by Eric Flint
He traveled by horse-drawn sleigh. Mike’s horsemanship was perfectly good enough to have enabled him to ride a horse even in such heavy snow, but David had managed to cobble together the design for a carriage suitable for a light artillery piece and the general wanted to test it.
Not himself, of course. He didn’t weigh nearly enough to substitute for an artillery piece. Instead he rode on an accompanying sleigh that would serve an artillery company as the winter equivalent of a battery wagon.
Half of the experiment—the half that involved him directly—proved to be successful. Unfortunately, Bartley’s artillery sleigh turned out to suffer from some rather serious design flaws. The damn thing either wouldn’t stay on the tracks; the skis would dig in too deeply; or, finally, one of the skis broke altogether.
As Mike had pretty much expected, things were trickier than they looked. Murphy was alive and well, obviously.
He wasn’t disheartened, though. He hadn’t really thought the experiment would work to begin with. Episodes from American history notwithstanding, he’d been skeptical that a hastily-assembled sleigh would be up to hauling such a heavy load in such heavy snow through a mountain range. Even given the advantage of traveling alongside a river, there were just too many ways for things to go wrong.
It would be nice, certainly, to be able to field light artillery pieces in a winter battle. But what Mike was really counting on was all the rest of his equipment—starting with the fact that his soldiers wouldn’t be freezing their butts off the moment they broke camp. Once Banér pulled his troops out of their siege lines, on the other hand, they’d get into sorry shape very quickly, as cold as this winter was turning out to be.
One of the major drawbacks to the seventeenth century’s libertarian method of paying troops was that everybody at every link in the money chain had an incentive to chisel. That was true even of the troops themselves, who were far more likely to spend their pay on wine, women and what passed for song in siege lines than they were to keep their gear up to snuff. Their officers certainly weren’t going to make up the difference, with a few rare exceptions. Any supplies they bought their men usually had to come out of their own pockets.
That was not the least of the reasons that Mike, in his days as prime minister, had insisted that the USE’s soldiers be paid from the national coffers directly. The money did not pass through a chain of officers except those assigned to payroll duty, who could be easily monitored. What was just as important, the army’s supplies all the way down to socks and boots were “government issue.” The USE army’s soldiers were GIs, not independent military sub-contractors.
It wasn’t impossible to chisel, of course. A black market in government-issued supplies and weapons had accompanied every army in history, and Mike didn’t doubt for a moment that it accompanied his own. Still, almost every soldier who marched out into the Saxon plain a week or two from now to meet Sweden’s Finest would have socks and good boots on his feet and be wearing an outfit designed to enable him to march, maneuver and fight in the cold and the snow and the ice. Which was a lot more than Banér’s mercenaries would have at their disposal.
Mike’s biggest worry was actually that Banér would choose to hunker down in his siege lines and not come out to meet him in the open field. The Swedish general hadn’t bothered to build lines of contravallation to guard his siegeworks—the lines of circumvallation, to use the technical term—from the possibility of being attacked by an army in the field. He hadn’t expected to find any such field army to face in the first place. Still, it wouldn’t be that hard to adapt siege lines for the purpose, especially in winter.
But Mike didn’t think that was likely. In the end, this was more of a political than a military contest. It was now obvious that Axel Oxenstierna had bitten off more than he could chew. Even before Princess Kristina showed up in Magdeburg, the Swedish chancellor had been losing the all-important so-called “war of public opinion.” His opponents’ shrewd tactics of avoiding open clashes and positioning themselves as the bulwarks of stability and order had put him on the defensive. (Mike was quite sure that was largely Becky’s doing, although she’d said nothing about it in her radio messages.)
Now that Kristina had placed the prestige of the dynasty on the side of Oxenstierna’s opponents, he would be thrown completely off balance. The ability of Dresden to defy him had been the great wound in his side from the beginning, and Kristina had now torn the wound wide open. The chancellor had no choice any longer. He had to take Dresden—and quickly, so he could marshal his armies to march on Magdeburg itself. He had no options left except naked force and violence. And if that lost him still more public support, so be it. He could rule the Germanies by dictatorship, if need be.
Or so he thought, anyway. Mike had his doubts. Five years ago, yes. Oxenstierna could probably have succeeded in such a project. Today? Mike thought it was not likely at all. Not in the long run, for sure.
He didn’t intend to let things get that far, though. Kristina’s action had done one other thing—it had given Mike the fig leaf he needed to bring his army back into the USE. Even technically, it would now be difficult to charge him with leading a mutiny. But that really didn’t matter because a civil war was never settled by lawyers. By very definition, a civil war was a state of affairs in which the rule of law had collapsed. What remained was, on one side, the field of arms; and on the other, the battle for the populace’s support.
Under those conditions, Mike didn’t think Banér could stay in his siege lines once Mike entered the Saxon plain and challenged him openly. He was almost certain that Oxenstierna would order him to fight in the field.
Where he might very well win, of course. On paper, at least, his army was larger than Mike’s—fifteen thousand to the Third Division’s nine thousand. But Mike was certain that Banér’s forces had suffered a lot of attrition by now. Mercenary armies always did, especially in winter. That was disease, mostly, although desertion was always a big factor also.
