The Baltic War(257)

The gunner gave the oncoming targets no more than a perfunctory glance, just to double-check that the gun's recoil shift had been corrected properly. The volley gun barrels were rifled, giving them much greater accuracy than smoothbore muskets. But the real advantage was the added range the rifling gave the bullets. With twenty-five barrels laid down in a row, angling slightly apart in a duck-foot design, there was no more point in "aiming" a volley gun than there was in aiming a smoothbore musket. Just point it in the direction of the enemy and close the hammer.



Which, he did. The twenty-five round magazine fired almost in unison with those of the other volley guns on the line. A trained crew could work the volley guns once every eight to ten seconds, where it took the crew of a four-pounder cannon much longer than that. Over time, that slight spread of skill would produce increasingly ragged fire, but this was only the second volley.



Twenty-five barrels to a gun, six guns to a battery, six batteries to a company—and on this field, today, Colonel Straley had three companies under his command. Within a space of one second, two thousand and seven hundred rounds were fired at an enemy now about one hundred and fifty yards away.



Bang.



Bang.



Two thousand, six hundred and fifty rounds, rather. Two gun crews had screwed up and fired a couple of seconds later. But they weren't any of the crews under Thorsten's command, so he didn't worry about it. And he was worrying a lot less about the oncoming enemy cavalry, too. They were starting to suffer heavy casualties already.





The enemy fired another volley, long before Jean-Baptiste expected. For the second time, the count of Guébriant was astonished.



Stunned, even—and quite literally. A round had struck his cuirass. Dead-on, a heavy three-ounce canister ball would have punched right through the armor and killed him. So would a musket ball weighing half as much, for that matter, if it hit straight on. A canister round could kill even with a glancing blow, with its greater weight. This bullet had struck a glancing blow, but the bullet wasn't any heavier than a musket ball.



Good for him at the moment, to be sure. He was a bit dazed and from the pain he knew he might have suffered a cracked rib. He'd certainly be badly bruised. But even through the shock and pain, Guébriant finally understood what he was facing, even though he still couldn't see the enemy clearly because of the gunsmoke. Those weren't artillery of any kind. They were organ guns!



But what sort of lunatic general would try to use organ guns against a cavalry charge? The weapons took as long to reload as cannons did. They weren't used that often, and then almost entirely in siege warfare for the purpose of suppressing enemy sharpshooters on the walls.



Another volley came, after they closed to seventy yards, and the count was struck again. A minor flesh wound on the back of his hand, but it was the right hand that held the sword. His weapon went flying.



That was three volleys in perhaps twenty seconds. Glancing from side to side, Guébriant realized they'd suffered casualties as bad as they would have taken against heavy artillery or massed infantry. It was incredible. He'd led his men into a trap.



Nothing for it now, however, but to press the charge through. Even with this horrendous enemy rate of fire, they were now within sixty yards. They wouldn't suffer more than one more volley.





That volley came when the French cavalry was not more than ten yards from the line of volley guns. Thorsten had been practically screaming at the gun crews, in his insistence that they stand their ground and keep firing. That wasn't easy, even with the huge clouds of gunsmoke obscuring the sight of the enemy. Unlike infantry units, the volley gun companies didn't have pikemen to fend off cavalry at the final moment. They'd be forced to fight with the ten-foot partisans they carried as hand weapons against men on horseback armed with wheel locks and sabers. And lances, some of them. It would be a slaughter, if it got that far.



But . . . it wouldn't. The gunsmoke had cleared enough, in patches here and there, for Thorsten to be able to see that the French cavalry charge was already collapsing even before that final volley was fired. There was still a solid group of perhaps two hundred men at the center—coming almost right at him, in fact—that was maintaining the charge. But the rest were not. The casualties they'd suffered from this head-on charge at ranked volley guns had simply broken their spirit. They were already peeling away, salving their wounded pride with a rather pointless caracole-style firing of their wheel locks and then racing to the rear. Very few volley gunners would be hit by pistol shots fired in such a manner.



Thorsten ignored them. There were still that two hundred or so thundering at his batteries. He'd never relinquished his own saber, and now he made sure he had it in a tight grip. Being one of the few men in the batteries on horseback, he'd have to meet cavalrymen directly and fight in their manner rather than his.