1635: The Eastern Front: Chapter Ten

Northeast of Halle, not far from the Saxon border

    The countryside between Magdeburg and Saxony reminded Mike Stearns of the American Midwest, except for the absence of corn and soybeans. The crops being grown were different, but the terrain was much the same — flat, and consisting mostly of open farmland but with quite a few wooded areas scattered about. None of the woods could be called forests, though.

    There was one other big difference from the Midwest, but that was not peculiar to this area. It was a common feature throughout central Europe, and Mike suspected you’d find it in Western Europe as well. Unlike the twentieth-century American farm countryside he’d known, with its many scattered individual farmhouses, central European farmers in the seventeenth century all lived in small towns and villages. The farmland itself was largely barren of inhabitants, except during the day when people were working in the fields. By and large, the collective methods and village traditions of the middle ages still applied to farm labor in the German countryside.

    To the farmers themselves, at any rate, if not necessarily the aristocracy. Seventeenth century Germany was no longer in any real sense of the term a feudal society. Labor relations might have resisted change, but the same was not true of property relations. In the year 1635, a landlord was just as likely to be a burgher or a well-off farmer as a nobleman — and still more likely to be an institution of some kind rather than a person: a corporation, a city council, a trust, whatever. Still, farmers lived in villages, not in separated and isolated farmhouses; and still, in many ways, worked the land in common.

    His musings were interrupted by one of his staff officers, Colonel Christopher Long, who came riding up bearing some new dispatches.

    “Anything important?” he asked.

    The young colonel shook his head. “Nothing that can’t wait until we make camp this evening.”

    The English officer was a professional soldier who’d come to Magdeburg to join the USE army — not the Swedish forces directly under Gustav Adolf, as did most mercenaries from the British Isles. The reason, Mike had discovered from a conversation a few days earlier, was that Long had been in Spanish service when the Spaniards invading Thuringia had been defeated by the Americans near Eisenach.

    In fact, the Englishman was one of the survivors of the destruction of the Wartburg. His depiction of the nightmare of trying to escape the castle as it was being consumed by napalm bombs was horrific, for all that he recounted the tale in a matter-of-fact manner. He’d come away from the experience convinced that the trade of war was about to undergo a drastic transformation — and thus had placed himself at the service of those who seemed to be the agents of that change.

    In the world Mike had come from, Long’s behavior would have bordered on treason. But nationalism and twentieth-century notions of patriotism were just beginning to emerge from dynasticism, in the seventeenth century. Long’s pragmatic attitude was the norm for professional soldiers in this day and age, not the exception. The only thing which made Long unusual was that, unlike most mercenary officers, he was quite willing to accept the rambunctious behavior of the CoC-influenced enlisted soldiers in the USE army, as the price for gaining the experience he wanted.

    After handing over the dispatches, Long studied Mike for a moment and then said: “Your horsemanship is very good, General Stearns. I’m surprised. I’d have thought you’d ride like the average American.”

    Mike smiled. “Badly, you mean.”

    The tall blond officer shook his head. “That would be unfair, I think. I’ve found that most Americans — assuming they ride horses at all, that is — are reasonably competent at the business. But that’s a long ways short of the sort of horsemanship you need to be a cavalryman.”

    Mike’s eyes widened with alarm. “Cavalryman? I thought I was a general. Sit on a horse — way back, you understand — and give orders.”

    “Alas, no. Even with the radios we have, I’m afraid command methods haven’t changed all that much and probably won’t for some time.” Long’s grin seemed a bit on the evil side. “The casualty rate among officers in this day and age — oh, yes, generals too — is usually no better than it is for infantrymen and artillerymen and considerably worse than it is for cavalrymen.”

    That was definitely an evil smile. “The cavalry can run away, you see. Except the generals, who have stand their ground and set a good example.”

    Mike had already discovered that Long’s casual joking with his commanding officer was normal in the army. Whether that was due to seventeenth century custom or the egalitarian influence of the rank and file soldiers, he didn’t know. Some of both, he expected.

    He wasn’t going to inquire, though, because whatever the source the attitude suited him just fine. Mike had every intention of succeeding — excelling, actually — at his new occupation. He’d done well at everything he’d turned his hand to in his life, and saw no reason to do otherwise here. But he was not a cocksure fool, either. There was no way a man in his late thirties with no training as an officer and whose only military experience had been a three year term as an enlisted man in the peacetime U.S. army — twenty years back, to boot — was going to transform himself overnight into what Mike thought of as “a regular general.”

