Chapter Seven: The So-Called National Army

“Potter, when we get into a fight, you have to charge to the front. The ones in front get the best loot and earn praise too. Look at me—ever since I hit it rich at a baron’s estate last time, I’ve been wearing cotton clothes. This is top-grade cotton, go on, feel the material, haha.” A soldier of the Germanic National Army, clad in a dirt-drab cotton coat, leaned on a wooden spear that rose just above his head, showing off to his fellow villager the spoils he had reaped in the campaign to flatten the eastern nobles.

“Hey, those propagandists were telling the truth after all—four-tenths of what you loot is yours to keep. Who’d have thought we’d get the day to rob noble lords ourselves, hee hee. Brother Bobby, from now on you’ve got to look out for your little brother.” A shorter soldier clutching an old matchlock musket gazed with envy at that worn-out cotton coat, then glanced down at his own coarse hempen rags full of holes, and felt his anticipation for the battles ahead grow even hotter.

“Potter, you and I are from the same village, so let me let you in on the trick to soldiering. As long as you’re at the front when you charge, not only do you get first pick of the valuables, but those propagandists will give you a good word too. Look at me, I’ve got some rank now, small as it is—I’ve got a good ten or so men under me. Some kind of ‘corporal’ or whatever it’s called; couldn’t read the word so I never remembered it—but being in charge of a dozen men makes me somebody, doesn’t it? We’re kin from the same village. Come follow me, and I guarantee that after we’ve stripped those noble lords bare you’ll have yourself a wife!” Bobby had been something of a bully back in the village too, but he was loyal to his own, and he always pulled fellow villagers into his squad.

“Would the officer approve of that?” Potter was clearly a fresh, green recruit just mustered in, completely in the dark about how things worked.

“Our national army has plenty of companies made up of neighbors from the same village. I know the propagandist in our company well—I’ll just have a word with him and it’ll be settled. He’s an easygoing fellow, and he knows a lot of characters—a real educated man! If you want to send a letter home, go to him, and he’ll write it out proper and fine for you.” Bobby thumped his chest in assurance.

Having weathered the great rises and falls of the orc continent, Amasjia. Von. William had developed an exceptionally sharp eye. In the years he spent mixed up in the underworld of the Madrid Empire, he came to understand deeply the ignorance of the lower classes and the crucial importance of propaganda. When he first founded the Germanic gang, he gathered followers through speeches and agitation, painted a glorious future for the men under him, and used his core circle to train a sizable crop of propagandists and mouthpieces. Through their indoctrination and the binding of mutual interest, Amasjia. Von. William’s power swelled without cease, and once he stepped into the light, he spread propagandists far and wide throughout his army.

While these propagandists had no authority over command and combat, they held the right of direct access to Amasjia himself, and in critical moments they possessed the authority to shoot any officer who disobeyed Amasjia’s orders and take command of the troops outright. Each one of them was a sword hanging over the head of every military commander! As a result, during battle, so long as a propagandist’s orders were not overly outrageous, the commanders would generally adopt them.

The core members under Amasjia could indeed see the benefits these propagandists brought. To the peasants who had been allotted land, after the powerful barrage of propaganda, their enthusiasm for enlistment was thoroughly ignited.

Once inside the army, with the propagandists constantly drumming up the benefits and battle rewards, the soldiers were filled with anticipation and vigor for war. Some of them even had their thinking warped to the point where they believed fighting a war was simply robbery!

Having sacked the capital of the Madrid Empire, Amasjia was hardly short of money. Those soldiers needed only to be fed, with no need for regular pay—the extra farmland they received upon enlistment was effectively a form of wages paid in land. Most of the national army soldiers, being peasant-born, felt that the ten acres of good farmland clutched in their own hands were far more real than a few gold coins of pay that might or might not be deducted by their officers.

Moreover, to make these mud-caked foot soldiers fight all the harder, Amasjia didn’t even bother with what it would do to the state treasury. With one sweep of his brush, he decreed that anyone enlisting would be tax-exempt for three years!

Hmm, Amasjia felt that if he really could hold this situation together for three years, then anything would be possible!

And so, with propaganda and ideological bombardment in one hand, and land distribution and tax exemption in the other, Amasjia firmly grasped this army of 250,000 under the Germanic National Assembly with himself at its head.

The common folk weren’t about to care about usurpation, conspiracy, or a sullied reputation. Among these common soldiers who had received real benefits, the personal prestige of Amasjia. Von. William stood extremely high!

It couldn’t be helped—these illiterate men had only the vaguest grasp of nation and ethnicity, and no deep impression of defending their homeland. But remembering the name of a great man who had shown them kindness—that was simpler than simple.

The thoughts of these peasant soldiers were thoroughly unadorned: Lord Amasjia. Von. William has given us food and clothing, let us live better lives, so we’re glad to give our lives for him!

That such a mindset had formed among the national army was no small credit to the efforts of those propagandists!

Amasjia. Von. William was quite confident about crushing those noble warlords, for a very simple reason: the armies those nobles had hurriedly expanded differed little from the feudal levies raised by the aristocrats of the Kingdom of the Radiant God. Well, maybe their weapons were a bit better—at least they had firearms like matchlocks. The Kingdom of the Radiant God’s level of industrial development was even more backward than that of the Madrid Empire!

Looking at equipment alone, the noble warlords and Amasjia’s national army were about evenly matched. Perhaps the noble warlords had a slight edge—at least they had cavalry wings made up of trusted knights and elite pikemen formed from household guards.

In this age, soldiers wielding long pikes were often braver than musketeers. That is, of course, speaking of ordinary human troops; any individual soldier in the elite legions had been tested by blood!

In any case, soldiers who could fight in close combat were always more ferocious than those who simply fired their guns from afar. Thus, the backbone of every noble warlord’s force—the pike phalanxes—were all household guards who attended their lords year-round. They were few in number, but every one of them was a warrior who dared to fight.

As for the levies, even the nobles themselves didn’t trust them much. Hand them a few muskets to make a bang and swell the noise of the army—that was all they were good for.

And so, Amasjia divided his 250,000 troops into five columns and drove them straight at the noble warlords, with each column accompanied by ten thousand new-model soldiers serving as enforcement troops. This was a fine opportunity for training. These national troops had morale to spare, but they were peasant militias who had never shed blood, and Amasjia genuinely did not feel comfortable throwing them straight against the elite legions of the Frankish Empire.

Even if the soldiers had the will to fight, the continuous thunder of cannon fire and volleys on the battlefield would be enough to frighten these inexperienced common recruits out of their wits. Before that day came, it was better to let them see blood and steel their nerve—a recruit who froze in terror the moment he stepped onto the battlefield was not a qualified piece of cannon fodder!

While the allied armies of the two nations advanced in great strides deep into the heart of the Madrid Empire, the Germanic National Army and the noble warlords formally went to war!