The Tide of Victory (37 page)

The opposite bank ranged in height from eight to twelve feet. Not much of a climb, perhaps—except for a man laden with armor and weapons, being driven in a packed crowd of confused and frightened soldiers. Not many of the Malwa even attempted to make that climb, and most of them were swept off the bank by their fellows pouring past in a rout. And for the few who made it, the ground beyond proved no refuge in any event. Abbu and his Arabs had crossed the riverbed and taken up positions on the opposite bank half an hour earlier. Their lances and sabers were just as eager as those of the cataphracts.

"It's working," said Maurice. "Damned if it's not."

Belisarius nodded. His tactics for this battle were proving themselves in action. Sittas and the main body of cataphracts had caught the Malwa infantry spread out, in the open. And the forces were evenly matched—twelve thousand against twelve thousand. The heavily armed and armored cavalry might be "obsolete" in this new age of gunpowder weapons, but obsolescence does not happen overnight.

A cataphract charge struck like a mailed fist. Well-organized and prepared troops could withstand such a charge, even bloody and break it, with pikemen shielding musketeers and volleys coming like clockwork thunder. But an army caught off-guard, driven off balance and never allowed to regain it, was like grain in a thresher.

Routed soldiers, like water, will follow the path of least resistance. Especially with Sittas and his cataphracts pouring into the riverbed themselves and driving the Malwa before them. With Cyril and his men guarding the shallow bank and Abbu guarding the other, almost the entire Malwa army was being herded toward the guns. Penned into a perfect killing ground.

The rise where Gregory had stationed the field guns had a clear line of fire into the river bed, and at enough of an angle to enfilade the coming troops. There remained only to place the "stopper" in the bottle.

"Now, I think," said Maurice.

Belisarius nodded. The chiliarch made a motion and the cornicenes began blowing. The Thracian bucellarii, awaiting the signal, trotted across the riverbed some two hundred yards down and took up positions. As the lead elements of the Malwa spotted them, they began slowing their pell-mell race. Several of them stopped entirely. Behind them, the Malwa soldiers started piling up in a muddle. They formed a perfect target for cannon fire, not more than four hundred yards away—almost too close, for round shot.

Belisarius leaned toward Gregory, who was sitting a horse to his left. "You're loaded with round shot, or canister?"

"Round shot," came the immediate and confident reply. "On that ground—most of the near bank is shale and loose rock—the ricochets will work as well as canister. And I've got more round shot than anything else."

Belisarius wasn't quite sure Gregory was right, but he wasn't about to second-guess him and order the guns reloaded. In truth, the artillery commander was more experienced at this than he was, at least in training and theory. This would be the first time ever in the Malwa war that either side used field guns as the major element in a battle. And since the range was at the outer limits of canister effectiveness, anyway . . .

"Go ahead, then. Fire whenever you're—"

"
Fire!
" bellowed Gregory, waving his arm. The cornicenes, waiting for the cue, began blowing the call. But the sound of the horns was almost instantly drowned under the roar of the guns. Gregory's entire battery—thirty-six three-pounders—had fired at once.

That volley . . . did much less than Belisarius expected. True, a number of Malwa soldiers went down—ripped in half, often enough. But instead of cutting entire swaths, the volley had simply punched narrow holes in the packed mass of soldiers.

He rose up in his stirrups, now tense. His whole battle plan
depended
on those field guns. And he didn't want to be forced to use the mitrailleuse and the mortars this early in the campaign. He turned to Gregory, about to order a switch to canister.

But Gregory was no longer there. The artillery commander had sent his horse trotting behind the guns. Gregory was up in his own stirrups, bellowing like a bull.

"Down, you sorry bastards! Lower the elevation! I want grazing shots, damn you!"

The artillerymen were working feverishly. In each gun crew, two men were levering up the barrels while the gun captain sighted by eye. On his command, a fourth man slid the quoin further up between the barrel and the transom, lowering the elevation of the gun and shortening the trajectory of the fire. That done, they raced to reload the weapons. Again, with the cast iron balls of simple round shot.

