The Defeated

Your August Majesty,

I regret to inform you that today your army and interests in the North suffered a most serious reverse. The foremost elements of General Jalenhorm’s division reached the town of Osrung this morning and took up a powerful position on a hill surmounted by a ring of ancient stones called the Heroes. Reinforcements were held up on the bad roads, however, and before they could move across the river the Northmen attacked in great numbers. Although they fought with the greatest courage, the Sixth and Rostod Regiments were overwhelmed. The standard of the Sixth was lost. Casualties may well be close to a thousand dead, perhaps the same number of wounded, and many more in the hands of the enemy.

It was only by a valiant action of your Majesty’s First Cavalry that further disaster was averted. The Northmen are now well entrenched around the Heroes. One can see the lights of their campfires on the slopes. One can almost hear their singing when the wind shifts northerly. But we yet hold the ground south of the river, and the divisions of General Mitterick on the western flank, and Lord Governor Meed on the eastern, have begun to arrive and are preparing to attack at first light.

Tomorrow, the Northmen will not be singing.

I remain your Majesty’s most faithful and unworthy servant,

Bremer dan Gorst, Royal Observer of the Northern War

The gathering darkness was full of shouts, clanks and squeals, sharp with the tang of woodsmoke, the even sharper sting of defeat. Fires rustled in the wind and torches sputtered in pale hands, illuminating faces haggard from a day of marching, waiting, worrying. And perhaps, in a few cases, even fighting.

The road up from Uffrith was an endless parade of overloaded wagons, mounted officers, marching men. Mitterick’s division grinding through, seeing the wounded and the beaten, catching the contagion of fear before they even caught a whiff of the enemy. Things that might have been just objects before the rout on the Heroes had assumed a crushing significance. A dead mule, lamplight shining in its goggling eyes. A cart with a broken axle tipped off the road and stripped down for firewood. An abandoned tent, blown from its moorings, the yellow sun of the Union stitched into the trampled canvas. All become emblems of doom.

Fear had been a rarity over the past few months, as Gorst took his morning runs through the camps of one regiment or another. Boredom, exhaustion, hunger, illness, hopelessness and homesickness, all commonplace. But not fear of the enemy. Now it was everywhere, and the stink of it only grew stronger as the clouds rolled steadily in and the sun sank below the fells.

If victory makes men brave, defeat renders them cowards.

Progress through the village of Adwein had been entirely stalled by several enormous wagons, each drawn by a team of eight horses. An officer was bellowing red-faced at an old man huddled on the seat of the foremost one.

‘I am Saurizin, Adeptus Chemical of the University of Adua!’ he shouted back, waving a document smudged by the first spots of rain. ‘This equipment must be allowed through, by order of Lord Bayaz!’

Gorst left them arguing, strode past a quartermaster hammering on doors, searching for billets. A Northern woman stood in the street with three children pressed against her legs, staring at a handful of coins as the drizzle grew heavier. Kicked out of their shack to make way for some sneering lieutenant, who’ll be elbowed off to make way for some preening captain, who’ll be shuffled on to make way for some bloated major. Where will this woman and her children be by then? Will they slumber peacefully in my tent while I doss heroically on the damp sod outside? I need only reach out my hand … Instead he put his head down and trudged by them in silence.

Most of the village’s mean buildings were already crowded with wounded, the less serious cases spilling out onto the doorsteps. They looked up at him, pain-twisted, dirt-smeared or bandaged faces slack, and Gorst looked back in silence. My skills are for making casualties, not comforting them. But he pulled the stopper from his canteen and offered it out, and each in turn they took a mouthful until it was empty. Apart from one who gripped his hand for a moment they did not thank him and he did not care.

A surgeon in a smeared apron appeared at a doorway, blowing out a long sigh. ‘General Jalenhorm?’ Gorst asked. He was pointed down a rutted side-track and after a few strides heard the voice. That same voice he’d heard blathering orders for the last few days. Its tone was different now.

‘Lay them down here, lay them here! Clear a space! You, bring bandages!’ Jalenhorm was kneeling in the mud, clasping the hand of a man on a stretcher. He seemed to have shaken off his huge staff, finally, if he had not left them dead on the hill. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll have the best of care. You’re a hero. You’re all heroes!’ His knees squelched into the muck beside the next man. ‘You did everything that could have been asked. Mine was the fault, my friends, mine were the mistakes.’ He squeezed the casualty’s shoulder then stood, slowly, staring down. ‘Mine is the guilt.’

Defeat, it seems, brings out the best in some men.

‘General Jalenhorm.’

He looked up, face tipping into the torchlight, looking suddenly very old for a man so young. ‘Colonel Gorst, how are you—’

‘Marshal Kroy is here.’ The general visibly deflated, like a pillow with half the stuffing pulled out.

‘Of course he is.’ He straightened his dirt-smudged jacket, twisted his sword-belt into the correct position. ‘How do I look?’ Gorst opened his mouth to speak, but Jalenhorm cut him off. ‘Don’t bother to humour me. I look defeated.’ True. ‘Please don’t deny it.’ I didn’t. ‘That’s what I am.’ It is.

Gorst led the way back down the crowded alleys, through the steam of the army’s kitchens and the glow from the stalls of enterprising pedlars, hoping for silence. He was disappointed. As so very often.

‘Colonel Gorst, I need to thank you. That charge of yours saved my division.’

Perhaps it will also have saved my career. Your division can all drown if I can be the king’s First Guard again. ‘My motives were not selfless.’

