When General Dude galloped behind the earthen defensive wall and leaned out to inspect Chris's distant camp through his telescope, his brow furrowed after only a few glances.
Cannons? Where had Prince Chris gotten so many cannons?
General Dude already felt utterly overwhelmed.
The fighting on both flanks was going badly. Birchwood was a lost cause. With the stream in the way, whether for moving men or supplies, he had already abandoned the idea of sending reinforcements across.
The ridge battlefield was doing somewhat better. Although the watchtower had burned down, the position still held.
Captain Lacey had repelled five enemy charges on the ridge at the cost of roughly a hundred men killed or wounded. His casualties were heavy, but he had done well.
Dude had been working with his staff officers on a night battle plan, preparing to launch a counterattack after dark and retake Birchwood. That would make the camp's frontal defenses easier to hold.
He had never expected Prince Chris to bring out thirty cannons of various sizes at this moment. One look through his telescope told Dude that these were no mere showpieces, nor were they ancient stone-throwing cannons.
What frightened Dude most was not the number of cannons, but their positions... even the closest cannon Prince Chris had deployed stood over a kilometer away. That meant their range exceeded that of most of the Minisia army's artillery.
To win this war, the Minisia expeditionary army under Dude's command had brought cannons, and plenty of them. Excluding smaller and older weapons such as swivel guns, grapeshot cannons, and stone-throwing cannons, they had twenty-five modern field guns.
These twenty-five bronze cannons were the secret weapons behind the Minicia Kingdom's dominance at sea. They came in various sizes, and fifteen were fast-firing Eagle Cannons.
The Eagle Cannon