WE TRIED TRANSLATIONS

Translator: Abood

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◈ Friedrich's Battlefield

Chapter 58: The Ducal House’s Circumstances

Ostburg Fortress had been recaptured just three days after it had fallen.

That grim news reached Remscheid shortly after dinnertime.

"Unforgivable! They had an entire battalion! How could they not even hold a single fortress?"

"What was the commander doing?!"

"This makes no sense! I demand a full explanation!"

Inside the conference room of the Bachstein ducal residence, the house’s senior retainers, urgently summoned, made no effort to hide their panic or fury as they interrogated the messenger knight.

The same young knight who had brought the joyful news of the fortress’s capture just days earlier now stood barely upright, supported on both sides by soldiers. He had forced himself to ride in from the front in just over half a day, a march that would take a full battalion a day and a half. His breath was ragged, and he clearly lacked the strength to even speak.

"Well? Speak! Explain yourself!"

"That’s right! You call yourself a knight? Then no matter the time or place—"

"Enough. Compose yourselves. You are in the presence of His Highness the Prince."

The one who stepped in to stop them was Duke Ernst himself. Not only was he concerned for the exhausted knight who had clearly used every last ounce of strength just to bring the report, but he also wished to prevent the house elders from disgracing themselves in front of Prince Konrad, who was seated beside him.

“Though the loss of Ostburg Fortress is indeed grave, and I too would like to hear the details, there is a matter we must prioritize before anything else. The two hundred prisoners reportedly abandoned on the plains.”

After the messenger was dismissed, Ernst’s words brought a heavy silence to the room, as if the earlier shouting had never happened. The elders of the house fell into grim contemplation.

“Should we move to rescue them after all?”

“But can we truly afford that right now? Even if we do recover them, half-dead prisoners can’t return to the front lines anytime soon. And there are many injured, aren’t there?”

“To begin with... this reeks of a trap. Isn’t it obvious?”

“You’re saying we should abandon them? Two hundred trained soldiers of the ducal army we’ve spent years building up? My own daughter is among those prisoners, left behind in that field!”

As voices of hesitation filled the room, one man’s anger broke through the growing doubt.

The one who shouted was Egmont, Ernst’s cousin and himself a knight of the ducal army. His daughter, Knight Franziska, had been the commanding officer of the battalion that was captured. She too was among those now abandoned on the plains.

“I understand that, but… wasn’t it Knight Franziska’s defeat that brought about this entire situation?”

“That’s right. And forgive me for saying it, but once your daughter became a knight, she had to accept the risk of death in battle—”

“Death in battle? You call this a battlefield death? Bound hand and foot, discarded on the plains like refuse is that what you call an honorable death in war?! If she’d died fighting, I would have grieved with pride. But this? I didn’t raise my daughter to become a knight just to let her die like this! For all we know, this very moment she’s freezing or being torn apart by beasts!”

No one could offer a strong rebuttal to Egmont’s impassioned plea. All those present had known Knight Franziska since she was a child, and considered her part of the ducal family.

“I too believe the prisoners should not be abandoned.”

Once the room had sunk into a heavy silence, it was Duke Ernst who broke it.

“Before you all gathered here, I received word, news of the prisoners has already begun to spread among the soldiers. Naturally, the men expect them to be rescued. These captives are their neighbors, their friends, their brothers. If we, the ducal house, were to abandon them, we would risk not only the loyalty of the remaining seven hundred soldiers but the affection of all eighty thousand subjects of our domain.”

The Bachstein Ducal Army was largely composed of part-time soldiers. Most of them were half-farmers, rotating between military service and training while spending about half the year tending their land. It was thanks to this system that they could maintain a force nearly the size of a full regiment.

In a population of eighty thousand, gathering a thousand soldiers meant nearly every man in the army had family, friends, or neighbors among the ranks. They trained and fought alongside people they’d grown up with. Their purpose wasn’t simply to wield arms, it was to protect their families, their land, their shared homeland. This was what gave them their cohesion and kept morale high, despite their part-time status.

The ducal house had, in fact, deliberately fostered and taken advantage of this local pride and familial bond.

And now, one in five of those soldiers had been cast out under the early spring sky. They lay freezing, vulnerable to beasts and suffering. Among the main force remaining in Remcheid, nearly every soldier had someone among the captured, someone from their village, their family, someone they cared about.

If the ducal house chose to abandon them, of course there would be backlash. Not just from the army, but from the families of the captured, and from all those with ties to the soldiers. The discontent would spread throughout the entire domain. The people would never forgive a ruling house that dragged its soldiers into rebellion against the crown, only to discard two hundred of them when it became inconvenient.

Even if they managed to seize the throne, it wasn’t as though they could immediately take full control over the central functions of the kingdom. The ducal domain would still have to remain the foundation of their power. They couldn’t afford to provoke widespread backlash from the people at this stage.

Ernst and the others had no choice but to rescue the prisoners, precisely because they had relied so heavily on the soldiers’ deep-rooted ties of land and blood to maintain their unity up until now.

