1634: The Baltic War (30 page)

Two hours later, as Turenne was putting his coat and hat on for the long trip back to Paris, du Barry reminded him of an overlooked detail.

"The name of the rifle. You still haven't decided."

Turenne finished buttoning his coat, while he thought about it. Then, with a smile: "Let's call it the cardinal."

Besançon,
The Franche-Comté

From Saint Etienne, a high plateau that opened onto the Jura massif and overlooked the ancient town of Besançon, Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar studied the Doubs. The river made a great loop below, which enclosed the town on three sides—more like eighty percent of its circumference, actually. The town itself was situated inside the loop, with a fortress protecting the neck and the beginnings of fortifications on the two hills which flanked it.

Only the beginnings yet, at Besançon. Bernhard's official military headquarters were much farther to the northeast, at the Abbey of St. Peter and Paul at Schwarzach on the Rhine. Though by nature a very thrifty man, Bernhard had spent a great deal of money to acquire his own copies of the
Encyclopedia Brittanica
brought by the Americans through the Ring of Fire. He'd chosen that location, to the discomfiture of the Benedictine monks residing there, on the basis of his careful reading of some of Louis XIV's Rhineland campaigns in the 1680s. That world would now not happen, of course, but the logic of the choice of location remained. Schwarzach had a convenient set of large buildings and was not far from what had once become Fort Louis. What was now becoming Fort . . . Whatever, since it didn't have a name yet. But construction was well advanced.

However, Bernhard and his handful of intimate advisers—
Der Kloster,
they called themselves since they had settled at Schwarzach, "the cloister," only half-joking—had agreed that to do more to fortify Besançon at this point would create too much suspicion. Bernhard's civil administrative headquarters were already in the town's Hotel de Ville, true enough. Cardinal Richelieu had agreed that an army the size of Bernhard's needed a civil administration to support it, or the mercenary soldiers would start looting the inhabitants they were supposed to protect. But no one really expected any military action in Besançon, or anywhere near it. Why would any army come here? The town was prosperous but not wealthy, and it was tucked against the mountains. It was certainly not the most inaccessible place in Europe, but the terrain was difficult enough to deter any of the casual plundering expeditions that the war had spilled around itself like a dog shedding water.

"Any chance the cardinal will increase your commission, Your Grace?" asked Friedrich Kanoffski von Langendorff.

Bernhard turned his head to glance back at the Bohemian mercenary officer who was perhaps the most trusted adviser he had in the Cloister. "No," he said firmly, shaking his head. "I don't dare even ask any more. Richelieu's the canniest fox of the lot, you know. I think he's already starting to ask himself questions. We'll simply have to settle with our existing commission. Ten thousand foot and six thousand cavalry. Less than we'd like, of course, but we can live with it for the moment."

Kanoffski wasn't surprised. The closer they came to the spring, and what everyone expected to be a volcanic resumption of hostilities in the field against the Swede and his Germans, the more insistently Richelieu was calling on Bernhard to move his army farther north. Saxe-Weimar had been able to forestall him so far, pointing out quite reasonably that he had to keep an eye on the Swedish general Horn's forces in Swabia. Since that was, indeed, the specific task for which the cardinal had employed Bernhard and his mercenary army—and one which Bernhard had carried out quite satisfactorily for the past two years, keeping one of the Swede's most capable generals and his army pinned to the southwest and away from the main theater of the war—Richelieu had accepted the excuse. Thus far.

But Richelieu's intendants ran a very extensive and capable network of spies. They had no one in or near Bernhard's inner circles, the Cloister was quite certain of that, but they were hardly deaf or blind. By now, if nothing else, Richelieu would be wondering why Bernhard was keeping so many of his troops this far into the Franche-Comté instead of closer to the Rhine.

"Yes, we can live with it, Your Grace," Kanoffski said, "but let me take this occasion to make clear that I am a most unhappy soldier. More precisely, a most unhappy payroll officer."

