The briefing at headquarters ended, and lunchtime arrived.
I received my meal on a tray in the mess hall located inside the headquarters building, together with the generals and Imperial Princess Victoria.
Whether in my past life or this one, the military was still the military.
“Eat with me, Ian.”
“Yes, Your Highness.”
I sat with Victoria in a corner of the mess hall.
“…Are your wounds all right?”
“The mage Arthur keeps with him treated them.”
“Ah, you mean Mr. Fate?”
“You know him?”
“He’s an expert at curing muscle soreness. I get treated by him after every workout.”
“…Yes, that fellow. He was quite skilled. The wounds healed quickly.”
The wounds had closed, but every time I saw the faint bruise remaining around her eye, a corner of my chest felt heavily weighed down.
“……I am truly sorry, Your Highness, that you were struck because of me.”
When I set down my spoon and bowed my head, Victoria indifferently swallowed a mouthful of meat soup and answered briefly.
“Forget it. How is that your fault? If anything, it’s my fault for being born wrong in the first place.”
Her calm reply, laced with self-mockery, only stabbed at my heart all the more.
She looked composed, as if trying to ease my guilt, but I found the heavy silence hard to bear and hurriedly changed the subject.
“……About this expedition. Against the enemies encamped before the double walls, how exactly does the military intend to fight?”
“In any case, the method is the same now as it was two hundred years ago.”
Victoria tore off a piece of bread and explained dryly.
“As always, they’ll put the walls at their backs and form thick squares of heavy infantry across the wide plain. Then we send the Empire’s pride, our heavy cavalry, charging all at once, using breakthrough force and mass to smash their formations as much as possible and open cracks.”
Victoria’s finger traced the battlefield across the tabletop.
“Once gaps appear in the formation, the follow-up units—light cavalry, horse archers, and infantry armed with spears—charge in like waves through those openings. We kill as many of them as possible to create a favorable exchange ratio for our side, then bite onto the tails of those fleeing back inside the walls and rush in, taking the fortress through a siege battle. That is the orthodox method, and in truth, practically the only move we can choose.”
“The enemy aren’t fools. They won’t just sit there and take a cavalry charge, will they?”
“Of course not. That’s why the casualties are so horrific.”
Victoria’s violet eyes sank coldly.
“From behind their formations, they’ll rain down tens of thousands of arrows and crossbow bolts on our heavy cavalry as they charge like mad. Anything to reduce the cavalry’s speed and breakthrough power. And the moment the surviving cavalry slam into the formation and lose momentum, they surround them with thick infantry squares, drag them off their horses, and stab them to death with spears.”
Victoria tossed the remaining bread into her mouth and added bitterly.
“The moment the destructive power of our Imperial cavalry charge disappears and they come to a halt is the moment we become overwhelmingly disadvantaged.”
I rested my chin on my hand and turned the matter over in my head.
The enemy builds their strategy to maximize the advantage of defense. In that case…
“Then is there really a need to expend the cavalry? Can’t we do the same as them—have our heavy infantry form solid squares, advance slowly across the plain, and engage their formation infantry against infantry in a contest of strength?”
“If we do that, we’d be throwing away the destructive power of our cavalry, our army’s greatest strength, without making use of it at all. Besides, there’s another problem.”
Victoria set down her water cup and shook her head.
“Stamina. There’s a great difference between men who stand still in one place, form ranks, and conserve their strength, and our troops, who must march in from afar wearing heavy armor. Once they actually clash head-on and close combat begins, our exhausted infantry could be pushed back and massacred by them.”
“……I see.”
The difference in stamina was certainly a factor that could never be ignored in melee combat.
I tried to think of another tactic. One of the most famous tactics from ancient military history in my memories of my past life.
“Then while our infantry blocks the enemy formation head-on and draws their attention, would it be impossible for our main cavalry force to make a wide detour and strike the enemy’s flank or rear? The so-called hammer and anvil tactic.”
“That hammer and anvil tactic you’re talking about is a doctrine we can only attempt safely when we’re on the defensive. In the expedition against the Kingdom of Laurent, we are the attackers, and we have no choice but to go in.”
Victoria pointed out.
“Besides, that operation is actually the very strategy we should be worrying about. In fact, twenty years ago, they used their infantry as the anvil and a cavalry force they had raised by imitating the Imperial Army as the hammer, striking the Imperial Army from behind and driving us to the brink of annihilation. Well, it’s more complicated if I explain it properly, but that much is enough for now. How many died then? Was it one hundred thirty thousand out of two hundred thousand, in a single battle?”
