Chapter 88: A Meaningless Victory

“Colonel Pekra, I am entrusting everything to you!” Outside Chamela Town, Fred said solemnly to Viscount Pekra. After the battle under the walls of Chamela City, the viscount, whose rank of lieutenant colonel had not changed for eighteen years, had finally received a promotion, and he had unquestionably become the most important staff officer in the Middle Route Army under Fred’s command. At this critical moment, he was now entrusted with a heavy task:

He would lead the nobles’ private soldiers under the Middle Route Army and most of the 9th Legion, about twelve thousand men in total, to Shadow Fort to reinforce the trapped Eastern Route Army under General Carterlake.

“Please be sure to break open the Cretans’ encirclement and bring whatever remains of the Eastern Route Army to the Umberlian Valley, and organize a second line of defense. The life and death of our entire army lies in your hands.”

“Please rest assured, General. I will do my utmost and will not let down your great trust.” Colonel Pekra straightened his back, then said with concern, “Compared with us, your safety, General, is what worries me more.”

Indeed, after the battle to take Chamela City, although we had replenished our troops on the spot, the number of soldiers still did not exceed twenty thousand. Once Colonel Pekra left, Fred would have in hand only fewer than three thousand light cavalry, four thousand heavy infantry, and a small number of scattered troops. We had to rely on this thin remaining strength to hold the present defense line, secure the army’s supplies, and at the same time tie down the power ful Cretan forces, leaving them no time to further increase their encirclement of the Eastern Route Army. On the surface, this was nothing different from an egg striking a stone—it was almost impossible.

But if this force included the “Star Knights” who had just established their glory under the walls of Chamela City; the spear unit that Rodrick had formed during the defense of Kampnavia City, which had performed brilliantly on the battlefield for years and was known as the “Fang of Longing”; and the heavy infantry formed at the same time, Dakla’s personal troops, who were no less powerful than the strongest infantry forces of any country on the continent—then the situation might have been different. Moreover, the man commanding this force was the brightest young military star to have risen on the Farvill Continent in recent years, the only outstanding commander who could be mentioned in the same breath as Crown Prince Louis of Winston—my lifelong closest friend, Fred Guderian.

If anyone could accomplish this impossible battlefield miracle, it had to be us. Of this I was absolutely certain.

“Do you remember what I said to you under the walls of Chamela City, Colonel Pekra?” Fred said. “If you truly worry about my safety, then please rescue General Carterlake as soon as possible, and then come back here…”

“…I am entrusting everything to you…” My friend said seriously, and his words carried boundless entrustment and trust. It was the limitless trust of one soldier in another. The power of that trust was enough to make us place our lives in another person’s hands without the slightest hesitation.

“I will obey, sir!” Colonel Pekra raised his saber in a salute to Fred, then turned and asked me with a smile:

“Lieutenant Colonel, would you mind seeing an old fellow like me off?”

“It is my honor, sir.”

The two of us rode side by side at the front of the army, deliberately keeping our distance from the soldiers behind us.

“Lieutenant Colonel…” Colonel Pekra glanced at me, seeming to want to say something, but not knowing how to begin.

“Sir, what do you want to say?”

“…If—I mean if—after forty days we have not returned to Chamela Town, please be sure to persuade General Guderian to withdraw to Blade’s Edge Canyon.” He clenched his teeth and finally got the words out.

“What do you mean?” I was a little confused.

“I do not mean anything, Lieutenant Colonel!” He looked a little restless, and interrupted me somewhat roughly. “I am only saying ‘if’… You know, it is only a guess. Judging by common sense, if everything goes smoothly, we can return victorious in at most forty days. If we really do not come back, please put the General’s safety and the whole war situation first, and persuade the General to withdraw the entire army back to the canyon. I am not afraid of you laughing at me. I am just… I am just a little uneasy. Damn it, maybe I am overthinking. Perhaps everything will go smoothly, and we will be back in fifteen days.” He complained with some annoyance, swaying crookedly on his saddle. At that moment, he really did not look like a soldier at all.

“Why didn’t you say these things to the General yourself?”

