“Captain Forster, as I live and breathe! Tis dead you were thought, sir, and all your men, as well, when ye rode into the very maw of the Scots. Ye impressed the King mightily, then, they say.”
Foster paced Bruiser forward slowly. “Who won the battle?’
The Welshman cackled. “No one, last I heard, b’God.”
Foster was amazed; full battles—as opposed to raids, skirmishes and patrol-actions—were never fought at night, here and now, due to the lack of effective communications aa much as custom.
“I heard no shots?” he said skeptically.
“No powder left, mostly,” answered the wounded officer. “An’ what little be likely wetted. But the center and right was both rock-steady when I lefted. And the left had been reinforced and was firming up.”
Foster thought he could catch a glimmering of how the lines had taken that ninety-degree turn. “The left broke, then?”
The officer unconsciously nodded, then gasped and grimaced with pain. Weakly, he answered, “Oh, aye, they were flanked. The dragoons tried to do what you and your’n did, but they run onto a bit of swamp and ere they could get free, the barbarians were all over them. Captain Webster and several of his officers were slain and—w
“Webster? Bud Webster? Dead?” Foster felt numb.
“Shot from off his horse, or so I heard, God rest him.” The Welshman crossed himself solemnly. “He were a gallant so-jen”
Foster thought that the long-bodied, short-legged man was beginning to look faint “Is there room for my animals and men inside the wagon fort?”
The wounded officer nodded, unthinkingly once more, staggered and almost fell. Leaning most of his weight on his staff, he croaked, “More than enough, good sir, and well come ye be. The quartermaster captain and all his war-trained men were thrown into the battle with every other unattached man to bolster the left, and I was brought here to command when I took a quarrel through me thigh. But all it be to defend the baggage and stores be wounded sojers and wagoners what hadden’ been shot oe’r, ere this. An’ each time the battleline shifts a bit an’ we end a-hint the Scots lines, them Sa-tan’s-spawn Highlanders make to o’emin us again. Twice now, it’s happened, and a chancy thing each time.”
Three more times during that long confused night the wagon fort was attacked by roaring, blood-mad, loot-hungry Highlanders. Each time the battle line turned a few degrees, the hordes of tartaned irregulars swept against the embattled wooden walls. Lieutenant Squire Howard ap Harry stumbled and fell into a blazing watch fire during the first attack and died in unspeakable agony an hour later, leaving Foster—as senior officer present—in reluctant command of the vulnerable, valuable, and seriously undermanned position.
Since the King had wisely left most of the trains in Durham, there were but about a hundred and fifty wagons arranged—at Reichsherzog Wolfgang’s orders—in a perfect square, fronted by chest-high ramparts of peat. Not a bad arrangement, Foster thought, had there but been enough men to adequately defend it. There were his own two hundred-odd troopers on whom he could depend. For the rest, perhaps two hundred wagoners were left, armed with a miscellany of pole-arms, hangers, and elderly matchlock muskets. Every third wagon was mounted with a breech-loading brass swivel-gun, averaging an inch and a half in the bore and each furnished with four to six brass breechjacks, which arrangement should have made for easy defense of the wagon fort, as the swivels required little or no training and experience to employ and were nothing short of murderous in their effect on targets at three hundred yards or less—being simply huge shotguns.
However, Foster was quickly aware of some glaring snafus, somewhere along the line. There was plenty of powder, of all grades, but all of the stuff was packed in casks, there was no paper to make cartridges, and but a limited number of flasks, roughly one flask for every three and a half muskets. Moreover, no one had been able to locate the grape and canister loads for the swivels, and for want of anything better they had been loaded with handfuls of musket balls, scrap metal, short lengths of light chain, and even dried-out knuckle-bones from last night’s stewpots.