Napoleon of Another World!

Chapter 35 - Attack and Defense

The retreat from the mountains ended in Basterwick, the largest town near the front line.

The atmosphere was tense, and not just in the audience hall of the governor's palace where Daemon had gathered his war council.

Drunk with freedom and satisfaction for having finally freed themselves from imperial domination, as well as by all the well-being that the new economic policies were bringing to the nation, the citizens had ended up forgetting that there were those who had no intention of letting the Revolution go unpunished.

Some wondered if it was not yet possible to go back, trusting in the fact that it was not the imperial army looming over them, but that of Eirinn: brothers of the same lineage.

Only Oldrick and Adrian were missing from the meeting, since both were still in Grote Muren, but the first thing Daemon did as soon as the meeting began was to decide on the immediate abandonment of the fort.

"Defending Grote Muren was still possible as long as we maintained control of our territories, but with the fall of the pass we can consider the eastern border lost. They must retreat now while they still can."

"And abandon the fort like that?" asked Septimus "Without fighting?"

"A fort can be taken back, a dead soldier cannot be brought back to life. Now we'll need everything we have available. What's the situation with the deliveries of the new armaments?"

"The warehouses are full." Borg said. "You could give a sword, a bow, a spear to every man, woman and child in this country and there would still be supplies left."

"Artillery?"

"We just finished building six new twelve-pounder guns." said Zypax "We are already bringing them here from the smelters."

"Wouldn't it have been better to build those new weapons?" Scalia asked. "They seemed very effective in the first battle on the pass."

"They may be small, but they are not at all easy to make and assemble. To build the little more than a hundred that we delivered we had to work day and night for months."

"And to make matters worse, almost all of them remained up there, buried under the snow." Septimus said sadly "Let's just hope that our enemies don't find them, or that they don't know how to use them."

"Now there's no point in crying over spilled milk. Let's focus instead on what we can do. We will use Basterwick as a new command center to coordinate defensive operations."

"Wouldn't it be safer to fall back to the Castle?"

"Scalia is right, it is deeper in our territory, and closing the valleys would be easy enough."

"Did you look out the window? Basterwick and its fields are our main source of food, and to make matters worse the wheat has yet to be harvested. Do you really want to leave all this stuff in the hands of the enemy?"

Both Scalia and Septimus lowered their eyes, ashamed that they had not considered something so obvious.

"We cannot leave the enemy free to devastate and raid our crops. Furthermore, the terraces further west are not yet ready, and it is not certain that they will be ready in time for the next sowing. If we lose this grain, even if we manage to repel the invasion next winter we will find ourselves starving. We must stop the enemy here, or the Free State will die before it is a year old."

"What are your orders?" Septimus then asked

"Let's mobilize everyone. I want every single soldier at our disposal. We will leave only the strictly essential units to defend the bridge and the pass to the north."