1634: The Baltic War: Chapter Thirty One

PART III

April, 1634

    The next morning, Thorsten Engler was trying hard not to laugh at his friend Eric Krenz. Eric was in a foul enough mood as it was. Fortunately, since Eric was riding behind him and to his right, Krenz couldn’t see the grin on Thorsten’s face.

    “Where did they get these fucking nags, anyway?” he heard Krenz complain.

    After making sure he’d suppressed the grin, Thorsten turned his head and looked back. As he’d expected, Eric wasn’t even looking at the horses drawing the battery wagon at all. Instead, his gaze was fixed, like a paralyzed rabbit’s on a snake, at the limber pole swaying back and forth very close to his right leg. The “tongue,” as it was often called, would inevitably wind up slamming against that leg from time to time, when the limber’s wheels struck an obstruction or rut of some sort. Of which there were bound to be some, especially this time of year, even in a road as well designed and graded as the road that followed the Elbe north of Magdeburg.

    The blow could easily cause bruises, and possibly even break a bone. That was the reason that the right legs of the volley gunners riding the three near horses of each gun crew had an iron guard encased in leather. So did the riders on the ammunition wagon and the battery wagon. The devices worked perfectly well, even if it was a bit startling to have the tongue suddenly slam against you.

    The problem was twofold. The first aspect was that Eric simply wasn’t accustomed to it. By now, Thorsten had plenty of experience riding the near horses on a gun team, even if—as was true today—he would normally ride his own horse on campaign. That being one of the chief perquisites of his august status as the sergeant in command of a battery, not assigned to any specific team.

    Eric, however, being none too fond of horses to begin with, had used every opportunity during their training to avoid riding the blasted beasts. He’d been able to get away with it because he wasn’t assigned to one of the crews in Engler’s B Battery either. Instead, he’d accompany the battery wagon with its load of tools and equipment to repair whatever needed to be repaired on campaign.

    The second part of the problem was even simpler. Krenz was a mediocre horseman, at best. He invariably referred to horses as “surly brutes”—even though, in point of fact, Captain Witty and Lieutenant Reschly had selected the most placid animals they could find. Eric’s stubborn insistence on indulging his dislike for horses meant that his rudimentary skills in a saddle had not improved much throughout the course of their training. By no means all of the volley gunners came from backgrounds, like Thorsten’s own farming, that gave them experience with horses. But, by now, all of them—except Krenz—were at least passable riders. Thorsten’s own horsemanship was quite good, as good as that of most cavalrymen.

    Engler had warned Krenz several times that eventually Eric would have to get on a horse. But Krenz had cheerfully insisted that what he called “proper military doctrine”—and there was a laugh, since Eric missed as many of the formal classes as he could, too—meant that he’d always either be on foot or, at worst, riding on the limber.

    “Artillery officers want their men on foot, Thorsten,” he’d said stoutly, a few weeks back. “I read that in the manual.”

    “Not our manual, you didn’t,” replied Engler, a bit irritated. “That’s the general manual you’re talking about, which is mostly addressed at heavy artillery. Eric, we’re the lightest artillery there is. What they call ‘flying artillery’ or—brace yourself—‘horse artillery.’ We’re supposed to be able to keep up with cavalry, on anything except an actual charge or a fast reconnaissance.”

    Krenz just looked stubborn. He could do that superbly well, when he was of a mind. “I read it,” he persisted.

    “No, what you read was that in the regular artillery, they only use one or two riders on the near horses. Yes, fine, you could get around that, if you were assigned to something like a six-pounder or twelve-pounder battery. As bad a horseman as you are, no sergeant in his right mind wants you guiding a horse team. The manual’s insistence that the gunners who aren’t riding must stay on foot except under special circumstances like fast maneuvers is because they don’t want lazy gunners riding on the limbers, like so many of them will do if the officers or sergeants aren’t watching. That’s because they’re likely to get injured if the limber hits a hole or a rock and jostles them hard enough.”

    He might as well have been talking to a brick wall, from the expression on Krenz’s face.

    Thorsten sighed. “Still don’t get it, do you? When we actually go out on a campaign—especially the one we’re training for, where we have to keep up with the ironclads—you will be riding a horse. Everybody will. There’s no way we could keep up otherwise.”

    Alas, when he wanted to be, Eric’s capacity for self-justification was an endless cornucopia.

