and continued to stand his post, though the tears must have blinded him.
I turned and went below.
'Baron Piotr, get your men together. I'm going to take out a bridge by ramming. You and your men are going ashore with Captain Targ.'
He didn't get up from the map board.
'Yes, sir. We heard something about that. But the fact is that we really don't know whether the boat will sink or not. Ashore, well, we wouldn't be able to do that much good for Sandomierz, since most of us here have been sitting at desks and radio sets for years. We are way out of training. But if the boat does stay afloat, we're going to be needed here to continue coordinating our efforts. We still have eleven boats on the river, after all. So, begging your pardon, sir, but we're staying.'
'Damn you, Piotr, that was a direct order!'
'Sir. I am a Radiant Warrior, blessed by God to do His holy work. I am not going to run away now.'
I looked around the room. All of the men were trying to look busy.
'This is mutiny!' I shouted.
'Yes, sir, I suppose it is,' a mousey-looking radio operator said. 'But it's really for the best, sir. Our place is here.'
'Damn you all,' I shouted and went down to the cargo deck.
One of the crew was flooding the odd-numbered watertight tanks, to give the boat more weight, he explained, and never mind about the buoyancy. He wanted to make sure that we hit the bridge as hard as possible.
'It'd be a shame to waste our last blow at the bastards, wouldn't it, sir?'
The troops were jamming the war carts up against the forward drawbridge, again to increase the impact.
Captain Targ came up to me.
'I regret that I have to report a mutiny, sir. I was afraid that this might happen, but the men won't leave. We're down to less than four full platoons now, and they've seen too many friends die to run away at this point. It would be like dishonoring the dead. Anyway, if the boat hangs up on the bridge, you'll need us to repel boarders, so it's for the best.'
'God damn you all to hell! But that bridge still has to 90 !:'
'Of course, sir. Speaking of which, we'd better all get up on deck or we'll miss the show. Tadaos won't be waiting for orders, you know. AH platoons! Report on deck! Pass the word!'
'You are all crazy people!' I shouted.
'Yes, sir,' a warrior said as he brushed by me, heading for the stairs. 'I suppose we are.'
I got on deck when we were less than three-gross yards from the bridge. We were going full-speed downriver and the helmsman had us aimed dead center.
The bridge was built rather high for such a temporary thing, and the top of the roadway was higher than the deck of the boat. It-was built on wooden tetrahedrons made of oversized telephone poles that looked to be simply set on the river bottom, with the roadway strung on ropes above them.
There were thousands of men and horses on it, rushing across, and while some of them were shouting and pointing at us, they still kept coming. There were men getting on the bridge the moment we hit.
The impact was enough to knock us all over, and we all went skidding across the splintered deck. As I got up, I saw that we had not punched a hole through the bridge, as I had expected. We had actually tipped it over!
The part of it that was right in front of us was already in the river, and the roadway was caught by the current. On both sides of us, like water breaking over a dam, the long flexible bridge was pulled slowly over on its side.
The water was filled with thrashing horses, but with fewer men than you would expect. Not that many of the desert-bred Mongols could swim. Those few that did make it to shore didn't live long. The captain already had the swivel guns in action.
But the bridge was still in one piece and we hadn't gone through it. Tadaos got us into reverse and we backed off the wreckage.
A crewman ran up from below and reported to Tadaos, who turned to me and said, 'The bow is smashed up, but we're still afloat. Maybe you ought to see about repairing the damage, sir.'
So I went down to play steamboat repairman, again. On the way, I stopped to tell Piotr to radio the other boats that a bridge could be taken out by ramming. He had already done so.
The next morning, after the other boats had taken out four other bridges and lost two of their number doing it, it became strangely quiet, all along the Vistula. Some men thought that we had actually won and the enemy had given up. Others were sure that it was some kind of a trick. The planes reported that the Mongols were concentrating in a dozen groups, each a few miles east of the river, but not going back any farther. It was eerie and quiet for the first time in a week. Even the catapults were unmanned.
Then, the morning after that, an even stranger thing happened. All at once, along the whole river as far as we could tell, enemy troops led their horses down to the frozen banks of the river. Holding on to the horse's tail, they got the animals swimming across the icy waters of the Vistula, pulling the rider behind them.
We steamed through them, drowning hundreds, but they were like lemmings and we couldn't begin to stop them all.
Tadaos looked at it in disbelief.
'If they could do that, why didn't they do it a week ago?'
'There's your answer,' Captain Targ said, pointing to the west bank. 'Every horse had a man behind it when it went into the water. Only maybe half of those men are still there when they come out.'
'Good God in Heaven, you're right! They are deliberately throwing away half of their army just to get across! Who could order such a thing? Why do they do it? Don't they realize that we no longer have anything to fight with?'
We all shook our heads and watched half of the enemy army die.
I don't know. Maybe they ran out of food. Maybe they just got impatient. It's likely they never realized how close to the wire we were. The only thing sure was that the Battle for the Vistula was over and the Battle for Poland had begun.
FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SIR VLADIMIR CHARNETSKI
We set up a system where each platoon 'adopted' up to ten of Duke Boleslaw's troops, at least for dining purposes. Later we had to up it to twelve. More of them were coming in every day, and many had had a hard time finding us.
The printshop in Cracow made up thousands of little signs that said where our camp was; one of the Big People ran them to Eagle Nest and the planes were soon dropping them on friendly troops who looked lost. It helped, but as it turned out, it also told the Mongols where to find us. Maybe that wasn't so bad. We wanted to find them.
Grain was arriving daily from the granary, the first batch brought in by a dozen Big People the first 'day. They'd gone out and taken over the first dozen carts from the slow moving mules, mostly to show Duke Boleslaw that there was nothing to worry about.
Yet for three days there was nothing to do but wait. Patrols were sent out, but they found little. The area was evacuated, since the refugees that had been through a week ago had finally convinced almost every noncombatant to leave.
In hours, we'd set up what amounted to a very large city. Carts were hauled a set distance apart and tarps were zippered over and between them for roofs, just like in a training exercise. Hammocks were slung both under the carts and between them, Cookstoves all had their proper place by the streets, and latrines were dug as per the manual. Oh, everything was covered with freezing mud, but that was only to be expected. After the training we'd put our men through, it was hardly noticed.
Everything was just perfect except for Duke Boleslaw, who couldn't comprehend any sort of tactics except for charging at the enemy and killing them all gloriously.
After days of discussion, persuasion, and pleading I finally had to threaten to cut off his food supply if he didn't let us take part in the fight. Couching it that way, where he was doing a favor for the people who were feeding him, he came around a little.
