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Chapter Seven

Feldwebel Taenzler and his Gulaschkanone

Range A (Rifle), Near Camp Budapest

First and Third Companies were still hard at work putting in a range for the heavy and light machine guns, as well as the 37mm cannon. Their little spades could be heard, faintly, chink-chink-chinking away, from off in the distance.

Today was expected to be a great day. Today was Number Two Company’s first day on the rifle range.

There were firing points numbered One through Forty, running left to right. From the deep trench and berm, in and behind which the target handlers sheltered, toward the camp, there were roughly one- by two-meter raised dirt beds, at one hundred and fifty, three hundred, four hundred and fifty, and six hundred arshini3 from the target line. At seven hundred and fifty arshini, instead of raised beds, the battalion had dug down to create positions for firing in a standing supported mode.

As with most rifles of the era, the Model 1891 was capable of engaging mass targets—columns of men moving in the open, for example—at greater than five hundred meters. Indeed, the sights of the models scrounged by Romeyko were marked for as far away as thirty-two hundred arshini, or roughly two thousand, two hundred meters.

Again, though, that was for mass targets, not individual ones. More practically, in the hands of a reasonably well-trained soldier, effective engagement of a man-sized target at five hundred meters was probably worth the effort . . . if the target were standing still and approximately upright. Engagement of a moving target was, for any rifleman, extremely problematic and kinetic success in such engagement largely a matter of luck.

Though every man in the battalion was literate and numerate, mistakes still happened with this kind of thing. Thus, rather than putting up just numbers at the target line, successive relays of men had tramped down the grass in straight lines to mark each firing lane.

Even so, thought Sergeant Major Blagov, some idiot is going to fire at his neighbor’s target. Always happens. I suppose it always will.

The weather was actually not bad, for Russians, hovering at about forty-three degrees, Fahrenheit, or about six degrees, Celsius. For someone from, say, Saint Peterburg, this was equal to a balmy, early April morn.

The field telephones and communications wire hadn’t yet shown up; they probably never would. Still, the noncoms had worked out a system of whistle, trumpet, and visual signals. Following the somewhat superfluous command of, “Set your sights for lowest possible range,” superfluous because, below thirteen hundred arshini, there was no setting, a whistle blast caused forty men in the long, deep shelter of the trench and the berm to raise forty targets on high.

The next command, by voice, came from the firing line. “Load one clip of five rounds!”

That was easy enough; all the ammunition broken down, so far, came in five round clips. These the troops inserted into a slot above the magazine and, with a single push, forced all five rounds down. The clips were then tossed, with bolts slammed and twisted home to chamber the first round.

There was no need to order the men to take the weapons off safe; their rifles hadn’t been on safe to begin with. Indeed, the Model 1891 could not be loaded with the weapon on safe.

“Commence firing!”

Camp Budapest

“‘The market here in fill-in-the-space is good’ will mean all the Romanovs are in one place, whichever one we put in. But what if they’ve been split up?” asked Lieutenant Turgenev. “How do we account for that?”

“Maybe value and sex,” suggested Mokrenko. “We use the most valuable, the sable, as a stand in for the tsar. After that, the fox for the tsarina. After that, the blue fox for the grand duchesses and the polar fox for the tsarevich.”

“I’m not sure that’s the actual relative value,” said Turgenev.

“Maybe better if it isn’t,” Mokrenko admitted. “But there’s a problem; nobody is going to go to the expense of sending a wire to Sweden for one polar fox. It’s inherently suspicious.

“So maybe,” he continued, “we just add zeroes to the actual number, as many as we need to be something besides suspicious. So . . . one hundred is just one. Four hundred blue fox are just the four grand duchesses. So are four thousand, if we find the market is big enough to justify that.

“That works. Write that down, Goat.”

“Yes, sir,” answered Corporal Koslov, whose surname, in fact, meant goat.

“We need codes for places, too,” said Turgenev. “One for each stop on our itinerary. And then a way to designate different places.”

“Yes,” Mokrenko agreed. “We might, after all, find that they’ve been sent somewhere completely different than we expect.”

