The European Coalition (4)
Sixty thousand French reinforcements had slogged their way across Russia — across land that thawed and rained and dissolved into bottomless mud — to arrive at last, exhausted and half-dead.
"This is insane…"
Leo, who had led the troops as their commander, could not believe what he was seeing.
The mess halls had nothing to offer but thin, watery gruel and mold-flecked hunks of hardened bread. And in the trenches, soldiers lay strewn about so carelessly that it was impossible to tell the dead from the living.
"This is the commander's quarters."
"Much obliged."
Gauided by a soldier, he made his way to the command tent — and found a scene beyond belief. Cigarette smoke still hung thick in the air, mixed with the reek of alcohol, and there was Gustav, fast asleep with a naked woman in his arms.
"The man has lost his mind…"
The adjutant's quarters, where Leo went next to assess the situation, were just as bad — empty liquor bottles rolled about everywhere.
Then he walked the front lines himself, and he knew: this could not go on.
Upon reaching the front, I find fewer than 100,000 soldiers fit for combat. We require a withdrawal and a full reorganization.
Declaring it a matter of the gravest urgency, Leo sent off a courier — all the way to the Holy See, supreme headquarters of the Coalition.
"How long will that take, I wonder…"
He was terrified that his own troops would end up the same way. He desperately wanted to know how men who had once been healthy could have become this, why the ground was riddled with dug-in burrows, why everything had decayed so far.
"Eeeek! We're cursed, I tell you!"
"It's the sin of coveting the angel's land, that's what it is! *Hack, wheeze.* We're all going to die!"
"Eeheehee! Let's just die, die, die!"
BANG!
The units he toured were a complete shambles. Worse still, when he pressed them with questions, one soldier took his own life right before his eyes.
This was truly a grave matter. In Christendom, suicide was regarded as a mortal sin of the highest order.
"God grant that courier hurries…"
It was a rainy day in May of the year 4049.
The courier bearing word of the front reached the Holy See in September of 4049, and all of Rome's supreme command erupted into an uproar.
"What did you say?!"
"You're telling me they advanced not a single step?"
"They couldn't even breach the city walls!"
Some four hundred thousand men had been dispatched, nearly all of them armed with gunpowder weapons — save for a handful of exceptions.
Yes, Daehan wielded terrifying weaponry and displayed an overwhelming presence at sea. But on land, surely numbers would count for something. That was what they had believed.
And yet the result: they couldn't even take the walls of Qajar, let alone touch Daehan.
"What are we to do?!"
"We must send more troops, must we not?"
"And where exactly would those troops come from?"
"…"
The room fell silent, a gathering of mutes who'd swallowed honey. They could squeeze a few more soldiers out if they truly tried — but that would mean arming actual farmers with muskets and shipping them off to die.
No — at this point they couldn't even spare the muskets. The men would have to be sent as they were. Every nation needed a standing force to defend its borders and suppress rebellion, and not one of them could bear to give theirs up.
"What on earth do we do…"
"We must prepare for a decisive naval battle."
"*Sigh*…"
The original plan — building armored warships to sink the invincible fleet and seize command of the seas — had gone slightly sideways the moment the Blue Sharks sailed into port. At one and a half times the size, sleek and predatory, those vessels looked to any eye like pure warships.
"Whatever it takes, we must sink their ships, seize their harbor, and take their technology."
"And then sue for peace?"
"If we ever hope to catch up to them, acquiring their technology is everything."
They were, after all, the second and third men of their respective nations, and their cunning never failed to turn. Nor was it a bad plan, truthfully — once you had the technology, catching up was merely a matter of time, wasn't it?
"How large a reparations payment should we prepare…"
"We will need to pool every nation's gold and silver…"
"It did knock Venice flat on its back, after all?"
The Europeans, easy in their assumptions as ever, patting themselves on the back for their cleverness.
From there the council devolved into scheming — ways to capture Haneul himself, hostage negotiations, and a dozen other schemes. Every last one of them was underhanded and vicious.
"In the meantime, send word to the front: hold the line by any means necessary."
"Defending should still be within their capability, no?"
The command staff reasoned that as long as a man's trigger finger still worked, the line could be held — and in doing so, they took the reality on the ground far too lightly.
By November of 4049, as the cold returned and the waterlogged ground froze solid, the European Union's front line had become a sight no man could bear to look upon.
