stored away, and that if I ever had a son, I would give it to him.
'It feels good to be appreciated. But tell me, Josip, is there anything I can do for you now?'
I said there was, and explained to him that I had been on the boat for twelve hours now, and they said that the boat was on a river, but I had never in my life actually seen a river. Could I perhaps have permission to go up and have a look?
'You never…? I'm sorry, but I sometimes forget how restricted the life of a commoner can be. I'll do better than just let you topside. I'm doing an informal inspection just now. Come with me, and I'll give you the threepenny tour of the
And with that he took me all around the boat, starting with the engines, where the engineer had forbidden us troops to go. But who would dare stand in the way of Lord Conrad, or even the lowly grunt who was accompanying him?
I was surprised to discover I already knew the baron who was in charge of the radio room. He was Piotr, whose parents had the room two doors down from my father's. Eight years older than me, he had once been one of the 'big kids,' although he had been the smallest 'big kid' at Okoitz, and now I was a head taller than he was.
He said he remembered me, but somehow I don't think he really did. He was just being polite. Truthfully, I doubt if I could remember any of the little kids there who were eight years younger than I was!
The dawn was breaking before we finally got all the way up to the fighting top, and at last I saw what a river looked like. The Vistula was as beautiful as they had always told me it was.
That morning, word went out that those of us below could go up topside, one platoon at a time, whenever there wasn't a battle going on. I'm sure that order came from Lord Conrad.
I was below at noon, when all of the guns above us started shooting, not just the three dozen swivel guns my company manned, but the steam-powered peashooters that quickly spat out thousands of small iron balls, and the Halman Projectors that threw bombs high over the enemy. It went on for an hour before my lance was called up to the ready room. After a few minutes we were needed up on the fighting top.
The gun smoke was so thick you had to gag, and after the darkness below, the sunlight was blinding. The noise could make a man go deaf, and the number of arrows being shot at us was simply unbelievable. They were stuck all over the deck and looked almost like wheat ready for the harvest. We found that we had to walk with a sort of sliding motion, breaking off the arrows as we went, to keep from tripping over them.
All of the men on deck had arrows sticking out of them, a frightening sight! But we soon realized they were all right. Our armor was of plated steel, heavily waxed and covered with thick canvas. It was proof against the Mongol arrows, although those missiles tended to stick in the wax and canvas.
What I had taken at first for convulsions was in fact the men laughing about the whole situation!
A gunner signaled for help, with an arrow in his upper arm that was squirting blood. Somehow, it had managed to slide up his brassard and get under his pauldron. Not a deadly wound, but it needed tending. Fritz and Zbigniew helped him below, his loader took over shooting the gun, and the spotter took over loading the twenty- round clips into the gun, and then reloading the empty clips from the ammunition boxes.
I had nothing better to do, so I felt free to stand behind them and act as their spotter. It gave me a chance to see what was going on.
A great mob of Mongols was on the bank, crowding right down to the shore. They were trying to kill us with their arrows, which were obviously ineffective. We, on the other hand,
Three dozen swivel guns were each shooting twenty rounds a minute into a packed crowd of men and horses, and you could see where individual bullets were killing three and four of them in a file at a time. The two peashooters on that side of the boat were spraying away, taking out Mongols in horizontal ranks. And the Halman bombs were bursting above them, each explosion knocking down a circle of the enemy a dozen yards across!
The enemy was being shot so fast that no attempt was made to remove the dead and wounded. Those that fell were just left there to be trampled, to bleed, and to die.
And the fools kept coming! They made no attempt to run away, or to hide behind something, as any rational creature would, but instead were actually
I tell you that in some places they were sitting on horses that were standing on three and four layers of dead men and dead horses!
And once there, there was nothing they could do. Their arrows couldn't really hurt us, and when some of them went into the water to get at us, those that didn't freeze immediately soon found that the sides of the boat were six yards high, and made of smooth metal that couldn't possibly be climbed.
In our months of training, we had been repeatedly told that we were facing the craftiest, best organized, and best led enemy in the world. That day, it seemed to me we were simply slaughtering a mob of idiots with less brains than a herd of sheep
Then the loader on the gun next to me got an arrow in the eyeslit, and I had to leave off watching the war and go to his aid. He was on his back and not moving. I needed help to get him below.
Looking about, I saw Taurus was shooting a gun three places down, and laughing and screaming insanely at the Mongols the whole time. He was shouting what could only have been the names of his family and friends who had fallen to the Mongol onslaught of the Ukraine.
I thought that he was somehow living in Heaven and in Hell at the same time. I knew that while he had both bullets and Mongols to shoot them at, I would get no help from Taurus.
Then Sir Odon saw my need and ran over to help me. Together we picked the wounded man up and carried him down the steps to the surgery.
Later, we found out that our gunner lived, and he was back at his gun the next day.
This sort of slaughter went on for days, and we were all amazed there were so many Mongols. One night I spoke briefly to Lord Conrad again, and he admitted to being as astounded by their numbers as everyone else was. His biggest worry was that we would run out of ammunition before Batu Khan ran out of warriors.
Then the Mongols started to get a little bit smart, or maybe, as some said, their engineers finally caught up with their frontline troops.
One of our planes, piloted by Count Lambert himself, someone said, dropped us a message telling us that the enemy was building a pontoon bridge along the riverbank, downstream of us.
We went there with another boat following us, and they ordered us to get ready to land and chop the thing up with our axes right after we gave them a pass with the guns.
All of us except the gunners poured out of the drawbridge in the front of the boat, with the fifth lance of each platoon taking up the rear, as usual. We had to be behind the other guys in order to see them when they got wounded, and get them back to safety. Not that we didn't do our share of the fighting, you understand.
The first lance, made up of the biggest men, always went in first with their halberds, and we went in last to pick up the pieces, whether we were with our pikes, towing a war cart behind us that was full of gunners, as in a field battle, or when we just went in with axes, like now.
The Mongols had broken and run away after our gunners had done their job on them, which made me figure that their engineers must be a lot smarter than the average run of the enemy — say, about up to the level of a flock of ducks.
There wasn't much for us to do, since the guys up front had already chopped up everything that looked like it might have been a part of a bridge, or a bit of a Mongol.
There were a lot of dead bodies lying around, hacked up and bloody and stinking worse than anything you could possibly imagine. It wasn't just the shit that had been shot out of the guts of so many of them.
During training, we'd been told that Mongols never bathed, that they put their new clothes on the outside and then let those on the inside just rot away, but we hadn't believed it, not until we had to walk through all those dead bodies.
By this time everybody had gotten used to seeing dead people, but the stench of that beach got at least a dozen of the guys heaving their breakfast out, and that was a very bad thing to do when you were wearing one of our helmets, which covered your whole face. Think about it, if you really want to.
We had one guy whose visor hinge got jammed, and he darned near drowned before Zbigniew got the thing freed up.
There was a lot of gold on that beach. Every dead body seemed to have a big pouch full of the stuff. I didn't
