Лео Франковски - Conrad's Last Campaign

“Near the end of the battle, we saw a boat beached on our side of the river. We dropped the two rocks on it and then charged hard before they could burn it. We lost four hundred men getting across the beach, but once we got on board, it was pretty easy to kill the crew. We knew the khan always rewarded men who brought back new weapons, so we immediately began to salvage what we could.

“We were able to chop most of the works out of the hull and load them onto our artillery wagons. That big thing there lay across three wagons and needed over a dozen horses to pull it. Once we were out of Poland, we had the engineers build some big wagons like our grandparents used to move their yurts, only much bigger, and then it took us over four months to get it home.”

“Your adventure was an epic one and I have personally heard the khan praise your accomplishments. However, we are ignorant scholars please explain to us what made these boats worth the effort. What was so special about the?’”

“For that, you must know something about the battle. I was in charge of over a thousand Chinese engineers and two hundred cavalry. We didn’t have cannon because this was supposed to be a fast raid and there was no time to drag cannon across the steppes. If we had had our cannon, these boats might not have been so dangerous.

“We did, however, bring the metal parts needed to build trebuchets. My men had been cutting logs and loading them onto wagons in the week before the battle, so when we reached the river we were able to assemble several good machines over the period of a few days.

“We reached a wide river, perhaps a li across, but before the bridging crews could get anything up, we saw boats approaching, about as big as a standard river cargo boat. It took a little while to realize that they were being moved by that paddle wheel over there. We figured that they had men operating the wheels from inside, like they row Korean battle boats from inside, but they were damned fast and damned big.

“They were also bigger and better armed than the Korean boats. The Korean boats had low metal roofs with blades sticking out the top to keep you from boarding and a fire thrower in the bow. Some had small cannons or crossbow platforms. We killed them pretty easy by just putting a lot of men on top of them and chopping a way in .

“These were a lot different. They were bigger and looked like a floating fort. They had six bu high walls covered with metal and battle towers at each corner, and they didn’t use crossbows.

“The first time I saw one from the bank, they opened up with those small cannons you have over there. One shot killed my chief engineer, wounded the assistant standing behind him, and broke a horse’s leg. The damned things shot almost as fast as a bow.

“I got my men off the bank and down behind a hill but then we started hearing strange sounds, something like a clap mixed with a bellows sound. I never heard anything like it before and grenades started dropping on us.

“I thought that they were tossing grenades with small trebuchets, but when I peeked over the top, I saw men dropping grenades into tubes.”

He walked over next to a five foot high tube and rested his hand on the rim. “We kept this one off the boat we captured and there’s another one in one of the wagons. They would light the fuse on a grenade, drop it into the tube here, then stomp their foot and the tube would make that weird sound and toss a grenade the size of your head about ten times as far as a man could, and they could fire as fast as a bow.

“When one for the bridging crews decided to ignore the boats and bridge the river anyway, when we found out that they had fire throwers on the front of the boats. We weren’t able to salvage the one off of our boat, but I see that you have a smaller one sticking out of that war wagon.

“They aren’t much better than our own fire throwers except that they seem to shoot a lot farther and ours were thousands of li away.

“About the middle of the second day, we got orders to cross the river. Ogedei must have thought that no matter how good those little cannon were, they had to run out of ammo sometime, and we had armies of auxiliaries that we didn’t want to feed on the way home. In fact the boats were a probably what made him attack. There must have been fifty on this river and any country that can afford to build that many must be very, very wealthy.

“We could easily have turned south and taken Hungary, but Poland was obviously much richer and, as I said, we had a lot of surplus auxiliaries to use up.

“I don’t think it turned out like he planned. Every time we charged over the banks, the boats showed up, and they had another weapon. The men called it the Demon’s Breath. Every boat had a tower at each corner and those towers began slinging metal balls faster than you could count.”

Chief Gan paused to look around the floor. “There. These things are mixed up.” He picked up a large leather bag off the floor. “These are what they fired. They’re metal balls about the size of a china man’s nuts. We dug these out of one of the riverbanks and cleaned ’em up. They came out of that wheel thing on the wagon. ”

He dropped the leather bag next to a one bu wheel sitting on its side in a wagon. “This thing sat the other way up in a tower. It spun like crazy and threw these balls like a magic sling. They came like hail stones and there was no way past them.

“I think Ogedei just didn’t believe how bad they were. I heard that we lost over three hundred thousand auxiliaries and twenty thousand real troops before we learned how to kill the boats.

“After a couple of days, they started running out of ammo and we learned to kill them with our trebuchets. Mostly we burned them with bags of flaming oil, but this one we killed with two stone balls.

“It was in some kind of trouble and was up against a river bank. We smashed it up and then managed to get on board before they were able to burn it. It was the only unburned one we captured.

“Even then, we didn’t have much time. The Poles always came back to burn captured boats and we couldn’t stand up against a boat with a working flame thrower and Demon’s Breath.

“We had five hundred men with axes alive after we boarded. The engineers pointed out what they wanted, and we chopped it loose with our battle axes as fast as we could. The men were told to chop things out without hurting them, and they did their best. As fast as they chopped things loose, riders roped them and dragged the stuff over the bank, sometimes thirty or forty horses pulled at the same time.

“Sometimes we had to make fast choices. There were four towers where the demons breath was mounted, so we chopped one down and took it with us. There were two identical mechanisms attached to the paddle wheel, one on each side. We could have gotten by with only one, but I didn’t want to damage the paddle wheel by hacking one side off.”

He motioned us to follow him as he walked over to the large machines that were attached to the paddle wheel. “These were all that were attached to the paddles. You should lay them out straight. The paddle wheel was at the back and there was a machine on each side of the boat attached to a crank on the paddle. There wasn’t any place for rowers and we didn’t kill anyone that looked like a rower. These things were also attached to big tea kettles inside the hold.”

“Tea kettles?”

“I don’t know what else to call them. They were big round barrels lying on their sides. There was water running out of them and there was fire under them, so ‘tea kettle’ is the best description I know.

“They were pretty badly smashed by the second rock we threw and too big to get out, so we didn’t bring one back.”