1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [147]
Fuck!
Chapter 37
The first hussar charge was driven back with a horrible slaughter. This was the first time Stanislaw Koniecpolski had faced the new rifled muskets massed on a battlefield, and he'd underestimated their effectiveness. They could be reloaded as quickly as smoothbore muskets but had two or even three times the effective range. He understood now why the Swedes had such a seemingly-perilous dearth of pikemen. They had only one pike for every two muskets, where the usual ratio was one-to-one or even two-to-one in favor of the long spears.
But those slender ranks of pikemen were enough, given the horrific rate of fire being maintained by the riflemen they were protecting.
Koniecpolski almost lost the battle, right then and there. He surely would have, had he followed his natural urge to hurl more hussars at the enemy. He'd won battles before with that simple tactic, and more than one of them. Hussars were terrifying in a full charge, on their immense horses and with the wings expanding their apparent size and their huge lances. They were like something out of legend. Mounted knights of fable, with the ferocity of ancient warriors.
But not this battle. The Swedes stood their ground and gunned down the Polish cavalry. Shot them and shot and shot them. Not more than twenty or thirty even managed to reach the enemy lines, and they were either killed or driven off by the pikes soon enough.
The grand hetman couldn't afford such casualties. Not even hussars could withstand losses like these, if they kept up.
"Call them back!" he bellowed to his aides. As they raced off to carry out his orders, Koniecpolski turned to the commander of his Cossack units, Severyn Skoropadsky.
"I need you to relieve the pressure, Ataman. Make no frontal attacks, you understand. Just harass them and keep them off balance for . . ."
He paused to gauge the sky. "Perhaps half an hour. Or a bit longer."
Skoropadsky had a little smile on his face, with perhaps a trace of derision. As if Cossacks were dumb enough to imitate blockhead Polish hussars! Cossacks were raiders of the steppes. Like Tatars and the Mongols before them, their style of warfare was fluid. They mostly used firearms now instead of bows, but their tactics were still basically those of mounted archers.
But if there was any derision in that smile, it was only a trace and more the product of Cossack habit than any disrespect for Koniecpolski himself. The grand hetman of Poland and Lithuania was well-regarded by the Commonwealth's registered Cossacks. Koniecpolski had played a major role in the Polish campaign to crush the Cossack rebellion in 1630 led by Taras Fedorovych. No Cossack doubted that Koniecpolski would have completely crushed the rebels had that been what he saw as his duty. But during the negotiations that finally produced a treaty in August, Koniecpolski had opposed harsh reprisals against the Cossack rebels. He'd thought that the long-standing tensions between Poland-Lithuania and the Cossack hosts would never end until the Commonwealth changed its policies toward the Cossacks.
So, whenever he went on campaign, Koniecpolski had no trouble gaining the adherence of several thousand registered Cossacks—no small accomplishment, given that there were not all that many to begin with. Many of them were no doubt unregistered, of course. In time of war, the atamans would usually look the other way if their ranks were partially filled with Cossacks from the various independent hosts who had no legal standing in the Commonwealth.
So would Stanislaw Koniecpolski. Whatever their faults, Cossacks were fighters.
Whenever a charge was broken as badly as this one had been, there was always the great danger that the retreating cavalrymen would trigger panic in the whole army. The repulse of a charge would then become the rout of an army.
Koniecpolski himself could play the most important part in stifling that danger. He was already riding toward the returning hussars, to steady them with words of assurance and his simple presence.