Belisarius slowly scanned the enemy forces in the trenches not more than a few hundred yards away. “He’s probably right, too. Unless I miss my guess, the Malwa commanders are still preoccupied with getting their forces into position. Those fieldworks are pretty badly designed. Sloppy. The kind of thing soldiers throw up in a hurry, each unit working on its own, without any real overall planning or coordination.”
He heard the soft whump of a Roman mortar being fired, and followed the trajectory of the shell with his naked eyes. A few seconds later, the missile struck almost dead on in a Malwa trench. By now, two days since the fighting at the forward fortifications had begun, the Roman crews manning the coehorn mortars had become very accurate with the crude devices. They were using Malwa powder instead of Roman, since Belisarius had wanted to reserve the better grade for his field guns. But, with a little experimentation, the Roman mortar crews had adapted handily. This many years into the war, even Malwa gunpowder was far more uniform and standard in grade than had been the case earlier.
“I don’t think those men out there are convinced yet that they’ve got a real siege on their hands,” he mused. “Which, if I’m right, means that they’ll be mounting a mass assault pretty soon. That’s why I’ve kept the mitrailleuse out of sight, and have been using your sharpshooters so sparingly. I want to mangle them as badly as possible when they come in. Then—when they’re retreating—Sittas can lead out his beloved sally. That’ll turn the whole thing into a complete bloodbath.”
The savage nature of the words went poorly with the soft, almost serene voice. But Belisarius had long since learned to put his personal feelings aside in the middle of a battle. A man who was warm by nature was also capable of utter ruthlessness when he needed to be. He no longer even wondered much at the dichotomy.
Neither did Aide. The crystal’s thoughts were even more cold-blooded than the general’s. They won’t have any real experience with modern fortifications, either. Even if they’ve been instructed, the instructions won’t mean much. They’ll come straight at the curtain wall, instead of the bastions like they should. The mitrailleuse will catch them enfilade, piled up against the wall with scaling ladders.
Belisarius was standing in one of those bastions himself. The bastion was shaped liked an arrowhead, with the rear sides of the “blade” facing the curtain wall at a ninety-degree angle. Those sides were what was called a “retired flank,” invisible to an attacking enemy because of the protecting lobes of the “arrowhead”—what were called, technically, “orillons”—and sheltered from cannon fire. The gun ports in the retired flanks were empty now. But mitrailleuse crews waiting in a bunker below would bring the weapons up once the attack began. From those gun ports, the crews would have a protected and perfect line of fire down the entire length of the curtain wall which separated this bastion from the next one, some two hundred and fifty yards away.
The fortifications, which were thick earthen ramparts rather than stone construction, were fronted by a wide ditch. There was perhaps two feet of water in the ditch, due to natural seepage from the high water table. In the more elaborate fortifications which Belisarius was having built several miles to the rear, where he planned to make his real stand, his engineers were designing the ditches to be suddenly flooded by ruptured dikes. But these simpler outer fortifications had no such elaborate designs.
They didn’t need to. The purpose of the outer fortifications was twofold:
First, give Belisarius the time he needed to finish scouring the area north of his “inner line” of any and all foodstuffs. That work was now almost finished.
Second—hopefully—draw the Malwa into an ill-conceived mass assault which would enable Belisarius to bleed them badly. That remained to be done. But, from what he could detect through the periscope—and even more from his well-honed “battle sense”—it should be happening very soon.
“Tomorrow,” he pronounced. “No later than the day after.” His gaze, looking through the gun ports in the retired flank, ranged down the length of the curtain. He could envision already the mass of Malwa soldiers piled up against that wall, and the pitiless enfilade fire of the mitrailleuse and canister-loaded field guns which would turn a muddy ditch bright with color.