Belisarius hesitated, then lowered himself down to his saddle. He still wasn't sure Gregory was right, but . . .

Good officers need the confidence of their superiors. Best way for a general to ruin an army is to meddle. 
 

While the guns were reloading, the Greek cataphracts who were now massing on the southwestern slope began firing their own volleys of arrows into the packed mass of Malwa troops in the riverbed. As Belisarius had insisted—he wanted to keep his own casualties to a minimum—Sittas and Cyril were keeping the armored horse archers at a distance. But, even across two hundred yards, cataphract arrows struck with enough force to punch through the light armor worn by Malwa infantrymen.

Belisarius could see a knot of Malwa begin to form up and dress their ranks. Somewhere in that shrieking and struggling pile of soldiers, apparently, some officers were still functioning and maintaining order. Good ones, too, from the evidence—within the few minutes it took for the Roman guns to reload, they managed to put together a semblance of a mass of pikemen, flanked by musketeers. Within a minute or so, Belisarius estimated, they would begin a charge.

He glanced at his own artillerymen. They were getting ready to fire again, waiting for Gregory to give the order. Belisarius moved his eyes back to the enemy. He wanted to study the effect of this next volley. "Grazing shots," Gregory had demanded. Belisarius understood what he meant, but he was uncertain how effective they'd be.

"
Fire!
" The cannons belched smoke and fury. Then—

"
Sweet Mary,
" whispered Belisarius.

Gregory got his wish. Almost all of the cannonballs struck the ground anywhere from twenty to fifty yards in front of the Malwa soldiery. Three-pound cast-iron balls came screaming in at a low trajectory, hit the ground, and caromed back up into the enemy at knee to shoulder level. Where the first volley had plunged into the middle and rear of the Malwa soldiery, killing and maiming a relative few, this volley cut into them from front to back.

Far worse than the balls themselves, however, was the effect of the ricochets. The ground which those cannonballs struck was loose rock and shale. The impact sent stones and pieces of stone flying everywhere. For all practical purposes, solid shot had struck with the impact and effect of explosive shells. For each Malwa torn by the balls, four or five others were shredded by stones.

Most of those ricochet wounds, of course, were not as severe as those caused by the cannonballs themselves. But they were severe enough to kill many soldiers outright, cripple as many more, and wound almost anyone not sheltered from the blow.

That single volley also put paid to the charge the Malwa were trying to organize. Whether by accident or design, the worst effects of the cannon fire were felt by the semi-organized men in the middle.

The riverbed was a shrieking, blood-soaked little valley now. The cataphracts continued their own missile fire while the guns reloaded again.

"Fire!"

Another round of perfect grazing shots. Belisarius was beginning to sicken a little. Through his telescope, he could see Malwa soldiers trying to stand up, slip and slide on bloody intestines and every other form of shredded human tissue, fall, stagger to their feet again . . .

He lowered the telescope and waved at Sittas. But then, seeing that the big Greek general was preoccupied with keeping his men from moving too close and therefore hadn't seen his wave, Belisarius turned in his saddle and shouted at the cornicenes. For a moment, the buglers just stared at him.

Cease fire
was the last order they had been expecting to blow. But, seeing Belisarius' glare, they obeyed with alacrity.

Startled, Gregory and his artillerymen lifted their heads. Belisarius swore under his breath.

"Not you, Gregory! You keep firing! I want the
cataphracts
to hold their fire!"

Gregory nodded and went back to his work. Sittas, meanwhile, started trotting—then cantering—his horse toward Belisarius. Seeing him come, Belisarius didn't know whether to scowl or smile. He had no doubt at all that Sittas was going to protest the order.

But, to his surprise, when Sittas pulled up his horse the big man was smiling broadly.

"I was going to chew your head off—respectfully, of course—until I figured it out." He hefted himself up in the stirrups and studied the Malwa. Another volley of cannon fire ripped them again.

"You've got no intention of finishing them off, do you?" The question was obviously rhetorical. "Which means we wouldn't be able to recover our arrows. No small problem, with our light supply train, if we use up too many this early in the campaign."