Leo, who had brought sixty thousand reinforcements, threw himself into rebuilding the army by any means he could.
SPLOSH.
"*Sigh*… I'm losing my mind."
The trenches were open-air pits of rot, reeking of every manner of filth decomposing in the cold. With no spare clothes to change into, even his once-neat uniform had degraded into beggar's rags.
"We're short of everything…"
Weapons were scarce despite the infrequent fighting — doubtless because the quantities being skimmed off in Russia were simply too great.
"Then you'd think they'd at least send food properly…"
The arrangement was that weapons came from Europe while food and other supplies were issued from nearby Russia — yet nothing intact ever arrived. Bread he had specially ordered to feed his own men, unable to bear watching them starve, turned moldy and rock-hard overnight, as if someone had swapped it out.
Food and firewood were desperately short. And the commander and his adjutant had both gone out of their minds.
The soldiers he'd brought from France were half-mad themselves. He might well have been the only sane man in the entire army.
"There! The enemy's coming!"
"Enemy attack!"
The Qajar army had begun its advance.
CREEEEAK—
The gate of Qajar, which even during shift changes opened only a narrow sally port, swung wide open. And from within poured forth rank upon rank of soldiers, clean, rested, and in perfect order.
"Everyone, keep to cover and stay down! That is the only way you live!"
Soldiers poured from the main gate as well, crossing the river — and though the Coalition didn't yet know it, more Qajar troops lay prone in ambush behind them, having slipped out a distant gate days earlier and swung far around to encircle the enemy.
"We hear the enemy army is on the verge of collapse — but do not let your guard down, any of you!"
The Qajar advance was unstoppable.
BANG! Rat-tat-tat! THOOM. THOOM-THOOM-THOOM.
"Get down! Flat on the ground — crawl!"
"Crawl! Unless you want a bullet, get down!"
The soldiers advanced step by deliberate step, bellies low to the earth.
BANG! BANG!
And of course, when an opening presented itself, they fired.
THOOM. THOOM-THOOM-THOOM.
"The bullets flying overhead are no joke."
"Head down! You want a hole drilled in your skull?!"
However much of a shambles the Coalition army had become, with the enemy bearing down on them they weren't about to simply stand and watch.
Soldiers pushed forward through the pouring rain of lead.
"All of you, snap to! Enemy inbound!"
"Return fire!"
With the enemy flooding in, a counterattack finally began — anchored by the sixty thousand French troops who had arrived later and were still relatively whole.
"The cannons! Why aren't the cannons firing?!"
"The powder's soaked through, sir — the guns won't discharge!"
It wasn't just the cannons. The soldiers had tossed their gunpowder around carelessly for so long that misfires plagued every musket in the line.
"Damn it all! Send for reinforcements from Kazan, now!"
Leo judged that holding the front would require help from the Russian army at Kazan, and hurried a courier off at once.
And in the trenches, the soldiers were doing their desperate best to fight back.
SSS-SSS-SSS.
"Huh…"
The fuse touched the wet powder — and no bullet came.
"The gun won't fire!"
"Go get more powder!"
"With what legs?! Look at this leg!"
The powder store was far away in a warehouse — how was a man on crutches supposed to fetch anything while bullets filled the air?
Zip! Zip-zip! Zing!
"Insane! This is insane!"
Countless rounds whistled past overhead. The moment you lifted your head above the trench parapet, a hole through your skull was all but guaranteed.
Thud. Rumble-rumble. Fizz-fizz-fizz.
A great iron sphere rolled down into the trench, landing beside a soldier who had his head ducked and curses on his lips. Without even looking at it, anyone could tell the thing spewing smoke was dangerous.
"Damnation… I was never meant to end up here."
KWA-BOOM!
The Qajar troops had crawled close enough to lob their Fist Potatoes in, and in an instant a river of blood began flowing through the trench.
"Gah! We have to run!"
"I'm coming with you!"
"Go where?! We fight here, together!"
A substantial number of the men who'd been at the front longest — the ones on crutches or limping on ruined legs — began abandoning the battlefield outright.
"What are *we* supposed to do?!"
The French, still in reasonable shape, kept returning fire and holding the line.
Rat-tat-tat.
And then gunfire began ringing out behind their backs.
"No… it can't be?"
"It can't be, right?"
