Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume XV

First, reverse thrust on the steam engines. Nick shifted a couple of levers. Then, angling the thrust-he shifted more levers as he continued to lose altitude. Shift the trim weight. More work. He had to crank it back to the tail of the Testbed. In doing these things, Nick lost about two thousand feet of altitude.

"It's coming right at us!" one man screamed.

The big balloon looked to the Polish troops on the ground like it was making a slow-motion dive-bombing run. Not that they had ever seen a dive-bombing run of any sort. The nose of the Testbed was pointing straight at them and it was billowing white smoke. Steam, actually, but they didn't know that.

"Fire, you bastards! Fire!"

Chaos reigned for minutes. Some the men decided to be elsewhere, but a surprising number stood their ground and started shooting.

The Testbed was still out of what could reasonably be considered effective range of a seventeenth-century musket. but it was significantly bigger than the broad side of a barn. Even a big barn. Inevitably, it got hit several times. Bladders filled with hydrogen were struck by musket balls. And nothing much happened. To get hydrogen to explode takes three things, hydrogen, oxygen and a spark. The hydrogen and oxygen need to be mixed together fairly well to get any kind of significant flame. But the crucial issue here was the lack of a spark. The lead shot back from the muskets was indeed still quite hot, but not that hot. Besides, there was all that steam condensation on the bladders and the skin of the Testbed.

"Nothing's happening! It's still coming!"

By the time Nick had the Testbed leveled out at about twenty five hundred feet above ground, it had a couple of dozen holes poked in the skin and three of it's four hydrogen bladders had holes poked in them. It takes a long time for the hydrogen to leak out of a balloon forty feet across. The Testbed continued on, as best anyone on the ground could tell, totally unaffected by the shots fired at it.

As best anyone on the ground could tell.

"Damn it," Nick said. The Testbed was losing lifting gas and was already negatively buoyant. Further, it was not recovering any of the steam it was using to run the engines. So while Nick had hours of fuel left, he had five or ten minutes of water and when that ran out, he would lose power. Nick headed for base. He didn't make it. He literally ran out of steam just over half way there. Absent the engines which had been holding him up, he started to sink, fairly slowly, to the ground. Nose first.

Back at the battle, Gosiewski saw his opportunity but had some difficulty exploiting it. After the disastrous attack of the first day there wasn't a lot of enthusiasm for frontal attacks on the golay golrod. It took a while to get things organized.

Hot Shot Hampstead looked over at his captain. "They'll be coming, sir. Now that the balloon is gone."

"I know." The captain nodded. "But where?"

Hot shot shrugged. "Maybe on the left. There are some gaps on that side. Sure as heck we can't be everywhere." Their unit had been left on the outer wall to stiffen the peasant levies which were unarmed, just there to make it look like the wall was manned. The peasants had sticks painted to look like rifles and muskets, because the Russian government wasn't real big on arming peasants. Armed peasants tended to turn into Cossacks or bandits. Not that there was much difference between the two.

So Sergeant Hampstead and Captain Boyce had been assigned to go to wherever the Poles attacked and shoot so that it looked like the whole wall was manned by armed troops.

Captain Boyce nodded again. "It's as good a place as any, John. Start shifting the men." They could hear shooting from behind them. The Russians were in Rzhev and would be occupied for hours cleaning out the Polish troops in the town. If the outer wall was to hold, it would be them that held it.

"Form the men just inside the wall! We're going to wait right there."

"What about the firing ports, Captain?" Hot Shot wanted to know.

"I'm getting sneaky, John," Captain Boyce told his sergeant. "As important as holding this part of the wall is, convincing the Poles that we are just one of the units manning them is just as important. We need to give them a reason why the other parts of the wall aren't shooting." Then he turned to the peasant levies. "Who's in charge here?"

Having identified the man, Boyce explained what he wanted. "Tie ropes onto the golay golrod. When I give you the word I want you to pull these two sections apart. As quickly as you can. Then when I tell you, push them closed again."

Then man nodded and started giving orders. It would give them a roughly twenty foot front. "John, two ranks only and keep the pike men in reserve. Have the men fire as the golay golrod clear the breach. Then fall back as soon as they have fired. Reload and reform as the walls come back together."

It didn't go like clockwork. Unless you were talking about a clock with a busted arrester gear.

"Open!" The walls started coming back with dozens of men pulling each wall. The troops started firing. Blam Blam, Blam Blam, and the walls retreated. And they did a credible job of retreating behind the golay golrod but then it went to hell. Some men kept going, others stopped too soon and the walls caught up and passed them. leaving them exposed to enemy fire. Almost no one had time to reload because they were too busy moving. Then there were the Polish troops-they had been taking sniper fire from those walls for weeks. As best Boyce could tell, no one gave the order but the Polish formation went into a charge as the walls opened. They took casualties, lots of them, since Boyce's troops were firing from pointblank range. But the Poles saw the breach and ran right over their fallen to get to it.

Boyce ordered the wall to close before it was all the way opened. But it wasn't soon enough. The walls didn't close all the way; they were blocked by Polish troops.

Boyce on one side and John Charles on the other, they struggled to reform the men and close the breach. They weren't alone. The Russian peasants armed with whatever was handy were right there with them.

Ivan didn't really know why he'd been assigned to this wall section, or even why he'd been pulled away from his farm. But one thing he did know was that Polish forces loose in Russia were a bad thing. He'd been hearing the stories all his life, how the Poles had decimated his village and killed his grandfather.

He didn't have one of the fancy guns the soldiers had, but he did have a shovel he used to flatten ground for the walking wall. If nothing else, he and his peers could use their heavy painted sticks against the Poles. And they would, he knew. Nobody wanted the Poles in charge again. The boyars were bad enough.

So he stood in the shadow of the wall, waiting for the inevitable rush of men trying to get inside. Then he swung the shovel, blade out. The Pole dropped to the ground and Ivan swung at the next one. Misha was swinging just as frequently. Some of the Poles got past, of course. A shovel doesn't have much chance against a sword, a pike, or even a flint-lock pistol.

Still, they kept swinging.

"Get a message to Izmailov," Boyce shouted across the breach. "Send a man, now!"

Hampstead grabbed the nearest man and sent him inside Rzhev. "Tell the general we need more men. And we need them now, if he doesn't want the fucking Poles up his backside!"

In a sense, Boyce's trick had worked.

To the Poles it did look like one more weird Russian maneuver using the golay golrod, but their commander thought that this one had backfired. It was clearly poorly planned and not drilled nearly enough. At least, not at the place the Polish force had attacked. It might work better at other points along the line, but that didn't really matter. They had a breach and poured everything they could into it. The unsupported peasants at other places along the wall were not attacked. And the maneuvering to bring forces to the breach cost the Poles time.