Chapter 402 — Walking Corpses
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Even if the "heavenly fire" fell right on their heads, he would not get up! They would not get up either!
They tore at the last of the bread and flatbread; the human spirit of sharing even welled up in some minds, and those who still had food split it in two and pressed it to the lips of companions beside them who had long been famished. Amid the deafening roar of the heavenly fire, the knight of Kritland and the soldiers he led ate these final morsels in silence, until the explosions died away, until the acrid, stinging smell that always followed a magic blast drifted to their side.
And then they simply sat and lay among the earthen pits and the stones, thinking nothing, doing nothing.
When a Cecil "recovery squad" found this band, its captain was badly startled.
Several noble knights with a few dozen private soldiers were sitting only a few hundred meters from where the last shelling had fallen. Half of them had already slumped into unconsciousness; those still awake watched the Cecil soldiers appear before them with numb faces. That dead-man's gaze left a deep impression on the captain of the recovery squad, and years later he described what he had seen thus:
"...Once they crossed that limit, their will (the noble coalition's) was completely destroyed. They moved across the plain like walking corpses, and when their strength ran out they stopped and sat down wherever they happened to be. Our shells fell beside them and they did not stir at all. They would finish the last of their food, and then simply wait like that. Surrender? No, they were not trying to surrender; they did not think of it at all. They were merely staying where they were. Only, when we arrived, they cooperated quite readily and threw out all their weapons. Their one and only request was to sleep... it seemed that so long as they could rest in peace for a while, they would do anything at all."
On the eighth day after the battle of Gravel Ridge ended, the fleeing noble coalition began to surrender in great numbers — or rather, to halt where they stood and wait quietly for the Cecils to "incorporate" them.
Sir Philip and Wald Perrich beheld the most inconceivable sight they had seen since taking up arms: men utterly stripped of the will to fight drifting across the plain in whole batches like walking corpses. Capturing prisoners no longer required any fighting at all — a few shots fired into the ground beneath their feet, or a single crystal grenade tossed into the distance, was enough.
They would stop of their own accord; indeed, if you gave them a rope, they would tie their own hands.
On the tenth day after the battle of Gravel Ridge ended, the Cecil Combat Corps entered the western part of the Southern Region. Through a series of circuitous marches they swung in a long arc around the Carrol-Konsko area and continued their "pursuit" toward the Hosman domain; and that afternoon, the knight Byron, leading a thousand reinforcements and a great quantity of supplies from the Cecil homeland, effected a junction with Philip's corps.