Chapter 722: Chapter 721

The fourth hour was the hour that the battle turned.

Not because one side achieved a dramatic breakthrough. Not because a commander fell or a formation shattered in a single moment of catastrophic failure. The battle turned because the mathematics of attrition reached the threshold where the combined force’s numerical advantage could no longer compensate for the Horde’s qualitative advantage, and the threshold expressed itself not as a single event but as a hundred simultaneous events across the battle’s three-mile front.

Soldiers at the spear wall who had been pressing forward for four hours stopped pressing. Not retreated. Stopped. The specific moment when a soldier’s body decided that the forward direction contained nothing but death and the body’s survival instinct overrode the mind’s professional discipline. One soldier stopping was nothing. A hundred soldiers stopping across a hundred positions simultaneously was the threshold.

The Roarers’ fire, which had been the battle’s background percussion for four hours, reached the combined force’s reserve ammunition wagons. A Throat Team of fifteen warriors, deployed during the third hour through the gap the Rhakaddon charge had created, reached the wagons and fired them with fire spheres. The ammunition wagons’ explosion was not the battle’s turning point, but it was the sound that accompanied the turning point, the detonation that every soldier on the field heard and that communicated, in the language of explosions, that the things behind the line were no longer safe.

Aldrath saw the threshold. The Lord-Commander who had commanded three campaigns recognized the specific quality of a battle line that was approaching the point where professional discipline could no longer sustain the forward pressure against a defensive position that had absorbed everything the attack had produced and had not moved.

“The center is holding them,” Snowe said. “Our center is holding against their center. But the flanks are bent past recovery and the reserve is committed and the ammunition wagons are burning. We cannot sustain four more hours of this.”

“We do not need four more hours,” Varen said. “We need one more hour. One hour of sustained pressure on the spear wall and it must break. Eight thousand warriors cannot hold forever.”

“They have held for four hours against forty thousand,” Snowe said. “The mathematics you are citing are the mathematics of a normal engagement. This is not a normal engagement. The spear wall is not weakening at the rate that normal spear walls weaken because the warriors in the wall are not normal warriors. They are bigger. They are stronger. They are fighting with a conviction that our soldiers cannot match because our soldiers are fighting for a kingdom’s orders and their soldiers are fighting for their people’s right to exist. Those are different fuels and they burn at different rates.”

* * * * *

Khao’khen committed the 11th and 12th Warbands.

The final reserve. One thousand Yurakk warriors who had been standing behind the battle line for four hours, watching their brothers fight, hearing the cries and the grinding and the Roarer fire and the catapult impacts, waiting for the chief’s order with the specific tension that reserves produced in warriors who wanted to fight and who had been told to wait.

The order came. The 11th and 12th hit the combined force’s left flank, which had been pressuring the 9th and 10th Warbands for four hours and which had absorbed casualties but had maintained its coherence because the left flank’s commander was a competent professional who understood that flanking pressure was the mechanism by which the overall engagement could be won.

One thousand fresh warriors hitting a flank that had been fighting for four hours produced the effect that fresh troops always produced against tired ones. The left flank’s coherence, maintained through four hours of flanking combat, broke under the additional pressure.

“GRAK’THAR!” The 11th Warband’s fury cry erupted with the specific energy of warriors who had been waiting four hours to fight and who brought to the engagement the accumulated investment of four hours of observation and the fury that waiting produced in warriors who were not designed for waiting. “KRAGH! VRAAK! DUUM!”

“Mok’rok vol!” The 12th Warband’s honor cry, the Ashrock tradition, the ancestors are watching. “SHARAG KRUL! Take what they died for!”

The combined force’s left flank collapsed. The collapse was not the gradual bending that the right wing had experienced. It was the sudden failure that occurred when a formation that had been sustaining pressure for four hours received additional pressure from a direction it could not address and whose warriors were fresh and whose fury was the fury of a release.

The left flank’s collapse exposed the center’s left side. The center, which had been pressing against the spear wall for four hours and which had been sustaining the grinding casualties that the spear wall produced, now found itself attacked from its left side by the warriors who had broken the flank and who were driving into the center’s exposed formation with the assault energy that the flank’s collapse had generated.

Aldrath ordered the withdrawal.

The order was the correct order. The only order. The order that saved the combined force from the encirclement that the left flank’s collapse and the right wing’s earlier separation had been creating for four hours and that the final reserve’s commitment had completed.

The withdrawal was professional. Organized. Costly. The combined force’s soldiers retreated across the eastern plain toward the camp that their arrival had established, the retreat covered by the cavalry squadrons that Aldrath committed as the rear guard and that fought the Horde’s pursuing warg cavalry with the courage that professional soldiers displayed when they were covering their army’s retreat and when the alternative to courage was the destruction of everything they were protecting.

“GRAK’THAR!” The Horde’s cry pursued the withdrawal across the plain, eight thousand voices and the Rhakaddons’ ground-shaking advance and the Roarers’ final volleys and the catapults’ last stones, the sound of an army that had fought forty thousand soldiers to a standstill and then broken the standstill and then broken the army.

The Battle of the Eastern Plain’s results were tabulated that evening. Combined force losses: four thousand eight hundred dead, three thousand two hundred wounded. Horde losses: six hundred and forty-one dead, eight hundred and ninety wounded. The combined force’s effective strength had been reduced from forty-seven thousand to approximately thirty-nine thousand. The Horde’s effective strength remained at approximately seven thousand.

Seven thousand against thirty-nine thousand. The ratio had improved. The campaign continued.

The Snarling Wolf advanced to the position that the combined force had held that morning, the banner planted on the eastern plain where forty thousand soldiers had stood at dawn and where seven thousand orcish warriors stood now, the wolf’s snarl directed east, toward the camp where the combined force was counting its dead and where the Lord-Commander was writing the dispatch that the Lord Marshal would read to a council that had rejected the peace and committed the Second Reserve Corps and was now receiving the specific consequence of that rejection.

The dispatch would be brief. Aldrath’s dispatches were always brief. The brevity was the message. The message was: the military path remains closed.

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