[X]Forlorn Hope: When the walls are breached, a storming party is usually assembled taking volunteers. The priests will bless them with great pageantry, they will go out with solemnity and nervous anticipation, and few will return – those few are usually promoted or awarded in some manner. You can petition for a spot on the forlorn hope, if your regiment is tasked with siege duties. But be warned – it has risks. Yes, you may die. A new chargen will follow, for another character in the war. Your Cavalry Command stat will work here, as you are commanding dragoons.
[X]The Priest: The company chaplain has been peddling tales you of being more in favour of the western heresies than orthodoxy and associating with a Scotsman who is himself a Protestant. While normally this would be laughed off by any sane officer, your unit is too new to take the officers' words over the priest's. With that in mind, you dealt with the priest in the best manner you could while restoring discipline in the ranks.
[X]Vanguard: You and your regiment – along with a number of others – are to act as a screen to the south while the army besieges the fortress of Memel. This means that you'll be the first to encounter the Prussian relief if there is one. Or you'll be vainly slogging through mud while others have the glory.
[X]The Hunger: Due to the endless mud and the endless rain, the army has marched on a half-full stomach. Much of your time has gone into addressing this basic need, with every other officer in the army attempting to do the same for their soldiers.
[X]Vanguard: You and your regiment – along with a number of others – are to act as a screen to the south while the army besieges the fortress of Memel. This means that you'll be the first to encounter the Prussian relief if there is one. Or you'll be vainly slogging through mud while others have the glory.
[X]The Hunger: Due to the endless mud and the endless rain, the army has marched on a half-full stomach. Much of your time has gone into addressing this basic need, with every other officer in the army attempting to do the same for their soldiers.
[X]Vanguard: You and your regiment – along with a number of others – are to act as a screen to the south while the army besieges the fortress of Memel. This means that you'll be the first to encounter the Prussian relief if there is one. Or you'll be vainly slogging through mud while others have the glory.
[X]The Hunger: Due to the endless mud and the endless rain, the army has marched on a half-full stomach. Much of your time has gone into addressing this basic need, with every other officer in the army attempting to do the same for their soldiers.
[x]Forlorn Hope: When the walls are breached, a storming party is usually assembled taking volunteers. The priests will bless them with great pageantry, they will go out with solemnity and nervous anticipation, and few will return – those few are usually promoted or awarded in some manner. You can petition for a spot on the forlorn hope, if your regiment is tasked with siege duties. But be warned – it has risks. Yes, you may die. A new chargen will follow, for another character in the war. Your Cavalry Command stat will work here, as you are commanding dragoons. [x]The Priest: The company chaplain has been peddling tales you of being more in favour of the western heresies than orthodoxy and associating with a Scotsman who is himself a Protestant. While normally this would be laughed off by any sane officer, your unit is too new to take the officers' words over the priest's. With that in mind, you dealt with the priest in the best manner you could while restoring discipline in the ranks.
You know what they say about pain and gain. I honestly want to see how it'll turn out.
[X]Forlorn Hope: When the walls are breached, a storming party is usually assembled taking volunteers. The priests will bless them with great pageantry, they will go out with solemnity and nervous anticipation, and few will return – those few are usually promoted or awarded in some manner. You can petition for a spot on the forlorn hope, if your regiment is tasked with siege duties. But be warned – it has risks. Yes, you may die. A new chargen will follow, for another character in the war. Your Cavalry Command stat will work here, as you are commanding dragoons. [X]The Priest: The company chaplain has been peddling tales you of being more in favour of the western heresies than orthodoxy and associating with a Scotsman who is himself a Protestant. While normally this would be laughed off by any sane officer, your unit is too new to take the officers' words over the priest's. With that in mind, you dealt with the priest in the best manner you could while restoring discipline in the ranks.
Theory In Practice В исследовании нельзя выиграть битву, а теория без практики мертва.
No battle can be won in the study, and theory without practice is dead.
-Suvorov
Talking with the Quartermasters: d20-4(Abysmal Admin)+1(Charisma Bonus)+1(Subterfuge Bonus)→ 11-2=9
Required: 10+, failed
Scrounging Up Supplies: d20-4(Abysmal Logistics)+1(Intellect Bonus)+1(Charisma Bonus)→ 18-2=16. Passed.
