The Radiant Warrior

Chapter Nineteen

FROM THE DIARY OF PIOTR KULCZYNSKI

I had spent much of the winter in preparation to attend Sir Conrad's warrior school. I had trained one of my subordinates, Jozef Kulisiewicz, to take over my position for a year, taking him twice on my rounds of Sir Conrad's factories and inns, and saw to it that his replacement was well trained.

I had artfully observed all the exercises that Sir Conrad and his knights were doing, and diligently practiced them myself. And I had worked on Count Lambert very carefully, and eventually got him to appoint me to the school. This was not easy, for while my father was one of the count's peasants, I was not, being sworn to Sir Conrad. But I persisted with the count, and came up with many reasons why I should go. At last, I irritated him sufficiently.

"Dog's blood! If you were sworn to me, I'd have you whipped! Piotr, you are too damn smart for your own good!"

"Yes, my lord. But isn't that precisely what Sir Conrad asked for? Men who were too smart?"

"By God it was, and I'm going to send you there just to get you out of my mustache! I know what Sir Conrad has planned at that school, and I think you'll be dead in three days if you go!"

"Thank you, my lord."

"You can thank me after he kills you! Now get out of here and get out of town, too!"

My plan accomplished, I left quickly. For I thought it was absolutely necessary that I attend the warrior school. My position as chief accountant gave me an excellent income, pleasant working conditions, and considerable prestige, but it did not give me what I really wanted. It did not give me Krystyana.

She was intent on marrying a true belted knight, or not marrying at all. Although nothing had been said of it, I was sure that those who survived the warrior school would soon be knighted. What other purpose could the school have?

So thus it was that I was standing in line with a gross of the grossest peasants I'd ever seen. It seemed that they had been picked for ugliness rather than for any other reason. They were all huge and hairy and smelled bad. I began to think that I had made a big mistake, a serious error in my career development plan.

"Piotr, what the hell are you doing here?" Sir Conrad shouted.

"Count Lambert sent me here, my lord. He said that I was rude and insubordinate and that if I were sworn to him, he'd have me whipped."

"Count Lambert could have you hung, sworn to him or not! Who is taking over your job?"

"Jozef Kulisiewicz, my lord. He's quite competent."

"I'll bet he is! After this stunt, he just might keep your job! You conniving little runt! You planned this, didn't you? Well, you planned wrong! You wanted to come here? Okay! You'll stay here! You're not my squire any more, Piotr. You're just another grunt in this line!"

I was so shocked that I barely heard the things that he said to the others in the line, though he was loud enough to make a snake listen. My position gone? And I was no longer a squire? What had I done to myself?. Surely no one would knight this bunch of ruffians! I was ruined!

They gave me little time to bemoan my fate. We were marched off to the showers, for Sir Conrad said that we stank too badly for him to stand before us.

They had us strip naked and throw our clothes into a pile, to be burned, they said. Burning was probably the right thing to do with the rags that the others were wearing, but I had been spending much of my pay on nice clothing! My red hose and purple tunic were thrown into the pile of rags, along with my blue hat, my green cloak, and my beautiful Cracow shoes with the longest pointed toes in Silesia! I could only thank God that I hadn't worn my sword and armor, reasoning that none of the others would have such finery.

We were each given a small bag with our name on it for our valuables. We were told that these would be returned to us if we survived the year out, or sent to our families in the more likely event that we did not.

Four old women were waiting for us with sheep clippers, another of Sir Conrad's inventions.

We were each clipped of all hair, from head to foot and all in between, with the old women laughing at the small sizes of our privy members or occasionally pretending to be astounded at the size of others.

It was a vastly humiliating experience, and followed by the knights shouting at us to wash our bald heads and denuded bodies with the foulest smelling soap I've ever encountered.

We were each inspected for fleas before they let us out to air dry in the cold spring wind.

We were issued clothing from stacks of ready-made garments. There were even some that fit me tolerably well, but it was all of the baggy peasant cut that doesn't have to be well-fitted. The boots were sturdy, and of the cut of Sir Conrad's hiking boots, with blunt toes and no style at all.

The other grunts-for that is what they called us-were surprised at the quality of the clothing, but for myself, I thought it ugly. The cloth was sturdy linen, undyed and without any embroidery. The others liked the food as well, for it was like that normally served at Sir Conrad's installations, but it was no new thing for me.

The barracks were of blocks of artificial stone and we must needs sleep in bunks three decks tall, with four dozen men to the room, but all was remarkably clean and orderly.

