1634: The Baltic War: Chapter Six

    After the waitress brought them steins of beer, Eric Krenz started drinking right away. But Thorsten Engler just stared at his stein for half a minute before, almost desultorily, beginning to sip from it. After setting down the stein, his eyes wandered about the tavern for another half minute. Seeing, but not really thinking about what he saw. No matter what he looked at, the image that kept flashing back into his mind was that of Robert Stiteler having the life swatted out of him as if he’d been nothing but an insect. He’d had a nightmare about it the night before, too.

    Eric’s voice startled him. “If you can’t get it out of your head, you should go see those American women. The ones I told you about. The ‘social workers,’ they call them.”

    Engler stared at him, for a moment, trying to bring his mind to bear on what his friend was saying.

    “What are ‘social workers?’” he asked.

    Eric shrugged and drained some more of his beer. “I’m not sure, really. I think—”

    A voice coming over Thorsten’s shoulder interrupted him. “They’re a variety of what the up-timers call ‘psychologists.’ Except real psychologists—so I’m told, anyway, I don’t think the Americans actually have any here—only handle customers one at a time and they charge a small fortune for it. These ‘social workers’ are apparently the type that get assigned to the unwashed masses.”

    Grinning in his vulpine sort of way, Gunther Achterhof pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. “Like you and me,” he finished.

    He leaned back in his chair, turned half around, and waggled a hand at a nearby waitress. When she came over, he ordered a beer for himself. Then he turned back to look at Thorsten. “And I agree with Eric. Especially if you find you’re having regular nightmares about it.”

    Thorsten winced a little.

    “Thought so,” Gunther said, nodding. “They have a name for it, even. They call it PTSD. The letters stand for ‘post-traumatic shock disorder.’”

    He used the actual English terms rather than trying to translate. Engler and Krenz had been in Magdeburg long enough to have a good grasp of the peculiar new German dialect that was emerging in the city—as it was in Grantville and many other towns in the USE. People were starting to call the dialect “Amdeutsch.” It was a blend of Hochdeutsch and Plattdeutsch, essentially, but with a large number of American loan words and a more stripped down grammar than that of most German dialects. The new dialect had adopted the simplified English system of verb conjugations, for instance. Newcomers to Amdeutsch found it a bit peculiar to say ich denk instead of ich denke, but they soon got used to it.

    Although Engler and Krenz didn’t have any difficulty with the fact that the terms were English, they still didn’t really understand what they meant. So Achterhof spent a minute or so clarifying the matter.

    As best he could, anyway.

    “Stupid, you ask me,” was Krenz’s conclusion. “So bad things that happen to you are upsetting. What else is new? For this we need fancy up-time words?”

    Achterhof shook his head. “For you, Eric, it’s maybe that simple. Crude and coarse blockhead that you are. But for sensitive and poetic types like me and Thorsten, things are different. It’s more complicated than you think.”

    Krenz snorted in his beer. “You! ‘Poetic’!”

    But Engler found himself wondering. “These ‘social workers.’ Have you been to see them?”

    Achterhof nodded. “The Prince himself suggested I go to them, when I told him once about the nightmares. So I did. They were quite helpful. I still have the nightmares, but not as bad and not as often. And there are… other things, that are not so bad.”

    He didn’t seem inclined to elaborate, and Achterhof was not a man whom one would lightly press on such a matter. Engler knew enough of his personal history to know that he’d had plenty of things to have nightmares about. Quite a bit more than Thorsten himself, for certain. A terrible accident was one thing. What Achterhof had lived through…

    A little shudder went through Thorsten’s shoulders.

    “How much do they charge?” he asked. “I can’t afford much, now. I got fired this morning. Because of the accident.”

    “Assholes,” said Krenz. “It wasn’t Thorsten’s fault.”

    Gunther shrugged. “No, it wasn’t. But the coal gas plant was owned by Underwood and Hartmann. The biggest American prick in partnership with the biggest German prick. What do you expect? ‘Shit rolls downhill,’ as the up-timers say—and any company owned by Underwood and Hartmann might as well have that for its official motto.”

