If there was any single pony who could claim to be suffering the greatest in the unbearably hot and humid climate of the Badlands, it was Captain Frostbite. As his name and his cutie mark, a single stylised snowflake with jagged edges so as to resemble a ninja’s shuriken more than a delicate and fragile crystal of ice, suggested, his special talent was in cold weather survival, which made him uniquely unqualified to fight a campaign out here in the blistering heat of the desert. Every time I saw him he looked thoroughly miserable in this heat, sweating so much that one could mark his passage around the camp by following the trail of puddles he left in his wake, before they dried up, that is.
“We don’t have the luxury of going where our cutie mark leads anymore,” he said, when I asked him why he wasn’t up near the Yakyakistani border where he might be more comfortable instead. “I doubt the Yaks are going to try anything about now, eh?”
The peculiar pronunciation of ‘about’ as ‘a boot’ and the superfluous ‘eh?’ at the end of the sentence identified him as a native of the Vanhoover March, as did the overly dense coat on him, which had defeated all attempts at thinning by clippers and scissors, which made him look rather broader than he really was. He was young, of course, which only made the comparison to the stallion whose position he now filled all the more poignant. Unlike when I had first met Red Coat, however, I gathered that he was already an experienced officer, albeit as a lieutenant stationed on one of the many forts along the northern wastelands shared with our large and belligerent neighbours, and despite suffering in the heat he still attempted to present a thoroughly professional front.
Why him, an outsider, and not a junior officer from the Night Guards who could perhaps more easily step into the vacated position, was something of a mystery to me. Perhaps there truly was no suitable candidate amongst them to take Red Coat’s place, or their own sense of honour forbade them from accepting the dead stallion’s stars, or, as was most likely, this questionable decision was merely the result of an uncaring military bureaucracy that treated ponies merely as numbers on parchment. Nevertheless, he was here, and he would have to get over his extreme aversion to heat if he was going to be of any use to anypony.
“They’re our allies now,” I said, remembering that Pinkie Pie’s unexpected skill with negotiating with a nation of mad, drunken, illiterate, ineloquent savages (though now that I think about it, perhaps it was not so unexpected that she’d get on so famously with the brutes) had somehow broken their self-enforced isolation and opened up the reclusive Yaks to the wider world. “I’ve heard from Princess Celestia that Prince Rutherford wants to send an expeditionary force to the Badlands to ‘stomp bugs’.”
“Smash bugs,” said Frostbite, and I fought off the instinct to strike him for correcting me. “Yaks smash, not stomp, but it looks about the same.”
“Still, if you’re struggling this much now, imagine how Yaks would feel over here.”
We laughed, as imagining a Yak warband making its way here, through the length of Equestria, merely to suffocate in their own dense fur in a climate of precisely the opposite extreme to their native one still precluded the idea that they could be organised enough to scrape together a real expeditionary force. They could hardly spell the word ‘expeditionary’ in the first place. I would eat those words, of course, much later when the impossible happened and the Y.E.F. not only mustered and equipped enough Yaks to form a near-enough full division, but also organised themselves accordingly and managed to make it to the frontline without much trouble, and then proceeded to acquit themselves surprisingly well in battle.
[The Yakyakistani Expeditionary Force was formed by Prince Rutherford, who had expressed concern that the Yaks were missing out on ‘good smashing’ in the Badlands. The Y.E.F. would take part in the final offensives of the war, and in particular as heavy shock troops in the breaching of the Chrysalis Line, the last set of fortifications before the Queen’s Hive.]
Besides that, Captain Frostbite was of average height, good-looking in a sort of rustic manner, and had a rather stocky build even without his thick fur, with a small, decidedly non-regulation beard that he insisted he shaved off every morning but it always re-appeared on his face within three hours. His fur, matted with so much sweat, might have been a rather attractive shade of ice-blue if it wasn’t for the ever-present pale grey and yellow dust that clung to just about everything, and all the more so if something happened to be damp and sticky. I thought that I ought to go and meet him if, as his Company Sergeant Major had said, I was to tag along with him to whatever next battle we were about to be thrust into.
