11. SPECIAL FIELD REPORT NO 7

A good general, a well-organized system, good instruction, and severe discipline, aided by effective establishments, will always make good troops, independently of the cause for which they fight.

SPECIAL FIELD REPORT NO. 7

TO GENERAL NEY, COMMANDER OF FRENCH FORCES IN FALMART

Headquarters, Italica, 20 Nivôse, Year XXI

Citizen General Ney, it has been thirty-two days since you appointed myself, Citizen Chaucer, and my superior, Citizen General Courbet, to the task of establishing effective means of resupply for the Third Corps's musket cartridges, cannonballs, powder stores, and manpower. I have endeavored to do this task with the eagerness befitting of the Republic. In the past weeks, I have made substantial progress. In this report I shall endeavor to inform you of the methods on which this progress has been gained.

Let's get down to business, shall we? On your orders, I was put in charge of managing supply issues for the Third Corps. The first step to that was, well figuring out what exactly our issues were. Ever since Russia, that terrible place where our army's logistics broke down in such a way even Citizen Berthier could not fix, there has been a terrible failure to keep proper records of our exact deficits and surpluses.

I aimed to fix that.

I've always had a head for numbers. Ever since I was a boy, my father wanted me to become a lawyer. It's a good profession, don't get me wrong, and it has produced some very fine men such as the esteemed Robespierre; however, I didn't want that. Why not? My father loved to ask that question. He was a lawyer, his father had been a lawyer, and (I don't actually know if this is true) his father's father had probably been a lawyer. It paid well and was a fitting job for a middle class man like myself. Numbers, I told him. Numbers. They've always just clicked for me. I loved to count; when I was four I counted exactly how many bits of straw were in my bed, and then did it again just to be sure I hadn't missed anything. I was taught basic arithmetic at age six, and at age eight I started keeping track of the family's money. By the time I was a teenager, I was running the finances for my father, our neighbors, our neighbors' friends, and our neighbors' friends' friends.

Then the Revolution happened, and I enlisted. I was at Valmy, you know. Served with General Kellermann to fight off the Prussians and drive them from France. I sang the Marseillaise and shouted Ça Ira to the beat of Prussian bootsteps. We won, as you most certainly are aware, and I discovered that I wasn't very good at soldiering. But numbers, oh I was very good at that. Quartermaster was the natural step from there, and ever since then I've been managing numbers for the army. It's a good job, if you don't mind the marching. I never became a lawyer.

Anyway, I love numbers. So it gets on my nerves when people can't seem to get their numbers right. The quartermasters in the Third Corps are better than most when it comes to that, but they're still disgustingly human. They make mistakes. A few extra cartridges here, one too few cannonballs there, some loaves of bread lost to the rats. You don't think that's such a problem? You think, a few bits and pieces lost, what's the big deal? Well, I'll tell you; all of those tiny bits and pieces add up.

Say you have a company of soldiers. Say, in that company, a man accidentally stumbles, loses a few cartridges in the muck, and decides to get a few replacements from the quartermaster. The quartermaster thinks, oh alright it's just a few and I really don't want to bother with all the paperwork, go ahead and take them. Then let's say that company goes campaigning, and over the course of a few months more men lose cartridges and the quartermaster goes ahead and replaces them without bothering to fill out the papers. Then at the end of that campaign, the company returns to the depot and the quartermaster submits a request for new cartridges. His papers say he only needs this many but really he needs that many. So the quartermaster receives this many cartridges instead of that many, and they go off campaigning again. Then let's say the company gets into a skirmish with the enemy. They fire off a bunch of shots then return back to camp all happy because none of them died. They ask the quartermaster for new cartridges because they're supposed to be foraging tomorrow and they might get into another skirmish and it would be really bad if they ran out of ammo. No problem, the quartermaster says, I just got a full load from the depot. Then he looks at his stockpile and he actually only has enough cartridges for half the men. Shit. Guess you're out of luck, sorry. They go foraging, get into a skirmish, half the men run out of ammunition, and the enemy kills twenty of them because they can't fight back. That's men dead because of the quartermaster and all the tiny mistakes he made. Of course, that's one company. Now imagine how many tiny mistakes are made in our corps of twelve thousand men. Imagine how many men could die because of those mistakes. Now that's a big deal.

I hate mistakes; especially when it comes to numbers. The official count, from our esteemed quartermasters, was that we had 320,000 paper cartridges for the whole corps. I didn't like that number. It was too even. Too perfect. I had them count again (they really complained about having to do that, and it took a whole day to do). Oops, looks like it was actually 298,631 cartridges. That's 21,369 cartridges we thought we had but didn't. Roughly how many a regiment uses per battle. That's what happens when those tiny bits and pieces add up.

You think I'm annoying? Fair enough, I am annoying. I force men to do more for their jobs. I make people do extra work. I cause soldiers to hate me. But at the end of the day, I save lives.

Go ahead and curse behind my back. It doesn't change the facts.

I did recounts for everything. Rations, bandages, uniforms, tents, muskets, bayonets, cannonballs, boots, gloves, flints, shovels, axes, swords, brandy, and a dozen other things that needed counting. It took a good few days, and it would have taken longer if it weren't for the men being in barracks idling around most of the day.

But by the end of those few days I had it. Accurate numbers for the whole corps. All our needs and problems, organized into nice little columns on sheets of paper. The only thing left was to go about solving those problems. There were a lot of them.

Problem number one was money. That's not a problem, you say, we just made a hundred million Francs off of indemnities and ransoms from the Saderans. Well, yes. We did. But where's that money right now? I don't have it. Do you?

It's in Sadera of course. Because Emperor Molt still hasn't accepted our peace terms, and all that gold we're owed is still sitting in an Imperial treasury. Even if he did accept, we wouldn't get all the money for weeks. I wasn't going to wait for that.

So where do you get money in a city like Italica? Banks of course.

