At the end of February, when final preparations were being made, when weapons, ammunition, preserved food, and everything else we would need for the months ahead was being issued, one of the warehouse workers handed me a white leather kit with a red cross on it.
I asked what it was.
'It's a medical kit,' he said. 'We usually hand them out only to people who have completed the surgeon's course, but someone had too many of these kits made up. The captain said to hand them out to one man from each company, just in case you need it.'
I said that I was in the fifth lance, so I'd had the first-aid course, but that was just to help the wounded until somebody got there who knew what he was doing. I didn't know anything about really fixing people!
'Everybody who does already has a kit. Keep it. Clip it on your belt, just in case.'
I did as I was ordered, and I quit wearing my smaller first-aid pack since everything in it was also in the big medical kit.
I soon discovered there were advantages to wearing the kit, since real medics were rarely sent out to do the dirtiest jobs, such as cleaning the latrines. Once I had the kit, people assumed I was trained in its use, and thus my life became a bit easier. No one ever asked me if I had taken the proper course, so I was never even tempted to lie about it;
Our company was part of the River Battalion, the men who would be manning the riverboats on the Vistula. This intrigued me, since I had often heard of boats, but had never seen one. In truth, I had never even seen a river.
We wouldn't be actually operating the boats, of course; that was the job of another group entirely. We had only to ride along, we were told, and to obey the orders of our knights and captains, who had vast experience on the dozens of steam-powered boats the army had.
Well, my knight, Sir Odon, was the same age I was, but had joined the army a year earlier, and I don't think he had vast experience in anything. My captain, Sir Stashu, looked to be perhaps eighteen and was no gray-bearded repository of wisdom, either, but I kept my mouth shut, as my father, a wise man, had taught me.
Grunts bitched about everything, but we learned that there were a few topics of conversation that could get you chosen to shovel out the garbage, or to wash a few thousand dishes, and that among these was the inexperience of our leaders. They knew it themselves, and preferred not to think about it.
Chapter Three
From the Journal of Josip Sobieski
WRITTEN JANUARY 19, 1249, CONCERNING FEBRUARY 15, 1241
AT LAST, we said our final Sunrise Service in Hell, and we marched out to war.
Well, we had to pull our war carts behind us, there were only two railroad tracks to pull them on, and there were a sixth of a million of us troops to move out. An hour went by before we finally left Hell, and we were near the front of the line. Our doubled column was over sixteen miles long! Even at a brisk walk, it took almost six hours for us to march by!
Once we finally got on the tracks, it wasn't all that hard to pull the big cart, even loaded as it was with the tons of guns, pikes, and all the other material we needed to fight with. Counting our six knights and the knight- banner who led us, there were forty-three men in our platoon.
Our cart could be pulled by eighteen of them, with the rest of us riding aboard, resting, eating, or even sleeping. This let us continue onward right around the clock, doing over six dozen miles a day without ever once breaking into a run.
The six carts of my company pulled off the main road when we got to East Gate and left the main body of the army to go on without us.
A great crowd of civilians was leaving the dock area. There must have been thousands of them, mostly peasants, but with a scattering of well-dressed people as well. They were all walking back the way we had come; refugees who would shelter at the Warrior's School, we presumed.
I had heard much about the castle that had been built at East Gate, how it was made entirely of reinforced concrete, and I was eager to examine it closely.
I never got the chance for we were marched straight onto our boat, the RB1
The drawbridge door was closed behind us, leaving us in the dark, and our riverboat pulled out immediately to let the next one up to the dock to be loaded. It was like being locked up in an oversized barn, filled with six war carts and the almost two gross of men of my company.
We soon found out that we were riding in no ordinary steamboat, but in the craft that held the commanders of the entire river flotilla, all three dozen boats. We had two army barons aboard, as well as Sir Conrad, now Count Conrad, himself.
Captain Targ didn't want his troops getting in the way of all these high personages, so he had us stay down below on the cargo deck, just in front of the engines. The second deck had the radios and the war room, called Tartar Control, as well as the kitchen and the sleeping rooms for the officers.
There was a fighting top above that, and a few hours after we were aboard, the sixth lance of each platoon was sent up there with their guns. So were the fourth lances, who acted as loaders for the swivel guns, and the third, who acted as spotters.
My own fifth lance acted as corpsmen, assistants for the surgeons, and we wouldn't be needed until somebody got shot. This meant we had to stay inside, cooped up without even a window, until somebody had the courtesy to get decently wounded so we could go outside and do something.
That night I was one of the few men below who couldn't sleep. I was standing near the stairs with my helmet off when a tall man walked by with a line of white circles down the armor on his back. I snapped to attention.
You see, the army used a color code for the numbers of its lances, platoons, companies, and so on. One was red, two was orange, three was yellow, four was green, five was blue, and six was purple. The buttons on our uniform jackets used these colors to define where we were in the army's organization.
The top button was your position in your lance, the second, your lance's position in your platoon, the third was your platoon's place in the company, and so on. The buttons on my jacket went, from the top down, orange, blue, blue, yellow, orange, red, green, blue, and red. This meant that I was the second man in the fifth lance, of the Fifth Platoon, of the Third Company, of the Second Komand, of the First Battalion, of the Fourth Column, of the Fifth County, of the First Division of the army.
The leader of any group used a white button in that position. That is to say, Sir Odon's buttons were the same color as mine, except that his top one was white. Captain Targ's top three buttons were white.
On our armor, which zippered together, there were big spots, a different shape for each color, running down the chest and the back, painted in the same colors as our buttons. Otherwise, we all looked the same in armor, and with the faceplates closed, you couldn't tell who was who. Once you got used to it, you could spot your friends quickly.
Also, if someone was impersonating a warrior, before long his button colors would get him caught by someone who knew he wasn't who he was supposed to be.
So when I saw a line of nine white circles on the man's back, I knew he had to be Lord Conrad himself. I came to attention, as I had been taught, and he stopped, turned, and looked at me.
'I know you, don't I?' He said, 'Yes, you are Josip, the son of the baker from Okoitz.'
I said that I was, and that I was surprised so great a person as he was had actually recognized me.
'I am just another man, Josip, not much different from you. I think that mostly I remember you because of your surprise and your laugh when I showed you that top I made for you.'
I said that I had been six years old then, but yes, I remembered it, too. I said I still had that toy, carefully
