By My Sword Alone by David Black (ebook reader ink TXT) 📕

The latest word from the countryside was that the Russians were about to begin their work proper on reducing the city. Their heavy guns had arrived, and were waiting in artillery parks in the countryside to the south and west, before being rolled up to the newly dug battery positions facing Danzig’s walls. And a new general had arrived, one Burkhard Christoph Graf von Münnich, another German in the service of Tsarina Anna, and a noted army engineer who was reputed to have been placed in charge of the inner circle of Russian forces.

But James wasn’t thinking about that right now. He was tutting away to himself over the lack of targets for his dragoons. The Russian cuirassiers trotted round the curve in the road and vanished into the wall of forest. But as they did, from the other horizon, from towards Danzig, appeared an altogether more promising cavalcade.

A coach and four, escorted by a dozen hussars in the same sky blue uniforms he remembered from a previous tussle. The coach looked as if it carried officers of some significance.

This road was the main artery from the mouth of the Vistula at Fort Sommerschanz to Danzig, and where the coach was passing was where the Baltic’s featureless, flat and sandy coastal plain ended, and the road curved into the forest and rolling landscape that was now offering James and his Dzików all this dead ground for cover.

James reached for his telescope. The coach was coming to a halt.

Strange.

Why?

Then, six officers were clambering out of the coach. He turned his focus on them, the lens of his glass picking out all too clearly the gold braid that bedecked their uniforms, and the feathers flowing from their equally braided tricornes.

A field table was produced, and was being unfolded, and map tubes were being laid out. Were they here to survey some siege-supporting site? Actually, he didn’t need to know any more; he had already decided he was going to grab them.

The Dzików were at their leisure in a dip in the terrain, the horses from the two squadrons tethered and minded by the young buglers, and the troopers squatting and nattering in small groups, taking the odd fortifying chug from their eau de vie flasks. This departure from the usual rigid discipline was highly uncommon. Soldiers did everything in files and columns. It was universally understood; for every movement, an order. It was modern way of fighting; how you bent uneducated masses of men to your will.

It had taken a long time for NCOs, and even the men, to become accustomed to stepping out of that world, no matter how briefly. But James had decided rested troops, and rested horses, fought better than ones who’d spent all the day’s long hours stuck in meaningless regime; men sitting to attention on their hard saddles, and their mounts standing motionless in strict lines with a trooper’s weight on their backs.

Once his lumpen, usually deeply stupid, troopers had overcome their astonishment at being allowed to loll about from time to time, they had responded well, despite all the additional drills – and discipline – involved in learning how to re-mount and form up fast, in an emergency.

So nobody needed calling to alert when James and Casimir came galloping over the brow of the hill.

‘Captain Poinatowski! To me!’ cried James as he pulled Estelle to a halt.

James’ plan was simple. Poinatowski would take a troop of dragoons and ride down to secure officers who had emerged from the coach. He and James agreed, the mere dozen Russian hussars covering them would not be capable of putting up much of a fight against seventy charging Dzików; so capturing the Russian gentlemen should be a mere formality.

James would take the rest of the two squadrons and watch the road lest another of those cuirassier patrols turned up from the direction of Fort Sommerschanz. The flat terrain towards Danzig meant James could offer no cover from that direction without them losing surprise. So Poinatowski would just have to take his chances when making his grab.

The units parted, James leading the bulk of his force up out of the dip and on to the rising ground overlooking the road to the east.

He and Casimir went ahead to scout, dismounting again, and crawling to the lip of the rise. When they popped their heads up, there before them, deployed in four ranks across the road, facing back to Danzig, were at least 200 Russian cuirassiers, their big heavy cavalry mounts snorting and stamping billows of dust as they waited, officers conferring at their head.

From James’ position, he was looking diagonally towards their backs, and he could easily see the curve in the road that masked them from the Russian officers’ coach and equally, any cavalry unit intent on attacking it. But it was not the whole picture. Maybe 1,500 paces back up the road towards Fort Sommerschanz was another mounted group. James retrieved his telescope. Another dozen or so Russian cavalry. Most of them cuirassiers, but one officer in particular so be-decked with braiding he must be a general at least; as if there to watch the ambush the Russians so obviously intended for anyone attacking that officer-filled coach up ahead.

James smiled, and said to himself, so you’re just going to sit there, just close enough to say you were present at your victory, but not so close you might feel the swipe of a sabre ... well, we’ll see about that.

‘Casimir,’ said James, ‘tell the captain of second squadron I have ordered that he give you command of half a troop.’

‘Excellency!’ breathed Casimir, his eyes wide, fit to burst, and a manic grin splitting his face. ‘Immediately, excellency!’

‘Casimir, please wait one moment …’

‘Excellency!’

‘… to hear what it is I want you to do with them.’

James was aware of the