Chapter 93: Army Framework

A few days after the Victory Celebration, Roland began the farming project.

He was sitting at his desk with the windows behind him when he noticed the sound: a steady soft percussion against the glass, not quite rain. The snow had started to melt. He had spent New Year’s lying in front of a window at the country house, watching the ice prisms under the eaves go from white to transparent to droplets, one after another, until the whole formation was gone. There had been time for that sort of watching then. Not now — but the sound of the earth starting to unlock itself, underneath the work, was something he could live with.

He had until roughly the end of the week before the snow was gone. The road between Border Town and Longsong Stronghold was another matter — built on mud, no drainage, unusable for another month at minimum after the melt. If he was going to take Longsong Stronghold eventually, road construction had to precede it; he made a note, set it aside, and returned to the immediate problem.

The army.

Transferring the militia to a standing force had been the easy part — the announcement, the offer of retirement pay, the fact that no one took it. The actual work was building the framework they would operate within. Rules, ranks, discipline, rewards. Roland stared at the blank page in front of him and acknowledged privately that his knowledge of military organization consisted largely of half-remembered childhood chess games and the sort of general principles one absorbed from reading fiction.

So I’ll design it myself, he thought. As creator, if I do something unreasonable, who’s going to tell me?

He started with structure. Squad: five men — dictated partly by practical arithmetic, since a cannon required at least five to operate properly. Ten squads to a team. Ten teams to a platoon. Division-level structure he deferred; the total force wasn’t large enough to require it yet, and two or three platoons, honestly deployed, should be able to defeat most of what this era could put in the field. He wrote this down before he could second-guess it.

The code of conduct was simpler than he’d expected. Obey your commanding officer. Never desert. Never betray a comrade. Standard entries that would appear on any army’s list. But Roland put the first rule in capital letters at the top of the page before he wrote anything else: No plundering. No civilian harassment.

He had thought hard about this one.

Noble armies didn’t fight wars because their lord asked them to. They fought because war, when it ended, opened the losing side’s coffers, granaries, and settlements to the winners. The looting wasn’t an unfortunate side effect; it was the economic engine. For mercenaries the calculus was even more direct. A flag with no profit attached to it was just a flag.

Only an army recruited from civilians would reliably refrain from treating other civilians as inventory. It wasn’t a moral argument, or not only a moral argument — it was an engineering observation. The people in Border Town knew what it felt like to be on the losing end of an army that answered to no code. They weren’t likely to become that army. But moral restraint, Roland knew, eroded under sustained conditions of victory. The rewards had to stay ahead of the temptation.

Which brought him to territory.

He had land. Between Border Town and Longsong Stronghold there was a considerable amount of unclaimed and underused ground that would become his in either case. He could grant parcels of it — not a knight’s fief of two thousand acres with the autonomy and taxation rights that implied, but a few acres to a dozen, enough for a house and a small working farm, enough to mean something. No industrial autonomy, no independent levy. The land remained under Border Town’s laws. But it was theirs, recorded and deeded.

More than ninety percent of mainland land was held by the nobility. The math alone made the offer significant. And once a soldier had a parcel of land attached to his name, he had a stake — not in the abstract sense, but a physical, heritable stake. Overthrowing Roland would mean losing it. That was not a calculation he needed to spell out to anyone; it would perform itself.

Humanity isn’t driven by words and whips, he thought. Just by interests. Line up their interests with yours, and you don’t need the whip.

He wrote the territorial reward structure out cleanly and set it aside. Then, finally, he could start thinking about the part he was actually qualified for.

Weapons.

The flintlock production rate was improving. As it did, the logic of the spearman-as-bodyguard for gunners was becoming less elegant — that was manpower he could better use elsewhere. What the gunners needed was a way to defend themselves in close quarters if the volley didn’t break the enemy’s nerve before they closed the distance. Not to become melee troops. Just to not be completely helpless.

Bayonets. The answer was bayonets.

He sketched the requirements: a fixed blade, one that didn’t obstruct the firing mechanism, one that didn’t jam in a body and require someone to stand there wrestling with it while more enemies arrived. The first-generation solution — a blade on a wooden plug that went into the barrel — failed on both counts. You couldn’t fire with it mounted, and it stuck. Workable in desperation; unworkable as doctrine.