“I don’t know, Lieutenant Colonel. It’s just a feeling. Although the General is very young, when I am with him, I cannot think of these things at all. It seems… it seems that all victories are already decided, and it makes one feel very safe inside. In front of him, I… I cannot say these words. But you are different, Lieutenant Colonel. With you, I feel relaxed. Forgive my impertinence, but to tell the truth, you are such a lovely young man that you always make people unable to resist telling you everything. Thank goodness you are not a woman, Lieutenant Colonel. Otherwise, you would surely empty out every secret in my heart and then spread them all over the streets—we know women love to do that—and then my reputation would really stink…”

Hearing his praise, I did not know whether to be happy or upset. I could only promise him that if these situations we did not want to see really appeared, I would certainly do as he asked.

“…Then please go back, Lieutenant Colonel. Talking with you truly makes me happy. Oh, right. Please be sure to keep my secret!”

“Secret? Is it about that commoner officer?” I really could not see what there was to keep secret about that.

Colonel Pekra looked a little embarrassed. His face flushed red, and he muttered, “Not that. I mean… I mean… the fact that I wet my pants on the battlefield…”

…

How could one use fewer than nine thousand men to hold a defense line that stretched across almost half the plain, while also attracting no fewer than forty thousand enemies and leaving them no time to think about anything else?

Fred’s answer was firm: attack.

Yes, only attack.

Only attack could hold the Cretans’ attention. Only attack could keep the Cretans from seeing through our true strength. Likewise, only taking the initiative to attack could keep the choice of whether to fight firmly in our own hands, allowing us to seize as much initiative as possible in this extremely unfavorable situation.

Attacking did not mean a head-on clash with a powerful enemy. On the contrary, precisely because we were the ones attacking, we had the right to choose weaker opponents.

First, we chose the town of Mongadillo in the southeastern corner of Chamela. On the surface, choosing this as the point of attack did not seem wise. It was not a small town; it had a garrison of nearly two thousand. For us, who were short of troops, it was a very hard target to crack. But it was precisely for this reason that Fred pointed his command baton there.

Only by taking Mongadillo would the Cretans truly believe that this was a battle to seize territory, not a bluffing feint.

The battle was not as hard as expected. The Cretans were completely unprepared for our arrival. In this carefully planned night attack, we reached the top of the city wall at very little cost, and did not even leave the enemy time to sound the alarm. When Dakla, fully armored and holding a warhammer, shouted at the wide-open city gate, the battle was in fact already over. Under Fred’s plan, we set no ambush south of Mongadillo. The routed Cretans fled out of the wide-open south gate like sheep escaping from a pen. If they had gathered their wits, re-formed their ranks, and retreated in an orderly fashion, they might have saved more lives. But their fear of war and death made them forget discipline and formation. They scattered across the empty grassland like a pile of messy stones.

And on the grassland, what could be more dangerous than a band of knights shimmering with dangerous magical light?

The Star Knights, in groups of one hundred, cruelly hunted down every human prey that appeared before their eyes. They shouted, they slaughtered, they drank blood. They hammered the name “Star” deep into the heart of every terrified survivor, making these once-brave people, even in their twilight years, not dare to walk alone under a bright starry night.

Star—that beautiful word—now appeared before people with an unprecedented bloody meaning, casting a blood-colored glow.

“…When the stars give off an eerie light, the earth is covered in blood. Soldiers’ lives lose the mercy of the gods, and they fall weeping upon the wasteland…” Decades later, when I had the chance to set foot on the land of the Cretans, I heard these verses from a bard. Those gentle words were only the limit of a romantic, ignorant schoolboy’s imagination. They could never describe what that scene had been like. The companions traveling with me, when they recalled that night, could not help trembling and asking themselves:

“How could we have been so cruel back then?”

That was a savage mentality that could only erupt when one was actually in that situation. It was the maximum release of a group’s instinctive power in extreme danger and despair. Yes, the enemies before us were insignificant, but behind them stood tens of thousands of enemies. Every extra enemy we killed gave us one more chance to survive. In such a situation, it was impossible for a normal person not to go mad.

That bloody night passed quickly. We had fewer than three hundred wounded, and had killed nearly fifteen hundred enemies.

Most of the enemies died outside the city. Some fugitives, even after climbing over three small hills in a row, were still killed by the pursuing light cavalry.

Glorious victories are always piled on top of countless bones.

After occupying Mongadillo, we took as much surplus grain and winter clothing as we could, while still leaving the local residents the bare minimum they needed to live. Except for what we could carry away, everything else was piled up outside the town and burned. Afterward, we destroyed the city walls, burned the storehouses, and wrecked six of the town’s nine wells.

