“Understood, Your Majesty. If you’ll excuse me.” Balthazar spun his mount around and rode off at an energetic trot.
“Is it just me, or does he seem a lot more chipper than usual?” I whispered to Timona, low enough that it wouldn’t reach Balthazar’s ears. I remembered the imperial guardsman being a lot more listless, high-strung, and on edge back in the imperial demesne. As if he had felt cramped in its confines.
“Sir Balthazar began his service on the front lines, as a sworn retainer to his liege lord,” Timona explained.
So the guy was actually looking forward to returning to the domain of blood, death, and gunsmoke? He wasn’t secretly one of those bloodthirsty maniac types, was he?
Before long, people in peasant garb began to come into view, sprinkled along the highway in ones and twos. There were those who bowed and scraped with a sincerity only manageable from those who were truly convinced of my divinity, those who prostrated themselves but snuck glances when they thought they could get away with it, and children who hid behind their parents’ backs as they stared at the procession. No two reactions were the same. I took that to mean that none of it was feigned.
Perhaps distracted by their audience, the new conscripts began to lose their marching formation. I heard the angry bellows of platoon commanders from elsewhere in the column. Mentally, I shrugged—you couldn’t really expect much more from soldiers who had been ordinary citizens merely a scant few weeks ago. Even to my eyes, they looked like total amateurs, not really equipped to do much more than ready a spear or aim a gun.
Incidentally, the current, most common type of firearm in this world was the muzzle-loaded, smoothbore type. In other words, muskets, some of them matchlocks, such as the sudums our host was equipped with. Matchlocks had spread throughout Japan during the Sengoku period, and unlike automatic rifles, required the wielder to take a number of steps to fire them.
First, the firearm needed to be stood straight up, with its muzzle pointed into the air. The wielder would proceed to load the firearm with gunpowder and a bullet by using a rod to push it into the muzzle and down the barrel. Then they would return the firearm to a horizontal position before filling the flash pan with gunpowder and lighting the fuse, which was usually a piece of flammable rope or twine. Lastly, they would aim the weapon at their target and pull the trigger.
The way the mechanism worked was that the trigger pull would cause the fuse to make contact with the gunpowder in the flash pan, igniting it and causing the gun to fire. Afterward, it was also necessary to clean out the barrel with the rod before repeating the process.
In short, it was a pain in the ass and it took the better half of forever. And that wasn’t even getting into the tendency for amateurs to cause accidental discharges at the drop of a hat. We could’ve given every citizen in the imperial capital their own matchlock, ordered them to join us, and not improved our military strength in any meaningful way.
Our new conscripts, however, had been drilled in the proper procedure, trained to hit a target with some degree of accuracy, and familiarized with acting as a unit. Even so, perfection would be a pipe dream; I had no doubt there would be frequent errors.
What’s that, you ask? How could a ragtag group of soldiers who were little better than raw recruits even be useful on the battlefield? Honestly, if it came down to a fair fight on even ground, it likely wouldn’t take much to rout them—especially since none of them had any real combat experience. However, that wouldn’t be a concern for the upcoming battle, since we’d essentially be trapping them in our own defensive encampment on Chelán Hill. Additionally, these were the better of the new soldiers we’d trained and recruited. That was why there were only two thousand of them.
Whether that number seemed large or small probably depended on the person. Though, given the scale of the Empire as a country, it was probably small. There was a reason for this, and it was one I could do nothing about.
When I’d come into power, I’d been forced to start building my own army from scratch. I’d secured the numbers with my public addresses and the weapons through my agreement with the Golden Sheep Trading Company. However, that still left a gaping hole in the form of commanding officers.
One could not simply gather a whole heap of soldiers, label it an army, and call it a day. Aside from a general to take overall command, you needed officers of varying ranks to direct the army’s many divisions and subdivisions. To use the human body as an analogy, these commanding officers were like the joints—indispensable when it came to executing the commands sent down from the top. Without finger joints, for example, you’d be out of luck using your hands as anything but blunt instruments. It was only when all of the joints in the fingers worked in unison that delicate motor control became possible.
Boiled down, my point was that commanding officers were a crucial part of any army. Without them, our host wouldn’t resemble a united force of soldiers so much as it would a well-armed mob. No matter how superior the number of your soldiers or quality of your weapons were, you could not win a battle without officers to command your troops.
So obviously, having started from zero, I’d had no commanding officers to put in charge. It had taken a lot on my part to finally scrape together the bare minimum, including borrowing officers from Duke Warren’s army and calling upon Joel de Bourgault-Ducoudray’s old acquaintances, just to name the big moves I’d had to make. Ordinarily, the positions would have gone to barons or viscounts within the emperor’s directly held territories, but the majority of such individuals had formerly belonged to the Chancellor’s faction or the regency, and thus couldn’t be trusted. To make matters worse, the most talented commanding officers around had long since been headhunted by other nobility to lead their personal forces.
I might have parted the Chancellor and Minister of Ceremony from their mortal coils, but it seemed I’d be feeling the consequences of their corruption for a long time to come.
Incidentally, in the Empire, a platoon commander led a unit of a hundred soldiers. From what I’d heard, the rank had different names in other countries, such as a one hundred man commander or centurion. However, if you assumed that having twenty of them would be enough to mobilize a two thousand man army, you’d be wrong. You see, you also needed a second-in-command for each platoon, to take over in case the platoon commander became indisposed (e.g., sick, wounded, or killed in battle) and that alone doubled your officer head count.
As it happened, we had fallen rather short of our quota of seconds-in-command. In plainer terms, we were really pushing it with just two thousand soldiers. Even if we would have the armies of my lords and vassals fighting alongside us, our enemy was the Raul army, famed for its prowess. Victory would be far from easy to achieve.
It was a good thing we had spent a lot of time and resources preparing.