There was something of an ulterior motive to that too; Square Basher was more astute than her clumsy, meal-headed appearance had otherwise implied, and had suggested that this initial meeting should take place in full view before the soldiers of the company. The idea, as I had worked it out, was that the common soldiery would see me, an officer whom they apparently respected and trusted for whatever reasons peculiar to them, getting along with their shiny new officer and consequently think that if I liked him then clearly he must be a stand-up fellow worthy of following into certain death. Personally, I had my doubts that such a thing would work, believing that even the proletarian masses who made up the bulk of the Equestrian Army would see right through such a ploy, but it appeared that they were so enamoured with the myth of the great Lord Commissar Prince Blueblood, Hero of Equestria and all that rot, that they seemed to fall for it. I suppose I ought to give Square Basher some credit where it is due; one does not spend an entire adult life in the military without picking up a few things about how a soldier’s mind works, when it’s not distracted by drink, whores, and trying to stay alive, that is.
It was in the mid-afternoon when we had our staged meeting; Market Garden had called a halt and so we hadn’t advanced from our camp all day, though I’d heard that the PGL had been dispatched on a few scouting missions to our south. This left everypony else feeling rather anxious, and as I had done my rounds earlier I’d picked up more than a few rumours that we would be facing a battle very soon, perhaps even tomorrow. Such talk and the lack of any concrete information had only served to aggravate my anxiety about it all, and so I took extra care to make sure that I remembered to wear that star spider silk undershirt I had commissioned from Rarity’s boutique. As I stood there, sweating in the sun (albeit not nearly as much as Frostbite here), the awful thought that its unique resilience would be compromised by being drowned in sweat intruded into my mind and simply would not leave.
Out of an apparent lack for anything else to do, Frostbite’s company was mustered for an impromptu inspection. At least I managed to convince a few bored pegasi to bring some clouds over for shade, not that the sparse amount they could muster out here offered much in the way of relief from the hot sun. The ponies of the company, the ones who weren’t otherwise occupied with some sort of duty, were arrayed out in a small square in the camp cleared for just this purpose, with the Royal Colours hanging limply from the flagpole overhead. They were all well below parade-ground standard, being on campaign and far from any reliable source of high-shine polish for armour, but despite this they presented themselves quite well despite their difficulties. Besides, neither Captain Frostbite nor Yours Truly could be considered anything approaching ‘presentable’ either after nearly a full day of marching yesterday, our uniforms stained with dust and enough sweat to drown a colony of breezies, so it was not as though we two filthy, stinking officers were in much of a position to criticise the appearance of the common soldiery.
Nevertheless, Company Sergeant Major Square Basher was deeply sorry about the state of her troops as we marched down each row of still, statue-like ponies at attention. “Standards have slipped somewhat, sir,” she said, rather meekly. “I do apologise.”
“As long as they’re ready to fight,” I remarked.
Stopping at one soldier at random, whose name and face has long since faded into the void just like all of the countless others I have met over the course of my career, to cast a critical eye over the state of his uniform and equipment, I saw that although his dark steel armour was covered in dust and the sweat gave his coat a grimy, almost oily sheen, that his equipment was immaculately clean. His musket was presented upright, with its butt resting on the ground and held straight up with his right foreleg; I had very little understanding of how these things worked, and I still don’t as these ugly things exist merely for the benefit of earth ponies and pegasi to make up for the lack of a horn in combat, but I could see that the dark metal bits that actually operated the mechanism were as devoid of dust as one could possibly imagine. At the very tip, pointing defiantly at the sky, the bayonet was plugged into the gun’s barrel, where it positively scintillated even in the slightly-dimmed light of the cloud-covered sun.
“They’re ready to fight, sir,” said Square Basher. She strode towards the soldier before me, who, despite being at attention, could not override the instinct to flinch from the tall mare bearing down on him like a dragon on a helpless sheep. “Aren’t you, colt?”
The stallion hesitated briefly, eyes flitting from Square Basher, to me, to Frostbite, then back to Square Basher. He opened his mouth to speak, but it wasn’t fast enough for the Sergeant Major, who pushed her face uncomfortably close to his and shouted at an unnecessarily high volume, “I asked you if you’re ready to fight, colt!”
“I’m ready to fight, sir!” he shouted back, voice cracking a little. I realised that he must have been barely out of puberty, but I would never have worked it out from his appearance alone, being strapped up in armour and equipment and the characteristic teenaged facial blemishes concealed with a foundation of dust.
“Louder for the Captain and the Commissar!” bellowed Square Basher, her grey face turning crimson. She leaned in even closer until their helmets struck with a loud ‘clang’. “I want Chrysalis to hear it in whatever disgusting hole in the ground she’s hiding in, colt. I want her to piss herself in terror because she knows the Night Guards are coming for her, and you are going to pull her wings off one by one and ram them up the one place where Princess Celestia’s sun doesn’t dare to shine!”
