A War Without Romance
Wang Yangming’s Noksan forces and the eight hundred troops sprinted across the trench lines, racing for the gap cut through the second belt of barbed wire as they fell back.
Meanwhile the interception of the cavalry hard on their heels fell to the Yeogang captain waiting in the second trench.
“Aim!”
The Yeogang troops who had been lying prone beyond the second trench sprang to their feet and leveled their flintlock muskets at the enemy.
Because the first, second, and third defensive lines had been cut in terraces down the hillside road, the men in the second trench could fire over the heads of their own retreating comrades without the slightest risk of hitting them, pouring shot straight into the pursuers behind.
“Fire!”
Bang! Bababang!!
They had committed their precious iron-armored heavy cavalry precisely against gunfire, yet neither the scale armor, the brigandine, nor the lamellar harness the Mongols had forged could stop a flintlock musket ball.
After all, it was the massed volleys of line infantry that had rendered the full-plate lance charge obsolete in the first place.
In the brief moment when the enemy reeled and died under that single discharge, Wang Yangming and his men cleared the broad lane between the wire. The instant they were through they hauled a great spear-cart across the gap and sealed it, then slipped around behind the second-trench troops and began to reload.
By then the second trench had already finished its second loading cycle and was firing again.
“Fire!”
Bababang!!
Another clot of men and horses went down. While they fell, Wang Yangming’s first-trench companies, magazines refilled, brought their muzzles to bear once more.
“Fire!”
Babababang!!
The soldiers’ drill was nowhere near professional standard, so the volleys were not lightning-fast; still, the coordination was superb.
What good did it do to smash the first trench at such cost when those same defenders simply fell back into the second and kept pouring lead? Even if you threw yourselves into the bullets and somehow cracked the second line, the enemy would only scuttle into the third. Despair settled in the Chagatai soldiers’ eyes.
Their officers, however, could not afford despair. They brandished swords and drove the men on.
“Close up! Close up! No matter how fine the defenses, there are only three of them! Break three and the day is ours!”
True enough—breaching the first line only to find the same nightmare waiting again could crush the spirit, yet every step still brought them closer to the enemy. Already the second-trench garrison could be seen preparing to withdraw.
This time Wang Yangming and the first trench raced ahead into the third while the second trench crossed under their covering fire. It was an orderly, textbook leapfrog. Considering how little time they had been given for systematic training, the result of that crash course deserved full marks.
The reason green recruits fail on the battlefield is information overload.
Hwiyeom had asked only three things of his men:
Red flag waved—fire.
Yellow flag waved—first trench retires.
Blue flag waved—second trench retires.
They never closed to spear-range; they simply squeezed triggers at a distance. The psychological shock of killing was therefore mild, and even ordinary soldiers could move with near-elite precision so long as they kept their eyes on the color of the flags.
The Chagatai host, by contrast, milled in confusion before the second trench. The iron cavalry sent to run down the first trench had slammed into the wire and stalled; the infantry pioneers tasked with clearing it were still scrambling forward from the rear. Their lines of movement had hopelessly tangled.
Everything is unfolding exactly as planned, Hwiyeom thought, watching with cold detachment.
“Young Master, the Type Byeong Divine Machine Arrows—”
“Not yet. Draw them all the way into the second trench.”
Hwiyeom answered Dang Jiu without taking his eyes from the field.
“Director Wang and the Yeogang captain are performing better than I expected.”
The captain’s showing was especially striking. Wang Yangming already understood Tang weapon doctrine and possessed long combat experience; that level of skill was only natural. The Yeogang captain, however, had first seen a flintlock musket a little over two months earlier, and the defense of Yeogang itself was his first true battle. In that short span he had become a commander who handled line infantry with practiced ease.
“Has it already been two months? The enemy’s supply lines must be screaming by now.”
Hwiyeom’s voice was almost conversational.
“They have too many mouths to feed. We shall gladly lighten the burden for them.”
At that moment the Yeogang captain’s companies also slipped back across the third trench line. The iron cavalry that had missed them by a few dozen paces stamped and fretted while the horse split left and right so the infantry could push forward without another traffic jam. Having broken two of the three belts, murderous light and fighting spirit began to rekindle in the enemy’s eyes.
“Catch those bastards alive and tear them apart!”
“Waaaaaah!!”
Yet even as the fever of battle seized the host, a few men began to notice something wrong.
“What the hell is that sticking out of the ground?”
One Noyan— a junior officer scanning every inch of the trench line for weak points—caught sight of the gray body of a Musinpo half-buried in the earth. Once he saw the first, he saw them everywhere: gray, box-like shapes scattered across the slope. Some lay half-covered by gravel, some completely exposed; some faced upward, some downward, some aimed straight ahead like open mouths. Nothing so regularly square could have grown there by nature.
An uneasy chill took him. He glanced about and, by chance, watched one of the advancing infantrymen trip and sprawl. At first he thought the man had caught a rock; looking closer he saw a wooden crate that had been lightly covered with soil, now kicked into the open.
“…No.”
He spun and stared back the way they had come. Had the same things been lying in the first and second trenches? He could not be sure, but he thought they had. And both those trenches were now packed solid with the men Adiya Khan had driven forward to smash the third line and storm the outpost; there was scarcely room to set a foot.