I went to the biggest bank in Italica. All the banks in the Empire are owned by big banking families, rich fellows who've been riding the momentum of their ancestors' good thinking and using their money to get more money. Most banks in Italica are merely branches of the main banks located in Sadera itself, and this one was no different. It was a Galanti bank run by a certain Fertus Galanti, son of Tecon Galanti, who happened to be in charge of the second most profitable Galanti branch in Falmart. The Italican branch. Second only, of course, to the Saderan branch. Fertus was a banker through and through. He knew how to count coins, and he had zero faith in anything new or dangerous; it's how he kept his money. He didn't loan to risky endeavors. He didn't fund strange proposals. And he most certainly didn't give money to foreign men from another world with no credit to their name who suddenly demanded tens of thousands of gold coins from him. A reasonable man, really.

Listen, I served in Italy with Berthier and Bonaparte. The Army of Italy was a sad thing, I'll tell you. We were a band of looters and thieves, reduced to merely sitting on the defensive while the Austrians had free reign over Italy. We never got our pay. Supplies were coming in only occasionally. We had no money. I was fairly certain that if the Austrians didn't come to kill us, we'd have starved where we stood. Then Bonaparte came. I have cursed his name many times in my life, but what he did in Italy was nothing short of a miracle. He drove us through Italy, beat the Austrians, and suddenly we no longer cared that we weren't getting supplies from Paris because we were taking our supplies directly from Italy. It's in Italy that I learned how to deal with bankers. With all their wealth, and their influence, and their big fancy buildings, and their nice clothes, it's easy to see bankers as gods. Beings who, by the virtue of their extraordinary wealth, are untouchable by the common man. Well in Italy, we proved that wrong. All that wealth and influence? It's not real power; it's all just a facade that makes them seem powerful. The only real power comes from the barrel of a musket, and Bonaparte showed us that. He authorized the collection of 'war contributions', essentially the legalized theft of Italy's vast wealth. All those powerful bankers in Italy didn't seem so powerful once we'd ransacked their coffers, seized their wealth, and shot anyone who spoke out against it. Bonaparte was a good teacher. Shame he betrayed the Revolution.

So anyways, I arranged a meeting with Fertus Galanti. My translator was a girl with blue hair, courtesy of a certain Captain Duclos. She's the only one in the world who speaks Saderan and French fluently. Some of our boys know German, and some of them know German (or Elban as they call it) too, and that's how we've been conversing so far. It works fine for the most part, but Fertus Galanti doesn't speak German and neither do I, so I figured it would be best to not use that system. Language is always a tricky thing. If you get it wrong, both parties might end up agreeing to something while having completely different ideas of what that something actually is. In Bavaria, I had to deal with an officer who only spoke German. I don't speak German, so I got a man who did, only he didn't speak French. He did speak Italian, so I got a man who spoke Italian and French. So in the end, I was talking to the Italian who spoke to the German who then in turn spoke to the officer. I thought we had an agreement, but it turned out later that when I requested a thousand chasseurs, light infantry to reinforce some losses we'd taken earlier, he thought I wanted a thousand shoes. I ended up with a thousand shoes I didn't need and a thousand less light infantry than I did need, and it was a whole debacle that I spent two days fixing.

Forgive me, I'm driveling on. I arranged a meeting with Fertus, and, through the girl, told him exactly what I wanted. Can't be done, he said. I told him that it could be done and it would be done and he would be generously compensated when all our gold from Sadera arrived. That's too much of a risk for my bank, he said. I told him that we would most definitely be able to compensate him since the treaty is essentially as good as signed already. He told me he wouldn't do it. Fine, I said. Wait here.

I left the bank, mostly to get some fresh air. It was very stuffy in that place, and Fertus must have been smoking something because it reeked. Then I went back into the bank with a company of grenadiers. He saw the grenadiers and asked what authority I had to do this. I showed him a warrant for the arrest of him, his wife, and all five of his children. That's my authority, I told him. He gave me a terrified look and said he'd look into arranging some funds. No, I said, you'll do what you're told. We left him, and he cursed behind my back a lot. Can't say I blame him.

So that was problem number one solved. I had the entire vault of the Italican Galanti bank at my disposal. Money problems over; what's next?

Oh yeah, gunpowder.

The recipe for gunpowder is very ancient. I'm told it was originally invented in China, by men trying to discover the elixir for eternal life. Now ain't that irony. Looking for eternal life only to discover something that brings so much death. Oh, well. The Chinese never put their invention to good use; they still fight most of their wars with spears and swords. It was only when it came to Europe that we fully realized the potential of gunpowder.

Now the recipe for gunpowder is ancient and as such it's also very simple. It requires three things: charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter. Just get those things, grind them up into dust, mix them together, and you're all set with some homemade blackpowder. Things that sound simple are never really simple.

Our first ingredient is charcoal. That's easy to get, it can be collected from the ashes of a fire rather quickly. I requisitioned a company of infantry, men who were sitting on their arses all day ever since they entered barracks, and gave them the title of Powder Supply Requisitioners. Fancy title, eh? They liked it, and it made them bitch less about having to do extra work. Now, every morning before the cooks start making breakfast, they go around and gather all the charcoal made from cooking fires the previous day. It's piled into barrels and sent to be ground up into dust by another company of infantry who have the title Powder Supply Manufacturers.

That's charcoal then, the easiest of the three ingredients. Next is sulfur.

Sulfur, also known in the Bible as brimstone, is a very foul smelling thing. It also happens to be one of the most common naturally occurring elements in the world. Our world, at least; I suspect the same is true for this one.

To find sulfur, all I had to do was hop on over to Italica's very own library. It's a nice place, filled with plenty of books and the collective learning of several dozen generations. It's not accessible by the common people, of course. The nobility, Supreme Being curse them all, were the only ones permitted. I'm not nobility, obviously, but I had a company of grenadiers as my bodyguard and that was better than any noble lineage when it came to this sort of thing.

I got a map from the library. It marked and listed the locations of all major mining operations within the general vicinity of Italica. You'll note that, according to our treaty, these operations are under our jurisdiction. The map was dated two centuries ago, at least according to the girl with blue hair, but the information was still good because these things rarely change.