I watched Captain Frostbite flush crimson with embarrassment. “I don’t think that kind of language is necessary,” he said quietly, though Square Basher appeared not to hear it.
“I’m ready to fight, sir!” the soldier roared back, though the sharp, squeaky twinge to his voice undermined the effect somewhat.
“Good lad.” Square Basher wiped the teenage spittle from her face, but she seemed satisfied with this display, and demonstrated it by playfully slapping her dinner plate-sized hoof against the stallion’s pauldron. He was nearly knocked over onto his side. With her delightful mental image now seared into my mind like a brand, we moved on, and another ghost of the rank and file faded into obscurity.
Civilians who are reading this, whether they be ordinary commoners or of the armchair general variety, might have seen the Royal Guard around and about in Canterlot, standing to attention in the various royal properties around our great capital city and being subjected to obnoxious tourists who seem to have forgotten that spears are in fact sharp. Those ponies might also have seen paintings produced by war artists, in particular those employed by the Ministry of Information for the purposes of pure propaganda, of gallant ponies charging triumphantly into battle at Black Venom Pass or Virion Hive and so on, with their armour glistening in the sun and unsullied by the dust kicked up by their hooves. If they could go back in time and see for themselves how those same Equestrian soldiers, especially those of the much-vaunted Guards regiments, really looked, then they simply would not have been able to recognise them. The ponies standing before me were filthy, though they made do with what little time and resources they had, and they stank too; the aroma of body odour, gunpowder, and the latrines permeated everywhere where these soldiers made their camp, in places stronger or weaker depending on the concentration of ponies and the direction of the wind, and perhaps it is this ever-present miasma that lingers foremost in my memory of those unhappy times.
Even the most fastidious of Sergeant Majors, like Square Basher, were forced to accept that the omnipresent dust simply could not be kept off armour, and that cosmetic dents and scratches would simply have to be tolerated where replacements took up valuable space on supply trains needed for food, water, and ammunition. Basic sanitation and grooming had to be kept to a basic minimum standard, and with water being so heavily rationed due to our precarious supply situation, the prohibition on beards (moustaches were allowed, even encouraged, for whatever reason) was quietly ignored. The once-sleek armour became festooned with pouches containing musket cartridges, ration bars, and as many canteens of stale, sterilised water as each pony could carry and still be expected to move. It was a far cry from the sight of rows of highly-polished armour that I had seen in the first months of the war, and, perhaps, the clearest indication of the transformation of the Royal Guard into the Equestrian Army; the superfluous pomp and ceremony had gone, to be replaced by this machine of war. In truth, I felt rather sad at this realisation, and I looked forward to a time, hopefully soon, where the only soldiers I would meet were the ones standing to attention next to Princess Celestia, with spears instead of muskets and armour so shiny I could check my handsome face in the reflection.
There was, however, only one thing that could overpower the lingering background stench of the camp, and the sudden wave of concentrated unwashed socks alerted me to the arrival of my aide, Cannon Fodder, a good few seconds before I heard him approach.
“General Market Garden wishes to see you, sir,” he said, holding out a small note scribbled on a scrap of paper torn off from an envelope. The unidentifiable organic grime from his hoof stained it into illegibility.
“Thank you,” I said, suppressing the minor flitter of anxiety in my stomach. It meant one of two things -- either Market Garden wanted to show off the new pocket watch that she’d bought for the new offensive, or she was planning something painful in my immediate future. I hoped for the former, and from what I’d heard from Major-General Garnet it was rather a nice pocket watch, but as a gambling pony, which ranks somewhere in the middle in a list of my various sins in order of severity, I would have placed all of my money and the shirt off my back on the latter.
“I thought Field Marshal Hardscrabble was in charge, sir.” Cannon Fodder’s words interrupted my train of thought before it careered right off the tracks and over a cliff.
“He is,” I said. “But he’s in overall command of the theatre, and he’s tasked Market Garden to lead the 1st Army into the Changeling Heartlands.” Presumably to mollify her after she threw a small fit over not getting the field marshal’s job herself, thought I.
“As the Princesses will, sir.”