    Instead, he’d do it his way, by leaning heavily on those traits he already had which he thought would serve him in good stead as a military commander.

    First, he was courageous. That wasn’t conceit on his part, it was simply a matter-of-fact assessment. He’d faced enough physical threats in his life to know that his immediate reaction to danger was cool-headedness, not panic. He didn’t think he was probably Medal-of-Honor material, but he didn’t need that sort of superlative bravery. Just enough to keep calm in the middle of a battlefield and think clearly.

    Second, he was a very capable leader — and leadership, he thought, probably translated well into any field of endeavor.

    Third, he was an experienced organizer. That was, in fact, the channel through which his leadership abilities normally ran. He know how to command outright, and would do so when needed. But his preference and natural inclination was to assemble a capable team and work with them and through them. He saw no reason to think he couldn’t do the same with the staff of an army.

    One of the things that would require was a certain relaxation in his dealings with his subordinates. And if that sort of casualness would have appalled most of the officers Mike had known in his stint in the up-time army, so be it. He simply wasn’t worried that familiarity would lead to contempt. Why should it? Nobody who’d even gotten to know Mike Stearns in his first almost four decades of life had been contemptuous of him, not even his enemies. The only reason anyone would start now would be if Mike fumbled his new job.

    Which, he had no intention of doing. It would be better to say, didn’t even consider.

    And that, of course, was Mike’s fourth relevant trait. His wife Becky had once said — not entirely admiringly — “Michael, you have the self-confidence of a bull.”

    Well… Yes. He did.

    “And yourself, Christopher? I wouldn’t have imagined an Englishman would ride all that well, either. Your island being so small and all.”

    Long chuckled. “We’re lazy. Why walk when you can make a dumb beast do most of the work? And then, of course, I was in Spanish service for a time. Your proper hidalgo considers it a point of honor to spend most of his life in a saddle. It’s an infectious attitude, I found.”

    About fifty yards to the rear, and as many to the south — they were following different roads — Captain Jeff Higgins and his own staff were observing their commanding general.

    Jeff’s staff was much smaller, of course. It consisted of his adjutant, Lieutenant Eric Krenz, who like Jeff himself was too young and inexperienced for the job. General Schuster had promised Jeff that he’d have experienced and capable company commanders — and so he did. Everyone of the battalion’s captains was up-to-snuff. So, naturally, following the surrealistic logic that Jeff had decided was inherent to the military mind, they’d put two neophytes in charge.

    At least Krenz had been in a battle before. A real one, too, not the sort of firefights and commando raids that constituted the entirely of Jeff’s experience. Eric had been part of the flying artillery unit that broke the French cavalry charge at the great battle of Ahrensbök.

    “Why don’t you ride a horse as well as Stearns does?” Krenz asked him, a sly smile on his face.

    Jeff grunted. “Mike’s a fricking athlete. Used to — voluntarily, mind you — slug it out with professional prizefighters. Won every fight, even. Me? I’m a fricking geek. Until the Ring of Fire planted me in this madhouse, my idea of physical exercise was rolling the dice in a Dungeons and Dragons game.”

    He didn’t have to explain the reference. Eric Krenz was a natural-born geek himself, and had quickly acclimatized himself to the quirks of American custom. He and two other officers in the regiment, in fact, we’re planning to launch their own gaming company as soon as their terms of service expired. They intended to plunder Dungeons and Dragons lock, stock, and barrel. Why not? One of the legal principles that had been established by the parliament of the USE was that no copyrights, patents or trademarks for anything brought through the Ring of Fire were still valid except for ones held at the time by residents of Grantville who’d made the passage.

    There were a few of those. Seven people were published authors; nothing fancy, just various articles in magazines or journals. Two people held patents for small inventions, Jere Haygood and Diana O’Connor. None of those did them any good, though. O’Connor’s patent was for an esoteric aspect of business software which was irrelevant to anything in the here and now. Haygood’s two patents were for minor gadgets that no one would probably have any use for until the patents expired. On the other hand, Haygood held several patents for devices he’d invented since the Ring of Fire — and the same law had established copyrights and patents for the here and now.