Wonderful, I thought. Now all I have to do is go ahead and tell the miners who's in charge and where to send all their sulfur.

So I rode over to the largest sulfur mine marked on the map with the blue haired girl and my company of grenadiers. Just one problem. The map, being two centuries old, neglected to mention that sulfur doesn't really have much of a use in modern Saderan society. We arrived at the sulfur mine and found everything abandoned because why would you mine sulfur when no one has a use for it. Well, not completely abandoned. We found five men with pickaxes taking large chunks of sulfur and putting them in jars. "Who are you?" they asked.

"Chaucer, in charge of Italica's supply requisition," I replied through the blue haired girl. "What are you doing?"

"I'm Jacek," the man who appeared to be a leader offered. "We're collecting sulfur for Rondel."

"Rondel?" I asked. "What's that?"

He gave me a filthy look, befitting of such a stupid and utterly basic question. "Rondel, the city of mages. They want this stuff for their experiments."

I nodded. "I want this stuff too. Would you mind working for me?"

"How much do you want?" he asked.

I told him.

"That much?" he laughed. "You see how many men I have with me? It can't be done."

"I have money," I informed him.

"How much money?"

I told him.

Jacek is a fairly straight forward person, and I like that about him. He saw the problem I presented and came up with a means of dealing with it instantly. No whining, no bargaining, nothing unnecessary. People like him are what empires are built on. They're the grease that keeps the great bloated apparatus of the state running. They often don't get enough credit.

"I can get extra men from the mines over in the Romalia mountains. Double pay should entice them over. I'll get the equipment from Italica and the transports from Sadera. I'll need a good deal of money for this whole operation."

"You have it. I want the first shipments to come in soon."

"How much time do I have exactly?" he asked.

"Three days," I said quite unreasonably.

"Can't be done," he said. "It'll take at least two days to gather the men I need for this. The equipment will take another day. Then the whole mining operation will take at least a week."

"I'll triple your payment if you get it done in three days."

He heard the offer, reconsidered his estimate, and nodded. "Three days it is. I'll have to hire far more men than I'd usually take on and pay some outrageous prices for the…"

I walked away and left him to his musings. Sure enough, three days later I got the first shipments of sulfur from Jacek. I gather that more than a few people died to get this to me, mining accidents as a result of them abandoning safety precautions, but it was done. I sent Jacek his triple payment, courtesy of the Italican Galanti bank, and gave him instructions to continue operations. Then I sent the sulfur to the Powder Supply Manufacturers to be ground up and mixed with the charcoal.

So that's the sulfur done. Now just the saltpeter. That's the hardest ingredient to get.

Saltpeter, or potassium nitrate as chemists call it, only forms in nature from certain very specific conditions. First, the presence of decaying organic matter, preferably animal matter. Second, the presence of an earthy base such as lime or potash. Third, consistent moisture. Fourth, free exposure to the air. Fifth, shelter from the sun and rain.

This obviously creates certain problems. Saltpeter needs animal matter to form, but it also has to be with an earthy base like lime which few animals enjoy staying on. It needs consistent moisture but also can't be in the rain. It needs free exposure to the air but it also can't be in sunlight. The result of this is that saltpeter is only found in very specific areas.

The typical source of saltpeter is caves, typically those which house bats. Bat shit, also known as guano, is collected and then filtered through water which frees the saltpeter crystals and provides a healthy amount of the stuff for manufacturing gunpowder. Alternatively, certain soils are naturally inclined toward the production of saltpeter. India, for example, is supposed to be excellent grounds for its extraction.

That's how the British get their saltpeter. Their colonial empire all but ensures a consistent plentiful supply of saltpeter. They gather it from the soil in India and scrape bat guano off caves in the Caribbean. By extent, all of Britain's allies such as the Russians and Spanish are also allowed a plentiful supply of saltpeter.

But what about France? What of France, who is cut off from any colonial holdings by the Royal Navy and must rely on Europe's resources alone? We are fortunate then that saltpeter does not only form in nature.

You see, the conditions for saltpeter to form can also be found in man-made structures. Most notably, stables, sheep and cattle pens, cellars, and manure heaps. We are then even more fortunate that this saltpeter is collected from agricultural areas and that the countryside surrounding Italica is primarily agricultural in nature.

Now, in France we do not solely derive our saltpeter production from agricultural byproducts. Special nitre beds have been constructed with the sole purpose of producing saltpeter on an industrial scale to keep up with the needs of an ever growing army. I could order the same to be done here, but then I must ask why? It takes roughly a year for a nitre bed to begin producing saltpeter. Things take time to get up and running. So I ask again, why? Are we not hoping to be free of this world soon? To return to France when we are able?

I have my doubts that we will be here for a full year, so I have decided against the construction of nitre beds. Should I be proven wrong, I accept responsibility.

Instead, I assembled a whole battalion for a task they would not like. Go into the countryside, I ordered them, go and test every farm you find for saltpeter. Of course, they immediately asked how does one test a farm for saltpeter? Well this is the part they wouldn't like.

You test it by taste. You test manure piles, decades old stables, shit filled animals pens, and damp cellars all by tasting them.

It's disgusting work. I would know, I did it for a while. After Valmy, I became a quartermaster in General Kellermann's army; I liked that. All the numbers, keeping track of records, sending reports. It was what I was meant to do in life. My superior was a man named Remi. He was a fine quartermaster, a good man with a head for numbers like myself. I would have liked him if not for one thing; he was a royalist. Ah the old days. I'm sure you remember it, but back during the Revolution not everyone was a republican like myself. There were the royalists, those who wanted to retain the monarchy albeit with a constitution limiting its power. Traitors all of them, I say. They attempted to betray us to the Austrians, the scum. When Robespierre came to power, he saw the infected limb that were the royalists and did his best at amputating them. Shame he was killed for it, saving France.

