Merkenwig, the Sixth!

As the Wurstburp left-wing wheels in retrograde to try and meet the threat from the enemy, the Kurlandian cavalry receive new orders. These orders are not to their commander Boris Katsonov's liking. This isn't a surprise, because the orders instruct him to wait three days for the arrival of Grigori Savvinos, who will then take him out to lunch. Alas, Savvinos has been multi-tasking in his role as Grand Duchess Catherine's chief of staff. Writing one missive to Katsonov with his new orders, and another to his mother laying out the arrangements for her birthday, he has inadvertently swapped the messages. 

For most other Mittelheim cavalry, an invitation to halt for a couple of days on the battlefield and then have someone else pay for lunch would seem like a perfectly reasonable request from higher command. But Katsonov is having none of it. In the heat of the battle, he wants nothing more than to get to grips with the enemy - even an enemy as dirty as the Wurstburpers. So, he orders one of his units into a rash frontal assault upon the enemy (below)!

As a military enterprise, it is an attack that rates higher for its optimism than it does for its pragmatism. The Wurstburpers actually much prefer hand-to-hand combat to firing (or bathing), and the chance to head-butt some horses just increases the fun from their perspective. 

(Above) The outcome is predictable, and the Kurlandian horsemen are driven back in disorder. They are not happy. Although. on balance, they are probably happier than Grigori Savvinos' mother, who will be receiving a letter from her son instructing her immediately to work her way around the flank of the nearest Wurstburpers and rush on them from behind. This is by anyone's standards a poor way of celebrating one's birthday .

As the Kurlandian cavalry take the opportunity to retrograde even further in order to evade enemy musket fire, General Pronounski decides that it is time to try and seize back the initiative.  The initiative, however, seems to have been frustratingly lubed up by the Kurlandians with the very slippiest of lard. The general orders up his right-flank cavalry. His aim is to thrash the Cassock irregulars off the hill to his front, and then menace the Kurlandian infantry, as preparation for a wild charge by his infantry.

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(Above) Alas, as happens so often during battles in Mittelheim, there manifests suddenly a strange laxity in map reading. A large and hitherto unseen marsh appears suddenly in front of the Kurlandian cavalry. To the sound of unmanly tittering from the Cassocks, the initiative slips with a plop from Unpronounski grasping hands.

(Above) The Kurlandian sniggering is short-lived, however. Displaying a flexibility more often associated with Mittelheim moral scruples than with the manoeuvres of their cavalry arm, the Wurstburp horse form into mass. The tittering amongst the Cassock irregular cavalry stops. Having reduced their frontage, the enemy can now not only pass the bog, but they will be in an even better position to charge in upon the Kurlandian flank!