“North and south from a known point?” Turgenev suggested. “Also east and west? How about by money? North is rubles; south is kopeks. What for east and west, though?”

That took some thought. Finally Koslov suggested, “America is east; England is west. Murmansk is north. Odessa is south. We make it a two sentence effort—no, three—for each part of the direction. The first establishes a known point, whichever it is. The second, couched as being a place to send furs to, establishes a direction. The third the distance from that point in that direction. Then we do it again for the other cardinal direction.”

“Seems complex,” Turgenev said.

“Yes, sir, but we’re running out of time. We still have to familiarize on the pistols. We still have to get the money. And we still have to leave soon if we’re to get there on time. Besides, at least that way doesn’t obviously look like a coded message, which anything that gave coordinates would, and which anything that used an offset to give coordinates also would.”

“Directions and money it is. But let’s make it rubles and kopeks for each part, with rubles being ten versts and kopeks being one.”

Mokrenko nodded sagely. “I think that works, but we’re going to have to be very careful to make our figures nonsuspicious.”

“Yes, we are,” Turgenev agreed. “Now let’s start working on enemy situation.”

“Invert numbers,” said Mokrenko. “One hundred and twenty-three would mean three hundred and twenty-one, for example. At least that keeps us, well, usually, from sending a suspiciously accurate number. And, if they’re the same, one hundred and thirty-one red guards, for example, we don’t have to be that accurate; we call it two thirty-one, which means one hundred and thirty two, and is close enough to the truth.”

“Okay . . . I can see that, Sergeant. Then . . . squirrel for red soldiers . . . mmm . . . martens for machine guns . . . rabbits for cannon . . . excellent condition is excellent troops . . . not of the best is rabble . . . more coming is more coming.”

“Let me try something,” said Goat. “So we see two hundred and five red guards around the tsar and his family, who are all together. The guards have eighteen machine guns. There are no cannon. Five hundred more red guards are coming in a week or ten days.”

“The message, then, would read: ‘The market here is good STOP I was able to pick up five hundred and two squirrel pelts STOP only eighty-one martens available from my dealer STOP no rabbit fur and no word of any coming STOP supposed to be one hundred and five more rabbit available in a week or ten days STOP quality of what we have is not of the best STOP shall I wait . . . ’ meaning, ‘the Romanovs are here, guarded by two hundred and five guards now. They are all rabble. They have eighteen machine guns, no artillery and none coming, five hundred and one, which is close enough, more red guards supposedly en route and expected in a week or ten days.’ ”

Turgenev stroked his chin. “That ‘shall I wait?’ It reminds me that we need to be able to receive a message, too, once we’re in one place to stay. Hmmm . . . my stomach is rumbling. Let’s go eat lunch; we can work as we eat.”

Range A (Rifle), Near Camp Budapest

Feldwebel Taenzler cracked the whip above the horses, being most careful not to hit them. These beasts were in much better shape than the poor miserable things turned over to the Russian battalion, about a quarter of which, at this point, had died, though the rest were on their way to recovery.

Taenzler had given some thought to the notion of butchering the dead horses and mules but, given that they hadn’t necessarily died of starvation, he’d recommended against that and the Russian commander had listened to him.

The pair gave a little forward lurch, setting both the limber and the Gulaschkanone into forward motion.

Fired by wood, the Gulaschkanone was a modern marvel. The Kanone part of the name came from the smokepipe mounted to one corner. The Gulasch? Well, that was a simple one pot meat dish that the device could make in its large central pot, as it could make any kind of stew, in sufficient quantity for about a company. The marvelous part included that the thing could do so while on the move, plus that it had a means of spreading the heat evenly across the surface of the main cooker. This was a double boiler of sorts between the cooking pot and the firebox, containing glycerin. It also had a tub to heat tea or coffee, as well as a kind of griddle.

What it could not do was provide much in the way of variety, stew or pasta or boiled vegetables were pretty much it, and only one of those at a feeding.

It would have been woefully overtasked for feeding a small battalion, as it was now, but then Taenzler still had the kitchen at the camp, plus plenty of cooks now, what with the additional Russians. He planned on feeding the crew working on range building, then going back to refill the stew pot, to bring hot stew to the men using the rifle range. He’d been around the German Army long enough to know who could drop what they were doing to come and eat, and whom he would have to wait upon, as they finished absolutely necessary tasks to a schedule. The firers fit into the last category, the range builders into the former.

