by Eric Flint
He had what almost looked like a scowl on his face. Moved by a sudden impulse, Eddie leaned out of the still-open window.
“Cheer up, Gunther! Look at this way. If I crash and burn, you get a republic after all.”
He followed that with a thumbs up and went back to checking his gauges.
Time to go. The weather was still superb.
He gave Achterhof a last glance. The man now had a peculiar sort of vulpine smile on his face. And he returned Eddie’s gesture with a thumbs-up of his own.
That gesture could be interpreted in two different ways, of course. Good luck or I hope you crash and burn, you fucking jackass.
Either way, Eddie was cheered up. He took off with a grin on his face.
Chapter 32
Dresden, capital of Saxony
Eric Krenz woke to the sound of gunfire. He didn’t need Tata, this time, to roll him out of bed. Before she’d fully awakened herself, he was already half-dressed.
Those weren’t simply the sounds of cannon fire. There was also the unmistakably distinctive sound of volley guns being fired. That could only mean one thing.
“What’s happening?” Tata asked, her voice still a bit fuzzy from sleep.
“They’re coming across the ice! I didn’t think even Banér was that fucking crazy!”
He finished jerking on his boots and practically flew out of the door. “If a man insists on being an idiot, he could at least try to be intelligent about it!”
As soon as Eric reached the street, he realized why Banér had launched the attack. There was a heavy overcast, enough to make it impossible to see more than thirty yards in any direction, even with a half-moon. The Swedes would have been able to get most of the way across the Elbe before being spotted.
Not that it would do them much good now. As he hurried toward the fortifications along the river, he could see rockets firing. These weren’t artillery rounds. General Stearns—his staff, rather—had never been fond of the temperamental devices and didn’t use them as weapons. So, none of the soldiers from the Third Division who’d been sent to Dresden to recuperate from injuries had any experience with the heavy rockets used by some units as artillery.
The Third Division did, on the other hand, use rockets as flares and signaling devices. Krenz and his fellow officers had ordered a number made by the city’s artisans, for precisely the purpose they were being put to now—illuminating the area in the event of a night assault.
They were some real advantages, Eric had discovered, to fighting a siege when you were the ones inside the walls. At least, if they were the walls of a major city like Dresden, with its many workshops and manufactories, and hundreds of skilled craftsmen. The volley guns he could hear rattling away in the distance had been made here also. Dozens of them, in just a few weeks.
By the time he got to the bastion guarding the western end of the river wall, the battle was raging. The sound of grenades had now been added to the mix, which meant the enemy had gotten all the way up to the walls along the river bank. Some of those grenades were being thrown by the Swedes, trying to clear an area wide enough to get infantry over the walls on ladders. He could tell the difference from the sounds of the explosions.
Friedrich Nagel was already there when Eric got atop the bastion. “I think they’re mostly coming at the east end!” he shouted, pointing in that direction.
“Can you handle everything here?”
Nagel nodded. “It’s not so bad, really. The volley guns make a lot of difference. I don’t think they were expecting them.”
Eric turned and went back down the stairs. He had to force himself to move a little slowly. The snow covering the steps made them slippery.
He’d thought the volley guns would help. They were easy to make, once you understood the trick of the things. Most of these weren’t rifled, the way the division’s own volley guns were. But for the purposes of these guns, that didn’t matter so much. They were intended for the close range work of repelling assaults, not firing on an open battlefield. The key was the firing mechanism itself, the use of a single breech-loading firing strip that enabled the gun crew to fire a volley of twenty-five rounds five or six times a minute—even seven times a minute, if the crew was good enough.
These Dresden-made guns couldn’t match that rate of fire, of course, because they weren’t using percussion caps. No one in the city was set up to make such firing devices. Instead, these volley guns used a more primitive powder train. That cut the rate of fire in half.
Still, most of the volley gun crews along the walls could manage three volleys a minute—quite a bit better rate of fire than three-pounders loaded with canister, and far better than that of larger cannons. In fact, they could almost keep up with infantrymen firing muzzle-loading muskets.
The volley guns were quicker and cheaper to make than cannons, too, since they didn’t require the specialized equipment and skills needed to make large cannon barrels. Dresden had plenty of gunsmiths able to make the simple two-foot-long musket barrels, even if only one of the gun shops was set up to rifle the bores. The same was true for the carriages. A number of artisans in the city were able to manufacture them, where making the massive carriages for a cannon would have been difficult.
Another advantage of the volley guns was that they didn’t require a big crew—three men, where most cannons required at least twice than many. The ordnance was lighter and easier to handle, as well. That had made it possible to train a large number of the militiamen in their use, far more than they could have done with larger artillery.
Eric was sure that Nagel was right. The Swedish mercenaries coming across the river wouldn’t have expected to run into that heavy a fire. One or two bad volleys, certainly—canister fired out of cannons. Probably only one volley, with the limited visibility caused by the darkness and the overcast. Instead, once they’d been spotted, they’d been under continuous fire.
