The Cub and the Old Lion (1)
Lycaon pictus
Donor
June 11, 1839
Silistre[1], Bosnia-Rumelia
Leopold Prince of Wales scratched his face. His beard was coming in thick and black. People seemed to think he was growing it to impress the locals. The truth was, someone had stolen his shaving-kit last week. He supposed he should have expected that. This land was famous for its bandits. He wasn’t the only one—a lot of men who’d served in America had beards, although he’d heard it was because the shaving-soap had kept running out.[2] And honestly, it was nice to have one less thing to bother with in the morning, especially with such a big bother in front of them right now.
The Duke of Wellington gave the prince a knowing look. “Not quite what you signed on for, is it, lad?”
Leo, speaking in something just below a shout—His Grace was almost deaf—said “They said I should have some military experience. They didn’t say how much.”
Wellington laughed, then turned back to look at the impressive and terrifying vista.
They were on the north wall of a hill fort just south of town. The town of Silistre occupied a nub of land on the south bank of the Danube, overlooking where the great river split into separate streams on its way to the sea. It was one of the world’s Megiddoes, places where you could safely predict that one day a great and famous battle would be fought because armies had already fought so many battles there over the course of history that it was just a matter of playing the odds.
And according to what Prince Leopold had been told, there had already been three events that could be called “Battles of Silistre” just within the past twelve months. One of them had been the battle eleven months ago, in which the Russians took the town and fort away from the small garrison of Turks and Bosniaks. Another, three months after that, had been the battle in which two battalions of Arabs tried and failed to retake it. The third had been the surprise attack six weeks ago, in which Sultan Husein’s men, alongside Arabs and British soldiers, had retaken the fort after the local Bulgars had allowed the Russian garrison to find and requisition a particularly large amount of plum brandy.
Now there was a force of Britons, Arabs, and the Sultan’s army holding the fort and surrounding hill. (Mostly the hill—this many men wouldn’t have fit inside the fort.) The plan had been for them to link up with the French and Austrians and help them establish supply lines from the Aegean ports to Wallachia, give the Wallachians the Woolwich rockets and teach them how to use them, then send the prince and his guard back to Thessalonica where they’d be out of harm’s way.
The problem with that plan was the gigantic Russian army holding the town.
And the other bank of the river.
And the island in the river.
It hadn’t been a complete surprise, of course—scouts had reported this army days in advance—but the Arabs and the Sultan’s men wouldn’t abandon this hilltop, and if they had to fight that army, this was the strongest place to do it. And their allies were still coming. Better to fight here than be defeated in detail. Better, but not good.
“They’ve got both banks covered,” said Wellington. “Or to put that another way, their backs are to the water in two places at once. And there are Italian gunboats on the river.”
Wellington gazed to the northwest. Somewhere across the river and over the horizon, the French and Austrians were coming. They were supposed to be here already, or by this evening at the latest. “Napoleon the Second,” said the Duke. “If he’s anything like his father, the Russians are in for it.”
Whatever had happened to Wellington’s hearing, his peripheral vision was as sharp as ever. He saw Leo’s surprised glance in his direction.
“Surprised to hear me say that, lad? He was the greatest general of the age—this age, past ages, any age. And I think he’s been dead long enough it’s safe to speak the truth. His one weakness—everyone has a weakness—was that his campaigns were too perfect. He built them of iron, like steam engines. If one piece broke, there went the whole structure. I built mine of rope. If something broke, I tied a knot and kept going.”
Leo nodded. The younger Napoleon was untested, but everyone had heard good things about Radetzky—and the Wallachian king Ludovic, who was accompanying them. And of course they had Wellington. And they would need all the military genius they could get, because there had to be hundreds of thousands of men on the Russian side. The Sultan’s men, the Arabs, us, French, Austrians, Wallachians, Italians… can even a seven-nation army hold that many Russians back? I suppose we’ll find out.