    He took a long pull on his beer. “They probably would have fired you too, Eric—every man working the shift—except the rest of you were in the union.” He tipped the stein in Thorsten’s direction. “Engler wasn’t, since he was officially part of management.”

    Eric shook his head. “I still say that’s silly. In the guilds—”

    “Fuck the guilds,” said Gunther harshly. “Yes, I know. In the guilds, a foreman like Engler would have been a member. Which is one of the many things wrong with the guilds. It’s the guildmasters and top journeymen who run them, and fuck everybody else. The American union system is better for the common man. Much better—even if, now and then, somebody shitty happens like this. Just the way it is.”

    Engler agreed with Achterhof, actually. Krenz came from a family of long-established gunsmiths. Even though he’d joined the Committee of Correspondence soon after he arrived in Magdeburg, in some ways he still had the attitudes of a town guildsman. Thorsten’s family, on the other hand, had been farmers from a small village. Prosperous enough ones, until the war ruined them and forced the survivors into the towns—where they got no help or friendship from the haughty guilds.

    “Yeah, fuck the guilds,” he murmured. “I understand the situation, Gunther, but it still leaves me in a bad place. I’ve got enough money saved to get me through for maybe a month. After that…”

    He shrugged. “There’s always plenty of work here. But it won’t pay very well. Unlike Eric, I don’t really have any skills. I was lucky to get that foreman job.”

    “Luck, bullshit,” said Krenz. He used the English term. No American loan words except purely technical ones were adopted wholesale the way their delightful profanity was. “You were a good foreman, Thorsten. That’s why they promoted you in the first place. They’re shitheads, but they’re not stupid.”

    Achterhof drained his stein and called for another one. “Eric’s right, Thorsten,” he said, after she left. “I asked around. All the men thought well of you. Being a foreman is a skill too, you know.”

    “Sure is,” agreed Krenz. “I know. I’ve had plenty of bad ones. Either they didn’t know the work or they were afraid to make a decision—usually both—or they knew what they were doing but were rude and unpleasant bastards to work for. It’s not that common to find a foreman who doesn’t have either vice.”

    Engler made a face. “I didn’t really know what I was doing.”

    A sudden flashing image of Stiteler came, and he paused while he desperately tried to fend it off. It was the same image as most of them. There’d been a moment there, after Robert had been slammed into a stanchion, when his body seemed to be glued in place by the force of the blow. His face had been untouched, but the back of his head had been completely crushed. Eyes still open but empty, the man already dead, with blood and bits of his skull and pieces of his brain starting to ooze down the metal column.

    Thorsten closed his eyes and shook his head. That seemed to help, sometimes.

    When he opened his eyes, he saw Achterhof gazing at him. Sympathetically—and knowingly.

    “Go talk to the up-time women, Thorsten,” the CoC organizer said softly. “If you can’t pay right away, they’ll make arrangements.”

    Engler took a slow, deep breath. “All right, I will. Where is their business?”

    “It’s actually a government enterprise. Part of what they call the ‘Department of Social Services.’” The waitress arrived with Achterhof’s beer, and he paused long enough to pay her. Then, with the stein, gestured in the direction of Government House. “They’re in the corner next to the river, on the third floor. Just ask for the social workers.”

    Thorsten nodded, drained what was left of his own stein, and then contemplated the empty vessel. More to the point, contemplated whether he could afford to order another. The very fact that he even had to think about whether he could do so drove home to him just how quickly his financial situation would become desperate.

    Well… “desperate,” in a sense. Finding a job that would pay enough to keep him fed and sheltered and even reasonably clothed wasn’t the issue. Magdeburg was what the Americans called a “boom town.” If he started looking early the next morning, Thorsten could have a new job by the end of the day. Maybe even by noon. But it would be unskilled labor, almost for sure.

    The problem wasn’t even the work itself, as hard as it would most likely be. Thorsten was not lazy and, though he was no taller than the average man, was stocky and very strong for his size. In particular, like most people raised to farm work, he had a lot of endurance.

