1635: The Eastern Front: Chapter Seventeen

    “It might be a ploy, sir,” said Colonel Carl Bose.

    Hans Georg von Arnim continued to examine the peculiar maneuver being undertaken by the enemy’s right wing. He’d lowered the eyeglass, though, after he’d confirmed that the commander was the newly-made general Michael Stearns.

    “A trap, you mean?” Von Arnim had spent the past few minutes pondering the same problem. But now, he shook his head.

    “I don’t believe Torstensson would be so reckless. Stearns is a complete novice. If he loses his head — not even that; simply becomes confused and loses control — this could turn into a complete disaster for them.”

    He wasn’t entirely certain of his conclusion, but… What choice did he really have, with the odds so heavily against him?

    “Tell von der Pforte to move up his troops. But before all else, we have to get Hofkirchen’s cavalry engaged.” Von Arnim pointed to a creek in a distance, barely visible because it was so narrow. “If at all possible, we have to keep Stearns’ division from anchoring its flank on the Pleisse.”

 

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    “He might decide it’s a trap,” said Colonel Schonbeck. He was leaning forward in his saddle, intently studying the center of the Saxon lines where von Arnim was stationed.

    Torstensson, who was almost slouched in his own saddle, gave his head a little shake. “I’m sure he’s considering the possibility. The key is Stearns. I wouldn’t have tried this maneuver with Brunswick-Luneburg or Knyphausen. But I’m betting von Arnim will decide I wouldn’t have chanced it with such a novice as Stearns.”

    His aide eyed him sidewise. “It is a bit risky, General.”

    Torstensson shrugged. Like the headshake, the gesture was minimal. “Stearns may be new at this, but his soldiers aren’t. Most of the units in the Third Division were at Ahrensbök. So were the flying artillery companies I lent to him. As long as Stearns doesn’t panic, they’ll be able to fend off the counter-attack. Long enough, anyway, which is all that matters.”

    Schonbeck was still eyeing him sidewise. Torstensson smiled. “I’ve seen Stearns in a crisis, Colonel.”

    “The unrest in Magdeburg after Wismar? But there was no real fighting there, sir.”

    Again, the USE commander shook his head. The gesture, this time, was not minimal at all. “That’s not really what matters. The great danger in a crisis is not that a commander collapses from fear of being hurt or killed. Most men are not cowards, certainly not most soldiers. No, the real danger is that they simply can’t think clearly. Their brain freezes. They exude uncertainty — and that’s what begins to create panic in their subordinates and soldiers. Relax, Colonel Schonbeck. Stearns won’t lose his head.”

 

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    Losing his head never even occurred to Mike Stearns.

    Although he had no experience with military battle, he had been a prizefighter for a time when he was a young man. Young and stupid, as he liked to say. He’d been quite good at it, too, especially the mental side of fighting. He’d won all eight of his professional bouts. The reason he’d quit — other than a sudden and unexpected lapse of youthful imbecility — was because he’d come to realize that his reflexes simply weren’t good enough. Mike was very strong and had superb reflexes. Even now, despite spending the last several years as a sedentary executive, he was still in far better physical condition than most men half his age. But “very strong” and “superb reflexes” were one thing, measured against normal values. Measured against the values of professional boxers, they were something else entirely.

    So, he’d quit. Almost twenty years ago, now. But as he moved toward his first battle, Mike felt the familiar mindset closing back in.

    The key thing was not to lose your head. To stay in control of the adrenaline rather than letting the adrenalin control you. Ignore the blows. Accept them as inevitable. Concentrate on the enemy. Above all, watch. The natural response of a man in a fight was to flail away. To let the fear and rage fuel his physical abilities, so that he might overpower his foe. In essence, to let the animal try to save the man.

    Against a capable opponent, that was a recipe for failure. You had to watch. Never lose control. Whatever else, stay calm.

 

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    The officers and soldiers within eyesight were watching him. Quite closely. They knew just as well as Torstensson and von Armim that their commanding officer was a neophyte general. And they knew just as well what the calamitous results might be.

    They were reassured. He might not really know what he was doing, but he seemed confident and relaxed. He had good advisers. All he had to do was listen to them.

 

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    “The key thing right now, sir, is to anchor ourselves on that river.” Colonel Long pointed ahead of them and to the right.

    That was the Pleisse, Mike thought. Like most so-called “rivers” in the area, it was really just a creek — and not a particular large one at that. By North American standards, all the rivers he’d seen in Europe were on the small side. Even major rivers like the Elbe — the Rhine and Danube too, he’d been told, although he hadn’t yet seen them himself — were far smaller than the Mississippi.

    But while Mike hadn’t been in a battle yet, by now he’d had a fair amount of experience in the seemingly simple task of getting an army to move. He’d also read a copy of von Clausewitz’s On War that Becky had obtained for him. So he’d already learned just how cruelly accurate the military theorist had been.

