Sturm warning, p.1
Sturm Warning, page 1
MUSKET MEN
BOOK 1
STURM WARNING
By Gilbert M. Stack
Amazon Edition
Copyright 2024 by Gilbert M. Stack
Cover Copyright 2024 by Chris L. Adams
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Dedication
I had the pleasure of shooting a black powder rifle while I was a Boy Scout journeying to Philmont Scout Ranch. It is amazing to think that these cumbersome slow-firing guns were ever a serious weapon of war, and yet they revolutionized armed combat—especially after the British figured out how to take those smooth-bore weapons firing an inaccurate round ball and make them into the most devastating infantry weapon known to that time. This book, the first in my new series, is dedicated to Bernard Cornwell for his series about, Richard Sharpe. Those were the books that first made me understand the British achievement and they’ve definitely influenced this series. Thank you, Mr. Cornwell.
Table of Contents
Dedication
Map of the Three Empires and the Surrounding Regions, 1196
Map of Oosten Graanland, 1196
The Commandments of Wotan
The Rule of Wotan
Prologue: First Battle
Chapter One: Is This Hell?
Chapter Two: The Hospital Ward
Chapter Three: A Time Piece
Chapter Four: A Crazy Idea
Chapter Five: The Highest-Ranking Officer in Oosten Graanland
Chapter Six: A Frank Conversation
Chapter Seven: Old Dogs, New Tricks
Chapter Eight: The First Test
Chapter Nine: The Price of Self-Indulgence
Chapter Ten: The Southern Problem
Chapter Eleven: New Orders
Chapter Twelve: An Unfortunate Choice of Commanding Officer
Chapter Thirteen: Written Orders
Chapter Fourteen: The Quartermaster
Chapter Fifteen: On the Trail
Chapter Sixteen: Rain
Chapter Seventeen: Into the Pass
Chapter Eighteen: Trouble
Chapter Nineteen: Disaster
Chapter Twenty: Muskets
Chapter Twenty-One: Pikes
Chapter Twenty-Two: Scouts
Chapter Twenty-Three: Cannon
Chapter Twenty-Four: Running Low on Ammunition
Chapter Twenty-Five: Cavalry
Chapter Twenty-Six: Plans
Chapter Twenty-Seven: A Clever Story
Chapter Twenty-Eight: General Pierre Rochefort
Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Messenger
Chapter Thirty: Preparing for the Next Assault
Chapter Thirty-One: That Is the Question
The Calendar
Military Ranks in Kriegsturm and Anjou
Army Units in Kriegsturm and Anjou
About the Author, Gilbert M. Stack
About the Cover Artist and Map Maker, Chris L. Adams
Other Works by Gilbert M. Stack
Contact, Gilbert M. Stack
Map of the Three Empires and the Surrounding Regions, 1196
Map of Oosten Granland, 1196
The Commandments of Wotan
Thou shalt always remain faithful to Wotan.
Thou shalt always defend your king.
Thou shalt always maintain your oaths.
Thou shalt always face your honorable foes blade-to-blade on the field of battle.
The Rule of Wotan
A man is:
Brave
Loyal
Trustworthy
Strong
Steadfast
Zealous
And
Right
Prologue
First Battle
The Southern Graanland Plains, Kriegsturm
The Worm Moon, Day 21, Year 1196
“Cavalry!” One of the men screamed and then most of the rest of the forty-two men in Lieutenant Marshal Sturm’s platoon were shouting the same word as twenty or twenty-five horsemen wearing the blue-and-white of the Empire of Anjou rode over the low hill and into view.
Sturm and his men were out here doing their own cavalry’s job, serving as the eyes of the army as they searched for a sign of the major incursion the Angies were supposed to be making into the territory of the High Kingdom of Kriesgsturm. The two nations had been fighting over Oosten Graanland for more than twenty years with Anjou mostly sending cavalry to raid, but occasionally upping the ante with a few thousand pike and musket men to see if they couldn’t make the black-and-green-clad officers of Kriegsturm blunder in a way they could take advantage of.
“Form a line!” Sergeant Klein shouted drawing a glare and an immediate countermand from Sturm. Both men were tall, both men were blonde under their helmets, and both believed that they were truly in charge of the platoon.
“No! Run for those rocks, boys!” Sturm ordered. “Quick as you can! We’ll make our stand there!”
About half the men took off running immediately, probably seeing the sense in the order more than reacting to the very new lieutenant’s authority. The other half took the time to look to the sergeant who, very reluctantly, waved them toward the rocks, burning two or three precious seconds in doing so.
As the rest of the men ran, the sergeant wasted one more second to glare at Sturm before heading after them. Sturm kept pace with him, keeping his eye on the enemy who had overcome their initial astonishment at finding a Kriegsturm platoon out in the open and were spurring their horses hard as they attempted to reach the musket men before they found the relative safety of that rocky outcropping.
“Form the best line you can when you’re in the rocks,” Sturm shouted, but the older men in his company were already taking positions that made them look more like hunters than soldiers.
