Conrad Starguard - Conrad's Quest for Rubber Part 2

At the end of February, when final preparations were being made, when weapons, ammunition, preserved food, and everything else we would need for the months ahead was being issued, one of the warehouse workers handed me a white leather kit with a red cross on it.

I asked what it was.

"It's a medical kit," he said. "We usually hand them out only to people who have completed the surgeon's course, but someone had too many of these kits made up. The captain said to hand them out to one man from each company, just in case you need it."

I said that I was in the fifth lance, so I'd had the first-aid course, but that was just to help the wounded until somebody got there who knew what he was doing. I didn't know anything about really fixing people!

"Everybody who does already has a kit. Keep it. Clip it on your belt, just in case."

I did as I was ordered, and I quit wearing my smaller first-aid pack since everything in it was also in the big medical kit.

I soon discovered there were advantages to wearing the kit, since real medics were rarely sent out to do the dirtiest jobs, such as cleaning the latrines. Once I had the kit, people a.s.sumed I was trained in its use, and thus my life became a bit easier. No one ever asked me if I had taken the proper course, so I was never even tempted to lie about it; Our company was part of the River Battalion, the men who would be manning the riverboats on the Vistula. This intrigued me, since I had often heard of boats, but had never seen one. In truth, I had never even seen a river.

We wouldn't be actually operating the boats, of course; that was the job of another group entirely.

We had only to ride along, we were told, and to obey the orders of our knights and captains, who had vast experience on the dozens of steam-powered boats the army had.

Well, my knight, Sir Odon, was the same age I was, but had joined the army a year earlier, and I don't think he had vast experience in anything. My captain, Sir Stashu, looked to be perhaps eighteen and was no gray-bearded repository of wisdom, either, but I kept my mouth shut, as my father, a wise man, had taught me.

Grunts b.i.t.c.hed about everything, but we learned that there were a few topics of conversation that could get you chosen to shovel out the garbage, or to wash a few thousand dishes, and that among these was the inexperience of our leaders. They knew it themselves, and preferred not to think about it.

Chapter Three

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski WRITTEN JANUARY 19, 1249, CONCERNING FEBRUARY 15, 1241.

AT LAST, we said our final Sunrise Service in h.e.l.l, and we marched out to war.

Well, we had to pull our war carts behind us, there were only two railroad tracks to pull them on, and there were a sixth of a million of us troops to move out. An hour went by before we finally left h.e.l.l, and we were near the front of the line. Our doubled column was over sixteen miles long! Even at a brisk walk, it took almost six hours for us to march by!

Once we finally got on the tracks, it wasn't all that hard to pull the big cart, even loaded as it was with the tons of guns, pikes, and all the other material we needed to fight with. Counting our six knights and the knight-banner who led us, there were forty-three men in our platoon.

Our cart could be pulled by eighteen of them, with the rest of us riding aboard, resting, eating, or even sleeping. This let us continue onward right around the clock, doing over six dozen miles a day without ever once breaking into a run.

The six carts of my company pulled off the main road when we got to East Gate and left the main body of the army to go on without us.

A great crowd of civilians was leaving the dock area. There must have been thousands of them, mostly peasants, but with a scattering of well-dressed people as well. They were all walking back the way we had come; refugees who would shelter at the Warrior's School, we presumed.

I had heard much about the castle that had been built at East Gate, how it was made entirely of reinforced concrete, and I was eager to examine it closely.

I never got the chance for we were marched straight onto our boat, the RB1 Muddling Through.

The tracks went right up to and over the big drawbridge at the front of the boat and right into the cavern of a hold that made up most of the lower deck. We could hardly see the huge boat as we went aboard it.

The drawbridge door was closed behind us, leaving us in the dark, and our riverboat pulled out immediately to let the next one up to the dock to be loaded. It was like being locked up in an oversized barn, filled with six war carts and the almost two gross of men of my company.