    “Oh, that’s nonsense, Thorsten. I heard one of the up-timer sergeants in the infantry—not more than two weeks ago—saying that a properly-conditioned man on foot can travel longer and faster than a horse over long distances. He said they even had some tribe of savages in their old country—‘Apashoes,’ or something like that—who could make a hundred miles a day on foot.”

    Thorsten silently cursed Paul David Willcocks. Though now in his mid-forties, with no excuse for the childish habit, the up-time sergeant who served the volunteer regiments as a special trainer had the incorrigible practice of regaling his soldiers with tales from his former universe, many of which Engler thought were probably what the up-timers called “tall tales.” But whether true or not, Willcocks never seemed to give any thought at all to whether the stories were appropriate for a training sergeant to be blathering to his men.

    “Apaches,” he corrected. “Yes, I know, I’ve heard the story. Here’s what else is true. Since you now seem besotted—and when did this magical transformation take place?—with proper military doctrine. Apaches were light infantry—as light as it gets—detached into small units. A dozen men, perhaps. They didn’t have to worry about keeping hundreds of men moving on a single road, and they weren’t carrying any equipment worth talking about. You, on the other hand, unless you used horses, would have to carry several hundred pounds of gear, powder and shot. You couldn’t even pick up your share and take one step, much less outrun a horse. You couldn’t outrun a tortoise. Even in the infantry, the average soldier in the regiments has to be able to tote fifty pounds on campaign.”

    Since Krenz was obviously still willing to argue, Thorsten had broken it off. “Never mind,” he’d said, waving his hand. “Be as stupid as you want. But if you fall off your team horse a few weeks from now and get turned into sausage by the wheels of the limber and the wagon, don’t claim I did warn you.”

    Now that the joyous day of I-told-you-so had finally come, Thorsten wasn’t actually worried that Eric would fall off his mount. Given the white-knuckled way he was grasping the pommel, Krenz would probably manage to stay in the saddle even if he and his horse were both swept up by a tornado. In any event, Thorsten had made sure the least skilled horseman in his battery was riding the third of the near horses, the one closest to the limber. The “wheelers,” as they were called—the other two on each side would be the “swing” and the “lead” horse—were the biggest and steadiest horses on each team. Even if Eric did fall off he’d manage to land on the limber instead of under it.

    Of course, Engler knew he probably wouldn’t be able to bask in the sunshine of just retribution for more than a few weeks. They were setting off on the expedition with six horses assigned to each gun or wagon, when four would be plenty and, in a pinch, the volley guns were so light they could be hauled by two. That was because it was inevitable that some of the horses would fall by the wayside as time went on. Lamed, ill, killed or wounded in action. So, sooner or later, Eric probably would be able to start walking or riding on the limber.

    Captain Witty had told Thorsten that they could expect, at best, to lose one horse in ten over the course of the expedition—and that was assuming they didn’t fight any major actions. That was the average for a good cavalry unit. In reality, Witty thought their losses would be closer to one horse in four. Most of the men in the volley gun batteries were only passable horsemen, and the price for their inexperience and clumsiness would mostly be paid by the horses themselves.

    As it happened, Captain Carl Witty was thinking about the matter himself, that very moment. And his thoughts were every bit as acerbic as that of his master sergeant.

    “Let’s hope they get better as time goes by,” he grumbled to his second-in-command.

    Lieutenant Markus Reschly—“Mark,” now, since he’d adopted the up-time abbreviation of his name—was a more cheerful man by nature than his commander. Smiling, he said, “Oh, they’re bound to. Training exercises are one thing; a real campaign, quite a different matter. They’ll learn.”

    “Yes, I know. But how many horses will they grind up while they do? Horses are not cheap.”

    From the blank look on the young lieutenant’s face, it was clear as day that he’d never once thought about that aspect of the problem. That was a bit odd, actually. Had Reschly been one of the usual volunteers, Witty wouldn’t have expected him to understand that whatever else war was, it was also an economic enterprise. But Reschly was one of the traditional sort of mercenaries, of whom there were plenty in the USE’s new army, especially in the officer corps. Witty himself was another, from Switzerland.

    Reschly came from the Moselle valley, a region that produced both horses and mercenaries. Plenty of the former and, if not as many as Switzerland, a fair number of the latter. Mercenaries usually understood the economics of war quite well, especially mercenary officers who had to bear a lot of the cost out of their own pockets. And Markus came from a traditional mercenary family, too.

