1636_ The Saxon Uprising - Eric Flint [125]
The Third Division did, on the other hand, use rockets as flares and signaling devices. Krenz and his fellow officers had ordered a number made by the city’s artisans, for precisely the purpose they were being put to now—illuminating the area in the event of a night assault.
They were some real advantages, Eric had discovered, to fighting a siege when you were the ones inside the walls. At least, if they were the walls of a major city like Dresden, with its many workshops and manufactories, and hundreds of skilled craftsmen. The volley guns he could hear rattling away in the distance had been made here also. Dozens of them, in just a few weeks.
By the time he got to the bastion guarding the western end of the river wall, the battle was raging. The sound of grenades had now been added to the mix, which meant the enemy had gotten all the way up to the walls along the river bank. Some of those grenades were being thrown by the Swedes, trying to clear an area wide enough to get infantry over the walls on ladders. He could tell the difference from the sounds of the explosions.
Friedrich Nagel was already there when Eric got atop the bastion. “I think they’re mostly coming at the east end!” he shouted, pointing in that direction.
“Can you handle everything here?”
Nagel nodded. “It’s not so bad, really. The volley guns make a lot of difference. I don’t think they were expecting them.”
Eric turned and went back down the stairs. He had to force himself to move a little slowly. The snow covering the steps made them slippery.
He’d thought the volley guns would help. They were easy to make, once you understood the trick of the things. Most of these weren’t rifled, the way the division’s own volley guns were. But for the purposes of these guns, that didn’t matter so much. They were intended for the close range work of repelling assaults, not firing on an open battlefield. The key was the firing mechanism itself, the use of a single breech-loading firing strip that enabled the gun crew to fire a volley of twenty-five rounds five or six times a minute—even seven times a minute, if the crew was good enough.
These Dresden-made guns couldn’t match that rate of fire, of course, because they weren’t using percussion caps. No one in the city was set up to make such firing devices. Instead, these volley guns used a more primitive powder train. That cut the rate of fire in half.
Still, most of the volley gun crews along the walls could manage three volleys a minute—quite a bit better rate of fire than three-pounders loaded with canister, and far better than that of larger cannons. In fact, they could almost keep up with infantrymen firing muzzle-loading muskets.
The volley guns were quicker and cheaper to make than cannons, too, since they didn’t require the specialized equipment and skills needed to make large cannon barrels. Dresden had plenty of gunsmiths able to make the simple two-foot-long musket barrels, even if only one of the gun shops was set up to rifle the bores. The same was true for the carriages. A number of artisans in the city were able to manufacture them, where making the massive carriages for a cannon would have been difficult.
Another advantage of the volley guns was that they didn’t require a big crew—three men, where most cannons required at least twice than many. The ordnance was lighter and easier to handle, as well. That had made it possible to train a large number of the militiamen in their use, far more than they could have done with larger artillery.
Eric was sure that Nagel was right. The Swedish mercenaries coming across the river wouldn’t have expected to run into that heavy a fire. One or two bad volleys, certainly—canister fired out of cannons. Probably only one volley, with the limited visibility caused by the darkness and the overcast. Instead, once they’d been spotted, they’d been under continuous fire.
And once the battle had started, the visibility factors would be working against them. The same darkness and overcast would make crossing