Everyone back in London had seemed to think he needed to take part in this war. He’d thought so himself. Why was that? The greatest soldiers he’d known growing up were the Duke of Wellington and his own father, in that order. Had either of them ever told him going to war would be good for him? That it would make a man of him?
Not in so many words. His father had said, “They made me a colonel, then a general—honorary, of course—long before I was old enough to fight. I fought the French when they seemed invincible[3] and we won, but it was nothing like I’d imagined.” He remembered what Wellington had said, more than once: “If being a soldier improved a man’s character, I never would’ve had to hang any of mine. But a man who has a voice on decisions of war and peace should know what war is, and you can’t learn that from books.”
It hadn’t quite been any direct advice from them. It had been a feeling, just from looking at those two men and being in their presence, that if he wasn’t willing to subject himself to some of the same risks that they had, he would be a much lesser man than they were.
He’d heard that the young always thought themselves immortal. Apparently that feeling didn’t last to the age of twenty-two. Certainly he hadn’t thought much about the possibility of death at Lamia—but then, with the way the Greeks had fled in panic at the surprise attack, there hadn’t been much need to.
Now… he kept thinking of Julie, and not just because he wanted to be in bed with her at the earliest opportunity. He loved her. It had been an arranged marriage, not like his parents’ once-in-a-century royal love match, but Julie was a joy to be around. Her slight accent, her warm brown eyes, her sputtering laugh at his jokes… he wanted to see what their children would look like. And yes, he wanted to keep the dynasty going.
And speaking of the dynasty, there was Christian Duke of York to think about. Chris, whose clothes had to be specially made because he reacted to any sort of irregularity in the fabric along the inside as though a scorpion were crawling over that part of his skin. Chris, who when asked by the Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh how he felt about Mother and Father’s twentieth anniversary, had said, “I think we should use leaf springs on the coach instead of leather braces.”[4] (Which was probably a good idea, but not the sort of comment that Silly Billy could possibly have been expecting.) Chris wasn’t the most eccentric person in the British aristocracy—not even now that old Slice-of-Gloucester had passed on[5]—but as king, he would surely cost the monarchy whatever power it still had, because there was no overlap between the political duties of the king and the things he could keep his thoughts pointed at.
I could never do that to Chris. I may have teased him—more often than I should have—but dropping the duties of the heir in his lap would be an act of cruelty. And even more than that, Julia also deserves better. I must survive this battle. I must get back to her.
“Remember this, lad,” said the duke. “Nothing’s ever certain in war. Anyone can win, and anyone can lose. Remember that. Because that army—that giant mass of men—that army can lose too.”
Somewhere down there, horns were blowing. The Russians were preparing to attack. Most of the battles in this war had been paltry affairs, forgettable except to those who had the bad luck to be in them. This one looked to be one for the history books.
It was an honour Leopold Prince of Wales could have done without.
Valerian Madatov was dead. Alexander Arkadyevich Suvorov, who had been serving as ambassador to Italy until the outbreak of war, was not the general his namesake and grandfather had been and was expending the motherland’s strength in futile attacks on the passes of the Carpathians. Vasily Perovsky, who had been in charge of the war effort in Bosnia-Rumelia since Madatov’s death, was under siege in Bucharest. Count Ivan Paskevich was preoccupied with suppressing the Polish rebellion, while Aleksei Yermolov was running the Russian army in the Persian war.
So it was Grand Duke Nikolai himself who led the army of 420,000 men south from Kishinev and along the Danube. His plan was to force the Allied armies into a decisive battle and crush them with overwhelming force—or, if they didn’t oblige him, to split up his army and rebuild the garrisons until his control of Wallachia and the Bulgarian lands could no longer be contested.
At Sillistre, his army was divided into three unequal portions. One portion surrounded him on the island in the Danube. One portion waited on the north bank of the river. And one portion—the largest—held the town itself.
This was the portion that attacked on the afternoon of June 11. Between 180,000 and 200,000 Russians charged uphill a force of 40,000 Britons, 20,000 Arabs and 30,000 Turks, Bosniaks, and loyalist Bulgars. The failure of the Russian attack can be attributed to two factors.