    On the other hand, Reschly was still very young. And although he was officially a “mercenary” it had become quite obvious that he’d used the family tradition, along with a decent amount of training in the skill of arms, to wrangle himself a position in the USE’s army for primarily ideological reasons. If most of the volunteers came from the German lands heavily influenced by the pestiferous Committees of Correspondence, the new USE army was drawing enthusiasts from all over Europe.

    Which was a damned nuisance, as far as Witty was concerned. Not even in the most ill-disciplined mercenary company he’d ever served in had he encountered such a disputatious lot of soldiery. True, the men maintained a tight discipline over themselves when it came to the usual problems of drunkenness and thievery. Much better than mercenaries would. But they were quite prepared to argue about almost anything else. Gloomily, Witty foresaw the day when these idiot “democrats,” as they liked to style themselves, would insist on the right to vote whether or not to have a battle—or even a charge.

    He consoled himself with the thought that the pay was as good as that of most armies in Europe, and there was that one great benefit on the side. Among the many peculiar ramifications of the up-timers’ notion of “democracy” was that they considered it outrageous to expect soldiers—even officers—to pay for their own military equipment. That was to be provided by the state, it seemed.

    An idiot notion, of course. If Witty were the emperor, he’d damn well see to it that his soldiers bore as much of the financial burden of war as possible. Let them make up for it by looting.

    Which the up-timers also considered outrageous—to the point where they’d even persuaded General Torstensson to ban looting altogether, under pain of draconian punishments. There seemed to be no end to the silliness they could generate out of their heads. Perhaps the absurdly lavish care they devoted to their teeth made their brains rot instead.

    Ah, well. Witty had calculated everything carefully, before he agreed to take a commission, and decided it was still worth doing. The pay was decent, after all, and he figured that whatever he’d lose by not getting a captain’s share of the loot, he’d make up for by also not having to pay a captain’s share of the expenses.

    Still, old habits died hard. Every time he saw one of the inexperienced gunners misusing a horse, he couldn’t stop calculating what that was likely to cost a few weeks down the road, even if he wasn’t the one who’d be paying for it.

    On the positive side, the road was good. Very good. However fantastically impractical the up-timers might be in their politics, there was no question they designed good roads. The best roads Europe had seen since Roman times were now those in the Germanies. Well, some of the Germanies, at least. Pomeranian roads were still said to be as bad as ever.

    But Pomerania was the armpit of the continent anyway. Witty had been there once. Hopefully, he’d never go again. He was thirty-three years old now. A few more years and he’d be able to return to Switzerland with enough money to set himself up nicely.

    Who knows? He might even have enough to pay a dentist before he retired. Not likely, of course.

    The river was unpleasantly cold in the bright morning light.

    Well, of course it was. It was only late March, and the Elbe River was never exactly what one might have called toasty warm, Admiral John Simpson reflected as he stood with hopefully impressive calm in the conning tower of SSIM Constitution. He’d been a bit surprised that the river hadn’t frozen, although intellectually he’d understood that the past winter hadn’t really been as cold as it had sometimes felt, Little Ice Age or not.

    It was still cold enough to offer the very real threat of hypothermia to anyone who found himself immersed in it, though. A thought which John Chandler Simpson found rather reassuring as he contemplated the intelligence reports about possible threats his command might face. Not that there weren’t entirely enough purely physical problems, without any need for enemy action behind them, to make his current task sufficiently daunting.

    Captain Franz Halberstat maneuvered Constitution cautiously away from her dockside mooring. “Give me ten degrees of starboard rudder, reverse thrust on the starboard jet, and increase to ten percent power on the port jet,” he said.

    “Ten degree starboard rudder, ten percent power on the port jet, aye, aye, Sir!” his helmsman repeated crisply, and the engineroom telegraph jangled as the quartermaster transmitted the orders.

    The ironclad’s twin rudders moved, and a curved section of pipe lowered itself over the nozzle of the starboard pump as a pair of engineers spun the geared wheel which controlled it. The pipe clamped tight, capturing the output from the pump and directing it forward, underneath the ship’s hull, while the port jet continued to push forward. The combination turned the vessel sharply, and Constitution’s five hundred-ton bulk seemed to quiver slightly underfoot.

    That was probably his imagination, Admiral Simpson told himself. On the other hand, maybe it wasn’t.

    The ironclad moved slowly but smoothly towards midstream and away from her mooring, and Halberstat’s quiet orders returned the starboard jet to normal operation. Simpson nodded in satisfaction, and then stepped out onto the bridge wing, looking astern as the other six ships began to move as well.

