Ring of Fire III

  Finally—it failed only this!—the one and only cavalry company that von Lintelo had finally agreed to provide them was the one commanded by Colonel Johann von Troiberz. Who was probably the most incompetent field grade officer in the Bavarian forces and certainly the most obnoxious.

  * * *

  As it happened, all but one of Estuban Miro’s fleet of airships was out of the State of Thuringia-Franconia that morning. But the one that was in the province was right where it needed to be—at the Bamberg airfield, fueled up and ready to go.

  “I’ve got an important mission for you, Estuban,” said Ed Piazza, the president of the province. He nodded toward the third man present in his office, General Heinrich Schmidt, one of the top officers in the SoTF’s National Guard. “Heinrich and his staff can fill you in on the operational details later. But the gist of it is that I need you—or Franchetti, rather—to take the Albatross down to Amberg and get the two young Bavarian dukes out of there. Better bring their Jesuit tutor, too.”

  Miro looked at Schmidt, and then back at Piazza. “And bring them here? Or take them to Magdeburg?”

  He didn’t bother pointing out that the boys could be flown just as easily to Prague as to Magdeburg, where they could be reunited with their father. The equations of power were what they were. So long as the USE had custody of Albrecht’s sons, they had some leverage over the man who might very well become Bavaria’s next duke without having to wait for Maximilian to die a natural death.

  “Bring them back here,” said Piazza. He didn’t elaborate on his reasons for choosing Bamberg over the nation’s capital. Given the near-civil war that had erupted within the USE, the SoTF’s president probably saw no reason to give up any assets, even if he didn’t have any immediate use for them himself.

  As a technical exercise, the project was perfectly manageable. Bamberg had an airfield outside the city walls which could handle dirigibles as well as airplanes. But in a pinch, an airship could be brought into the city itself. The market square was big enough to land one of the Swordfish-class airships like the Albatross or the Pelican. Doing so in strong winds would be difficult, though. But the weather today looked good, and Miro presumed that Piazza wanted this mission undertaken immediately.

  The news of the Bavarian attack on Ingolstadt had already spread throughout the city, but Miro knew very few of the details. Of course, it was quite possible that no one knew many details yet.

  “Do we know if the Bavarians are sending an expedition to Amberg?” he asked.

  “Yes, they are.” That came from Heinrich Schmidt. The thick-chested young general had a cold grin on his face. “And if you’re wondering how we know, you’ll be pleased to hear that your Pelican escaped the city last night. With Rita Simpson on board, as well as your survey crew.”

  That was a relief. Estuban had been worried about what might have happened to Stefano and the airship.

  “They’ve decided to remain in the area, serving Major Simpson and what survives of the Danube Regiment as scouts, while they try to reach safety in Regensburg.”

  He didn’t bother to ask Miro—who was, after all, the proprietor of the Pelican and Stefano Franchetti’s employer—whether or not he approved. Estuban was not surprised. He’d already learned that Americans and those like Schmidt who shared their view of things took a very expansive attitude toward the use of private resources in times of crisis. They called it “nationalization.” Being fair, plenty of down-time rulers did much the same thing—and the Americans eventually returned the property and recompensed the owners for its use, which any number of kings and dukes neglected to do.

  Estuban had already figured out that the smart thing for him to do was to be very cooperative at such times. Indeed, he satisfied himself with simply billing the government for his expenses, not seeking a profit from such work at all.

  Not a direct profit, rather. Indirectly, eventually...ah, the possibilities were endless. The up-timers also had an appropriate name for that. “Most favored nation status.” Estuban saw no reason that term couldn’t be used expansively as well. “Most favored company status” had a nice ring to it, he thought.

  “In that case,” he said, “I think it would be wise to plan on bringing more gasoline to Regensburg. If it’s not carrying anything else except the necessary crew, any Swordfish-class dirigible can haul five barrels of gasoline in a single trip. We could operate both airships out of the city, with that much fuel. Not just now but throughout the crisis.”

  Schmidt and Piazza looked at each other. Then, the gazes of both men got a bit unfocused as they considered all the many military possibilities that would open up if the SoTF had what amounted to its own air force.

  “Oh, splendid,” said Schmidt. His grin widened while somehow not gaining any warmth at all.

  “How soon can you leave?” asked Piazza.

  Estuban pondered the question for a moment. “I am tempted to say within an hour, but it might require two. The flight itself, depending on the winds, will take somewhere between an hour and a half and three hours.”

  The SoTF’s president nodded. “Either way, you’d get there well before nightfall. Would you have enough time to fly back?”

  Miro shrugged. “Perhaps not. But if the Bavarians are already investing the city—very unlikely, I’d think—and the situation was too critical to wait until morning, we’d simply take off. Then it all depends on the winds. That’s what the Pelican chose to do last night, after all.”

  An airship the size of the Albatross, even with a minimal crew and all cargo space devoted to extra gasoline, couldn’t fly for very many hours without refueling. The problem wasn’t the engines, it was the fuel needed to keep the burners going. That was the great advantage of hydrogen over hot air designs, in addition to the greater buoyancy—you could fly much greater distances before having to refuel. Estuban had chosen the more primitive but safer hot air design for his fleet because the ships were only intended for short-distance runs. And it was much easier to stockpile gasoline supplies where needed than make sure hydrogen would always be available.