While doing all this, Fred was crying, I was crying, Red Flame was crying; all of us were crying.

We had stripped the people of this town of their peaceful, comfortable lives, and we could not make it up to them. Even the Cretan occupying forces had never done anything so brutal, and we left them to live in hunger, thirst, and poverty for a long time afterward. All we could do was preserve their most basic needs, so that they would not curse us to our faces or rise against us. Perhaps in the near future, many of them would die directly or indirectly because of this atrocity. All of it was our guilt.

This guilt was too heavy, so heavy that we did not know how to atone to them.

I accompanied Millia from house to house, calming people’s hearts and asking the residents of this town to endure this temporary hardship. Before the beautiful monk, these helpless residents were gentle and seemed reasonable. But while talking, they clearly kept glancing at the sword at my waist again and again, and their terrified expressions could not always be hidden well.

I did not know whether they truly understood Millia’s words, or only understood the threat coming from a soldier. I only knew that as we walked down one street, a child threw a stone at me.

The stone hit the right shoulder of my armor with an ugly scraping sound. I stopped and turned to look at that child.

The child was being heavily slapped in the face, again and again, by his father. The father’s hand was heavy, leaving bright red finger marks on the child’s face one after another. His expression was as heavy as his hand, and the look he gave me held panic, pleading, and hatred.

Helplessly, I waved my hand at him and turned away.

What else could I do? That child had every right to hate me, this tin can of a knight, didn’t he? Just a moment before, what I had taken from him might have been his rich, sweet dinner, the new clothes he would have worn tomorrow morning, and his dreams of the army and of heroic soldiers. And all he did was throw a stone at me.

That revenge was too light.

A day later, we finished all of this, and then we left—all of us.

Three thousand cavalry pointed their lances at Dover, a small town to the southwest, while four thousand infantry attacked a small village called Albert in the middle, leaving the town of Mongadillo, which had not a single soldier, to the Cretans who were rushing toward it.

Two days later, we got word that Mongadillo had been occupied by five thousand Cretan troops.

Three days later, Dover fell, and Albert Village fell at the same time.

Half a day later, we left Dover, carrying the deep hatred and sorrow of the local residents. Four days later, we joined the infantry led by Dakla and Rodrick outside a town called Darianka in the southeast. At this time, intelligence showed that nearly ten thousand Cretan troops had gathered at both Dover and Albert.

Half a day later, Darianka fell.

After another half day, we left nothing in Darianka except the tears of its residents.

Two days later, Dakla, Rodrick, and I led the infantry in a lightning raid on Mongadillo, whose walls were broken and which had only five hundred defenders. Fred and Red Flame, meanwhile, led the cavalry to break through two layers of Cretan defenses one after another and captured Cheva Village deep in their southern territory.

Intelligence showed that the Cretan army at Darianka had already reached thirty thousand…

The pursuers behind us grew more and more numerous, and the time we could stop and rest at any one place grew shorter and shorter. On one hand, we could proudly say that we had successfully slowed the enemy down, left them no time to turn east, and done our utmost to ensure the safety of Colonel Pekra, who was going to rescue the Eastern Route Army. On the other hand, we were like a group of reckless children who threw a small stone at the top of a snowy mountain. The stone rolled into a snowball and finally set off a huge avalanche. And what we had to do, besides keeping ourselves safe in this disaster, was to find every way to make that avalanche erupt even more violently.

…

That was our strategy. Appear where we absolutely should not have appeared, break down city defenses, drain supplies, and then leave to look for the next prey.

Even the boldest commander, I am afraid, would not dare to scatter the mere nine thousand men in his hands when facing more than forty thousand enemies.

But Fred dared.

He could use the incomparable mobility of the light cavalry to attack a village in the south and one in the north in a single day, creating the illusion that we had two armies attacking at the same time. And at that moment, the infantry could free up their hands and concentrate their strength to attack a larger town. If the attack failed, we would retreat at once and wait to regroup at a prearranged place. Then we would attack again.

From beginning to end, Fred accurately predicted the Cretans’ moves, allowing us to move nimbly through their dense layers of encirclement. We were like an oversized loach that slipped into a pond when no one was paying attention and stirred up mud all over the pond.

No one knew that beneath all that muddy water, there was only one loach.

