Harry Turtledove - Advance and Retreat

How would it break down? What would happen when it did? He had no idea. Sooner or later, he would find out. Meanwhile…

Meanwhile, he kept marching through the mud. As long as he concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, he didn’t have to think about anything else. Sometimes, even for a barrister, not thinking came as a relief.

Darkness fell earlier every day. Getting a fire started with wet wood wasn’t easy. “Where’s a mage when we really need one?” somebody grumbled.

It was, Gremio thought, a good question. The north had held on as long as it had in this war because its mages were generally better than the ones the southrons used. Being better for battle magic, however, didn’t necessarily mean being better for small, mundane tasks like starting fires.

Gremio looked around. He didn’t see any blue-robed mages around, anyhow. He had no idea what they were doing. His mouth twitched in what wasn’t quite a smile. A lot of the time, they had no idea what they were doing, either.

Some of his men still carried half-tents that they toggled together to give them shelter from the rain. More, though, had long since abandoned such fripperies or had never had them to begin with. Gremio’s mouth twisted again. Tents weren’t the most important thing on his mind right now. A lot of his men had no shoes. That was a far more urgent worry.

Eventually, by dousing wood with oil that wouldn’t be used on wagons now, the soldiers got some smoky fires going. They huddled around them, trying to get warm. Some poked bare toes toward the flames. Gremio pretended not to see. The only way those men would get shoes again would be by taking them off dead southrons.

Along with his men, he toasted hard biscuits over the fire. Toasting made the weevils flee, or so people said. Gremio hadn’t noticed that much difference himself. Every so often, something would crunch nastily under his teeth when he bit down. He’d learned to pay little attention. Weevils didn’t taste like much of anything.

Smoked and salted beef accompanied the biscuits. No bugs got into the beef. Gremio suspected that was because they couldn’t stand it. Every time he choked down a bite, he wondered who was smarter, himself for eating the stuff or the bugs for having nothing to do with it. He feared he knew: one more thing better left unthought about. But marching made a man hungry as a wolf. If you didn’t eat all you could, how were you supposed to keep moving dawn to dusk? You’d fall over dead instead. Gremio had seen men do it.

Thisbe said, “Another day or two and we’ll be back in Franklin.”

“Seems only right, since we’re the gods-damned Army of Franklin,” a soldier replied.

“That’s what it says on the box, anyways,” another soldier said. “But this’ll be the first time in almost a year we’ve really been there-since the stinking southrons ran us out after Proselytizers’ Rise.”

Low-voiced curses, and some not so low-voiced, made their way around the campfire. All the men who’d been with the regiment then still felt the Army of Franklin had had no business losing that battle. The southrons had swarmed straight up a steep cliff, right at everything King Geoffrey’s men could throw at them. They’d swarmed up-and the northerners had run away, leaving the field to them.

“A regiment of men could have held that line,” Thisbe said, exaggerating only a little, “but a whole army didn’t.”

“Thraxton the Braggart’s spell went wrong.” Gremio spread his hands, as if to say, What can you do? And what could they do-now? Nothing, and he knew it only too well. “The spell was supposed to fall on General Bart’s men, but it landed on us instead. We didn’t run because we were cowards. We ran because we couldn’t help it.”

“Well, to the hells with Thraxton, too,” Landels said. “Scrawny old sourpuss never did lead us to anything that looked like a victory.”

Heads bobbed up and down. Gremio and Thisbe nodded along with the ordinary soldiers. Blaming Thraxton the Braggart meant they didn’t have to blame themselves. But they knew they’d fought as well as men could. Thisbe said, “The one time we had as many men as the southrons-when we fought ’em at the River of Death-we whipped ’em. And then Thraxton threw that away, too.”

More nods, some angry, others wistful. If they’d laid proper siege to Rising Rock, if they’d starved General Guildenstern’s army into submission… If they’d done that, the whole war in eastern Detina would look different now. Could they have done it? One man in four at the fight by the River of Death had been killed or wounded. Thraxton hadn’t thought they’d had it in them. Maybe he’d been right. But if they couldn’t follow up a victory, what were they doing fighting this war? No one seemed to have an answer for that.

A runner with his hat pulled low to keep rain out of his eyes came splashing up to the smoky, stinking fire. “I’m looking for Captain Gremio,” he announced.

Gremio got up off the oilcloth sheet he’d been sitting on. He wondered why he bothered with it, since he was already good and wet. “You’ve found me.”

“Colonel Florizel’s compliments, sir, and he’s meeting with all his company commanders in his pavilion,” the messenger replied.

“Now?”

“Yes, sir-as fast as all of you get there.”

“I’m on my way.” As Gremio walked toward Florizel’s tent, he reflected that that was one way to tell Geoffrey’s men from Avram’s when they spoke, for most of the differences between their dialects weren’t great. But, while men in the northern provinces said all of you , those in the south had a separate form for the plural of the second-person pronoun, with a separate set of verb endings to go with it.

Sentries in front of Florizel’s tent saluted as Gremio came up. The regimental commander was a stickler for the forms of military politeness. Returning the salutes, Gremio ducked inside.

He was glad to find only a couple of the regiment’s other nine company commanders there ahead of him. “Good evening, your Excellencies,” he said-both of them were barons, not that either was liege lord to much of an estate.

“Good evening,” they answered together, an odd mix of caution and condescension in their voices. They were nobles, and Gremio wasn’t, which accounted for the condescension. But he was not only a barrister but had more money than either one of them even if he didn’t own land. That accounted for the caution.

One by one, the rest of the company commanders came in. They were noblemen, too. Gremio and they exchanged the same sort of greetings he’d given their fellows. When the last captain squeezed into the pavilion, Colonel Florizel said, “Gentlemen” — he nodded to Gremio, as if to make sure Gremio knew he was included among that elect group- “I want you to convey to your men the certainty that we can yet win this war.”

“Hells, don’t they already know that?” demanded Captain Tybalt, one of the two who’d been there ahead of Gremio. He had courage to spare and a temper hot as dragonfire, but no one had accused him of owning a superfluity of brains. He went on, “Of course we’ll lick the gods-damned southrons.”

It hadn’t seemed like of course to Gremio for a very long time. While he tried to find some way to say that without actually coming out and calling Tybalt an idiot, Colonel Florizel said, “We’re getting entirely too many desertions. Spirits are down. Some of the soldiers seem to think we’re bound to lose. We have to fight that. We have to fight it with everything that’s in us. Do you understand?”

Some of the soldiers have the sense of ordinary human beings , Gremio thought. But Captain Tybalt didn’t seem the only company commander astonished at the idea that his men might need encouragement.