The Pole, Chmura, recently assigned to the kitchen had proven a big help. At his translation of Ilyin’s suggestion, Taenzler and the cooks had begun scraping the Schmaltz directly into the daily stew, where, by dipping, the Russians ate it with considerably more relish than they had when it was spread on bread.

Though it’s perhaps just as well that they don’t know that the fat comes from crushed and processed Maybugs. I wish I hadn’t made the mistake of asking, myself.

The newly building range wasn’t far. It seemed like mere minutes before Taenzler found himself pulling on the horses’ reins to bring the Gulaschkanone to a stop at a likely spot. Chmura stood and, in Russian, called for the men to drop their shovels, collect their mess tins, and line up for lunch.

They didn’t need to be told twice.


“You know,” said Corporal Goat, on the road to the mess tent, “we might be being too paranoid here. All businesses have secrets they don’t want to share. Maybe we’d look more suspicious, not less, if we didn’t put in something that actually looked like a secret we were trying to keep from competitors.”

“Maybe put in a substitution code, you think?” asked the lieutenant. “Use it for something . . .”

Turgenev stopped progress, as did the other two, at the edge of a company street. It was stop or risk being run over by sixteen men, racing along in two groups, each group hauling a 37mm infantry gun on wheels, plus a small ammunition caisson ahead of the gun. Turgenev recognized Lieutenant Federov running along ahead of the first gun, while a Feldfebel he didn’t know paced the second. The three stopped to watch the drill.

“I know nothing about artillery,” Turgenev said, “but I’ve always found the drill involved to be a fascinating dance.”

First, Federov stopped, made a show of looking through the binoculars hanging from his neck, then thrust out one arm in a different direction from the one they’d been racing toward. Swerving to avoid hitting the lieutenant, the four men pulling the caisson made a tight circle to the left, stopped the caisson, let the pole drop, opened the ammunition chest and extracted four containers of ammunition, each holding sixteen rounds of ammunition and weighing, per container, about fifteen kilograms.

The men hauling the gun stopped it before running their lieutenant over, then lowered the trails to the ground. One of the three then pulled the pin that retained the front leg of a tripod, knocked that leg down into position, then replaced the pin. This locked the leg in place while turning the gun’s carriage almost into a tripod. He then pulled another pin, thus detaching the gun’s soon to be tripod from the axle.

The other two members of the gun crew joined to lift the gun slightly off the axle. The first man then rolled axle and wheels out of the way, to the left.

They then lowered the entire gun assembly to the ground. With the pull of another pin, the gun and recoil cylinder were detached from the pintle. The squad leader helped one of the men get the eighty-eight pound tube and cylinder assembly onto his shoulder. The tripod and pintle assembly took a bit of effort as well, but was longer, better balanced, and inherently more stable. The remaining crewman was able to walk it up to the vertical position, then bend, put his shoulder into it, and stand upright on his own.

At that point, the second gun had come up abreast of the first and begun its dance, just slightly behind in time.

Turgenev heard Federov shout, “Follow me.” At that point, the gun crew trotted off, hauling gun and ammunition by main force, until the view of them was lost to the intervening tentage. The drill was fast enough that the second gun crew began trotting off about the time the first crew disappeared.

“Getting there,” said Mokrenko, “aren’t they?”

“Yes,” said Turgenev, “but for them as for us, time is a limited resource. Let’s go . . . and about that substitution code; are businesses that unsophisticated? A mere substitution code when actual, by God, money is on the line.”

“I confess, I don’t know,” Mokrenko replied.

“No clue,” added Goat.

“Let’s presume they’re not,” said Turgenev. “What else might be available to us?”

“Books,” said Goat, who was no dummy.

“Books?”

“Sure, sir; we get two copies of the same book, two exact copies. Any word we want is going to be found by a combination of a page number, a line number, and a word on the line number. Inefficient? I’m sure. But probably pretty secure.”

