1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [4]
On the positive side, the hand guns owned by the villagers were actually better than those of most soldiers, even regular forces. They were rifles, for the most part, not smoothbore muskets. Far more accurate, especially in the hands of men who'd been hunting all their lives.
Their great limitation on a battlefield was their terribly slow rate of fire compared to smoothbore muskets. That was the reason that professional armies generally used muskets. Wilhelm had heard that the Americans had introduced a method for rapidly rearming front-loading muskets. It involved something called a Minié ball. But he'd never seen one and had no real idea how it was done.
For an ambush like this, however—with Kresse and his men in hot pursuit of the enemy—the villagers didn't really need to worry much about reloading quickly.
* * *
Wilhelm Kuefer had participated in many fights under Kresse's command. He knew Georg would launch a savage assault on the deserter camp just as dawn was breaking. Then, as the panicked band of mercenaries tried to escape, he would harry them relentlessly—always keeping them to the road and not letting them veer off into the countryside.
The road would seem like the safest escape route, anyway. So, they'd follow it for two hours after the initial assault—well over six miles of a mountain "road" that was more in the way of a trail for pasturing cows. By the time they arrived at the ambush site where Kuefer and his cannon and militiamen were waiting, they'd be exhausted as well as terrified.
When the first deserters appeared around the bend, the militiamen began shooting them down. But, at Kuefer's prior orders, only a handful of them were firing, their best marksmen, and they were not firing volleys. Their fire was deadly because of its accuracy, but it wouldn't seem to the deserters that they were facing a sizeable opponent. Just some mountaineers trying to defend a local village; at worst, a small number of skirmishers from the same partisan group who'd attacked them.
Either way, especially as they were in a panic over the oncoming and relentless pursuit, Kuefer had figured the deserters would try to rush the barricade and simply drive over the presumed handful of men guarding it.
So it proved. At the last moment, one of the deserters spotted the mouth of cannon barrel hidden behind some branches, and tried to call out a warning.
But by then it was too late. "Fire!" Wilhelm shouted. The saker belched a double load of canister. At that point-blank range—the nearest deserter was less than ten feet away—the canister slaughtered every man in its path. It didn't spread very far, but Kuefer didn't care. The noise and the carnage would be enough to stun the now-completely-disorganized crowd of deserters. And as soon as he shouted the command to fire, all of the militiamen behind the abattis fired a volley. That took down another dozen men. By now, almost half of the band of deserters had been killed or wounded.
Such horrendous casualties would have routed even a disciplined unit of good soldiers. This rabble immediately tried to flee back up the road. Several of them dropped their weapons along the way.
Three of them tried to scramble up the slope to find safety in the forest beyond. But militiamen had been waiting in the woods also, and gunned them down as soon as they reached the crest.
Then, before the last of the Holk deserters had disappeared around the bend, Kuefer could hear more guns firing. Kresse had arrived, obviously.
It was almost comical, in its own way. Now the deserters came racing back. The cannon wasn't reloaded yet, but many of the militiamen had been able to reload their rifles. They started firing again. Not in a volley, but it hardly mattered.
By the time Kresse's men appeared, there weren't more than five deserters left alive and uninjured. You couldn't say "left standing," though, because all five of them were lying on the ground, trying to pretend they were dead.
Wilhelm shook his head. Fat lot of good that would do them.
If it had been left to Kuefer himself,