I digress. Where was I? Ah yes, Remi. We hated each other. Constant debates and conflict that made every day a battle. Him being the superior officer to myself, I was at a disadvantage. Eventually he figured out a way to get rid of me. He claimed I was stealing regimental funds (an absurd claim) and then tried to have me court-martialed. I obviously saw the way the winds were blowing and fled. It's not desertion, I assure you, because I had no choice. Merely a strategic withdrawal until I could return later. I went to Paris where the National Convention was realizing that they were essentially at war with the whole of Europe and desperately needed to do something. So, being the good revolutionary I am, I joined the requisition office in their search for gunpowder. That's how I learned how to do all of this, by the way. I was one of the unlucky souls who had to go farmhouse to farmhouse tasting manure piles to see if they had saltpeter in them. That was terrible. And now, even knowing just how terrible it is, I've subjected an entire battalion of men to doing the same. Poor fellows. I gave them a good name to make up for it. They're officially Chief Army Requisition Officers. I don't think they appreciated it very much.

There's saltpeter finished. I sent it to the Power Supply Manufacturers to be mixed in with the charcoal and sulfur. And there we have it. Gunpowder. Just like that eh?

Not really.

See, just mixing charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter may have been how the Chinese created gunpowder, but it's not how we do it. The problem with just mixing them is that, yes the powder will work and burn, but it tends not to last long. Sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter all have different masses. What that means is when they move around, like say when a soldier is marching, the power gets separated into its base components. This means the powder stops working and you've got to mix it all together again before you can actually use it. So obviously that's a problem.

Now, smarter people than I have thought over this problem relentlessly. They've had centuries to figure out a solution, and I'm just here to implement it.

The solution is that when manufacturing the powder, you wet the saltpeter crystals before mixing it with the sulfur and charcoal. This causes it to become less of a powder and more of a moist paste. The paste is then pressed together and cut into tiny kernels which are then cut again until the kernels are finally small enough to look like powder. This means you have a powder which doesn't separate into its base ingredients every time you move.

Then comes the fourth ingredient. Did I say there were only three ingredients? I lied. The fourth ingredient is graphite. You mix it powdered with the kernels so that they don't stick to each other and cause problems when igniting. If you don't use graphite you get a lot of issues with reliability, never a good thing when in the heat of battle. It can be done, of course, but it's not ideal.

I sent a note to Jacek asking for graphite. He sent back a dozen barrels and a note asking for more money. I sent him more Galanti money and asked for regular shipments. He agreed.

I had the graphite sent to the Powder Supply Manufacturers, they mixed it in the manner I described, and within twelve days of starting we had our first barrel of gunpowder ready for use. There. Gunpowder. Just like that.

But what's the point of gunpowder without something to propel with it? That's where we come to bullets.

A modern musket ball, the kind fired from a standard issue Charleville Model 1777 Musket, is a .69 caliber sphere made of solid lead. It's an easy thing to make. You can forge musket balls over campfires like the Americans did during their war of independence. I aimed to be a bit more refined than that, but the same basic concept applies.

To make a musket ball, all you need is an iron mold which splits open. You melt down lead over a forge (or a campfire if you're in the field), pour that lead into the mold, close the gate (the part that lets you pour stuff into the mold), knock off any excess lead from your mold, open the mold so that you see a partially solid burning-hot ball of lead, drop the ball into a bucket of water, and there you have it, a musket ball. Then you repeat that process over and over again until you're ready to drop dead.

However, if you want to mass produce musket balls, you instead build something called a shot tower. As the name implies, it's essentially just a big tower which is used to produce balls en masse. Molten lead is poured into a sieve at the top, the long drop causes the lead to cool and form into roughly equal sized balls (something to do with physics that smarter people than me have figured out), and they fall into a basin of water at the bottom. Now instead of producing one ball per minute you're producing thousands.

I chose to forgo building a shot tower. They're hard to build, and I had plenty of manpower to work with instead. So, being the mean and evil requisitions officer who loves to force people to work, I commissioned five hundred bullet molds from the blacksmiths of Italica. "What's that for?" they all inevitably asked when I explained what I wanted.

"Marbles," I lied. "It's a game we like to play back in France."

Laugh all you want, I wasn't going to explain to Saderans, i.e. potential spies, how our 'magical staves' are actually just glorified tubes that shoot out metal balls really fast. Call me paranoid, but I think we should keep our cards close to our chest.

The smiths got me my molds relatively fast, mostly because I was paying them silly amounts of Galanti money to have it done quickly.

Poor Fertus. I should mention that at this point Fertus was begging me not to spend so much money. In two weeks I'd blown through a quarter of his vault. I was spending his money like a prince in a whorehouse. My poor bank, he said, I'll never financially recover from this if you keep spending. Shut up, I told him, you'll be compensated when our money from Sadera arrives. Eventually he couldn't bear it anymore; he locked himself in his house with his wife and kids and refused to even glance at the detailed ledgers I left which showed exactly where all his money was being spent. I sent a grenadier to keep watch on him because men in that state of mind are prone to do stupid things to themselves. I would know.

So anyway I had my molds. I assigned a battalion of men to use them, and then I sent another message to my good pal Jacek.

Fuck you, was the opening to his letter back, you know how much lead weighs? We're barely able to keep up transporting the sulfur and graphite. How do you expect us to transport barrels of fucking lead?

You'll manage, was my response. Then I had a battalion of men go about Italica requisitioning horses and carts. To our credit, I had them give each owner we requisitioned from an official signed and stamped letter stating that they would be repaid the full value of their requisitioned property as soon as possible. I could have given out more Galanti money, true, but contrary to Fertus's belief, I didn't want to blow all of it at once.

I sent all the carts and horses to Jacek and he sent them back to me loaded with lead. That lead was quickly melted down and cast into musket balls, and suddenly it didn't seem like we were in such a bad situation as when I first started this whole project.

There was just one last thing needed to finish making brand new paper cartridges. The paper. See, when I first started this project, I had my doubts about whether or not the Saderans actually had paper. It may surprise you, but it was only a few centuries ago that us Europeans figured out how to make paper. Before that we used parchment, dried out animal skins which is far more expensive than paper and entirely impractical for musket cartridges. So far I'd only seen parchment used by the Saderans. That map I got from the library? Parchment. The letters Jacek sent to me? Parchment. All the Imperial records we captured? Parchment.