It had been a long time since Belisarius had actually been on campaign with his barrel-chested friend. Sittas looked so much like a boar—and acted the part, often enough—that Belisarius had half-forgotten how intelligent the man was underneath that brawler's appearance.

"No, I'm not. At close quarters, we'll suffer casualties, no matter how badly they're battered. There's no purpose to that, not with almost the whole campaign still ahead of us." For a moment, he studied the enemy. "That army's finished, Sittas. By the end of the day, what's left of that mass of men will be of no military value to the Malwa for weeks. Or months. That's good enough."

Sittas nodded. "Pity not to finish 'em off. But, you're right. Cripple 'em and be done with it. We've got other fish to fry and"—he glanced up at the sun—"at this rate we can still manage to make another few miles before making camp."

He gave the bleeding Malwa his own scrutiny. Then, with a grimace: "No way we want to camp anywhere near this place. Be like sleeping next to an abattoir."

For the next half an hour, Belisarius forced himself to watch the butchery. Eight more volleys were fired in that time. That rate of fire could not be maintained indefinitely, since firing such cannons more than ten shots per hour over an extended period ran the risk of having them become deformed or even burst from overheating. But against such a compact and massed target, eight volleys was enough. More than enough.

For Belisarius, too, this was the first time he had been able to see with his own eyes the incredible effectiveness of field artillery under the right conditions. He had planned for it—he wouldn't have made the gamble this whole campaign represented without that presumption—but, still . . .

Gustavus Adolphus' guns broke the imperialists at Breitenfeld, said Aide softly. And those men in that riverbed are neither as tough nor as well led as Tilly's were. 

Belisarius nodded. Then sighed. But said nothing.

I know. There are times you wish you could have been a blacksmith. 
 

Belisarius nodded; sighed; said nothing.

By the end of that half-hour, Belisarius decided to break off the battle. There was no point in further butchery, and the Malwa soldiers were finally beginning to escape from the trap in any event. By now, corpses had piled so high in the riverbed that men were able to clamber over them and find refuge on the steep, opposite bank. Abbu and his Arabs were no longer there to drive them back. Belisarius had pulled them back, fearing that some of the light cavalry might be accidentally hit by misaimed Roman cannons—as he and Agathius' cataphracts had been at the battle of Anatha, by Maurice's rocket fire.

Most of the killing was done by the big guns, but not all of it. Twice, early on, bold and energetic Malwa officers succeeded in organizing sallies. One sally charged down the riverbed toward the Thracian bucellarii, the other upstream against Sittas' Greeks. Both were driven back easily, with relatively few casualties for the armored horsemen.

Thereafter, Belisarius gave the Malwa no further opportunities for such sallies. To his delight, Mark of Edessa was finally able to give his sharpshooters their first test in battle. Whenever it seemed another group of officers was beginning to bring cohesion back to some portion of the Malwa army bleeding to death in the riverbed, Belisarius would give the order and concentrated fire from the sharpshooters would cut them down. Mark's men, shooting weapons which were modeled after the Sharps rifle, were still indifferent marksmen by the standards of the nineteenth-century America which would produce those guns. But they were good enough, for this purpose.

By the time Belisarius broke off the engagement, the enemy forces had suffered casualties in excess of fifty percent. Far more than was needed to break almost any army in history. The more so because the casualty rate was even higher among officers, and higher still among those who were brave and capable. For all practical purposes, a Malwa army had been erased from the face of the earth.

Even Maurice pronounced himself satisfied with the result. Of course, Maurice being Maurice, he immediately moved on to another problem. Maurice fondled worries the way another man might fondle a wife.

"None of this'll mean shit, you understand, if the Ethiopians can't give us supremacy at sea." The comfort with which he settled back into morose pessimism was almost palpable. "Something will go wrong, mark my words."

"I can't see a damned thing," complained Antonina, peering through the relatively narrow gap between the foredeck's roof and the bulwarks which shield the cannons in the bow.

"You're not supposed to," retorted Ousanas, standing just behind her. "The sun is down. Only an idiot would make an attack like this in broad daylight on a clear day."