Leo Frankowski - CONRADS QUEST FOR RUBBER

Nonetheless, 1 beat a hasty retreat down to the lower deck.

Lezek followed me, giggling.

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski

WRITTEN JANUARY 21, 1249, CONCERNING FEBRUARY 26, 1241

WE GOT back to East Gate every second or third day, to load up on more coal, food, and ammunition, and to put ashore our dead and our seriously wounded.

The fighting was getting grim. The Mongols were becoming a lot less stupid than they had been, and we were starting to take serious losses.

The Mongols killed their first riverboat by luring it close to shore, and then felling a tall pine tree on it. They swarmed over the tree and eventually killed everyone in the crew. They were learning how to use the guns when Lord Conrad had another boat set the captured boat on fire with its flamethrower.

Their engineers all seemed to have black hair, yellowish skin, and funny-looking eyes. Lord Conrad said they were Chinese, from a place called China on the other side of the world.

They started setting up a sort of Mongol catapult. The things had a long arm with a big rock at one end and maybe two gross of their men pulling ropes on the other. They worked a lot better than you'd think, throwing rocks weighing over a ton for hundreds of yards.

One day when I was resting down on the cargo deck, a rock came through the fighting top, through two bunk beds in the officers' quarters, through the second floor, through our war cart not a yard from where I was lying down on top of it, through the cargo deck floor, and down through the bottom of the boat a yard below that!

I'd made the mistake of removing my armor before lying down to rest, so I got sprayed with about two dozen big splinters. I was never in danger of dying, but it took the surgeons over an hour to patch me up. And it hurt.

Lord Conrad got the bottom fixed before we sank, but just when he was done, another rock came all the way down through the boat not three yards from where the first one hit!

I tell you, warfare was starting to get dangerous!

We managed to keep our boat afloat, but had we caught a rock in the boilers, or on the paddle wheel the way some boats did, we would have been wrecked just like so many of the others.

Usually, the boatmaster could get his boat on the west bank before the thing sank, or sometimes another boat was near enough to be able to help out, so most of the men were saved. Most, but by no means all.

Sir Odon said it was possible to swim in armor, and he had done it himself, but he didn't think that a man could last long in the freezing water of February. It didn't make much difference to me one way or the other, since I had never learned to swim.

We got to avoiding those catapults, except where they started building a bridge in front of a bunch of them. As long as we could keep the Mongols on the east side of the Vistula, we knew eventually we would beat them. We didn't dare let them across, so we didn't dare let them get a bridge built.

Then the Mongols came up with their best idea yet, only maybe I should call it their worst one. They got whole cowhides, sewed them back together, and filled them with oil and lard. They lit them on fire and threw them at us with their catapults. When they hit a boat, it usually burned to the waterline. We lost more than half of all our boats to those firebombs, and all too often their crews were burned up with them.

In front of Sandomierz, where the enemy tried again and again to build a bridge, I saw six riverboats get hit by those oil bags and burn right down to nothing. Each of them had over two gross of our men on them, and only one of the six was able to beach itself on the western shore. You had to cry, looking at it.

Then, as suddenly as the firebombs started, they stopped. The best anybody could figure out, the Mongols must have just run out of oil and lard.

We were running out of almost everything, too.

Finally, there came a time when there were only about a dozen or so riverboats left on the Vistula.

We were out of the wood alcohol and pine resin stuff they used in the flamethrowers, out of bombs for the Halmans, out of iron balls for the peashooters, and almost out of ammunition for the swivel guns. We had even run out of Mongol arrows to shoot back at them.

Almost everybody on board had at least one wound, and out of my company we had more than six dozen men gone, either dead or wounded so bad they couldn't possibly fight.

We had some coal for the engines and food enough to eat, but that was about it.

And we were all tired. Deep-down-right-to-the-bone tired, so tired that even sleep didn't seem to do much good anymore.

That was when we found a completed bridge all the way across the Vistula, with thousands of Mongols racing across the top of it, getting to the west bank we had protected for so long.

Most of us were down in the cargo deck finishing lunch when Lord Conrad ordered everyone ashore, except for one volunteer to take care of the engines. He said he was going to take out the bridge by ramming it and this would likely sink the boat, so there wasn't any sense in getting everybody killed.

Except by then, well, there weren't any of us that had much sense left!

Leaving the boat? Abandoning ship when so many of our friends had died to preserve her? How could we do such a thing?

I looked at the men around me and said that maybe the boat wouldn't sink. Maybe the boat would get hung up on the bridge and we would be needed to clear the decks of the enemy. The others around me nodded. What I said seemed like perfect sense to them.

Then someone said that if we pushed all the carts right up tight to the front of the boat, the boat would hit the bridge with a much more solid blow, and a bunch of the guys immediately started packing the big war carts tight up against the bow. One of the engine crew said if we flooded some of the watertight compartments below the floor, we would make the boat heavier, and it would hit harder, so they started doing that, even though we all knew that doing so would make the boat even more prone to sink.