As a result of all of the mess that I had endured over the past few months, my actual job (and you, dear reader, cannot begin to grasp how insulted I continued to feel, that I, a prince, had a job now with a salary, like a common pony) had been in something of a confusing pickle. In addition to my role as an independent commissar attached to the Two Sisters Brigade headquarters, who was also apparently free to run off with a battalion when the mood took me, I was still a ‘lord’ commissar also attached to Market Garden’s personal staff, with the aim to smooth out the rather jagged parts of her personality that did not lend well to maintaining the sorts of professional relationships between general officers of different ranks. In reality, that did not mean much, aside from sitting in on meetings and reassuring slighted ponies that her bluntness was not to be taken personally, so there remained a glimmer of hope, shining like gold at the bottom of a refuse pile, that this was merely another dull meeting about logistics that required my presence to add a sense of gravity to the proceedings.
I made my apologies to Captain Frostbite, who was probably grateful for the opportunity to go and lie down in the shade somewhere until night came when the temperature would drop to a level he was more comfortable with, and I followed my aide and his odour over to Market Garden’s command marquee. As expected, she had positioned her headquarters prominently in the centre of the camp, from which she could keep an intrusive eye on everything that took place here and make sure that everypony knew that she was really in charge. A large, sprawling gazebo-like structure that consisted of a cover of stained, dusty cloth, which also served as some form of aerial camouflage as if the thousands of ponies around it were somehow missed by the Changeling scouts, stretched over a series of tall tent poles, it was, as ever, a hive of activity. However, I noted that, as with Hardscrabble’s office back in Virion Hive, most of the furniture and files, except for the map table, were still packed away in various boxes and crates ready for the expected advance.
The map table was in the centre of the tent, and, I noted as I followed Cannon Fodder into the shade granted by the marquee, was bigger than Field Marshal Hardscrabble’s one back in Virion Hive. It looked newer too, having only a lighter patina of dust than everything else in the camp, and seemed to be of a collapsable sort that could be easily folded down and transported. Market Garden herself was perched over it like a gargoyle, peering down at the maps arrayed out before her in that all-too familiar pose. Her generals of corps, division, and brigade, plus a few staff officers and the odd commissar, were gathered around the map table with the air of a group of morticians around a hideously-mangled corpse they were expected to make appropriate for an open casket funeral. As I approached a free space at the map table, I felt as though the next funeral I would be attending would not be of some elderly aunt I had never met or a cousin who drank himself to death, but my own; the scene before me only confirmed my suspicions about imminent violence in my future.
The meeting was already underway when I arrived. A commissar, with considerably more gold lace on his uniform than mine, was in the middle of speaking: “...operating in this area, and they may be of some assistance here.”
Market Garden shook her head emphatically. “Princess Luna’s partisans are unreliable - an ill-disciplined, un-trained, and under-equipped gang of thugs and brigands - at best they would only be a mild distraction to the enemy. We cannot depend on them in this battle.”
The commissar looked as though he was about to argue further, but clearly thought better than to try and batter down the General’s stubbornness and gave up with an awkward shrug. It was then that Market Garden noticed that I had turned up, at unreasonably short notice I might add, and she hopped off the table.
“Ah, Blueblood,” she greeted. “Good of you to finally arrive.”
“Prince Blueblood,” I sneered, as I took off my cap and tossed it, top down, onto the table in front of me.
Market Garden grinned, apparently still taking my annoyance at her refusal to use my proper title as some sort of shared little joke. The damned thing was that there was nothing I could do about it; she didn’t care enough about other ponies to stop if I asked her politely, and firing a general who, in spite of her personality, had become quite popular at home thanks to ‘her’ victory at Virion Hive, hardly reflected well on me. I would have to simply put up with it, and hope that other ponies did not take it as an invitation to follow her rude example.
While I was quietly simmering away in futile irritation, she picked up her swagger stick in her mouth and tapped the end on a point on a map just close to her. “Natalensis Hive,” she said, getting straight to the point as ever. [Presumably after taking the stick out of her mouth.] “That’s our target. It’s a vital source of love and slave labour for the Changelings, and that’s why it must be taken.”
“Forgive me, ma’am,” said Major-General Garnet with barely-concealed contempt dripping off each word. “Another siege?”
The Field Marshal pulled another one of her smug little smiles. “No, Natalensis Hive is not fortified and not garrisoned,” she said. “It has no walls, no towers, no trenches -- completely open, and there’s nothing to stop us from simply walking in, except for the Changeling war-swarm perched on the high ground to the north-east of the city. I have selected I Corps to drive the enemy from the hills.”