And once the battle had started, the visibility factors would be working against them. The same darkness and overcast would make crossing the frozen river—already bad footing—more difficult still. Whereas the defenders didn’t really have to worry about any of that. They weren’t firing at specific individual targets anyway. No one did, in a battle, not even with rifled weapons.
Eric’s own footing wasn’t that good, for that matter—as he was forcibly reminded twice along the way, when he slipped and fell. Luckily, he didn’t suffer anything worse than a bruise. Maybe not even that. Several inches of snow isn’t much of a shock absorber, of course, but the slipperiness meant that any fall except a perpendicular one tended to have much of its energy transferred into a skid instead of a direct impact.
He wouldn’t know for sure until he could remove his clothes and examine the places he thought might be bruised. Better still, have Tata examine them and do her healing wonders while he sipped hot broth in front of a fire. As he ought to be doing this very moment, if the general in command of the Swedes hadn’t been a madman.
“War sucks,” he muttered. But, never faltered on his way. Krenz was one of those people who always did their duty. The grousing that went along with it was just a necessary lubricant.
Ernst Wettin spent the first fifteen minutes of the battle simply watching it from one of the windows in his bedroom in the Residenzschloss. Then, spent the next fifteen minutes pondering his own duty.
The decision, in the end, came down to a simple inability to do nothing at all—which was his only course, if he opted to stay out of the fray. He couldn’t very well go back to working on his manuscript. Not even Ernst’s devotion to educational reform was enough to keep him scribbling at a desk when the fate of an entire city was in the balance.
He tried his best not to let personal preferences shape his choice. It was hard, though. He detested Johan Banér, from the months he’d been forced to work with the brute in the Upper Palatinate. And, on the flip side, had grown rather fond of the young people who’d taken charge of defending the city against the Swede.
Gretchen Richter, Tata, the troll-ugly but surprisingly genial Joachim Kappel—certainly the dozen or so stalwart lieutenants from the Third Division—all of them were people whom he thought would fare rather well, when their time finally came to face the Almighty.
And should that time be now? Ernst Wettin thought not.
So, he left his little suite and made his way to the great chamber at the center of the palace where Richter had set up a command center. Surely he could be of some use, whatever it might be.
Not sure whether she should be amused, bemused, anxious or appalled, Noelle Stull watched her two young companions as they set about barricading the entrance to their townhouse.
Between the energy with which they set to themselves to the work and the simple fact that there was only so much that could be done anyway, they were finished within a few minutes. Then, brandishing pistols—Denise Beasley, the trusty .45 with which her father Buster had gone down to everlasting fame and glory during the Dreeson Incident; Minnie Hugelmair, an expensive-looking cap-and-ball revolver that she’d sweet-talked her employer Nasi into buying for her—the two teenage girls stood stalwart guard, ready to slaughter whatever Swedish hordes might force their way in. Minnie had a nasty-looking dagger in her left hand, too.
Noelle cleared her throat. “You know, girls, if they can’t hold the walls, I really think we’d do better to try to find a hiding place in the root cellar.”
Uncertainly, torn between romance and reason, the girls looked back and forth from the door leading outside to the considerably smaller and less ornate door that led to the root cellar.
“It’s nasty down there,” said Denise.
After a moment, Minnie shrugged. “Not so nasty as it’d be up here, when they break in. Which they will, if they get into the city. We just can’t hold off all of them. Come on, let’s see what we can do.” She headed for the root cellar.
Denise, always the more rambunctious of the two, was still scowling. “There’s probably rats down there.”
Minnie unlatched the door. “Probably. On the other hand, not once in the history of the world have women been gang-raped by rats. It’s always important to keep a perspective on these things.”
She had a point, and not even Denise was that stubborn. On their way down the steep stairs—more like a heavy ladder, really—she consoled herself by saying: “Well, I guess we can always have our last shoot-out down here too.”
Noelle was bound and determined to see it didn’t come to that. She started moving sacks of onions and turnips, wondering if there were enough to pile over them.
“Hey, look at this,” said Minnie. She was crouched in a corner of the small basement, holding up the lantern Noelle had brought down.
The two other women went over. When they got next to her, they saw that Minnie had scraped aside some straw and exposed what looked like a small trapdoor. Denise reached down, seized the little loop of rope that seemed to serve as a latch, and lifted the door.
It came up fairly easily, given that it was obvious no one had moved the thing for years. Minnie held the lamp over it. Looking down, they saw a very small empty room below. More in the way of an alcove, really. The walls weren’t dirt, though. They’d been lined with wood, as had the floor. It was like a small, rather well-built closet that you entered from the top instead of the side.
Denise frowned. “What…?”
Minnie chuckled. “Whoever built this house was a pessimist, obviously. We don’t have to create a hideout, Noelle—there’s one already here.”
Noelle had reached the same conclusion herself. The safe room was superb, actually. Once the trapdoor was lowered on whoever hid inside, it could be covered with straw, some dirt—plenty of that, in a root cellar—and piled high with sacks of vegetables. Not quite enough to prevent the people inside from eventually forcing the door back open, but enough to discourage any searchers. Mercenaries looking for loot and women wouldn’t spend much time down here anyway. Especially if they were drunk, which they almost certainly would be. The biggest danger was that they’d set the whole house on fire. Arson was often a feature of a city being sacked.
