Colonel Carlos stood before the command tent, his face deathly pale. He could not understand what had happened.
Outside, gunfire rang out incessantly. People were firing into the camp from every direction, bullets whistling wildly through the air. Now and then, someone was hit, stiffened like a wooden dummy, and fell, never to rise again.
He had tried sending out Riflemen who had set aside their cumbersome Matchlocks and taken up longswords and shields, dispatching them in squads to drive off the enemy. But of the ten squads that went out, only two returned.
The soldiers who never came back had either died fighting or broken down and fled.
The pitch-black mountain forest was like a demon's gaping maw, devouring every Bohemian soldier who dared step inside.
Colonel Carlos's knuckles whitened around his gold-plated pocket watch. With every tick of its second hand, it seemed another soldier fell forever in this cursed, snowbound forest.
Bohemia's Riflemen had once been the most fearsome killers on the battlefield. Now, however, they had lost their bearings in the darkness. The longswords and shields in their hands should have been their most dependable weapons, but now they had become burdens that hampered their movements.
"Sir! They've breached the eastern fence!"
A sergeant with blood covering his face rushed in to report.
"The Cheval de Frise has been set on fire again."
"Where are they getting all that incendiary material?"
The aristocratic adjutant crouching behind a shield could not help asking. Beside him, the Commoner Adjutant nodded numbly and pointlessly.
"Probably pine oil... There are so many pine trees in these mountains. With just a pot, you can quickly and easily extract flammable oil. Judging by the black smoke coming off our Cheval de Frise, they're using crudely refined pine oil. It produces thick smoke