    War is very simple, but in War the simplest things become very difficult.

    Now, looking at the little river that his aide Long was pointing to, Mike could see how important it would be for his division to place its right flank against it. Even a creek ten feet wide and probably not more than a foot or two deep could serve as a significant protection against a possible flank attack. It didn’t look like much — and, indeed, to a man enjoying a hike through the countryside, it wasn’t much. He could cross it quite easily. At worst, get his boots wet.

    But crossing that same creek during a cavalry charge, with bullets and cannonballs flying, would be something else entirely. Horses were big animals and like all big animals the prospect of falling made them very nervous, especially falling on a run. An eight-year-old boy weighing fifty pounds would race across that creek without a second thought, shrieking gleefully the whole while. A warhorse weighting a thousand pounds and carrying an armored man weighing another two hundred pounds might balk. Or, if they did wade across, might trip and fall if the bottom was soft or stony or simply uneven.

    A balked or spilled cavalryman is likely to be a dead or maimed cavalryman, and nobody knew that better than cavalrymen themselves. So the mere fact that an opponent had his flank anchored against a creek, be that creek never so modest, would automatically shape the battle. Whether or not that creek could be forced was likely to become a purely theoretical exercise, because no general wanted to take the risk of finding out.

    “Makes sense to me, Christopher. See to it, if you would.”

    That lesson, Mike had not learned from an aristocratic Prussian military theorist at the age of forty. He’d learned it from his hillbilly mother, at the age of four. A none-too-gentle slap accompanied by the words be polite!

 

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    Lieutenant Krenz was looking slightly less unhappy. “Well, at least he knows enough to anchor our flank on the river. Now if we could just get off these damned horses.”

    Jeff shared Eric’s opinion on both issues. Especially getting off the horses. Having to ride one was the biggest disadvantage he’d found so far to being an officer, and he was still pretty disgruntled over the issue. He was supposed to be an infantry officer. He’d made quite sure of that after he returned from Amsterdam. I want an infantry assignment, he’d specified — and he had been assured he’d receive one.

    Technically, they hadn’t lied. He had been assigned to the infantry. What Jeff hadn’t considered—never even crossed his mind, the notion was so absurd — was that in this day and age it was expected that all officers had to be mounted.

    Laundry officer? Officer in charge of day care for the camp follower kiddies? Didn’t matter. Up you go, buddy.

    There was no logic to it. None whatsoever. He had to stay with his troops, didn’t he? For Pete’s sake, he was the battalion’s commander. Of course he had to stay with his troops. They were infantry, no? I-N-F-A-N-T-R-Y. That meant they walked into battle. Not rode. Walked. Except for their officers. They had to ride, whether they wanted to or not.

    This was one of the disadvantages of being in the seventeenth century that was a lot harder to shrug off than the quality of the toilet paper or (more often) total absence thereof. And that was nothing to shrug off lightly.

    “He must be listening to his staff officers,” Krenz went on.

    Jeff’s horse did one of those incomprehensible little jiggly things that horses so often did. Itchy hoofs? Bad hair day? Gelding equivalent of that time of the month? Who knew? By definition, they were dumb animals. What person in his right mind would plant himself on top of one of these huge beasts and place himself at the mercy of a brain which, relative to body mass, probably wasn’t much of a step up from a chipmunk?

    Would you ride a chipmunk?

    The horse did it again. “I can’t wait for the battle to start,” Jeff groused.

    “Me neither,” agreed Krenz fervently. “Finally be able to get off these damn things.”

    A few seconds went by. They grinned simultaneously.

    “You realize how insane that is?” asked Eric.

    Jeff nodded. “War is hell.”

 

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    None of those thoughts went through Thorsten Engler’s mind. He’d been a good horseman as a farmer. Now that he’d been in the army for almost a year and half, all of which time he’d spent in the flying artillery, his horsemanship rivaled that of most cavalrymen.

    That aside, he shared some of Jeff and Eric’s relief at seeing the division angling toward the Pleisse. Obviously, their commander Stearns had either had the good sense to anchor his flank against the only significant natural feature in the area or the good sense to listen to one of his staff officers.

    Some of the relief, not all. Unlike Higgins and Krenz, Thorsten and the other flying artillery unit commanders had been made privy to Torstensson’s plan. They pretty much had to be, given that they’d play the critical role of fending off or at least blunting the cavalry charge that was sure to be the Saxons’ initial response. So Engler knew that, anchored on the Pleisse or not, the enemy cavalry was almost certainly going to contest the field — and once that happened, the fact that some infantry battalion was happily nestled against the river wasn’t going to do Thorsten and his men much good at all.

    In the month of July in the year 1635, cavalry was still the principal offensive arm in a battle. That would change, and pretty rapidly, as the impact of the new rifled muskets spread — and it would certainly change once the new French breechloaders became common. At that point, cavalry charges in a battle would simply become too dangerous to the cavalrymen. The role of cavalry would shift to what it had been during the American civil war, reconnaissance and raiding enemy supply lines. From then on until the introduction of tanks, it would be the infantry and artillery that would be the offensive arms.

