From Boulder Heights, Chris watched the battle to the south.
The Retalians were brave. Their knightly lords dared to charge straight into cannon fire and musket shots, and the First Line of Defense held by the Hegrande Legion had lasted only two hours before they punched a hole through it.
This result surprised Chris, but not by much.
The Retalians' ferocity was plain to see. It was only natural that the Hegrande Legion could not stop them. Marquis Dirac's decision to forgo a counterattack, abandon the First Line of Defense, and fall back to the Second Line of Defense, trading space for time, was an even wiser choice.
Sure enough, when the Retalians charged on horseback toward the Second Line of Defense like madmen after barely a dozen minutes of regrouping, the waiting batteries of Field Guns and the infantry's Crouching Tiger Cannons sent men and horses tumbling.
The Field Guns fired solid iron shot, which could do real damage to those armored Retalian knights who barely seemed human. A hit meant death.
The Grapeshot from the Crouching Tiger Cannons was just right for dealing with the knights' retainers, along with their mounted Archers and Crossbowmen and Riflemen.
Under concentrated cannon fire and the Hegrande Riflemen's fire at will, the Retalian knightly lords leading this attack barely managed to tear a few gaps in the Barbed Wire and Cheval de Frise line before they were battered senseless.
Although the enemy seemed to have found a way to deal with the Barbed Wire, it was not particularly effective. Essentially, they were trading cavalrymen's lives for wire, and the exchange rate was not in their favor.
As for the east... Chris turned to glance that way and felt completely at ease about the Minisians.
Whether they wanted to reduce casualties or simply