//------------------------------// // Trampled Underhoof // Story: In the Company of Night // by Mitch H //------------------------------// SBMS153 The fighting filled my surgical tent, then my farmhouse, then the field-barn. The orderlies were putting up new tents for the later arrivals, and my original staff of doctors were starting to fade, even with the ‘shifts' I ordered. I found out afterwards they had just ignored orders, and several of them kept working until they dropped. We lost ponies that should have lived if it weren't for the sleep-deprived hacks that had refused rest when it was prescribed. I sort of wanted to buck them in the privates, but the fools weren't actually in my command, merely my responsibility. I could only express my disapproval via vigourous discussion. I was glad that these discussions were held outside, though, the mess would have compromised sanitation inside the tents. The cringing, sniveling - bah. It was about this time that the staff from Rye Daughter's second field hospital arrived on scene, and provided an actual rested cadre of surgeons to take over for my herd of imbeciles. They didn't bring their ambulance-drivers or orderlies with them – somepony had to pack up the field equipment and look over the recovering wounded at their previous site – but that mattered less than the fresh surgeons. Orderlies and the ambulance-drivers generally have more sense than the damnable doctors. The night after the fall of the first line of resistance was a busy one on the front lines. Few casualties, thankfully, so we were able to catch up with the aid of Rye's ponies. From all accounts, the enemy's victory and subsequent rough handling by the aerial cohort and the ‘night witches' had left them in chaos, and they didn't get organized quickly enough to storm the second line of resistance in the pre-dawn hours, as any soldier worth her salt would have preferred. The General and her ponies would have been ready for them, anyways. The second line of resistance was actually the main line of resistance, and was posted heavily on both flanks in a pair of abandoned hamlets that dominated the heart of the Clearances. Many of the local tenant-farmers had lived within these two villages, and worked the fields and improvements across this stretch of reclaimed land for the local baroness. You can look the names up elsewhere, I suppose, but nopony other than those missing tenants and their absent landlady cared about that noise. They were all gone, not a soul were to be found when the troops moved in and began dismantling everything we didn't need for the defenses. Barns and silos were torn down to provide planking and protective roofing for communication-trenches, shingles stolen to line defensive berms and bastions. By the time of the first heavy assault by the White Rose in those middle-morning hours, the twin hamlets looked like they'd been worked over by a tandem team of rampaging dragons and ravenous parasprites. Many of the buildings were nothing more than skeletal walls and piles of discarded plaster. That first heavy assault didn't really get a close look at the fortifications, because unlike the first line of defense, this one was well-protected by the General's runes, and heavily ponied. Elements of five regiments held the trenches and bastions, and were well-protected against the barrage of rocketry with which the enemy tried to plaster our troops. The great runes flared, and the shields went up, and the detonations of gunpowder and fiery death-magic englobed the forward arcs of those invisible shields like the sun touching down upon a parched earth. The fires oozed down the surface of that great working, and where they touched earth, great clouds of steam burst outwards away from the loyalist defenses. If the rebel regiments had not paused well back from the bombardment, they would have been par-boiled in their barding by the back-wash of their own tartarus-fires. As it was, accounts and the condition of the recovered corpses rather suggest that they made their subsequent charges more than a little flash-fried, and this may have explained why their initial push was so uncertain. That first charge got nowhere near any donkey, caribou, or pony of the North. A number of scutae-bearers fell to the forward fires of the bolt-throwers, but once their own shields started to break up, the enemy paused and fell back a bit. With what seems to have been at least eight regiments on the field, they paused, and went to ground at only a little bit of return-fire. The ground-troops did not appear eager, I am told. Or perhaps they were waiting for the heavy engines to be brought forward in support. A dozen machines were rolled forward, with two or three scutae-bearers protecting each, and were hammered into the treacherous soil. Treacherous, I say, because only eight made it to solid ground, their sisters dropping into various mud-pits and hidden mire-trenches, their scabbed-over surfaces having been thick enough to carry the tread of infantry hooves, but not nearly thick enough to support the weight of the great machines. When I think of the sweat, blood, and tears it must have taken to have hauled those machines all the way from wherever they had been keeping them – unimaginable. But then, I'm told, the beasts in the traces weren't the sort that bled or cried. Some accounts insist that there were ghouls hauling the heavy war-machines through the crowds of living rebel soldiers. I can't be sure, this was not seen by any Company witness in either direction. Well, none that weren't crazed by exhaustion and battle-madness, but more on that anon. The appearance of those war-machines induced the General, who was on scene, standing