novelraw Chapter 217: Thrust
Chapter 217: Thrust
As the distance between the two armies continued to shrink, many light infantrymen appeared at the front of the Viking lines. Formed into squads of fourteen, some were equipped with shields and short axes, others with two-handed spears, and the rest with Welsh longbows.
Relying on their superior range, the longbowmen used high-angle fire to rain feathered arrows down upon the Frankish archers on the eastern side of the battlefield. Worried about running out of time, they universally adopted rapid fire. Sacrificing accuracy, they harassed the enemy at a blistering rate of over ten arrows per minute.
Because the Frankish archers were packed in a relatively dense formation, the Welsh longbowmen enjoyed a solid hit rate. Every so often, a Frankish soldier would wail and collapse to the ground.
After waiting for just over a minute, the Viking army finally entered their range. The Frankish archers hurriedly drew their bows and unleashed their first volley using high-angle fire toward the advancing front. To their shock, only a sporadic few enemy figures fell.
What just happened?
Some archers checked their wooden bows and feathered arrows, suspecting a manufacturing defect. Urged on by their commanding officers, they unleashed a second volley, but the results were just as dismal.
"Those damned Flemish merchants actually sold us fakes!"
In an instant, curses erupted from the archers all around. They looked ready to string up those treacherous merchants who had peddled such shoddy goods.
Just like that, after enduring ten consecutive volleys of feathered arrows, the black-clad Viking infantry continued their steady, rhythmic march. When the distance had closed to a mere fifty paces, the light infantry at the very front began to fall back through the gaps between the formations.
At thirty paces, the drums and horns abruptly ceased. The Viking spearmen halted their advance, and upon their officers' commands, the first two ranks lowered their spears to a horizontal level.Tweeeet!
The next moment, shrill copper whistles pierced the air in rapid succession. Countless Vikings roared war cries of "Valhalla!" and "Odin!" as they launched a devastating spear charge at the enemy.
Seeing this, the Frankish archers hastily loosed one final, chaotic volley before fleeing in terror toward the rear of their allied lines. They shoved and trampled one another in their panic, completely disrupting their own infantry formations in the process.
Very soon, the Viking spearmen closed the distance, engaging in a brutal thrusting attack against the Frankish infantry, who were also armed with spears. The front-rank soldiers exhausted every ounce of their strength, thrusting their heavy spears forward, retracting them, and violently stabbing out once more.
The second-rank soldiers drove their spears through the gaps between the men in the first rank, joining the deadly barrage of thrusts. The soldiers further back remained on high alert; the instant a man in the front rows fell, they had to step up immediately to plug the gap.
As time ground on, the center of the battlefield twisted into a massive, churning vortex of death. A dense thicket of spear shafts clashed, tangled, and snapped. Some Vikings abandoned their spears altogether, crouching low to crawl through the chaos and engage in visceral close-quarters combat with their short axes. The Frankish forces ruthlessly met them by drawing their daggers to strike back.
Before long, while Gunnar's direct subordinates were still bitterly holding their ground, the mercenaries and the reinforcement troops supplied by the other nobles began to buckle.
They had never experienced such a harrowing slaughter. Forced into a steady retreat by the crushing weight of the Viking spears, their morale plummeted past the breaking point, and over half of the Frankish army spectacularly routed. Seizing the opportunity, the Vikings flooded through the shattered lines, catching Gunnar's personal forces in a deadly pincer attack from both the front and the flanks, utterly annihilating them.
Witnessing the utter collapse of his infantry from the eastern side of the battlefield, Charles was stunned. He had never expected the mercenaries and ragtag auxiliary troops to be so incredibly fragile, failing to hold the line for even ten minutes.
"My lord, what do we do?"
The Frankish knights, unable to suppress their thirst for battle, anxiously urged their commander to order a counterattack.
Forced to cover the retreat of his own men, Charles deployed the vast majority of his cavalry. Alerted by the blaring horns and frantic flag signals, the frontline Viking spearmen abandoned their pursuit. In a desperate scramble, they formed small pike phalanxes ranging from a few dozen to a hundred men.