A very familiar tactic, wasn’t it? At the very beginning of this war, Prince Louis of the Winston Empire had relied on this kind of tactic, cutting back and forth through the northern mountains of Delanmaya. He created an astonishing myth of contemporary warfare and won the military nickname “a man who can embroider on the battlefield.” Now Fred was once again using the same method to create his own miracle as a commander. He did it even better: the Cretans never knew exactly how many enemies they were facing.

But the danger we faced was also growing greater. Crown Prince Diansos, the commander of the Cretan forces, had clearly turned more of his attention to the fiercely contested central battlefield. He unsparingly poured large numbers of troops across the Greenleaf Plains. With an enormous numerical advantage that we could not resist, he formed a huge shackle around us and tightened it bit by bit, trying to squeeze us to death in an ever-shrinking space. Only later did we learn that in this large-scale hunting operation, the troops the Cretans eventually put into the battle had actually exceeded fifty thousand.

Fred’s unpredictable raids continued, but the places we could choose were fewer and fewer. Several times we nearly fell into an ambush. If we had not seen the signs early, we would probably have been completely wiped out. Crown Prince Diansos had already wrapped his chain around us, forcing us to drag that heavy burden while playing a war game as dangerous as walking on a tightrope.

After constant marching and fighting, the soldiers’ bodies grew worse and worse, and after every battle, our casualties increased. The many all-night marches left the mages among the Star Knights unable to recover their energy, and the magical help they could provide on the battlefield became smaller and smaller.

These were still nothing. The biggest headache was that our raids gradually lost their goal. At first, we were drawing enemy troops in order to cover the Eastern Route Army’s breakout. But now, Colonel Pekra’s reinforcements, which were supposed to appear at the designated place, had still not appeared. Even we ourselves began to doubt whether such raids still had any meaning. Now we were trapped inside the enemy’s encirclement, and it was very hard to get new information. No one could tell us what had happened to Colonel Pekra. If he had been surrounded together with General Carterlake’s Middle Route Army, then no matter how brilliant our raids were, we would only be a joke in this already lost war.

Finally, one day, as we withdrew from Albert Village for the third time, I looked up at the gloomy sky and remembered what Colonel Pekra had said to me.

My heart tightened. I lowered my head and counted the days, and my heart pounded wildly.

It was already the forty-third day since the colonel had left, three days past the deadline he had given me.

It was not that I intended to break my promise. It was just that the passing time held too many terrible possibilities behind it, making me unwilling to think or to count.

Could the Eastern Route Army have been completely destroyed? Could our efforts have all been in vain? Could the colonel have…

I no longer dared to think further. I could only hurry to Fred’s side and say in a low voice:

“Fred, I have something to tell you.”

Fred nodded silently and led me to a quiet place where no one else was.

I suppressed the uneasiness in my heart and told him the colonel’s words exactly as they had been said.

My friend was silent for a very long time. Finally, he nodded, sighed deeply, and said: “You are right, my friend. Clearly something has gone wrong with the Eastern Route Army. But you do not need to worry too much either. If the Eastern Route Army and Colonel Pekra’s reinforcements had all been wiped out, then those surrounding us here would not be just these enemies.” He said this comfortingly. His words made good sense and relaxed the extreme tension in my heart a little. When I thought that Colonel Pekra might be safe, I even felt a bit of joy.

“However, it really is time for us to retreat.” Fred went on. “The soldiers have reached their limit, and our losses have already exceeded one thousand. If we go on like this, no one will be able to hold on.”

He gave the order to withdraw to Chamela Town. The soldiers, who had already been exhausted, finally perked up a little. No matter what, more than a month of marching and fighting had finally come to an end. That was indeed something to be a little glad about.

It was hard for us to give a convincing evaluation of this operation. On the surface, a force of fewer than eight thousand, under the encirclement of more than fifty thousand troops, moved forward and backward as it pleased, killing and wounding nearly seven thousand enemies while losing fewer than one thousand of its own, and kept the invading enemy from advancing even an inch for more than a month. Such an achievement, placed in any army, would be a great feat to be proud of.

But from a strategic point of view, this was a meaningless victory. The reinforcements we had been waiting for and the news that the eastern front had eased never came, turning this splendid offensive into a flashy but hollow circus act on the battlefield.

It was already winter. The large stretches of wild grass on the Greenleaf Plains had withered. Our feet stepped on the dry grass stems, and now and then there came a cracking sound.

Perhaps that was the sound of the road ahead of us collapsing.