We soon found out that we were riding in no ordinary steamboat, but in the craft that held the commanders of the entire river flotilla, all three dozen boats. We had two army barons aboard, as well as Sir Conrad, now Count Conrad, himself.

Captain Targ didn't want his troops getting in the way of all these high personages, so he had us stay down below on the cargo deck, just in front of the engines. The second deck had the radios and the war room, called Tartar Control, as well as the kitchen and the sleeping rooms for the officers.

There was a fighting top above that, and a few hours after we were aboard, the sixth lance of each platoon was sent up there with their guns. So were the fourth lances, who acted as loaders for the swivel guns, and the third, who acted as spotters.

My own fifth lance acted as corpsmen, a.s.sistants for the surgeons, and we wouldn't be needed until somebody got shot. This meant we had to stay inside, cooped up without even a window, until somebody had the courtesy to get decently wounded so we could go outside and do something.

That night I was one of the few men below who couldn't sleep. I was standing near the stairs with my helmet off when a tall man walked by with a line of white circles down the armor on his back. I snapped to attention.

You see, the army used a color code for the numbers of its lances, platoons, companies, and so on.

One was red, two was orange, three was yellow, four was green, five was blue, and six was purple.

The b.u.t.tons on our uniform jackets used these colors to define where we were in the army's organization.

The top b.u.t.ton was your position in your lance, the second, your lance's position in your platoon, the third was your platoon's place in the company, and so on. The b.u.t.tons on my jacket went, from the top down, orange, blue, blue, yellow, orange, red, green, blue, and red. This meant that I was the second man in the fifth lance, of the Fifth Platoon, of the Third Company, of the Second Komand, of the First Battalion, of the Fourth Column, of the Fifth County, of the First Division of the army.

The leader of any group used a white b.u.t.ton in that position. That is to say, Sir Odon's b.u.t.tons were the same color as mine, except that his top one was white. Captain Targ's top three b.u.t.tons were white.

On our armor, which zippered together, there were big spots, a different shape for each color, running down the chest and the back, painted in the same colors as our b.u.t.tons. Otherwise, we all looked the same in armor, and with the faceplates closed, you couldn't tell who was who. Once you got used to it, you could spot your friends quickly.

Also, if someone was impersonating a warrior, before long his b.u.t.ton colors would get him caught by someone who knew he wasn't who he was supposed to be.

So when I saw a line of nine white circles on the man's back, I knew he had to be Lord Conrad himself. I came to attention, as I had been taught, and he stopped, turned, and looked at me.

"I know you, don't I?" He said, "Yes, you are Josip, the son of the baker from Okoitz."

I said that I was, and that I was surprised so great a person as he was had actually recognized me.

"I am just another man, Josip, not much different from you. I think that mostly I remember you because of your surprise and your laugh when I showed you that top I made for you."

I said that I had been six years old then, but yes, I remembered it, too. I said I still had that toy, carefully stored away, and that if I ever had a son, I would give it to him.

"It feels good to be appreciated. But tell me, Josip, is there anything I can do for you now?"

I said there was, and explained to him that I had been on the boat for twelve hours now, and they said that the boat was on a river, but I had never in my life actually seen a river. Could I perhaps have permission to go up and have a look?

"You never... ? I'm sorry, but I sometimes forget how restricted the life of a commoner can be.

I'll do better than just let you topside. I'm doing an informal inspection just now. Come with me, and I'll give you the threepenny tour of the Muddling Through."

And with that he took me all around the boat, starting with the engines, where the engineer had forbidden us troops to go. But who would dare stand in the way of Lord Conrad, or even the lowly grunt who was accompanying him?

I was surprised to discover I already knew the baron who was in charge of the radio room. He was Piotr, whose parents had the room two doors down from my father's. Eight years older than me, he had once been one of the "big kids," although he had been the smallest "big kid" at Okoitz, and now I was a head taller than he was.

He said he remembered me, but somehow I don't think he really did. He was just being polite.

