It had been raining for a day and a half, and rivulets of cold water trickled down Colonel Renvil's slicker as he watched his brigade straggle by. He wore no insignia of rank. He'd cut them off after a sniper had killed Brigadier Lord Willing, leaving him in charge.
Commanding officer! He grunted. Spectator was the word. The brigade had been misused, the men overspent. Willing had known it, and had argued on the radio with Rumaros, to no avail. Now the mortgage had been foreclosed. (If he'd known that a mercenary officer had used the same metaphor, two nights ago, he'd have thought it a fitting irony.)
At the beginning, Willing had tried to make it a fighting retreat, though mostly the men had lacked the energy for it. Then the downpour had begun, no transient summer convection storm, but a slow-moving, pre-autumnal cold front undercutting warm moist air. All fighting response had dissolved in it, and the men rode soddenly southward, hoping the snipers would sight on someone else.
Where the land was suitable, stretches of the road were flanked by narrow fields, mostly no more than two hundred yards wide. The fields were glacial till. Generations of farm boys had picked rocks in them, and each year frost heaving provided a new crop, to be piled as fences along the edges of the field, especially along the back edge, the forest margin. It was there that sniping was the worst, especially when the rain thinned a bit, for the Smoleni could shoot in safety.
More often, though, the forest came up to the ditches, and the sniping was much less heavy there.
The men were desperate for sleep, and if they'd been on foot, it would have been worse. Many more would have lain down beside the road, rain or not.
As it was, they still had to walk from time to time to rest the horses. Rather often, in fact, for they were short on horses. They'd lost enough, that first night, that they'd started back with many carrying two men. And some of the snipers seemed to target horses; even indifferent marksmen could easily hit them. (It never occurred to Renvil that the Smoleni looked at his horses as food, to be smoked and stored for winter.) Doubling up became more common, almost the rule. Men had broken discipline, cutting artillery horses free to ride them, leaving the caissons and guns in the ditches for the Smoleni. In the rain, the caissons wouldn't even burn readily.
Troops afoot sometimes took cover in the shelter of a roadside fence, mostly not to shoot back, but for a reprieve and a nap. Willing had forbidden it. The column had to keep moving, and once a man fell asleep, even on that cold wet ground, it was nearly impossible to wake him. Sometimes, enticed beyond resistance by the shelter of a roadside stone fence, they lay down despite orders and threats. At one stretch, the Smoleni had violated such a shelter with mortar fire, throwing the column into confusion, and causing more concentrated casualties than sniping did.
Men slept on horseback, but that wasn't really effective. Occasionally one fell out of the saddle without being shot; some didn't even wake up when they hit the ground. Some who'd lain down and refused to get up, Willing had had shot, and the problem had abated somewhat till nightfall. When daylight came, they were hundreds of men short. Much of this was certainly due to night ambushes by submachine gunners, who struck, then quickly withdrew, but as certainly, many had simply gone back in the woods a bit and lain down to sleep.
He had no doubt that the Smoleni had made that sleep permanent; they had no facilities for prisoners.
The night before, they'd passed the remains of the supply column—corpses and broken wagons. With the heavy cloud cover, it had been necessary to use battle lamps to stay out of the ditch, and by their light, it seemed the fighting had been heavy there. That might have been the Smoleni's major effort, with supplies the incentive and prize. He hoped they'd paid heavily for them.
He'd never believed in Yomal; educated people didn't. But just in case, he prayed they'd meet a relief column before night fell again.