Both recruits looked at me in nervousness and I guessed that some of the anger I had been restraining was visible. Haltingly the one asked, "What should we have done?"
"This column is riding parallel with the border. Every soldier in this command is craning their head towards the border in order to be the first to see the enemy coming. Should a greater force than our own attack from the border the option remains to us to simply retreat into Philanthia if…….… if we've not been cut off by a force already within Philanthia! One of you should have rode to the rear and the other to the front. Once 2 miles out from the column you should have angled back, one along the borderlands and the other along the homeward side of Philanthia, but as of right now we are blind to what lays behind us, ahead of us, and towards Philanthia proper! This is unacceptable!"
"We're sorry sir. We weren't thinking."
"No, you weren't listening, because I just reiterated everything I told you both this morning before we left camp!"
Both soldiers winced visibly, but I wasn't done with them. I was so intent on the pair of scouts before me I almost tuned out the exclamation of alarm in the ranks behind me. In sudden dread I looked toward Philanthia and saw my nightmare become reality, as a mounted force bearing the standard of Crona separated out from a patch of forest.
Drawing my sword I used it to point to the oncoming line of cavalry, "Case in point! Fall into the line!" The two scouts hop skipped their mounts quickly away from me, only wanting to disappear from my view forever.
I watched the approaching cavalry closely. They were moving too slow in my opinion and there were too few of them. We were almost even numbers, but the Cronians were smarter than that.
I looked to the sides of the border we patrolled and I thought I saw a bit of movement off to the one side on Philanthia's side. So that was the game. They wanted us to charge the force before us and then two flanking forces, still hidden, would converge on us from along the border, while we were locked immobile with the first attack.
If I attacked the force before us a lot of boys would die this day as few yet had the stomach or abilities needed to power through the force of soldiers that stood between us and home, in order to avoid the trap of the two flanking forces. The only place the enemy probably wasn't was over the border, because they knew that was where we would be looking for them.