Imagine my surprise then when I discovered that Italica was home to one of the Empire's very first paper mills. It was only just beginning production, and it hadn't been quite popular enough to overtake parchment yet. In fact, they were considering closing down shop due to their perceived failures. I, a very generous soul when using other people's money, decided to put a stop to that. I put in an order for stacks upon stacks of paper, more paper than they had sold in all their months of production so far. "What do you need all this for?" the owner, a nice man named Toldo, asked.

"Paperwork, of course," I lied. Actually, I wasn't completely lying here. A substantial amount of it would indeed be used for paperwork. Armies run off of paperwork, as you no doubt are aware, and we were honestly starting to run out of it. I didn't tell him that the rest of it would be used to manufacture our ammunition.

I got a hold of yet another battalion of men to do the work of cutting, rolling, and packaging the cartridges into something usable by the men. Now we are producing paper cartridges. Hundreds of them each day. We are self sufficient in that regard. Hooray. I suggest you issue orders for the men to begin regular firing drills again. Practice makes perfect.

I had solved three problems by this point. Money, gunpowder, and musket cartridges. Moving down the list, my next problem was cannonballs.

Unlike musket balls, cannonballs are not made of lead. They're made of iron. They used to be made of stone, actually. Back in the olden days, cannonballs were made of stone and would shatter whenever they impacted something. Then, some wise artillerymen figured that if they used iron instead of stone, the balls wouldn't just shatter when they hit the ground, but rather they'd bounce, continuing through an enemy formation, and cause three times the amount of devastation as before.

So iron. I needed someone who could cast solid iron balls. That's harder to do than it actually sounds. You need a forge capable of heating a tremendous amount of iron to a very high temperature. This is why cannonballs used to be made of stone. Most smiths don't ever actually melt iron. It's far more efficient to just heat it up until it's soft enough to be beaten into submission by a hammer. Getting it to the temperature where it melts is just plain ridiculous for a forge not specifically designed to do that. And why would any of Italica's forges be designed for that? Who in their right mind wants a solid iron ball? Fortunately, hard to do does not mean impossible.

I asked around the smiths' street (or rather, I had the blue haired girl ask around while I stood awkwardly behind her pretending to understand what was being said). That led me to Tullia Bato, the only female smith in Italica and possibly the Empire.

What makes her special you ask? Well aside from being the only female smith, she also is the only smith in Italica who has a forge for casting iron. I gather this is the story. Some eight or so years ago, Count Formal who ruled Italica wanted a metal statue of himself. Great, every metal worker in the city offered to do the casting because who wouldn't want that sort of exposure? Then Count Formal announced he wanted the statue made of solid iron; something to do with him being strong as iron or some crap like that. Immediately everyone withdrew their initial offers for the reasons I stated before. Can't be done, every smith said. Or even if it could be done it was too much effort to do. Every smith except one. Tullia Bato. You see, Tullia took over her father's forge at the age of sixteen and as both an inexperienced smith and a woman she'd never really gained any respect or reputation. This statue was the perfect opportunity for her to make a name for herself, and she'd be damned if she let some silly issues like having to melt down iron get in the way. She redesigned her father's whole smithy for the task. Everything had to be rebuilt, remade, rethought all for this one commission. The bellows were made bigger to allow them to pump more air into the forge. The hand pumps replaced by water wheels on a diverted stream to keep them running constantly. The furnace enlarged to allow for an increase in oxygen availability. The whole workshop ripped apart to be able to house a statue mold. By the end, it had zero resemblance to her father's forge, and was able to create cast iron. She used it to cast Count Formal's statue, and she showed that even a woman like herself was capable of producing good work.

That was Tullia. And I needed her forge.

"You want to create iron balls? Using my forge?"

"Yes, of course," I said through the blue haired girl. "Who else?"

She stared at me blankly. "I haven't used it to cast iron in years. What do you even want with iron balls?"

"An art piece," I said, though her face made it clear she didn't believe me.

"Why iron?" she continued. "You could use bronze and it'd be just as good. It wouldn't rust either."

I shrugged. "It needs to be iron. I'll pay you good money if you get to work immediately."

Her eyes lit up. "You'll pay upfront. Got it? No funny business here. No wasting my time."

"Done."

And that's how we've been replenishing Citizen Delon's ammunition stores. Tullia does good work. She produces an iron cannonball exactly to our specification every hour or so. Sometimes even two in an hour.

Now, all this talk of cannons and cannonballs got me thinking. Delon had what? Twelve cannons in total? For the entire corps? That's a pitiful number when you think of it. We needed more.

This problem didn't just suddenly come to me, of course. I'd thought through the problem several times and everytime came to the same conclusion. Can't be done, the Saderans don't have the metallurgy we need to cast iron cannon tubes. Even Tullia's forge, which is doing an admirable job at casting our iron cannonballs, isn't capable enough to make a cannon. The technology just isn't there. They don't have the techniques that centuries of experience give. They don't know how to cast an iron tube that won't explode the second you try and use it as a cannon.

But something Tullia said stuck with me. You could use bronze and it'd be just as good.

She was right, even if she didn't know what she was right about. Bronze cannons work just as well as iron cannons, better in some cases. They don't rust, they don't explode, and they are much easier to cast. I'll try not to bore you more than I already have, but to make things simple, bronze is a much more forgiving metal. You can have more inconsistencies, more alterations, more mistakes when casting with bronze. With iron, you make a mistake and the thing explodes when you try to use it. With bronze, you make a dozen mistakes and it still works fine. Another thing, bronze needs a lower temperature to melt than iron, and as such the fine smiths of Italica already have plenty of experience casting in bronze. Really it's the perfect metal for this sort of thing. The reason why iron cannons are so much more popular in Europe is because bronze is exorbitantly expensive, and iron is not. But I already solved our money problem, remember, and the Galanti vault was still mostly full.