The first was the superior firepower of the British. Their revolvers could maintain a rate of fire some three times that of their Russian counterparts, despite the disparity in numbers. Wellington was well supplied with Woolwich 38s, which he had intended to give to the Wallachians for use against the Russians. Now he could cut out the middleman.
The second factor—and one which would prove decisive over the course of this battle—was the Russian command structure. Nikolai was what modern business managers would call a nondelegator[6]. He saw to every movement of troops in his huge army, every order for resupply or reinforcement. Implementing all the lessons of war the Russians had learned fighting Napoleon and the Ottomans, he took pains to ensure that their baggage trains arrived with the same supplies they’d started out with, minus only what was necessary to feed the crew and draft animals. He made sure the front line was kept strong, never allowing noble officers to keep too many troops attending on them.
It is a tribute to his attention to detail that Nikolai was able to coordinate an army of this size by himself. The problem was that none of his generals or colonels (other than the trusted Prince Alexander Sergeyevich Menshikov, who was on the north bank) felt empowered to attack or retreat without orders, and though Nikolai sent orders with the intent of causing a mass attack on the fort, his messengers sometimes arrived at their destinations a half hour or more apart from each other—when they arrived at all. The Italian Marines often picked them off while they were crossing the river. The result was a steady drumbeat of charges that wore the Allies down but was never enough at any one time to overwhelm them. By the time Nicholas had thought of simply delivering a single message to the whole army—“attack at 7 p.m.”—they were too tired to attack effectively.
And Prince Menshikov couldn’t be spared, because by 5 p.m. the wing of the Allied army under Napoleon II, Radetzky, and King Ludovic had arrived. Between the 80,000 Austrians, the 60,000 French, and the 35,000 Wallachians, they had the 120,000-strong Russian army on the north bank outnumbered. Menshikov was busy organizing a defensive line, which successfully held off the allies until sunset. He was also calling for fresh supplies of powder and shot.
At 8:30 pm, just when the whole battle had seemed to go quiet, Napoleon II launched a new attack along the riverbank. This attack out of the setting sun took the Russians by surprise, and the massed Francotte revolver fire of the French was every bit as effective as Wellington’s.
But the “Twilight Charge,” as the Moniteur would call it (recalling the Midnight Charge at Nancy) was only the first step. Just when Menshikov was starting to rally the Russians in the fading light and the French were badly overextended and pressed against the Danube, Marshal Damrémont[7] ordered his rockets to fire. These were Maëstricht rockets, similar to Congreve rockets but with the rear nozzles modified to resemble the American Henry-Hunt. They weighed up to 50 kg, and they were loaded with gunpowder and white phosphorus. Although the Americans had the dubious honor of introducing this French invention to the world’s battlefields two years earlier, more of it was used in this single engagement than the Americans had even manufactured during the War of 1837.
The sudden appearance of this new weapon threw the ranks of the Russians into confusion. Worse, only half of the 1,000 or so rockets were fired at the army—the other half were fired at the fleet of Russian boats on the Danube, which were still being unloaded. The explosion of a boatload of powder killed Prince Menshikov instantly, throwing the army on the north bank into utter confusion. The clouds of white smoke, illuminated from within by white light, silhouetted the Russian soldiers and left them easy prey for French and Austrian riflemen in the darkness to the northwest…
[1] Silistra, Bulgaria
[2] I’ve heard something similar happened during the Crimean War IOTL.
[3] The Battle of Kulm in 1813
[4] Leaf springs are a kind of suspension system. In 1836, Charlotte and Leopold celebrated twenty years of marriage with, among other things, a family ride through London in the Gold State Coach—a vehicle not at all designed for comfort. His Grace was thirteen at the time.
[5] Prince William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, survived to 1838 ITTL.
[6] Micromanager
[7] Charles-Marie Denys de Damrémont, Marshal of France and (on this mission) Guy Who Makes Sure the Boy Emperor Doesn’t Screw Up.
