Cold War
"You there! Stop dawdling and move it already!"
"I'm sorry! The carriage wheel broke—"
"I know the carriage is stuck! Either fix it right now or get it off the road!"
"S-Saintess, i-is France always this cold...?"
"Anyone who wants to drink wine with me, first three only!"
"Mother told me not to go wandering around in winter..."
A white forest blanketed entirely in snow.
The cold wind that tickled faces whenever it pleased, and a marching column loud with every kind of clamor.
At the far end of the road leading to their destination, the city of Montpellier, the cowardly Saintess silently reconfirmed the situation she now found herself in.
Count Montpellier had chosen to raise an army.
The rapid shifts in France's political landscape had spurred that cunning traitor to hasten his great undertaking, and the moment the Count read out his declaration of war, France's civil-war crisis had transformed into a genuine, irreversible civil war.
The Vesta Order, which the Count had so cheerfully sold out, was likewise classified as a de facto participant.
The fact that the Vesta Order had already collapsed and vanished more than forty years earlier was of little importance.
If they simply pretended ignorance and lumped the two together as one faction, they could seize every last remnant of the Order's legacy this time—why would such a trivial truth catch anyone's eye?
Not a single person truly believed the Order was involved in this affair, yet for everyone's benefit the Vesta Order had to be treated as Count Montpellier's ally.
The politicians of Italy had chosen war.
The Kingdom of Venice had staked everything on this holy war and done its utmost to drag its neighbors into the conflict.
And the nations of the Boot Peninsula could not possibly ignore the diplomatic debts that had piled up over the decades.
There had been those who reacted as if they could not care less about holy wars or anything of the sort, but when the Saintess of an Order revived after decades shoved unknown blueprints in their faces and threatened to cut off their livelihoods if they refused, no one possessed the courage to simply lie down and bare their bellies.
So they hastily gathered troops and committed them to the holy war, and Asty obtained command of a coalition force numbering ten thousand.
The peasants of Avignon had chosen silence.
The Peasant Republic, which had only just taken its first steps, was a nation in name only and possessed nothing.
George's gang, who had once driven bamboo spears into the belly of the Count of Avignon, were skilled at irregular warfare—ambushes and raids—but extremely inexperienced in frontal confrontations such as sieges or pitched battles, and their numbers were severely lacking compared to the coalition.
Fortunately Asty herself had no desire for a bloodbath, so the peasants of Avignon were able to escape the crisis without major damage.
...Well, they did get fleeced of a considerable amount of supplies under the pretext of donations to support the holy war.
But that was so common in this era as to be expected, and thanks to Asty suppressing individual soldiers' excesses as much as possible while invoking the virtues of crusaders, civilian damage was minimized.
Rather, some of George's gang, captivated by the cause of the holy war, joined the coalition, so the new Order's first civil-affairs operation could fairly be called highly successful.
"The crusaders of Italy pay their respects to His Majesty the new King of France!"
"Ooooh...! Welcome, all of you! I shall have wine and meat brought out for you!"
Thus the coalition of a little over ten thousand entered Montpellier City amid Count Montpellier's warm welcome.
And then they settled right there, reduced to the status of freeloaders simply eating up food.
It was winter.
"We cannot fight a war like this. Absolutely not."
While the soldiers dragged up from the Boot Peninsula pitched camp near the city and prepared their billeting grounds, I went straight to the Count and dropped the bombshell.
We cannot fight a war like this.
Even if we marched on the ducal territories with the forces we currently had, we would only meet ruin, so under no circumstances must we move the army first—I stated it flatly.
"Certainly, winter is not a good season for war. It would be best to wait until the weather softens somewhat before setting out."
It was an excessively defeatist claim to make right after bringing ten thousand troops, yet the wise and shrewd Count Montpellier, instead of barking that I was talking nonsense, found a plausible reason and nodded along.
But he was wrong.
The reason I insisted we postpone the campaign was not that trifling matter of the weather.
Of course I knew how grueling it was to wage war in winter, yet if that had been the only reason I would never have opposed it so absolutely.
"No. That is not the problem."
The real problem lay with the soldiers.
The ten thousand elite troops I had gathered while even invoking a holy war.
"You already know the soldiers I brought are from Italy, correct?"
Their skill was not the issue.
Given the cause I had raised, our pasta-loving friends had selected their personnel with exacting care.
From experienced mercenaries and royal household guards to the Venetian Kingdom's garrison troops who had brawled with demonkin, career veterans who had driven stakes into the army for life, and capable squires and plain knights—the roster was nothing short of luxurious.
From commanders down to the lowest ranks there was not a single green recruit, so in terms of combat experience and individual fighting power they would hold the advantage against any army.
The problem was... everything except their skill.
"Yes. That the brothers of the faith would come all the way from the far southern tip to aid this unworthy man—how far does His providence truly reach...!"
