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and choose the only historically correct road. By cajoling the Tatars and doing his best to be on friendly terms with them, Alexander secured for himself freedom of action in the West whence loomed the greatest danger to the Russian people and to the first shoots of national consciousness engendered by aggression from East and West. Alexander decided to deliver his first blow at the Germans.
The Battle on the Ice, fought on Lake Chudskoye on April 5, 1242, crowned the successful campaign he waged together with his peasant militia. It was the climax of the brilliantly planned military campaign against the invader who tried to check the advance of Alexander's vanguard at Izborsk and to encircle his main force. Alexander divined the German plan and, surprising the enemy by a vanguard manoeuvre, stopped him on the western bank of the lake, close to the mouth of the Embach. Numerically overwhelmed, the vanguard, under the command of the valiant Domash Tverdislavich and Kerbet, wasdefeated. Undaunted, Alexander retreated to the frozen Lake Chudskoye and, without crossing to the eastern (Russian) bank, resolved to engage the Germans at the gulf joining lakes Chudskoye and Pskovskoye. The Teutons attacked in the terrible, invincible wedge formation..
Let us picture to ourselves this formation, formerly considered invincible. Imagine the stem of a battleship or a powerful tank magnified to the size of one hundred iron-clad horsemen advancing in serried ranks. Imagine this gigantic iron triangle advancing at full gallop and gathering momentum. Imagine, finally, the "thin edge" of this giant iron wedge cutting into the very midst of the enemy soldiers, stupefied by the terrible mass of steel bearing down upon them: instead of the knights' faces they see steel visors with cross-shaped openings. No sooner does the wedge split the enemy front than it breaks up into so many "spears," each "spear" being an iron-clad knight (the prototype of a light tank), cutting his way through the living mass of the enemy soldiers and felling them right and left. The comparison with a light tank becomes all the more convincing when we recall that a "spear" was not one knight but a whole group of men (sometimes thirteen) consisting of armour-bearers, pages, knaves,, horsemen, all acting at one with the knight.
With the state of military art as it was in those days it was as impossible to withstand the attack of a wedge as trying to stop a tank with bare hands is today.
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