within one of the bastions in the centre of the complex, to order the seals broken on the barrels full of specially prepared projectiles, and the bow-mares and bolt-throwers began firing off her apprentices' rune-carved weaponry. And true return fires draped over the shielding protecting those great ballistae. A few of the rebel shields broke under our fire, and the machines flashed into fire and shrapnel before even getting off a shot. The rest of them began thumping away, and heavy projectiles larger than ponies began slamming against the runic wards of the main line. Additional scutae-bearers advanced to defend their heavy ballistae from the battering they were receiving from our own devices and the unicorns. The enemy infantry began creeping forward under this supporting fire, platoons and companies shying away from the front of the war-machines themselves. At first, the officers in the regiments of the line didn't even realize this was a second assault, it crept along so softly, so slowly under the exchange of fires, like a tidal surge. But still they crept. The advancing regiments forming inadvertent columns of advance as they crept across the contested grounds. And some of them hit the secret mud-holes and quicksand traps still seeded across those open, smoldering fields. The advance gained speed as it was noticed by the commanders of the line, and fire was directed upon the enemy infantry as they came forward. They fragmented yet again as some columns of advance stalled in mud and quicksand, leaving perhaps six disordered regimental bodies to shuffle forward, leaning against the fire of the lesser bolt-throwers placed on the flanks of several of the bastions along the line, the crews of which couldn't find a bearing on a vulnerable enemy machine of their own, having turned their fire against the advancing infantry. The heavy bolt-throwers continued their duel with the rebels' heavy ballistae, and at this point the runic shields over several of our bastions cracked and broke under fire. Unicorn shield-choruses in place took over these sections of the defense, posted in expectation of failures such as this. The General herself reinforced her own grand bastion, and it continued its fire unmolested throughout the whole of the day of battle. At a signal, the massed bowmares of the Company crouching in the heavy-bermed bastions likewise turned their fire against the advancing assault columns. The van of the on-rushing rebel infantry melted away like wax, but the pressure of the charge as it gained its momentum built until a wave of desperate, battle-maddened pike-ponies hit the awaiting loyalist pike and spear with an irresistable force. Not swiftly, but insistent and unrelenting. A true push of pike ensued, and our infantry lines sagged back from the ramparts as the press of bodies pushed the dead and dying rebels at the fore over the edge. The enemy clambered over their own wounded and dying, and pressed onwards. The officers of each regiment along the line sent in their reserves, and our northerners pushed their own weight against the screaming horde of easterners. The line firmed, but didn't move. Each incursion along the line was isolated from every other one by the nature of their advance, and a half-dozen half-circles of bleeding and dying ponies screamed and howled at each other over the cacophony; as the precious minutes ticked away, those half-circles slowly merged. Two Company cohorts, placed in preparation on the flanks, descended upon the stalled regimental tangles from both the north and the south, searching for the rear of those boiling columns of desperate, hungry, heavily armed rebels. Fuller Falchion led his ponies in a masked charge from the fresh ruins of the northern hamlet, hidden from enemy view by half-demolished walls. The Second Cohort, fresh to battle, formed a perfect wedge of couched lances, and cut into the northernmost regiment of White Rose regulars. They just fell to pieces before the onslaught of that sword-stallion's ponies, and if the enemy had been one continuous front, I think that would have been the end of the assault – they would have rolled up, and they would have preserved their numbers for another push or two perhaps. As it was, they simply captured the whole of that fragment of the enemy assault, and Fuller Falchion got bogged down trying to extract himself and his cohort from their victorious chaos. The Second Cohort lost four brothers and sisters to the fight for the northern flank. Smooth Stone and Buried Bullion, earth ponies male and female, mortally wounded in the initial crush, of lances crashing against the dense-packed enemy. Point Parfait, that Company jenny who crushed beneath the recoil of the mass, as her section-mates swung away; the Queen of Hearts, that silent caribou doe who never had words for anypony who was not a section-mate, fell cut in a thousand places, bled out from the punishment she absorbed at the head of the wedge, the punishment she took for her sisters and brothers. The experience of Smooth Draw and the Fourth Cohort, emerging from the tumble-down walls of the southern hamlet was not nearly so happy, when they accidentally exposed their right flank, and it caught the eye of a rebel war-engine crew. They were heavily raked by enemy fire before Smooth Draw was able to form an impromptu shield chorus from her few sword-stallions to protect her exposed ponies. Five Company ponies were lost to the projectile fire before protections were thrown up – jack, Petit Marche; earth pony stallion, Green Furrow; earth pony stallion, Grave Dirt; caribou buck, Gestörter Schmutz; jenny, Collier Tourné – all knocked out of the ranks by the heavy bolts of the enemy's