1636： The Saxon Uprising ARC - By Eric Flint Page 0,152
that reality, damn him. How could a man who planned to become a psychologist behave like a blasted lunatic on a battlefield? If Jeff didn’t find him and reunite the volley gun company with the regiment’s infantry, things were likely to get very hairy. The Hangman was light, when it came to regular artillery, so they relied a lot on the volley guns.
He heard another screech. Again, he couldn’t make out the words, but it sounded closer.
The words had been: “Come into position!”
Thirty-six volley guns swiveled on the snow, gliding easily on their Bartley rigs.
“Come on!” Jeff shouted, raising his sword and waving it. He detested the thing almost as much as he detested horses, but it was just a fact that an officer leading a charge had to wave a stupid sword around. Waving a pistol just didn’t do the trick, not even a big down-time wheel-lock.
Yes, it was asinine. Nothing but a pointless tradition left over from the days when illiterate men went into battled armed with nothing but oversized swords and blue paint. But the Hangman was an elite unit and elite units take tradition seriously.
Thankfully, Jeff was a big man and had big hands even for a man his size. So he probably wouldn’t lose his grip on the sword more than twice before the battle was over.
Somehow, it never occurred to him that he might be dead or maimed before the battle was over. He never thought of that, in the middle of a battle. He’d only think of it as he tried to sleep afterward, when sometimes he’d get the shakes.
He heard another screech. He might finally have been close enough to make out the words but the screech was immediately drowned by a thunderclap. Nine hundred volley gun barrels going off at once made the term “noisy” seem inadequate if you were anywhere nearby.
That third volley—again, at point blank range—destroyed the Östergötland Horsemen. Most of them survived, as men somehow do on a battlefield. Most of them weren’t even injured. But as a fighting formation, they were done. On this battlefield today, at least. The survivors raced to the rear, insofar as men could race through heavy snow and insofar as they could tell where “the rear” was in the middle of a heavy snowfall.
The sun was still invisible. It would remain invisible through that day and most of the next. But there was now enough light that a man could distinguish, approximately, between east and west. And, that done, determine which way was north—which is where they wanted to go. Back into the siege lines.
Miserable they might be, those trenches, but they weren’t as miserable as being savaged by musket balls fired by an unseen enemy.
Not more than one soldier in five of the Östergötland Horsemen had caught so much as a glimpse of the men who’d been killing them. Not more than a dozen had gotten a good look at them. Of those dozen, only two were still alive.
One of them was now hiding under the carcass of his horse, trying not to scream because of a broken leg. He was playing dead in the hopes that none of the enemy soldiers passing by would spot him. They were likely to cut his throat if he couldn’t offer ransom, which he couldn’t. His had not been a wealthy family, either, and the Swedes had been late with the pay.
Again.
Dresden, capital of Saxony
“Where? Where?” Jozef demanded, as soon as he came onto the platform around the tower.
Eric Krenz pointed to the south. “Over there. Somewhere. It’s hard to be sure, exactly.”
Wojtowicz peered into the snowfall. You really couldn’t see anything worth looking at. From this high up in the Residenzschloss, you couldn’t even see the city’s own walls.
Gretchen Richter came onto the platform, followed by Tata.
“So what is happening?” she asked.
“We’re not sure,” replied Friedrich Nagel. He was standing next to Krenz. Both lieutenants had their uniforms on, but neither one had finished buttoning up their outer jackets. Like Jozef himself, they must have scrambled out of bed in response to the distant gunfire.
Suddenly, Jozef saw a flash. A dim one, but it was definitely a flash. Followed, a moment later, by a muffled boom.
“That was an artillery piece,” he said. “Pretty big one, too. Probably a twelve-pounder.”
He looked at Eric and Friedrich. “Does the Third Division have any field ordnance that size?”
They both shook their heads. “Biggest we’ve got—unless something got added after Zwenkau—are six-pounders.”