A little smile came to Saxe-Weimar's face. "Don't tell me. You're going to desert."

They both chuckled, softly. Kanoffski could remember a time when the same remark would have triggered off one of Bernhard's rages, instead of a jest. The man was as notorious for abusing his officers as he was for his arrogance toward almost everyone. Kanoffski had gotten his share of that, in the beginning, and still got some today, from time to time. But he'd found that once Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar did let someone into his confidence, he could be as charming and witty—and generous—as he normally was not at all.

Granted, he was still not an easy man to work for, as a close subordinate. But Kanoffski was thick-skinned by temperament, and had had plenty of experience as a mercenary officer since he left Bohemia. He'd served under commanders every bit as arrogant and harsh as Bernhard—some, more so—but who had not one-tenth of the Saxe-Weimar duke's intelligence and ability. Bernhard was frugal without being stupidly stingy; he was a truly excellent administrator; bold in battle and shrewd on campaign. Overall, in Kanoffski's estimate, one of the very best commanders in all of Europe.

He was even, in his own way, a pious man. His ordinances for the conduct of chaplains in his mercenary army demonstrated both his concern for the spiritual well-being of his soldiery—and his usual canny sense of the abuses to which chaplains were prone. Well, not abuses, precisely. "Limitations" might be a better word. The ordinances made plain that although the chaplains, like Bernhard himself, were all Lutheran, they were to avoid doctrinal fine points in their sermons and stick to the basics, as the duke saw them. "Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil" worked well, right along with, "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain." The duke disapproved of blasphemy. That might be the only thing he had in common with his brother Ernst. Plus, they made it clear that any chaplain who wanted to collect his pay was going to provide spiritual consolation to every man in the regiment, no matter what his own official religion might be. Catholic or Calvinist, sectarian or heretic, a dying soldier was to be given words of comfort.

Kanoffski didn't think it was even hard to understand Bernhard's sometimes outrageous behavior. He was the youngest of four brothers. Four living brothers. Six other sons of his parents had died as infants or children, or been killed in the war—or, in one case, gone mad and committed suicide. That didn't count the one, William's twin, who had been stillborn. All four of the surviving brothers had inherited the duchy of Saxe-Weimar, and Bernhard quite obviously nursed a certain sense of grievance at not having gotten his just due. As the youngest of the four, he could never realistically expect enough of an income from the inheritance to live on it in the manner of a
Hochadel.

So, from the moment he became his own agent as an adult, his consuming passion was to find a place for himself in the world, one that suited his sense of his own stature. Which was perhaps grandiose, but certainly not absurd. In Kanoffski's estimate—being in many ways, not so different a man himself—it was that ambition as much as any admiration for Gustav Adolf or commitment to the Protestant cause that had led Bernhard to seek his fame and fortune as a soldier under the Swedish king's banner.

But that lurking sense of grievance had exploded when Gustav Adolf, for all practical purposes, handed over Saxe-Weimar's lands to the American upstarts. The fact that Bernhard had not really lost very much from the decision, in cold-bloodedly calculated material terms, simply didn't matter. What mattered was that a man trying to gain in stature had just had what little he started with cut out from under him. The fact that the three older brothers had acquiesced in the outrage, arguing political and military necessity, had simply incensed Bernhard further.

He'd given his oath of allegiance to Gustav Adolf—and the treacherous Swede had repaid him with a stab in the back. And an insult, to rub salt into the wound. Not directly to the duke's face, of course, but various people—several of them—had made it their business to ensure that he heard what the king had said to Oxenstierna at Mainz. In the hearing of others.

No, no, no. In this, the dukes of Saxe-Weimar are proving to be as petty as any German noblemen. In their absence—protracted absence, let me remind you—the people of their principality have seen fit to organize themselves to survive the winter and the depredations of the war. What were they supposed to do, Axel? Starve quietly, lest the tranquility of the dukes be disturbed?