Truthfully, I doubt if I could remember any of the little kids there who were eight years younger than I was!

The dawn was breaking before we finally got all the way up to the fighting top, and at last I saw what a river looked like. The Vistula was as beautiful as they had always told me it was.

That morning, word went out that those of us below could go up topside, one platoon at a time, whenever there wasn't a battle going on. I'm sure that order came from Lord Conrad.

I was below at noon, when all of the guns above us started shooting, not just the three dozen swivel guns my company manned, but the steam-powered peashooters that quickly spat out thousands of small iron b.a.l.l.s, and the Halman Projectors that threw bombs high over the enemy. It went on for an hour before my lance was called up to the ready room. After a few minutes we were needed up on the fighting top.

The gun smoke was so thick you had to gag, and after the darkness below, the sunlight was blinding. The noise could make a man go deaf, and the number of arrows being shot at us was simply unbelievable. They were stuck all over the deck and looked almost like wheat ready for the harvest.

We found that we had to walk with a sort of sliding motion, breaking off the arrows as we went, to keep from tripping over them.

All of the men on deck had arrows sticking out of them, a frightening sight! But we soon realized they were all right. Our armor was of plated steel, heavily waxed and covered with thick canvas. It was proof against the Mongol arrows, although those missiles tended to stick in the wax and canvas.

What I had taken at first for convulsions was in fact the men laughing about the whole situation!

A gunner signaled for help, with an arrow in his upper arm that was squirting blood. Somehow, it had managed to slide up his bra.s.sard and get under his pauldron. Not a deadly wound, but it needed tending. Fritz and Zbigniew helped him below, his loader took over shooting the gun, and the spotter took over loading the twenty-round clips into the gun, and then reloading the empty clips from the ammunition boxes.

I had nothing better to do, so I felt free to stand behind them and act as their spotter. It gave me a chance to see what was going on.

A great mob of Mongols was on the bank, crowding right down to the sh.o.r.e. They were trying to kill us with their arrows, which were obviously ineffective. We, on the other hand, were hurting them, hurting them badly.

Three dozen swivel guns were each shooting twenty rounds a minute into a packed crowd of men and horses, and you could see where individual bullets were killing three and four of them in a file at a time. The two peashooters on that side of the boat were spraying away, taking out Mongols in horizontal ranks. And the Halman bombs were bursting above them, each explosion knocking down a circle of the enemy a dozen yards across!

The enemy was being shot so fast that no attempt was made to remove the dead and wounded.

Those that fell were just left there to be trampled, to bleed, and to die.

And the fools kept coming! They made no attempt to run away, or to hide behind something, as any rational creature would, but instead were actually climbing on top of their own dead in order to get at us!

I tell you that in some places they were sitting on horses that were standing on three and four layers of dead men and dead horses!

And once there, there was nothing they could do. Their arrows couldn't really hurt us, and when some of them went into the water to get at us, those that didn't freeze immediately soon found that the sides of the boat were six yards high, and made of smooth metal that couldn't possibly be climbed.

In our months of training, we had been repeatedly told that we were facing the craftiest, best organized, and best led enemy in the world. That day, it seemed to me we were simply slaughtering a mob of idiots with less brains than a herd of sheep Then the loader on the gun next to me got an arrow in the eyeslit, and I had to leave off watching the war and go to his aid. He was on his back and not moving. I needed help to get him below.

Looking about, I saw Taurus was shooting a gun three places down, and laughing and screaming insanely at the Mongols the whole time. He was shouting what could only have been the names of his family and friends who had fallen to the Mongol onslaught of the Ukraine.

I thought that he was somehow living in Heaven and in h.e.l.l at the same time. I knew that while he had both bullets and Mongols to shoot them at, I would get no help from Taurus.

Then Sir Odon saw my need and ran over to help me. Together we picked the wounded man up and carried him down the steps to the surgery.

Later, we found out that our gunner lived, and he was back at his gun the next day.