The Third Division, on the other hand, hadn’t suffered at all. Mike had made sure their quarters were good, with good sanitation, and he’d kept his men well-fed and well-supplied. They still lost soldiers, of course, but they replaced them with new recruits. In fact, the division was a little over-strength. His paymasters told him there were now almost ten thousand men on the active rolls. Some of those added men were specialists, of course; repairmen or supply troops of one kind or another. Part of the so-called tail rather than the teeth of an army. But at least a third of them were in combat units, especially heavy weapons units.
So, Mike figured the armies were relatively even, in purely numerical terms. In the end, it would come down to leadership. Banér was one of the Swedish army’s handful of top generals—and going by the record, the Swedish army could lay claim to being the best army in Europe over the past half decade. Mike, on the other hand, was still largely—not quite—a neophyte general. He didn’t begin to have Banér’s experience and proven skill on the battlefield.
But he didn’t intend to match that skill and experience, in the first place. The one lesson Mike had learned by now was that “generalship” was a vacant abstraction. There was no such thing, really, in the sense that most people meant by the term—a definable and distinctive skill set, such as one might learn in school to become a doctor or an accountant or an architect.
There were many specific skills involved in leading an army, of course. And experience mattered, as it did in any line of work. But what there really was, at the heart of the matter, was simply leadership. And leadership was never defined abstractly. A man did not “lead.” No, he led specific people with specific goals and motives to accomplish specific tasks.
In this instance, he would be leading an army of citizen soldiers intent on defending their nation’s liberties and freedoms from the depredations of a mercenary army paid for by a foreign occupier. So long as Mike committed no outright blunders, he was confident he could triumph in that specific task. Banér
would try to match one general against another, where Mike would be matching one army against another.
Morale would decide it, in the end. Mike was sure of that—as long as he didn’t just purely screw up, at any rate. His army’s morale was excellent. He’d made sure it wasn’t sapped by lack of food, disease, and freezing toes, and he never failed to maintain the division’s regularly-published broadsheet that kept his soldiers well-informed and motivated.
That was the other reason Mike had decided to travel by sleigh. He had one of his beloved portable printing presses on board. The devices were more dear to him than anything except his wife and children.
Live by the word, die by the word. The Swedes had already lost that battle. Mike figured the rest was bound to follow.
The Third Division started arriving in Tetschen two days after Mike left. It took the division a day and half to pass through the town. Not from the marching, but from the time it took to get every man outfitted with winter clothing that fit him properly.
Properly enough, anyway. Soldiers don’t expect sartorial perfection and David had made sure to err on the side of getting boots and outfits that were too big rather than too small. A man could wear two pair of socks, if need be, and there were a number of ways to pad an oversize winter outfit with jury-rigged insulating material. A lot of soldiers specifically asked for oversized clothing, in fact.
By the time it was all over and the division was on its way up the road that followed the Elbe toward Königstein and Saxony, David Bartley was the most popular officer in the division. Hands down.
He was especially popular with the flying artillery units. Those men had become deeply attached to their volley guns, in the battles they’d fought starting with their great victory over the French cavalry at Ahrensbök. Now that winter was here and they knew they’d be fighting in the snow, they’d been glumly certain they’d have to leave their volley guns behind and suffer the indignities of becoming wretched infantrymen.
No longer. Not with the new auxiliary ski attachments, which they were already calling Bartley rigs.
David was tickled pink, truth be told. It almost made up for being left behind with just two companies of supply troops.
On the down side, he was the only significant officer left in Tetschen—and now, quite famous to boot. The campaign waged by the town’s matrons kicked into high gear. If there was a single eligible daughter or niece to be found anywhere in the region who was not introduced to the newly-promoted Major Bartley, she had to be deaf, dumb and blind.
Literally deaf, dumb and blind. Merely being hard of hearing, tongue-tied and myopic was no disqualification at all, from what David could tell.
Chapter 37
Osijek, the Balkans
“You look tired, Doctor,” said Janos Drugeth.
“I am in fact very tired.” Doctor Grassi wiped his face with a handkerchief. “I’ve been traveling almost constantly for weeks now.”
He tucked away the handkerchief and slumped back in his chair. The chair lent itself well to that, being one of the two very plush armchairs in the small suite of rooms Janos had rented in the town’s best tavern. Normally, he would have kept himself less conspicuous, but he hadn’t had a choice. Osijek had been packed with refugees when he arrived. Not poor refugees, who couldn’t have afforded to stay in taverns at all, but more prosperous people. By the time he arrived in the town, they’d already taken all of the cheaper housing.
He hadn’t expected that. Why would a war against Persians fought in Mesopotamia produce refugees in the Balkans?
Doctor Grassi had explained it to him.
“Murad’s campaign caught everyone by surprise, Baron.”
The doctor usually called Janos by that title. It was not technically correct, but Janos saw no reason to fuss over the matter. Rankings in the Austrian empire were complex, especially when it involved Hungarian nobility—and the Drugeth family was of French origin, to make things still more complicated. Janos was one of the handful of men in the Austrian empire who were so powerful and influential in actual fact that the formalities of titles didn’t overly concern them.
