Von Arnim would have no choice but to acknowledge receipt of that message. Still, mobilizing ten thousand men was not a quick process, especially in February. By the time he could get his army onto the field to join Banér’s, anything might have happened.
Banér could be dead. Stearns could be dead. Both could be dead. The chancellor could be dead. The emperor could have regained his wits.
A horse might even have learned to sing.
Paris, capital of France
After he finished reading the copies of the intercepted radio messages that Servien had given him, Cardinal Richelieu rose from his desk and went over to one of the window in his palace.
“A real pity,” said Servien, echoing the sentiment he’d expressed a month earlier.
Richelieu said nothing. He didn’t agree with his intendant, as it happened. It might be better to say, was feeling a different sort of pity this morning.
Pity poor France. What had the great nation done to so offend God, that he inflicted Monsieur Gaston upon it?
And an even greater mystery: What had the wretched Germanies done to gain His favor, that He would bless them with such a prince?
Madrid, capital of Spain
There was no reaction to Mike Stearns’ radio messages in the court of Spain.
They had no radio. They wouldn’t receive the news for days yet.
Brussels, capital of the Netherlands
Fernando I looked around the conference table at his closest advisers.
“We’re all agreed, then?” said the king in the Netherlands. “We will still take no advantage of the current civil conflict in the USE, even now when it’s coming to a full boil?”
“With Stearns on a rampage?” said Rubens. “Risky, that.”
“He’s badly outnumbered,” pointed out Scaglia. “Outclassed, too, in terms of experience.”
Miguel de Manrique shook his head. “The numbers probably aren’t as bad as they look, Alessandro. And in that sort of fight—it’ll be a slugging match, fighting in the snow in February—his army will have a great advantage when it comes to morale. I agree with Peter. It’s too risky. If Stearns wins, we’ll have a bear to deal with.”
“And to what purpose?” chipped in Archduchess Isabella. The old woman’s expression was even more skeptical than Miguel’s. “We’ve done quite well so far. Minor gains, all of them, yes. But they came with no real risk and they’re solid. Leave it be.”
The king had listened attentively, but that was simply to be courteous. He’d already made his decision the night before, while discussing the matter with his wife. Maria Anna was as bold an adviser as any he had—and even she had urged the path of caution.
“We’re all agreed, then,” he stated. “We’ll just wait to see what happens.”
Poznan, Poland
“The king is still adamant, and the Sejm even more so,” said Stanislaw Koniecpolski. The grand hetman shrugged massive shoulders. “They’ll have no talk of a peace settlement. There’s no point in raising the issue any longer.”
Lukasz Opalinski’s jaws were tight.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. As every day passed, it became clearer and clearer to him that his friend Jozef Wojtowicz had been right all along. If Stearns had the two divisions of the USE army out there in the siege lines around Poznan to add to his own, he would win this civil war easily. And everyone knew—well, perhaps not every szlachta voting in the Sejm, as pig-ignorant as so many of them were—that Stearns had been opposed to the war with Poland from the start.
It could be argued, of course, that Torstensson would stand in the way. But Lukasz didn’t think even Torstensson could keep his men under control, if Stearns summoned them. The Poles had quite good intelligence on what was happening in Torstensson’s army, from all the Polish civilians employed by that army. The USE troops were restive and getting more so by the day. They’d even presented a petition to Torstensson three days ago, urging him to march on Berlin and restore the rightful prime minister.
The only thing that really enabled Torstensson to keep them under control any longer was…
The Poles. The stance of King Wladyslaw IV and the Sejm of the commonwealth.
What had poor Poland done, to so offend the Almighty that he visited seven years of stupidity upon the nation? Followed by seven years of idiocy, another seven of imbecility, yet another seven of cretinism—all that coming after seven years of dull-wittedness, preceded by seven years of struggling to count toes, seven years…
He wondered what had happened to Jozef. Was he still in Dresden? If so, was he still alive? They had heard nothing from him in weeks, since the batteries in his radio died.
