“Yup.” The grin came back. “Think of it as a promise that you’ll campaign to make it happen. Now, show me these winter outfits. I’m dying to see the things, after hearing the reports.”
David was awfully proud of them, in point of fact. He was something of a military history buff. He’d designed the outfits himself—well, allowing for a whole lot of input from actual tailors—based on what he remembered of the telogreika, the padded winter jacket that the Soviet army had used in World War II. That had been one of the great advantages the Russians had had over the Nazis.
Most of the outfits were gray, but he’d had about two thousand done in white for camouflage. The Hangman Regiment had taken almost half of them for their assault on the fortress at Königstein.
The jackets all came with matching padded trousers, and there were good winter boots and plenty of wool socks. The Third Division would be one of the few—maybe the only—large military unit in this day and age that would fight a winter campaign while properly equipped for the task.
What impressed Mike the most, though, was something David hadn’t even mentioned in his reports.
“You made sleighs for the volley guns?”
Bartley shook his head. “It’s better than that, actually. Uh, sir. These are more like detachable skis that you can add onto the regular gun carriages if you need to operate on snowfields. Here, I’ll show you how they work.”
Mike had half-forgotten than David Bartley had gotten started as a tycoon by helping to design down-time sewing machines based on up-time models. The young man was a good artificer as well as a whiz at finance.
“The town’s blacksmiths figured out most of it,” David admitted. “But it was my idea to start with.”
The design was downright cunning. The ski attachments didn’t weigh all that much and could be fixed to the carriages ahead of time. Once the rig was in place, it wouldn’t significantly impede the teams of horses which pulled the volley guns. But with a simple cranking mechanism, the skis could be lowered in less than two minutes—at which point the carriages became sleighs, for all practical purposes.
Mike scratched his jaw. “I wonder if anyone’s ever tried to tried to use cannons in winter using sleighs instead of regular carriages?”
“I know of at least one instance when it was done,” said David. “During the revolutionary war, Henry Knox hauled a bunch of cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston in the middle of winter using sleighs. I don’t think they kept them on the sleighs while they were firing them, though. They wouldn’t really need to, since they were using them against fixed British positions, not on a battlefield.”
“Regular field pieces might be too heavy to fire on a sleigh. Shouldn’t be a problem with volley guns, though.” Mike gave Bartley a smile. “We’ll find out, won’t we? In the meantime, see if you can mount a field piece on something like this.”
That’d keep the blacksmiths happy, at least.
Three days later, accompanied by the same platoon that had been waiting for him at the airfield, Mike left for the fortress at Königstein. He’d had to wait those three days because of a snowstorm that had passed through Brandenburg and Saxony and the southern fringes of which had touched northern Bohemia.
He traveled by horse-drawn sleigh. Mike’s horsemanship was perfectly good enough to have enabled him to ride a horse even in such heavy snow, but David had managed to cobble together the design for a carriage suitable for a light artillery piece and the general wanted to test it.
Not himself, of course. He didn’t weigh nearly enough to substitute for an artillery piece. Instead he rode on an accompanying sleigh that would serve an artillery company as the winter equivalent of a battery wagon.
Half of the experiment—the half that involved him directly—proved to be successful. Unfortunately, Bartley’s artillery sleigh turned out to suffer from some rather serious design flaws. The damn thing either wouldn’t stay on the tracks; the skis would dig in too deeply; or, finally, one of the skis broke altogether.
As Mike had pretty much expected, things were trickier than they looked. Murphy was alive and well, obviously.
He wasn’t disheartened, though. He hadn’t really thought the experiment would work to begin with. Episodes from American history notwithstanding, he’d been skeptical that a hastily-assembled sleigh would be up to hauling such a heavy load in such heavy snow through a mountain range. Even given the advantage of traveling alongside a river, there were just too many ways for things to go wrong.
It would be nice, certainly, to be able to field light artillery pieces in a winter battle. But what Mike was really counting on was all the rest of his equipment—starting with the fact that his soldiers wouldn’t be freezing their butts off the moment they broke camp. Once Banér pulled his troops out of their siege lines, on the other hand, they’d get into sorry shape very quickly, as cold as this winter was turning out to be.