We soon found out how it was kept that clean, for much of our time was spent in cleaning and polishing. That is to say, much of our time that was not spent doing other things, for they kept us inordinately busy. We were up every day before dawn, to wash in cold water and stand in neat lines before breakfast, to say mass and recite our oath at sunrise, always followed by a run that started at three miles but was eventually extended to twelve. Nor was this a simple run on flat land. It went up and down hills, over obstacles made of huge logs, over chasms hand over hand on ropes, and up and down cliffs. Many of the grunts were injured and no few killed in the process, for great fatigue and dangerous heights are a deadly combination. Whenever someone was hurt, we always got an impromptu first aid lesson, and all things stopped while we watched the victim being sewn back together again. We were constantly marching or running or jumping up and down and doing other exercises. After a week, we were issued weapons, first a pike, then a sword and dagger, and lastly a halberd. Fully a quarter of our day was spent working with these weapons, or the quarterstaff, or learning to fight without any weapons at all.

Another quarter of our day was spent in the classrooms, for it was decreed that all must learn to do arithmetic, and to be able to read and write. As I had already mastered these subjects, I was put to tutoring some of the others, though most had difficulty learning when they were so tired. In fact, more men were dismissed for mental reasons than for physical ones.

Some of the grunts actually went crazy under the strain of it. One man locked himself in a supply closet and when we finally got him out, he was babbling incoherently. He was naked and smeared with his own shit.

FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD SCHWARTZ

Getting the army going was the hardest thing I've ever done.

It wasn't the arms or armor although that was a lot of work. The Bessemer converter to make cast iron into steel took many thousands of man-hours, as did the rolling mill that made sheetmetal and the stamping line that pressed out helmets, breast plates, shoulder cops, and the other twenty-seven pieces it took to cover a man. And every piece had to be made in at least four different sizes, so the total number of dies required was huge.

We were making steel using the wootz process, so making good pike heads, halberds, swords, and daggers was straightforward, but still a lot of work.

We had decent black powder and making the swivel guns was not hard, once the production line for it was set up, but we hit a snag when it came to the primers. I wanted a breach-loading, bolt-action, clip-feeding gun with brass cartridges and lead bullets, but after two years of trying to come up with a dependable primer, I had to set the project on a back burner. There just wasn't time, not if we were going to get it into mass production in time to train the men to use them to fight the Mongols.

Yet I dreaded going to something like a flintlock. The rate of fire would be so slow that we would need twelve times the guns to do the same job. The advantages of breach-loading and premade cartridges were obvious. The problem was lighting the gunpowder.

I finally hit on the idea of putting a firecracker wick on the back of each cartridge and an alcohol burner in the base of each gun. A shield on the bolt covered the wick until the bolt was turned home, at which time the flame hit the wick, it sputtered for a few moments and then fired the cartridge. Not the best system in the world, but it worked.

During the Hussite wars in fifteenth-century Bohemia, war carts proved to be decisive in many battles. Our guns were fairly heavy, about six dozen pounds each, and the weight of the ammunition alone was more than a man could be expected to carry, not to mention the other arms and armor.

I came up with a big, four-wheeled cart, six yards long and two wide. The wheels were two yards high and mounted on castors such that the cart could be pulled either the long way, for transport, or sideways, for fighting. There was no possibility of getting enough horses to pull the thousand carts that we would need, so thirty-six men armed with pikes and halberds would have to do the job. Six guns and gunners in the cart could be pulled along with the pikers protecting the guns and the guns firing over the heads of the pikers.

One side of each cart had enough armor to stop an arrow, and the top of the cart could be slung six yards out to act as a yard and a half high shield for the men pulling it. It was armored, too.

If the men were well trained, and if we could get the Mongols to attack us, or if we could somehow surround them, they were dog meat. But there wasn't much we could do about their mobility. The typical Mongol had several horses and, in a race, they could easily beat us.

Communications can make up for speed, to a certain extent. No matter how fast your troops are, you must get a message to them before they can move. If we had radios, our effective speed would be doubled. I didn't have a radio yet, and wasn't sure I could do it, our materials' technology being so low, but I set up a crew to learn Morse code over short telegraph lines. If we could make radios, the operators would be ready.

There isn't much to making a telegraph. Electricity goes through a wire and a simple coil of wire makes an electromagnet which clicks or rings a bell. We had wiredrawing equipment and almost any two metals in ajar of vinegar makes a battery. But years ago, I'd tried to string a line between Three Walls and Okoitz and never did get it up. The price of copper was so high that seeing so much of it hanging on the trees was too much for people. Thieves stole the wire faster than we could string it up! We couldn't guard it all, and every time we caught a thief, three more sprung up to take his place. I finally had to give the project up and Sir Vladimir said he'd told me so.

But we could string wire around inside Three Walls, and we did so, mostly to train operators but also for internal communications.