Chapter 42
Dresden, capitol of Saxony
As he had in his first interview with the woman, Jozef Wojtowicz was finding Gretchen Richter unsettling. You’d think eyes that were colored a sort of light brown would be warm by nature, but hers weren’t. Not, at least, when she was studying you while trying to squeeze out the truth.
The scariest thing about the whole situation was that she wasn’t even suspicious. She wasn’t trying to uncover duplicity or treachery or misdoings on Jozef’s part, she was just trying to ferret out the truth about his military skills. Jozef hated to think what the woman would be like if she was running an actual inquisition. She’d terrify Torquemada. Either that, or turn him green with envy.
“You still seem hesitant, Jozef,” she was saying. “I do not understand why.”
He raised his hands in a gesture of frustration, as if he’d been about to raise them high in despair but then managed to control himself.
“You just don’t understand.” He blew out a breath. “Yes, I have pretty much all of the separate skills of a hussar. To start with, I’m an excellent horseman. Better than a lot of hussars, actually. Then, I am quite good with a sword—a cavalry saber, at least. Not so much with a side sword and not at all with a rapier or a schiavona because those are—”
He waved his hand irritably. Richter’s face creased into a thin smile. “Because those are silly things useless in a battle. Good only for duels. And you’re not a duelist.”
He cleared his throat. “No, I’m not.” A fairly good assassin, though, and I’m handy with any sort of dagger…
Seemed like an unwise thing to add, under the circumstances. “Contra-indicated” was the up-time term, according to Ted Szklenski, who was addicted to the damn things.
“I’m also a fair hand with a lance. Either the big ones favored by hussars or the lighter styles preferred by Tatars.”
“What about guns?”
A fairly good assassin, like I said. No, didn’t say. Any sane assassin would rather shoot a man in the back than stab him. Which I can do with just about any kind of pistol ever made. Wheel-lock, new style flintlock, any sort of up-time revolver or pistol—I can handle any of them.
Also seemed contra-indicated.
“Fair enough. Especially with pistols. Cavalrymen—that’s how I was trained—don’t have much use for any other sort of firearms.”
She nodded. “So what’s the problem, then?”
“I can do all the separate parts of being a hussar, but it’s not the same thing as actually being one. Gretchen, that takes practice. Riding a horse well is one thing and using a saber well is one thing. Doing them both at the same time—especially while people are shooting at you and trying to stab you—is another thing altogether.”
Again, he made that up-raised hands gesture. More with resignation this time than frustration. “Look, I was a bastard. I got the training but I never really got accepted. So I turned my hand to other things.”
“What things? Now that I think about it, you’ve never made clear how you made a living.”
“Various…things. Most of them involved running errands for the Koniecpolskis.”
Including running their spy network. Also contra-indicated.
“Some of those errands weren’t all that respectable,” he added. Covering up polit
ical misdeeds with merely criminal or immoral ones was a time-honored tactic for secret agents.
Richter cocked her head. “Somehow I have a hard time picturing you as a pimp.”
He tightened his jaws. Damn the woman. She was even a Catholic, at least in her upbringing. Why couldn’t the Spanish Inquisition have recruited her and gotten her out of his hair?
Because they didn’t recruit women, was one obvious answer. They didn’t recruit revolutionaries either, was another. Rather the opposite, actually.
Richter straightened up from the table. “All right, I’ll let it go. That’s not really any of my business. Here’s what it comes down to, Jozef.”
She nodded toward Eric Krenz. The lieutenant wasn’t actually “in command” of the city’s garrison. He was more like the first among equals of the dozen or so lieutenants from the regular USE army who acted as a command staff. Command college might almost be a better way of putting it. Nonetheless, whenever Gretchen needed to consult an individual officer, it was usually Krenz. That might partly be due to his relationship with Richter’s close associate Tata, of course. But Wojtowicz allowed that the man did seem competent in his own right.