Still, it was safer than anything else.
Denise peered more closely into the hideout. “I’m not sure we can all fit in there.”
Noelle had already come to that conclusion also. It didn’t really matter, though. The trapdoor wasn’t that well-concealed on its own. Minnie had spotted it easily, once she looked in this corner. Someone else could do the same. To make the hideout work, someone had to stay above and cover the trapdoor after it was closed.
“Give me your guns,” she said, extending her hands.
The two teenagers stared at her. “You’ve already got one,” said Minnie.
“And you can’t shoot anyway,” added Denise.
“I’m not going to argue about this, girls. A formality it might be, most of the time, but the fact is that you’re minors under my care. You won’t need those guns if you have to squeeze yourself down into that hole, and I need to stay up here to cover the trapdoor so it won’t be spotted.”
Noelle shrugged. “And my marksmanship is a moot point. If I have to use the guns—all three of them, and don’t think I won’t be blasting away like a maniac—it’ll be at point blank range anyway.” She looked around, squinting in the dim light. “I figure I’ll make Stull’s Last Stand down here, not upstairs. Less chance they could take me alive—and, either way, there’d be enough gore and stuff that they won’t stick around down here afterward to look for anybody else.”
Denise’s eyes were wide. So was Minnie’s one good eye.
Noelle shook her head. “I am not going to argue about this,” she repeated. “Give. Me. Your. Guns. Now.”
In the end, they settled on a compromise. Denise and Minnie would keep the guns until and unless it became clear that the walls had been breached, the city was being sacked, and all was lost. Then—only then—would the girls do as they were told.
As compromises went, Noelle figured it wasn’t a bad one. Given those two.
Then, they went back upstairs. Minnie and Denise settled down for a card game in the kitchen. Noelle went upstairs to watch the street from a window.
“She’s pretty cool,” observed Denise, as she dealt out the first hand.
“We already knew that,” said Minnie. “But it’s nice to see these things confirmed.”
Jozef Wojtowicz tried to cheer himself up. At least they wouldn’t be hauling any rocks for a while.
And there was this, too—he was learning how to use one of these fascinating volley guns in actual combat, always the best way to really become familiar with a weapon.
The design was quite interesting. Ingenious, even. Lt. Krenz had told him it was modeled on an ancient up-time weapon called the Billinghurst-Requa battery gun. “Ancient,” of course, as up-timers reckoned these things. Apparently the Americans had had a civil war of their own, back in the dawn of time, and the gun had first seen action then.
Best of all, it was a design that was well within the capability of Poland’s artisans to make. The only tricky part of the design was the percussion cap, from what Jozef could see. But you didn’t need that anyway—all of the volley guns in his bastion were being fired by simple powder trains. Percussion caps would certainly improve the rate of fire, but Jozef thought it would be possible to buy them from the French. The things weren’t bulky, so shipping wouldn’t be a big problem.
Still, it was an awkward situation. If Jozef’s history ever got exposed, how was he going to explain to Polish hussars that his only real combat experience had been fighting on behalf of the USE? His friends wouldn’t care, of course, and Grand Hetman Koniecpolski was a man of broad and wide experience, who’d take the thing in stride.
Alas, the average hussar was about as broad-minded as a rooster. Jozef would never live it down. The ridicule would follow him into the grave. Which might be an early one, if any of the hussars took it in mind to be outraged and offended.
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Alas, the average hussar got outraged and offended about as readily as a rooster too.
Maybe he could argue that since he’d actually been fighting on the side of the rebels in the affair—
But that wouldn’t do him any good if the rebels won the civil war, in which case they would become the USE themselves and he was right back in the soup, as far as hussars were concerned. Yet if the rebels lost the civil war—starting right here in Dresden, this being the only place there was any serious fighting—then hussars would be the least of Jozef’s problems. Outraged and offended Swedish mercenaries would have done for him already.
Outraged and offended, indeed. They were suffering horrible casualties out there on the ice. The volley guns really were quite murderous.
When Ernst reached the command center, he found Tata there, along with Joachim Kappel. But Gretchen was gone.
“She’s out walking the lines,” Tata explained.
The responsibility of command. Wettin would have been doing the same, had he still been in charge. So would the best kings and queens, down through the years.
It was not always enough, to be sure. Constantine XI had personally led his troops in the final battle against the Turks in the siege of Constantinople in 1453, but they’d taken the city despite him. He’d vanished in the fighting, presumably killed, his body tossed with those of others into a mass grave.
The same might happen to Gretchen Richter, this very night.
But it might not, also—and by personally visiting the soldiers on the ramparts, she improved the odds in favor of the defenders. Quite a bit, probably. The sort of close quarter combat involved in repelling assaults during a siege required a great deal of raw courage and confidence. Richter exuded those traits. They emanated from her, almost as if they took real and physical shape.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Ernst asked.
Tata and Joachim looked at each other. Then Joachim turned and pointed toward a long table near the back wall. Half a dozen youngsters were gathered around it, arguing about something.