    It was the boredom that would slowly—no, not so slowly, not any more—drive him half-mad. Now that Thorsten had had the experience of a job that was interesting and challenging, the idea of going back to spending all day wielding a pick or a shovel was far more distasteful than it would have been a few months earlier. He’d been spoiled, really.

    “I’ll have to make arrangements,” he said, almost sighing the words. “Even though I hate being in debt.”

    He noticed, suddenly, that Achterhof’s earlier sympathetic expression had been replaced by something else. There was now a look on his face that wasn’t exactly what you could call “predatory.” But it reminded him of the way hunting dogs fixed their gaze on something that might be prey.

    “Join the army,” Gunther said. He nodded toward Krenz. “Like he’s going to.”

    Surprised, Engler looked at Eric. Krenz shrugged, smiling perhaps a bit ruefully. “Hey, look, Thorsten. They didn’t fire me, true enough. But there’s not going to be any work for me there until they rebuild the whole factory. Which will take months—and Underwood and Hartmann are not the old-style type of masters who’ll pay a man when he’s not actually working.”

    The young repairman looked a bit uncomfortable, for a moment. “Besides. I’d been thinking about it anyway. It’s also a matter of patriotic duty.”

    Patriotic. That was another up-time loan word in Amdeutsch. The notions involved in the term weren’t completely foreign, not by any means. Any German who had citizenship rights in a town—which many didn’t, of course—understood perfectly well that the rights also carried obligations. Including the obligation to serve in the militia when and if the town was threatened. But the Americans gave a sweeping connotation to the notion that was quite different from the traditional one. Almost mystical, in a way. As if such a nebulous thing as a “nation” was as real as an actual town or village, and could make the same claims on its citizens.

    Now suspicious, Thorsten looked back and forth between Eric and Gunther. “You set this up,” he accused. “The two of you.”

    Achterhof snorted. “Don’t be stupid. Of course we did. The minute Eric told me you were moping around—that was halfway through the morning—I told him to get you down here this afternoon and I’d recruit you into the army. Both of you. That’ll solve all your practical problems at one stroke—and you can stop feeling like a worthless parasite feeding on your nation like a louse.”

    “I wasn’t feeling like a worthless parasite,” Thorsten said stiffly.

    Gunther’s eyes widened, almost histrionically. “You weren’t? A man as smart as you?”

    Thorsten was starting to get a little angry, but Eric’s sudden burst of laughter punctured that. His friend had a cheerful outlook on life that was often surprisingly contagious.

    “He’s only smart about things that he’s actually thinking about, Gunther,” Krenz said, “and he concentrates his attention to the point of being oblivious about everything else. That can make him as stupid as a mule about something he hasn’t really thought about.”

    He took a swallow of beer, then raised the half-empty mug in a saluting gesture. As if he were making an unspoken toast. “Like the war.”

    A bit defensively, now, Thorsten said: “Keeping the factory going was part of that.”

    Achterhof nodded. “Yes, it was. That’s why nobody from the CoC came by to urge you—pester you, if you prefer—to volunteer. But the factory blew up, and even after they get it rebuilt there’s no job for you there. And while I’ll admit that if you squint real hard, you can claim that digging a sewer ditch is also a contribution to the war effort, it’s pushing it. Not to mention being a complete waste of your skills.”

    Engler made a derisive sound, just blowing air through his lips. “Ha! As opposed to carrying a musket? At least digging a ditch, I don’t have to work shoulder to shoulder with some smelly Saxon like Krenz here.”

    Eric grinned, and so did Gunther. But that expression on Achterhof’s face was predatory now. He might as well have been a fox in human clothing, sitting at a table and drinking beer.

    “Who said anything about carrying a musket?” He issued his own derisive puff of air. “And you can forget that ‘shoulder-to-shoulder nonsense.”

    Eric leaned forward. “They’re forming up new units, Thorsten,” he said eagerly. “’Heavy weapons squads,’ they’re called. Gunther told me he could get us into one of them.”

