SBMS032
As night followed dusk, we tried to settle the new arrangements in the expanded medical quarters. We were quickly running out of clean rags and bandages, so I set Rye Daughter and one of the oxen to running our tiny laundry-hearth, while I did the rounds in the wards and checked the concussion-cases for problems and the older wounds for seepage or signs of rot. A couple hours into the night, the camp was thrown into turmoil again, and the ground cohorts began to muster again in the marshaling yards, which would have been churned into impassibility by this time if it weren't for Mad Jack and his pathological need to plank everything that didn't buck back. Most of the aerial cohort had never returned to camp at all.
Eventually, somepony thought to update me on the ongoing chaos. The enemy had sent a reconnaissance in force westward from Lait Blanc at some point earlier that evening. They thought. it was all very vague, I think because the aerial ponies were overstretched and off-balance. We had never gotten notice that the two battalions we had destroyed on the Bride's Road that afternoon had been separate columns; that miscommunication had nearly shattered our allied militia, nearly caught the ground cohorts out of position. I think that Tickle Me's ponies were trying to prove something that night, because they just swarmed whatever it was that the caribou tried to push down the main road to the battlefield. Normally they'd just quietly follow an enemy night-movement overhead, and the rebel would never know they were being followed. Instead, the pegasi and griffins were counting coup, dropping rocks and improvised stakes on the heads of the enemy.
The Lieutenant had called out the ground cohorts, and sent them back out to the main road in hopes of getting behind the enemy movement, getting between them and Lait Blanc. The luck was against us that night, and the Company was no-where near in position when a group of caribou managed to reach the abandoned battlefield in the darkness.
Apparently it wasn't nearly as abandoned as I had thought. I don't know if some stragglers drifted back from the brush onto the road and were just lost, or if the local ponies had turned out in force to loot the wreckage, but the caribou found somepony on the field, and from all accounts, they scared the hell out of each other. There was some sort of scuffle on the battlefield, and afterwards we found some unfamiliar donkey and earth pony bodies on the field, along with a couple caribou corpses which *might* have been fresh – it was hard to tell given how much of a mess we had left behind earlier that evening. The militia were no help – they had a couple dozen missing at the time, and it would probably be days before we got a full accounting of how many we'd just missed in the clean-up, and how many were straggling all over the district. It's easy for militia-ponies in an unfamiliar province to get turned around and lost; they're trained, but they're not professionally trained.
The caribou panic was contagious, and the fleeing forward patrol stampeded the main body of the enemy. We think. The pegasi and griffins tried to pin down the fleeing rebel force, raining everything that came to hoof on their heads. It just re-doubled the panic, and they were at a dead gallop when the head of the first cohort reached the crossroads with the Bride's Road. Our forward sections made a hasty charge to try and intercept the flight. A good number of caribou went down, some of them not even trying to defend themselves, but the mass simply parted around our disorganized hasty attack like a flash flood around an obstruction.
And like a bridge caught in a flash flood, the Company's vanguard was nearly swept away. It nearly turned into a real fight for a few desperate moments before the rebel remnants got untangled from us and continued their flight, those that were able. The next morning found the nearby drainage ditches full of drowned caribou, some with broken legs, some just dead for no apparent reason except they fell in the dark and couldn't get out.
This blind skirmish in the dark was what got me sent back out with some of my oxen, the ambulances, and my last set of sanitized surgical tools. We set up in the muck just short of the crossroads, and I operated out of the back of an ambulance; I used a set of nightsight charms in the darkness, fearing to attract attention with torches or lamps on a chaotic battlefield. Most of my casualties were broken bones and more concussions; there were a surprising lack of open wounds and punctures. Later, we found the road between the battlefield and the crossroads littered with abandoned pikes. The caribou had just thrown away their weapons, and had fought through our attempted ambush with their war-shoes and antlers. I think they would have pried off their shoes as well if they had the prybars to hoof.
The Marklaird had come out to play by the time I was set up. He and the aerial ponies harried the fleeing caribou all the way to the encampment gates outside Lait Blanc. It was a much reduced body of rebels that rushed those gates, and the little warlock put the cherry on the sundae by blasting the gate open ahead of them I'm told the panicked rebel just collapsed on their haunches in the roadbed, wild-eyed in fear at the sudden flaming wreckage of their sanctuary, but unwilling to return in the direction they came. By morning, the town proper was littered with deserters lurking in every alley, afraid to return to their units.
Morning also brought a few casualties from the aerial cohort. The rebel had apparently hacked together some clever war-engines, and mounted them on the walls of their compounds. Light multi-bolt ballistae, they apparently didn't have a high rate of fire, but one burst caught a flight of griffins as they rose up from a bombardment run, and another raked a couple incautious pegasi. Their brothers hauled their riddled bodies back to my ambulances at the crossroads, and we were just lucky they didn't bleed out on the way.
I sent the oxen with the other ambulances back to our compound with full loads, and was working on stitching back together the wing-base of a griffin named Gertie when Rye Daughter arrived in the back of a supply cart with my portable surgery table and a load of clean bandages and my re-sanitized surgical tools. Behind her, was the bulk of the III Verdebaie, and they turned onto the main road and headed for Lait Blanc to join the Company's main body, which were advancing cautiously on the enemy encampment.
Rye Daughter also brought word that the militia regiments encamped in the direction of the provincial border were also advancing on Lait Blanc. We were keeping our distance because the rebel encampment was teeming with war-engines, and they were flinging indiscriminate long-distance death at anypony who approached their walls. Mad Jack and his pioneering details arrived not long after the militia passed by us, and they descended on the neighboring woodlots to start hacking out planking for mantlets and other necessaries for a siege.
I finished up on Gertie, and sent her into the compound with the next ambulance. A pegasus with a bolt through her right primaries was laid out on my surgical table, and I got to work on her with the fresh tools and supplies. It had been a long night.
It was a longer day.