1757
The Baltic Campaign
The Imperial Russian Army's commissariat is a place of broken dreams, a place where the corrupt tend to flourish like toadstools in the Pripyat Marshes while the competent tend to die off about as fast as a peasant in that same salubrious part of Ukraine. The tents of the supply quartermasters are better-appointed than yours, than Major Vorontsov's, better even you suspect than the colonel's. There's less in the way of morals here than the Odessa Moldavanka, and probably more vor v zakone in the commissariat than in the most crooked neighborhood of Moscow.
You're rather careful to keep those opinions to yourself when you heartily greet one Lieutenant Vyshinsky at the entrance flap of his tent with a bottle of wine that one of your troopers 'rescued' from a manor house that the company swept through last week.
Vyshinsky, however, takes your wine before apologizing for the fact that he can't quite do anything without the captain of the commissariat's approval. That worthy apparently has grafted himself like an unwanted boil to the general's retinue, and you're not getting close to that. Or at least, you don't think you are. Which means that in order to avoid having more turnips and thin stew for tomorrow's meals, you need to think of something else.
There's a shouting in the distance as your boots squelch through mud and trampled grass, and almost on a whim you head for the source. The tents in this section of the camp are far more patched and worn when they're even present, some of the cavalrymen – and cavalrymen they most certainly are – pitching makeshift bedrolls in the mud. The shouting turns out to be a collection of wrestling Cossacks, and and the officer nearby is munching on an apple rather than separating the fighters.
Naturally, you go over there and ask him whyever not. He looks at you quizzically for a moment, before his eyes settle on the dragoon uniform and your worn sword-scabbard. The young man's scarred face and cold black eyes seem to gleam in amusement, "Why, lieutenant, to separate Cossacks in an honor duel is something that one doesn't do. The men have a code, you know."
"I see." You carefully avoid calling him out on the bullshit and the fact that there's clearly betting going on, instead focusing on the important things. Your stomach is growling quietly, and you can smell meat nearby. A bit of drool collects on your moustache. "And those rations are come by out of honor and the code of the Cossack, I take it?"
"Indeed." The lieutenant – at least by his epaulettes he's a lieutenant – offers you a half of another apple as his knife slices his half into smaller parts, "Apple? Yes? Good. Well, if you like I can show you how the code of the Cossacks gets food. Almost given to you, in fact."
There's a sniggering from nearby as one of the Cossacks passes the two of you by, and he shuts up the moment he sees your hand drifting near your belt. You glare him into silence and turn back to the lieutenant, "And what do the Cossacks gain, then?"
"We get some help in negotiations. There are some people who are a bit harder to talk to, you see. Sometimes one needs horse artillery." He grins, mischievous and cunning like the tales your grandfather told of cunning Ukrainian Cossack raiders all those years ago, yet the smile never once reaches his eyes. "Lieutenant Romanyshyn is my name. Pleased to meet you, lieutenant."
You have scrounged up supplies by reaving farms on the marching route with the Cossack companies that the regiment is working with to screen the flanks.
Siege: Roll 1: d20+5(Siege Train, Numbers)+5(Command, Martial) v. d20+12(Command, Martial, Fortification)→ 26 v. 15. Breach
Siege: Roll 2: Reducing the Breach: 24 v. 19. Breach expanded, no man's land sapped
Volunteers: d20+2(Charisma)+2(Oratory), need 12+: 18+4=22, Epic Success
Sneaking to the Lines: d20+1(Subterfuge)+2(Cavalry Command) v. d20+4(Alert and Ready) → 6 v. 6. Detected.
Assault: d20+2(Martial)+2(Cav Command) v. d20+4(Alerted and Ready)+2(Command)→ 20 v. 12
Breach taken.
Holding the Line: d20+4 v. d20+2+2(Reinforcements)+4(Raking Fire) → 11 v. 27. Epic Failure
Pushed back with heavy casualties, reinforcements already committed.
Retaking? D20+4 v. d20+8 → 20+4 v. 10+8, retaken.
Survival? D20-3(Under Heavy Fire), need 8+: 9
Memel
August, 1757
The fortress is a squat, compact, and formidable one. High ramparts with earthen banks seem to leer at the Russian army as it makes camp surrrounding the city, a black-on-white eagle fluttering from the fortress' towers while Prussians pace like clockwork marionettes on the walls. You can taste the salt tang in the air of the Baltic in summer as you eye the fort through a glass from a safe distance, the fortress-city looming over a broad, deep moat and with the sea to feed it for now.