    Thorsten eyed Achterhof skeptically. Granted, the man was one of the top organizers for the CoC in Magdeburg, and granted also the CoCs had a lot of influence in the new regiments. But one of the things that made those regiments “new” in the first place—even the most ignorant farmboy knew this much—was that recruitment wasn’t based on the same who-you-know methods that were standard for most mercenary regiments. Instead, it was done—depending on who you talked to—in a manner that could be described as “fair” or “nonsensical” or “as stupid as you can imagine.”

    Red tape, after all, was another up-time loan word in Amdeutsch. At least the old-style mercenary recruiters could generally be depended upon to deliver on whatever promises they made. No such thing could be said about recruitment into the new regiments. Thorsten personally knew a man—he’d been working at the plant when Engler first hired on—who’d signed up for the army thinking he’d become a cavalryman because the recruiter had told him his horsemanship skills were useful and would be prized. Instead, he’d wound up in the Marines—spending all day on his feet standing at attention while guarding the Navy Yard, bored half to death. Not even the fancy uniform had consoled him.

    And why? Apparently because some careless clerk had jotted down something wrong in his papers. But try getting it changed, after the fact! In the real world, often enough, we play no favorites was a gleaming phrase whose immediate and tarnished successor was and we don’t pay any attention to what we’re doing, either, followed by the downright sullen no, that’s too much of a bother to fix now that it’s done.

    “It’s true,” Eric insisted.

    Thorsten was still squinting at Achterhof. Gunther smiled, took another drink from his beer, and then shrugged.

    “No, I can’t guarantee anything. But I know General Jackson and he’s an easy man to talk to. More to the point, the Swede Torstensson put Jackson in charge of the new units. And why did he do so? Because the reason they’re called ‘heavy weapon’ squads is because they’ll be using gadgets that only the Americans really understand that well yet. And the Americans—you know this to be true, Thorsten, from your own experience—prize nothing so much as a down-timer who seems to have an aptitude for mechanical things.”

    He pointed at Eric with his beer stein. “That’s him. And they also prize down-timers who seem to know how to manage men with mechanical skills. Which is you.”

    Another flashing image of Stiteler came. And went, thank God, faster than most.

    “Oh, yes,” Thorsten said gloomily. “I can just imagine how enthusiastic your Jackson fellow will be, when you tell him—make sure to smile as wide as you can, Gunther—that—o happy occasion!—the foreman who managed to oversee several men getting killed and the whole coal gas plant getting destroyed is now available to be a sergeant—that’s the rank they use, am I correct?—in his new units.”

    Eric grimaced. But Gunther’s smile actually widened.

    “It’ll be the easiest thing in the world, Thorsten,” he said. “After I tell the General that Quentin Underwood owned the factory—which he knows already—and that he blamed you because he didn’t take the time and spend the money to have you trained properly. Jackson will have you sworn in ten minutes later.”

    Engler squinted at him. “Why?”

    “Ha! You don’t know anything about Frank Jackson, do you? Well, he wasn’t a general up-time, I can tell you that. He—and the Prince himself, you know—were both coal miners. Leaders of their union. And Quentin Underwood was the mine manager. And if you think you have a low opinion of Underwood, ask Jackson about him someday. Make sure you stand back a few paces, though. Your skin will likely blister if you don’t.”

    Thorsten pondered the matter. He’d had so little direct contact with up-timers that he’d never really given any thought at all to what they’d done or who they’d been in the world they came from. To him, as to most Germans he knew, all the Americans seemed somehow Adel. True, they didn’t fit any of the existing categories of the nobility, but what difference did that make? They’d simply added another one of their own, which they enforced either by simple prestige or the still simpler method of beating nay-sayers into a pulp on a battlefield.

    A coal miner.

    Thorsten came from a village not far from Amberg in the Upper Palatinate. There were iron mines all over that area. For generations, men in his family had often supplemented their income by doing a stint of work in the mines. Thorsten himself had done so for a few months, when he was seventeen.