"Those friends who came up from that southern tip are on the verge of freezing to death. If we send them to the front lines right now, I am not joking—half of them will turn into ice statues."
One issue, as I had already said, was the season.
The Europa Continent lay north of the equator—in other words, in the Northern Hemisphere.
And in the Northern Hemisphere it generally grew warmer the farther south one went and colder the farther north; the Italian Peninsula sat southeast of France.
Which meant the Italian coalition had no tolerance for cold.
Those from Venice or Piedmont, whose latitudes were similar to the Occitania region, might endure to some degree, but the friends who had lived in the warm southern lands were already performing a miracle simply by having followed this far without dying.
Down around Sicily it did not even snow in the dead of winter.
In that neighborhood snow was treated as a meteorological anomaly.
"Hmm, in that case if we distribute firewood generously for heating..."
"And because it is a multinational coalition, their coordination is abysmal. Order them to take a single castle and they will bicker among themselves until the garrison beats them senseless and the whole force disintegrates."
The second problem was, of course, cohesion.
Our Italian coalition was an army composed of elite troops drawn from the seven nations of the Boot Peninsula.
Thanks to that, the soldiers' skill and the diversity of troop types were dazzling, yet organic cooperation or unit cohesion was nowhere to be found no matter how hard one scrubbed one's eyes looking—a miracle of non-cohesion.
Dozens or hundreds of organizations that had operated in different environments, with different goals and different methods, had been forcibly mashed together; what else could one expect?
It was already fortunate that they could even understand one another's speech.
Naturally, executing systematic strategy and tactics with such an army was impossible; one first had to question whether they were even capable of conducting a war at all.
Did anyone know how much I had suffered bringing these people this far?
The agony of limbs moving independently of one another could not be understood without experiencing it firsthand.
I had clearly given proper orders and they had faithfully carried them out, yet somewhere in the middle process something twisted into grotesque knots and the result turned into a mess—more times than I could count.
"And decisively, they are not my private soldiers. They are an army I temporarily borrowed after asking the brothers and sisters of the Italian Peninsula for understanding. I cannot use them in positions where heavy losses are expected, and even if I wanted to I must not."
The final problem.
The army I had brought was a coalition.
Moreover, it was a single enormous diplomatic debt formed by the seven nations of the Italian Peninsula carefully selecting only their elites.
I could not work them carelessly.
If Count Montpellier, blinded by the crown, ground these priceless soldiers into paste, everything would literally be flushed down the sewer.
First the newborn Kingdom of France's diplomatic relations would spectacularly collapse; the prestige the Vesta Order held on the Italian Peninsula would plummet; the Kingdom of Venice, which had gone all-in on the holy-war coin, would fall, and the demonkin of the Balkans would launch a frenzied offensive.
Then the remaining six nations, having lost thousands of elite troops each, would be annihilated in an instant; the entire Italian Peninsula would fall into demonkin hands, shrinking humanity's living space; and the plan to establish a theocracy in the Benelux region would suffer a major setback.
Besides, even if one ordered men dragged into another country's civil war to go fight and die, they would never obediently comply.
This was not a holy war.
The opponents we faced were not heretics or other races who deserved to die, but ordinary human politicians—perhaps even brothers and sisters who shared the same faith.
Decades had already passed since the old Order incurred the Goddess's disappointment and fell.
The title of Merciful Saintess might be enough to stir nostalgic faith that was fading from memory, yet it was woefully insufficient to shove an army summoned for a holy war onto a filthy battlefield.
"I believe that for now we should concentrate on the most peaceful and productive activities possible while preaching our cause to the neighboring lords."
I needed meat shields.
Not for a holy war, but weak and pitiful meat shields summoned for real-estate transactions among feudal lords.
"The city happens to look short on space and the residents are in difficulty—how about we correct that first? Montpellier is to become the capital of the new France, and we also need lodgings for our brothers and sisters of the faith, so a large-scale redevelopment project seems necessary."
In short, we would not fight a war.
Not until winter passed and this cold eased.
Not until the sowing season was over and every field was filled with sprouting green shoots.
We would leisurely redevelop Montpellier City while expanding our forces.
A mere eighteen thousand—what nose was that supposed to stick to?
I could not feel secure at all.
The fundamental principle of war had always been to mobilize more troops and send them to the front.
Eulji Mundeok had buried three hundred thousand Sui troops at the Cheongcheon River, yet these stingy big-noses, unable to scrape together even a hundred thousand on both sides combined, were claiming they had done their best.
"I will go ask the neighboring lords whether they have any intention of joining the project."
Of course, the more troops one mobilized the greater the casualties in each battle, yet crushing the enemy with overwhelming numbers from the very start would still kill fewer people than a drawn-out stalemate in which neither side could seize the initiative.
For the swift conclusion of the civil war and the minimization of human loss, every last one of our southern noble lords would have to join the rebellion.