I showed off one of Delon's cannons (a six-pounder because I didn't quite trust the smiths to get a twelve-pounder right) and asked the smiths if they could cast me one that's identical only in bronze. Most said no, but a few were up to the challenge and they were given molds created from Delon's cannon to work with.

But wait, you say. Didn't you want to keep our technology out of Saderan hands? Well yes, and one of the benefits of using local smiths to create cannons rather than say muskets is that they're so simple. See, a musket is more than a tube of metal and some wood; it's a complex piece of machinery mounted onto a tube of metal and some wood. The flintlock mechanism is leagues more advanced than basic matchlock systems. Giving that to a Saderan would be a problem. By contrast, cannons are really just large tubes of metal. There is no complicated system to make them fire, just a simple match on a stick. I told them that the tubes were ways for us to channel our 'magic'; something I'm fairly certain they already presumed. Nothing about gunpowder. Nothing that reveals our secrets.

It was expensive, that's for certain. I had to get Jacek to ship in copper and tin then hire more smiths to create the bronze because there wasn't enough of it in Italica. But by the end of that week I had solved the cannonball shortage, and I had just commissioned twenty-four new six-pounder guns, tripling our artillery capacity. I stopped at twenty-four because by that point I was starting to run low on Galanti money.

Poor poor Fertus. He heard in passing what I'd done: spend three fourths of the Galanti bank's vault, and he couldn't take it anymore. The grenadier I had watching him said he only barely managed to stop Fertus from jumping from a tower. Depressing stuff, but I still needed to spend more of his money.

Do you remember France back in '93? You were already in the army back then; I had gone off and joined the requisition office. Neither of us were eligible when the National Convention decreed for levée en masse. But I remember it very clearly; the day the National Convention conscripted the entirety of France.

I bring up '93 because having finished solving our ammunition and artillery problems, I decided to tackle the final one. Manpower.

It should surprise no one that we, the French, are not popular occupiers. We're different, strange, otherworldly. We bring with us strange customs and terrifying magic. We share very little with the local population. How then should one create an army? You already know my answer because I told it to you the day we met, so I'll just skip to the point.

Back while I was still tackling how to acquire saltpeter, I issued an official decree effective immediately for all citizens of Italica. I don't quite remember the exact wording, but I believe it went something like 'Attention all citizens - as of this day, all men aged eighteen to thirty-five who do not hold current employment are hereby requisitioned to military service in the French Army. Report to the nearest barracks immediately for assignment.'

Wonderful, right? Of course, no one showed up the next day for assignment. Who would after all. What are they going to do if I don't show up, I'm sure they all laughed, hunt me down?

Yes.

I utilized an entire line regiment for this task. All the soldiers were given simple orders to follow and then given Elban translators (who could speak with our German translators) to help with it. Here's how it typically went down.

Some fresh, young, unemployed men with nothing to do are sitting in a tavern burning away their last denari on a refreshing drink. It's midday, and, as all the normal folk have jobs to do, they're the only ones in it. Then they hear three stern knocks on the door. That doesn't sound good. The only people who knock on tavern doors are bailiffs and government men coming to deal with rowdiness. The young men, being naturally very brave, don't open the door and hope whoever's knocking goes away. This does not happen. Instead, they watch the door get kicked down by mean looking soldiers who promptly block all the exits and shove forward an Elban man to do the talking.

One of the soldiers barks something to another soldier who then barks at the Elban.

You are all in violation of your conscription orders, the Elban man translates. Report immediately or be charged with insubordination.

Conscription orders?

More barking.

The Elban man gives an apologetic look. All unemployed males aged eighteen to thirty-five have been conscripted, he explains. Best come with these men or you'll be arrested.

So all the young men go to follow the soldiers until one of them has a bright idea. Wait! I'm not unemployed! I've got a job at the tanner's shop, he tells the soldiers.

Some barking between the soldiers and the Elban.

Oh really, the Elban says. Which tanner's shop? We can head there right now and see. Only, if you're lying, you'll be charged with both insubordination and desertion, and you'll probably be shot.

Nevermind, the young man replies. I never liked being a tanner anyway. I volunteer.

And so the young men get sent to a barracks to be officially drafted into the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, or 4th Auxiliary Regiment as part of the 1st Auxiliary Division. The soldiers then go onto their next destination, drafting any beggars they can find in the streets, and repeat the process. The locals say good riddance, they're finally getting rid of all those good-for-nothings, and we get our men, free of any riots or rebellions.

So that's how I managed to dredge up 3,195 of Italica's 'finest' for our auxiliary division. I'm sure you'll now be saying that 3,195 men is nowhere near enough to fill an entire division. You're right. A division is at minimum supposed to have 8,000 men. I needed more men.

We are lucky then that there is another source of manpower I had not yet touched. Slaves. The Saderan Empire is full of them, and Italica is no exception. You will note that, as slavery is legal in France (the Revolution made it illegal but then Citizen Bonaparte went ahead and reinstated it, curse his name) we had not yet made any changes to the status of slaves during our occupation of Italica. Like so many other things, I intended to change that.

A week after I issued the first decree (at this point I had moved onto cannonball production), I issued a second one. I believe it went 'Attention all enslaved persons - by order of the French Army, all currently enslaved men who agree to serve a period of six years as auxiliary soldiers for France shall be immediately freed upon their enlistment. Furthermore, all women, children, and elderly family members of an auxiliary soldier are to be immediately freed upon said family members' enlistment.'

I had soldiers nail the decree (translated to Saderan, of course) to the front door of every major slave owning family in Italica. Within a day, I had enough volunteers to bring our numbers up to exactly 8,000 (I actually had a bit too many, so I sent the excess to Jacek so they could help mine sulfur). Of course, the slave owners despised me for it, and they were very good at making their hatred known as you'll hear soon.

The 1st Auxiliary Division was assembled outside Italica's walls for its first day of drill the next morning. They had no uniforms, no weapons, and certainly no discipline. They reminded me of our army. The one that fought at Valmy. You were there. You remember.