In your eyes, or at least through the glass' magnification, you can see a lancer on horseback with a fluttering white pennant carry General Apraksin's offer of terms to the garrison. A man atop the gates gestures and talks at the lancer for a time, and then the horseman rides back to the lines far more slowly. The white pennant is dipped to the ground, the lance held low. You lower the eyeglass and fold it with short, sharp motions even as the troops begin to whisper.
There is a long, low susurrus before the officers calm things down. A murmur born of fifty thousand soldiers, a grim acknowledgement that more than a few people are going to die.
Memel has yet to surrender.
For three days after that, artillery pounds the fortress. The dull roar of cannon fire from the army's siege train becomes a familiar thing, the dragoons under your command collecting the same rations in the same camp for three days while the guns sound. You chafe a little at being this stationary, at drawing pay while manning static pickets with your horses tied in place. The men trade nervous jokes about the gunfire and the storming of the breach that will come, and when a breach is made the humor turns more nervous still. A lancer goes out again with a white pennant on his spear, and rides back again – this time with a warning shot to speed him on his way.
There's an ugly undercurrent to the conversation after that, an anticipation of the storming to come mixed with imaginings of loot and wealth. The rain slackens, and the weather turns fairer as if God himself is watching the armies die.
You catch yourself fiddling with your scabbard numerous times, a nervous habit that you're forced to stop yourself from indulging in.
A day later, the general calls for a force to be made ready from the cavalry and the grenadiers for a forlorn hope. He says in what seems to be a sad or solemn tone, in private as you meet him on request, that this wasn't what he had planned for. But your regiment is a good choice, its men used to close combat and armored besides. Your men having more firearms and crack shots than the Cuirassiers. Besides, says old man Apraksin with a weary snort, one cannot trivially send the Guards heavy horse to die.
You nod slowly. You don't tell him of the nervous anticipation. That the men – some of the men – want to be in the forlorn hope. Money, promotion, and glory.
All that and more, at the cost of blood and terror. Why not?
You make that argument at the campfire that night, to the assembled officers and men. You tell them of the same wild reckless dreams of wealth and glory that are whispered like furtive dreams in the night, you tell the officers of promotion and decorations and ennoblement. You argue with Major Vorontsov before the throws up his hands and bids you go volunteer, and the other lieutenants come with you.
Ensign Obolensky comes nervously, the thin young officer's nervousness palpable as it wars with visions of what might be. He asks you about the odds, about the rewards, about whether you will lead the hundred men to go from the regiment.
You tell him that you will, and you'll do your best to bring them back.
Semyon Vasiliev is bold and brash, demanding that you don't leave him behind even as you can see the fear in his eyes. You tell him that you wouldn't dream of it, that the regiment wouldn't be able to fight without him, and nods jerkily before bellowing something about being there to make sure the unit isn't cheated out of loot. You just nod.
You don't talk about the toll in blood to be paid, and he seems almost thankful for it.
The others come afterwards, from Mogamedov with his odd almost-Mussulman and quiet dignified demeanor to Captain von Weide coming forward to wish you luck in a broad Baltic German accent. Von Weide tells you quietly that he'll lead the followup company, and tells you that he'll make sure you make it home. One way or another.
You thank him for the courtesy.
The predawn gloom is thick and cold, with mud oozing beneath your boots as the Baltic breeze greets your little forlorn hope. Your regiment's contribution forms up at the side of an infantry company, their accents marking them as coming from near Moscow. They say they're the Suzdal Regiment, and your men make quiet conversation about home as the priest comes forward with a censer and blessed canteen.
The prayer is one about victory and homecoming, archaic catechism and holy water seeming to steady the men as you impatiently count off the time left to move. General Stepan Apraksin himself comes out and seems about to say something, nodding at the officers before saying "I have faith in you men. You will return with victory, and you will be remembered."
There's almost no conversation as you lead the men through the muddy cratered land where shells burst prematurely and roundshot falling short has carved trenches in the earth. The breach looms ahead with the moonlight filtering through it, and the dry moat is full of gravel.
The men are quiet, following behind you with the Suzdal Regiment's company at your side. The mud oozes past your breastplate as you clamber into the moat, the mud sticking to your tunic all cold and gritty. You shiver a little, and the quiet clink of the men's swords, armor and weapons is almost a metronome. The shadows of sentries on the ramparts are moving and stretching in the moonlight, horrors that cannot see you for now. That should not see you, lest you die.