As if the reason for their "protracted absence" had not been that they were serving in the king's own army! As if they had been luxuriating at some mineral hot springs rather than fighting in his campaigns!

Kanoffski had heard it often enough. From Bernhard's point of view, the common perception that
he
had "betrayed" Gustav Adolf stood reality on its head. The truth was the other way around. He'd simply repaid the Swede's infidelity with its just reward.

They were quite a quartet, those brothers, Friedrich mused. Saxe-Weimar had never been a very important principality in Germany, even before the Americans overran it with their rebellion. Yet, even though dispossessed from what little they'd had, at least three of the four brothers looked to be emerging as major players in the great game of the continent, almost entirely due to their own capabilities. They were an exception—not the only exception, to be sure, but perhaps the most startling one—from the usual run of German princelings, whose pretensions were generally in inverse proportion to their measly land-holdings and still measlier talents.

The day might even come when the oldest of the brothers, Wilhelm, faced the youngest across the field of battle. Not as two generals, but as two heads of state.

Who could say, any longer? The war that had begun at the White Mountain in Bohemia fifteen years earlier had steadily pulled more and more of Europe into its maelstrom. And then God had thrown the Ring of Fire into the very center of it. For what purpose, neither Friedrich nor Bernhard had any idea at all.

But to what
effect
?—oh, to that question, they had found an answer, with Bernhard leading the way.

When the youngest duke of Saxe-Weimar broke his oath to Gustav Adolf, he also broke all his ties to established custom. Whether you viewed him as a traitor or—as Bernhard did himself—the one betrayed, the end result was the same. He was now a man on his own, with no limit to his ambition and no restraints beyond whatever objective reality might pose.

In their smaller and less ambitious ways, all of the Cloister shared the same view. They were new men, in a new world.

Altogether a new world, even if most of Europe's powerful and mighty persisted in closing their eyes to the reality. Bernhard and his intimates thought most of the American prattle about equality and liberty was just that—prattle—but they'd all come to accept what they saw as the heart of thing. Which Bernhard himself, something of a patron of the arts like all the Saxe-Weimars, said he'd found best expressed in an up-time book of poetry he'd run across in Grantville. A line penned by an English poet of the future.

A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for?

So,
Der Kloster.
As Bernhard had put it to them, in what Friedrich had whimsically come to think of as their own—very different—version of a constitutional convention, held four months earlier at Schwarzach:

"If Wallenstein can do it, why can't we?"

That really meant
me,
not "we," since Bernhard was not proposing any sort of constitutional monarchy, much less a republic. But none of the seven officers in the room had objected to that aspect of the matter. That there would be a first among equals—and quite a long ways first, at that—was a given. They remained monarchists, at bottom; they'd simply shed the false and illusory notions concerning so-called legitimacy with which the powers-that-be cloaked themselves. Legitimacy, to a new man with eyes to see, was simply what you made of it. Nothing more—and nothing less.

Friedrich Kanoffski had been the first to speak. Verbally if not in writing—of course not in writing, since they weren't fools—putting down what the Americans would call his John Hancock.

"Wallenstein is Bohemian, you know. So am I."

That brought a circle of grins. They probably should have called it the Wolfpack rather than the Cloister.

Bernhard turned away from the view below. "I think it would be prudent for the time being, Friedrich, for me to take quite a few companies into the Breisgau. Put the cardinal's mind at rest. Send Caldenbach and Ohm, maybe Rosen as well, toward Mainz. All three of those units can move very fast when they need to."

"Yes, your Grace. Anything else?"

Bernhard looked down at the ground beneath his boots. "Here," he said, stamping his foot on Saint Etienne. "We'll put the big fortress here. Tell Bodendorf to have his military architect start working on the plans while I'm away."

Magdeburg

"I'd recommend we include Nils Krak's men, too," said Frank Jackson. "They're all dragoons as well as sharpshooters, and with their rifled muskets they should give the Thuringian Rifles whatever extra support they might need. We can only send one squad of the Rifles with the combat team."

