03 - Call to Arms (14 page)

All along the line, the same drama was repeated. Swordsmen and spearmen
stabbed their weapons into the boars and their riders, the enemy rendered all
but helpless by the crush of their own bodies.

It was grim, bloody work, but Dieter did not flinch. Following the lead of
his comrades around him, he stabbed his sword backwards and forwards, working
the blade with mechanical monotony, attacking any target that presented itself.
It was hard to keep track of time, but it seemed to him that within minutes the
ground beneath his feet was sodden with the enemy’s blood.

As further minutes passed, he became acutely aware of the hot, stifling
conditions. Caught in the press of bodies, face-to-face with the enemy at the
coal face of battle, there was no relief from the butcher’s work of killing.
Sweat poured from his body, his muscles ached from the constant effort.

Distantly, he could still hear the sound of music; the lilt and rhythm of
fife and drum as the musicians of various regiments continued to offer
encouragement to their comrades. Louder still were the other noises of battle.
He heard the roars of boars and their riders, screams of pain, the cries of
dying men. He heard the clash of steel against steel, the crunch of sinew and
bone as they struck against the shield face, the wet ripping sound a blade makes
as it saws through flesh.

Suddenly, just as Dieter had begun to wonder how much longer he could bear
it, the pressure around him lessened. Sooner than he would have thought
possible, the enemy withdrew. The surviving boar riders turned tail and ran,
leaving their dead and wounded comrades behind them, lying in the dirt.

“Tenth rank, mercy duty!” Sergeant Bohlen shouted once he was satisfied the
enemy withdrawal was genuine and not a trick. “First rank, retire! Get the
wounded men back to the rear to see the surgeons. The rest of you, step
forward!”

Confused by the staccato series of orders, for a moment Dieter stared dumbly
around him, unsure what was expected of him. At the same time, he experienced a
rush of relief at having survived his first battle.

“I wouldn’t stand there taking in the air for too long,” Hoist said. The big
man had seen out the fighting mostly intact, as had Gerhardt and Rieger. He
favoured Dieter with a broad, personable smile. “Come on, didn’t you hear the
sergeant? We are ordered to retire.”

“I…” Abruptly, Dieter felt himself acutely aware of his ignorance. Even with
all the things Helmut Schau had taught him, it was becoming plain there were
gaps in his knowledge. “I heard the command. But I wasn’t sure what it means.”

“It means we are to pull back to the rear of the regiment,” Gerhardt said,
chivvying him along. “The men of the second rank will take our place, while the
third rank takes their place, and so on. We change ranks this way at regular
intervals throughout battle. It allows the men who have done the fighting to
take a rest, replenishing themselves before their next turn in the front rank.”

“No, I understood
that,”
Dieter said. He glanced back toward the
killing ground in front of the Scarlets’ position, a place littered with enemy
corpses. “But I couldn’t see why we are doing it. I mean, shouldn’t we be
pursuing the orcs? The battle’s over, isn’t it? The orcs have fled. We’ve won.”

“Won?” Hoist rolled his eyes, before looking towards Rieger. “Do you hear
that? Sigmar protect us from war virgins and babes-in-arms. He thinks we’ve
won
.”

“Hardly that, Dieter,” Gerhardt said, while Rieger looked at him sadly.
“Granted, the orcs have withdrawn for now. But it’s hardly the end of the
battle.”

He gazed around him, at the battlefield and their own lines, and his eyes
hardened.

“Believe me, there’s more killing to be done in these fields before the day
is done.”

“Stand fast the 3rd! Stand fast for Hochland! Stand fast the Scarlets!”

By the time midday came and the sun was high overhead, it seemed to Dieter he
had heard those words a thousand times. He was exhausted beyond any tiredness he
had ever known. Like the men around him, his face and clothes were daubed with
splattered gore courtesy of the countless enemy they had killed already. His
hand was sore from holding his sword. His shoulders ached from bracing his
shield. His throat was dry. He wanted nothing more than to sleep.

And, still, the orcs kept coming.

Since the first charge by the enemy earlier in the morning, the fighting had
continued on for what seemed like hours. With that initial attack, the shape of
the battle had been revealed. In the hours since, the orcs had not varied in
their strategy at all. They attacked in wave after wave, sending their boar
riders to repeatedly assault the same section of the western perimeter.