“Why?” he asked. “It’s been a foregone conclusion ever since the Persians seized Baghdad in 1624 that sooner or later the Ottomans would try to take it back. And Murad is a young and dynamic sultan.”
Grassi inclined his head. “Yes, that’s true. But copies of the American texts concerning the Ottoman-Safavid war have been circulated quite widely. Even the Persians have read them by now. And in that universe—”
Janos threw up his hands. “Is everyone a Calvinist idiot? For that matter, not even Calvinists think that because something happened in such-and-such a way in the American universe that it will happen the same way in ours, and at the same time. Unless they’re idiots to begin with.”
The doctor smiled. “Oh, yes—and if you ask anyone who has studied the up-time texts, be that man a Christian or a Moslem or a Jew, he will assure you he understands that events in that universe are not binding on our own. And then, nine times out of ten, he will act as if they are.”
Drugeth sighed. Grassi was quite right. He’d seen the same phenomenon himself—sometimes, emanating from his own emperor. Janos knew full well that a large part of the reason that Ferdinand discounted the Turk threat was because he knew that in another world, the Ottomans had not launched a major attack on Austria between Suleiman’s attempt in 1529 and Mehmed IV’s in 1683. And they’d been defeated on both occasions.
Unfortunately, while the history of that other world could certainly illuminate many things, it provided no guarantees of similar outcomes. The opposite was likely to happen, in fact, if a leader tried to guide himself too closely by that history.
“No one was surprised by the attack, as such,” Grassi continued. “But no one—possibly not even the Turks themselves, save only the sultan—expected such a powerful assault, and such a quick one.”
“They had the new weapons you expected, then?”
The doctor shook his head. “I wish I could claim such prescience, Baron. In fact, they were far better armed than I had expected. They had twice as many rifled muskets as I told you they would have last year. At least twice as many. And that was perhaps the least of it. They used massive rocket barrages also.”
“Rockets?” Drugeth’s eyebrows went up. Rockets had long been a weapon in the Ottoman arsenal, but the Turks hadn’t used them much in several decades now. The devices were too erratic and temperamental.
“Yes, rockets. They’ve improved them a great deal, it seems. I was not able to find out many details, unfortunately. I did learn that they are now enclosing them in metal cases and apparently spin them in some fashion. They are said to be more powerful and more accurate.”
Spinning rockets…
If Janos remembered correctly, the rockets the Jews used against Holk’s army when he tried to cross the great bridge in Prague had spun also. The Jews hadn’t designed the rockets themselves, though. They’d been provided to them by the notorious up-time revolutionist Sybolt.
Had the Turks somehow gotten their hands on such a rocket? Or the designs for it?
There was no way to know, at the moment. Whatever information existed on the rockets would have to be found in Bohemia—with which Austria was still officially at war, because Ferdinand was being pig-headed about that also. Not much chance Wallenstein would respond to any queries Janos sent him!
“What else?” he asked Grassi. It was obvious from the doctor’s expression that there was more bad news coming.
“They have new artillery also. Their own volley guns.”
“They’ve had volley guns since the last century.”
Grassi waved his hand. “Yes, I know. Those great cumbersome things with nine barrels. I saw one once, in Istanbul. But these new ones are said to be quite different. Much more like the ones the USE uses.”
Wonderful. Janos hadn’t faced those weapons in combat himself, but they’d become rather famous over the
past year and half. The USE volley guns were credited in most accounts with having broken the French cavalry charge at Ahrensbök.
“And what else?”
“They do in fact have an air force, as I told you they might.”
“It needed only this,” Janos muttered. “And the nature of it is…?”
“Apparently they have no airplanes like those of the USE’s air force. What they have instead are lighter-than-air craft.”
“Ah, yes. ‘Zeppelins,’ I think they’re called.”
“Not quite, Baron. I investigated the matter and discovered that zeppelins are difficult to make. They’re the best such craft, but there are many obstacles to overcome. On the simplest side is what are called ‘blimps.’ Those have roughly the same elongated shape but the big envelope that lifts them is like that of a balloon—without any internal structure. Just a big bag, basically, filled either with hot air or some kind of light gas.”
“So these are blimps, you’re saying?”
The doctor held up his hand in a staying gesture. “Give me a moment, please. Somewhere in the middle is a hybrid design. They are only partly rigid, with a much simpler structure than that of a zeppelin properly so-named. They have what amounts to a sort of keel, but most of the bag is left to its own shape. That is apparently what the Ottomans have.”
He opened a pouch hanging from his shoulder and dug out some papers. “I have some diagrams here, which I got by bribing a Turk cavalryman. I wouldn’t count too much on its precision, because it’s just something the man drew from memory. Still, it gives you an idea of what they look like.”
Janos spent a couple of minutes studying the diagrams. There was no point spending more time than that, since it was obvious from the drawings themselves that they were only approximations based on memory.
“There is no sense of scale. How big are they?”