“Horsefeathers, not us again,” I heard Lieutenant General King Fisher, the elderly pegasus stallion with a fishing rod cutie mark standing to my right, whisper to me under his breath. I hadn’t seen much of him, it just occurred to me, as given Market Garden’s tendency towards micromanaging the various units of ponies under her 1st Army, most of the generals gathered around the table probably felt somewhat redundant there.
“What was that?” asked Market Garden, quite pointedly.
“I’m honoured, ma’am,” said King Fisher. “Truly honoured.”
Even one as socially inept as General Market Garden could see through that, and she gave King Fisher a positively withering glare before moving on. “The Changelings have just announced that Queen Chrysalis has appointed Hive Marshal Chela to command the war-swarms on this front.”
There was an audible, collective gasp in the assembled generals, and a few whispered to one another in hushed, shocked tones. The name did not mean much to me at the time, not having been terribly interested in whatever was going on with the other fronts, being sideshows to the main event here, but the reactions of everypony else present told me everything that I needed to know -- that this Chela, whoever they were, had a reputation, and Changelings only gained such reputations with Equestrian officers for being brutal, ruthless, and skilled. A pattern emerged, in which whatever we had done to make our fighting forces more effective, the enemy invariably followed suit; we brought in Field Marshal Hardscrabble, and now they brought in this Hive Marshal Chela fellow.
As the growing anxiety spread throughout the ponies in the meeting, and despite knowing very little as ever I was starting to catch it too, Market Garden merely smiled. “Finally,” she said, after having allowed her officers sufficient time to build themselves into a state of mild agitation. “A worthy opponent.”
[Chela needs little introduction, but to provide some much-needed context for Blueblood’s narrative, the ‘Desert Buzz’ had previously commanded the Changeling forces in the Eastern Theatre of the war, where she had directed the only reversal of the Equestrian advance into the Badlands and had pushed the 2nd Army back to the border. She was rewarded with a promotion to Hive Marshal and sent to replace the captured Odonata as the commander of the main Changeling swarms defending the Heartlands.]
Her display of her usual pig-headed confidence seemed to calm the generals, and the talk devolved into the usual tedium of these meetings -- troop movements, supplies, logistics, projected casualties, water, hay, ammunition, and so on -- and I stopped paying attention to it, both utterly bored and horrified by what I was hearing. I rarely had anything of worth to say in these meetings anyway, beyond the usual platitudes about our duty to the Princesses and to Equestria and all of that other vacuous nonsense that they nevertheless ate up. However, in spite of my lack of interest in the dreary conversation I found my attention drawn to the assortment of maps and aerial reconnaissance photographs scattered all over the table, while Market Garden bloviated about finally getting the sort of set-piece battle she had fantasised about.
I’m rather fond of maps, even military ones; there’s something quite enticing about the promise of exotic foreign lands and ponies in the lines and barely-pronounceable names there on parchment that excites the imagination, and sets one’s hopes up high only to be disappointed by the real thing. I found a topographical map of the city and its environs, which somepony had disfigured with some scrawls indicating the positions of the Equestrian and Changeling armies. The city itself was a large sprawling blob at the centre, looking like the cartographer had spilt some soup on the parchment and then drawn its outline in ink, and even I could see that it would be a damned tricky place to defend even with the high ground around the city. A cunning general might hide her forces inside the city itself, blunting our superiority in magic and firepower by dragging us into the quagmire of street-to-street fighting, especially with civilians in the way to complicate matters. So, when I saw that the enemy had done the ‘conventional’ thing and placed her forces atop that high ground outside the city, marked out by a series of little green boxes with crosses and circles within, that immediately set off an alarm bell the size of the one in the Cathedral of the Sol Invictus in my head.
“It’s a little bit too convenient,” I blurted out, interrupting Market Garden mid-speech.
“Pardon?” She glared at me from across the sea of maps and stationery.
I held up the map in my magic for all to see. “Just a thought, General,” I said, and as everypony, generals and commissars alike, turned to watch me, I felt an inkling that I might be making a fool of myself by telling these much more experienced military ponies how to do their jobs. It was too late now, so I thought I might as well commit fully: “The enemy has placed her forces in a very prominent position on these hills, directly in front of our own positions, almost daring you to attack them directly.”