“What book?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe War and Peace?” Goat offered.

Mokrenko shook his head. “Sure has enough words . . . but we’re Russian, for God’s sake. Maybe some book less obvious? Something that isn’t by Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?”

“Lermontov?” suggested the lieutenant.

Goat offered, “Or maybe Chernychevsky?”

“Maybe better, because more obscure,” Turgenev said.

“You know,” said Mokrenko, “We might be well advised to find a telegraph station away from wherever we may find the royal family, and as far from their guards as possible.”

“Point,” agreed Turgenev.

“May not be possible,” said Corporal Koslov. “And there’s no train station or even a near passing line in Tobolsk, if they’re still there.”

“There will be a telegraph station in Tobolsk,” Turgenev said. “They’d never have brought the royal family there without a way to give the order to kill them in a hurry.”

“Also, ‘point,’ ” conceded Goat. “But if so, sir, there’s still not going to be another station in easy distance. What? Tyumen? Could we even get back to Tyumen in time to give the word.”

“No,” Turgenev said. “Well . . . six days? Maybe we could.”

“I wonder if we could get a man attached to us who knows telegraphy and a portable set for him that we could to tap into the wires?”

“Army math,” Turgenev reminded. “If you must have one of something to end with you must start with more than one.”

“Maybe so,” Mokrenko said, “but, under the circumstances, we’ll be lucky to get even one.”

Those words brought them to the mess where the lieutenant said, “No more talking until we’ve got our food and are on our way.”


“A minute and thirty-two seconds,” announced Federov to both gun crews, together, seated in a semi-circle on the ground between the pair of cannon. “A minute and thirty-two seconds from me designating a stopping point to both guns, side by side, ready to fire. You know, that’s not bad. I think maybe we’re ready for the real ammunition.”

“We’re ready, sir,” said the Feldfebel, “but the range is not. What we can do, though, is put the guns up, draw our rifles, and go knock off the requirement to qualify on the M1891s. That would be a good use of our time.”

Federov considered that for perhaps as much as three seconds, then said, “Let me know, Feldfebel, when everything is secured and we’re ready to march to the range.”

Machine gun and cannon range (Under Construction)

The men building the range were still eating when Kostyshakov suddenly appeared on the dirt road.

Both First and Third were commanded by senior lieutenants, Boris Baluyev for First and Georgy Lesh for Third. They ran up and reported to Kostyshakov as soon as they spied him.

Lesh spoke first. “Any word on the pioneer tools, sir? This would go so much faster if we had them. And we’ve still got to do the deep digging for the building clearing.”

“We need more lumber, too, sir,” added Baluyev, blowing aside facial hair as he spoke. “Trying to do this with entrenching tools is, well . . .” Baluyev took off his mittens to show blistered, bleeding hands. “See, sir? And the men? They’re in worse shape than we are. We’ve got to get those pioneer tools.”

“I know. Romeyko’s at wit’s end. The Germans are trying but nobody seems to have anything to spare. What they had to spare seems to have gone west with the divisions being shifted to face the French and British and, now, the Americans.”

Lesh scowled. “Hell, sir, we could make our own wooden handles if they’d just get us the metal parts!”

“Yes, sure. But we don’t have those either. Now quit complaining and show me what you have managed to do here.”

“Georgy has something special to show you, sir,” said Baluyev. “While he’s setting that up, I can walk you around.”

“Fine;” said Daniil, “go get your demonstration set up, Lesh.”

“Yes, sir.” With a hasty salute, Lesh trotted off.

Baluyev led Daniil to the firing line. The first thing Kostyshakov noticed was a set of large screens, at either end.

“What are those for?” he asked.

“The infantry guns, sir. Their tactics involve leaving their ammunition wagon, along with the mule or horse if they have one, in safe defilade. They manhandle the guns forward. But we don’t have anywhere with a suitable hill, nor any particularly good means of raising a hill. So we put these up to give a simulation of defilade. It’s not perfect because the guns can’t go over them but have to go around. But then, they’re supposed to go around.

“The heavy machine guns will do something similar. And we have two so both can be on the range at one time, or, when we don’t need both, either one has a choice of where to go. Or they can split sections.”