When swarms of unexpected deserters leapt up and bolted from the line, the waiting Qajar forces had no choice but to begin their attack.
BANG! BANG! BANG! Rat-tat!
As serious gunfire erupted from the rear in earnest, even the French — elite by comparison — began to waver.
"Damn it! What are we supposed to do when they hit us from both sides?!"
"*Sob*…"
"I don't want to die in a place like this!"
As for the courier moving among those deserters — he'd long since fallen to the ambush.
Dark clouds now gathered over the Coalition army, caught between hammer and anvil.
"AAAGH!"
"Goddamn it!"
When bullets came screaming from behind, the artillerymen abandoned their guns and dove into the trenches.
"Huh? The enemy's falling back?"
"Why?"
"They're not! GET DOWN!"
THOOM! THOOM! THOOM! THOOM!
They hadn't fallen back at all — their cannons had simply rolled forward and finished preparing to fire.
"Everyone, take cover!"
"Down! DOWN!"
KWA-KOOM-KOOM! KWA-BOOM!
Since when did Qajar have this many cannons? Along the long front held by two hundred sixty thousand men, there was not a single stretch of ground the shells did not fall upon.
"GWAAAAGH!"
"KYAAAAH!"
Someone, somewhere, had apparently been entertaining a woman in the ranks, because a woman's screams joined the general chaos. It was pure pandemonium.
KWA-KWA! KWA-BOOM!
"Just don't land on *here*, damn it…"
Thousands of shells? No — tens of thousands, surely.
The thunder of Qajar's guns dwindled, and their advance began anew. It was the judgment of the Qajar command that no amount of shelling would collapse the trenches into nothing — so the infantry would have to finish it.
"Shouldn't we be surrendering about now?"
"*Sigh*… What in the world is high command even doing?"
"We're not all going to die… right?"
Thud. Fizz-fizz-fizz.
Down among the despairing soldiers, something dropped — trailing a sinister ribbon of smoke, no less.
"Huh? What's that?"
"Oh, f—"
KWA-AAAANG!
The Fist Potatoes began raining into the trenches. At such close range, they flew far truer than any cannonball.
The soldiers who merely stood staring, dumbstruck — the instant that fuse burned down to its end was the last light they ever saw.
It did not take the Qajar army long to finish the battle.
"Hmm? We've taken a great many prisoners."
"What should we do with them?"
"Why are all their legs like that? They're useless for labor."
Of the one hundred twenty thousand prisoners Qajar had taken, hardly a man was whole.
"Give the cripples pickaxes and send them to the mines."
"Yes, sir!"
Sending them home would accomplish nothing worthwhile anyway. Qajar, too, made a habit of marching its prisoners off to the mines.
Unlike Daehan, however, they would be made to work like true slaves — for no mercy was spared to those who had dared defy their god.
"Everyone, your full attention on the roads! We build roads first!"
Qajar began with the roads. The defense was over — so now, surely, it was time to take the offensive.
"We go north first!"
And the prisoners had spoken of a place called Kazan in the north, headquarters of the expeditionary army. That was where it had to begin.
This time they would advance slowly, and surely. They knew all too well what had befallen those who betrayed that one's will after Temüjin passed.
"The time has come to rain fire upon all who defy that one's will!"
It was Russia that panicked at Qajar's advance. Who could have imagined that a coalition so vast would collapse in a single stroke?
The entire burden of halting that advance now fell upon Russia alone.
"Your Majesty! The Coalition has been routed and Qajar has begun its advance!"
"What? Those quiet bastards — why NOW?!"
Ivan IV never saw it coming. Through dozens of invasions, Qajar had done nothing but defend behind its walls — never once had he seen them march out.
The Coalition was numerous, yes, but he had assumed this time would be like all the others — and in the meantime, he'd been happily skimming the Coalition's supplies for himself.
"Send a man, NOW! Tell them the enemy has begun its attack — demand they send reinforcements!"
He dispatched a courier to the Holy See in haste — though just how much response he'd get from the Europeans, watching the drama from across the river, was anyone's guess.
The supplies he'd been diverting for his invasion of Poland-Lithuania would have to be turned back to stopping Qajar.
"Damnation!"
The schemes of Ivan IV — who had meant to merely go through the motions and bide his time for a chance to expand westward — were beginning to unravel.