At the Sign of Triumph by David Weber
“Oh, I know that! And if it’s a choice between putting them into uniform and having enough weapons to go around for the men we already have in uniform, I’m all in favor of letting you have them! It’s just the caliber of the men in question. And then there’s the little matter of how much more weight this makes us throw on Rainbow Waters and the Mighty Host.” The captain general shook his head. “It’s slowing the training process, too, and that means we’ll be slower hitting our deployment targets this summer.”
Duchairn nodded. The voracious demand of the manufactories supporting Mother Church’s war effort was cutting into the personnel available to Mother Church’s armies. There’d always been some competition in that regard, but it had gotten steadily worse—far worse—as the Church found itself confronting the floodtide of Charisian productivity. Duchairn’s comb-out of the great orders had provided a huge upsurge in available hands two years ago, but much of that manpower surge had vanished like a prong buck sliding down a crusher serpent’s gullet. Not because the hands the personnel requisition had provided weren’t working harder than ever, but because the previous year’s military catastrophes had required even more weapons—replacement weapons, as well as the newly designed and developed ones—than anyone had dreamed might be the case.
The production techniques Lynkyn Fultyn and Tahlbaht Bryairs had pioneered right here in Zion helped enormously, and Fultyn had assembled what he called his “brain trust” to push that process along. Duchairn knew the Chihirite monk was nervous about pulling so many of his more innovative thinkers together into a single group so close to Zhaspahr Clyntahn’s personal eye, and the treasurer had been careful to point out in his memos to his colleagues how incredibly important that group’s efforts were. That didn’t keep him from worrying about the targets he and Fultyn had pasted onto those men’s backs, but it was the best he could do, and they needed the “brain trust.” They were not only Fultyn’s primary problem solvers—the analysts he turned to whenever yet another new piece of Charisian technology was brought to his attention—but were also engaged in what Fultyn called “efficiency studies.” They were specifically charged with studying the production techniques and processes being mandated and enforced across every single one of Mother Church’s manufactories for the specific purpose of finding ways in which those techniques could become even more efficient.
Yet even with all the “brain trust” could do, Mother Church’s productivity per man-hour remained drastically lower than that of Charis. There were times that seemed impossible when Duchairn looked at the thousands of artillery pieces—and the hundreds of thousands of rifles—pouring from her manufactories, yet it remained true. And, far worse, because the capability of those cannon and rifles remained inferior to that of the weapons in heretic hands, her defenders had no choice but to substitute quantity for quality. The Treasury had poured out a floodtide of marks building manufactories to make that possible, and that tide continued to flow, even though Duchairn had been forced to more and more desperate expediencies to sustain it. But manufactories needed far more than bricks and mortar, and money wasn’t the only thing that had to be carefully budgeted to meet the Jihad’s insatiable appetites.
More and more of the Temple Lands’ women were moving into manufactory jobs and proving themselves equal or superior to the men who would normally have held those jobs, but that process was in its early stages and there simply weren’t enough women—yet, at least—in the labor force to sustain the necessary production levels. Quite aside from the hands which could be taught the necessary skills “on-the-job,” the steadily expanding numbers of manufactories needed hands which were already skilled. Even more critically, they needed supervisors, people who could teach those skills, who could implement the directives coming down from Fultyn’s St. Kylmahn’s offices.
That was why Maigwair had instituted a draconian manpower allocation policy within the Army of God. Experienced mechanics, and especially experienced master mechanics, who enlisted (or, increasingly, were conscripted) for the AOG, never saw an army parade ground. Instead, they became corporals or sergeants who were handed over to Duchairn and assigned wherever they were most badly needed. The numbers provided that way were lower than one might have thought, given the scale of the Army of God’s rebuilding efforts, but they were a critical component of Duchairn’s weapons production. Yet they would have been almost equally valuable to the Army’s frontline maintenance commands, and even if that hadn’t been true, their education, skills, and intelligence meant they represented a large supply of men who would have made excellent officers. Given the numbers of new formations Maigwair had been forced to stand up, the loss of so many potential officers was painful indeed.
“Allayn, if there was any—” Duchairn began, but Maigwair shook his head.
“I said I didn’t think we could come up with better arrangements, and I meant it, Rhobair. The worst part is the delay in getting our new divisions trained up to something that can hope to face Charisians in the field. The number of experienced officers and noncoms we provided to the Mighty Host a couple of years ago is biting us on the arse in that regard, I’m afraid. But the delay means the Harchongians will have to carry even more of the load in the field longer than my people had originally projected.” The captain general’s expression was grim. “We’d hoped to have them ready for deployment by late November. It looks now like I may be able to get the first new divisions on their way by the end of next month. It’ll be May, at least, and more likely June of even early July before we can get the bulk of them to the front, and I’ll be honest with you, Rhobair. Even when we get them there, they’ll still need a lot of additional training before I’d consider them suitable for anything much more demanding than holding fortified positions. They certainly won’t be equal to Charisian mounted infantry in any sort of mobile battle, that’s for damned sure! But there’s nothing we can do to change that.” He shrugged. “Sometimes your only choices are between bad and worse, I’m afraid.”