“Good thinking in general, though I’ll ask the Germans if there’s a place we can use that has actual hills or ridges, too.”

“I think Lieutenant Federov would appreciate that, sir.

“Now between the two screens, we’ve put in spots for five Lewis guns at a time.” Baluyev pointed down range, saying, “Note here, sir, that we haven’t put in anything for the Lewis guns to shoot at that’s closer than seven hundred and fifty arshin. For that they may as well use the rifle range, no?”

Kostyshakov considered that, then gestured a general agreement.

“What are you using for targets here?”

“You can’t generally see them, sir, because they’re camouflaged, but we have forty-five deep pits we’re digging. Men sheltering in those will raise targets on whistle command. Scoring, since those will be machine guns being scored, will be from the firing point rather than the target. That’s for the Lewis guns and the Maxims when shooting targets at range. We’re also building frames to put basic machine gun targets on, but I’m having trouble figuring out what to do about our traversing and elevating mechanisms, and our usual targets being in Russian, and the only ones available, the Germans’ targets, being in metric.”

“If you had heavy duty paper and paint or ink,” Kostyshakov asked, “oh, and rulers, I suppose, could you make our kind of targets from scratch?”

“Probably, sir, though we’d have to test them with our guns, too, to make sure they’re right.”

“I’ll see if we can squeeze that material out of the Germans.”

“That would be great, sir, and . . . I think . . . Lesh is ready to show you something.”

“Lead on.”

The trail blazed by Baluyev led first to the center of the range, and then half a mile downrange to near where most of the troops dug. Daniil saw nothing of any particular interest, even when they reached where Lesh stood, beaming. In the course of it, they passed four enlisted men, just waiting.

“You had something to show me, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir. But you’re almost standing on it.”

Daniil looked down and saw a neat board, about one arshin on a side, or perhaps slightly less. A wheel was attached to the center of the board, via a vertical spike. The heads of four more spikes had been driven through the board, holding it firmly to the ground. Rope—roughly half inch stuff—led off in both directions from the wheel, which seemed to have a cavity around the rim in which that small bit of the rope lay hidden.

“It came from one of the manuals we got from the Germans, the one for the 37mm cannon, sir.”

Beginning to lose patience now, Daniil exclaimed, “What came?”

“Oh, sorry, sir; moving targets for the machine guns and the light cannon.”

“I really don’t . . .”

“Watch me, sir.” With that, Lesh ran about one hundred meters toward the far firing line, to where the four previously idle troops waited. Bending, he and the men picked up the free end of the rope and began to walk to the south.

“Look over there, sir,” said Baluyev, pointing to a clump of bushes from behind which slid a small sled, moving at the same pace as Lesh and his detail of rope haulers. Suddenly the sled picked up speed as the haulers started to run.

“It’s just going to lock up on the . . .” Daniil shut up as the sled suddenly changed direction, still moving forward at a man’s running speed.

“How . . . ?”

“There’s a knot in the rope, sir. It doesn’t fit the cavity around the wheel so the rope jumps out of it, then pulls the sled in the direction of the next wheel, which can be just about anywhere.”

“Fucking fascinating,” Daniil said, wonder in his voice. “I’ve never seen . . .”

“Neither had we, sir. Neither had Federov. But as soon as he saw it he also saw the potential and brought it to us.”

“Bloody marvelous. It’s impossible—well, it’s been impossible—to have moving targets before, at least as far as I’ve ever heard, but this . . . Oh, this is going to be so much fun!”

“Yes, sir.”

“How much did you have to do with this, Baluyev?”

“Less than half, sir.”

“Okay. How good are you with explosives?”

“Better than some, less good than others, sir.”

“Well. I have this project for you.”

Quartermaster’s Shop, Camp Budapest

Romeyko, the battalion quartermaster, looked over the task board on the wall. It was better prioritized now, to be sure, but it was also substantially more full. For every problem we solve, two more arise, Romeyko mentally groaned. And some of the problems are starting to appear unsolvable.