Second generation: casing mount. The bayonet had an iron sleeve at the base. The sleeve fit over the barrel — internal diameter slightly larger than the barrel exterior, fixed by a lug-and-slot engagement so it couldn’t rotate off. The blade itself: triangular cross-section, three edges, each slightly inward-curved. A wound from a triangular blade didn’t close the way a slash wound did; it held open. That was the point, and he didn’t pretend otherwise.

Mounted, the bayonet extended past the muzzle by a few centimeters, which complicated loading but didn’t make it impossible. Compared to a folding design it was simpler by a significant margin — no moving hinge, no spring mechanism, nothing to break or jam in the cold. Any competent blacksmith could reproduce it from a sample.

He sketched the mount detail, noted the tolerances, and looked at what he’d produced. It was sound. The manufacturing path was clear. The one gap he couldn’t fill himself was the training requirement.

Roland did not know how to fight with a bayonet. He knew the geometry of it in the abstract — lever the thrust, don’t overcommit, recover the line — but he had never actually done it, and more importantly, he had never taught anyone else to do it.

He made a note to find Carter.

Carter had mentioned at some point, with the particular confidence of a man who knows he is good at many things and would like you to be aware of it, that he could fight with almost any weapon. This had seemed like an idle boast at the time. It was now potentially the most useful thing he had ever said.

The drip from the window was steadier now. Somewhere outside, the snow was losing the argument with March.

Chapter 93 Army Framework

A few days after the victory celebration, Roland finally undertook the great farming project.

A constant dripping sound could be heard from the direction of the windows when he was sitting in his office, it sounded as if it was raining non-stop. It was the sound of the melting snow.

When he visited the countryside for New Year’s, he laid in front of the window most of the time, watching the long ice prisms which hung under the roof turn transparent and then into droplets, which then fell down. At the moment he hadn’t had the time for such leisure. However, writing down plans for the future while simultaneously listening to the voice of earth’s recovery was also very pleasurable.

According to the information gathered from the previous years, the snow would need about one week’s time to melt, but the road between the Border Town and Longsong Stronghold would at least need one month until it was usable again. It took so much time after the snow melted since the road was built out of mud and also didn’t have a drainage system

Roland could already imagine it, if he wanted to defeat Longsong Stronghold, the first thing he needed to do, was to build a road between the two cities which was usable by carriages even during heavy rains.

But now the problem with the highest priority was still the issue of the army’s reconstruction. Without a reliable and mighty army, it would be impossible to defeat the forces of the Longsong Stronghold with his outnumbered troops. Transferring the militia into the regular army was only the first step. The specific preparation of establishing the new rules, discipline, reward and punishment system turned out to be a big headache.

Although as a child he had played land battle chess, however, he had already long forgotten all the previous teachings. Roland, after some thought, simply decided to make up his own plans. Anyway, as the creator of the new army, even if he implemented unreasonable things, no one would discover it anyway.

So Border Towns’ first compilation for the new army was soon prepared: according to the Army, division, platoon, team, squad, five people for a squad (taking into account that a cannon needed at least five people to operate), ten squads for a team, ten teams for a platoon. As for the number of platoons within a division, he decided to consider it later. In view of the overall battle prowess of the armies during this era, as long as he sent out two or three platoons of soldiers, it should be enough to defeat the vast majority of opponents on the battlefield.

When he decided on the basics for the army framework, Roland took a deep breath.

The rules and regulations that came next were much simpler, in addition to always wearing their uniform, they had to obey the commanding officer, never desert, never betray a comrade and so on. Roland’s first rule was to prohibit plundering and harassing.

The problems caused by plundering were numerous, and the negative impact it had on the local inhabitants was so great, that they would need years to recover, if ever. This was also the reason why he had insisted on only using civilians as the members of the military.

When the aristocracy responded to the call for battle of their Lords, the main reason for their obeying wasn’t to defeat the enemy, instead, it was for the looting afterwards. Or in other words, the main reason they followed the call of war, was to plunder the wealth and territory of an enemy, of course, this included also the innocent civilians within that territory.

As for the mercenaries, not to mention bandits, even though they looked steady and fierce, but if you took a closer look, they were just a flag waving in the wind and at the same time robbery was also a major source of their

income. So hoping for military discipline from these people was meaningless.