To all of us, it was no longer important whether we lived or died. The important thing was to knock down that bridge, and then, if we were still afloat, to defend the boat from the Mongols.

Lord Conrad and Captain Targ were shouting at each other. I'm sure I heard someone say "Mutiny!"

Then our captain said, "Of course, sir. But for now, we'd better all get up on deck, or we'll miss the show. The boat-master, Baron Tados, won't be waiting for orders, you know. All platoons! Report on deck! Pass the word!"

"You are all crazy people!" Lord Conrad shouted.

Sir Odon said, "Yes, sir. I suppose we are." Then he hurried up to the fighting top, and I was right behind him.

The bridge was tall, much taller than any of the other ones we had destroyed. I guess they had cut the logs thinking that the water was deeper here. Anyway, it was higher than the boat, and the roadway was made out of ropes that ran at the top of the logs.

There were I don't know how many thousands of Mongols up on that bridge, moving across as fast as they could. They saw us coming, they were pointing at us and shouting, but they never stopped moving. I saw men and horses getting on that bridge right up until the moment we hit it.

And hit it we did! Only we didn't punch a hole through it, the way I thought we would. We knocked it right over! Those big logs must have been just sitting on the bottom, because the ones right in front of us just went right over, Mongols and all! Then the water sort of caught the rope roadway and dragged it downstream, which just naturally pulled down the whole rest of the bridge with it!

There were all those thousands of Mongols splashing in the water, but none of them splashed around for long. Somebody said they came from a dry country called a desert, and they couldn't swim one bit better than I could!

Well, a few of them got near the western shore, so the gunners used some of their last bullets to get rid of them. I think most of the horses swam away, though.

It took us the rest of the day to get the boat fixed up.

Then things got quiet for a few days, and some of the guys said that the Mongols must have quit and gone home. The captain said that the enemy had pulled back from the river, but they weren't headed home yet, so we just paddled slowly around, waiting.

Then a really strange thing happened.

Early one morning, all along the river as far as we could see, the Mongols rode their horses down to the riverbank. They each got off, grabbed their horse's tail, and made the animal swim out into the water. And those horses swam all the way across the Vistula with the men behind them!

Our boat went right through them, drowning I don't know how many. Hundreds, maybe thousands, but not all that many compared to the huge numbers of warriors that were in the Vistula that chilly morning.

I heard somebody say that if the Mongols could do that, why hadn't they done it weeks ago, before we had killed so many of them on the riverbanks and on all those bridges we took out?

Then somebody else said to look carefully at the horses getting out of the water. Only about half of them still had a man behind them. All the rest of them must have drowned and sunk to the bottom in their armor.

That meant we had just seen half of the entire Mongol army drowned! They wanted to get across so bad they were willing to see half of their men die just to do it! And I mean half of the men they had left, after we had spent a week killing them by the thousands!

We were all dumbfounded, including, I think, Lord Conrad. The best anybody could think up for an answer was that maybe they had run out of food for themselves and their horses. There were millions of them, after all, and that many people and animals must eat an awful lot.

Later that day, when the insane enemy advance was over and the banks of the Vistula were again empty, Captain Targ told us we would be going ashore soon, to join up with the rest of the army that was getting ready to fight the Mongols, west of Sandomierz.

This time, no one thought of disobeying orders.

The Battle for the Vistula was over.

The Battle for Poland was about to begin.

From the Journal of Josip Sobieski

WRITTEN JANUARY 22, 1249, CONCERNING MARCH 7, 1241

THEY COLLECTED all the riverboats they could find, and together we disembarked in the cold rain, all of the men from the River Battalion who could still fight.

There were only nine boats left, nine out of the three dozen we had started out with.

There were only forty-one war carts to be pulled away from the shore out of the two hundred sixteen that had been loaded aboard at East Gate.

There were only sixteen hundred twenty-nine of us left out of the nine thousand men who had marched out of Hell to war, and almost all of us were wearing bloodstained bandages.

My lance had been surprisingly lucky. All six of us plus Sir Odon were still alive and upright, if not exactly well, but we were no longer together.

We had lost our platoon leader, and our war cart itself was smashed in the fighting, so the fifth platoon had been split up, temporarily, to fill out the losses in the other platoons.

Only Taurus was still by my side. Captain Targ told me to keep an eye on him, and Sir Odon told me to hit him on the head if he went crazy again. They both said that he was a valuable fighting man, but we had to make sure he did his work only on the Mongols.

Taurus himself had been very quiet since that fight on the riverbank. Days later and late at night, when the others were asleep, he asked me to tell him just exactly what had happened. When I told him, he just nodded, as if he was trying hard to absorb it all.