    He wasn’t the only person watching them. The navy yard’s entire workforce was out in strength, standing on the river banks, bobbing about in every rowboat they could lay hands on, shouting and cheering and stamping their feet. The sound of their voices would probably have been deafening, if the raucous sound of the ironclads’ sirens (actually, horns purloined from diesel trucks which weren’t going to require them any longer), the timberclads’ whistles, and the ringing of Magdeburg’s bells hadn’t drowned out any purely human sounds.

    So much for operational security, Simpson thought dryly.

    Of course, there’d never been much chance of maintaining any sort of security, even if Mike Stearns—or John Chandler Simpson—had wanted to in the first place. Everyone in Magdeburg, which undoubtedly included literally hordes of spies for everyone from Richelieu to Christian of Denmark to Emperor Ferdinand of Austria to the Wizard of Oz, had known the Navy would be moving out as soon as possible for its spring showdown in the Baltic. There’d been no possible way to conceal that. Nor was Simpson particularly averse to letting the other side know what was coming.

    There’s damn-all they’re going to be able to do about it, anyway, he thought with a certain grim satisfaction. It wasn’t a thought which someone with his own profound respect for the Demon Murphy was prepared to express out loud, but Simpson was well aware of the potency of the weapon he had forged.

    Standing there and simply watching the ships of his squadron was one of the more difficult things Simpson had ever done. Every nerve ending in his body cried out to take the con himself, at least for his flagship. Certainly, even ten or twelve months ago, the mere thought of allowing seventeenth-century officers to command vessels like this would have been a guaranteed source of permanent insomnia. After the exhausting weeks and months he’d spent working with and training the officers in question, that problem at least no longer applied.

    Well, he thought, let’s be honest with ourselves here, John. It doesn’t apply very much, anymore.

    He snorted with humor carefully concealed behind his impassive “the Admiral is on duty” expression as he admitted the real reason his entire epidermis itched with the need to give the helm and power orders himself. These ships were very much his babies. Building them, and the Navy to employ them, had been probably the most satisfying task he’d ever undertaken in a life filled with substantial accomplishments. He wasn’t prepared to admit that to anyone except, possibly, his wife Mary, but he knew it was true, and he simply hated the thought of delegating responsibility for what happened to his ships in any way to someone else.

    At least the skippers he’d appointed to command the ironclads had all been given the opportunity to practice with the slower, clumsier, smaller river steamers already in commission. In fact, Simpson had used those practice and training sessions to wash out several prospective watch-standing officers. The transition from sail or oar power to paddlewheel steamers had required greater mental flexibility than most up-timers would have expected, for a lot of reasons, and some people—whether up-timer or seventeenth-century—simply lacked that flexibility.

    One problem which had caused quite a bit of confusion for the Down-timers, at least initially, was the fact that Simpson had insisted upon providing all of his new vessels with wheels, rather than the simple tillers virtually all seventeenth-century ships utilized. There were several reasons for that particular decision, and the opinion which he knew some people had expressed—that it was simply the system with which he was familiar—wasn’t actually one of them. The use of a geared quadrant system to shift the rudder not only permitted him to build in a much greater mechanical advantage for the helmsman, but also offered a substantially greater amount of maneuverability.

    All contemporary vessels used a tiller. For all intents and purposes, it was simply a stout bar, attached to the head of the rudder stock, and used to steer much as the tiller was used in a modern sailing dinghy or outboard motorboat. Unfortunately, the length of the tiller had to be in direct proportion to the forces required to shift the rudder, and its maximum length was restricted by the width of the ship itself. In larger ships, a “whipstaff” was required simply to control the rudder, and that made things even worse. The whipstaff was essentially a vertical lever, mounted on a pivoting center and extending from the ship’s quarterdeck down to the level of the tiller, where it was attached to the end of the bar. It provided the helmsmen with a powerful mechanical advantage, but meant that the rudder’s range of movement was even more sharply restricted. As a result, a large sailing ship (although “large” was a relative term) found it impossible to apply more than five or six degrees of rudder.

    Simpson’s ships, on the other hand, could apply up to eighty degrees of rudder, would have made them immensely more maneuverable even without the fact that they weren’t solely reliant on wind power or oars. It had taken his seventeenth-century officers a while to make that mental adjustment, and then to make the necessary counter-adjustment and learn to respect the limitations which still existed. Actually, the second adjustment had been rather more harrowing for Simpson to observe. For a while, it had reminded him forcefully of Hans Richter’s adventures behind the wheels of up-timer vehicles.