John Chandler Simpson was half-amused and half-irritated at Jackson's stubborn insistence on using the up-time phrase "combat team" to refer to the special combined arms force they'd be sending as an escort for the ironclads as they made their way downriver to Hamburg. They'd all agreed that sending the ironclads without a land escort would be foolish. As powerful as the war machines were, there were just too many ways in the narrow confines of a river for the enemy to set traps. It could be something as simple as obstructions in the river bed that required the ironclads' accompanying service craft to pause for a bit, while the crews removed the obstacle—easy targets for snipers firing from the river banks. In much the same way that a main battle tank working its way through the narrow streets of a city needed infantry support, so long as they were on the river the ironclads did as well.

The problem—tiny, tiny problem—was that the down-timers had no fixed terminology to use for most such military purposes, just as they tended to use terms like "lieutenant" and "captain" in a very loose and fluid manner. That didn't bother Simpson much, but it drove a former sergeant like Frank Jackson half-crazy. So, once he got on Torstensson's staff, Jackson had insisted on developing precise terminology.

The Swedish general had been willing enough to accommodate him, in principle. But, alas for Jackson, Torstensson insisted on picking the actual terms. And after Simpson had casually mentioned that the sort of combined arms land force they were putting together, as a temporary unit for a specific task, had a different term in the up-time German tradition than the American "combat team" appellation Jackson proposed, Torstensson had chosen it instead. He thought it sounded better.

So, "battle group" it was to be—but Jackson wouldn't budge from using combat team instead. Granted, no one who knew the man could accuse Frank Jackson of being xenophobic, especially after they met his Vietnamese wife Diane. But in many ways, the former coal miner's American chauvinism was so unthinking and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to uproot. In that respect, he was very unlike his long-time close friend and former union associate Mike Stearns, who was generally quite cosmopolitan.

Fortunately, the Swedish general whom Gustav Adolf had placed in overall command of the USE's military seemed more amused than anything else by his American adjutant's recalcitrance.

"Of the two other squads," Jackson continued, "one of them is in Luebeck and I'm assuming"—he cocked his head toward General Torstensson—"that you'll want to keep the third squad in reserve, for whatever you might need them for."

"Whatever Gustav Adolf might need them for," Torstensson grunted. He smiled thinly. "Or are you foolish enough to think the king will let me remain in command after he's broken the siege?"

Admiral Simpson half-scowled. "He certainly
should.
"

The young Swedish general shrugged. "Yes, perhaps. But there is not much chance of it, John, as you well know. I
will
do my best to restrain him from personally leading any cavalry charges. Even there, I can make no promises."

Simpson was tempted to pursue the matter, but it would be pointless. For good or ill—and it was sheer irresponsibility on his part, as far as John was concerned—Gustav Adolf was one of those monarchs who insisted on leading his men on the battlefield. Perhaps the only such monarch left, in this day and age, although there were several princes who'd do the same. Quite capably, in some cases, as the Spanish cardinal-infante had so graphically demonstrated in the Low Countries over the past six months.

He decided he'd do better to save whatever few bargaining points he had left—he'd already used up most of them, he figured—to try to get Colonel Christopher Fey's force beefed up a little.

"Frank," he said, clearing his throat, "please don't take this as any sort of implied criticism of either Krak's people or the Thuringian Rifles. But the fact remains that I don't think they're enough, by themselves."

Jackson frowned. "They
aren't
by themselves. I'm assigning two volley gun batteries to the combat team."

"Yes, I know. But that's still not enough, if they run into a large cavalry force that's willing to accept some casualties. Don't forget that the only unit that'll have repeating breechloaders will be the one Thuringian Rifles squad commanded by Sergeant Wilson. That's not more than—what?—a dozen men?"