“Eric tells me that we may need to make a sortie at some point. It’s now clear that Banér is going to challenge Stearns in the field. He’s starting to pull his mercenaries out of the trenches.”
Jozef felt alarmed. “Now? Gretchen, Banér is almost certain to be expecting a sortie while he carries out such an evolution.”
Richter’s expression became a little sarcastic. “No real military skills? Yet you seem very familiar with all this.”
Jozef flushed a little. “Fine!” he snapped, “You can’t spend any time at all with Koniecpolskis without picking up a lot. Those people talk tactics over breakfast, starting at the age of four. My point remains—this is not a time to be talking about making a sortie. Banér will be ready for it.”
“Oh, relax,” said Krenz. “I’m not stupid. Stupid officers don’t last in the Third Division. The general is relaxed about a lot of things, but he’ll shitcan an incompetent officer very quickly.”
The term shitcan was English, blended in smoothly and perfectly with the German that made up the rest of the sentence. That was how Amideutsch worked.
“We’re not planning any sorties right now,” Krenz continued. “We may never even do one at all. But we want to be ready in case the general does what we think he’s going to do. Try to do, anyway.”
“And that is…?” Jozef was skeptical that a commanding general with as little experience as Stearns was planning any sort of tactic, much less a subtle one.
Krenz apparently sensed the skepticism. He smiled a bit crookedly. “You don’t really understand the general. Professional soldiers usually don’t—and spare me the lecture about being not-really-a-hussar, Wojtowicz. You know a lot more than any civilian would, that’s obvious.”
Jozef decided to ignore that. “Please enlighten me, then.”
“The general knows he isn’t an experienced commander, so he relies on his staff for that. What he does himself is bear down on those things he does understand and know how to do.”
“Such as?”
“He’s the best organizer you’ll ever meet and—this is rare as hen’s teeth, in your circles—he actually gives a damn about his soldiers.”
Jozef started to say something and then stopped. Protesting the skills in that area of Stanislaw Koniecpolski was also contra-indicated.
Still, he must have flushed, because Eric’s not-quite-a-sneering-lip curled further. “And I’m not talking about the way a good noble general will respect and appreciate his soldiers’ valor and morale, either. I’m talking about socks.”
“About…what?”
Eric pointed to his feet. “Socks. And boots. All that sort of mundane and unromantic stuff. Do you know what the disease rate is, in the Third Division?
He didn’t wait for an answer—which Jozef wouldn’t have been able to provide anyway.
“The Third Division has better health than any division in the USE army. And the USE army has better health than any other army in the world. Do you know how fast the Third Division can march?”
Again, he didn’t wait for the answer. “Faster than any other division in the USE army. A lot faster, in fact. Everyone else—our own people as much as the enemy—keeps being surprised at how soon we show up somewhere. And do you know why?”
He pressed right on. Even if he’d wanted to, Jozef couldn’t have squeezed in a word.
“Because the men always have good boots. All the men always have good boots, with plenty of spares. Socks, too. The horses are always shod. All the horses always get shod, whenever they need it. The wagon wheels are always in good shape, and there are plenty of spares if something breaks. A wheel breaks, it gets fixed right then and there. Same for an axle. D’you me want to go on? I could, believe me.”
Finally, he slowed down enough to take a deep breath. “The point’s this, Mr. Hussar-who-isn’t. You have no idea what a military force is really capable of, when it’s organized. The general won’t even try to match Banér, maneuvering on a nice open field. That’s why he launched his campaign in the middle of February. What general in his right mind wants to fight in the teeth of winter? I’ll tell you—a general who knows his enemy has more experience but his soldiers don’t have boots that are worth a shit. Whose soldiers have a crappy morale because they’re mercenaries and no mercenary in his right mind wants to fight a winter campaign. I know the general. Right now, he’s probably praying for another snowstorm—because that’s when he’ll attack Banér.”
