1635: The Eastern Front

Chapter 37

The first hussar charge was driven back with a horrible slaughter. This was the first time Stanislaw Koniecpolski had faced the new rifled muskets massed on a battlefield, and he'd underestimated their effectiveness. They could be reloaded as quickly as smoothbore muskets but had two or even three times the effective range. He understood now why the Swedes had such a seemingly-perilous dearth of pikemen. They had only one pike for every two muskets, where the usual ratio was one-to-one or even two-to-one in favor of the long spears.

But those slender ranks of pikemen were enough, given the horrific rate of fire being maintained by the riflemen they were protecting.

Koniecpolski almost lost the battle, right then and there. He surely would have, had he followed his natural urge to hurl more hussars at the enemy. He'd won battles before with that simple tactic, and more than one of them. Hussars were terrifying in a full charge, on their immense horses and with the wings expanding their apparent size and their huge lances. They were like something out of legend. Mounted knights of fable, with the ferocity of ancient warriors.

But not this battle. The Swedes stood their ground and gunned down the Polish cavalry. Shot them and shot and shot them. Not more than twenty or thirty even managed to reach the enemy lines, and they were either killed or driven off by the pikes soon enough.

The grand hetman couldn't afford such casualties. Not even hussars could withstand losses like these, if they kept up.

"Call them back!" he bellowed to his aides. As they raced off to carry out his orders, Koniecpolski turned to the commander of his Cossack units, Severyn Skoropadsky.

"I need you to relieve the pressure, Ataman. Make no frontal attacks, you understand. Just harass them and keep them off balance for…"

He paused to gauge the sky. "Perhaps half an hour. Or a bit longer."

Skoropadsky had a little smile on his face, with perhaps a trace of derision. As if Cossacks were dumb enough to imitate blockhead Polish hussars! Cossacks were raiders of the steppes. Like Tatars and the Mongols before them, their style of warfare was fluid. They mostly used firearms now instead of bows, but their tactics were still basically those of mounted archers.

But if there was any derision in that smile, it was only a trace and more the product of Cossack habit than any disrespect for Koniecpolski himself. The grand hetman of Poland and Lithuania was well-regarded by the Commonwealth's registered Cossacks. Koniecpolski had played a major role in the Polish campaign to crush the Cossack rebellion in 1630 led by Taras Fedorovych. No Cossack doubted that Koniecpolski would have completely crushed the rebels had that been what he saw as his duty. But during the negotiations that finally produced a treaty in August, Koniecpolski had opposed harsh reprisals against the Cossack rebels. He'd thought that the long-standing tensions between Poland-Lithuania and the Cossack hosts would never end until the Commonwealth changed its policies toward the Cossacks.

So, whenever he went on campaign, Koniecpolski had no trouble gaining the adherence of several thousand registered Cossacks-no small accomplishment, given that there were not all that many to begin with. Many of them were no doubt unregistered, of course. In time of war, the atamans would usually look the other way if their ranks were partially filled with Cossacks from the various independent hosts who had no legal standing in the Commonwealth.

So would Stanislaw Koniecpolski. Whatever their faults, Cossacks were fighters.

Whenever a charge was broken as badly as this one had been, there was always the great danger that the retreating cavalrymen would trigger panic in the whole army. The repulse of a charge would then become the rout of an army.

Koniecpolski himself could play the most important part in stifling that danger. He was already riding toward the returning hussars, to steady them with words of assurance and his simple presence. But it would help a great deal if the army could see that the enemy was being engaged by other forces. In truth, the Cossacks couldn't do more than tear at the edges of the Swedish forces. But that would be enough to keep Gustav Adolf from launching any charge of his own. All Koniecpolski needed was enough time for the rain to begin again.

Cavalrymen didn't like to fight in a storm, even less than infantrymen did. The horses were harder to handle, and for good reason. Many of them would inevitably stumble, charging through rain and mud, and a horse fall could kill or cripple a man very easily.

Still, whether they liked it or not, hussars would have the advantage in a heavy rain. Their somewhat archaic style of war would serve them in good stead then.

A musket is hard to reload in a downpour, leaving the soldier with no better weapon than a bayonet-against a sixteen-foot lance that needed no reloading. And when that lance was lost as lances usually were in a battle, the infantryman would then have to face the hussar's saber. A man on foot armed with what amounted to a short clumsy spear, against a man wielding a long saber from atop a horse fourteen to sixteen hands tall.

It would be a bloody, muddy, mess of a battle. But Koniecpolski thought he could win it. No, Koniecpolski was determined to win it. This was the third time Gustav Adolf had invaded Poland. Enough was enough.

Given the pace Mike Stearns was demanding, the march had been exhausting already. Then the rain started coming down.

"Well, fuck a duck," said Colonel Jeff Higgins. Wishing, before long, that he was a duck himself.