Silistre[1], Bosnia-Rumelia
Leopold Prince of Wales scratched his face. His beard was coming in thick and black. People seemed to think he was growing it to impress the locals. The truth was, someone had stolen his shaving-kit last week. He supposed he should have expected that. This land was famous for its bandits. He wasn’t the only one—a lot of men who’d served in America had beards, although he’d heard it was because the shaving-soap had kept running out.[2] And honestly, it was nice to have one less thing to bother with in the morning, especially with such a big bother in front of them right now.
The Duke of Wellington gave the prince a knowing look. “Not quite what you signed on for, is it, lad?”
Leo, speaking in something just below a shout—His Grace was almost deaf—said “They said I should have some military experience. They didn’t say how much.”
Wellington laughed, then turned back to look at the impressive and terrifying vista.
They were on the north wall of a hill fort just south of town. The town of Silistre occupied a nub of land on the south bank of the Danube, overlooking where the great river split into separate streams on its way to the sea. It was one of the world’s Megiddoes, places where you could safely predict that one day a great and famous battle would be fought because armies had already fought so many battles there over the course of history that it was just a matter of playing the odds.
And according to what Prince Leopold had been told, there had already been three events that could be called “Battles of Silistre” just within the past twelve months. One of them had been the battle eleven months ago, in which the Russians took the town and fort away from the small garrison of Turks and Bosniaks. Another, three months after that, had been the battle in which two battalions of Arabs tried and failed to retake it. The third had been the surprise attack six weeks ago, in which Sultan Husein’s men, alongside Arabs and British soldiers, had retaken the fort after the local Bulgars had allowed the Russian garrison to find and requisition a particularly large amount of plum brandy.
Now there was a force of Britons, Arabs, and the Sultan’s army holding the fort and surrounding hill. (Mostly the hill—this many men wouldn’t have fit inside the fort.) The plan had been for them to link up with the French and Austrians and help them establish supply lines from the Aegean ports to Wallachia, give the Wallachians the Woolwich rockets and teach them how to use them, then send the prince and his guard back to Thessalonica where they’d be out of harm’s way.
The problem with that plan was the gigantic Russian army holding the town.
And the other bank of the river.
And the island in the river.
It hadn’t been a complete surprise, of course—scouts had reported this army days in advance—but the Arabs and the Sultan’s men wouldn’t abandon this hilltop, and if they had to fight that army, this was the strongest place to do it. And their allies were still coming. Better to fight here than be defeated in detail. Better, but not good.
“They’ve got both banks covered,” said Wellington. “Or to put that another way, their backs are to the water in two places at once. And there are Italian gunboats on the river.”
Wellington gazed to the northwest. Somewhere across the river and over the horizon, the French and Austrians were coming. They were supposed to be here already, or by this evening at the latest. “Napoleon the Second,” said the Duke. “If he’s anything like his father, the Russians are in for it.”
Whatever had happened to Wellington’s hearing, his peripheral vision was as sharp as ever. He saw Leo’s surprised glance in his direction.
“Surprised to hear me say that, lad? He was the greatest general of the age—this age, past ages, any age. And I think he’s been dead long enough it’s safe to speak the truth. His one weakness—everyone has a weakness—was that his campaigns were too perfect. He built them of iron, like steam engines. If one piece broke, there went the whole structure. I built mine of rope. If something broke, I tied a knot and kept going.”
Leo nodded. The younger Napoleon was untested, but everyone had heard good things about Radetzky—and the Wallachian king Ludovic, who was accompanying them. And of course they had Wellington. And they would need all the military genius they could get, because there had to be hundreds of thousands of men on the Russian side. The Sultan’s men, the Arabs, us, French, Austrians, Wallachians, Italians… can even a seven-nation army hold that many Russians back? I suppose we’ll find out.
Everyone back in London had seemed to think he needed to take part in this war. He’d thought so himself. Why was that? The greatest soldiers he’d known growing up were the Duke of Wellington and his own father, in that order. Had either of them ever told him going to war would be good for him? That it would make a man of him?