“You can’t give an order like that,” the sergeant muttered at him. “They have to be short and crisp.”
Sturm ignored him.
The cavalry closed to about three hundred yards and half a dozen of Sturm’s boys fired their muskets—not that they had any chance of hitting anything at that distance.
“Stop firing!” Sturm screamed and half of the remaining men looked his way and then stopped aiming.
The cavalry kept coming—two hundred fifty yards, two hundred.
Sturm put on a burst of speed and outpaced the sergeant to reach the protection of the huge boulders jutting out of the ground. “Best line you can, now, boys!” He shouted between pants for breath. “Lead the cavalry. They’re riding fast. Get ready.”
The sergeant reached them, saw the men taking aim, and yelled fire a good eighty-five yards earlier than Sturm wanted him to. Four or five cavalrymen fell and Sturm turned around and decked the man who had just usurped his command.
He turned back to his men. “Reload now!” he shouted and the men began to fumble for their powder horns and reach back into their packs for their measuring cups, looking not at all like the bright and efficient soldiers Sturm wished them to be.
“Did anyone not fire?” Sturm shouted as the cavalry finished closing.
Three of his forty-two soldiers raised their hands.
“Good! Get up here and aim at that lieutenant with me,” Sturm told them as he lifted his own musket.
The horsemen were only thirty yards away now but that was still too far for what Sturm wanted.
“Wait for it! Wait for it!”
He yelled fire when only seven yards separated them and they blew the Angie lieutenant in his pretty blue-and-white uniform right out of his saddle.
The Angevins immediately swerved away, but they’d be back if they had any sense—back before Sturm could get his men reloaded.
Apparently, the loss of their lieutenant was even more disrupting than Sturm had hoped. Perhaps they had gotten lucky and taken down the senior noncom too for the enemy circled wide and came to a halt about five hundred yards away.
The sergeant grabbed Sturm’s leg and pulled him to the ground, shocking the lieutenant into dropping his musket.
A fist thudded against the small of Sturm’s back, knocking the wind out of him. The sergeant hit him again and Sturm elbowed the older man hard in the temple, truly surprising the bastard. Then Sturm hit him squarely in the nose, breaking it spectacularly. He scrambled to his feet and kicked the sergeant hard in the ribs, but the damn breastplate kept him from breaking them.
The sergeant’s little mutiny gave the Angies back their nerve. They came straight in probably intending to shoot their little pistols and then jump off and come in with swords.
“Who’s reloaded?” Sturm asked, putting the sergeant out of his mind.
About a third of the men raised their hands. The rest had apparently stopped to watch the brawl.
“Loaded muskets upfront with me,” Sturm ordered. “The rest of you, get your guns ready to fire.”
He lined the men up as the cavalry closed past one hundred yards. “Not a one of you fires until I say to!” Sturm warned them.
Seventy-five yards.
“Take aim!”
Fifty yards.
Sturm counted to three and yelled, “Fire!”
Fourteen m uskets thundered and a black acrid cloud of smoke filled the air around them, but that didn’t stop Sturm from watching eight more Angevin cavalry men go down.
The remainder turned and fled.
“A word, lieutenant,” Captain De Haan asked as he approached Sturm’s platoon in the camp they had established for the night.
The two men walked about a hundred yards away from the other soldiers where they could talk in relative privacy.
“What am I going to do with you, lieutenant?”
The question genuinely shocked Sturm. “Sir?”
“I have heard from six different men that you broke your sergeant’s nose today,” the captain told him.
“That’s true, sir,” Sturm said, suppressing the urge to shrug even as he wondered if Captain De Haan had somehow thought he would deny it. When the Rule of Wotan charged a man with being trustworthy, it certainly implied that he should be honest with his superior officers.
The captain just stared at him for several long moments, but Sturm had always been comfortable with silence so he waited him out.
“Why did you break his nose, lieutenant?”
“Does the captain wish the lieutenant to share the whole story, or just the proximate cause?” Sturm asked.
His question drew an unwilling smile from the captain’s lips which he tried hard to suppress and then gave up and laughed. “I forgot for a moment that you were an aide to a general back in Eisenland. Did the sergeants in his office teach you to talk that way?”
Sturm permitted himself a wry smile of his own. “Yes, sir, but I was attached to Colonel Kraus—not a general.”
“And why did you end up coming out here?” De Haan asked.
“Colonel Kraus had a heart attack and died,” Sturm explained. “His replacement did not need me, and I asked to be attached to a musket company.”
“You asked?” De Haan checked and it occurred to Sturm that in the brief moon he’d been under the captain’s command this subject had not come up before.
“Yes, sir,” he confirmed. “I have always liked muskets. My uncle used to take me hunting with them. We made our own shot and mixed our own powder—you know how important it is to get the mix right to prevent clumping and misfires. I even spent a summer in a gunsmith’s workshop learning to make the weapons. Joining a musket company is what I had hoped to do when my family bought my commission, but my mother had other ideas and she used her connections to get Colonel Kraus to make me an aide.”