At the front of the column, Mike and his aides had called another halt. They had no choice, really, since the division was getting spread out too thinly again. There was only one passable road in this area and you could only safely march three men abreast. That meant the Third Division stretched for more than two miles between its head and its tail. If you didn't make periodic stops, that stretch got even worse. The division was like a giant caterpillar moving across the Polish landscape.

A wet caterpillar-and from the looks of the sky, it was going to get wetter before the day was over.

"How far, do you think?" he asked his aides.

Duerr shrugged. "In miles? Somewhere between two and four. Probably around three. In hours? As long as it may take."

Long made a face. "That's about the truth of it, sir. In decent weather, even on a road like this, we could make it in an hour or two hours. Be wiser to take the two, though."

Leebrick nodded. "There's no point coming to a battle so quickly that you're in no shape to fight." He pointed with his thumb to the army stretched out behind them. You couldn't see the end of it from here, and probably couldn't have even in good weather. "You show up at a battle strung out like this, cavalry will eat you alive. Hussars won't even bother to salt you first."

Mike listened for the sound of cannon fire. The battle must have started by now. If they were only two to four miles away from the battle, you'd expect to hear the guns.

He couldn't anything at all. But with this sort of heavy rainfall, he had no idea how much the noise of a battlefield would get suppressed.

Five minutes later, the march resumed.

Anders Jonsson was having no trouble hearing the guns. But he wasn't paying much attention to them, because it wasn't cannon fire he was worried about at the moment. He squinted through the rain, shielding his eyes with a hand. The helmet he was wearing was designed to shed bullets and sword blades, not raindrops.

You could barely see the enemy any longer, the downpour was so thick. Surely the Poles wouldn't try-

The huge shape of a winged hussar came into sight, followed by dozens more-hundreds on either side were now visible-no, that must be at least two or three thousand-

Miserable be-damned Poles. Fighting hussars was like fighting armed and armored lunatics.

For a moment, Jonsson felt a fierce yearning for some of his own lunatic ancestors. A field full of berserks charging the other way would be nice, right about now. Swinging great swords, wearing nothing but bearskins, biting their own shields in a fury.

Not much different from hussars, really, except for the wings and not being quite as dumb.

"Again!" Koniecpolski roared. "No mercy on the Swedes!"

Three times he'd sent the hussars against the front ranks of Gustav Adolf's army since the rain began. Three times they'd been driven back. But each time, they returned with renewed fury rather than despair. The hussars were suffering heavy casualties, but they could sense their enemy weakening.

Meanwhile, Koniecpolski kept the Cossacks in the fight. He'd never let them rest once since he first launched them at the enemy's flanks. They couldn't get around those flanks, of course, because the Swedes were backed up against the lake. But they could keep Gustav Adolf pinned where he was.

The Swedish king was completely on the defensive now. He was outnumbered, unable to maneuver, and had lost all of his advantages. The superb rate of fire of his artillery had vanished. There was no way to reload a cannon quickly in a downpour. The same for reloading a musket. Rifled or smoothbore, it mattered not. The rain equalized everything. The men handling breechloaders in the Swedish army could still maintain a fairly decent rate of fire, but there weren't that many of them. And as for the accuracy of the rifles, what did it matter if you could hit an enemy soldier at three hundred yards? You can't shoot something you can't see. Between the rain and the gunsmoke, this battlefield was almost as obscured as it would have been in a fog.

A gust of wind cleared aside the gunsmoke, allowing Gustav Adolf to see most of the field for the first time in ten minutes.

He felt a little shock of horror. A gap had opened up between the Vastergotlanders and the Green Brigade. It wasn't a huge gap, but hussars wouldn't need much to start rolling up the lines.

Outnumbered as he was, he hadn't kept much of a reserve, and he'd already used up what he had. He'd sent Colonel Hepburn and his men to shore up his right very early in the battle. What he'd had left was just the Orange regiment. Ten minutes ago, he'd sent them to bolster Winkel. They couldn't be called back in time.

Whatever was to be done, it had to be done now. The gap had been created by the Green Brigade, which had bunched itself up from the confusion of the battle and the never-to-be-sufficiently cursed rain. Their ranks needed to be spread out again.

He couldn't spot the brigade's commander. He might have been killed already.

The Swedish king spurred his horse and charged forward. In five minutes, he could salvage the situation.

Anders Jonsson did mutter profanities out loud this time as he raced after Gustav Adolf. No reasons not to, now that the king couldn't possibly hear him. Not with the rain and the gunfire and, most of all, the blood rushing through Gustav Adolf's own ears as happened to idiot berserkers.

The Scots came behind him, mouthing their own profanities. Some of which were no doubt Celtic, which was a bit absurd given that the ancestors of those men had once charged into battle stark naked and painted blue.