Regardless, I had the auxiliaries assigned NCOs drawn from our Elban prisoners. You remember them, right? From Duran's army. They're in a tricky spot because they don't love the Saderans but they also don't know what to think of us. We beat them in battle, as you recall, but some of them are quick to forgive. I offered any man capable of speaking both Elban and Saderan a silly amount of money and a promise of freedom following six years of service to enlist. They know military discipline, marching order, and most importantly they can communicate with us. I also got together as many German officers as I could, mostly Wurttembergers (we're going to have to do some more field promotions to make up for this), and assigned them to take charge of the auxiliaries. The idea here is that the Germans will receive orders in French, tell them in German to the Elbans, and the Elbans will relay them in Saderan to the Saderans. Eventually the Elbans and Saderans will learn French commands, and this will all be redundant, but it's the best system we have for the moment. Then the auxiliaries started learning and practicing marching in formation. It was all without weapons, of course. That was something I had to fix.

Let me ask you a question. How do you arm 8,000 men? Muskets? We don't have enough spare muskets for 8,000 men and even if we did I'd be wary about arming Saderans with them. With spears and shields like legionaries? No, then they'd end up being a less experienced, outnumbered, poorer quality version of the Saderan legions.

Pikes. Now there's a real solution.

I commissioned from the smiths of Italica (they're getting very rich off of us) 8,000 pikes. Each pike is twelve feet long with an ashwood shaft and an iron tipped point. They're long, unwieldy, and very hard to march with. They're also the best weapon we could give the auxiliaries.

Why's that? Well consider this. Our auxiliaries will never be on par with Saderan legionaries when it comes to a melee between them. They don't have the years of experience that the legionaries do, and we don't have the years of experience commanding heavy melee infantry that the Saderan generals do. But a wall of pikes is impregnable from the front no matter how experienced the enemy is. When your pike out ranges the enemy's spear by a good six feet what can they hope to do in response? Philip of Macedon realized this, and he turned his fragile army into a deadly machine with it. His son, Alexander, then proceeded to use it to conquer the known world. The Scots defeated superior English armies using the pike. The Flemings used it to defeat our French knights. The Swiss, they mastered the pike and ushered in an era dominated by pike and shot. My point is that the pike is a very fine weapon. Perhaps antiquated by modern standards, I doubt a pike block would stand long against a modern volley of musketry, but still a very admirable tool. It has certain vulnerabilities, true, but I have faith in your ability as a commander to understand and protect against these vulnerabilities.

So we armed the auxiliaries with pikes. It was also around this time that I was made aware that Captain Duclos of the Ninth Company, Third Battalion, 134th Line Regiment discovered a large cache of Saderan equipment. I gather that it involved some very brave and adventurous action from him, and that following this great feat of bravery, all of that equipment had been left sitting for weeks in a warehouse with no good use. So wasteful.

I requisitioned it all for the auxiliaries. Gambesons (a type of armor made from layers of quilted linen) and helmets for each man. Swords to serve as sidearms in case their pike formations broke apart. Crossbows and bows for those who knew how to use them so that the auxiliaries could have an organic skirmisher element to them.

The gambesons and helmets gave them a sense of uniformity, so that they now look like real soldiers instead of a mob of society's vagrants. In fact, they look more uniform than our own straggler regiments with our mismatched kits drawn from a dozen different regiments. That will need some fixing, by the way (I would have solved it myself, but by this point I was out of Galanti money).

Anyway, morale was high after I got them this new kit. By the end of the first week of drilling, they were acceptable at marching and could form pike squares with relatively alright timing. It will take a lot of practice before they're anywhere near good soldiers, but for the time being they're alright considering the circumstances. Discipline is one thing that could do with improvement. I recruited the worst of society, so really the blame falls on me, but the auxiliaries are a rowdy bunch. The Elban sergeants are doing a fine job keeping it at a minimum, but I've been assured it will take time to stamp it out completely.

I should mention that while I was doing all this, there was a gang war being raged in the streets of Italica. Something Captain Duclos did caused a whole shakeup amongst Italica's underworld, and there was a big power struggle between six different gangs. A lot of people died, but it wasn't much concern to myself so I ignored it. That is, I ignored it until an entire company of our auxiliaries decided to desert and join in on all the chaos.

Now that was a problem. The company was mostly our less than motivated conscripts, many with prior criminal affiliations, and they decided that they'd had enough of being soldiers and wanted to go back to being gang members. Very bad indeed.

I needed to set an example, so I had a battalion of regulars march down to Italica's southside, round up all the auxiliaries, and march them back to barracks where they would all await summary judgement.

Bad idea, as it turns out. Immediately their gang was up in arms demanding that their brothers be released. This wouldn't have been a problem under normal circumstances; what's a gang going to do against a battalion of soldiers? Nothing, that's what. But as it turns out, these were not normal circumstances.

Remember the slave owners? They're very wealthy, mostly as a result of their slaves, and they hated my guts. They wanted a way to get back at me for liberating a whole bunch of their slaves, so they began to use that wealth to unite the gangs. It probably took a lot of money, more money than they were losing from my emancipations, but what started as one gang's problem quickly became every gang's problem. I had the entire criminal underworld of Italica united against me in the span of a single day. What was their chosen method of attack? A riot. A fucking massive one.

The whole southside erupted into chaos. Hundreds of gang members up in arms which then proceeded to attract thousands of regular people because there's nothing like a riot to get the blood going. It started as a movement to free some gang members. It turned into a general uprising against French rule. Oh boy had I fucked up.

Now, you'll remember this part because you obviously were there. I went to your office and explained the situation. You were furious, rightfully so, because I was essentially the root cause of it all. You wanted to put down the riot. In fact, I remember your orders almost exactly.

"Courbet! Get me Captain Delon! Tell him to bring me cannons!" you ordered. "We'll give them a whiff of grapeshot!" Or something like that.

"But, sir," I said very respectfully because I was completely aware of my fault and very humble and you were very angry at the time. "I have an idea."