The breach comes forth to you, crumbled masonry and earth forming a rough ramp more than twenty paces long before it even reaches the walls. You reach ahead to grasp a stone, and suddenly there is shouting.
A rapid crack of gunshots sounds out, shouting in unintelligible German. You throw caution to the winds, shouting at the men to get moving. "Go! Forward or dead, boys. Go!"
You're shouting, raising your sword to rally the men behind you. Green-coated infantry that you almost attack swarm past you, the Suzdal Regiment interspersed with your men. Vasiliev nods grimly at you with powder stains on his face, raising a trumpet to his lips. You didn't think he had a trumpet. Obolensky's ahead of you, thin form raising pistols and firing desperately with the reckless courage that keeps the men in line. A German appears before you. You cut. He falls.
Suddenly, the breach is clear. A man slumps next to you – dead – and bullets whizz past you to carom off the walls and breach's ruins. Vasiliev's trumpet calls a wild carillon, the order to charge.
There are voices to the rear. Von Weide, perhaps.
The Prussians come again first, tall caps and bearskins splendid on white uniforms. They come in a line, proud and unwavering as your men find cover in the breach and fire at them. The Suzdal Regiment stands with the same desperate courage, knowing that to run is to die.
You tell them that, hoarsely. "Run and die. They have the guns. Stand and live."
Stand and live.
Vasiliev's trumpet still calls out, and there are answers from the Russian lines. Aid is coming.
Stand and live.
The Prussians fire in a great rippling thunder, and you feel something tug at your sleeve before you realize that it's a bullet. The man behind you is dead, slumping forward with his carbine clattering to the ground. You fire anyways, your kneeling rank firing as one with the infantry. The volleys cloud the breach with smoke, and there is a great cheer in German.
The Prussians then come through the smoke with gleaming bayonet and powder-burns on their uniforms, their officers leading them into the breach. A drummer - you're unsure whose - is beating a steady tattoo even as the Russian dragoons raise a wild call to arms, and your sword arm aches as it cuts deep into a Prussian infantryman's neck. He falls heavily, and the man behind him lets off a shot that goes wild before your left-hand pistol finishes him.
There is a shout from the dragoons, and you can see the banner fall on your right. Obolensky's thin form is cutting wildly at the Prussians as if to save it, before he falls with more than a dozen bleeding wounds. The Prussians cheer. Your flag is taken.
You roar out an order to stand even as the Suzdal officers echo it, but for all the desperate courage of the forlorn hope your men are pushed back.
Your pistol is dry. Your powder is empty. You throw it aside as you sidestep a bayonet thrust before skewering the infantryman. The lines close again, and you fall behind them to survey the damage.
Your banner is carried off, and the right flank is broken. There is the distant noise of gunfire, rippling cracks of volley fire bringing home the fact of reinforcements coming to your aid.
Yet still you are pushed back. Another Prussian volley, faintly echoed by the few men on your side. Another charge, and this time you are pushed near out of the breach.
A trumpet sings, and this time there is a reply.
Green-uniformed infantry suddenly swarm into the breach from behind you to force the Prussians back, and you lean against the wall in exhaustion as Captain von Weide follows them in with a dragoon company on foot. Your banner might have fallen, but the regimental flag has come to the ramparts.
You look blearily at von Weide, and attempt to salute with an aching arm. You look down and see something damp, and recognize it as blood.
Von Weide salutes back solemnly, "Lieutenant, you are relieved."
"Sir." And with that terse formality, you sit on a piece of debris and take a sip of water. Vasiliev sits down heavily next to you, his arm wrapped in a sling. There's a trumpet on his back.
"We won, sir?" Vasiliev's voice is scratchy and barely intelligible, exhausted from the trumpet-calls of before.
You look at the carnage, the breach near carpeted with Russian or Prussian dead. The banner waving from the ramparts. The shouting and gunfire in the distance. You sigh and pass him your canteen before he can ask for it. "Yes, lieutenant. We won." You have led the forlorn hope that stormed Memel. You will have a reward in the following update. This quest is not dead.
That's about as good as most forlorn hopes get. It's always a tossup, storming a breach. Especially before the Napoleonic Wars. You lost your company colours but held the breach for reinforcements, against superior odds. You took heavy losses, but that is part and parcel of what the high command expected. You might be seen as a glory hound, but you have in this case been an effective one.