    Those might be challenged. Haygood’s new patents fell into the legal gray area that would afflict any up-time inventor. On the one hand, he had created the devices himself since the Ring of Fire. Nobody questioned that. On the other hand, since there had been nothing close to a complete record in Grantville of all patents, trademarks and copyrights granted by the United States of America, who could say? Maybe Haygood had just copied something that he remembered.

    Jeff was pretty sure that the courts would rule in Jere’s favor, though, if anyone did challenge him. German jurisprudence was every bit as inclined as the American to see possession as nine-tenths of the law. Unless someone could prove that Haygood had swiped his inventions from something already in existence up-time, his patents would stand.

    Jeff was sure enough of that to have been severely tempted when Eric Krenz and his partners had offered to bring him into the business. But, after thinking it over, he’d declined.

    The problem was twofold. The first, and lesser problem, was that there might be a conflict of interest involved if the commanding officer of a battalion went into business with some of his subordinates, even if the business wasn’t launched until they’d all left the army.

    Jeff wasn’t sure of that. What he was sure of, however, was how Gretchen would react. His wife wasn’t normally given to stuffiness. But he was pretty sure that the recognized central leader of the Committees of Correspondence would cast a cold eye on her husband hustling fantasy games.

    Besides, they didn’t really need the money any longer.

    Speaking of cold eyes being cast…

    Jeff scrutinized Krenz’s none-too-relaxed posture. “And you got a lot of nerve making fun of your battalion’s commander’s horsemanship, lieutenant. Your own equestrian skills would fit right into a Three Stooges movie.”

    “What are the three stooges?”

    “Ah! An aspect of American high culture you’ve missed, I see. Well, let me be the first to enlighten you. The Three Stooges were a legend, up-time. Three renowned sages, philosophers one and all, whose wisdom –”

    “You’re lying to me again, Captain Higgins, aren’t you?”

    More than a mile further back in the march, and on yet a different road, Thorsten Engler turned to the man riding next to him and said: “How do you think Eric is getting along in his new post?”

    Jason Linn grinned. He was the mechanical repairman who’d replaced Krenz in the flying artillery unit. “He’d have been all right if he’d stayed a grunt. But he went ahead and accepted the commission they offered him. He’s an officer now. Officers ride horses. It’s a given.”

    Linn wasn’t all that much of a horseman himself, but the redheaded young Scotsman didn’t have Krenz’s fear of the beasts. And he didn’t need any horsemanship beyond the basic skills. He’d be riding the lead near horse of a battery wagon, just as he was doing at the moment.

    Thorsten, on the other hand, was riding a cavalry horse. That was expected of the commander of a volley gun company. Fortunately, he was quite a good horseman.

    He’d damn well have to be, riding this horse. He’d been given the stallion as a gift just three days before the march began, by Princess Kristina. He didn’t want to think how much the animal had cost. He was still getting used to the creature. This steed was about as far removed from the plow horses he’d grown up with as a placid steer is from a Spanish fighting bull.

    Jason was a good repairman. He was a blacksmith’s son and had gotten some further training in one of Grantville’s machine shops after he arrived in the up-time town. He’d been all of twenty years old at the time and eager for adventure.

    “Scotland’s the most boring country on earth,” he insisted. As vigorously as you could ask for, despite having experienced exactly one and half countries — Scotland and parts of the Germanies — not counting three days each spent in London and Hamburg.

    Still, Thorsten missed Eric Krenz. And he certainly envied his friend’s position in the march, way up in front with one of the leading infantry units. Where Engler’s flying artillery company was positioned, they were almost choking. An army of twenty-five thousand men, many of them mounted, throws up a lot of dust. As it was, they were lucky they were ahead of the supply train.

    “Think it’ll rain?” asked Jason, his tone half-hoping and half-dreading.

    Thorsten felt pretty much the same way about the prospect. On the one hand, rain would eliminate the dust. On the other hand, everything would become a soggy mess and if the rain went on long enough they’d be marching through mud.

    “War sucks,” he pronounced, using one of the American expressions beloved by every soldier in the army.

    It wasn’t until an hour later that it occurred to him that he was denouncing war because of the prospect of moderate discomfort. Not death; not mutilation; not madness brought on by horror. Just the possibility of being wet and muddy. As a farm boy, he’d taken getting wet and muddy as a matter of course — but would have been aghast at the carnage of a battlefield.

    Thorsten wondered what had happened to that farm boy. Was he still there, beneath the Count of Narnia riding a warhorse given to him by a future empress and betrothed to a woman from a land of fable?

    He hoped so.