    After that, they’d settled down, and Simpson felt reasonably confident of their ability to handle the paddlewheel timberclads. The ironclads, though, were a different kettle of fish entirely. Crude as they might still appear to up-timer eyes, they were far more advanced in both concept and execution than the steam kettle timberclads. For all their greater size, they actually accelerated faster and had a tighter turning radius (proportionately) and a higher sustained speed than any of the steamboats which had yet been produced here in the United States of Europe.

    And they were lots, lots bigger.

    “Meet her,” Captain Halberstat said.

    The captain’s voice came faintly but clearly through the open armored door. Simpson couldn’t hear the helmsman’s response, but Constitution steadied on her new heading, steaming directly down the center of the river. Well, not “steaming,” precisely.

    The pair of pumps around which each of the four ironclads had been built turned each of them into what Simpson sometimes thought of as the world’s biggest jet skis. They’d allowed him to avoid all sorts of problems in building the things, and they offered significant tactical advantages. They didn’t come without drawbacks of their own, of course. For one thing, they were big, and designing their intakes and flow lines had presented quite a few headaches. Foreign object damage was also a consideration, and designing screens to protect the intakes against objects large enough to inflict damage without thoroughly obstructing water flow had provided another set of headaches.

    On the other hand, they’d kept Simpson from having to figure out how to design truly efficient propellers—something he was going to have to do by the time they started laying down the proposed screw-frigates. They were also far less vulnerable (and far more mechanically reliable) than the paddlewheels he’d used for the supporting steamers. And they were immensely more efficient at moving water . . . which, after all, was what any mechanical propulsion system had to do.

    He stepped to the front of the open bridgework wrapped around the armored conning tower and looked ahead down the river. The pair of up-time power boats leading the ponderous line of gunboats downstream looked particularly anachronistic this morning. The fact that they were stuffed with Marines armed with flintlock rifles only added to their incongruity, but Simpson couldn’t have cared less. Each of those boats, like each of his ironclads, mounted one of the precious up-time fishing fathometers and carried one of the experienced Elbe River barge pilots. Over the last several weeks, those boats and pilots had scoured the upper reaches of the Elbe, familiarizing themselves with its waters in order to pick practicable channels for Simpson’s vessels.

    The fact that the river was running springtime deep and that the ironclads’ draft could be reduced to as little as five feet by pumping out their trim tanks had helped immeasurably with that task, but there were still a few problem areas waiting for them. Most of those had been addressed by building staustufen, or temporary holding dams, on the shallow bits. Like the more permanent wehrleucken, the staustufen’s function was to raise the water level in a given section of river to something which would float the gunboats. Unlike the wehrleucken, staustufen were intended from the beginning to be temporary structures. Once the water had risen sufficiently, they were simply breached and the vessels upstream of them rode down with the released wave. Wehrleucken, on the other hand, were permanent dams with central spillways which were supposed to be broad enough for barges and other river traffic to pass through.

    Unfortunately, none of the existing wehrleucken had been built to handle anything like the size of the USE’s steamboats and gunboats. In the long run, a more formal and efficient system of locks was going to be necessary, and its construction was already underway. But for now, Simpson was stuck with what was already in place.

    And what’s already in place is stuck with me, too, he thought with a certain grim satisfaction. You should have listened to Matthias, Freiherr. He was trying to be much more reasonable than I’m going to be.

    One thing about Mike Stearns, the admiral reflected. The man had nerves of steel and an intelligent ruthlessness whose depth Simpson, for one, had been woefully slow to recognize. In his own way, Stearns was every bit as ruthless and willing to resort to bare knuckles at need as Gustav Adolf himself . . . and just as pragmatic.

    The prefix for the ships themselves, in fact, were a reflection of that characteristic of the man. SSIM stood for Schiff seiner imperialen Majestät—“His Imperial Majesty’s Ship,” in English. The CoCs had raised a ruckus, wanting USES instead. But since there’d been no substance to the matter beyond pure symbolism, and the issue was raising the emperor’s hackles—more because the he saw the CoCs as challenging him, than because he really cared himself—Stearns had squelched the CoCs and settled the issue to Gustav Adolf’s preference. Figuring, Simpson had no doubt, that he’d save his bargaining leverage for issues that really mattered. When the time came to fish or cut bait, Prime Minister Stearns, unlike certain other up-time political leaders Simpson could have named, never waffled.

    Careful, John, he told himself. You’re actually starting to like the man!