By My Sword Alone by David Black (best e books to read .TXT) 📗

He caught himself starting to wonder why, just as it became obvious why. If the charge was going to hit home and scatter that Russian line, it had to go before that other damned Russian battalion loosed another volley, otherwise there might not be enough Dzików left standing to deliver a killer blow.

The bugle’s tinny blare cut through everything, even the sudden pounding of hooves; even above the ragged cheer his men were sending up from somewhere in that opaque roil of smoke. James spurred Estelle to follow his troopers into the battle.

When he caught up, there was no first squadron or second squadron. All he could see were troopers’ backs, and corporals-of-horse urging troopers forward to fill the gaps in the first line as the advancing mass of dragoons picked up their pace.

James’ two squadrons, now collapsed into one mass of men, hit the Russian’s kinked line at a brisk canter, sabres drawn. Fewer than two dozen of the fusiliers had managed to deploy back to face the Dzików, and even then, they only stood two deep. Their raised muskets, bayonets fixed, managed to skewer a couple of dragoons as their lumbering mounts carried them through, but nearly all those Russian fusiliers died or were maimed under the dragoons’ relentless slashes.

The main Russian body, three ranks deep, then took the Dzików’s full blow. Horses ran into and trampled the green-coated infantry, splintering the ranks, some of the Russians falling under the horses’ hooves, others under their riders’ sabres. Others just turned and ran. For those closest to the flank, they ran into dragoons whose mounts were carrying them curling round the back of the Russian line, and went under their hooves too, or fell to flashing steel. The others, on pumping legs, were simply fleeing to any open space not filled with dragoon chargers or other Russian soldiers liable to get in their way.

The entire Russian line began to disintegrate, like leaves from an autumn branch, and as it did, the Dzików’s cohesion collapsed, too. Their line split, and clumps of them, and then individuals, broke away to chase down the fleeing infantry, slashing and skewering as they went.

So the next volley from the enfilading Russian battalion sent its lead balls mainly into open space. James felt the whiz of them in the air and the draught of a couple, as Estelle carried him over the carnage. He was aware of the trampled and sliced bodies beneath him, but he would not let his eyes linger there, and anyway, the blood was too dull a colour in the washed out, lightless, smoke-choked air to assume its full horror. He must not dally, for confusion was everywhere, and he needed to ride through it to find thinner smoke – to see if their charge had saved the pinned line of Polish grenadiers.

As he rode, he rallied lone dragoons, until over a dozen Dzików were clustered around him as they exploded between banks of smoke to find themselves already in amongst the flank platoons of another Russian regiment, the one facing off against the Polish grenadiers.

James had been desperately trying to keep a picture of the battlefield in his head when he was confronted by an astonished Russian sergeant’s face where only smoke and shadow had been. He’d had no sense of his own speed as he rode forward, and now the man’s solid mass seemed about to flash past him – which was when he saw the sergeant’s halberd coming up to meet him, the spike of it right in the path of his trajectory, like a wrong angle getting in the way of his solving an exercise in trigonometry. Too fast; everything too fast. He hadn’t even his sabre in his hand, and his left hand – gripping the reins too tight to his body – was in the way of him reaching across to draw it. No time. His right hand went for his long saddle pistol; the left hand reached to parry the halberd and then the pain of the blow as his heavy gauntleted hand and halberd staff connected. The pistol out of its holster and up, pointing in the Russian’s huge moustachioed face, a hand’s breadth from his bared teeth; and then his finger squeezing as his aim and the weapon’s barrel and the Russian’s face went disappearing behind him, out of his field of vision. And the explosion as the powder ignited and the ball travelled from the barrel into the Russian’s mouth; so fast no human eye could see – so fast, even the wreckage of its passage was gone and James was slewing Estelle so as not to collide with one of his Dzików troopers stabbing into the back of a running Russian fusilier, right in his path.

Another rending, deafening, rippling crash; another volley, from out of the smoke to his right. The fleeing fusilier and the pursuing Dzików went down in front of Estelle’s pounding hooves, like some invisible cheese-cutter had sliced them away below his vision. He felt Estelle rear, and leap beneath him as she cleared the flailing legs of the stricken horse and its thrown, tumbling rider.

The volley had been the grenadiers’ reply, and it took Russian and Dzików alike. More fleeing Russians to be sabred, but their mounted officers were coming into view now; halberd-waving sergeants trying to halt the flight, and dense clusters of blanco-ed cross belts and green coats dimly perceived, marching in formations James could not make out in the smoke. The drumbeats coming thick and fast. He had not enough dragoons with him to roll up this press of enemy soldiers, and they too must realise it, soon. But the drumbeats were coming from his right, not his front. The Polish grenadiers were advancing.

James realised Poinatowski had been right in his assertion; that generals must lose control more or less from the first exchange of fire. More than right – because he