‘Whose are? It’s the results that go down in history. Our reasons are written in smoke. And the fact is I nearly destroyed my division. My division.’ Jalenhorm snorted bitterly. ‘The one the king had most foolishly lent me. I tried to turn it down, you know.’ It seems you did not try hard enough. ‘But you know the king.’ All too well. ‘He has romantic notions about his old friends.’ He has romantic notions about everything. ‘No doubt I will be laughed at when I return home. Humiliated. Shunned.’ Welcome to my life. ‘Probably I deserve it.’ Probably you do. I don’t.

And yet, as Gorst frowned sideways at Jalenhorm’s hanging head, hair plastered to his skull, a drop of rain clinging to the point of his nose, as thorough a picture of dejection as he could find without a mirror, he was swept up by a surprising wave of sympathy.

He found he had put his hand on the general’s shoulder. ‘You did what you could,’ he said. ‘You should not blame yourself.’ If my experience is anything to go by, there will soon be legions of self-righteous scum queuing up to do it for you. ‘You must not blame yourself.’

‘Who should I blame, then?’ Jalenhorm whispered into the rain. ‘Who?’

If Lord Marshal Kroy was infected by fear he showed no symptoms, and nor did anyone else in range of his iron frown. Within his sight soldiers marched in perfect step, officers spoke clearly but did not shout, and the wounded bit down on their howls and remained stoically silent. Within a circle perhaps fifty strides across, with Kroy bolt upright in his saddle at its centre, there was no lag in morale, there was no lapse in discipline, and there had certainly been no defeat.

Jalenhorm’s bearing noticeably stiffened as he strode up and gave a rigid salute. ‘Lord Marshal Kroy.’

‘General Jalenhorm.’ The marshal glared down from on high. ‘I understand there was an engagement.’

‘There was. The Northmen came in very great numbers. Very great, and very quickly. A well-coordinated assault. They made a feint for Osrung and I sent a regiment to reinforce the town. I went to find more but, by that time … it was too late to do anything but try to keep them on the far side of the river. Too late to—’

‘The condition of your division, General.’

Jalenhorm paused. In one sense the condition of his division was painfully obvious. ‘Two of my five regiments of foot were held up on the bad roads and have yet to see action. The Thirteenth were holding Osrung and withdrew in good order when the Northmen breached the gate. Some casualties.’ Jalenhorm recited the butcher’s bill in a dull monotone. ‘The majority of the Rostod Regiment, some nine companies, I believe, were caught in the open and routed. The Sixth were holding the hill when the Northmen attacked. They were comprehensively broken. Ridden down in the fields. The Sixth has …’ Jalenhorm’s mouth twitched silently. ‘Ceased to exist.’

‘Colonel Wetterlant?’

‘Presumed among the dead on the far side of the river. There are very many dead there. Many wounded we cannot reach. You can hear them crying for water. They always want water, for some reason.’ Jalenhorm gave a horrifically inappropriate snort of nervous laughter. ‘I’d have thought they might want … spirits, or something.’

Kroy kept his silence. Gorst was unlikely to break it.

Jalenhorm droned on, as if he could not bear the quiet. ‘One regiment of cavalry took losses near the Old Bridge and withdrew, but held the south bank. The First is split in two. One battalion made their way through the marshes to a position in the woods on our left flank.’

‘That could be useful. The other?’

‘Fought valiantly alongside Colonel Gorst in the shallows, and turned back the enemy at great cost on both sides. Our one truly successful action of the day.’

Kroy turned his frown on Gorst. ‘More heroics, eh, Colonel?’

Only the bare minimum of action necessary to prevent disaster turning into catastrophe. ‘Some action, sir. No heroics.’

‘I was mindful, Lord Marshal,’ cut in Jalenhorm, ‘of the urgency. You wrote to me of some urgency.’

‘I did.’

‘I was mindful that the king wished for quick results. And so I seized the chance to get at the enemy. Seized it … much too ardently. I made a terrible mistake. A most terrible mistake, and I alone bear the full responsibility.’

‘No.’ Kroy gave a heavy sigh. ‘You share it with me. And with others. The roads. The nature of the battlefield. The undue haste.’

‘Nonetheless, I have failed.’ Jalenhorm drew his sword and offered it up. ‘I humbly request that I be removed from command.’

‘The king would not hear of it. Neither will I.’

Jalenhorm’s sword drooped, the point scraping against the mud. ‘Of course, Lord Marshal. I should have scouted the trees more thoroughly—’

‘You should have. But your orders were to push north and find the enemy.’ Kroy looked slowly around the torchlit chaos of the village. ‘You found the enemy. This is a war. Mistakes happen, and when they do … the stakes are high. But we are not finished. We have barely even begun. You will spend tonight and tomorrow behind the shallows where Colonel Gorst fought his unheroic action this afternoon. Regrouping in the centre, re-equipping your division, looking to the welfare of the wounded, restoring morale and,’ glowering balefully around at the decidedly unmilitary state of the place, ‘imposing discipline.’

‘Yes, Lord Marshal.’

‘I will be making my headquarters on the slopes of Black Fell, where there should be a good view of the battlefield tomorrow. Defeat is always painful, but I have a feeling you will get another chance to be involved in this particular battle.’

Jalenhorm drew himself up, something of his old snap returning at being given a straightforward goal. ‘My division will be ready for action the day after tomorrow, you may depend upon it, Lord Marshal!’

‘Good.’ And Kroy rode off, his indomitable aura fading into the night along with his staff. Jalenhorm stood frozen in a parting salute as the marshal clattered away, but Gorst looked back, when he had made it a few steps further down the road.

The general still stood beside the track, alone, hunched over as the rain grew heavier, white streaks through the fizzing torchlight.