Market Garden didn’t quite roll her eyes, but the slight nod of her head at least hinted at that gesture. “That’s entirely the point, Blueblood,” she sneered. “We finally have the enemy where we want her -- no more manoeuvre or Changeling trickery this time. Tomorrow, there will be a battle.”
That hardly abated the somewhat tense atmosphere that had descended under the marquee, and it was Major-General Garnet, ever the self-important voice of reason, who spoke up on its behalf: “Ma’am, I think we ought to at least consider the possibility that this is a trap. Chela pulled something like this in the Battle of the Gazelle Village, where she made a decoy attack to the north and-”
“Enough,” snapped Market Garden, cutting off another one of Garnet’s lectures (though in this case, I thought it was actually pertinent to the discussion at hoof for once, and I certainly wouldn’t have minded letting him ramble on). “I was afraid of this; you’re so scared of what Chela might do that you’re paralysed by indecision. That’s why the Eastern Theatre was in retreat. We have total superiority in firepower here, so any trap that she might spring on us will only be a temporary setback for us. Look to your own commands and prepare to fight a battle, that is all that is required of each of you.”
Market Garden’s confidence was infectious, but unfortunately I was naturally immune to such things by now. Nevertheless, the generals around me seemed to draw some degree of comfort from her bull-headed insistence that she was going to win the war for Equestria, and, I suppose I have to grant her credit here, kept them all focused on the task at hoof instead of fretting about what the supposedly unbeatable Chela was going to do to us. What other option did we have? Besides running home away from this whole war business, of course, but few ponies present would be amenable to that suggestion.
That did not stop me from fretting, however, and I paid little attention to the remainder of the meeting as my mind became focused on how in blazes I would go about weaselling my way out of this mess. My aristocratic sense of honour and noblesse oblige had brought me into it, and the ancient tenet of Dictum Meum Pactum [My word is my bond] forbade me from turning around and saying ‘On reflection, I think I’d much rather not go into battle against the most feared general in Chrysalis’ vast swarms, thank you very much’. I could only console myself with the fact that I was dealing with a neophyte officer, who, although experienced enough to be promoted to Captain in a new Army that now forbade ponies from purchasing their ranks, had never seen a battle in this theatre, and therefore I could rely upon Square Basher’s NCO-instincts prompting her to protect him, and by extension me as long as I remained close by his side at all times. It was quite a risky strategy, but short of destroying the reputation that had shielded me from the more mundane, bureaucratic terrors, it was all I had.
However, once the meeting had finally wrapped up and everypony but Yours Truly was buoyed with a newfound confidence for tomorrow’s fight, I had made a last ditch attempt to find something, anything, at Brigade HQ that could keep me from having to follow through with my hasty promise. Unfortunately for me, the only cards left on the table were more assignments with the other units of the brigade, as standing back at a safe distance with the Brigadier was apparently snapped up by a more enterprising commissar than I, so I was rather stuck with Square Basher and Frostbite.
As ever, I did not sleep a wink that night, but as I struggled with sleep for most nights the effect it had on me the next morning compared to others was negligible at best; a cup of that strong Trottingham tea seemed to perk me up a little, but did nothing to assuage my mood. I spent much of the early morning, as the army martialled itself out of the camp and organised its various units and detachments, fretting anxiously while everypony else got to work. How my aide Cannon Fodder took my nervous pacing around between the tents and my quiet mutterings that it was all hopeless I’ll never know, for it was almost impossible to guess what thoughts rattled around inside his skull, but that he continued to stick by my side throughout this entire mess seemed to imply that he thought that it all served some higher purpose.
The well-drilled machine that was the Equestrian Army had mustered itself just as the sun was raised over the hilly horizon. The entirety of I Corps was arrayed out in a column and advanced, in true steamroller fashion, across the vast wastes of the Badlands towards that high ground Market Garden had pointed out on the map. Generals seem to find the high ground very reassuring, and I pondered this as I trudged on in this great column weaving through the wastes, for in the absence of any clearer directives from above they would always default to taking the biggest hill they could find. This obsession seemed a little redundant when both armies have soldiers gifted with flight, but my wandering mind considered that the fact that our erstwhile General is an earth pony might have something to do with it.