    A former miner, for a commander. That might be… pleasant. Even in a war.

    Perhaps especially in a war. Anger that had been simmering for a day and half, under the grief and the guilt, fed by the nightmares and the horrible sudden images, began to surface.

    The accident hadn’t been Thorsten’s fault. Being fair, it hadn’t even been the fault of Underwood or the plant manager. Everyone was being pushed, by the demands of the war. Which was just another way of saying, by the aggression of Richelieu and Christian IV of Denmark and Charles I of England and the Habsburg king of Spain.

    “So fuck them,” Thorsten growled softly. He liked the way things were happening in Magdeburg, and everywhere else that he knew of in the Germanies that the up-timers had an effect upon. One of his uncles and three of his cousins had moved to Bamberg after their village had been destroyed. Thorsten had gotten some letters from them since. Part of what they talked about in those letters was their good opinion of the new up-timer administration of Franconia. And part of the letters seemed very veiled, which meant that something explosive was brewing down there. Something which the Americans might not be leading or even really know about, but also something that his uncle and cousins didn’t expect the up-timers to oppose, either.

    A prince of Germany—the only prince that all Germans had, commoners for sure; that much Thorsten had already concluded—who had once been a coal miner. That was also… pleasant to think about.

    “Okay,” he said, unthinkingly using the one American loan word that had swept over Germany faster than any plague and bid fair to do the same across all of Europe. “Where do I sign up?”

    Achterhof hoisted his stein in another half-salute. “Right here. In about”—he glanced at the big clock hanging over the bar—“forty-five minutes. I told Frank to meet us here.”

    Both Engler and Krenz stared at him.

    That vulpine smile that fit so easily came back to Gunther’s face. “I told you. I know him. Quite well, in fact. And he’s partial to the beer in this tavern, and doesn’t mind getting his general’s hands dirty doing lowly recruitment work. He’s very enthusiastic about the new squads, too.”

    He looked down at his stein, which he’d set back on the table. It was almost empty. “Speaking of which—another round? Oh, stop looking like a fretful housewife, Thorsten. I’ll buy.”

    Achterhof did know Jackson quite well, as it turned out. The first sentences out of the American general’s mouth after Gunther finished his summary of the way Thorsten had been singled out for blame due to the accident was:

    “Quentin Underwood is the biggest fuckwad asshole who ever disgraced the state of West Virginia. Yeah, fine, he’s a competent mine manager. He’s also a complete prick and a miserable shithead and if the cocksucker was lying in the gutter dying of thirst the only thing I’d do is walk over there to piss all over the worthless motherfucker.”

    He took a long pull on his beer. “So forget that bullshit. What matters is that after Gunther raised this with me, I went and talked to Mike about it. He was right there next to the two of you all the way through that nightmare. He told me if I didn’t sign you up, assuming you volunteered, I’d be an idiot. Not to mention a bigger asshole than Underwood, which probably isn’t possible anyway given the laws of nature.”

    Another long pull. “So. Thorsten, I can start you right off as a sergeant. We promote from the ranks, so anything after that is up to you. Eric, you’ll be what in my old army we would have called—ah, never mind—but what it amounts to is a technical specialist. The thing is, these Requa volley guns aren’t that complicated all by themselves. They’re really just a fancier version of organ guns. But what I’m looking toward is replacing them as soon as we can with real machine guns. That’ll most likely be Gatlings, first off, but who knows? So I need as many men as I can get who’ve got the knack for this stuff. Especially someone like you—this is what Gunther tells me—who comes from a gunsmith’s background.”

    When Engler and Krenz reported to the army headquarters the next morning, so it proved. The papers were already prepared and ready for their signatures, enlisting both of them in one of the new heavy weapons units. As promised, Engler with the rank of sergeant and Krenz with a specialist rating.

    No clerk had made an error.

    Given Jackson’s command of the more salient features of Amdeutsch, Thorsten was not surprised. Paper was flammable, after all. So were clerks, when you got right down to it.