For the Scarlets and the other infantry units guarding that region, it had
swiftly become a war of attrition. No matter how many times the orcs charged to
battle, the Hochlanders held the line—though only at tremendous cost.

Dieter had barely had time to become acquainted with many of his comrades,
but already he had seen several of them die. Breitmeyer, one of the men of his
file, had been killed at an early stage of the battle, gored by a boar tusk when
a section of the shield wall had briefly given way during an enemy charge.
Impaled on the tusk, Breitmeyer had been thrown in the air when the boar tossed
its head up. He had landed disembowelled, dying in the stink of his own shit and
blood as his intestines unspooled from his belly like a tangled coil of rope
suddenly cut in two.

Rosen, another man from the file, had died later. By then, Dieter had lost
count of how many times the orcs had attacked. Rosen, it seemed to him, had
suffered an unlucky death. There was no glamour to it, no glory. Moved by fury
at his riders’ inability to break the Hochlanders’ line, one of the orc
chieftains had thrown his horned helmet into the human ranks in a gesture of
pique. The helmet had hit the shield rim of the man in front of Rosen and
tumbled end over end through the air, the sharp point of one of its horns
transfixing the unlucky Rosen through the eye as he looked up to see where the
helmet would land. Appalled, Rosen’s comrades had rushed him to the surgeons,
but there was nothing to be done. Rosen had suffered a mortal wound and, with
it, the sad ignominy of a ridiculous death.

Alongside Breitmeyer and Rosen, at least another dozen or more Scarlets had
died, not counting the men who had been wounded too badly to continue and had
been evacuated for treatment in the surgeon’s tents at the centre of the
encampment. Even at that cost, Dieter realised the regiment had been lucky. They
had held the line, as had the other units guarding the perimeter, meaning they
had suffered their losses in piecemeal fashion. If ever the line broke, the
effects would be catastrophic: the current trickle of casualties might well
become a torrent.

“Stand down!” Sergeant Bohlen’s voice called out as the latest orc attack
faded. Glowering after the enemy as they turned their mounts and retreated once
more to the safety of the tree line, Bohlen barked out a familiar series of
commands.

“First rank, retire! Get any wounded men back to the surgeons! The rest of
you step forward! Gerhardt, you and your men are on mercy duty. Look lively, the
lot of you! You needn’t worry you’ll have time to be bored. The orcs will be
back soon enough!”

Following the sergeant’s orders, the men of the regiment rearranged
themselves accordingly. The men who had borne the brunt of the orcs’ latest
assault pulled back to the rear of the regiment, taking their wounded comrades
with them. From there they would be allowed to rest briefly in relative safety,
rebuilding their strength before taking up their new position as the rear rank
of the regiment. In the meantime, the men of the second rank had taken their
place, while the third rank stepped up, ready to move forward in turn and face
the enemy when it came their time to do so. War as an infantryman, Dieter was
learning, combined the varied aspects of a procession and a slaughterhouse.

“And so it goes on,” Hoist chuckled darkly. “You’d think the damned
greenskins would’ve learned their lesson by now. Sigmar knows, we must have
killed ten of them for every man we’ve lost. But that’s the way with orcs. They
never seem to know when they are beaten.”

“I’m not so sure,” Rieger warned him. “It could be the orcs know something
that we don’t. Either way, it doesn’t do to get too cocky.”

“You are a cheery soul as ever, I see,” Hoist rolled his eyes in sarcasm.
“I’m glad to see all this fighting hasn’t dented your eternal optimism.” He
glanced toward Dieter. “You have to be wary of this one, young blood. Rieger has
a tendency to always look on the dark side of everything. If you hand him a
refreshing cup of spring water, he’s bound to ask you how many men have pissed
in it upstream before you got there. He’s the kind of man who can never see the
silver lining for the black cloud around it.”

“It is a matter of perception,” Rieger replied. “I see it differently. In my
opinion, I am a realist and you are an oaf.”

