Herald of Steel

The military commanders seemed to be in unanimous agreement that the new bow was an epoch-defining weapon.

And this sentiment was reflected by the fact that their eyes seemed to glow with happiness every time their eyes landed on the bows held by the soldiers

The only exception was Hemicus, who also had a similar initial reaction before it was extinguished by Alexander.

And hence he did not join in the celebrations.

Alexander gave the men some time to discuss the weapon amongst themselves, and in the meantime, he also gloated over his invention.

And then decided it was regretfully time to bring the party down.

But contrary to Hemicus’s expectation, Alexander did not dampen such enthusiasm with the weight of money.

Instead, like the live fire demonstration, he decided to show them the problem of using such a weapon in open combat.

“Ahem,” Alexander faked a cough to draw his military commanders’ attention, and asked, “I trust you have enjoyed the show?”

“Yes, lord! To think you have made such a weapon! It’s … it’s…,” Menes seemed unable to find the right words.

This was both because he was overwhelmed, but also because Alexander had strictly ordered all to use Azhak and only Azhak in all formal settings, a language that Menes was still not proficient in.

As a side note, Alexander’s instruction had produced great resistance in the army, and even now, Alexander knew that outside of communicating with him, Thesian was the primary medium of communication among the officers.

The reason for this was two folds, one because the time had been too short for the army to learn the language, less than two months.

And also because the Thesians were very proud of their heritage, and were determined to vehemently resist their way of life.

But what was funny was though there was an official version of Thesians which was used in formal speaking and writing, there was also an extremely varied range of dialects that people of different regions of the area used.

And sometimes they could be so different that Alexander would wonder why they were not a different language by themselves.

Alexander ignored these actions for now because there was no better way, and also because he knew the switch would be inevitable.

These people living in a foreign land would naturally pick up the native language while mixing with the locals who outnumber them maybe two to one just in Zanzan city, and maybe hundreds of times over Adhania.

Alexander also planned to favor officers who spoke the language of the land, so if the soldiers wanted better pay and greater social status, they would have to learn to apply themselves to the customs of the land.

This was done because Alexander did not want to deal with an army that spoke a hundred different languages.

But such considerations were for later, as Menes’s amazed answer was followed by other similar responses.

“Mmm, I’m glad that you enjoyed it,” Alexander answered to all the praises with a light smile, and then suddenly proposed, “Now, let us see the same thing while in a battlefield setting.”

“…..” The others were a bit confused by this and thought, ‘Isn’t this a battlefield setting?’

But they decided not to question Alexander, but instead wait and see what their lord meant.

And soon what their lord meant became obvious, as new, now wooden targets were set up, but more importantly, they saw supply wagons being pulled up about two to hundred meters behind the men.

Alexander intended to simulate the logistics of delivering the arrows from the back to the front.

And this sight immediately made the veteran commanders have a sinking feeling.

They were battle-hardened enough to understand what Alexander was eluding to even before the start of the demonstration and all their enthusiasm vanished into thin air.

And soon their fears came true and some more with the commencement of the demonstration, which began under Alexander’s command, “Start.”

At this signal, the soldiers restarted the procedure of letting off their bows and finished their entire quiver in less than a minute.

In the meantime, there were boys, uncreatively named arrow boys running to and fro between the supply wagon and the front, carrying stacks and stacks of arrows with them in an attempt to resupply the archers.

And in this endeavor, they were doing a remarkably good job, somehow managing to run the 300 meters, deliver the arrows, again run back the same distance to the supply wagon, collect an appropriate number of arrows, and then repeat the process.

And with this constant supply, the twenty men were able to keep up the steady stream of fire without great trouble.

But though the archers were having no trouble, the military commanders watching the demonstration were very much in trouble.

For they noticed what was going on.

They noticed that Alexander had assigned one arrow boy to each archer which was a ridiculous arrangement.

For context, the tooth-to-tail ratio, which was the number of supporting men that were needed to keep a soldier fighting was 1:4 for Alexnader’s army, which was evident by the fact that 1200 servants served with the 4800 soldiers.

And so it was impossible for Alexander or any army for that matter to assign individual logisticians to each and every archer.

There were many other jobs during a battle after all.

Taking care of the wounded, being messengers and heralds, and guarding the camp against enemies and also against looters from one’s own army.

So even if Alexander was Mansa Musa and had the money to throw 45,000 ropals per minute against his enemy, the difficulty of refilling the soldiers’ quivers was too high.

It might be possible in an ideal situation such as a test range and with a very small number of men, but the situation would be vastly different in a real battlefield.

For instance, in real life, the archers would not be arranged in a checkerboard formation, but be bunched together to maximize the concentration of firepower.

And so there would not be just two rows of just twenty men, but multiple rows. maybe more than ten, containing hundreds of men.

This meant that would be very difficult to resupply those in the more frontal sections, and especially those in the middle row, even if there were enough arrow boys to get the arrows from the back to the front.

The experiment ended, or more appropriately fizzled out after a few minutes when the arrow boys become too tired to keep running to and fro between the wagon and archers, causing many of the archers to stand still and defenseless with empty quivers, while others had to significantly slow down the rate of fire to match the delivery speed.

After giving a hand signal to end the demonstration, Alexander turned to face a crowd with a much-downcast look.

The mood had changed very much within the short timespan, transforming the once vibrant and cheery atmosphere into a gloomy countenance of disappointment.

All the men present were smart enough to recognize what had happened and understood the hard limitations this new kind of weapon had.

The constraint was logistics and hard physics and there really was no solution to this.

For the instant bow’s rate of fire was too much to make it a sustainable weapon on the battlefield.

And if the rate was reduced, then why use it over a regular bow which was significantly cheaper?

“My lord, how many arrows can the men carry?” Menes asked in a low unyielding voice.

He was not resolved and wished to make the men carry as many arrows as possible.

“Each of the men carried twenty, ten on each pouch attached to either side of their legs. They also had five arrows in their…umm….bows, for a total of twenty-five shots. Which lets them fire at full rate for 50 seconds.” Alexander gave the numbers.

“My lord, regular archers can carry 60 arrows in their quivers. And I have seen that the arrows fired by these bows are much shorter, similar to crossbow bolts. So they should be able to carry a hundred right?” This observation was made by Hemicus, and the fact that the usually taciturn man had spoken so much so quickly proved his enthusiasm for the bow.

And this proposal was buttressed by Melodias who joyously commented, “That’s right. That’s right. The pounch might be useful for getting the bolts out quickly, but we can sacrifice that little bit of speed, no problem.”

But the party pooper Alexander had to burst their bubble before his military commanders got too ahead of themselves.

Because it would not work.

Even if 100 arrows could be carried, which for the record Alexander did not think the soldiers could carry, but even if they could, the number was too small.

For context, at the battle of Agincourt, it is estimated that the English had 1 million arrows and 4,000 longbowmen.

That gave each archer an average of 250 arrows. .

Also, the battle lasted four hours, which gave the longbowmen an average firing rate of roughly 1 arrow every minute.

While Alexander’s instant bow would fire around 30 arrows every minute.

Now, it had to be remembered that the English archers did not shoot one arrow every minute for four hours.

They shoot in bursts and the actual firing rate was actually a lot more.

Meaning their logistic chain was capable was supplying a lot more than 4000 arrows per minute.

But still, it would not have been 30 arrows per archer per minute, making the instant bow unviable to be used in open combat.