“Been a lot of that going around for the last few years,” Duchairn agreed sourly. “But it looks to me like Rainbow Waters has come up with the best way to use what we can give him.”
“Assuming he can put his plans into effect without any more … elbow joggling from certain parties in Zion.”
Maigwair’s tone was even sourer than Duchairn’s had been. But then the captain general shrugged again.
“The truth is,” he told the treasurer, “he’s got a lot better chance of pulling that off than anyone else would. And thank God he’s got a brain that works!”
“From your mouth to Langhorne’s ears,” Duchairn agreed reverently.
Taychau Daiyang clearly intended to fight his own sort of campaign, and taking all of the known factors into account, his was almost certainly the best campaign plan available. As Maigwair had just said, sometimes it came down to a choice between bad or worse, but the Earl of Rainbow Waters clearly understood what was in play—not just on the field of battle, but in the foundries and manufactories.
Despite how steeply Mother Church’s total production of weapons had grown relative to the Charisians over the last year or two, he was not at all confident about the outcome of that side of the Jihad. In fact, Duchairn had no doubt that curve was about to begin reversing itself, and not just because the Treasury was so close to outright collapse.
Both he and Maigwair were convinced Zhaspahr Clyntahn was holding back information the Inquisition had gleaned about the Empire of Charis’ manufacturing capacity. That was ultimately stupid; the reality would become painfully evident on the battlefield sooner or later, and Duchairn couldn’t decide whether Clyntahn was concealing things because he genuinely believed the Charisians were profiting from demonic intervention he didn’t want spreading to Mother Church’s own manufactories or if he was simply in what a Bédardist would have called “denial.”
Given the way he’d twisted the Proscriptions into a pretzel any time he decided it suited his purposes, it w
Whatever else he might try to hide, however, the Inquisitor had been forced to admit that at least a half dozen additional major manufactory sites were about to come on-stream in the Empire of Charis. Three of them, in Old Charis itself, bade fair to eventually rival the sprawling Delthak Works which had spawned so many of the Church’s military disasters, but that was scarcely the worst of it. The Maikelberg Works in Chisholm were also expanding at breakneck speed, and reports indicated that the Charisian Crown was using the windfall of the Silverlode Strike to finance additional works in Chisholm and Emerald, as well. There were even reports of two new manufactories breaking ground in Corisande—and another in Zebediah, of all damned places! And to make bad worse, the majority of Siddarmark’s foundries and manufactories had always lain in the eastern portion of the Republic, which meant they’d been beyond the Sword of Schueler’s reach. Most of them were once again working propositions, and while there was no way they’d be matching Charisian levels of efficiency anytime soon, their productivity was still rising steadily … and at least as swiftly as anything Mother Church could boast.
And if the Imperial Charisian Navy succeeded in its quest to control the Gulf of Dohlar.…
The truth is that no matter what we do—no matter what we physically could do, even if I had an unlimited supply of marks—we’ve lost the production race, he thought bleakly. They’re not simply more efficient than we are in their existing manufactories, the number of their manufactories is increasing more rapidly than ours … and their rate of expansion’s climbing like one of Brother Lynkyn’s rockets. And despite everything Brother Lynkyn and people like Lieutenant Zwaigair can do, the weapons they’re producing—especially their heavy weapons, like their artillery and those damned ironclad warships—are better than ours. And it looks like their rate of improvement’s continuing to climb just as quickly as their manufactory capacity! At the moment, we’re still producing more total weapons—a lot more total weapons—per month than they are, but by midsummer—early winter, at the latest—even that won’t be true any longer.
The tsunami coming out of Charis would simply bury the Mighty Host and the Army of God on the field of battle. That was obvious to both him and Maigwair, however resolutely Clyntahn might continue to insist that a man armed with a rock and the invincible spirit of God was superior to any rifle-armed heretic ever born. And since there was no hope of preventing the sprawling Charisian merchant fleet from delivering those ever-increasing numbers of weapons to their armies, Mother Church’s only hope was to find a way to eliminate the armies themselves before the tidal wave destroyed everything in its path. Which, given the past record of the Army of God and its allies, would be a … nontrivial challenge, Duchairn thought mordantly.
“How likely do you really think it is that Rainbow Waters will be able to follow his campaign plan? His actual plan, I mean; not the one he’s officially submitted for approval.”
“Noticed that, did you?” Maigwair gave the treasurer a lopsided smile. “Careful to hide it all in the ‘contingencies’ section, wasn’t he?” The captain general shook his head in admiration. “Just between you and me, I’ve never really liked Harchongese bureaucrats very much. Always seemed to me that they were even worse than our bureaucrats! But there are times when a good, bluff military man such as myself can only watch in awe and admiration as they dance rings around their superiors.”