I mean, for comparison: The Connaught Rangers and the 45th of the Line took 562 casualties while storming Ciudad Rodrigo, with better artillery support and two breaches. 562 combat ineffective from two one-battalion regiments totaling about 1,000-1,500 men overall.
We're alive and victorious, which by the standards of forlorn hopes mean this has been a unqualified success. It really can't be emphasized enough how dangerous it is to be in a forlorn hope. We were badly outnumbered, traversing poor terrain, and made to stand against a well-trained and prepared enemy under desperate conditions. The odds were drastically against our success. Make no mistake being the victor of a successful forlorn hope (the first attempt too) is one of the ultimate glories to one's name.
We can expect our career to be fast tracked to the top after this, and I'll be very surprised if we don't get immediately promoted to captain in the aftermath.
The RL Siege of Memel had been mostly blasting artillery into the fortress. The defenders' morale eventually broke down under the bombardment and they surrendered before any kind of breach was attempted. It should be noted that despite the prolonged bombardment the garrison suffered minimal casualties.
In the quest their morale held firm and we were forced to storm the fortress to a much bloodier outcome. It wasn't the easy victory that OTL had, but it was one where we had the opportunity to nab the spotlight and have the entire army take notice of us.
This is why I was hesitant to vote for the assault. We had the option to avoid it, but didn't. At least we're getting something out of it, but our character damn near almost died. I really think that in the future we should try and invest into the relevant skills to actually make our chances of survival higher, provided we ever decide to try something like this again.
As far as the reward, I imagine we might get a promotion and/or a share of the wealth that was looted from Memel- what we did to was fairly glorious, at least in the eyes of others.
The city – the town, really – of Memel is not what you had expected while in siege lines or in the leadup to the desperate storming of the breach. Of course, while in the breach you hadn't had the time to concentrate on things. Not to mention that as Vasiliev puts it, a sack does a city no favors. When the city fathers and the general turned down the Russian terms, the army had the right to loot. To deny that to the men would spark a mutiny.
So the troops ran wild.
You don't remember much of that, part of it from being asleep for almost a day after that storming. When you woke up, though, you ate a mountain of borscht with as much wine as you could hold, and the rest of the regiment did it with you before the general himself pinned the battle honour 'Memel' on the regimental flag. You and another forty men from your company, the rest of it dead or wounded. The officers' places at the head of each file is likewise empty, the company drawn up with great gaps torn in it just like every other unit in the regiment. Above you is the banner of the 3rd Dragoons, stark stained white under a cloudy sky. The horseman with his lance on the banner seems somewhat weatherbeaten, great rents in his armor from shot and shell, yet the lancer of the city of Moscow just like his regiment somehow soldiers on.
There are two things that you would most remember from that ceremony, the regiment on parade to receive its 'awards' for bleeding itself white in the breach. You remember the splitting headache that you had while the colonel called out the speech in his cracked, aging voice. The priest's sermon after that was on the glory of doing one's duty and on the virtue of those who sacrifice themselves for their comrades, giving you a worse headache and making your eyes stray towards the empty space in your troop where Ensign Obolensky would have stood. Poor bastard.
General Apraksin then steps forward with a solemn look and fresh lines on his face. With jowls red and eyes narrow over pouchy bags he speaks, the conscript horsemen behind you standing stiff on parade as their sergeants eye them with palpable anticipation. You've never seen the unit this polished, this proud. Your eye sweeps past Obolensky's empty place in the file, Vasiliev meeting your eyes from his section. The unit might be polished and proud, but you'll be writing Obolensky's parents tonight.
The general himself seems to regard the costs paid as worth it. You suppress a sigh as he describes the success, the same wild celebration that you'd thrown once you recovered from the storming party. The same sort of language that your colonel had used gets trotted out, the same appeals to the glory of the aging, vain Tsaritsa in St. Petersburg so far from Moscow where the Kremlin stands. It helps, though. A little. Death was not for nothing, and God will watch over the dead.
Finally, General Apraksin concludes. He stands in front of your company, the one with less than half its troopers and officers that stares back at him with dead or bloodshot eyes. There are those who are hungover like Sergeant Ivanov who managed to find the largest consignment of vodka you'd ever seen, two nights ago. There are those who are mourning or quiet, shocked by the bloody chaos of the storming party, like Mogamedov who visited the priest multiple times on the day that followed the storming party. And then there is you, the one officer who sweated over paperwork when they were awake enough to do so.
