The Eastern Front(118)

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 Jönsson 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.