Only an army built up out of civilians wouldn’t see other civilians as only lambs to be slaughtered. Of course, relying on discipline and moral restraint alone wasn’t enough. After long days in the field, the heart of greed would enlarge with each continued victory. Therefore, the given rewards had to always keep up with the greed, only in this way could he prevent looting and other illegal behavior.

In order to make the reward grand enough, Roland decided to offer the greatest reward of all – receiving their own territory. As long as they achieved great merits during battle, they could get their own territory. Roland had many unclaimed territories, like this, the land between Border Town and Longsong Stronghold could slowly be reclaimed.

Since more than 90% of all land belonged to members of the aristocracy, such a reward was absolutely very appealing. Once they had their own property, these people would be closely attached to his side, and in case there was someone who wanted to overthrow him, they would show the strongest possible resistance to protect their benefactor and with this protect their own land as well.

After all, humankind wasn’t driven by words and whips, but by their own benefits. Putting it another way, as long as he could continuously fulfill the basic interests of the people under his rule, there would be no one who could shake his dominance.

Unlike a traditional fief, Roland will grant them an area between a few acres and up to a dozen acres. The territory could be used to build their own residences, and they could purchase serfs or hire farmers to take care of their fields, but they weren’t allowed to set up their own industry. In contrast, the rewarded territory for a knight is close to two thousand acres, an area equivalent to a small village. The above-mentioned industry income was used to provide the knight and his attendant’s for their war necessities, for example, it was needed to purchase their own weapons, armors and horses.

Being awarded such a small area of land wasn’t of much interest to the aristocracy and as such wouldn’t encounter much resistance, but it would also weakened the feeling of independence for the people on the battlefield. In Roland’s view, it was just like paying a retirement pension, which would ensure that the soldiers had a stable income even after retirement.

At the same time, in order to strengthen the centralization of power, and to avoid that the thought that “servant’s servant is not my servant,” would occur, he would only grant them the ownership of the territory but no autonomy. In other words, the land was still under the jurisdiction of the laws, regulations, and systems in the Lord’s area. In a sense, they would become the foundation for the future generations of farmers.

After he had written down the concept for the reward system, Roland took a break and stretched his body. Then finally he could start thinking about a field within his own area of expertise – R&D weapons.

With the increasing speed of flintlock manufacturing, continuing to use spearman to protect the gunners seemed to be a waste of manpower, so the latter needed the ability to fight independently in melee combat.

There was a very easy solution to this problem, that was, adding a bayonet to the flintlock. Roland didn’t expect his own men to take the initiative and engage in close range combat, instead they should only have the ability to defend themselves in case the power of the gun wasn’t able to completely destroy the enemy’s courage and they started a desperate attack.

A weapon like a bayonet wasn’t so difficult to manufacture, describing it in easy to understand words, it was just a sharp cone, and in the case of further improving the killing effectiveness, he could also add a blood groove into it. The key part was the connection between the bayonet and the gun, the first bayonet was a blade which was connected to a thin wooden pole, which could be directly put into the barrel of the gun. The advantage of this construction was that it was quite simple, the disadvantage was also very obvious, if the bayonet was used the gun was unable to fire, and in addition, if it was used to stab someone, it could happen that the bayonet would become stuck in the enemy’s body.

So Roland intended to produce the improved second generation bayonet – the casing type bayonet. The bayonet had an iron casing added to the blade’s handle. The inner casing diameter was slightly larger than the grooved barrel.

One only needed to weld a piece of iron with a hole on top of the barrel. After plugging the bayonet on top of the barrel and inserting a filling into the hole, it would become fixed. The blade had a triangular form, with three sharp blades, if pierced into the body it wouldn’t fall off, and it would also leave a difficult to heal wound.

After the installation of the bayonet, the bayonet would be slightly longer than the barrel, and so also complicate the loading process, but compared to a folding bayonet, it was much simpler for mass production. As long as there was a sample, any blacksmith was able to reproduce it.

But to enable the bayonet to play an important part in a battle, it was important to train the soldiers in how to use it.

But Roland naturally didn’t know anything about it. Fortunately, he remembered that his Chief Knight had once boasted, that he was able to use any weapon. So he just had to find him and get him to teach the others how to fight with a bayonet.

TN: For more information about bayonets. They seemed to fall off all the time