Looking over the task board, Romeyko saw:


Machine Pistols

Pioneer tools

Nails

Map of Rodina

Canvas or heavy paper

Paint or ink

Straight edges, drawing

Horse blankets

Portable telegraph set

Money

Nine Kindjal

Nine Shashka

Lamb papaha

Blacksmith

Wrist watches, or at least some kind of watches, for 150

Field telephones

Communications wire

Cavity wheels

Nine hundred arshini of good rope

Spikes, heavy, sixty

Boards, one arshin square

Sheet tin

Civilian clothing and shoes, Russian

Binoculars.

Lathe to turn dummy grenades

Lead ingots

Explosives, bulk


He didn’t bother to look past those, but estimated, And still, two dozen important items after that. Different important items, yes, to some extent, but the number never shrinks.

He was also starting to feel the pinch of transportation, what with the need to haul ammunition to the rifle range—and more ranges, soon enough, as well as more and heavier ammunition—to having to feed the troops at several different locations, locations too far away from camp for them to walk back for lunch and dinner. The need to draw from the railhead hadn’t changed, but the need to disperse to where things would be used, while still drawing in firewood, too, since the coal was proving insufficient to the need, meant his three wagons still on loan were not enough.

Thank God for Taenzler.

Feldwebel Weber, who spent about half his time inside the wire, working with Romeyko, and half, outside, fighting with the system to try to get Romeyko the material the Russians needed, asked, “Something bothering you, Herr Hauptmann?”

Romeyko just pointed silently in the direction on which his eyes were already fixed.

“Well,” said Weber, “I have one good thing to report. One company set of pioneer tools has been found in the salvage depot at Kuestrin, along with a couple of dozen spares of various types. Also the other seven hundred thousand rounds of M1891 and belted Maxim ammunition has been secured. Should be here in about ten days, eight if we’re lucky.”

“Machine pistols?” Romeyko asked, hopes suddenly buoyed up by the news.

“They remain a problem,” answered Weber. “Major Brinkmann, bearing a requisition from Hoffmann, himself, has gone to Baden to try to get a portion of the first batch coming off the assembly line.”

Camp Budapest

There was a kind of constrained parade field in the center of the camp, surrounded on three sides by the off-white tents of the three companies, with a mix of tents, wooden buildings, and a dirt road, leading to the main gate, on the fourth side. In the middle of that field, under the supervision of Sergeant Major Nenonen, thirty men—thirty often cursing men, ten minimalist gun crews—went through the arcane but necessary ritual of disassembling and reassembling the frustratingly complex light machine guns.

Nenonen was the only man of the battalion with previous training on the Lewis, that having been a lengthy and difficult course run the prior year, not too far behind the then front. Nenonen was a veteran of the Finland Guard Regiment of the Imperial Guard.

“Step one,” Nenonen shouted, “is to remove the magazine. That’s that round thing on top for you, Private Durak. We do this by sticking a finger into the hole—you know how to stick a finger in a hole, don’t you, Corporal Blyad?—and push that little button, then lift.”

The troops tittered, neither man was actually addressed by his proper surname, but each had picked up a not necessarily complimentary nickname from his comrades, basically “dummy” and “fuck,” the latter for a corporal too much given to bragging about his amorous conquests.

“Now set the magazines down on your ground cloth.

“Next, your fingers on the bolt charging handle—that’s that little thing sticking out to the right—pull the trigger and ride the bolt forward.

“Now, flip your guns over so the trigger and pistol grip are away from you. See that little lever right where wood meets metal? Put your left hand in a reversed grip on the pistol grip, then use your right to twist the wooden stock towards you . . . that’s right; forty-five degrees and she’s free. Remove the stock and put it down on the ground cloth next to the magazine.

“Now pull the trigger and pull backwards; you will find that the entire grip and trigger assembly slide off easily. You know the drill . . . put it on the ground cloth.”

Daniil Kostyshakov was, himself, unfamiliar with the Lewis guns, though he’d read about them, and about light machine guns, in general, in various German military journals while incarcerated in Fort IX. These had mostly covered tactical employment, rather than the mechanics of the things.

Seeing Kostyshakov watching from the edge of the parade field, Nenonen turned matters over to a half-trained assistant and trotted over.