You said something along the lines of, "Damn you and all your ideas!"

"We can use the auxiliaries to put them down," I suggested very calmly because you were not calm.

You were all red in the face at this point. I suppose that's how you got your nickname; Le Rougeaud. "Are you insane?!" you screamed. "They'll all join the Saderans!"

Maybe I was insane, and you were right there was a not insignificant chance the auxiliaries would all switch over to become rioters. But I had a hunch. I didn't think the scum of society we recruited really had all that much loyalty to their countrymen. The slaves most certainly not, but the vagrants as well. Sure, some were gang members, but this had gone far beyond a simple gang matter. This was a rebellion to drive France out of Italica, and I didn't think our auxiliaries would really support that movement. The auxiliaries just needed a chance to prove themselves.

What I really wanted was a trial by fire, and this moment was perfect.

I'm sure you remember how I used my amazing wit and charm to sway you to my point of view. No? You remember me begging on my knees for this chance to avoid court martial? I guess we just have different recollections of the event.

Whatever the case, you gave me permission to send the auxiliaries out (albeit with Delon's cannons loaded with grapeshot behind them just in case).

They marched out of barracks in an acceptable manner. It wasn't pretty, but at least they were together. The streets of Italica are fairly narrow, so each of the battalions went along separate paths. You and I planned it out, naturally. I don't know much about tactics, so you did the heavy lifting, having them all converge on the mob from different angles that would cut off their avenue of retreat and- Ah… why am I explaining this? You were there of course. You already know all this.

The mob was penned into a city square and had no way to run. We demanded they lay down their arms and surrender. They, being sensible humans as individuals but excitable monkeys as a crowd, refused. If I had worries about the auxiliaries deserting, all of that flew away when they started throwing rocks at us. An auxiliary went down, and the crowd stopped being their countrymen and became their enemy.

We hardly had to give the order. A simple nod from you, and the Elbans ordered them forward. Pikes were leveled, the men advanced, and the crowd was massacred. Actually it wasn't a massacre, or rather it shouldn't have been one. The pikes barely killed a few dozen before the crowd was surrendering en masse, and the riot was broken. But our auxiliaries are an unruly bunch and wanted blood. They kept advancing, pressing the pikes into a helpless crowd that had nowhere to run. Our Germans and Elbans only managed to get them to stop after a lot of blood had already been spilled.

The final body count was 3,852. It could have been sixty. Oh well, the riot was dispersed, and the auxiliaries proved their loyalty. I was finished with the final problem I set out to solve.

After the massacre, we sorted through the ones who managed to surrender and picked out the gang leaders. They denied any responsibility, of course, but at this point the city was under martial law and we didn't need a trial to convict them. I ordered a guillotine to be constructed.

Ah, the guillotine. A symbol of equality. You know before the Revolution execution was segregated by class. The common people would be hanged in the gallows or tortured to death on a breaking wheel; terrible deaths that took a long time. The nobility, being the favored class, would get to pay an executioner to cut their head off. Being an executioner was a skilled profession. If you had a bad executioner, they might require multiple swings to take off your head; also a terrible death. Nobles, being very wealthy, would often pay their executioners to ensure their blades were sharp so the deed would be done in a single blow; quick and clean deaths. The guillotine made it all equal. No longer was execution segregated; everyone met their end by the guillotine and the guillotine only. A quick, clean death for everyone regardless of class. Really the guillotine represents the Revolution; liberty, equality, fraternity. Long live the Revolution. Long live the guillotine.

I wanted to make an example of the gang leaders. The guillotine was constructed in front of Italica's palace. If I was a poet I'd probably say it symbolized French rule of law replacing the old Saderan system, but I'm not. Really, it's because the palace is located in the center of the city with a big courtyard out front where everyone can see. We had the condemned brought out the next morning. There was a large crowd waiting.

Their charges were read out in Saderan and French. They were proclaimed guilty and sentenced to death by guillotine. No one stopped us when the blade dropped. No one stopped us when it dropped five times more.

Have you ever been up close when a guillotine drops? Probably not, you spent most of your time in the army, and the army prefers firing squads. It's a wonderfully sickening sound. The sliding of metal on wood then a sudden thok as the blade stops. No scream. No suffering. The sound of justice done. Beauty in its purest form. Then there's the cheering; there's always cheering. It doesn't matter who died or what for; the crowd adores to see justice done. A thousand voices crying out in ecstasy and jubilation.

I was in Paris when Louis Capet was executed. The traitorous so-called King of France whose negligence and pride cost France dearly. Slide, thok, cheer. His head was shown to the crowd, and France was free.

We showed the heads of the gang leaders to the crowd, and Italica was free. They cheered like any other crowd. There's perhaps another reason why I chose the guillotine to be in front of the palace. When we held the executions, I saw the red haired princess and her blonde brother staring through a window. I looked her in the eye and smiled. Sadera will be free.

Vive la révolution.

END OF REPORT

Signed,

Jean-Pierre Chaucer, Head of Requisitions

I wanted to experiment with a new style of writing, and this seemed like a fine place to do it. I don't really consider this to be Chapter 11 since it drastically breaks from the established format, but I also wanted to add something that delved into the logistical challenges faced by Ney's corps and the solutions to those challenges. Chaucer's report here is designed to summarize all that.

I had to do some research for parts of this chapter. The section on manufacturing gunpowder was partly derived from a paper by Robert P. Multhauf titled "The French Crash Program for Saltpeter Production, 1776-94" discussing French methods for saltpeter collection. I also based part of it off of manuals written by Joseph LeConte who worked with the Confederate Nitre and Mining Bureau during the American Civil War to manufacture gunpowder.

Ultimately I'm sure this was a very boring chapter for many readers. It's almost all logistics which I know can be dreadfully slow. I've tried my best to make it interesting, but who knows if I've succeeded. I don't know if I'll do future chapters like this one. It all depends on the necessity of describing the logistical situation which neither Jacques nor Ney spend much time delving into. Ah oh well. I hope you enjoyed regardless.