ballistae. It weakened the push upon the enemy flank, but eventually, after that wobbly shield-chorus recovered Smooth Draw's flank, they were able to recover and return to the task. Another three Company ponies died in crushing the rebel left flank, and few prisoners were taken on this side of the field. A jack named Handsome Stranger bled out from a hidden wound found too late; an undersized earth pony mare named Offside died of a simple stab wound in the press, and another much larger earth pony mare named ironically Pintsize died from more than a few such wounds. The mass in the middle between those two cohort-advances blended into a sagging wedge of splintered spears and pike, of blood and weakening ponies. The easterners' heavier barding and weaponry might have told against the northerners' light armour and spears, if it were not for the fact that they were hungry, and weak, and tired. They pressed back the centre, and it cracked in the middle, where the northern militia was weakest. As had been expected. The Captain, with the Third Cohort, had been held back in the centre, in expectation of… well, not something quite this chaotic, but some sort of strike through the middle. They had been pulled back to get some rest after days on the skirmish-line, and a week of open-field fighting before that. They had losses to avenge, and blood thundering in their ears and their eyes. The Company standard-bearer strode forward of the van of the advance, that long lanky orange colt with a spare banner streaming back from our great black war-lance, and the Captain behind him. And she bellowed Feufollet's battle-cry, and three hundred throats echoed the Captain's words, and they charged the face of the surging enemy centre, a small black-barded wedge of lowered lances and high keening cries. Carrot Cake's lowered Company war-lance never even touched an enemy throat. The sudden appearance of an apparition of devil-eyed monsters in front of them, at the very moment of desperate victory, was just too much. The rebel vanguard broke and ran, and crawled right back over the pike-shafts of those piled up behind them. Their centre collapsed in a tangle of limbs and pike-shafts and bodies, the rear still pushing forward, and those in the middle were trampled into the mud, both by those in the front trying to get away, and those in the rear still trying to get into the fight. The surviving regiments pushed back in again from each side, and the Third Cohort sealed the breach with a crash I could hear from the forward triage stations I was organizing in the little tent-city behind the line. Once they started running, the assault-columns collapsed into a mob, and those that tried to stay the panic were trampled, and those in the rear fled to their own lines without even waiting for the survivors to tumble back. Many were crushed against the rear and side-berms of the surrounded bastions of the middle, whose sword-stallion and bowmare and axe-pony defenders wrought a terrible price upon any who tried to force their way over their walls. The heavy bolt-throwers never ceased their duel with the now-battered rebel war-machines, whose defenders scattered as they were overrun by the fragments of the assault. Three thousand ponies died in the course of a long noon, most of them rebel soldiers. The finest and strongest regiments of the White Rose, the strong ones, the brave ones - they died in that slaughter-pen. Nopony with weapons in their hooves were spared, and many couldn't drop their weapons in that ugly crush. Later, when I examined the field of corpses, I found more than a few that seem to have simply asphyxiated, too crushed to breath, or just frightened to death. We removed the heads just to be sure. That litchfield would have been vomiting fresh ghouls into the world inside of a week. But that's a story for another day. The northerner regiments that held the line, paid a heavy price for doing so. Nearly three hundred dead in the press, and another six hundred wounded, enough to overwhelm my triage-station and the field-hospital surgeries. The Division of the Reserve fought and died on the line, and suffered heavily for it. They were in no mood for mercy when the enemy broke, and more than a few surrendering enemy that fell into their hooves never made it back to the prisoner-camps, but by and large, the surviving officers kept the troops under control. Brigadier De Villers' body was found at the centre of the line, half-buried by the corpses of her own ponies and those of the enemy. Her brevetcy lasted about forty-eight hours. She would be burned a Brigadier. The surviving surrendered prisoners were mostly taken into custody by a regiment of the Middle Division brought forward to secure the rear area. Nearly a thousand were taken alive, enough to fill multiple stockades. The Company cohorts and Reserve regiments were replaced by regiments from the Middle and Left Division, leaving only the crazed inhabitants of the battered bastions, still intact, still fighting, punishing any rebel who dared to approach the abandoned, half-wrecked ballistae across the bloodied field. The Captain and Major Hardhoof tried to get them to stand down, but they kept to their positions. Surprisingly few casualties came out of those bastions; the battle had just broken around them like the sea around the boulders of the shore. The General finally waved off her subordinates, and told them to let the defenders of the bastions finish what they had started. Many of the bowmares and bolt-thrower crews didn't collapse until dusk swept over the quieting battlefield; dusk, and the pegasi brought us a soaking, sodden rain, that washed the filth of the fight into the marshes to the south.