“Good heavens.”
“Thanks to that, the Imperial Army completely lost the capacity for wars of expansion and wasted fifteen years merely restoring its strength. That defeat was also what allowed the Northern Grand Duke to increase his power, and if we had won that battle, the southern conquest would probably have been accomplished long ago. You might have come to the Empire not as a hostage, but as a talented man from the south.”
“Well, I figured it obviously wouldn’t work, but swarm tactics wouldn’t work either…”
“They’d do more harm than good. The core of swarm tactics is light cavalry, but light cavalry are powerless against the enemy’s crossbows and bows, which have far greater range, and they don’t have the combat power to pierce thick armored formations in the first place. Deploying them at all would be a loss.”
“……”
Cavalry charges would be stopped, infantry battles would lose out in stamina, and we even had to worry about the enemy’s flanking maneuvers.
It was difficult to properly make use of the mobility the Empire prided itself on, too.
The Kingdom of Laurent certainly had a reason for having held the Empire back for two hundred years.
“Hmm…”
I chewed my bread and pondered in silence for a long while.
The enemy was a densely packed formation of heavy infantry.
Slow, ponderous, a massive lump of iron that had gone all in on defense.
We needed some means of striking down that formation, packed tight like bowling pins, in one blow, but this world had nothing like that yet.
‘……Artillery. In modern warfare, dense formations like that would be food for the artillery.’
“Could mages perhaps provide fire support?”
“The most useless things on a battlefield are mages. Haven’t you heard of mana-disruption stones? They’re one of the basics of war.”
“Ah, the ones they laid down as a countermeasure against the Northern Grand Duke’s daughter…”
“Yes, those stones. With one large chunk, all the mana within a radius of several kilometers gets sucked straight into it, making magic impossible to use. There’s a reason mana communication devices and the like can’t be used on battlefields. We carry them around, and so will they. The only mage on the continent who can project firepower on a battlefield is the Northern Grand Duke’s daughter, and even that madwoman can do no more than hurl fireballs the size of a human head.”
“Hmm…”
In a flash, one ingenious idea passed through my mind.
“Your Highness Victoria. Have you perhaps considered using catapults on a large scale for this expedition?”
“Catapults? Once the siege begins and it’s time to break down the walls, of course we’ll deploy them en masse. They’re essential for destroying a fortress.”
“No. I’m not saying we should use them to break the walls.”
I leaned forward over the table, my eyes gleaming.
“Instead of saving them to shoot at the fortress, what if we fired rocks into the middle of the enemy infantry formations deployed on the plain?”
“……You want to shoot catapults at people? Who would let themselves be hit by that? You could dodge a stone launched by a catapult just by walking.”
She was right.
Catapults were siege weapons meant to destroy buildings or walls; common sense said they were inefficient as anti-personnel weapons for hitting moving people.
But what if our target was not individual soldiers, but the immobile formation itself?
“What I mean is, we fire at the formation itself.”
“…Hooh. Go on.”
“They’ll have a hard time breaking their formation. The moment they do, they lose the means to stop the breakthrough power of our heavy cavalry. But if they don’t break formation and stay where they are, they’ll be crushed by the catapults.”
“Ah, because the formation can’t move…!”
“Exactly. To stop our cavalry, they’ll maintain an extremely dense formation. If massive boulders fall onto a formation packed together with no room to evade, no matter how sturdy their armor and shields are, they’ll be smashed like paper.”
Taking the chance, I rapidly poured out the tactic that had come to mind.
“If we fire the catapults and attack the enemy formation right before the heavy cavalry charges in, the enemy will have to receive our heavy cavalry while their formation has collapsed under the bombardment from the catapults. In that case, we can maximize the breakthrough power of the heavy cavalry.”
“Certainly……”
Victoria murmured low and looked at me.
“Dragging catapults out onto the plain itself would be troublesome, and there’s the risk of exposing them to enemy cavalry, but there would be no shock tactic quite like it for collapsing the enemy’s dense formations without expending our own strength. As long as the catapults’ range adjustment and perfect coordinated movement with the cavalry support it, we might be able to smash the enemy’s first line of resistance while reducing our own losses to the extreme.”
A smile spread across her lips, one filled with conviction.
“It is well worth trying. An excellent idea.”
Victoria rose from her seat and lightly gripped my shoulder.
“I’ll submit what you just said as a formal agenda item at the meeting of the military high command this afternoon. Prepare yourself, Ian.”
The first desperate struggle for survival had begun with the moment a small stone was hurled toward the steadfast walls of the Kingdom of Laurent.