A better line of defense was the Vistula River. We had steam engines running in the factories and paddle-wheel riverboats were well within our capabilities. A fleet of armed and armored riverboats could stop the Mongols dead, especially if the boats had radios.

The rub was that the invasion would happen on March seventh, at which time the river might or might not be frozen over. With the river frozen, the boats would be useless, so we did not dare put all our hopes on them.

But all this was the easy part, for me at least. It just meant nine years of long hours of hard work for me and a few thousand other men and women.

The hard part was training the army itself.

In thirteenth-century Poland, there were no trained, professional fighting men except for the knights, whose concepts of honor and fair play made them fairly useless, except in the polite sort of conflicts that they were used to fighting. By their lights, it was more important to fight nobly than to win, a nice rule for a playing field but not the thing to do when the Mongols were planning to murder every man, woman, child, and household pet in eastern Europe!

I had to train a modem army from absolute scratch. There were no old sergeants left over from the last war. Things had been fairly peaceful for years, despite the fact that the country was rapidly disintegrating because of duchies being divided up among the heirs of the previous duke. Such wars as had been fought were more like sporting events than serious combat. And there wouldn't have been sergeants, anyway. On the rare occasions when the peasants fought, they were given no training at all, and often no weapons except for such agricultural implements as they might own.

Once I knew that we would have the industrial ability to arm an army of fifty to one hundred thousand men, I had my liege lord, Count Lambert, send me a gross of misfits and troublemakers from his other knight's estates, since my experience in the service had been that the best sergeants were misfits at heart. Maybe I was wrong, but it seemed to me that most of them would not have done well in the civilian world. To function well, most of them seemed to need the surrounding structure that the military provides. Anyway, nobody minded giving me their problem children.

We put them through absolute hell. The program was designed to keep them on the very edge of physical exhaustion, near the ragged boundary of insanity. And a lot of them didn't make it.

I deliberately killed two dozen men in that first class, and I don't think that my soul will ever be truly clean again. But I had to have leaders that were absolutely tough and reliable and I didn't have twenty years to nurture and train them. If they weren't good enough, we could loose thousands of men in battle, and maybe the whole country besides.

But it hurt. It hurt like hell. And often, after a funeral service, I cried myself to sleep. Me, a supposedly mature man of thirty-six.

FROM THE DIARY OF PIOTR KULCZYNSKI

We were constantly under supervision, with never a moment to ourselves except on Sunday afternoons. Then, one could walk away from the barracks and spend a little time absolutely alone, and it was wonderful.

It was a month before I had the opportunity to speak privately to Sir Vladimir, for I found him sitting alone on a log in the woods.

"How are you doing, Piotr?" he said, as though we were back in Sir Conrad's great hall.

"Very good, sir!" I said, involuntarily bracing.

"Relax. Nobody can see us here."

I tried, but it was difficult to do so. For years, he had treated me like a younger brother, but for the last month he had been as brutal as the others.

"Thank you, Sir Vladimir." I sat down on the log next to him.

"You've surprised us, you know. None of us expected you to last a week, especially Sir Conrad."

"Indeed? But don't you see that I have to? If I fail here, I wouldn't have anywhere else to go. My position is gone and I am no longer a squire."

"Maybe, maybe not. Myself, I think it likely that if you went to Sir Conrad and asked for them back, you would get them. Sir Conrad was annoyed that you circumvented his wishes, but he is not an evil man. I think you need only apologize and admit your failure here."

"The apology is his, had I but a chance to give it. But I have not failed this school. Not yet, anyway."

"Well, if you can take it, you might as well stick with it. Eventually, all of Sir Conrad's men will be attending this school, so you might as well get it over with."

"Then why was Sir Conrad angry with me for wanting to attend it now?"

"Because this is not the regular course! This first class is intended to teach the teachers. The later classes will not be as difficult as this one. We are hoping that one-quarter of you will survive this training. We must have first-rate instructors to train the others. After this, at least half will make it through. Sir Conrad was annoyed at you wasting his time by going through early."

"That's some relief, anyway. When do you think we will be knighted?"

"Knighted? Who told you that? There are no plans to knight anybody! In fact, it is my private thought that Sir Conrad would eliminate knighthood if he thought he could get away with it! I know that the separation of nobility and commoners displeases him, and that it doesn't exist in his native land."

"Then all that I have done has been for nothing, Sir Vladimir. I'd hoped that if I could be knighted, then Krystyana would look differently on me."

"So that's what it was all about' I was curious what it was that made you disobey your lord's wishes. May I speak frankly? Piotr, you and Krystyana are two crazy people! She wouldn't accept you if you were a duke! She wants Sir Conrad, even though she knows that she'll never get him. And you keep chasing after her even though she kicks you in the teeth every chance she gets! There are plenty of pretty girls out there, and you'd have a good chance with any one of a hundred of them."

