Not her problem, though. She belonged to the Disciples of Christ. The Lutherans and Catholics could sort out their differences without her personal participation. Grand Duke Bernhard’s problem.
“So, the truth of the matter is that the measures available and known now, in the 1630s, if rigorously applied, even without modern medicine, can make a really big difference in the severity of an epidemic.” Kamala stood up and turned to the easel hung with oversized sheets of paper. “And if I have anything to do with it, they will. So let’s get to work on the directive for Burgundy.”
Close the borders, whenever and wherever possible.
Place restraints on movement from place to place.
“Remember,” Weinhart said, “farmers and retailers of farm produce, such as animal hides, are in constant danger of contracting the plague. It is a normal consequence of the work they do. During a plague epidemic, their constant involvement with flea-bearing animals can be deadly. Still, we cannot forbid the transport of food. If we do, people will avoid plague only to starve. It is very important to define the restraints. No unnecessary movement from place to place.”
Kamala nodded.
Guarinonius sighed. “ Generals tend to regard troop movements as necessary. And, of course, we are scarcely in a position to forbid the grand duke to move his military units. Which means baggage trains and camp followers. Not only in the direct theater of action, but on the way to the direct theater of action. That is the worst. They leave behind stragglers. They leave behind the sick. Sources of infection for previously untouched towns and villages.”
Close all places of entertainment.
“That means no kirmesses, no village fairs, no touring troupes of actors.” Gatterer nodded his head decisively.
“On penalty of what, in case of violations?” she asked.
“Hanging,” Weinhart answered.
Kamala swallowed and moved to the next item on the list.
Forbid other types of public assembly.
“What about political assemblies?” Kamala asked.
“Wherever possible, postpone them,” Guarinonius said. “Close down the courts, so people won’t be coming for trials. Don’t convene the Estates.”
Establish pest houses outside of the uninfected walled towns.
“They are useful in two ways,” Guarinonius said. “There should be two buildings. In one, the authorities can place and isolate any travelers suspected of illness. In the other, they can quarantine those who appear to be healthy long enough to be sure of it. The buildings should be some distance apart, of couse.”
“That means hiring extra guards,” Weinhart pointed out. “Nobody should get as far as the regular city gate guards without an authentic certificate of health.”
“What if the infection does get into a town?” Kamala asked.
That’s the next item.
Quarantine.
“We identify each house where there is a case of the plague. We seal the infected person and all family members inside the house. No one is allowed to leave; no one to enter. We have the house locked and bolted from the outside. For those inside, the disease has to run its course––whether they die or they recover. Watchmen guard the houses. Many do not have enough provisions to last through a quarantine. The inmates may lower a basket from an upstairs window. The watchmen will place food in it. When enough time has passed, we open the house. If there are survivors, we provide them with certificates of health.”
Kamala shuddered. It was all just so––nineteenth century. She had seen photos from the 1800s, taken during epidemics of cholera, with the yellow tape strung across the doors and windows of infected houses.
“How do you handle the bodies?” she asked. “And the houses.”
Containment.
“For the bodies, they are collected by the death carts. They are collected naked. There must be no clothing, not even a shroud, to tempt the impoverished and greedy to rob the corpse. That only leads to further spread.”
“To man the carts, one must have persons who have already had the plague and survived it. It is not a popular occupation. Often, one must draft people for the duty over their very loud objections. There can be no individual burials. Outside of the town or village, one digs plague pits. The best are twenty feet deep. The width can be expanded to accommodate the number of corpses. The diggers should also be persons who have already sickened with the plague in the past and survived. The carts bring the bodies there and throw them in. Each day’s dead are then covered with ashes and lye.”
Cleansing.
“The living, also, come out of the plague house nude. The city will provide fresh clothing.”
“And the house itself?”
“Ideally, every plague house would be burned to the ground, and everything in it. That is not practical. There is always too much danger that the fire might spread.”
“We hire crews of people to disinfect the houses and burn the contents. We hire more guards to make sure that they do burn the contents. Again, many are unwilling and drafted into the duty. Sometimes, on occasion, these people move from city to city, where they hear rumors of plague, offering their services.”
“It’s as hard as hell to keep them from stealing.”
