During his desperate march through the snow and the night back toward Klow, King Ivan left a small rear guard at the small town of Orehovo. This was a wise move in the circumstances, as his force was flagging and increasingly disordered and would surely have been destroyed by a well organized rear attack. Orehovo had modest fortifications constructed by the Bordurians to protect the bridge leading to Klow, defenses that dated back to the before their campaigns against King Karel II (before 1645). With a fort and a bridge at its back (to the east), Orehovo was an ideal place to block pursuit and it was in fact the last place where Ivan could reasonably hope to do so with the men at his disposal. Ivan’s rear guard was quite small, consisting of a squadron of huszjar light cavalry (Syldavian hussars, rather good men but there weren’t many of them), a substantial battalion of militia infantry typically used as light infantry (the steadier of the two
News, plans and plots regarding my 18th century Imagi-Nations campaign set in the fictitious nations of Syldavia and Borduria, my variations on a theme of Hergé