“Our dear friend the Capuchin,” Kanoffski said, unrolling the chart and looking around. “One of Richelieu’s new cardinals. Give me that mug, will you. We’ll need something substantial on every corner. It doesn’t want to straighten out. They used tape with flour paste to hold the sheets of paper together and it’s stiff. It must have gotten damp since they rolled it up.”
“Here.” Erlach added both his gauntlets to the cause of making it lie flat. “Dear Father Joseph. Friar and war minister. A man who was, in the other world, happy to ally France with Gustavus Adolphus as long as both of them were opposing the Habsburgs.”
“On the theory, let us not forget, that one poison will counteract the other.” Kanoffski weighted down the final corner with his dagger.
Bernhard looked at the elaborately drawn plan. “War would be much simplified,” he remarked drily, “if a general could take cities by touching their names with his finger on a map.”
✽ ✽ ✽
“What the hell is Gaston doing in Commercy, already,” Bodendorf exploded. “The last we heard, he was somewhere around Verdun.”
“Count your blessings,” Rosen admonished. “He’s still north of Toul.”
They needed to keep Gaston from moving any farther south. That was what the king in the Netherlands had tasked them to do. Hopefully, they would be able to force him out of Commercy and back into the north of the duchy, to a point where Fernando’s forces could get behind him and herd him back into the Low Countries.
They were counting, possibly without sufficient justification, on his not being able to turn west into France. This latest undertaking had destroyed the latest of his many reconciliations with his brother. How often could he burn his bridges with Louis XIII? As long as there was no nearer heir to the throne, who knew? Maybe he would go west. Gaston was utterly unpredictable.
What they hadn’t counted on were the Lorrainers, who were getting tired––very tired––of having foreign armies rampaging through the duchy. At Rémiremont, the abbess, an aunt of Charles IV, had a garrison in place. A local nobleman, with a scrambled together body of peasant militia, managed to throw himself into the town ahead of Bernhard. The commander then, at her orders, refused to open the gates.
With a sigh, Bernhard sent for some artillery, which he had not expected to need. That was a delay in itself. Without the artillery, they assaulted with ladders.
Without success.
Once the cannons arrived, they opened a breech breach in the walls.
They next thing they saw was not only soldiers and townsmen, but a squadron of nuns, hauling rock through the streets to close the breach.
That night, the guns opened another breech.
The next morning, not only the nuns but, it appeared, every woman in the town, was out hauling rock to the barricades.
On the sixth day, Bernhard reluctantly assigned a sufficient number of men to Rémiremont to keep the garrison from coming out, told the artillery to stay put, just in case, and moved around the town.
“There is,” he wrote to Claudia with reluctant humor, “very little military glory to be gained by fighting nuns. Please forgive my disorganized writing and assure yourself that I am and remain your very humble servant.”
Next stop, Épinal. At least they were, to the best of their knowledge, still south of Gaston’s forces.
He sent back to the Franche Comté for more artillery, with all that meant in the way of diminished mobility. It wasn’t as if one just brought up the guns. To be useful, guns had to be provisioned even more than men did, which meant wagons full of powder; wagons full of shot. More draft horses to be fed. More teamsters to be fed.
He spent several evenings just working on the calculations. To Fernando, he reported, “everything so far, because of the bad weather and other inconveniences, has been going very slowly.”
✽ ✽ ✽
All of the intelligence reports, to both Bernhard and Fernando, concentrated on tracing Gaston and the regiments he brought out of the Low Countries. Even though Fernando expressed a wish to know where Henriette and Puylaurens had gone, this didn’t seem to be a priority, for the simple reason that they didn’t have soldiers. At most, everyone knew, they had a very small escort. It couldn’t be more than two dozen men.
That was quite true, Because they had a very small escort, they managed to go east, come down the Saar, and get into her territories around Phalsburg and Lixheim without attracting much notice. A generous application of the funds they raised along the way scrabbled together a regiment of experienced ex-mercenaries.
A certain number of those ex-mercenaries had dribbled away from the four Irish dragoon regiments that left the archbishop of Cologne earlier in the spring. They, like the rest of the colonels’ men, had encountered plague long the way. They brought it with them. It wasn’t a lot of plague, though, and there was always some plague around.
Henriette thought about it. Admittedly, neither the officers nor the men had experience working with one another, but it was still a regiment.
What’s more, Grand Duke Bernhard wouldn’t be expecting to see a regiment coming at Épinal from St-Dié.
It was worth a shot. At worst, it would be a distraction for the joint protectorate’s forces.
Not that she had any particular sympathy for Gaston. She had less every passing day, but she would rather like to see her brother back in the ducal palace in Nancy. Not to mention that she truly, truly, truly would like to see the French out of Pfalzburg.
“You’re not coming with us, Your Highness,” the colonel exclaimed, appalled. He was unhappy enough at the thought of babysitting Puylaurens.
“If I pay for something,” Henriette answered, “I see for myself whether or not it works.”
✽ ✽ ✽
Ohm had been drinking too much all spring. He knew it, Caldenbach knew it, the rest of the Kloster knew it, and probably Bernhard knew it. He’d admit that he wasn’t at the very top of his form. Still, he was perfectly functional. When his scouts reported the appearance of a foreign regiment just this side of St. Dié, he sent them back to identify it and got his own into battle order.
