That would help—help a lot—in the upcoming campaign, and the truth was that the Allies didn’t actually need to repeat their battlefield successes on the same scale as the previous two years. Victories were needed, yes, but the Church simply couldn’t sustain its current level of production indefinitely. Even Rhobair Duchairn’s coffers would inevitably run dry and the permanent isolation of South Harchong from the north would cut off any future weapons production from that source for the Mighty Host.
All of which meant there was no way the Temple would be able to replace losses on anything remotely like last year’s scale a second time. The bad news was that it was up to the Imperial Charisian Army and the Republic of Siddarmark Army to inflict those losses, and Rainbow Waters wasn’t cooperating.
That’s why they call the other side “the enemy,” Kynt, Green Valley thought sardonically. Why, oh why can’t all of their field commanders be as stupid as Kaitswyrth or Duke Harless? Or even only as smart as Nybar or Wyrshym? But no!
Rainbow Waters was as determined to avoid experiencing blood and destruction as the Allies were to visit them upon him. He had entirely too cool and calculating a brain with which to do that avoiding, too, and Carl Mannerheim would have strongly approved of his latest brainstorm. What Green Valley had just finished viewing was only the latest in several full-scale field experiments the Harchongian had authorized. He knew he couldn’t match the full capability of the Allies’ new-model artillery, but he was beginning to receive enough heavy guns of his own to let him at least approximate a Charisian-style bombardment, and he’d held many of them near his headquarters in Lake City to keep them concentrated while he experimented not simply with the best way to use them but the best way to defend against them.
Captain of Horse Rungwyn had built a fortified “line” a mile wide and three miles deep, and then Lord of Foot Zhyngbau had done his dead level best to blow it up again. Constructing something like that in the early stages of a northern winter had been no picnic, even for Harchongese serfs accustomed to a still harsher climate, but Rungwyn had persevered.
In a lot of ways, Rungwyn reminded Green Valley of Admiral Sir Ahlfryd Hyndryk, the Baron of Seamount, except that Rungwyn had possessed no military experience before the Harchong Empire raised the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels. He was a civilian engineer, and a very good one. That was one reason Rainbow Waters had selected him for his current position. Another was the fact that he was almost as smart as, if thankfully less innovative than, Seamount, and his commoner background left him blissfully unhampered by aristocratic prejudices. But the fact that he had absolutely no training as a military engineer was perhaps his most important qualification, since it meant he’d had so much less to unlearn.
The IHA’s engineers, like every other Harchongian, were the best, most effective practitioners of their art (whatever that art might happen to be) in the entire world. They knew that, whether anyone else did or not. The fact that they had exactly zero experience with the new-model tactics and weapons Charis had introduced was a mere bagatelle. Certainly those newfangled toys were no reason to panic or allow themselves to be stampeded into abandoning the tried-and-true techniques they knew worked!
It was possible that existing senior officers could have been taught better, but it was unlikely it could have been accomplished in time to save the Mighty Host from disaster. So Rainbow Waters, with a directness Alexander the Great could only have envied, had cut his own Gordian Knot with a blade named Rungwyn. It hadn’t made the captain of horse any friends. In fact, he was as well aware as Rainbow Waters of the innumerable enemies he’d made. Unfortunately for the Allies, he was just as focused on winning the jihad as the Mighty Host’s CO, and he’d already moved his family to Shwei Province in the South Harchong Empire. He liked the climate better there … in more ways than one, and many of the merchant and banking families of Southern Harchong were already floating tentative post-jihad employment offers in his direction.
In the meantime, however, he’d approached the question of new-model fortifications with a completely open mind, and the results promised to be extremely painful. Good as current Charisian artillery was, it had yet to approach the effectiveness of the TNT-filled shells of Earth’s twentieth-century wars. Sahndrah Lywys’ version of TNT might change that, but not in the next few months. Pilot lots had already been completed at the Delthak Works’ new satellite facility, and the new explosive—designated “Composition D” after the site of its development—had been tested very enthusiastically by Sir Ahlfryd Hyndryk at his Helen Island proving grounds, but the new explosive wouldn’t achieve true volume production until late spring or early summer. That meant all of the artillery shells available when the upcoming campaigns began would still be charged with black powder, and black powder—even the current Charisian “prismatic” powder—was an anemic explosive compared to something like dynamite or TNT. And, unfortunately, some of Rungwyn’s efforts would have been a serious challenge even for the massive artillery bombardments of 1916 and 1917.
He’d demonstrated that in experiments like the one Green Valley had just watched. Worse, he, Wind Song, and Rainbow Waters between them were in the process of formulating an entirely new doctrine to use those fortifications. It was one the Imperial German Army of 1916 would have recognized: a deep zone of successive belts of trenches and fortified strong points designed to absorb and channel an attack, diverting it into preplanned defensive fire zones. And just as Rainbow Waters had been prepared to modify the Mighty Host’s hand grenade design to produce a weapon his slingers could launch to extraordinary range, he’d signed off on the local production of the equivalent of Charis’ landmines. He didn’t have barbed wire—yet, at least—and the Mighty Host’s mines were less powerful and less reliable than the current-generation Charisian product, but within those limits, he was well on the way to producing something Erich von Falkenhayen would have recognized only too well. Neither Rainbow Waters nor Rungwyn had quite gotten to the point of deliberately allowing the attacker to advance until he’d outrun the effective support of his own artillery before throwing in a crushing counterattack. Given the way their current discussions were trending, the competent bastards were almost certainly going to arrive there eventually, though … and quite probably before the Allies were prepared to resume the offensive.
Perhaps just as bad, Rungwyn had been devising ways to attack his own fortifications. Some of his notions about combat engineers and demolition charges were unhappily similar to those the Imperial Charisian Army had worked out. Whatever Rainbow Waters might be telling his superiors in Zion, he clearly expected the Mighty Host and the AOG to be defending their positions this summer, rather than attacking. He wasn’t about to pass up any offensive opportunities that came his way, however, and Rungwyn’s mindset—and the mindset he was instilling into the engineers he was cycling through his training programs as rapidly as possible—was likely to provide Allied commanders with some very unpleasant experiences if that happened.
And Zhyngbau’s no prize, either, Green Valley thought grumpily. The man’s spent entirely too much time corresponding with Maigwair and Brother Lynkyn, than actually thinking about the best way to use his new guns. And he’s done too damned good a job of analyzing what we’ve done with them. His tools won’t be as good, and he won’t have the advantage of Ahlfryd and Ehdwyrd’s new toy, so we’re still going to have a huge advantage in reach, range, and flexibility. But he’s damned well going to evolve the best technique he can for what he does have, and he’s got a hell of a lot more than they ever had before.