"Ten men and two women, to be precise," said Jackson. His expression made it clear that he wasn't too happy about the last part of that equation.

Neither was Simpson, for that matter. On this subject, if not many others, he and Frank Jackson were generally in agreement. Fortunately, it was not a problem Simpson had to deal with much himself. Since the navy had been formed later than the army and drew most of its personnel from the Magdeburg area, John had been able to resist—sidestep, at least—letting any women into the combat units. The pressure for that had come almost entirely from up-time women in Grantville, and had naturally focused on the army and the air force.

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Colonel Wood smiling a little. There was just a hint of derision in that expression. Oddly, given that he was such a dinosaur in so many other ways, Jesse Wood didn't seem to have any reservations about including females in combat positions in the air force.

The smile was a bit irritating, but Simpson didn't rise to it. He was certain that if Wood had to command people who'd spend months at sea together instead of a few hours in a plane, he'd change his tune quickly enough. John's reservations about having women in combat units didn't stem from the same simple paternalistic traditionalism—call it male chauvinism, if you insisted—that lay behind Jackson's opposition. Nor did it result from Simpson's assessment of the martial capabilities of women. Except for units—mostly infantry—whose job required a considerable degree of muscular strength, he thought women were just as capable of killing as men were. More capable, in some instances. If he'd had any doubts, all he had to do was examine Julie Sims' track record.

No, the problem was that they got
pregnant.
Something that couldn't be managed without incredible acrobatics in the two-seat cockpit of a small airplane could be managed quite easily on a ship. And a state of pregnancy that posed nothing more than a minor nuisance on an army or air force base could be a real headache on a ship that couldn't return to port for months on end. True, that wasn't a problem he'd face in his ironclads, since the things were only marginally seaworthy. But Simpson was already looking ahead to the next generation of warships for the USE Navy. Those ships would be faster than any sailing ship of the time, but they would still wind up spending a year or more away from their home ports. Months at a time, at sea.

One of Torstensson's colonels spoke up. Bryan Thorpe, that was, one of the many mercenaries from the British Isles who served under Swedish colors. A bit unusually, an Englishman instead of a Scotsman.

"Frank, that will not be enough," he said, "if they run into real opposition." He spread his hands in a vaguely apologetic gesture. "Unfortunately, we do not have time to put the matter to a test in field exercises. But I can assure you that if they run into a regiment of good cavalry they are likely to get ripped to pieces unless they have some units who can defend them."

Jackson was starting to get exasperated. Enough so that he lapsed into the sort of casual blasphemy that Americans took for granted but rubbed seventeenth-century people the wrong way. "For God's sake, Bryan! We're only talking about an expedition from here to Hamburg—almost all of it in our own territory. Where the hell is a whole regiment of enemy cavalry going to come from in the first place?"

Perhaps because the blasphemy annoyed him—he was something of a Puritan—Thorpe's rejoinder was even sharper in its tone. "Where would they come from? I have no idea, General Jackson. The enemy is not in the habit of confiding his plans to me. That's why he's called the
enemy,
you understand?"

Torstensson intervened, to keep the issue from escalating into an outright quarrel. "I have to say I agree with Bryan, Frank," he said mildly. "USE 'territory' is a bland phrase, you know. Very mushy, like oatmeal. Let us be more precise. We are not talking about the vastnesses of the Russian forests or the great steppes. We are talking about a stretch of land between here and Hamburg that is not more than two hundred and fifty miles following the river. None of which beyond the bend of the Elbe is patrolled by anything other than local militias, except in the vicinity of Lauenburg and Dömitz. And those are garrison troops, not likely to react swiftly and sally out to deal with a passing cavalry raid."

He raised his voice a little, overriding Jackson's beginning of a protest. "
More to the point
, as the ironclads and their accompanying land escort approach Hamburg, they are not more than fifty miles from the French and Danish lines around Luebeck—and the emperor's forces are hemmed in the city, on the
other
side of those lines. They certainly won't be available to come to the admiral's rescue, will they?"