“But Ernst… as some have already said, what if this is a trap?”

It was Prince Konrad who cautiously interjected, likely aware of his lack of military experience. And because those were words spoken by their future king, Ernst gave a nod of acknowledgment.

“Your Highness is likely correct. The Ferdinand Regiment must be anticipating our attempt to retrieve the captives and waiting in ambush. Which is why we must act accordingly. The enemy lies in wait within our own domain, we know this terrain down to the last stone. We can likely guess where their ambushes are positioned... I will lead the main force of the ducal army myself. We will break through their trap and bring our soldiers home.”

As supreme commander of the Bachstein Ducal Army and as head of House Bachstein, Ernst declared this with resolute conviction, as if to affirm his own resolve.

・・・・・・

The following morning, out of the Bachstein Ducal Army’s main force led by Ernst, five hundred troops were preparing to depart Remscheid, excluding the portion left behind to guard Prince Konrad and maintain order in the encampment.

“Duke Bachstein. I’ll ask you one more time, are you truly set on going?”

The one who called out to Ernst just as he was about to give the command to depart was Knight Celestan, the adjutant to Countess Cecilia Fargiere.

“...Of course I am.”

Ernst responded coldly to Celestan, who had been dispatched in Cecilia’s place to lead Arelia’s advance unit while she remained in the homeland to rally more troops.

“Then allow me just once more to offer my advice. Please reconsider. Charging into the Ferdinand Regiment’s trap with only the ducal army is an extremely reckless move. Even if it results in some political damage, the prisoners should be abandoned.”

Ernst’s brows furrowed.

What could a foreign officer like him possibly know about the internal workings of the ducal army? For him to dismiss such a critical political matter as some damage was utterly unacceptable.

“We have already explained our situation. If you insist so strongly, then the Kingdom of Arelia should send troops as well. I am not asking you to deploy all your forces, just a few hundred would suffice. With that, you could match or even surpass the enemy who has surely set a trap.”

Since the Ferdinand Regiment will not simply abandon the fortress, even if they have laid an ambush using prisoners as bait, their numbers will be between about five hundred to at most seven hundred. If we assemble around a thousand soldiers, we will hold the numerical advantage, and that would be enough to secure a decisive victory.

“No. The authority entrusted to me by Countess Fargiere to deploy Arelian troops only applies to sending reinforcements to the fortress after its capture. Now that the fortress has been retaken by the enemy, I cannot move the Arelian army on my own accord solely to rescue your prisoners.”

“In that case, inform Countess Fargiere that the situation has drastically changed, and ask if she can lend us some troops. You brought a hawk handler with you, yes?”

“Yes. But I sent the hawk to Countess Fargiere in the early morning. To deliver the report that the ducal army had failed to recapture Ostburg Fortress.”

“You sent the only hawk you had without consulting us?”

Ernst glared at him, but Knight Celestan did not flinch in the slightest.

“Yes. I thought there was nothing else to report. I never expected you would try to forcefully rescue prisoners today, fully aware it was a trap.”

Ernst clicked his tongue loudly, clearly irritated by the insolent reply.

This knight was blatantly underestimating them, relying too much on the prestige of the Kingdom of Arelia and the famed Countess Fargiere. At first, he had acted respectfully, but day by day his true colors were showing.

The other Arelian soldiers had similar attitudes. Despite the prior agreement that the Bachstein Duchy army and Arelian forces would operate as equals in this campaign, the reality was different.

“Countess Fargiere’s unit is still some distance away, so the hawk won’t return until around noon. After that, we will need to rest the valuable hawk before sending another letter. Once we receive a reply from Countess Fargiere, only then can we decide on deploying Arelian troops. So… we ask that you wait until tomorrow to depart.”

“I can’t afford to wait that long! Enough! We don’t need your kingdom’s help to rescue our men!”

Ernst shouted at Celestan, unwilling to keep his soldiers who are eager to save their comrades wait an entire day.

Ernst held anti-Imperial views, but that didn’t mean he favored the Kingdom of Arelia. He simply thought that, being fellow Lutetians, they were better than the Rigald Empire.

In the end, the nature of great powers didn’t change. Powerful neighbors whether to the east or west, were only troublesome and unpleasant. That much was clear to him now more than ever.

He had a plan. A strategy he had spent the entire night formulating. With it, he would successfully rescue the prisoners on his own.

If he pulled it off, Arelia’s opinion of them would change. By proving the strength of the Duchy’s army and his own skill as commander, he would reduce how much and how often Arelia looked down on them, both during the ongoing campaign and in the governance of Konrad after the throne was seized.

This was his once-in-a-lifetime gamble. If he couldn’t win at this crucial moment, there was no way he could turn around the even tougher challenges ahead. He could never properly save the Kingdom of Edelstein.

“That’s enough talk! We leave now! Understood?”

“…This is the second time I’ve advised you. Don’t forget that.”

Ignoring Celestan’s parting words, Ernst ordered the officers to move out. The five hundred troops of the Duchy’s army who had been waiting eagerly hurried forward to begin their advance.

Footnotes: 

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