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Valentine saw wild worms running off to the east, and the Bulletproof harrying the Coonskins.
Hard luck for the Coonskins. Their halfhearted cover for the assault had aided in the repulse as much as the Southern Command's grenades and mortar shells.
Valentine looked behind. Bloom had better than half the camp moving up the hill.
They met strong fire on the ridge as the sun appeared, but the Bulletproof turned from their rout of the Coonskins to the east and put a fleshy curtain of gunfire against the Moondagger flank.
Valentine's assault expended the last of their grenades, pitching them over the hilltop.
They captured two big 155mm guns which were being brought forward to complete the camp's destruction, complete with communications gear and a substantial reserve of ammunition.
Southern Command's forces secured the crest line, guns, and few prisoners who didn't blow themselves up with grenades and planted themselves. On that glorious reverse slope where the Coonskins had been camped, picked out for its suitable field of fire, they found the Moondaggers in disarray and falling back.
Valentine watched machine-gun tracer prod their retreat, leaving bodies like heaps of dropped laundry on the slope. Moondagger trucks, crammed with men hanging off the side, pulled off to the south.
If only they'd had real cannon instead of light mortars. The Moondaggers would have been destroyed instead of just bloodied. Valentine did what he could with what he had, sending shells chasing after the retreat, dropping them at choke points in the road.
Moytana's Wolves would give them a nip or two to remind them that they were beaten and running.
It wasn't a catastrophe for the Moondaggers. But it was enough. Valentine felt the odd, light, post-battle aura. He'd survived again, and better, won.
Seng's expeditionary brigade had fought its first real battle and emerged victorious.
They buried their dead, slung their wounded in yolk hammocks hanging off the side of the legworms, and pressed on. This time with lighter step and more aggressive patrols, half-empty bellies or no. It was still a retreat, but a retreat from victory, with honor restored.
rawl: Directing a successful retreat can be as difficult as an advance.
Eastern Kentucky offers some advantages to javelin and its legworm-riding allies.
Mountain passes could be easily held against greater numbers-though this could be worked to their disadvantage as well, if the Moondaggers could slip around behind them. The mountains also serve as screens, and the clouds frequently trapped by the peaks hid them from aerial observation.
As Napoleon learned on his way back from Moscow, the most problematic of all is the threat a retreat poses to morale. A beaten army, like an often-whipped horse, lacks the dash and spirit needed to fight a successful battle. Any setback or check threatens a collapse of discipline and a rout. Understandably, the soldiers become shy of risk.
Worse, they come to see every mile of land as an enemy between them and their goal.
Food, clothing, and shelter can be obtained at rifle point from the locals. Friction, any mechanic can tell you, is an enemy to speed and smooth function.
Worst of all, they might see the slower-moving elements as hindrances to the all-important goal of getting home. A retreating army will dissolve like sugar spread in the rain, lost to desertion and despair.
* * * *
Valentine's earliest woe as chief of staff was handling the Kentucky Alliance. He couldn't order, he could only suggest. He had to ask for riders to watch their flanks, to take their mounts up mountains, to go ahead and seize passes and rickety old railroad bridges the vehicles could bump across.
At meetings with the company commanders, he forced himself to bluster and threaten regarding treatment of the locals, up to and including hangings for crimes of violence. If the collection of captains and lieutenants thought him a tyrant, drunk on newfound power, so much the better. He'd be the bad guy, the glowering, uncompromising stickler for regs, if it would keep the soldiers from doing anything to turn the populace against his side.
And he made it clear that responsibility would flow uphill for once.
* * * *
They found a sample of Moondagger mercy the third morning out, planted right along the road they were using to retreat out of West Virginia.
They came to a clearing of freshly cut trees, with bits and pieces of broken guns smashed over the stumps. A black and gray mound with a charnel-house reek sat in a circle of heat-hardened ground.
Tikka, riding with a few Bulletproof at the head of the column, identified the bodies as belonging to the Mammoth clan, God knew how. The unarmed men had been thrown into wooden cages and burned. From the burned heads and arms forcing their way between the charred bars, Valentine guessed they'd still been alive when the fires had been set.
Looking at the clenched teeth behind burned away lips, Valentine would have rather gone to the Reapers.
Valentine put his old company to work clearing the bodies and burying them in the loose soil of the grown-over slag heap of a mine in a mountain's pocket just off the road.