Not in so many words. His father had said, “They made me a colonel, then a general—honorary, of course—long before I was old enough to fight. I fought the French when they seemed invincible[3] and we won, but it was nothing like I’d imagined.” He remembered what Wellington had said, more than once: “If being a soldier improved a man’s character, I never would’ve had to hang any of mine. But a man who has a voice on decisions of war and peace should know what war is, and you can’t learn that from books.”
It hadn’t quite been any direct advice from them. It had been a feeling, just from looking at those two men and being in their presence, that if he wasn’t willing to subject himself to some of the same risks that they had, he would be a much lesser man than they were.
He’d heard that the young always thought themselves immortal. Apparently that feeling didn’t last to the age of twenty-two. Certainly he hadn’t thought much about the possibility of death at Lamia—but then, with the way the Greeks had fled in panic at the surprise attack, there hadn’t been much need to.
Now… he kept thinking of Julie, and not just because he wanted to be in bed with her at the earliest opportunity. He loved her. It had been an arranged marriage, not like his parents’ once-in-a-century royal love match, but Julie was a joy to be around. Her slight accent, her warm brown eyes, her sputtering laugh at his jokes… he wanted to see what their children would look like. And yes, he wanted to keep the dynasty going.
And speaking of the dynasty, there was Christian Duke of York to think about. Chris, whose clothes had to be specially made because he reacted to any sort of irregularity in the fabric along the inside as though a scorpion were crawling over that part of his skin. Chris, who when asked by the Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh how he felt about Mother and Father’s twentieth anniversary, had said, “I think we should use leaf springs on the coach instead of leather braces.”[4] (Which was probably a good idea, but not the sort of comment that Silly Billy could possibly have been expecting.) Chris wasn’t the most eccentric person in the British aristocracy—not even now that old Slice-of-Gloucester had passed on[5]—but as king, he would surely cost the monarchy whatever power it still had, because there was no overlap between the political duties of the king and the things he could keep his thoughts pointed at.
I could never do that to Chris. I may have teased him—more often than I should have—but dropping the duties of the heir in his lap would be an act of cruelty. And even more than that, Julia also deserves better. I must survive this battle. I must get back to her.
“Remember this, lad,” said the duke. “Nothing’s ever certain in war. Anyone can win, and anyone can lose. Remember that. Because that army—that giant mass of men—that army can lose too.”
Somewhere down there, horns were blowing. The Russians were preparing to attack. Most of the battles in this war had been paltry affairs, forgettable except to those who had the bad luck to be in them. This one looked to be one for the history books.
It was an honour Leopold Prince of Wales could have done without.
Valerian Madatov was dead. Alexander Arkadyevich Suvorov, who had been serving as ambassador to Italy until the outbreak of war, was not the general his namesake and grandfather had been and was expending the motherland’s strength in futile attacks on the passes of the Carpathians. Vasily Perovsky, who had been in charge of the war effort in Bosnia-Rumelia since Madatov’s death, was under siege in Bucharest. Count Ivan Paskevich was preoccupied with suppressing the Polish rebellion, while Aleksei Yermolov was running the Russian army in the Persian war.
So it was Grand Duke Nikolai himself who led the army of 420,000 men south from Kishinev and along the Danube. His plan was to force the Allied armies into a decisive battle and crush them with overwhelming force—or, if they didn’t oblige him, to split up his army and rebuild the garrisons until his control of Wallachia and the Bulgarian lands could no longer be contested.
At Sillistre, his army was divided into three unequal portions. One portion surrounded him on the island in the Danube. One portion waited on the north bank of the river. And one portion—the largest—held the town itself.
This was the portion that attacked on the afternoon of June 11. Between 180,000 and 200,000 Russians charged uphill a force of 40,000 Britons, 20,000 Arabs and 30,000 Turks, Bosniaks, and loyalist Bulgars. The failure of the Russian attack can be attributed to two factors.