He didn’t expect the scouts to come back with the news that they couldn’t identify the enemy. If nothing else, he’d been paying enough attention at the staff meetings that he knew which players were on the board.
Hell, no. He had not been having blackouts.
He put the captain of his guards company in charge of holding his men where they were and rode out with the scouts himself. There weren’t a lot of advantages to getting old, but one of the few was that you had met a lot more people than any eighteen-year-old was likely to have done.
Another advantage of getting old was that sometimes it improved a fellow’s distance vision. The trade-off was that he had to wear glasses to read, but given his vocation, he preferred the way it fell out.
He tied his horse to a tree and followed the scout to the edge of the low bluff.
Grinned.
At least, now someone knew where Henriette and Puylaurens had gotten to, and that someone just happened to be him.
Bernhard and Fernando would thank him for this.
Sliding down as quietly as he had climbed up, he headed back toward his regiment, fumbled his glasses out of the sturdy metal case in his saddle bag, wrote hurried notes, and sent off three messengers.
Then he turned around.
He knew they were coming.
Unless they had better scouts than he thought they did, scouts who had managed to hide from him, they didn’t know that he was here.
Now what could he do about it?
A fair amount, but he had three hundred men to their––at a guess––five or six hundred.
Henriette and Puylaurens, thanks to the perfectly competent colonel she had hired, managed to withdraw from the engagement in good order, back toward St-Dié.
Ohm came out of it with a terrible headache. If he hadn’t been wearing his helmet, he’d be dead.
/> He wasn’t as fast as he used to be. He couldn’t do anything about time, but he could cut back on the drinking.
✽ ✽ ✽
Schaffelitzky, crossed southern Alsace from the Breisgau and brought his two thousand men toward Bernhard via the alternate route up the Meurthe.
Captain von Hersbach leaned down from his saddle. This child with three sheep was the first sign of life he had seen for miles.
“Are you Croats?”
This was one suspicious little girl.
“Why do you ask?”
“You are on horses. The soldiers on horses, we call Croats.”
“No.”
“Are you the duke’s men?”
“Which duke?”
“Our duke. Duke Charles.”
“No. We are soldiers of duke Bernhard.”
“I don’t know him. Where are you going?”
“To Épinal.”
“They have already burned down the villages between here and Épinal. You won’t find any grain.”
“Our commander sent food for us. There is bread at Épinal, baked and waiting for us. We are looking for other soldiers.”
“People have been fighting,” the little girl said, “but they are still a long way away. Almost five miles, over by where the second husband of maman’s aunt lived before he died. We never pay attention to soldiers unless they come much closer than that.”
“Do you know who the soldiers are?” Captain von Hersbach asked carefully, not wanting to alarm her.
“The village council met last night. The mayor said they come from Pfalzburg. I don’t know where that is.”
“Do you know the name of the place where your mother’s aunt’s second husband lived.”
She nodded. “Bruyères.”
“Thank you very much.” He started to hand her a coin, thought again, reached into his saddle bag, and gave her a quarter-loaf of stale bread and a little jerky. “What is your name?”
“Barbeline, mon capitan. Barbeline Cayel.”
✽ ✽ ✽
When Henriette’s scouts reported that Schaffelitzky, who was recognized by one of them, was approaching with a couple of thousand cavalry, she decided that there were times when prudence should trump glory. She had considerable prudence––she just wished that someone else would notice. Over the vociferous objections of Puylaurens, she insisted that they withdraw their forces to Pfalzburg. Antoine sulked.
This withdrawal was also made in good order. Of course, they lost some deserters. As the colonel said, that always happened.
Some of those stragglers attached themselves to Schaffelitzsky’s baggage train, carrying plague down the Meurthe in the direction of Nancy.
✽ ✽ ✽
“How in hell did Gaston get this far south?”
“If we wait,” Bodendorf said, “the artillery will eventually come.”
“If we wait long enough, judgment day will arrive and we will all be carried up into heaven to the sound of trumpets.” Bernhard pushed his abundant hair back impatiently and clubbed it into a knot at the back of his neck. “I am not so thrilled with being at Charmes that I’m inclined to stay longer than I have to. With the reinforcements Schaffelitzky brought, we can overrun it.”
The ordinary soldiers considered the grand duke’s tendency to place himself in the middle of the action to be charismatic.
His senior staff considered the grand duke’s tendency to place himself in danger of life and limb, especially when he didn’t absolutely have to, to be a form of hybris and a constant irritation.
As it turned out, they couldn’t overrun it.
✽ ✽ ✽
“Well, my lady,” he wrote to Claudia, “I won’t delay you any longer with such insignificant items as the loss of my index finger, luckily on the left hand or my scribbles would be even more illegible than they usually are, but rather will end this note and herewith I recommend you and yours to God’s gracious protection.”
✽ ✽ ✽
The artillery did eventually show up and his army went into siege status.
As it turned out, the fortifications at Charmes had underground tunnels. Most of the soldiers eventually surrendered, but by then, Monsieur Gaston was long gone, back to Commercy.
