"Useless!"
On the smoke-filled mountain road, Colonel Carlos, dressed in a plain blue cotton coat, held up his spyglass and sneered contemptuously at the nobleman's carriage that had crashed into the rock face.
The carriage belonged to his adjutant, who had brought it from home. Judging by the screams and cries of pain, the young nobleman had taken more than one woman into it with him.
He was a typical spoiled aristocrat who had joined the army to polish his credentials. Colonel Carlos despised men like him, yet had no choice but to accept one as his adjutant.
There were many reasons for this, the chief one being that Carlos was merely a commoner.
The Bohemian Empire's army had an unwritten rule: any independently operating force should be commanded by a nobleman. If a non-noble took command, he should be assigned a noble adjutant.
The reasoning behind this was both absurd and deeply entrenched.
The nobles believed that although officers of common birth might possess military talent, they invariably lacked something in "leadership presence" and "strategic vision."
They believed noble blood and breeding carried an "innate ability to lead," inspiring greater trust in soldiers and allowing them to better manage relations with noble superiors and local officials.
This belief was deeply entrenched among the army's senior ranks. Although many common-born officers performed better than nobles in actual combat, the tradition stubbornly endured.
Colonel Carlos scoffed at it, but he also knew he could not change the tradition. All he could do was tolerate the spoiled young nobleman's presence and prove his own ability on the battlefield, silencing the nobles who doubted him.
Now, however, Carlos suddenly realized that having a noble adjutant was not entirely a bad thing.
The enemy's first attack had gone straight for that spoiled brat and