Staring down the dense thicket of cold, sharp spearpoints, the Frankish cavalry veered off, actively avoiding the formations to hunt down the scattered soldiers who hadn't formed up in time. Like a raging river crashing into a jagged reef, the cavalry charge was forcibly splintered into countless smaller streams.
After a while, observing that the Frankish cavalry's formation had loosened and their momentum was steadily declining, Wigg turned his head to inspect his own cavalry.
Counting the reinforcements provided by Pascal Jr. and the other nobles, he possessed a total of seven hundred cavalrymen. This consisted of five hundred heavy cavalry armed with lances, and two hundred light cavalry equipped with light cavalry sabers.
It was enough. He called out Thorkel's name, ordering him to lead the entire cavalry force in a direct charge against the thousand Frankish cavalry straight ahead. His strict mandate was to completely entangle the enemy.
"Yes, my lord!"
Thorkel's forces galloped off in a massive, sweeping formation. Immediately afterward, Wigg dispatched over six hundred Highland mercenaries. These men were notoriously poor at fighting in organized formations, but throwing them into a chaotic melee to hack down Frankish cavalrymen who had lost their momentum would put them to adequately brutal use.
At this point, Wigg still had two infantry regiments and one mountain infantry battalion at his side, along with over six hundred support personnel—cooks, stablehands, military clerks, and shamans. They had arranged the supply wagons into a tight square defensive perimeter. It offered nothing in the way of offensive capability, but it was more than sufficient for defense.
On the eastern edge of the battlefield, Charles Botini was left with only five hundred cavalry and a thousand heavy infantrymen. He listened grimly to a subordinate's report: the enemy's "black clothes" were, in reality, iron armor. Iron plates had been meticulously sewn between two thick layers of heavy linen, and absolutely every single black uniform was constructed this way.
"What a devious tactic."
Had he known the entire enemy force was heavily armored, he would never have been stupid enough to march out of the city and meet them in an open field battle.
Charles shook his head violently. He stared across the blood-soaked plains at the enemy's central command, and what he saw next completely shattered his will to fight. Even the lowly support staff hiding behind the wagon barricades were currently donning that same black armor!
"To hell with this! Where did the Serpent of the North get so much money?"
Left with no other choice, Charles dispatched his messenger riders, ordering all units to fall back toward Lutterworth Castle in the southeast. With this crushing defeat, Tamworth would likely be impossible to hold.
Watching the Frankish army's gradual retreat, Wigg let out a heavy sigh. The enemy still had five hundred cavalrymen held in reserve, acting as a potent deterrent that kept the frontline commanders from daring to launch a reckless pursuit.
By four in the afternoon, the two armies had entirely broken contact. Aside from the Highland mercenaries who had chased the enemy out of sight, the remaining units gradually returned, presenting their casualty reports to Wigg.
As evening approached, an exuberant Douglas led his clan warriors to Wigg, proudly declaring that they had captured nine noble prisoners.
"Understood. I'll have the clerks record their details, and all subsequent ransoms will belong to you. For now, your mission is to take a headcount."
Including this rowdy band of mercenaries, the battle had resulted in a total of eight hundred casualties.
The Frankish army's losses were significantly higher. Between the corpses left rotting on the battlefield and the captured prisoners, they had lost around eighteen hundred men. Furthermore, there were countless routed deserters—some would eventually choose to return to their units, others would devolve into roaming bandits, and the rest would flee south in a desperate bid to find ships to ferry them back across the sea to their homeland.
Wigg had no way of knowing the exact numbers, but he estimated that Charles Botini still retained roughly three to four thousand able-bodied men.
With the battle drawing to a close, Wigg had the wounded transported back to Raetia for medical treatment. The over seven hundred prisoners they had captured were similarly escorted and locked up in Raetia.
At present, the field medical company's primary treatment methods involved suturing wounds and boiling medicinal herbs, followed by a steady supply of clean food and clean water, alongside regular changes of linen bandages and undergarments.
Despite a severe lack of antibiotics and anesthetics, the field medical company maintained an overall recovery rate of approximately sixty percent. The results were remarkable, vastly outperforming their medical peers who were still hopelessly obsessed with bloodletting therapy.