  But if the winds were light and there was no need to reach an exact destination—nor any way to find it easily, in the dark—it was usually possible to keep an airship like the Albatross afloat until daybreak. Nothing was certain, of course.

  Up-timers often had difficulty accepting that reality. They had come from a world in which air transport was a safer form of travel than any. But this world was in the very dawn of the aviation era. Nothing was certain, once you left the ground—and casualties were heavy.

  Estuban loved it.

  Chapter 11

  To Tom’s surprise, the Bavarians didn’t attack them until late in the afternoon—and then, it was no more than a brief skirmish between a cavalry patrol and two platoons from Geipel’s company. From what Tom could tell, the cavalry unit seemed to have stumbled upon the platoons by accident.

  “There’s a large force of infantry coming after you,” Rita told him that evening. “I figure at least a thousand men. But they’ve already camped for the night. I don’t see how they could catch up to you until tomorrow afternoon.”

  By then, Tom would be within fifteen miles of Regensburg. That distance could be covered in a day, with one long hard march. That assumed they didn’t have to stop and fight, of course, which was probably wishful thinking.

  “All told, I think there’s another five hundred or so cavalry on your tail,” she continued. “They’re a lot closer, but they’re hard to count because they’re scattered all over east Jesus. I can’t for the life of me figure out what their commanding officer thinks he’s doing. Over.”

  “They’re probably foraging,” Tom replied. “We haven’t been leaving anything behind for them.”

  He was feeling a little guilty about that, but only a little. His troops were taking all the foodstuffs they could find as they marched down the Danube, and burning everything behind them. That wasn’t much, in midwinter, but it was enough to kee
p his men and—most important of all—their horses going. They hadn’t been able to bring much fodder with them when they left Ingolstadt. If they lost the horses, they lost their cannons, and without those guns they didn’t have much chance of fighting off a force as big as the one pursuing them.

  That was hard on the population, of course. But if Tom’s soldiers hadn’t taken the stuff, the Bavarians would have. At least the Danube Regiment was passing out promissory notes for it. What was probably more important, from the immediate standpoint of people living in the towns and villages they passed through, was that Tom’s rump regiment provided them with an escort. Refugees were now streaming away from the Bavarian onslaught, but these were the only ones who had military protection.

  A lot of the refugees were coming out of Ingolstadt itself, according to Rita, some of whom were being savaged by Bavarian cavalry as they tried to flee. Her voice had been tight when she reported that; taut with anger.

  Tom’s own fury was near a boiling point. It was a near-constant struggle to keep his temper under control. The Bavarians were clearly making no effort to restrain their troops. The reports he got from Rita on the Pelican kept reminding him of the horror that the collapse of the Danube Regiment had allowed to spill over the inhabitants of Ingolstadt and stretches of the Oberpfalz near or on the Danube.

  Some of his rage was sublimated guilt. Whatever the reasons might be, in the end he and Colonel Engels had been responsible for the regiment. He was by no means blind to that reality. But most of Tom’s anger was not directed at himself. It was not even directed at Duke Maximilian. The ruler of Bavaria had only been able to suborn the 1st Battalion because of the political crisis produced in the USE by the actions of the Swedish chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna. So far as Tom was concerned, every murder, every mutilation, every rape, every act of arson and every theft committed by Bavarian soldiers could be laid at the feet of that bastard.

  Not that he was giving Maximilian or his commanding officers a pass, either. There was no excuse for the conduct of their troops. The mayhem being inflicted on USE civilians went far beyond the occasional atrocities and excesses that were an inevitable feature of war. These soldiers hadn’t simply been set loose, they’d obviously been given the green light to run wild by Bavaria’s leaders.

  Why? Tom wondered. Even in narrowly military terms, the policy made little sense to him. The Bavarians were not nomadic raiders, who simply intended to return to the steppes with their booty. Duke Maximilian planned to seize the Oberpfalz—as much of it as he could grab, at least—in in order to use its assets. So what was the point of ravaging the area? Of all those assets, the human resources were far and away the most valuable. Leaving aside the people being killed, there was now a flood of refugees heading north, east and west. There were close to a thousand such people being shepherded ahead of them by his own troops.

  He hadn’t been able to spare much time—no time at all, really—for the needs of those people. Fortunately, Johann Heinrich Böcler had taken charge of that task. Some initial prodding from Bonnie Weaver had been necessary, because Böcler didn’t think of himself as an “authority.” Partly that was his youth, partly that was his modest origins; but mostly, Tom suspected, it was just the man’s personality. The provincial administrator’s secretary was one of those people whose natural relationship to the world’s affairs was that of an observer more than a participant.

  That didn’t necessarily mean such people were incompetent, however, whenever they set their minds to a practical task. Often they were not, and in some cases that same detachment made them very good at such work. They were more objective about the decision that needed to be made, and less prone to letting their own aspirations and ambitions influence them unduly.

