SBMS152
That afternoon after the conference saw a brief pause in the fighting, before the enemy's skirmishers returned, doubled. My best guess was that the battered companies and detached battalions of the rear areas on this side of their main concentration had been reinforced by an actual organized regiment or two, but what it meant was the resumption of fighting in front of the growing fortifications that would become the first line of resistance when they were done. By evening, an entire Hydromel regiment was on the skirmish line, supported by the increasingly worn-out Third Cohort. My expanded ambulance corps was put to heavy use, ferrying a steady stream of wounded back from the fighting.
Third Cohort lost three dead in the evening's skirmishing, an earth pony stallion named Long Traces, a jenny named Coquille Dure, and an earth pony mare named Steady Step. The militia lost two dozen dead, and the wounded from all four battalions engaged in the fighting filled my farm-house to the rafters, and kept my surgical staff running full-out until hours after midnight. I was finally forced to start designating doctors for enforced sleep shifts, so that I didn't have my entire surgical section collapse at the same time.
The night's storms provided my bustling hospital with a constant soundtrack of roaring downpours, thunder, and howling winds. To look northward from our tents, was like… it reminded me of standing in my grandmother's front door, watching the monsoon sweep the street-filth into the gutters, the eaves spilling over like waterfalls. It didn't exactly leave you dry, but the wetness was a sort of misting back-spray, as the heavy rain-drops and gouting eaves filled the air with a sort of universal humidity.
We didn't get caught in the pegasus-storm, but it certainly didn't leave us dry.
The morning dawned with a resumption of screams and clangour from the front line. The battered and exhausted Third Cohort had been rotated out of the front lines and replaced with the recently-arrived Fourth Cohort, and the Hydromel regiment with one of their sister regiments from Rennet. This was the third day after the rebel had been cut off from their supplies, and command fully expected a full-dress assault today, if it was going to come at all. If the pegasi had accomplished their task, the White Rose would not be swinging north of our prepared positions, not if they didn't want their rankers drowning in endless mudholes and mires. They'd already had several days of that treatment in the mess to our east. Hopefully they were more angry and desperate than cautious and pragmatic by this point.
And the General's troops had been careful to not build up their fortifications in an intimidating or obvious fashion. The lines of resistance were low, and subdued, and didn't look all that much different than the dykes and aboiteaus which had been there before the armsponies started digging. And the storms of the previous several days had soaked the ground everywhere around the Clearances except the Clearances themselves. From the mud-maddened viewpoint of the soggy enemy, we were standing on the only patch of dry land in several days march.
They had all the motivation in the world to drive us off that island of solid ground.
Our skirmishers had orders to fall back under any sort of display, that morning. There would be an end of the furious fighting for every last square inch of Cleared land. Our knocker was hung upon the door, our shield of heraldry was hanging beside the gate, Command was prepared to accept calling cards, and we were ready to accept morning house-calls. And we could hear the White Rose coming, fully prepared to exceed their allotted fifteen minutes, those boors.
They came booming, three regiments deep. Our skirmishers conceded the field, scrabbling across carefully concealed foot-bridges, and filing into the elevated trenchlines dug into the deep dykes which characterized the fields of the Clearances. The last ponies across the foot-bridges pulled away the planking as they fled, and the subtle magic of several of the Company's warlocks obscured their actions as they fled. The Company's magical strong suits was in illusion, and misdirection, and the indirect approach. We were hardly well-prepared for a set piece battle like this, but Gibblets and Obscured Blade had tilted the playing-surface as steeply as they could in our favour.
The advancing, muddy enemy was drawn up in massed units, shields interspersed with pike in a chequer-board formation. They would have been exposed terribly to our bowmares and the heavy bolt-throwers, if it weren't for those damn shields. The bolt-throwers opened up from the forward line of resistance, and the splatter of the bolts self-destructing upon the mystical shielding projected from those shield-units demonstrated the White Rose's stratagem for dealing with projectile fire. Each shield held by an earth-pony in the fore of the advancing regiments flared with etched runes. The enemy's runecasters had been very, very busy, carving dozens, perhaps hundreds of shield-spells into the symbolic wooden scuta.
But not all of the scuta had been created recently – it takes far too long to make even these minor mystical artifacts, and they, well, they age. I'm told by witnesses from the front-lines that a number of the scuta shattered within seconds of the bombardment, and holes quickly opened up in the general shield-wall.
And this is when the bowmares began their fire. A combined vexellation gathered from both the ranks of the Third and Fourth Cohorts, the bowmares massed together were almost numerous enough to produce a proper arrow-storm. Their fire tore through the visible gaps in the enemy shield-wall, and entire squads and platoons of the enemy collapsed under the weight of their arrows. The bolt-throwers continued to hammer away at the rest of the wall, keeping up the pressure.
That would have been that, if the enemy were fools. Even as their shocked regiments kept the pace of their advance, they wouldn't have reached the line of resistance intact under that sort of abuse. But the enemy weren't fools, and they had managed to bring forward their rocket batteries, at least a couple. The screaming howl of those gunpowder-launched spawn of tartarus was enough to loosen a pony's bowels, even from so far away as where I stood, miles away in the farmyard of my hospital. Far closer, for those armsponies in the line of fire, it must have been terrifying.
Far more so if the rockets had been in any sense accurate. The rockets flew all over the field, blasting holes in inoffensive swards of grass, naked soil, dykes, stretches of our fortifications, and the enemy's own formations without any sort of direction or discrimination. Shield-choruses drawn from the Third Cohort's ranks of swordsponies kept the return-fire from molesting the Company's bowmares, but two bolt-thrower crews were shot up by the enemy's rockets, and one crew was wiped out entirely, along with their war-engine.
The enemy might have shouted victory, and charged for the gap. If they hadn't caught their own supports' fire more heavily in the open than the loyalist battalions crouching in trench-lines. The shock of the friendly fire caused the advancing regiments to break and retreat, having inflicted precious little damage for the extent of their display.
But behind them, our forward observers saw twice their number of regiments forming ranks to repeat the assault. And that second assault, delivered around noon, found the traps and mires which we had intended for the first assault. And those regiments' rocketeers proved more capable of directing their fire than the morning brigade's had been. The second assault was a sea of blood and horror, and the White Rose spent a soul for every yard advanced.
Their credit was good for the assault.
Third and Fourth Cohort lost nine rankers and a corporal: earth pony mare, Short Bob; earth pony mare, Soil Foam; earth pony stallion, Foot Hill; caribou buck, Beaten Steel; jack, Braderie; jenny, Soie Fine; unicorn mare, Walnut Riser; unicorn mare, Osage Orange; unicorn mare, Ironwood; unicorn stallion, Corporal Iron Core. The Rennet regiment lost forty-five dead. And we lost the forward line of resistance.
The tanglevines and illusions plotted out by the warlocks protected the withdrawal of the battalions falling back from the burning ramparts of our shattered fortifications, and the random mudholes and quicksand pits bored by the inestimable Humus Brothers stopped the enemy surge dead while they worked out what was solid ground, and what would suck a squad right under the surface of what had looked like harmless sod.
The survivors of the first line of defense brought back with them vital information: the tartarus fire spread by the enemy's rockets could only be extinguished with damp soil – dry dirt would just ignite along with everything else. And there were definitely heavy magical hitters hidden among the rankers of the White Rose. Our ponies could have held the line even in the face of overwhelming numbers, if it weren't for the sudden intervention of some unseen hoof, that had started blasting holes out of the trenchline like something out of Bitter Ambrosia's Annals.
And Obscured Blade was insistent that the enemy warlocks weren't any such thing. He said they smelled like liches to him.