The inmates of Camp Raichel had been successfully marched deeper into captivity by the Inquisition and their AOG guards. Twenty percent of them had died along the way, but the death toll would have been far higher if Dialydd Mab hadn’t … arranged a change of command for the guard force. The inmates of Camp Urtha and Camp Zhakleen, unfortunately, had not been marched to the rear. They’d simply been massacred … all hundred and twenty thousand of them. In Camp Zhakleen’s case, they’d been joined by over a third of the camp’s AOG guard force, who’d mutineed against Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s orders and attempted to protect the prisoners, and Kynt Clareyk prayed regularly for the souls of the men who’d made that choice. Just as he’d seen to it that the guards of Camp Hainree, who’d mutineed successfully and marched eighty-seven thousand Siddarmarkian civilians to safety, had been treated as honorably and humanely as humanly possible when they reached the Allies’ lines barely five hours ahead of the pursing AOG cavalry.
That kind of humanity—and courage—was far too precious to waste.
But whereas he’d estimated they might recover as many as three hundred thousand, they’d actually saved well over half a million, and that had held them up even longer than he’d feared. In fact, it had cost the entire remaining campaign season in North Haven.
Actually, I suppose we could have resumed the advance after we cleared our supply lines … if we’d wanted to end up like Hitler’s army in 1941. There are a lot better Old Earth generals to emulate, though. Carl Gustav Mannerheim comes to mind, for example.
He grimaced at the thought, which was especially apropos, in a less than amusing fashion, given what Owl had just projected across his contact lenses. Green Valley’s troops would probably have fared better than the Wehrmacht had fared in Russia, given the ICA’s specialized winter equipment and training. But they might not have, too, in which case the end result would have been to leave the Charis-Siddarmark alliance at the end of tattered, overextended supply lines, fighting to haul desperately needed food and fuel forward through the wasteland the retreating Army of God had left in its wake.
The consequences of that could have been … unfortunate, and the Alliance had experienced entirely too many of those sorts of consequences when the Sword of Schueler spread blood and destruction across more than a third of the Republic. In the opinion of its leaders—and of Kynt Clareyk—it was time to visit some of that blood and destruction on someone else for a change, and even with the early halt the camps’ liberation had imposed, they’d made a decent down payment over the preceding northern summer’s short campaign season. Far better to get their troops into winter quarters before the full savagery of the long (and bitterly harsh) northern winter caught up with them.
The eight-plus inches of snow currently burying the ground outside his office lent that logic a certain point, especially to the tender sensibilities of a native Old Charisian, and more of it was swirling down on the teeth of that cold, wailing wind. According to Owl’s meteorological projections, the eight inches which would have accumulated by sunset would be closer to ten by morning. Until his first winter in Chisholm, Green Valley had never even seen snow, except for an occasional, innocuous white mountaintop admired from far, far away. Chisholm had been a sobering experience … and not a patch on a northern East Haven winter! It amused him that a Charisian boy had become the most successful practitioner of winter warfare in Safeholdian history, but he was never going to be fond of winter sports.
Stop distracting yourself, he thought sternly. You know this is going to make things a lot tougher when it’s finally time to start advancing again. So what kind of brilliant brainstorm are you going to come up with this time?
Unfortunately, nothing suggested itself to him.
Lord of Horse Taychau Daiyang, the Earl of Rainbow Waters, commanded well over a million men. Last summer, before the halt imposed by the camps’ liberation, only about eight hundred thousand of them had been at the front, and a third or more of those had been deployed as far south as the Tymkyn Gap in the Snake Mountains, over seventeen hundred air-miles south of Rainbow Waters HQ at Lake City on West Wing Lake. But by spring, the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels would have been reinforced to close to two million men. The Army of God would have several hundred thousand new troops in the field, as well, and Allayn Maigwair was already reinforcing the Army of Tanshar, which had moved up to take over the extreme southern end of Rainbow Waters’ enormous front. That relieved Earl Silken Hills, the Southern Mighty Host’s commander of his responsibilities in that area, and that allowed Rainbow Waters to pull his right flank in closer, building an even deeper and better defended defensive zone between the Allies and the Holy Langhorne Canal, the lynchpin of the Church’s northern logistics. By the time the weather permitted the Allies to resume offensive operations, they might well be facing as many as three million well-dug-in troops along a front that extended all the way from Hsing-wu’s Passage to Hankey Sound. Worse, many of those troops would be equipped with far better weapons than the armies the Allies had shattered over the previous summer. And there’d be even more—far more—of those weapons than the Allies had previously estimated, as well.
I’d really love to be able to blame Ehdwyrd for that, but the real culprits are Duchairn and Brother Lynkyn. Well, I suppose we shouldn’t forget Master Bryairs or Brother Sylvestrai, either. And Duchairn and Maigwair’s willingness to pull skilled artisans out of the AOG’s manpower pool came as a bit of a surprise, too. But still.…
He grimaced and shook his head. In retrospect, he should have seen it coming, he thought, reflecting on certain research he’d done in Owl’s databanks once the discrepancy between estimates and actuality became evident. Oh, perhaps he might be excused for doubting Duchairn could find a way to pay for all those rifles and artillery pieces, but given the frenetic rate at which the Church had expanded the number of its foundries and manufactories ever since the Battle of Darcos Sound, the output he was achieving actually made sense.
During the American Civil War back on Old Terra, the Union’s population had been roughly 18,500,000. In the course of the four terrestrial years—almost four and a half Safeholdian years—that war had lasted, the Union had put almost 2,700,000 men into its army and another 85,000 into its navy. It had also equipped all of those men with uniforms, saddles, food, rifles, cavalry sabers, cutlasses, pistols, knapsacks, canteens, and ammunition out of its industrial base. That industry had, admittedly, had the advantage of railroads and steam power—for some of its manufactories and ironworks, at least—but Safehold’s dragons and canals actually gave it better freight-hauling capacity than the Union had boasted, and water had remained the primary source of power for the United States until the 1870s. The need to expand the Union’s industrial capacity during the Civil War had given a significant impetus to the changeover to steam, but the widespread availability of fast-moving streams and the abundance of waterfalls in the Northeast had made water far cheaper. In many other respects, however, that industrial base had been inferior to pre-Merlin Safeholdian manufactories … and the Union had still produced over eighteen hundred bronze and cast-iron field guns—and another thousand 3-inch Ordnance Rifles out of far more expensive, far more manpower-intensive wrought iron—while simultaneously producing the artillery, machinery, and—ultimately—armor to expand its fleet more than fifteen fold.