This sort of slaughter went on for days, and we were all amazed there were so many Mongols.

One night I spoke briefly to Lord Conrad again, and he admitted to being as astounded by their numbers as everyone else was. His biggest worry was that we would run out of ammunition before Batu Khan ran out of warriors.

Then the Mongols started to get a little bit smart, or maybe, as some said, their engineers finally caught up with their frontline troops.

One of our planes, piloted by Count Lambert himself, someone said, dropped us a message telling us that the enemy was building a pontoon bridge along the riverbank, downstream of us.

We went there with another boat following us, and they ordered us to get ready to land and chop the thing up with our axes right after we gave them a pa.s.s with the guns.

All of us except the gunners poured out of the drawbridge in the front of the boat, with the fifth lance of each platoon taking up the rear, as usual. We had to be behind the other guys in order to see them when they got wounded, and get them back to safety. Not that we didn't do our share of the fighting, you understand.

The first lance, made up of the biggest men, always went in first with their halberds, and we went in last to pick up the pieces, whether we were with our pikes, towing a war cart behind us that was full of gunners, as in a field battle, or when we just went in with axes, like now.

The Mongols had broken and run away after our gunners had done their job on them, which made me figure that their engineers must be a lot smarter than the average run of the enemy-say, about up to the level of a flock of ducks.

There wasn't much for us to do, since the guys up front had already chopped up everything that looked like it might have been a part of a bridge, or a bit of a Mongol.

There were a lot of dead bodies lying around, hacked up and b.l.o.o.d.y and stinking worse than anything you could possibly imagine. It wasn't just the s.h.i.t that had been shot out of the guts of so many of them.

During training, we'd been told that Mongols never bathed, that they put their new clothes on the outside and then let those on the inside just rot away, but we hadn't believed it, not until we had to walk through all those dead bodies.

By this time everybody had gotten used to seeing dead people, but the stench of that beach got at least a dozen of the guys heaving their breakfast out, and that was a very bad thing to do when you were wearing one of our helmets, which covered your whole face. Think about it, if you really want to.

We had one guy whose visor hinge got jammed, and he darned near drowned before Zbigniew got the thing freed up.

There was a lot of gold on that beach. Every dead body seemed to have a big pouch full of the stuff. I didn't dare touch any of it, since doctrine was that you had to win the battle first before you started to loot. And even then you couldn't keep what you picked up, since all of the booty had to be brought together and counted before it could be fairly shared out.

Still and all, the temptation certainly was there. One of the men yielded to it, picked up a Mongol pouch, and got yelled at by Captain Targ. Then Lord Conrad said we might as well pick up a few pouches, just to get an idea of how much loot there actually was, and the captain gave the job to my platoon.

So I had about fifty pounds of gold and silver in my arms when all h.e.l.l burst loose over the top of the riverbank.

Chapter Four

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski WRITTEN JANUARY 20, 1249, CONCERNING FEBRUARY 21, 1241.

AT THAT point the river had a high bank, higher than the top of our boat, so the gunners and other people up there couldn't see over it to warn us about what was coming.

The other thing we had going against us was the fact that our helmets fastened to our breastplates and back armor with a rotary coupling that let you twist your head sideways but not up and down. It was a good system, most of the time, since a bash on the head wasn't likely to break your neck.

But in this instance, with the enemy suddenly above us, well, most of us didn't even know they were there until they shot us.

Actually, the Mongols did us a favor of sorts with that first volley, since it got our attention, and their arrows, like I said earlier, weren't usually all that deadly.

We soon found out that they had a spear with a long, thin point and sharp edges that was sheer murder.

Thrown at close range or carried at a run, that thing could punch right through our armor, and then right through the man who wore it, just about anywhere they put it. Once they had one of those spears in a man, they would jerk the spearsideways, and a little hole on the outside left a big, deep slash inside.

Had they just charged at us straight off, they could have killed most of us before we even knew there was a battle going on.