Ten Days Later
By midday, the air over Tournelle was thick with the stench of blood and churned earth.
The thawed ground had been broken into a sucking mire by thousands of boots, hooves, and the weight of the dead as the summer rains began to set in over the Western portion of the continent.
The first Francian counter-invasion wave had collapsed exactly as Julius expected — shattered against the disciplined Romanus wall.
But this being their home nation, the second and third quickly came one after the other.
Peasant levies for the most part, pulled from villages, towns and cities and pressed into military service by the noble, or encouraged to stand up and fight for their nation the heroine Sain Joan.
While the Romanus lines bore the brunt of the human wave tactics they managed not to break.
For weeks since Julius left the front, the lines had not advanced much, and not at all in some regions.
