Chapter 48: Campaign
Leshert gasped and pulled the sword out of the corpse with great effort. He wiped the blood and mud off his face and noticed several small cuts on his fingers. He stared at the tiny wounds that were still bleeding and found that he couldn’t remember where he had been injured.
This was easy to understand. There were always all sorts of strange injuries on the battlefield. Yesterday, when Leshert went on patrol, he saw a wounded soldier sitting on a bed, grimacing. The other knights said he had misjudged the opening direction of a door when he kicked it open and tore his ligaments.
Ah, for men, this was such a sad and embarrassing injury.
Leshert casually wiped the blood on his hands on his clothes. The humid summer wind with the breath of the ocean blew across his face, dispersing much of the strong smell of blood and making his breathing much easier.
The Knight Commander stood on the hill, looking at the city in front of him – the gates of this port city had been blown open by artillery fire, and the ancient city walls were riddled with mottled gaps and smoke. Some of the pungent-smelling gunpowder had not yet burned out and was still hissing, emitting large amounts of smoke and dust.
Countless corpses were piled on the ground, hung on the city walls, and blocked in the trenches. The wounded horses let out pitiful neighs before being given a merciful death by slitting their throats.
Wounded warhorses were useless, and they were inconvenient to keep during intensive marches. The most merciful way was to let them die with their masters.
Knights wearing the insignia of the Knights Templar were dismantling catapults and loading them onto the carriages of steam locomotives in batches. Many soldiers were also installing rails with hammers—iron was a precious resource, and the railway tracks that could run locomotives were all made of sections that were easy to disassemble. The tracks were laid on the required sections and removed after use. This was a very popular method. Of course, this method also made it impossible for the tracks to be too long, and steam locomotives could only travel short distances. If it were a long-distance track, it would require careful design and long-term construction.
However, having such transportation support on the march was already very satisfying.