Pilgrimage of Grace/Battle of the Border
The Battle of the Border, commenced on 6.II.1698 AN,was an effort to clear the remaining elements of the Gunbatsu Clique from the northern frontier of Huan Province, thereby opening up lines of communication between rebel held Dalmacija and Humanist-controlled Arboria.
Lifang
On 6.II.1698, Kildari militia, moved into positions north of Lifang in stages through a series of night marches launched a general assault against the positions of the Third Field Army, trapped between the frontier with Arboria in the north, and the rebel held territories of the south. A host consisting of up to one-hundred warbands had assembled along a front some fifty kilometres in length. As the Kildari rebels crawled the last distance in the dark towards the designated points from which their attacks would be launched, the calm of the night was shattered by an cannonade, comprised of captured field guns, the twin-barrelled main armament of obsolete Dolstier main battle tanks salvaged from museums and reserve vehicle parks, and an innumerable multitude of improvised artillery pieces, mortars, and rocket launchers. The bombardment had commenced at four in the morning and continued for several hours, slackening as the individual warbands expended their reserves of shells and rockets, before coming to a halt with the dawning of the Atos and the advent of daybreak by seven-thirty.
Surging forward from under cover, the rebels, equipped with a confusion of P62 rifles, antique muskets, hunting pieces, and the savage bladed implements that were the legacy of Kildare's feudal Shirerithian past, sought to beat their way through the defensive lines of the 5th Heavenly Corps. While focusing on pushing their way into the Jing lines through a landscape of craters, and half-buried foxholes, the more fanatical amongst the Kildari were seen to be throwing themselves onto barbed wire and attempting to haul out of the way field obstacles with their bare hands. More disconcerting still were the waves of knife wielding youths who, with the symbolic plastic keys to paradise hung around their necks, were directed by their elders to rush across those fields in which anti-personnel mines were thought to have been laid. Those boys, apparently drug addled, who find martyrdom underfoot rushed on until stopped cold by the continuous hail of bullets or the despairing thrust of a bayonet.
As the first dull thud of explosions reverberated amongst the first line of Jing defences it became apparent what the Kildari were so recklessly intent on protecting. One attacker in every twenty carried a satchel charge of up to nine kilograms of explosives, which they would hurl, once they were beneath the depression of the enemies field of fire, smouldering into any emplacement or defensive strongpoint which required demolition.
Alongside these, one in every ten of the Kildari grasped a length of scaffold pole to which had been welded a mortar bomb studded with percussion caps. The divisions of the Third Field Army were an armoured and mechanised force, and the grim duty of those bearing these devices was stalk the Dolstier II main battle tanks and T-86 light tanks that would be roaming the battlefields. Having reached as close as a dozen paces from the target vehicle, the final duty of those carrying the polebomb would be to break cover and to dash forward so as to thrust the device into the tracks of the armoured vehicle. It being considered the gift of Mors, Cedrist god of death, as to whether the man who had thrust home the bomb survived the ensuing detonation or not.
If any carrying one carrying either form of the explosive devices was killed in the act of carrying them forward the general order had been given that the nearest man to the fallen was to set aside his previous task and snatch the charge, taking on the obligation to deliver it against the nearest available target. It was with good reason therefore that those who stormed towards the Jing defensive perimeters in the first wave were known as the Forlorn Sacrifice.
