for his trouble. "Over there." He pointed back the way they'd come "three wall sections."
When they got to a section that the Russians mostly controlled, Tim used the volley gun platform and scaled the wall. This time he almost got chopped up by a Russian peasant with a shovel already bloody and covered with gore. "Open the walls! Open the latches! Let the volley guns through!" And, surprisingly enough, that's just what they did.
The Russian version of the volley gun was an outgrowth of the same technology used in the AK3. The plates were loaded with black powder and minie balls and were ignited by a quick fuse. They were slower firing than the ones in the west, but Russia was still having trouble with primers. They had twenty-four barrels arranged in three rows of eight. And the prep work was done on the chamber plates hopefully before the battle started. So all that was needed to reload was to pull a chamber plate and replace it with another then light the fuse. They were cranked, but only for traversing.
The last Russian slipped from in front of the volley gun. The gunner lit the fuse and started cranking. Crack Crack Crack Crack.. . twenty-four barrels in order. Then the gunner pulled the plate, inserted another and did it again. The gunners for the volley guns were big men. The plates weighed upwards of thirty pounds.
The volley guns wouldn't have been enough by themselves, but they took the pressure off the Russian troops long enough for a semblance of organization to occur. Unarmed peasants retreated to be replaced by armed musketeers carrying AK3s and the weight of fire shifted.
"Lieutenant Timrovich, you are to report to the general's quarters."
Two weeks after the battle, things had stabilized. Rzhev was surrounded by three walls, one inside the other. The Rzhev wall that had been built in a somewhat haphazard manner by the Poles and the two layers of golay golrod together constituted a formidable defensive network. Starving the victorious Russians out would take time. Meanwhile, the walls were bolstered by sand bags and firing platforms. Neither Tim nor General Izmailov had yet had occasion to mention Tim's orders to the volley guns, given in the generals name. Tim had been starting to hope-against his better judgment-that the general was going to let the whole thing slide.
"What am I going to do with you, Lieutenant?" General Izmailov sighed rather theatrically. "I have been reading a translation of an up-time book on a French general who had an elegant solution for this situation. He was dealing with a general, not a lieutenant who acted on his own authority. At their base, the situations are quite similar. Bonaparte's elegant solution was to give the general a medal to acknowledge his achievement." There was a short pause but Tim knew he was far from out of the woods.
General Izmailov continued, "Then, to maintain good order and discipline in the army, he had the man shot for disobeying orders." General Izmailov paused again and waited. Tim remained silent.
"What do you think of Bonaparte's solution, Lieutenant? I could have you a medal by sunset."
Tim gulped and hesitated, looking for the right words. "I can't say it appeals to me, sir. But I grant that the solution has a certain, ah, symmetry." He stopped. Tim really wanted, right then, to bring up the political consequences to the general should he find it necessary to execute a member of a family of such political prominence, even a minor member of a cadet branch. He didn't. Maybe it was because it would sound like the threat it was. But no, really it was because Tim understood that while what he had done was the right thing for that battle, it was the wrong thing for the army. He had sat in the Testbed and watched as Colonel Khilkov used his family position to destroy a couple of Russian cavalry regiments. He knew as well as General Izmailov that if word got out, his example would be used to justify every harebrained glory-hound for the next hundred years. Who knew how many people that would kill? Tim had known when he was doing it that it would cost him, but not how much.
"For political reasons I can't use Bonaparte's elegant symmetry. You will get neither the medal nor the firing squad. Those political reasons are only partly to do with your family." General Izmailov gave Tim a sardonic smile. "I will take the credit for your brilliant move and it may save my life when I must explain to the Duma my acquiescence to Colonel Khilkov's less-than-brilliant actions. We will say that it was a contingency plan. You will get a promotion, then you will receive the worst jobs I can come up with for some time to come. You will accept those jobs without complaint! Understand me, Lieutenant. You deserve the medal you will never get, but you also deserve the firing squad that you won't face this time. Don't make the same mistake again."
Tim was still doing latrine duty when Moscow finally decided to send reinforcements. At which point the magnate's army, which had never had the sanctioning of the Polish crown, retreated. He continued to receive unpleasant assignments for the next six months, much to the irritation of his father. But Tim never complained.