    In the world the up-timers had come from, that transition had taken three-quarters of a century. In this one, Thorsten didn’t think it would even take a decade. Tanks were coming, and probably soon. Thorsten knew that there were at least four newly-formed companies trying to develop the war machines. That was in the USE alone. He was pretty sure the French and Austrians — certainly the Netherlanders — were already developing their own.

    But from what he’d been told by a friend who was knowledgeable about technical matters, there was still the great obstacle of the engines. The hybrid technology produced by the Ring of Fire was, like many hybrids, often a peculiar thing. By now, everyone with any scientific or technical knowledge understood the basic principles of the internal combustion engine. The problem that remained was an engineering one. For a variety of reasons, the broad technical capabilities that a large internal engine industry required didn’t exist yet. Not to mention that there was a shortage of petroleum.

    So, willy-nilly, people had turned to steam technology. In this universe, the first tanks that lumbered into a battlefield would most likely be driven by steam engines.

    Steam technology posed its own challenges, but ones that could be met more easily. And that in turn introduced another wrinkle into technological development, which was that the steam technology being introduced into the seventeenth century in this universe was not the primitive steam technology that had first come into existence in the up-timers’ world. These new steam engines, even when they were modeled on nineteenth century designs, were still based on the technology that had been developed — often by hobbyists, since steam had been relegated to a secondary status — by the end of the twentieth century. Especially since, as chance would have it, several of Grantville’s residents had been accomplished and experienced steam enthusiasts.

    So who could say? Once that steam technology was established as the dominant engine technology, it might retain that status for a long time. There had been a lot of accidental and secondary factors that had produced the dominance of internal combustion engines in that other universe. They might never really come into play in this one.

    That sort of uneven and combined development had become quite common. Thorsten’s friend had told him that a similar situation existed with computer technology. Many down-timers now understood the basic principles of cybernetics. The friend himself, born in the year 1602, was one of them. But recreating the electronic industry the up-timers had relied on for the purpose was simply impossible in the here and now, and would be for some time to come.

    Here, his friend had spent half an hour enlightening Thorsten — and Caroline Platzer, who understood no more than he did — on the subtleties of something called “semiconductors.” Apparently, the problem of producing those would be enough in itself to stymie the development of up-time-style cybernetics for a long time to come.

    But there was an alternative, one which the up-timers themselves had never developed very far because by the time they began creating computers their electronic capabilities had been quite advanced. The alternative was called “fluidics,” and was based on using the flow of liquids instead of electrons — typically water, but it could be air and apparently the ideal fluid would be mercury or something similar.

    That technology was well within existing seventeenth-century techniques. Already, in fact, there was a little boom developing in Venetian glass manufacturing to provide some of the components needed for fluidics-based computers.

    What Thorsten’s friend had found most fascinating was that there was no telling where these developments would lead in the long run. Any industry, once established and widely spread, creates an automatic inertia in favor of continuing it. That same inertia handicaps its potential rivals. In the world the up-timers came from, that dynamic had entrenched internal combustion engines and electronic computers. But in this one, that might not be true. There were advantages to steam and fluidics, after all, which had never really been exploited in the universe across the Ring of Fire — but might be in this one.

    Across the field, Thorsten could see Saxon cavalry coming forward. It looked as if Torstensson’s ploy was going to work.

    It occurred to him that this was not the best time to ruminate on possible alternative technologies. For the here and now, cavalry was still the principal offensive arm in a battle, as the Saxons were about to try to demonstrate again — and it was Thorsten’s job to stop them.

 

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    “Here we go,” said Lukasz Opalinski. He and his Polish hussars had been ordered to join the Saxon cavalry in their charge against the over-extended right wing of the enemy’s army. That would be the Third Division, commanded by the USE’s former prime minister.

    “The Saxons claim he doesn’t know what he’s doing,” said Lubomir Adamczyk. He sounded more doubtful than hopeful. “Stearns, I mean.”

    But there was no time to talk any further. The charge was starting. Slightly more than four thousand Saxon horsemen would be hammering that enemy right wing within not much more than a minute. Along with two hundred Polish hussars.

    Lukasz wasn’t all that hopeful himself. It might well be true that the enemy general didn’t know what to do. But he didn’t really need to know. Stearns just needed to listen to his staff officers, because they would know.

    Apparently, he was doing so. To Opalinski, the speed and precision with which the infantry units of the Third Division were moving to anchor themselves on the Pleisse didn’t look like the result of confused and amateur orders. Not in the least.

    So be it. What remained was simple. As dangerous as it might be, there was nothing in the world quite as exhilarating — to a Polish hussar, anyway –as a cavalry charge.

    They were into a canter now. Next to him, Adamczyk started whooping.