"Many girls, but only one Krystyana."

"Piotr, you are digging a hole for yourself, and if you insist that you be buried in it, there's nothing I can do. It's time we were getting back. You go ahead. I don't want the others to think that I have been doing you any special favors, even though I suppose I have, or at least I've tried to."

I often thought of dropping the school, but I could never bring myself to fail or to publicly admit failure. I stuck it out.

FROM THE DIARY OF CONRAD SCHWARTZ

There is more to an army than weapons and training. Even more important than these two is spirit, the elusive esprit de corps. The men must believe in themselves and in their organization, and they must believe it in a deeply emotional way, rather than in a coldly logical manner.

You see, war is an absolutely irrational phenomenon. There is not and never was any sane reason to risk your only life attacking someone for some possible material or emotional benefit. Even if one was absolutely immoral, the plain fact is that you have everything to lose and damn little to gain.

It only makes sense to fight when someone else is attacking you, and even then there is a large element of the irrational in it.

Any individual man in a battle line can improve his chances of survival by running away. If he runs and everyone else stands and fights, odds are that he will live, while a certain percentage of those that fight will die. Yet if everyone runs, that army will take far higher casualties than if everyone stands and fights. The vast majority of casualties endured by a defeated army happen after the battle, during the mop-up operation after the battle line has faded.

So as irrational as it sounds, on the average your odds of survival are better if you stand and fight, even though as an individual your odds are better if you run away.

It is irrational. It's crazy! And therefore a winning army must be a special kind of crazy. The people in it must be insane enough to be willing to die so that the army may win. That special kind of insanity is called spirit.

You build spirit in many strange and irrational ways. One is that you stage special ceremonies, and our "Sunrise Service" was our most important one.

I wanted an oath of allegiance that would have emotional impact and be understandable to young and uneducated people. I carefully studied all the oaths that I could remember, but most of them were either too legalistic, like the military swearing-in ceremony, or they really didn't say much, like the American pledge to the flag. By far the best of the lot was the Boy Scout pledge and the Scout law. I modified it slightly to suit our circumstances, but every day of a trooper's life started out with this service.

They woke at dawn to the sound of bugles and were out on the parade grounds before the sun peaked over the horizon. At the first sliver of sunlight, a very short mass was said, less than eight minutes and without a sermon, though it took work to get the priest to do this at first.

I had a small band, some brass and percussion, play Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man." Then we raised our right arms to the sun and recited:

"On my honor, I will do my best to do my duty to God and to the Army. I will obey the Warrior's code, and I will keep myself physically fit, mentally awake, and morally straight."

"The Warrior's code:"

"A Warrior is: Trustworthy, Loyal, and Reverent; Courteous, Kind, and Fatherly; Obedient, Cheerful, and Efficient; Brave, Clean, and Deadly."

This was followed by the orders of the day, where the men were told what they'd be doing for the rest of the day.

The whole ceremony took less than twelve minutes, but it was done every day of a warrior's life. Forever.

Other things were done to build spirit. You wear the same kind of clothing, so you all look the same and start to think that you all really are the same. You march together, walking in exactly the same way. You sing together, sounding the same way. And you do great and impossible things together. You run difficult obstacle courses and eventually you win battles.

But my army wasn't going to have a chance to win any battles, not until the Mongols arrived. This wouldn't be like a modem war that lasts for five years and gives you a chance to blood your troops before the final conflict. The war with the Mongols would be won in two months if it was going to be won at all.

I needed something else to give the troops that magic feeling of invincibility, and I had two ideas. One was that notion of fire-walking.

Various primitive tribes and the crazy people in California practice fire-walking, or at least walking on a hot bed of coals. If I could show them that they could now walk naked through fire, they would believe that they were unstoppable. And no one will run if he truly believes that he will win.

The other is a curious optical phenomenon, called the glory. If you are on a high place early on a clear morning, and the valley below is very foggy, if everything is right, when you look at your shadow on the fog below, you see around your head beams of light radiating outward. It only shows up around your head and no one else's, at least from your perspective. They, of course, see it only around their own heads. I read about this in Scientific American, but their explanation for it was unconvincing.

Yet one morning, when I was running the troops through the obstacle course, looking down to my left I saw this very same phenomenon. It was spooky, as though I was wearing some sort of halo!

If I could show the men that they wore halos, that they were individually blessed by God, they would be true believers, absolute fanatics, the kind of crazy people who win wars.

I changed the course of the morning run and made that spot off-limits, saying it was a holy place. Yet I went back there other mornings and three-quarters of the time I could see the same strange effect. I would definitely make it a part of the graduation ceremony!