The first was the superior firepower of the British. Their revolvers could maintain a rate of fire some three times that of their Russian counterparts, despite the disparity in numbers. Wellington was well supplied with Woolwich 38s, which he had intended to give to the Wallachians for use against the Russians. Now he could cut out the middleman.
The second factor—and one which would prove decisive over the course of this battle—was the Russian command structure. Nikolai was what modern business managers would call a nondelegator[6]. He saw to every movement of troops in his huge army, every order for resupply or reinforcement. Implementing all the lessons of war the Russians had learned fighting Napoleon and the Ottomans, he took pains to ensure that their baggage trains arrived with the same supplies they’d started out with, minus only what was necessary to feed the crew and draft animals. He made sure the front line was kept strong, never allowing noble officers to keep too many troops attending on them.
It is a tribute to his attention to detail that Nikolai was able to coordinate an army of this size by himself. The problem was that none of his generals or colonels (other than the trusted Prince Alexander Sergeyevich Menshikov, who was on the north bank) felt empowered to attack or retreat without orders, and though Nikolai sent orders with the intent of causing a mass attack on the fort, his messengers sometimes arrived at their destinations a half hour or more apart from each other—when they arrived at all. The Italian Marines often picked them off while they were crossing the river. The result was a steady drumbeat of charges that wore the Allies down but was never enough at any one time to overwhelm them. By the time Nicholas had thought of simply delivering a single message to the whole army—“attack at 7 p.m.”—they were too tired to attack effectively.
And Prince Menshikov couldn’t be spared, because by 5 p.m. the wing of the Allied army under Napoleon II, Radetzky, and King Ludovic had arrived. Between the 80,000 Austrians, the 60,000 French, and the 35,000 Wallachians, they had the 120,000-strong Russian army on the north bank outnumbered. Menshikov was busy organizing a defensive line, which successfully held off the allies until sunset. He was also calling for fresh supplies of powder and shot.
At 8:30 pm, just when the whole battle had seemed to go quiet, Napoleon II launched a new attack along the riverbank. This attack out of the setting sun took the Russians by surprise, and the massed Francotte revolver fire of the French was every bit as effective as Wellington’s.
But the “Twilight Charge,” as the Moniteur would call it (recalling the Midnight Charge at Nancy) was only the first step. Just when Menshikov was starting to rally the Russians in the fading light and the French were badly overextended and pressed against the Danube, Marshal Damrémont[7] ordered his rockets to fire. These were Maëstricht rockets, similar to Congreve rockets but with the rear nozzles modified to resemble the American Henry-Hunt. They weighed up to 50 kg, and they were loaded with gunpowder and white phosphorus. Although the Americans had the dubious honor of introducing this French invention to the world’s battlefields two years earlier, more of it was used in this single engagement than the Americans had even manufactured during the War of 1837.
The sudden appearance of this new weapon threw the ranks of the Russians into confusion. Worse, only half of the 1,000 or so rockets were fired at the army—the other half were fired at the fleet of Russian boats on the Danube, which were still being unloaded. The explosion of a boatload of powder killed Prince Menshikov instantly, throwing the army on the north bank into utter confusion. The clouds of white smoke, illuminated from within by white light, silhouetted the Russian soldiers and left them easy prey for French and Austrian riflemen in the darkness to the northwest…
Burim Kelmendi, This Time We’ll Get It Right: A History of the Post-Ottoman Balkans and Interventions Therein (Eng. trans.)
[1] Silistra, Bulgaria
[2] I’ve heard something similar happened during the Crimean War IOTL.
[3] The Battle of Kulm in 1813
[4] Leaf springs are a kind of suspension system. In 1836, Charlotte and Leopold celebrated twenty years of marriage with, among other things, a family ride through London in the Gold State Coach—a vehicle not at all designed for comfort. His Grace was thirteen at the time.
[5] Prince William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester and Edinburgh, survived to 1838 ITTL.
[6] Micromanager
[7] Charles-Marie Denys de Damrémont, Marshal of France and (on this mission) Guy Who Makes Sure the Boy Emperor Doesn’t Screw Up.
