When you are in a shield wall, you have one task to accomplish—stay alive so that the spearmen behind you have some protection against attacking swordsmen. Let them do the killing; all you need to do is protect them. Owning a ‘V’ shield greatly facilitates that task, and so when a shield wall was formed to defend the bridge from the Ansteorran army, I stepped forward to offer my ‘V’ shield to the service of Trimaris.
I was the 3rd shield man on the right, and shield wall tactics are such that when a shield is lost, all the remaining shields shift right to fill the gaps. A line of shields is formed behind the leftmost shield in the wall to supply shield that are missing in the wall.
After a couple of heavy charges and assaults, the two shields on my right were lost, and I found myself on the right most point of the bridge. The spearmen on the other side of the wall were trying their damnest to get past my shield and get me, and they were doing this in a few ways.
First off they were trying to get me to open the shield by punching hard at it with spears. A couple of times they even got it pretty open, but I was able to close the shield again before a second spear could get me.
A second tactic was to try to hook the shield to open it. I was stopping that from happening by dislodging their hooks with my sword, or holding on to the shield so that they could not open it, or letting the shield open up while retreating out of spear range to dislodge the spear. As soon as the spears were dislodged I returned to my original position and waited for the next assault.
One advantage that I had, being on the end of the shield wall, was that I could see the shadows of the spears as they tried to hook my shield. From that, I could get an idea of when I could relax, and when I had to watch out.
One effective way to take out a big shield is to walk up to the blind side and hit over the shield. Happily anyone who came close to my shield had to deal with the spearmen behind me, so that didn’t work too well either. Also, the Ansteorrans has set up their own shield wall which was preventing their own troops form getting too close to me.
The clobbering from the spears was held off for brief moments while either the Ansteorran or Trimarian sides charged the other’s shield wall. When Ansteorra charged, I had to hold them back, and take a shot or two if I could get away with it with little risk to myself. Sometimes I would be asked to move aside to let Trimarian troops through to do a charge. Occasionally I would join the charge, killing whomever I could, and then return to my position.
As people were getting knocked out, they sat on the side of the bridge to watch the fight. Since I was on one side of the bridge, many people could see me hold that point, and after holding the point for some time, people started to cheer. They could see me getting pushed back, and then return to my position, again and again. Nobody knew who I was because first off I am still quite a new fighter, and secondly, I was wearing a simple Trimarian blue tabard, with no other visible device.
Some time during the battle, I noticed a glaive-man behind me. Since it is my job to protect and assist the spearmen and glaives in any way that I can, I asked him if there was something that I could do for him. After all, he was the one who was going to do the killing. All I needed to do was prevent him from getting killed. It turned out that the glaive-man was Sir Severin, and he was quite surprised at my question. He figured that it was all that I could manage to keep standing under the constant assaults, so when I calmly asked him what I could do for him, he was very taken aback.
I ended up holding that point for about 45 minutes. While I could hear cheering from the spectators, I thought that they were cheering about something that was going on elsewhere.
Finally, there was yet another charge, but this time I was swept forwards onto my shield. Technically, you are not supposed to hit a man if he is on the ground, which is where I was, but I was not taking any chances. I parried a couple of spear thrusts, while I tried to get back on my feet. This didn’t work very well, as I was pretty much lying on top of my shield and could not get up while holding on to the shield handle. I ended up letting go of the handle, and retreated dragging the shield back with me by the straps. A risky procedure as my fingers could be been crushed while my hands were not protected by the hand protection on the shield. Unfortunately, in that final charge, my shield hand protection (a few aluminum plates held together by string and duct tape) was damaged, forcing me to leave the line.
I got out of combat and made some hasty repairs to the hand protection. Then I went back into the melee. I didn’t want to prevent anyone else from being in the shield wall, so I took my place in the reserve shield line. While I was waiting to get back into the fight, I was relaxing in the back of the group. I guess I was a little too relaxed, because there was a push at the shield wall, and through a domino effect, one of the other reserve shields ended up pushing me into the river! Sploosh! What a way to go.
A few minutes later, the Ansteorrans gave another charge, defeated the rest of the wall and won the battle.
Soon after the battle, some rather strange things started happening to me. The marshal overlooking the bridge (Sir/Lord Wilfred, I believe) came over and congratulated me on doing such a great job on the bridge. Then a few other people came over and said the same thing. For the next few days, I was getting compliments from all over the place.
The next day, between field battles, Lord Wilfred brought be up in front of the fighters of the Triskel Legion and held me up as an example of a fighter with courage and valor. That was pretty cool.
Later that day, I heard that an Ansteorran knight was looking for me. When he found me, he too congratulated me on holding the bridge for so long, and he presented me with a gift. It was a left handed gauntlet! Apparently he had realized that I left the field due to my broken armor, and in providing me with a good left gauntlet was allowed avoid that issue in the future. Wow!
Finally, during the Trimaris court, two Lion d’Ors were handed out. One of them was awarded to Duke Bytor for taking out three other dukes at the bridge battle. I believe that they fell of the bridge, with a little help from Bytor, who ended up taking a swim himself.
The second one went to me. It turns out that when Sir Severin was knocked out of the bridge battle, he sat on the sidelines to see how long I would last. He watched me push back wave after wave of assaults, and still remain standing. He told the King about what he saw, and later on, he told the whole court what he had seen. It was very flattering and I was elated by the experience. Suddenly I was a celebrity! And getting the same award at the same time as Duke Bytor was an exceptional honor.