The air was filled with the noise of an army on the march; with the rhythmic thunderous beat of thousands of sets of hooves striking the earth, of clattering armour and equipment, of myriad snorts and whinnies, and of NCOs barking at their sections and platoons to keep their lines dressed and to watch their spacing. Choking dust, kicked up by the marching horde, was like a dense mist that obscured almost everything beyond a dozen paces that I could see. Not that I could see much in the first place; I was further back in the formation, so my vision was limited to the ranks of ponies immediately before me anyway, the sight of the regimental colours of the Night Guards fluttering defiantly in the warm morning breeze, and of the hills rising over this dust cloud before us.
A sense of deja vu struck me as I gazed up at those hills, which had emerged into view after about an hour of marching. These formed a ragged, broken line across the horizon, and looked perilous to climb with their pits and gullies. I could make out the formations of the Changeling swarm there, as dark long rectangles atop the peaks of those hills, almost daring us to charge up there and attack them in a head-on assault. Indeed, as I saw them there, placed like a damned obvious target that the likes of which Market Garden and Hardscrabble couldn’t possibly ignore, the words that I had said in that meeting in the day before echoed through my mind like a violent sneeze in a quiet art gallery: It’s a little bit too convenient.
Nevertheless, here we were. There was nothing I could have done to dissuade a pony like Market Garden, more bull-headed than a minotaur, from an idea once it becomes cemented in her head and especially if she thinks she came up with it, and all that I could do was trust in her apparent belief that overwhelming firepower always trumps alleged tactical genius. I wasn’t so sure; not being a general, I had very little idea of the supreme art of strategy beyond the bits and pieces that I had unwillingly picked up, but I had fought the Changelings for long enough to have learnt the painful lesson that they are always, seemingly without fail, up to something. It was like a pony believing that poker is really a game of random chance playing against a veteran gambler with half a dozen aces slipped up his neatly-pressed double cuffs.
The army came to a halt. At once, the constant cacophony ceased with a final, almighty clatter of that one last hoofstomp. My ears, at last, could have a temporary respite from that appalling racket, at least until the battle began, as it always does, with an artillery barrage. I heard a few mutterings elsewhere and the distant shouts of corporals and sergeants keeping order in the ranks, along with a few muted coughs and whinnies drifting on the stale breeze. Again, my view of the proceedings was quite limited on the ground; all that I could see were the ponies immediately around me and the hill ahead, of course, though when I thought to look up I saw that our pegasi had taken flight and remained hovering in set, straight formations above us. I smelt the all-too-familiar stink of sweat and fear, and I would wager that a not-inconsiderable amount of it came from me.
Frostbite, who had been marching beside me, was quietly shivering in his sabatons as he stared up with wide eyes at the vast array of Changelings perched upon the hills. The poor chap; this was probably the very first time he had laid eyes on a war-swarm, and even with my benefit of distance and experience it was not a pretty sight. The dark mass, though neatly arranged with a precision that would make Square Basher envious, looked like a stain upon the landscape -- a malignant growth, despoiling all that it touched, and spreading its tendrils north into our beloved realm.
“Scared, Captain?” I asked.
He tore his eyes from the ghastly sight ahead of us and looked at me. “N-no, sir,” he stammered out.
“I’m glad one of us isn’t,” I said, pulling a faithless grin. “I’m terrified.”
That bit of rare emotional honesty, wrapped up as the sort of cocky assurance that ponies expected of me, seemed to settle his nerves a little. Mine, however, were frayed to the point of near-collapse, but I was merely better at hiding it; unlike most common ponies, I had to learn to hide my true emotions from a young age lest I receive another beating from my father. That, at least, paid off now in presenting a facade of stoic implacability.
Now that the incessant noise of the army on the march had ceased with its halt, I could hear the blood thumping in my ears like the synchronised hoofsteps before. I felt sick, as I always do before a fight, as though my insides were writhing about under my skin and trying to escape from me. Yet I somehow managed to stand still and straight, shoulders level and head held high as a soldier apparently should, despite every conscious and subconscious urge pulling on my limbs to make me turn and run like the coward I truly am. I fought to keep my breathing level, which was no easy thing given the amount of dust that thousands of ponies’ hooves had kicked up, but focusing on each breath -- in and out -- helped relax me somewhat. It was madness, truly, to hurl bodies at a Changeling swarm perched atop a hill for reasons that I barely understood; Market Garden had decided that it was of vital importance to the war and we had to do it, and ponies would have to die for it.