"1st Company has led the regiment in its assault on Memel, and taken a fortress' breach with the aid of the infantry. In recognition of the storming of Memel, the regiment has been authorized by me, as the General of the Army in Germany, to take a heraldic name for the Empress to approve." General Apraksin finishes reading from the proclamation he wrote and sealed, pausing for a moment to clear his throat before continuing. "The regiment may choose its name, and that choice is given to 1st Company. By order of Colonel Lebedev and me, General Stepan Apraksin."
All eyes then come to you. You stifle a groan, head throbbing and maudlin from the hangover.
You are allowed to choose a heraldic name for the 3rd Dragoons. What bubbles up from your mind? This is also a chance to build your character.
[]`Yuri Dolgorukiy': The one that wrought the banner that flies above the unit, the founder of the ancient city that the melting pot of your regiment comes from. A place that equally honours the Suzdal Regiment, who fought with you in that breach. And a token of the sympathy that you have for Russia outside Petersburg, the same lingering resentment that many seem to share with you.
[]`St. Peter': One of the great saints, a call to the patron saint for longevity on behalf of the regiment. That the name on that banner will be a lasting one. That – for now – is what springs up to your mind, along with perhaps a desire for your own longevity. That it is a nod to St. Petersburg and the high nobility does not hurt, as well.
[]`St. Basil': Patron saint of the empire, the one most frequently invoked by the priests on the eve of battle, and the one whose blessings might have saved your life in that breach. Some of your tutors might disagree, but how do they know it was not? You still desire glory, your name to be etched in the history of the empire, and who better to invoke than the patron saint of Russia? (QM Note: See factual note below for historical error clarification courtesy of @Melifaro)
Note that St. Basil was not in fact the patron saint of Russia, and that honor goes to Apostle Andrew the First-Called. In this I have made a factual error.
An additional addendum is below courtesy of Melifaro: " Basil, however, from the point of view of the 18th century, will be divided into two points. One Greek saint, the second "blessed" of Moscow, the one because of which the famous "Temple as ice cream next to the Kremlin" is St. Basil's Cathedral. A beggar that with his faithful and asceticism and miracles of foresight has earned himself the status of one of the saints. Canonized in 1588, unlike the first basil, who was even before the split of the churches."
The name that you choose is accepted with a solemn nod, and the same army chaplain who blessed you and the Suzdal Regiment on the eve of the assault two days ago comes forward again to bless the banners. You close your eyes a little as the familiar catechism washes over you, lips shaping the syllables learned as a boy. There's a faint whispering behind you as the soldiers do the same, peasants and Cossacks and cityborn alike.
Of course, there is still celebrating to do and still meetings to have. You're called to the general's tent that afternoon, after Vasiliev comes back from it with a senior lieutenant's stars on his coat and a pouch bulging with coin, telling you with a broad smile that it's your turn next. You're not as casual as Vasiliev was, you're not lowborn enough or Ukrainian enough to be – and besides, Great-Uncle Stepan is family. You don't disappoint family.
So you have your stiff, starched uniform with your new batman – inherited from Captain von Weide who was wounded a day ago – handing you a polished sword and scabbard. Your boots are a slick gleaming black with most of the scuff-marks buffed out, and Vladimir Yaroslavsky the batman seems to take a quiet pride in his work. That, and he's very fond of the wine you ration out to him now and then.
You show up in front of the general's tent resplendent like this, entering it when the sentry waves you inside. Stepan Apraksin himself is slumped a little in his chair, pipe laid to the side and a bottle of wine uncorked on the table with two glasses on it, and he gestures at one of them as you come in. "Sit, sit, Alexei. Take a glass, and sit. We have to talk."
You sit down on the camp-stool before his desk a little gingerly, sipping what turns out to be a tart German wine before you answer him. "About what, sir?"
"First, the fact that you were an idiot. I didn't expect you to volunteer, and for a forlorn hope at that. I can understand ambition, Alexei, but…" He trails off, fiddling with a pair of pince-nez sitting on top of a sheaf of papers. "I can understand ambition. It's a good thing in moderation, but you're family. You're someone that I have to look out for. You understand duty to family, I take it?"
"Yessir." You swallow a little, a mix of hot shame and cold impatience warring in your gut as you listen to the lecture that you expected your father to give you.
