As more than a thousand Polish infantrymen reached the middle of the slope, dense cannon fire erupted from the bastion fort.
[Illustration, not Saint Peter Fortress]
Blood blossomed across the bodies of the several dozen men at the front, and they tumbled down one after another.
The soldiers behind them raised their guns and returned fire, hoping to use suppressing fire to reach the outermost wall. But their rate of fire was far too low, and reloading on the slope was difficult, while the Austrian Army could keep firing without pause.
In barely more than ten minutes, over two hundred Polish soldiers had already fallen before the bastion fort.
Kniaziewicz, observing the battle through a Telescope in the distance, sighed gravely and ordered the two battalions assigned to the attack to withdraw first.
The Erzgebirge Fortress Group had originally been built by Austria to resist Frederick the Great's southward advance. Queen Theresa and Joseph II had reinforced it repeatedly afterward. Each bastion fort alone was equipped with more than 140 Cannons, and with only a thousand or so soldiers stationed inside, it could withstand an attack by tens of thousands of enemies.
Now, with reinforcements from the other two fortresses, Saint Peter Fortress had been crammed with a full four thousand men.
If the French Army had relied solely on a frontal assault, it would have taken at least one or two months to capture this place, with certainly horrendous casualties. Afterward, they would still have had to face the two fortresses south of the mountain pass.
Thus, Archduke Karl and his officers had never considered the possibility that the French Army would choose to break through here.
However, with the Kościuszko Legion now coordinating from the south, the situation was completely different—when Saint Peter Fortress had been designed, no