Basel
“Tony,” Diane Jackson said.
“Yes, ma’am.” Tony Adducci––the younger Tony––looked up from the book he was reading.
“Have you read this about Lorraine?”
“Saw it in the papers this morning. Looks to me like the grand duke is possibly biting off more than he can chew.”
“I am very disappointed. Hasn’t he learned his lesson?”
“What was that joke someone made about Gustavus Adolphus and Christian IV last year? Back when they were setting up the Union of Kalmar? ‘Kinkering kongs.’”
Diane looked blank.
Tony explained why turning “conquering kings” into “kinkering kongs” was supposed to be funny.
The ambassadress didn’t think so. “We don’t need another one of those. Not on the doorsteps of Basel.”
Diane snorted in disgust the morning she saw the newspaper reports of events at Charmes. “Frank’s mother,” she informed her trusty bodyguards, “used to say that ‘the good Lord protects fools and small children.’ Why does He bother?”
Chapter 9 Not Doubting that the Most High Will Grant His Grace and Provide Suitable Means
“...nit zweyflende, der Allerhöchste werde seine gnade verleihen undt ergebige mittel weisen...”
Besançon
Hyppolitus Guarinonius looked at Kamala Dunn. “You are preaching to the converted,” he said. “That was a very favorite statement of young Matt Trelli during our stay in Kronach, when he thought we were telling him something he already knew.”
“You certainly are,” Kamala admitted. “And you, and you.” She waved toward Christoph Gatterer and Paul Weinhart. “Perhaps I am just rehearsing for when I speak to those who still aren’t persuaded. They don’t want to hear the message that the up-timers cannot provide, simply do not have the resources to provide, some kind of miracle cure for a major plague epidemic. They will have to listen to you. They will have to apply––and as rigorously as possible––the methods you already have in place.”
Guarinonius leaned his elbows on the table, steepling his fingers. “Out of curiosity... That is, we did not, generally, find the up-timers in Bamberg, when the regent first sent us to assist at Kronach, to be quite so certain that we could make a positive contribution. Yet they were lay people––not, that is, medical professionals. I truly expected... Well, all three of us truly expected, before you arrived, that you would have nothing but scorn for the measures we had spent two months trying to put in place here in Burgundy.”
“I rather noticed that you were dubious. But––let me start over. The biggest epidemic there had been in the twentieth century happened a long time back, toward the end of World War I, in 1917 and 1918. It was not just nationwide, in America. It was world-wide.”
Kamala stopped suddenly. “Just be glad we’re not expecting flu. We can’t provide a miracle plague cure for the whole continent of Europe, but at least the plague is bacterial and chloramphenicol works on it. Influenza is a virus. Whole different story. Anyway.”
“You were saying,” Paul Weinhart prompted. Of the three physicians, he was the only one who had noticed that the up-time woman, although much of her learning was more advanced than theirs, was nonetheless sometimes hesitant about speaking her mind to physicians. He suspected it had something to do with the up-time modes of training. The journals coming out of Jena made it clear that the system instituted by the gentle-lady Beulah McDonald, herself a “nurse” rather than a physician, was intended to introduce major changes to the system that had existed before the Ring of Fire.
So the up-timers––some of them, at least––were fully aware that their culture had not achieved perfection. That was good to know.
“Oh. The 1918 flu epid
emic. The American Medical Association published a study of the way various cities in our country handled it, from the loosest practices in regard to ‘quarantine and closing down the schools and public meetings’ in Philadelphia to the tightest ones in St. Louis, there was a real difference–even with no medical cure. Those methods are pretty much the ones you’re planning to use here. They won’t prevent an epidemic, but they will...” She paused and searched her mind for the right word. “They will ameliorate an epidemic. The grand duke’s representatives, when they hired me, told me what would be coming up, so I had time to do some reading. Philadelphia had an ‘excess mortality per 100,000’ of eight hundred seven people.”
She looked at them. “You understand the concept of ‘excess mortality’?”
Gatterer nodded “More deaths than would usually occur in a year. I have seen church registers that record, in a town which usually had fifty to sixty deaths within a year, ten times that many during the plague of 1625.”
“Good. One more thing I was afraid I would have to explain, but don’t. St. Louis, with the strictest quarantines and closures, only had an ‘excess mortality per 100,000’of three hundred fifty-eight. That’s a significant saving of lives. The same thing showed up, according to the AMA study, when applied to all of the forty-three major metro areas they included.”
Weinhart nodded. “This is like that survey of the prevalence of childhood diseases that the Leahy Medical Center has published for the Thuringian villages around Grantville. Fascinating.”
Dr. Weinhart, Kamala knew, was doing a great deal of pro bono work for the Besançon orphanage. His two wives had presented him with sixteen children of his own. He had served as personal physician to the archducal children in Tyrol. He was a great believer in religious instruction and handed out dozens of stuffed toy lambs with little crucifixes around their necks along with his advocacy for cleanliness, fresh air, proper nutrition, and plenty of exercise. That was fine as long as all the orphaned children were Catholic to start, but might be a problem later on.
Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence Page 9