Dieter had not known the two men long, but he suspected Hoist and Rieger’s
mock quarrel was as much a method of distracting their minds from the task at
hand rather than any real disagreement. In accordance with Sergeant Bohlen’s
orders, they had followed Gerhardt and the other men of their file as they
advanced out into the no-man’s-land in front of the Scarlets’ shield wall. It
was now their turn to perform an unpleasant task in the short period of grace
before the greenskins attacked again.

They called it “mercy duty”. Having refused to hide anything of the grim
nature of the soldier’s life from Dieter when he was growing up, Helmut Schau
had described the procedure to him on several occasions.

“When you put an enemy to flight, he doesn’t usually have time to go
collecting up his wounded—even if he has a mind to,” Helmut had told him.
“Most of them get left on the battlefield. Now, when you’re fighting civilised
men, it’s not too much of a problem. You leave those with mortal wounds to die,
and the rest become your prisoners. But, when you’re fighting orcs, or beastmen,
or marauders, matters are different. Wounded or not, they’ll cut your throat
given the chance, and neither side takes prisoners. So you finish them. In the
lull between attacks, you send out men on mercy duty. They don’t mess around
trying to sort the wounded from the dead. They just take a weapon and stick each
body in the head or heart, to make sure the job’s done right.”

Following the example of the other men around him, Dieter performed his
allotted task. The area immediately in front of the Scarlets’ position was
littered with the bodies of orcs and boars. Here and there, a fallen orc still
had enough life to pose an obvious threat. Roaring when it sensed the soldiers’
presence, the creature tried to raise itself to attack, only to be chopped down
by Dieter and his comrades.

Otherwise, the work was easy. Dieter might have expected it to be more
harrowing, but the long drawn-out struggle of the battle had begun to inure him
to slaughter. He had been killing orcs all day. The fact he was now ordered to
turn his attention to slaying those too wounded or helpless to presently harm
him did not seem to make much difference. They were orcs. It was a good enough
reason to kill them.

Dieter was wiping sticky gore from his sword and about to advance on the next
orc body, when he heard a warning cry behind him.

“Back to the lines!” It was Gerhardt, shouting out a warning. “Get back to
our lines and make it fast. The orcs are coming.”

Having regrouped their forces, the orcs appeared at the tree line as they
made preparations for another charge. Even as he hurried back to safety with his
comrades behind the Scarlets’ shield wall, Dieter noticed a difference in the
nature of their enemy.

This time, in place of boar riders, the orcs massing at the tree line were
all on foot. They seemed larger than the orcs Dieter had seen before. They were
taller, more broadly built, their bodies pitted with scars while their green
skin was darker in hue.

“And now the battle really begins,” Gerhardt said. Seeing Dieter look at him
in confusion, he explained. “Those orcs you can see over there are the
greenskins’ veterans. It’s said that orcs are like snakes or lizards: they never
stop growing. As they grow older, they get bigger, stronger,
tougher.
The
orc warlord must have decided his boar riders were never going to break our
line. So, now he’s sending his best troops against us.”

He smiled.

“You needn’t look so worried, Dieter Lanz. This is good news.”

“Good news?” Dieter looked doubtfully toward the gathering mass of the enemy.
“Are you sure of that?”

“Very sure,” Gerhardt nodded. “It means we are winning the battle. Now, all
we have to do is kill the orc veterans and it will all be over.”

Out by the tree line, the enemy preparations were complete. A particularly
large and battle-scarred orc pushed his way to the head of his fellows and
bellowed a guttural commandment. The orcs broke into a run and charged towards
the Hochlander line.

It seemed remarkable to Dieter, but there seemed to be a greater impact from
the charge of the orc veterans on foot than there had been from the orc cavalry
riding boars. Dieter and the other men of his file were stationed six ranks
back, but even in their withdrawn position he felt the shiver that ran through
the shield wall as the orcs charged into it.

Within seconds, Dieter found himself face-to-face with the enemy. The
Scarlets’ front rank buckled, unable to bear the strain of the veterans’ charge.
Unable to resist it any further, the second and third ranks quickly followed
suit. Where once there had been disciplined, implacable ranks of human soldiers
facing a brutish enemy, the situation quickly degenerated into an open melee.
Equally swiftly, the Scarlets’ small corner of the battlefield dissolved into a
confused disorder in which any pretension to military formation was lost. In
place of order, there was barbarism. Orcs and men mingled and killed each other
with abandon.