Rusgren Pass - March 30, 1836
"Alright boys, we'll resupply here and push on with our patrol. We got a lot of ground to cover before nightfall."
Corporal Joseph Lee glanced up as the captain at the head of his cavalry column spoke. The former horse artilleryman was a rather thickly built man who felt dizzy whenever he rode.
"How ya doin' Joe?" Lee looked up as his brother Chester rode up. Unlike himself, Chester was thin and rather light, well suited to the cavalry.
"Well enough thanks." Another matter in which the two siblings differed was their speech. Lee had been conscripted into the ranks of the Imperial army and had spent a few years having the mainstream Gallian accent rub off on him. Chester on the other hand, had been too young for Imperial service and had consequently retained his backwoods drawl.
"Ya reckon we'll run into some Imps once we get clear of this here pass?"
"I don't know. I'd rather not though."
"Aw, shucks. You're funnin' me. A heap o' the boys are rarin' for a good ruckus."
"That's because most of them have never seen a real one." Before his brother could argue further, the patrol rode into the supply depot. The depot was located in the center of a mountain pass, far from any prying Imperial eyes.
As the column halted with harnesses jingling, a major came out of a nearby tent.
"Welcome to Outstation 12, gentlemen. I am Major Harold Weber, its commanding officer."
"Captain Nathaniel Danielson, sir. 44th Cavalry out on patrol. We require supplies and provisions before we press on," the captain said with a salute.
"Very well. Kasu! Zeyd! See to it that these men have what they need."
Two young men with distinctive dark indigo hair and eyes ran up and saluted. Lee felt his skin crawl as he saw them. Darcsens. Their kind had been kept in labor jobs since the Darcsen Calamity almost two thousand years ago. They had also been stripped of their rights to family names or property. The Barious Desert to the east stood as a grim testament to the necessity of such measures.
As the men began to haul supply crates out of tents and open them, other members of the patrol made their distaste more obvious.
"Hey, dark-hair! Be careful handling my rations. Wouldn't want any of your tunnel filth on my food."
"That smell was you? I thought we had accidently ridden into a garbage dump." The Darcsens stiffened, but otherwise did not react.
"Here are the supplies you require sir." a nearby Darcsen said tonelessly, holding out a bag and a small box. Lee accepted them, wordlessly stuffing them into his pack.
"Where'd you steal that uniform from, boy?" another trooper asked as a nearby groom began to lay out feed for the horses.
The Darcsen drew himself up. "I am a member of the Darcsen Auxiliary Corps, and this uniform was issued to me as a part of my enlistment."
"Is that so?" The trooper looked around at his squadmates before viciously kicking the man in the face. "Don't think that you can be anywhere near equal to real Gallians, boy."
The Darcsen sat up clutching the side of his face as blood seeped through his hair. "I would thank you to accord me the respect you would any other man fighting for Gallia's freedom," he said.
"Oh, will ya look at his high-falutin talk." Chester jeered.
"I will not stand for that, Private!" Major Weber suddenly shouted, his face livid as if it were a personal insult.
"And I respectfully reckon commanding this place has turned you into a Darcsen-lover, sir," Chester drawled. "Come on boys, let's ride!"
As the patrol galloped out of the post, many trampled through the outstation's neatly stacked supply crates, scattering their contents every which way. Laughing and joking at the chaos they had caused, the column rode north.
"To be frank, I do not approve of such harsh treatment of Darcsens, Captain." Colonel Javier Franz said grimly. "I have no great use for them myself, but in this case, there is no room for personal prejudices. If we are to win this war, we must use every asset at our disposal. If that resource happens to be Darcsens, so be it."
Captain Ehren Gunther looked askance at his commanding officer. "But sir, they're Darcsens," he said in a tone of voice one might use with a dangerous lunatic.
"Keep the war free from your personal feelings. That goes for both the Darcsens and the enemy. If you allow your mentality to be influenced by emotion, the enemy will have that much of an easier time sending you home in a pine box."
"I'll keep it in mind, sir," Gunther said dubiously. Colonel Franz had been something like a mentor to Gunther ever since he'd been a raw recruit, but it was still hard for the captain to swallow such a radical idea. He began marshalling his thoughts to respond when their conversation was interrupted by the rapidly approaching form of an advance scout.
"Sir, beg to report, the enemy has a column of light cavalry up ahead! Looks like a scouting party, maybe four score men."
"Scheisse!" Gunther hadn't expected to see the enemy so soon. To make things worse, the number of men Franz and Gunther had along only amounted to about fifty.
"Have they seen you?" Franz, as always, kept his famous ironclad cool.
The scout looked offended. "Seen us? They could have had an artillery battery on their flank and not notice it."
"Good work." Franz pondered for a moment. "Captain Gunther, dismount a couple of platoons and hide them in the tall grass there. The horses will need to shift for themselves."
"Sir! A maneuver like that will leave you and the remainder of the men defenseless!" Gunther objected.
"That's up to you. Now move." The men moved. In a matter of minutes, Gunther was hunkered down in waist-high grass with forty other men, waiting. It wasn't long.
The enemy cavalry crested a hill, coming into sight. The scout had been right. Most of the enemies weren't veterans. They were laughing and joking with no forward scouts or markers deployed. Gunther's lips drew back in a feral grin. If the enemy wanted to send raw conscripts forward, Franz's veterans would cut them to pieces.
The column swung about as they spotted Franz's detachment and began to spread into a ragged line. There was absolutely no drill or discipline in the deploying formation. The captain almost tutted despite himself.
Franz began to pull in the enemy, his men taking a few potshots as they retreated. Gunther judged he had waited long enough.
"Give it to 'em!" he shouted as he rose up out of the grass and the front blade of his rifle settled on the back of the nearest trooper. The Koffler broke the silence with an abrupt booming crack, dropping the man out of the saddle with the first shot. His fingers worked the lever under the stock, flicking out a brass cartridge. The other men's rifles began to bark as they followed his example, knocking more unsuspecting cavalry off their mounts.
The enemy reacted much as he had expected them to. Displaying an appalling lack of fire discipline, the inexperienced cavalry troops fired panicked shots into the grass, with the sole result of emptying their antiquated single-shot carbines. As the murderous hail of fire scythed down more men, some attempted to dismount, only to be crushed by their own frantic mounts. Drawing sabers, the few remaining men rallied for one last desperate charge. Gunther and his men soon taught them the error of their ways as their lever-actions thundered. Men pitched out onto the field as horses were shredded by the blazing line of focused fire. By the time the slaughter was over, only a handful of the shattered cavalry unit managed to escape in disarray, urging their panicked mounts over a nearby hill.
"Good work, Captain," Oberst Franz remarked as he rode up, a smoking rifle across his lap.
"Danke schon. Have to admit, these new rifles helped a lot too."
"Quite so. Any casualties?"
"No, just a couple wounded. Those old trapdoor carbines aren't much use on horseback."
"Hm. They seem to be using old Army ordnance. Well, get your men together, and find your horses. As it seems resistance will be light, we should report back to Brigadegeneral Gregor."
"Jawohl!" The war would not win itself of course, but if Hauptmann Ehren Gunther of the Imperial Army had anything to say about it, Gallia would soon be back in Imperial hands.
Author Note: *Oberst, Hauptmann and Brigadegeneral are the German terms for Colonel, Captain and Brigadier General, respectively.
Once again, thanks to Markal and Chiemiangel for the beta-read.