Chapter 27

Devnum

“We’re still weak on the blocking side,” Velius said, looking down at the large map holding dozens of carved figures. “If we can’t hold them in this box, they will sweep around the lake and crush us.”

“I know, but we don’t have much of a choice. We have to use enough of a bait force to make them believe we are routing. They know what kind of forces we have available to us. We can get away with shortening our numbers some, especially if the cavalry does its job, but there’s a limit to it, and I think we’re getting very close to that. Any less here,” Ky said, pointing to the largest grouping of wooden figures. “And they will start looking for the rest of our army, or worse, looking more at the topography and seeing this area for what it is.”

“Are you sure they won’t see it ahead of time,” Ursinus asked? “As you said, they’ve got enough information already to see everything we did in making this plan. They know our forces and they have to be looking at maps of their invasion route.”

“If they see us putting up stiff resistance and that almost half our forces are missing, they might figure it out, but just looking at the map alone, no, I don’t think so. It’s just over a mille passus from the lakeshore to the cliffs. They’ll see the cliffs and the lake on the map, but they won’t see it for the box that it is until it’s too late, especially since they can’t see the excavation work we’ve been doing on the cliffside to make it impossible to climb. I’ve walked the area. On the ground, with the way the ground rolls, it’s even harder to see how much it narrows.”

Ursinus frowned, but nodded. Unlike most of the commanders, Ursinus had actually fought side by side with Ky when he first arrived, and had seen some of Ky’s use of technology up close, which meant he tended to give Ky the benefit of the doubt. Ky understood his hesitancy. No one of this time had ever seen aerial reconnaissance of a battle area before and would have a harder time grasping the entire field as a whole, rather than just what they could see from the ground.

He hadn’t considered it before, but once he managed to get a chemical industry set up and producing things like sulfuric acid, he could introduce hot air balloons, the earliest designs of which used sulfuric acid and iron filings to safely produce the hot gasses used to lift them. One of the biggest limitations in ancient battles was the limited information commanders had during the fight itself. They would strategize ahead of time, working out plans for how to fight the enemy, but during the battle itself, everything was passed by runners, sending back updates of the fight from commanders one by one. It limited what the commanders were able to do, turning the entire business into a slugfest with little tactical control.

Plans like this one required very specific timing to work. The only reason this plan was even feasible was because he could see the entire battle as it progressed and communicate with Lucilla in real-time from a distance.

No matter their training, it was unlikely the Romans and their Caledonian allies would have been able to pull something like this off without him, and he wouldn’t always be around. If, however, he could set up something like a signaling corps using balloons and flags, commanders would be able to outmaneuver their opponents even mid-battle without Ky’s intervention. It would give them a big advantage in the fights to come, especially since the Empire would be fighting on multiple fronts and its commanders would have to confront larger forces without Ky’s technology.

It wasn’t something for now, but Ky filed it away as another thing he needed to work on.

“Even if they don’t realize it’s a trap, I’m still not convinced they won’t break through our lines,” Velius said. “The front lines on both the forward and rear of the Carthaginians will take two full legions each to cover, and that’s spread very thin. The pressure of a hundred thousand men, especially ones who realize what mortal danger they’re in, will be intense. I’m not confident we can hold back that pressure. Considering we only have five legions total, once the fourth legion arrives, with two so under strength that we have to put them together to equal one full legion, we’re left with nothing but auxiliary forces in reserve. I mean no offense to our Caledonian allies, but holding men in place is a different kind of fighting than your men are used to.”

Drest, the man Llassar assigned to take his place, had almost as little expression as Llassar, but nodded back in answer. Everyone assembled knew that Velius had a point and had heard him make this point before, once all of the commanders were brought in on the plan. They’d run two full-scale mock battles to give the men a chance to train on what to expect, a concept that, in of itself, had been completely foreign to militaries in the ancient world and difficult for both the Romans and the Caledonians to grasp. The results had proven what Velius had said. When put into the Roman blocking positions, the Caledonians had not managed to hold the line, even when faced with just pushing and shoving of men armed with wooden training swords. When faced with the real thing, no amount of warrior drive and toughness would counter an organized and coordinated push by either a legion or a phalanx.

“I know, and I’ve agreed that this was the weak point all along. Unfortunately, we don’t have any more men to draw on. We’ve pulled every legion in and even if we stripped the praetorians for additional manpower, an action that could backfire on us dramatically considering men like Decius are still out there setting fires, it would not make a difference. There aren’t a thousand more men with legion training left in the Empire, and we’ve run out of time to train any more.”

“Then what do we do when the legions start to bend? And they will under that much weight.”

“They might not. If the civilian auxiliaries are effective, I’m hoping it damages the unit cohesiveness of the phalanxes enough to keep them from pushing our men back. However, I thought we could hold back enough of Drest’s men as a reserve. When the line weakens, they rush in as a counter-attack, giving time for the pressed legion to reform and reset their walls.”

“Charging an engaged phalanx like that is suicide,” Auspex said.

“My men aren’t afraid to die in battle.”

Auspex was about to retort when Ky held up a hand, stopping him.

“We saw in the war games that, while the Caledonians couldn’t hold a concerted line, a massed attack was able to push the opposing line back. That’s all we’ll need.”

“I’m still not convinced these war games of yours can be counted on to show us what things will be like for real. Men with steel swords react very differently than men with wooden ones,” Lartius, the newly appointed legate of cavalry, said.

“They also react differently when facing real swords instead of wooden ones. I know it’s a new concept and you’ll have to see it to believe it, but it does give us practical experience to understand what might happen. Once the battle is over, we can discuss its effectiveness. Until then, you’ll just have to believe me.”

“I think we can all agree a charge by armed Caledonians will push any opponent back, at least enough to let us reform our lines, so I don’t have an issue with that. I’m wondering where these warriors will come from. You yourself just said we needed to have enough men in the retreating forces to convince the Carthaginians. If these have to be Caledonians, where are you going to get enough men to use as a reserve? Because we need it on both sides of the fight, by my count, we don’t have enough men for this.”

Ky couldn’t disagree with Velius’s estimates. Sophus had run the numbers multiple times using the war games as a baseline, and even if they cut the number of soldiers in the bait force, the bulk of which would be made up of Caledonians either as themselves or dressed as legionaries, they had just barely enough left over to make up an effective reserve on one side of the fight. That was, however, not enough. The Carthaginians would be trying to break out in either direction, and if the rear force faltered, then nothing the main force did would matter.