Duchairn chuckled, but Maigwair was right. Rainbow Waters—or someone on his staff, at least—obviously understood the fine art of obfuscation even better than most Harchongians, and the earl knew exactly what Zhaspahr Clyntahn wanted to hear. Duchairn was fairly sure he also appreciated the way Harchong’s monumental loyalty to Mother Church inclined the Grand Inquisitor to put far more faith in a Harchongese commander than in anyone else. He’d certainly played to that inclination with consummate skill! His official dispatches were brimful of the offensive spirit, pointing out the way in which his fortifications and massive supply dumps would enable him to operate with far greater freedom once the weather permitted a general advance. And in the meantime, of course, they provided security against any sudden, unexpected move by the heretics.
What he very carefully hadn’t pointed out was that he had absolutely no intention of ordering any of the general advances he’d laid out in such enthusiastic detail, supply base or no. His calculation of the military realities—which he’d shared privately with Maigwair, via an oral report delivered by Archbishop Militant Gustyv Walkyr—was that the sustained, rapid fire of the Charisians’ new rifles and revolvers, coupled with their portable angle-guns and heavier artillery, would make any assault prohibitively expensive. He had the manpower to “win” at least some offensive battles simply by throwing bodies at the enemy, but the process would gut even the Mighty Host of God and the Archangels. And, given the Charisians’ greater mobility, any assault he launched, however brilliantly it succeeded, was unlikely to prove decisive, since he couldn’t prevent his enemies from slipping away and eluding pursuit.
He hadn’t said a single word about that in any of his written reports. Acknowledging that Mother Church couldn’t possibly take the war to her enemies and win wasn’t something Zhaspahr Clyntahn wanted to hear, even out of a Harchongian. And despite his … pragmatic awareness of the realities he faced, the earl himself remained far from defeated, because he’d also calculated that those same realities favored the defense whoever happened to be doing the defending. Having faced that starting point squarely, he’d proceeded to throw away the rule book—even the brand-new one, devised by the Army of God—and created an entirely new operational approach. He’d even come up with a term to summarize his new thinking: the “tactical defense/strategic offense,” he called it. And from Maigwair’s description of it, it struck Duchairn as commendably clear and logical.
The earl had no intention of simply lying down and dying—or running away—whenever the Charisians finally put in their appearance. His “defense in depth” would slow their attack, bleed their forces, force them to use up manpower, weapons, and ammunition fighting their way through one fortified position after another. And then, at the moment they were fully extended, he would launch his counteroffensive. With luck, the enemy would be caught off-balance and forced back, possibly even fully or partially enveloped and destroyed in detail. At the very least, his armies should be able to regain their original positions for a far lower price than that opponent had paid to push them back in the first place.
In fact, the difference in price tags might—might—be enough to offset the Charisians’ preposterous ability to conjure new manufactories out of thin air. In his bleaker moments, Duchairn suspected that hope was whistling in the dark, but what he knew for certain was that it was the only approach which offered even a possibility of success.
No doubt if Rainbow Waters’ strategy had been honestly explained to Clyntahn—which, thank God, no one had any intention of doing—the Grand Inquisitor would have denounced it as defeatist, since it conceded the offensive to the enemy. He might even have been right about that. The problem was that any other strategy would simply lead to Mother Church’s far speedier collapse.
Duchairn winced as he used the noun “collapse” even in the privacy of his own thoughts, but there was no point pretending. He and his hideously overworked staff had done a better job of propping up Mother Church’s finances than he’d ever dared hope they might. Yet despite every miracle they’d worked, they were only rearranging deck chairs as the ship foundered beneath them. Revenue streams were better than projected, and the initial response to his “Victory Bonds” had been far more favorable than anticipated, yet the civilian side of the ecnomy teetered on the very brink of collapse. He’d declared freezes of both wages and prices and instituted rationing—managed by the parish priests—of the most critical commodties, backed up by the full power of the Inquisition, but that had only succeeded in driving the price increases underground. Unless they were willing to equate bl
By the time the summer campaign season began in northern Haven and Howard, the Mighty Host would have just under two million men in the field. The newly revitalized Army of God, straining every sinew over the winter, would have almost eight hundred thousand new troops with the colors; combined with its surviving strength from the previous year, Mother Church would have just over a million men of her own.
That meant Maigwair would deploy very close to three million men this year, exclusive of anything Dohlar and the Border States might be able to sustain. That would be a far greater troop strength—far better equipped and with far more artillery support—than Mother Church had ever had before, although as Maigwair had just pointed out, the new AOG divisions wouldn’t be available before June or July. They would, however, be coming up behind the Mighty Host rapidly, which would provide a cushion against Harchongese losses in the earlier part of the campaign season. In fact, the combined strength of the Host and the new AOG formations would be at least four times as great as the Inquisition’s worst-case estimate of the numbers of men Cayleb and Stohnar could throw against them. The sheer firepower that represented was awesome to contemplate, and it seemed incredible—impossible—that it could be shattered the same way the Armies of the Sylmahn and of Glacierheart had been shattered the year before, especially with Rainbow Waters’ cool, practical brain in command.