The Eastern Front(60)

From their shouts of surprise and anger, Lukasz Opalinski knew the Saxon cavalrymen hadn't expected to be fired on by volley guns right at the beginning of the battle. They must have poor intelligence. He'd been expecting the phenomenon, himself, and had warned his hussars to be ready for it. His friend Jozef Wojtowicz had given him a full and detailed report on the battle of Ahrensbök before he left for Saxony.

Still, he was a bit shaken by the effectiveness of those volleys. Wojtowicz had warned him, but Lukasz had not taken him seriously enough. Perhaps the problem was that Jozef had shown him images of the USE army's volley guns. Woodcuts, mostly, although one of them had been what Jozef called a "photograph." Looking at the images, Lukasz had immediately categorized the weapons as organ guns, which were sometimes used in sieges. Clumsy things, although you didn't want to be caught in front of one when it was firing.

But these volley guns were quite different. First of all, the barrels were rifled, not smoothbore. Lukasz had known that, but dismissed it as unimportant. You couldn't really aim such a weapon on a battlefield anyway, beyond pointing it in the general direction of the enemy, so what difference did it make if it was rifled?

What he hadn't considered was the added range the rifling would give the rounds—especially since they were these new conical so-called "Minié balls" rather than the round balls he was accustomed to. Lukasz had even seen one, since some of the Saxon infantrymen—far too few, unfortunately—had been equipped with the new rifles that John George had purchased. But he hadn't seen them fired, so he hadn't paid much attention to the stories of their range.

Today, he was learning the hard way that the accounts had not been exaggerations. The USE flying artillery fired their first volley when the Saxon cavalry and Polish hussars were about two hundred and fifty yards away. At that range, a musket volley would have been completely ineffective. Few of the rounds would have hit anything, and many of the ones that did would have lost too much velocity to do much damage.

But these rounds were quite effective. Three of his hussars were struck off their saddles and two more were reeling from wounds. Four other hussars were spilled when their horses were struck. Worse than the casualties was the effect of the damage on the charge itself. Inevitably, the downed and disoriented horses impeded the rest. Instead of picking up speed as it should have at that range, the charge was actually slowing down. By the time they were within two hundred yards of the foe, a cavalry horse should be moving at the pace of a fast canter—say, fifteen miles per hour, for heavily laden warhorses. At that speed, they could cross the intervening distance in less than half a minute. Which in turn meant that they'd have to face only one volley before getting in among the enemy with their lances and sabers.

Here . . . They were probably only moving ten miles per hour, and the enemy's rate of fire was astonishing. A second volley came before they'd travelled more than fifty yards. The third volley came when they were still almost one hundred and fifty yards away—and the combined effect of the deadly fire was to keep horses falling and stumbling and impeding the charge.

They still weren't moving any faster than twelve miles per hour. At that distance, they should have been approaching a full gallop—which, for horses like these, was around thirty miles per hour. They'd cross the last hundred yards in six or seven seconds—a speed that often panicked enemy infantry or artillery; and, even if they didn't panic, allowed them no time to fire more than one volley, at most.

Instead, they'd been hit by three powerful volleys. At least forty—no, probably fifty—of his hussars were now out of action, dead or wounded or spilled by falling horses. And they were still so far away and moving so slowly that . . .

Sure enough. Lukasz could see the volley guns being hitched up while infantry units moved up to cover their retreat. The infantrymen fired a volley as soon as the artillerymen were clear.

That volley was just as brutal as the preceding ones. The musket balls were lighter than those fired by the flying artillery, but they were also more accurate. As Josef had warned him, most of the USE army's infantry units had been armed with rifled muskets. Quite obviously, these were.

Out of the corners of his eyes, Opalinski could see that the Saxon cavalry was peeling away. They were reeling from the carnage.

His own men had been hammered just as badly. At a quick glance, he didn't think he had more than half of his unit still in action.

But that still left him a hundred men, and these were Polish hussars, not be-damned Saxon shirkers—and the enemy was finally within reach. He could see the nearest USE infantry officer not more than thirty yards away. A big fellow who'd made the mistake of leading his men a bit too far in the fore.