Our artillery finally opened fire. A series of almighty crashes, like close thunder, split the relative silence, and Frostbite nearly jumped out of his boots. A pony somewhere made a quip about one of their comrades passing wind, but the laughter and the redressing from the sergeant was drowned out utterly by the second volley. I couldn’t see the cannons from where I stood, surrounded by ponies, but I could work out that they were somewhere in front of the formation. It made sense, I supposed, as even the old guard of officers would not have been daft enough to risk firing on their own ponies, at least on purpose.
All that I could see was the distant effect that Market Garden’s ‘total superiority in firepower’ had on the swarm above us. White and grey streaks arced gracefully through the sky, and then plunged into the dark mass of the Changeling formation. Much of the roundshot fell short, kicking up small plumes of dust as they skipped across the sun-baked ground, as the artillery ponies were getting their range in. A few, likely from Bramley Apple’s battery, struck true and tore out great gouges in the formation that were quickly sealed with more drones.
“They’re running away!” exclaimed Frostbite, and the relief was evident in his voice. Indeed, the Changelings were on the move, and the swarm inched its way backwards over the crest of the hill.
I exchanged a few glances with Square Basher and Cannon Fodder, as the three of us tried to mentally sort out which of us would be the one to tell him. Fortunately for me, it was my aide who punctured his balloon: “They’re moving to the reverse slope, sir, where our artillery can’t hit them.”
“Oh.”
Our cannons continued firing on the retreating Changelings, becoming more accurate, and therefore more deadly, with each shot. The bombardment grew in intensity, no longer single, regular volleys, but accelerated into a rapid crescendo as each gun, and there must have been many of them, was fired at the peak ability of its crew. Further conversation had become impossible. The noise was a constant, rolling drumbeat, with each gun barking with its own unique tone and timbre to become an orchestra of devastation. Yet for all its loud bluster, the bombardment seemed to have little overall effect from what I could see; it must have been horrifying for the poor drones there, expected to retreat in good order with the threat of randomised death from afar hanging over their chitin, and having been on the receiving end of artillery before I could sympathise, but they had somehow managed it, no doubt in part due to that insane fanaticism that Odonata had spoken of before.
The last slivers of the black horde slipped over the crest of the ridge and the Changelings were out of sight. The cannonade ceased, save for a few desultory shots at the peaks of the hill out of spite, which did little more than knock off a few inches off the maximum height of these interesting geological features. The smell of burnt powder drifted along the breeze, mingling with the general scents of sweat and fear. Relative silence descended once more, though it was interrupted by the occasional distant, distorted ‘thud’ of a mortar or a howitzer being fired in the hopes that the shell, fired at an oblique angle, would land somewhere where the enemy was hiding behind that hill. At least when the cannons were going off it was impossible to even think with all of the noise, as the thoughts of what was to follow were utterly drowned out. Now, however, came the imaginings of the horror to come, and with them the sharp, acid sensations of anticipation -- the fluttering of the heart, drying of the mouth, and the damned restlessness.
Somewhere, a bugle called out a lively tune, followed by another, and another in answer, until it rivalled in volume the artillery bombardment we had just witnessed. The drummers rapped out a tattoo in imitation of the cannon-based score that preceded them. I could make out the Prism Guards, far off to our right, call out their famous chant in time with the drums: “Vive Celestia! Vive Celestia! Vive Celestia!”
“Bloody Prenchies,” I heard Square Basher mutter under her breath. “I thought I smelt garlic.”
It was madness. Pure, utter madness; we were marching straight into a trap, my instincts told me that much, but looking back I don’t think I could have articulated it in any way that would have convinced Market Garden from deliberately springing it. In her mind, her faith in sheer, bloody brute force would overcome any trickery the enemy could muster. There was no way out for me now -- I touched my chest, feeling the sturdy fabric of the star spider silk undershirt that I had bought at great personal expense underneath my dusty wool coat, and prayed that it would be enough to carry me through the rest of the day. That’s what I told myself then and there, that I would only need to worry about surviving to the end of the day and it would be over until the next one, which I would be better prepared to escape from.
“Shall I give your order to advance, sir?” asked Square Basher.
Captain Frostbite tore his eyes from the sight of the hills we would be fighting and dying over, and looked up at his Sergeant Major. “Sorry,” he said, blushing fiercely under his helmet. “Give the order, Square Basher.”
The big mare nodded, sucked in a deep breath, and bellowed at a volume that could have been mistaken for the Royal Canterlot Voice: “You heard the Captain! Company, Forward march!”
The Guards Division had taken the bait, and we advanced on Hill 70.