  How good would Böcler be at such an assignment? Tom had no idea. But he was pretty sure they’d know within a day or two. This column of people moving down the Danube might be going slowly, but so did a pressure cooker.

  * * *

  By the time they made camp for the night, Bonnie had already come to a conclusion on that subject. Once again, pudgy little Johann Heinrich Böcler was proving to be a man of greater substance than he looked.

  True, he fussed a lot. Unflappable under pressure, steady at all times...well, no. He tended to get agitated, he talked a lot, and he dithered back and forth before coming to a decision. But he always did come to a decision, and he didn’t dither for long. And insofar as the fussing and talking was concerned, that might well be an asset under these conditions. He was dealing with large numbers of frightened, uncertain and often confused people. His willingness to talk with them, once his authority was established, probably helped to calm them down.

  Even in the seventeenth century, Germans tended to be a law-abiding folk. They were not particularly orderly, though—Bonnie had never seen a trace of the automatic obedience ascribed to Germans in the folk mythology of her own universe—and they were quite willing to argue with the powers-that-be. At the drop of a hat, in fact. But that those powers existed legitimately was not something they disputed. They just felt keenly that they had a right to be consulted before they were commanded to do something, and they were always sensitive to issues of fairness.

  Böcler’s authority derived from his status as the personal secretary of Christian I of Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler, the imperially-appointed administrator of the Oberpfalz. The fact that he’d served in the same post for the previous administrator bolstered his status also. Ernst of Saxe-Weimar had been a popular figure in the province. “A fair-minded man,” was a phrase you heard often when people spoke of him.

  Böcler had that sense of fairness also. Perhaps that was his detachment at work, but Bonnie couldn’t do more than guess at that. She still barely knew the man, although working with him in such close proximity and under such severe conditions was drastically speeding up a process that would normally have taken months, given his reserved nature. By late morning, at his invitation, she’d started calling him Heinz. That nickname was not used by many people who knew the secretary.

  Heinz would have been a disaster as a politician. Glad-handing, back-slapping—the thought of him kissing babies was downright hysterical—these were not his skills, to put it mildly. But he was conscientious and he listened to people. So, with few exceptions, his decisions were accepted with good grace, even by people who had wanted a different one.

  Those were usually people who just wanted to rest for a while, something that Heinz never allowed them to do until the army itself halted the march and began making camp. Then, Heinz chivvied his charges relentlessly, insisting that they had to help the soldiers set up the camp. Not until that was done—yes, that included digging latrines; of course it did!—would he allow the civilians to finally rest.

  But he’d been chivvying the cooks and sutlers just as relentlessly, so when the time finally came when labors could cease, there was food ready—and he saw to it that it was fairly distributed. He did not eat himself until he was sure that everyone else had been fed.

  He was quite a guy, actually, in his own sort of way. Bonnie realized he was growing on her. And was surprised again.

  * * *

  Captain von Haslang was in a much fouler mood than the American woman two miles downstream, whom he’d never met and whose name he didn’t even know. The day’s pursuit—by now he was using the term derisively—had been a disaster from daybreak to sundown.

  The retreating force was doing a very good job of destroying everything behind them. (So much, if further evidence was needed, for the absurd notion that Major Simpson was a fumbling novice.) In some places, where the conditions were suitable, they’d felled trees across the road. And not one bridge spanning the occasional smaller streams that entered the Danube was left intact.

  Worst of all, the enemy hadn’t simply destroyed the bridges. The first one that Colonel von Schnetter’s soldiers had come across had seemed in fine shape—until they crossed over it and discovered it had been mined. Eight
men were killed in the explosion and twice as many badly wounded.

  Thereafter, the enemy had simply brought down the bridges, figuring that the surprise wouldn’t work twice. But they left other mines hidden alongside the road. Given the hurried manner in which the mines had been designed and laid, the Bavarian troops spotted and disarmed all but one of them before any damage was done. The single mine they missed had been set well to the side and only injured one man when it went off, and him not badly.

  But that didn’t really matter, because the mines were doing the critical task for the enemy—they were drastically slowing down the pursuers.

  The pursuing infantry, that was to say. If the cavalry had been doing their job properly, they’d have been constantly harassing the enemy—which would have accomplished the same task of delaying the opponent’s movements. All other things being equal, a mostly-infantry force should be able to overtake an enemy that was primarily made up of artillery units.

  And why wasn’t the cavalry doing its job? Because its donkey of a commander, Colonel Johann von Troiberz, had sent his men all over the countryside—everywhere, it seemed, except in the vicinity of the retreating Danube Regiment.

  “Foraging,” he claimed. And stubbornly kept claiming, no matter how angrily Colonel von Schnetter demanded that he bring the cavalry units back into the pursuit. The claim was either a lie—nothing but a fig leaf for looting—or, which might even be worse, an attempt to cover up gross negligence or outright corruption.

  It was true enough that cavalry—infantry too, for that matter—needed to forage from the countryside if they undertook a long march that outstripped the ability of the supply train to keep up. But that should not be necessary on the very first day. Any experienced cavalry unit with even half-competent officers had enough sense to load their mounts with ten to fifteen pounds of hay and a bit of oats or bran.