“But…” Jozef was half-appalled and—by now—half-fascinated. “How will he control his troops, in a snowstorm?”
“Never heard of radios? Of course, you have. By now, everyone’s heard of radios. Even you Poles use them, I’ve heard. But you don’t have that many of them, do you? And the ones you do have, you don’t use very well, do you? Because you don’t really think that way, do you?”
The lieutenant shrugged. “But the general won’t even be counting so much on his radios. He’ll be counting on the fact that if he tells his men to fight in a snowstorm, they will damn well fight in a snowstorm—and they’ll fight to win. They’ll come right at Banér’s thugs, marching in good boots and not freezing half to death. Most of all, they won’t care so much whether they’re being maneuvering properly because they’re not thinking that way in the first place. That Swedish bastard damn well needs to be put down, and the Third Division will damn well do it. Right here, right now. And then what happens?”
Jozef finally saw where he was going. “Banér’s men will start coming back into their lines. Whether Banér wants them to or not.” He frowned. “That’ll only happen, though, if your fellow Stearns maneuvers at least well enough to keep them against the river.”
Krenz’s sneer was now open. “I said the general didn’t hold much with fancy maneuvers. I didn’t say he couldn’t tell the difference between north, south, east and west. Don’t worry, Wojtowicz.” He pointed out one of the windows. “We’ve talked it over—all of us regular army lieutenants, I mean—and we’re pretty damn sure that’s what the general will try to do. He might not do it exactly that way, of course. Nobody can predict the weather, just for starters. But we’re sure he’ll do something like that. Which means that one way or another, sooner or later, Banér is most likely going to try to regroup by using his existing siege lines as defensive works. And that’s when we’d do a sortie. When he’s least expecting it because he’s pre-occupied with the Third Division, and when it’d do the most good.”
Jozef thought about it, while running fingers through his hair. He couldn’t deny there was a certain…
Well, not charm, exactly. But the young USE lieutenant’s enthusiasm was infectious. All the more so because Jozef knew Krenz well enough to know that the man was not given to thoughtless martial enthusiasms. He tended to be a skeptic about the military virtues,
in fact. Not derisive as such, but not entirely respectful either.
If someone like Krenz was this full of confidence—even eagerness—when it came to fighting Banér’s professionals…
Suddenly, all of Jozef’s doubts and misgivings vanished. No doubt there was something truly absurd about the Polish grand hetman’s spymaster leading a charge for USE rebels, but he no longer cared. He had been trained as a hussar, and apparently there was still a small hurt lurking in his heart that he’d never been allowed that honor. Koniecpolski had never treated him like a bastard in his personal dealings, but he had used Jozef that way in professional terms. Always keeping him in the shadows.
How many hussars had led a sortie to relieve a city under siege, in the middle of a pitched battle on which the fate of an entire nation pivoted?
Not too damn many. His friend Lukasz certainly hadn’t done it.
“All right, fine,” he said. “I’ll organize your sortie, in case the opportunity comes. But—!”
He raised a stiff, admonishing finger. “We’re not hussars. Bunch of damn fools, I know them well. There is no way I’m going to lead a charge of horsemen across snow, much less a frozen river—certainly not in a snowstorm! If I did make it across, I’d be the only one. No, no, no.”
He gave Krenz a beaming grin. “We’ll adopt the methods of your precious General Stearns. Snowshoes, that’s the trick. Skis too, maybe, for those men good on them. But they’d have to be designed so they can be removed easily. You can’t fight on skis. Not amidst trenches, anyway, which is where we’d be.”
He turned to Gretchen. “Can you organize that? And we’ll need grenades more than anything. Lots and lots and lots of grenades.”
From the look on her face, he thought he was about to be inflicted with another be-damned uptime expression.
“Don’t teach your grandmother how to suck eggs,” she said.