Eric Flint: Grantville Gazette.Volume XV

"Back to the walls," Izmailov roared. "These pigs are well stuck."

Janusz Radziwill was dead, and most of his officers. The remaining force inside Rzhev were rounded up and under guard. "Back to the walls," Izmailov roared again. Tim gathered the men he'd been leading and headed back to the breach in Rzhev's walls.

"There's nothing there but peasants and sticks," Gosiewski shouted. "You're not turning back from peasants, are you?"

The Polish forces pushed toward the breach again.

"Here they come!" Tim's voice cracked on "come."

But it didn't matter that he was only seventeen. The men followed him readily. Nor were they the only group. Russian troops were turning over their prisoners to anyone handy and heading back to the walls. Unit cohesion ceased to exist. But by then most of the Poles in Rzhev were unarmed and most of the citizens of Rzhev weren't.

Suddenly Tim stopped dead in his tracks. They had reached the outer wall but the Poles weren't actually coming at them. They were nowhere near the breach. The Poles were crossing in front of them, not preparing to attack. He looked around trying to make sense out of the confusion and chaos that was battle.

Rzhev had been retaken. The volley guns and cannon that had been preventing resupply were no longer needed in that role. They hadn't been moved in preparation for the battle because the general didn't want the Poles across the Volga making a dash to reinforce Rzhev "while we're trying to take it back." But now, what purpose were the volley guns serving? He turned to find a man with an AK3 near him.

"Can you hold here with what you have?"

"I should be able to. Besides more men are coming all the time. What you have in mind?

What Tim had in mind was so far above his authority that it wasn't even funny. "Never mind. You men! Stay here." Then Tim ran. By going inside the inner wall, he shortened the distance he had to travel considerably. It still took him ten minutes to reach the volley guns. And considerable shouting to get them to pull away the wall section. "The general's orders! Bring the volley guns and follow me."

Of course, they weren't the general's orders; they were Tim's orders. And if the general decided to make an issue of it, Tim was going to be in a great deal of trouble. But somewhere during the battle the career of Lieutenant Boris Timrovich had decreased in importance. What was vitally important was getting the volley guns where they were needed.

Tim stood on the volley gun platform, which was being pulled by two steppe ponies. It wasn't a grand gesture; he needed the height to see over the wall to locate the breach. "That way!" He pointed. "Another hundred yards."

Tim and the gun crew were inside the inner walking wall. Just on the other side of it was a mob scene, packed with Poles slowly pushing back. The Russian defenders were spread along the wooden trench made by the two walls. Carefully, they lined up the volley guns at points where wall sections met.

That was when Tim realized the flaw in his magnificent plan. The golay golrod were made up of wall sections that could be latched together. But the latches here and now were on the other side, they couldn't open the walls. They knew where the latches were; there was one near the top one and near the bottom. Tim cursed himself for a fool. "We'll have to move the volley guns to where we control the walls." He climbed back up on the gun platform and looked over the wall again, almost getting shot for his trouble. "Over there." He pointed back the way they'd come "three wall sections."

When they got to a section that the Russians mostly controlled, Tim used the volley gun platform and scaled the wall. This time he almost got chopped up by a Russian peasant with a shovel already bloody and covered with gore. "Open the walls! Open the latches! Let the volley guns through!" And, surprisingly enough, that's just what they did.

The Russian version of the volley gun was an outgrowth of the same technology used in the AK3. The plates were loaded with black powder and minie balls and were ignited by a quick fuse. They were slower firing than the ones in the west, but Russia was still having trouble with primers. They had twenty-four barrels arranged in three rows of eight. And the prep work was done on the chamber plates hopefully before the battle started. So all that was needed to reload was to pull a chamber plate and replace it with another then light the fuse. They were cranked, but only for traversing.

The last Russian slipped from in front of the volley gun. The gunner lit the fuse and started cranking. Crack Crack Crack Crack.. . twenty-four barrels in order. Then the gunner pulled the plate, inserted another and did it again. The gunners for the volley guns were big men. The plates weighed upwards of thirty pounds.

The volley guns wouldn't have been enough by themselves, but they took the pressure off the Russian troops long enough for a semblance of organization to occur. Unarmed peasants retreated to be replaced by armed musketeers carrying AK3s and the weight of fire shifted.

"Lieutenant Timrovich, you are to report to the general's quarters."

Two weeks after the battle, things had stabilized. Rzhev was surrounded by three walls, one inside the other. The Rzhev wall that had been built in a somewhat haphazard manner by the Poles and the two layers of golay golrod together constituted a formidable defensive network. Starving the victorious Russians out would take time. Meanwhile, the walls were bolstered by sand bags and firing platforms. Neither Tim nor General Izmailov had yet had occasion to mention Tim's orders to the volley guns, given in the generals name. Tim had been starting to hope-against his better judgment-that the general was going to let the whole thing slide.

"What am I going to do with you, Lieutenant?" General Izmailov sighed rather theatrically. "I have been reading a translation of an up-time book on a French general who had an elegant solution for this situation. He was dealing with a general, not a lieutenant who acted on his own authority. At their base, the situations are quite similar. Bonaparte's elegant solution was to give the general a medal to acknowledge his achievement." There was a short pause but Tim knew he was far from out of the woods.

General Izmailov continued, "Then, to maintain good order and discipline in the army, he had the man shot for disobeying orders." General Izmailov paused again and waited. Tim remained silent.

"What do you think of Bonaparte's solution, Lieutenant? I could have you a medal by sunset."

Tim gulped and hesitated, looking for the right words. "I can't say it appeals to me, sir. But I grant that the solution has a certain, ah, symmetry." He stopped. Tim really wanted, right then, to bring up the political consequences to the general should he find it necessary to execute a member of a family of such political prominence, even a minor member of a cadet branch. He didn't. Maybe it was because it would sound like the threat it was. But no, really it was because Tim understood that while what he had done was the right thing for that battle, it was the wrong thing for the army. He had sat in the Testbed and watched as Colonel Khilkov used his family position to destroy a couple of Russian cavalry regiments. He knew as well as General Izmailov that if word got out, his example would be used to justify every harebrained glory-hound for the next hundred years. Who knew how many people that would kill? Tim had known when he was doing it that it would cost him, but not how much.

"For political reasons I can't use Bonaparte's elegant symmetry. You will get neither the medal nor the firing squad. Those political reasons are only partly to do with your family." General Izmailov gave Tim a sardonic smile. "I will take the credit for your brilliant move and it may save my life when I must explain to the Duma my acquiescence to Colonel Khilkov's less-than-brilliant actions. We will say that it was a contingency plan. You will get a promotion, then you will receive the worst jobs I can come up with for some time to come. You will accept those jobs without complaint! Understand me, Lieutenant. You deserve the medal you will never get, but you also deserve the firing squad that you won't face this time. Don't make the same mistake again."