It's Time to Show Them the Taste of the Cannons
After the failure of the Albion air raid, few people had laid eyes on Charles Raymonds. The door to the grand duke’s office remained tightly shut.
Ever since he had returned in a wretched state, no one knew what went on behind it. The only rumor circulating among the nobles was that occasional screams and the sound of shattering objects echoed from within.
Even so, they could not simply allow the Southern army to set foot on Western soil. The man who had seized full authority in Charles Raymonds’s place was the notorious officer Eric Smith—the one who had earned the greatest distinction in the wars against the western natives.
In a way, it might have been for the best. Not many nobles were willing to follow the orders of a man who had already made three catastrophic misjudgments.
Once he held absolute power, Eric Smith made only one demand.
The nobles accepted his proposal without hesitation. Corrupt and incompetent, they had no experience waging actual war.
The lower-born centurions and captains commanding the conscripted troops, however, resisted fiercely. They knew Eric Smith’s reputation all too well. His victories always came soaked in the blood of countless commoner conscripts.
In border conflicts, they could have accepted it. The long-standing raids had inflicted terrible suffering on the commoners. Many families along the western frontier had lost loved ones to the barbarians. They would have gladly died fighting those incomprehensible raiders.
But this war against the South was different.
A nobles’ war. That was how the commoners saw it. Their view of the South had always been relatively favorable. For a thousand years the two regions had maintained countless exchanges.
Many westerners had even traveled south during the height of the industrial revolution to find work. As a result, a great number of people had family and friends living in the South.
To the western ruling class, the South was a monster that devastated their manufacturing base. To the commoners, however, the South represented something else entirely: people who had shattered the nobles’ monopoly on production and supplied quality goods at affordable prices.
When tolls were collected at Sarcen Fortress, it was the western commoners who complained the loudest, because those taxes drove up the cost of southern factory goods.
With resentment already boiling over, no one wanted to fight the southerners. Conscripts with no will to fight. A public sentiment in ruins. Junior officers who refused to obey orders.
Faced with this nightmare, the man they called the Devil of the West offered a simple solution.
Weren’t junior officers supposed to be the backbone of an army? Eric Smith had never placed the slightest expectation on the commoner conscript units to begin with. It didn’t matter who commanded them. The conscripts only needed to move forward. In his mind, they existed solely as background to glorify the nobles’ achievements.
The role Eric Smith assigned to the conscript infantry was nothing more and nothing less than that of a meat shield.
While every eye was fixed on the conscripts, the cavalry, wyvern units, and aura-wielding knights would strike. Any magical attacks from the enemy would be blocked by their own mages. Once they closed the distance, victory was guaranteed.
As a result, the western army’s formation became grotesquely unbalanced: thirty thousand infantry arrayed in the front line while the main force waited safely in the rear. The infantry knew exactly what they had become. Yet they could not rebel. Knights watched them from behind with cold, gleaming eyes.
In that state, the western army marched toward the battlefield. Along the rugged western coastline, there was only one place where fifty thousand men could clash.
Arcal Plain. The sole coastal flatland in the region.
The distance from Sarcen Earldom to Porvin was roughly one hundred and eighty kilometers. Given that the maximum daily march for an average First World War infantry unit was twenty-four to thirty-two kilometers, the journey should have taken about a week.
They had deliberately chosen a more leisurely pace. No faction would sit quietly while an enemy army marched into its own front yard.
A mounted scout troop that had ridden back in haste delivered its report.
"They really scraped together every last man they could find," Kyle muttered.
Successive defeats naturally eroded support for the war. When support waned, the nobles stopped supplying troops. To assemble forty thousand men under those conditions meant they had pushed conscription to its absolute limit.
The intelligence bureau had already reported that western public sentiment was in tatters. They must have been truly desperate to attempt mass civilian conscription in such a climate.
"Troop composition?"
"Hmm?"
This formation went against every principle of western military doctrine. Their standard tactic was to devastate the enemy with wyverns, sweep the remnants with cavalry, and let the infantry secure the field. There was no reason for them to send infantry first.
Then one possibility occurred to him.
"Ah. So that’s what they’re thinking."
They had witnessed the power of his firearms during the battle at Sarcen harbor. Repeating the same attack as before would only produce the same result.
Anyone who had learned that lesson would never repeat the same mistake. They would look for a way to charge through the machine-gun fire.
And the method they had chosen was…
"Using the conscripts as shields?"
If that was truly their plan, it could only be called madness. The people were the foundation of any nation. Without them, a country could not grow. Adult males in particular formed the core of economic vitality.
To expend such precious human resources as mere meat shields—especially when public opinion had already collapsed?
"They’ve completely lost their minds. Well, it works in my favor."
Western nobles throwing their own people in front of the guns versus the gentlemanly southern army. For someone who needed to annex the West while maintaining a favorable image, this was practically a gift.
Besides, the enemy still did not fully understand the nature of modern warfare. This was not a conflict where you could only strike what you could see.
"All units, halt here. Summon the staff officers!"
He stopped the march and called his staff together. While they gathered inside the temporary tent, he continued refining his thoughts.
Would a head-on clash on open ground mean defeat? Not at all. The light machine guns and autocannons, capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute, could chew through forty thousand men in moments.
The fate of infantry who charged machine-gun positions with cold steel had already been written in blood by the Japanese army on the Pacific front.
But choosing a frontal assault here would be amateurish.
"That is not how you win a war."
Victory in battle and victory in war were two entirely different things. Winning a battle simply required defeating the enemy in combat.
Winning the war required achieving the strategic objectives of the western campaign. Slaughtering thirty thousand forcibly conscripted men would only create obstacles to the goal of annexing the West.
"Therefore, today only the nobles and their private troops will die."
In answer to his staff officer’s question, Kyle pointed at the map spread across the table. A narrow canyon formed the only approach from Porvin to Arcal Plain.
"With 76mm field guns alone, yes."
It was an operation the army could not accomplish by itself. But their expeditionary force was not composed of the army alone.
"Ah…!"
They possessed the most powerful firepower this era had ever seen—firepower capable of shattering even a fortress in a single salvo. A Dreadnought with a range exceeding ten kilometers could easily destroy a canyon near the coast.
"Deploy an artillery observation platoon and one squad to the nearby mountain."
The plan was straightforward. The Dreadnought would receive coordinates from the observation team and collapse the canyon entrance. Then it would sweep the trapped enemy with 305mm naval gunfire.
Aura was certainly a formidable power. The ability to let a human withstand 20mm autocannon fire and block several anti-aircraft shells was impressive. But could it endure a barrage from 305mm naval guns?
The remaining division had one task: annihilate any enemies who tried to flee the canyon after it had been turned into a slaughterhouse by naval gunfire.
The enemy was closing in by the minute. There was no time to waste.
Kyle looked at his staff officers and gave the order.