Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume XV

The Polish forces didn't flee. Three thousand Russian cavalry faced a wall of about two thousand Polish infantry, armed with pikes and muskets, as well as the Polish cavalry. The infantry stood in ranks and waited. Then they lowered their pikes and the Russian cavalry charge ran headlong into a porcupine made of men. Then the Poles fired. It was unlikely that the volley killed many men, but it was enough to shatter the Russian formation.

Then it was the Polish cavalry's turn. They were outnumbered but they were fighting a scattered unit. Colonel Khilkov tried to rally his men and almost managed it. But the Polish infantry had slowly-as infantry must-advanced while the Polish cavalry had been cutting its way through the Russians. Once their own cavalry was mostly clear, the Polish infantry opened fire again.

"It's all over, mostly," Nick said. There was, it seemed to Tim, a coldness in Nick's voice he had not noticed before. "We'd better head back to General Izmailov and tell him."

Tim nodded, tears blurring his sight. He kept seeing little cavalry units being picked up off a playing board while he looked at the clumps of bodies on the field. It was too far to tell but he knew many of the men in those cavalry units. He knew some of men whose bodies made up those clumps. "The general's not going to be happy."

The little boyars with their fine horses had left the field, those that still could. Routed by soldiers who worked for pay, not glory. Nikita restarted the engines and headed to the column.

By the time they got back to the column, it was crossing the Volga at Staritsa and Tim had himself well under control. He made his report and the general discussed the way the battle had gone. Whoever had commanded the Poles had kept his Cossacks in reserve. Which was a bit of a surprise; probably the greatest Russian weakness was in tactical mobility. Of course, a Russian army that was mostly cavalry was unusual, too.

"I am concerned about the loss of the cavalry," General Izmailov echoed Tim's thoughts. "The cavalry units were most of what tactical mobility we had. We can't afford to be caught away from the Volga. We'll need it for supply. It's a hundred miles along the Volga from Tver to Rzhev. I am going to take the main force straight to Rzhev. But I am sending Captain Boyce and his people along the river to grab up every boat they can find. You're going with them, Tim. I don't really think they'll bug out again, but better safe than sorry."

"Yes, sir. What do I do if they do bug out?"

"They won't. That's why you're going. I'm sending a squad of musketeers with you, but they are just to keep you safe. Captain Boyce knows that if his company fails in its mission, you'll take the musketeers and come tell me about it. Then he and his people won't get paid."

To supplement their rations, the Musketeers with their new AK3s went hunting between villages. Russia was sparsely populated compared to the rest of Europe and there was quite a bit of game. Captain Boyce and his sergeant were impressed with the guns. When they asked Tim about it, he called on one of the musketeers to do a show and tell.

Daniil Kinski set the butt of the AK3 on the ground and the tip of its barrel came not quite to his nose. If any of them had been familiar with the up-time weaponry, they would have noticed a marked similarity to a Kentucky long rifle. But that similarity was not complete. Like the long rifle, the AK3 was a flintlock with a long, rifled barrel. It was forty inches long, if you didn't include the chamber, which was four inches long. Daniil then lifted the AK3 and showed them how the chamber was removed. "The chamber, as you can see, is a steel case, not including the quarter inch lip that inserts into the bore of the barrel. Behind the lip, the front of the chamber is flat and supposed to fit flush to the bottom of the barrel. It doesn't always fit as flush as we'd like, so we made some leather gaskets." He pulled the gasket off the chamber and showed them. "We still have the flash from the pan and the touch hole, but that's no worse than any flintlock."

Daniil stuck the gasket back on the chamber and the chamber back in the rifle primed the pan, cocked, aimed, and fired.

Crack!

Then he pulled the chamber out, stuck it in his pouch, inserted a loaded chamber with a gasket already on it into the AK3, primed the pan, aimed, and fired again.

Crack!

Relative to muzzle loading a musket it was very fast. Plus, since both shots had been aimed, they had both hit the tree that was his target… some eighty yards away from where they were standing.

Daniil pulled the second chamber from the AK3 then leaned the rifle against a tree while he showed them how to reload the chambers. Daniil filled the chamber with a measured amount of black powder then pulled out a lead cylinder "It doesn't use a round ball, it uses a Krackoff ball." Which an up-time observer would note had a certain resemblance to a Minie ball, in that it was a cylinder with one flat end and the other rounded. But it fit snugly into the chamber. "Push down till the Krackoff ball is flush with or a little below the lip of the chamber," Daniil said. The chamber wasn't cylindrical on the outside. Instead it was designed to fit into the AK3 only in such a way that the touch hole lined up with the flint lock on the side of the rifle.

A week later, while Tim and his crew were still collecting boats on the Volga, the Russian force surrounded Rzhev. In a way, General Izmailov was surprised. His force seriously outnumbered the forces in Rzhev and he had half-expected the commander of the Polish mercenary force to realize that and withdraw.

Janusz Radziwill had considered doing just exactly that. His officers had suggested it. However, Janusz was a young man who had already thrown the dice. If he retired from the game now, things could get really bad at home. Besides, the ease with which they had dispatched the cavalry suggested that they could hold and break the Russians against their recently built ramparts. So he allowed General Izmailov to reach the town, hoping to bait him into to another rash attack.

General Izmailov didn't take the bait. Instead, he surrounded the Polish encampment and started fortifying, using the golay golrod. Now it came down to a question of who would be reinforced first.

"What are those things and what good are they?" Tim looked up at the badly accented Russian. It was the sergeant from the mercenaries. Ivan-no, John was the English form-John Charles Hampstead. He must not have been near Moscow during the testing. The army had been encamped around Rzhev for about five days when they arrived.

The mercenaries of Captain Boyce's company had done a decent, if not spectacular job. " Golay golrod. Walking walls, you might say, or walking forts."

Hampstead said, "Fine. That's what they are. What good are they?"

A group of peasant draftees were pushing one of the golay golrod into position. Tim pointed at them. "They are made of heavy plywood. They let us build fortifications very quickly. In winter we can even put them on skis for ease of movement. Right now, of course, they're on wheels…" Tim's voice trailed off. He thought a moment.

It was heavy plywood. The panels were a good three inches thick. The wheels could even be turned a little bit. And that's what the workers were doing now. They were pushing the wall back and forth to maneuver it into a gap in the wall. One of the things that had come out of the testing was that the walls were a lot more likely to stop a bullet if it hit them at an angle, so they were being set up at an angle to the city wall around Rzhev. Since the workers were filling in a gap in the wall, they were quite prudently staying behind the wall they were moving. Even if they had been in effective range of the Polish muskets-which they weren't-all the Poles would be able to see was the wall. Not that the workers seemed convinced of that. They were peasants, not soldiers of any sort. They weren't armed and weren't expected to fight, but were here to carry supplies, set up camp, and other support roles.