Stepan Apraksin probably sees it, from the way he sighs before speaking. "Your father wrote to me when you joined the German force. He asked me to keep you safe, as one member of the family to another. I'm not a fool, you're a man and a soldier – I'm not your nursemaid. But I have a duty from your father as well, you know."
"I know, Great-Uncle." You drain the wine, tart smooth alcohol not helping the mix of emotions that bubble up every time you hear about family. "But again, I volunteered, and it turned out fine."
"It turned out fine this time." General Apraksin picks up his wineglass and takes a loud slurping sip, courtly manners left to the side for now. "I have seen more than one storming party in my time, boy. You were lucky with that breach, and you were facing land militia instead of proper infantry. When we visit Prussia this year, you'll have to think before you act."
"Yessir." You shift in your seat a little, more impatient than anything else by now. You know you might have been a tad foolish, but it did work out. This time.
"Second." Stepan Apraksin hands you a sheaf of paper, the Empress' signature on the bottom far more faded than the rest of the writing on it. "Your warrant of commission from Her Majesty. I am hereby making you a captain, formalizing your company command. Your major has taken sick in the last assault, and holed his incontinent self in a tavern in Memel with what whores he can afford. Congratulations, you're battalion commander."
The general's voice is tart and angry, tense frustration bubbling underneath his level tone. You take the warrant gingerly, folded neatly and tucked in an oilskin envelope. You can't help yourself, though, perhaps because of the wine and the recent success and the sheer adrenaline high of the last few days. Or perhaps it's because Uncle Stepan is family. "Did something happen to the battalion, sir?"
There. That ought to be general enough to avoid looking gossipy.
"Your major is a Vorontsov is what's happened, boy. He doesn't want to march while taking sick, and I can't make him. I need a few officers to handle supplies and commissariat here as it is, so he's staying. Your regiment is thin enough to leave a few officers behind." The general slides his pince-nez back on and leafs through his papers, reading them with a squint. "Still, that is not your concern. The main concern right now is getting the city back together. The sack was bad enough that I had to pull most of the men out of it to save the damn port."
"I'll get my men in hand, sir."
"See to it." He grunts the sentence out at you with no little irritation, and you salute your great-uncle stiffly before leaving. General Apraksin sends you on your way with one parting shot, making you pause as you leave. "Good work, boy."
You are now a captain and a battalion commander. Your battalion is severely understrength. Pick two of the following to do while organizing the army post-sack:
[]Soldiers' Justice: The conscripts have in theory the right to appeal to their officers when there are abuses of authority by the senior enlisted. However, this is very rarely invoked simply because doing so makes one a marked man. There are rumors of one of the senior sergeants in the regiment being unusually abusive, though, and more than one man seems willing to come forward.
[]Restoring Order: The sack has had its three days of wild freedom, and it's long past time that the army stepped back in to restore order and hang the more unruly conscripts. A sack is always a messy affair, but every officer leading a policing party makes a difference. After all, it's the officers that have the authority to order summary action.
[]Talking to your officers: Most of you are newly promoted in the sheer bloody aftermath of the forlorn hope and the storming of Memel. The East Prussian Land Militia took a bloody toll on your dragoons, and you need to get the officers working together before the campaign resumes in mid-September. You have 800 Experience to allocate below:
[]Write In Allocation
Stats are a range from 1-20, and the greater they are the better the outcome. I will not show most background dice rolls. Martial: 8
Charisma: 8
Decorum: 4
Intellect: 5
Subterfuge: 4
Skills range from Abysmal→Unskilled→Trained→Skilled→Adept→Master. Cavalry Command: Trained (60/800)
Infantry Command: Unskilled (0/400)
Artillery Command: Unskilled (130/400)
Engineering: Abysmal (0/200)
Courtly Etiquette: Unskilled (200/400)
Combat: Trained (0/800)
Oratory: Trained (0/800)
Logistics: Abysmal (70/200)
Administration: Abysmal (30/200)
Company has Moderate to High Morale: +2 to Combat Rolls
The main concern right now is getting the city back together. The sack was bad enough that I had to pull most of the men out of it to save the damn port
Well, we're in charge, but uh, should we go all in on administration and logistics? The city is kind of wrecked, and who knows how much needs to be fixed.
Also, I want to name the regiment after Yuri if only to acknowledge the critical success of the infantry. Their nat 20 saved our bacon.