The distance between the trenches was roughly four hundred paces—just short of a flintlock’s maximum five-hundred-pace range—noticeably wider than any of the earlier works. That was only because the soil around Dali, unlike the rocky hills of Yeogang, was better for sweet-potato fields; when Noksan and the Tang family had laid out the outer post they had simply spaced the trenches farther apart. Yet that accidental gift had become a mire sucking in a host that looked to number more than ten thousand.
“…The Khan must be told!”
Sweat turned cold on the Noyan’s spine as he started to leave his place in the ranks. At that exact instant Hwiyeom raised his baton and brought it down hard.
“Fire!”
Hissssss!!
Whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-whoosh—!
A sound utterly different from ordinary cannon— the crackle of burning powder and the peculiar launch note of the Divine Machine Arrows—filled the air as fat, fish-shaped Type Byeong rockets climbed into the sky.
The forward Noyans clenched their teeth.
“Bastards! Only now they bring those out!”
“Volley! Shoot them down!”
As though they had waited for this very moment, the horse-archers raised their composite bows and loosed at the rockets. Every Divine Machine Arrow they had faced before had flown, struck the ground, and either blasted men into meat with its shockwave or sprayed iron shards in every direction. Once one exploded there was no defense; the only tactic their long councils had produced was to intercept the things in the air before they came close. Type Gap rockets that merely burst could be detonated harmlessly overhead; even the scrap-iron rain of Type Eul rockets lost much of its force if it fell from height, and iron armor could hope to stop it.
But this time something was different.
Babababang—!!
“Yes!”
“See that, you dogs!”
“Wait… what—”
The Chagatai riders who had successfully exploded the incoming rockets in mid-air were still cheering when liquid sprayed from the burst casings as though someone had flung a great ladle of water across the sky. An instant later it ignited with a hungry whoosh.
Someone screamed in pure horror.
“Oil! It’s raining fire!”
“Damn it—shields up! Cavalry, fall back!”
Too late. The infantry carried shields against musketry, but the horsemen had nowhere to go except rearwards—and the press of their own men still pushing forward blocked every path. At least the rockets had been stopped before they sailed deep into the formation; that was the only mercy left.
Then the rain of fire fell.
Sizzle-sizzle-sizzle!!
“Grrraaagh!”
“Aaaaaaah!!”
It was no ordinary oil. Even toluene alone would have been unthinkable firepower in this age, and far more had been blended in. Bitumen drawn from the natural oil wells of Sichuan—wells once used by the great Zhuge Liang himself—pine resin, and a cocktail of compounds Paracelsus had concocted: sticky yet fluid, the mixture ran under shields and into every gap of armor. Once lit, the flames could not be smothered by rolling, by beating, or by the water from a canteen. It was not white phosphorus, but toluene is still a merciless organic solvent of fire.
And their misfortune was not finished.
At Hwiyeom’s second command another salvo leapt skyward. Watching the Type Byeong rockets streak across the clear sky like a school of flying mackerel, the Noyans felt despair take them by the throat. The same rockets were also arcing over the heads of their own comrades who had already pushed past the second trench into the first.
They could have fired from the start. They waited.
Why?
We were lured. Drawn in. It’s a trap!
Farther back, Adiya Khan ground his teeth.
“The enemy is at the end of their strength! One more wall and we have their outpost! Fall back now and every death is wasted! Crush them!!”
Then it happened.
Burning solvent soaked into a soldier’s clothes and set the man himself alight. He flung his weapon aside and rolled frantically across the ground. Flame followed the trail of his body. The oil burned cheerfully even on bare earth, and it found the fuse that had been peeking from the soil like a pale green shoot. The fuse hissed to life.
Like sprouts waiting for spring rain, other fuses began to wake.
The solvent that had flooded the earth set the ground itself ablaze. Beneath that burning crust, like beasts that had hibernated until the moment of their rising, things lay coiled and waiting—some in wooden crates, some in cloth sacks. Fuses ran not only underfoot; they snaked out from the Musinpo emplaced on both flanks of the valley as though the devices had grown roots. Gravel had hidden the lines, but the flaming oil seeped beneath the stones just the same.
And soon—
Hissssss… fwoosh.
—they did not germinate. They ignited.
What bloomed was not a garden of many-colored flowers but a garden of crimson roar and thunder.
Not spring, but bombs came to the battlefield.
!!!!!!!!!
No living ear could parse the sound. Endless explosions ricocheted through the valley and struck every man equally deaf; all they heard afterward was a single high, endless whine.
Fire leapt. Steel flew. Gravel sprayed. Flesh scattered. Men became handfuls of blood; horses became rags torn into ribbons.
What word could name such a sight? Is there any better word than hell?
This was not war as Adiya Khan knew it—not the war of a descendant of the great Genghis Khan. True war was the honorable clash of spears and blades, the thunder of hooves, the singing of arrows, a contest of skill and the bond between man and horse, a blood-duel that still held romance and glory.
But this—
This…!
“Devil…”
Adiya Khan whispered the word without knowing he had spoken as he tumbled from the back of his terrified horse, the animal rearing and plunging in panic at the successive blasts.