The captain smiled in genuine sympathy. “Our families always think they know what’s best for us, don’t they?”
“Yes, sir, they do, and we cannot fault them for trying to look out for our best interests,” Sturm agreed.
“But she didn’t have any pull with the new colonel?” De Haan asked.
“She was dead by then, sir,” Sturm answered. He didn’t explain that she and his father had been attacked on the road by brigands who had used her most foully before they slit her throat.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Captain De Haan said. “May Frigg embrace her and keep her in a place of honor in the City of Wotan.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“But this is all getting off track. You broke your sergeant’s nose today. I can’t have that, Sturm. You need your sergeant. He’ll keep you from making big mistakes that cost a lot of lives.”
“Not in this case, sir,” Sturm insisted. “Sergeant Klein interfered in the operational command of my men, first trying to get them to line up in the open field against cavalry when good cover was only a short distance away, and then pre-empting my command of the muskets so that the men fired early killing only four of the enemy when we should have gotten at least fifteen.”
De Haan looked at Sturm for a long time before sighing and saying, “Lieutenant, you are very green. Klein has been in the service for fifteen years. He knows what he’s doing. What I hear is that you almost got your entire platoon killed.”
Sturm felt his face heat with anger. “Permission to make a full report, sir? Then the captain can advise the lieutenant on where he went wrong.”
De Haan sighed again. “Go ahead.”
Sturm took him through the whole action from the moment the cavalry came over the hill until he released half the men to loot the bodies.
When he finished, De Haan asked, “Why didn’t you arrest Klein for assaulting you?”
Sturm shrugged. “It would have technically been the correct thing to do, but sometimes men are still like boys. I decided to treat this like the neighborhood bully. I knocked him down twice. I showed him I’m the tougher man. And, as you have pointed out, I need a sergeant. I decided to give him one more chance.”
“I actually think that was a very mature call on your part,” De Haan mused. “I don’t know Klein well. I’ve only been with the company a couple of moons longer than you have. But this very well could work to show him who’s in charge and make him step in line.”
The captain came to a decision. “Let’s let it stand where it is until we get back to Fort Ster. This was a good talk, Sturm. We should have more of them. I haven’t quite figured you out yet, but I do know one thing for certain. You’re looking after your men while still doing your duty and that’s all that Wotan asks of any of His officers.”
Late the next morning, the musket battalion found the enemy army—or at least its forward elements—and the major in command seemed to think that it fell on the musket men, and the musket men alone, to vanquish the enemy.
He immediately called an officer’s meeting while the enemy pikes adopted a hedgerow formation roughly seven hundred yards across the field from them.
Major Otten faced his officers, his uniform in amazingly good shape considering that they were in the field. The black shirt was buttoned right up to his neck beneath his blackened breastplate. The forest green jacket was perfectly tailored and the equally green pants with the black stripe up each leg looked as if they’d been pressed this morning, Even, his damn boots sparkled in the sunlight as he spoke to his captains and lieutenants.
“This, gentlemen, is our opportunity to show Master General Albrekt what we’re made of. We have trained for this moment for two years without having the chance to show our worth in a battalion level action. Now, the enemy has presented itself, and Wotan, Himself, calls us to do our duty.”
Sturm glanced at the enemy, standing in neat rows with their twelve-foot pikes pointing up into the air. He had examined soldiers on parade enough times with Colonel Kraus to know that it would take less than three seconds for those men to ground the butts of their pikes in the earth and lower the points to face the enemy. The result was an impressive hedge of death that had originally been designed to ward off attacking cavalry, but proved even more effective against charging musket men.
“When I finish speaking,” Major Otten continued, “you will return to your men and we will march across the field as if Master General Albrekt, himself, were watching us. At approximately thirty yards distance, I will give the order to take aim and fire—disrupting our enemy’s formation. I will then shout, Charge! And we will go win greater glory for Wotan.”
Sturm listened in growing horror to the major’s battle plan. On a theoretical level, he was aware that this was commonly how musket companies were utilized in battle. But the charge was a shock tactic ideally used when taking the enemy by surprise or against other musket men. To charge here against pikes that were ready for them? That would be the very definition of suicidal.
Sturm couldn’t let that stand. “Excuse me, sir, may I ask a question?”
Standing next to the major, Captain De Haan grimaced.
The major looked about and spotted Sturm. “Yes, lieutenant, what is it?
“Sir, why don’t we march until we’re roughly one hundred fifty yards away from the enemy and then stop and fire our weapons?”
The major looked confused by the suggestion. “And why would we do that, lieutenant?”
Sturm thought the answer was blatantly obvious, but he presented it anyway. “So that we can reload and shoot the Angies again, and again, and again until they get out of that damn hedgerow formation and come at us so we have a better chance of actually killing them.”
The major’s mouth hardened with disapproval. “That sounds like cowardice to me, lieutenant. The Fourth Commandment of Wotan charges us to meet our enemies on the battlefield blade to blade.”