“I am beginning to doubt, Sergeant Major, that the Germans will come through with those machine pistols,” Kostyshakov began. “That means we may be using these things to clear rooms, hallways, stairwells, and floors. Tell me about them.”

Nenonen filled his cheeks and blew air out, in a fricative. “They’re a really mixed blessing, sir.”

“How so?”

“Well . . . in the first place, they’re very complex. They’re . . . mmm . . . best I show you.”

Nenonen led the way to where one group of three men had just completed disassembly on their Lewis. “Go join one of the other gun teams,” he told them. “Your gun will still be here when you get back.”

Nenonen picked up one of the pan magazines lying on the ground cover. Turning it over, he said, “Problem one is this, sir. So are problems two and three.

“This holds forty-seven rounds. Captain Romeyko is sitting on some that hold ninety-seven rounds, but they’ve got their issues, too, so we don’t know what to do with them. Note that it’s open on the side that faces the gun and the ground. It has to be, given the way these things are loaded. It has the advantage of allowing dirt and mud to get out. It has the far worse disadvantage of allowing a lot more dirt and mud to get in in the first place.”

Nosing around the ground sheet the sergeant major picked up a cylindrical tool, from a cubical leather case, which he affixed to a shorter cylinder that was part of the magazine. The tool had a hand-width diamond pattern engraved on the upper half to aid in gripping.

Nenonen explained, “You load these by inserting one round at a time and then”—here he twisted the tool by hand to demonstrate—“turning this to rotate the disk that holds the round in place. You have to do this forty-seven times to load the magazine fully. It is not easy and it is not quick.

“That’s why we have twenty-two magazines for every Lewis gun: to keep up an adequate rate of fire for a long enough time, you need every one of those, fully loaded, to start.

“But the weight of twenty-two fully loaded magazines is about sixty pounds for the ammunition and thirty-eight or so pounds for the magazines. Add in the twenty-eight pounds for the gun, itself, and . . . well, a three-man crew is barely enough for the job. And they won’t be exactly playing leapfrog with each other while they’re moving across the battlefield, either.

“It’s also a problem for marching fire. This magazine spins as it’s feeding ammunition to the gun. If the gunner doesn’t keep it well away from his body and cant it to the right, it’s going to rub on, maybe even get caught on, his uniform. That means a stoppage.

“And then there’s the overheating problem . . .”

“But I thought that shroud on the barrel kept it cool,” Daniil interrupted.

“For a while—longer than you might expect—it does. That’s not the problem.”

Nenonen reached down again, this time picking up a smallish, flattish half cylinder. “It’s this thing, the operating spring. Unlike most machine guns, instead of a long helical spring to drive the bolt and/or operating rod forward, it’s got what amounts to a clock spring wound up inside this. But it’s also near the chamber and it does get hot, hot enough to lock up the gun. And in a hard fight it will tend to do so long before those twenty-two magazines are used up.

“Oh, and speaking of heat”—here the sergeant major reached out and tapped the shroud around the barrel—“this thing gets hot within the first four magazines, too hot to hold without a glove, and that glove had better be thick.

“Also, sir, note that if you get to close quarters, there is no bayonet lug. It’s also too heavy to manhandle quickly from one aiming point to another.

“Finally, there are fifteen distinct causes of stoppages, ranging from a freely rotating magazine that won’t feed to a double feed. About half of those, eight, to be exact, can generally be dealt with by immediate action. The other seven? They require a good deal more effort, down to and including taking the thing apart, to one degree or another. This is a neat trick on a muddy battlefield.

“But, sir, all that said, what it does, which is to provide mobile suppressive fire to the foot soldiers, it still does better than anything else in the world, to date.”

Kostyshakov nodded understanding. And one problem you didn’t mention, Sergeant Major: once we go into a building to clear it out and rescue the royal family, this thing is going to shoot right through all but the stoutest walls, at things we cannot even guess at, let alone see. Put the royal family in a clump, on the other side of one of those walls and, well, we shouldn’t have even bothered to start.

* * *

3 The Arshin was an archaic Russian unit of measure, set by Tsar Peter the Great at exactly twenty-eight English inches.


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Framed