Fortunately, Jackson had enough sense to yield the point, seeing that the army's top commander had come down on the other side. Simpson was sure that Frank's opposition hadn't been all that deeply rooted, anyway. He had no specific objections, he was simply reacting automatically. Guarding his pieces against the plundering damn squids.

Still, when he wanted to be, the man could be more mulish than a mule. "Fine. But I don't see how you expect pikemen to keep up with dragoons. They're certainly not going to be able to handle those eighteen-foot spears on horseback. Assuming they could ride a horse in the first place, which a good half of them can't."

Torstensson took a deep breath, settling his temper. "Frank, please do not be more pigheaded than necessary, would you? We have hardly any pike units left in the USE's army, in any event. Obviously I do not propose to send pikemen. We will simply use . . ." He turned his head and cocked an eye at Thorpe. "Bryan?"

Thorpe was the adjutant Torstensson generally used for such matters. What, in the U.S. Army back up-time would have been called the G-1, assistant chief of staff, personnel. The English colonel mused for a moment, then said:

"Mavrinac's company, I think. Erik has them trained to serve as dragoons, if need be. They won't ride as well as the Thuringians and Krak's people, but well enough to keep up with the ironclads. We've already agreed that the volley guns can't make better than thirty miles a day. Mavrinac and his men can certainly manage that. We'll have to provide them with the horses, though. They won't have enough of their own, not for a company of two hundred men."

Torstensson nodded and looked around at the other officers in the conference room. "Gentlemen? Any further objections or considerations you wish to raise?"

Frank was still looking skeptical, but didn't say anything. For his part, Simpson went over the matter in his head, to see if he agreed with Thorpe's assessment.

He didn't know the unit in question, and to the best of his recollection had never met the commanding officer. But Thorpe wouldn't have picked a green unit, and by now most of the volunteer regiments had gone through enough training that just about any of their companies could handle the relatively straightforward task of forming a line or square to defend against a cavalry charge. Two hundred well-disciplined men armed with rifled muskets and bayonets would provide enough of a shield for the volley guns and the sharpshooters to defeat any cavalry force no bigger than a regiment. The likelihood of encountering anything larger than that was remote.

John was more concerned about the ability of Mavrinac's company to keep up on the march, actually, than he was with their fighting capabilities. The problem was their horsemanship, not their marksmanship. Strip away Thorpe's politesse and the gist of what he'd said was that Mavrinac's men were half-assed dragoons. Men who could ride a horse, but most of them not particularly well.

He looked out of the window onto the training ground below. From the second story vantage point, he could see one of the volley gun batteries going through some exercises. Quite nicely, so much was obvious even at a distance. But most of the men in those batteries had been selected, in part, because they were experienced riders.

John brought his gaze back into the conference room, still gauging. He'd only reluctantly agreed to the thirty-mile-a-day estimate in the first place. Unless they had mechanical trouble, he thought his ironclads would manage quite a bit better than that, at least forty and perhaps fifty miles in a day. He hadn't pressed the point too far, however, because he'd also been confident that the volley guns could match whatever his ironclads would do. Certainly the Thuringians and Krak's men could. They were officially dragoons, but all of them were excellent horsemen. As good if not better than most cavalry units.

After a moment, he decided Mavrinac's people could probably manage well enough. The Elbe was flanked by roads all the way down to Hamburg, so it wasn't a matter of riding cross-country. And the whole force simply wasn't big enough to pose the usual problem of a march, which was simply that no one road could possibly handle a sizeable army. More often than not, the real problem wasn't the ability of the grunts to stay on their feet or in the saddle. It was the ability of their officers to coordinate a march that required using multiple roads.

That simply wouldn't be an issue here. John did the arithmetic quickly. Two hundred dragoons added to a dozen Thuringians and Krak's three dozen sharpshooters, then figure two heavy weapons batteries with a total of . . .