“They are to burn all fabric––clothing, bedding, towels, rugs, curtains and tapestries. We have seen too many cases where plague was brought into a town by a rag-picker’s cart. You have to keep a close eye on paper makers. They are so greedy for old linen, they will be tempted to buy and store even that from plague houses.”
“‘The love of money is the root of all evil,’” Gatterer interjected.
“Then, once the house has been stripped, they clean it, from top to bottom.”
“Using?”
“Vinegar, primarily. It is believed to kill the infection.” Guarinonius paused. “I am not sure whether it does or not. At the very least, it does no harm.”
“It doesn’t, I’m sure,” Kamala said. “I recommend stocking up on DDT and chlorine bleach.”
✽ ✽ ✽
“Good Lord,” she said to Carey Calagna that evening after getting their respective children bedded down. “Give me a glass of wine. I could use a whole bottle.”
“Bad day at Black Rock?”
“‘To recapitulate...’ Who was it that used to say that? At least the down-timers are used to having plague doctors wear protective costumes. Masks, and waxed clothing to fend off fleas. So when we require our personnel to use face masks and gloves, it just makes ordinary people think first that we know what we’re doing, and secondly that we’re giving them the kind of treatment that ordinarily only the wealthiest could possibly afford.”
✽ ✽ ✽
She repeated that thought when they got back to work the next morning.
“The wealthiest or, in Italy, those already confined to a pest house,” Dr. Weinhart answered. “The city councils employ doctors to treat them.”
“The up-time treatment protocols require everyone known to have been exposed to a plague victim to receive a seven-day preventive course of antibiotics.”
Everyone in the room just looked at one another, realizing the impossibility of this. The level of chloramphenicol production, in the face of an epidemic the size of the one that was coming...
The up-time protocols weren’t irrelevant, exactly. They were just impossible.
“By the grace of God,” Guarinonius said. “By His grace, we will accomplish this, trusting that He will provide us with sufficient and appropriate resources.”
Weinhart looked at the protocol written on the easel. “It’s not as if we haven’t done it before.”
“We have done it for a single walled town, such as Kronach. We have done it for a particular Italian city state, such as Pisa. Sometimes, we have tried to do it for a small principality, such as Tuscany. Never before have we done it on a frontier that will run from the coast of the Low Countries to Venice, from the Atlantic to the Adriatic, in a curving line across
central Europe. Without the up-timers, we would never have dreamed of attempting such a thing.”
Innsbruck, Tyrol
“It is a good protocol,” Claudia de Medici said. “We agree with Dr. Guarinonius that We need for it to be uniform.” She gestured at Dr. Bienner. “Let it occur.”
Bienner, having a considerable amount of experience in understanding the regent, scheduled a “plague summit.” Innsbruck, not Bolzen. Matthias Burglechner, the Innsbruck chancellor, had a fascination with both local history and statistics. He wasn’t young any more, but would certainly want to have one or more of his sons involved in the project. Or, perhaps, he could use it to bait a hook to catch young Motzel. His mind wandered off into only vaguely related topics of personnel and administration.
Diane Jackson showed up from Basel with both of the relevant Baden-Durlach margraves in tow, Georg Friedrich protesting mightily that there were things going on in Swabia that were more important than attending meetings about plague, of all things. Plague, in his opinion, was just a fact of life. She also brough brought Tony Adducci.
General Horn sent an up-time military medic, Bob Barnes, as his representative––he also sent a letter that too busy dealing with the four Irish colonels to come right now or to send any of his senior staff. He apologized that Barnes was so young, barely twenty, but pointed out that the young man’s father, Warner Barnes, had recently transferred from the USE Department of State to the staff of Herr Piazza, the president of the State of Thuringia-Franconia. He expressed a sincere hope that this connection might be perceived as giving the boy sufficient rank that his presence at the table would not offend the well-born and highly esteemed regent of Tyrol, or any other territorial rulers and mayors who might be present in person.
Bernhard sent Raudegen on from from Württemberg, adding a couple of the Englishmen on his staff. Phillip Skippon, from Norfolk, had been on the continent for nearly twenty years and been married to a German wife for a dozen of them. Lawrence Crawford, not much older than Barnes, was Kamala Dunn’s regular translator. They picked up Barnes on the way and spent most of the trip worrying about spread of the plague by the various military units moving around, USE units as well as others. They mapped out a sanitation campaign.
Barnes and Adducci, having been in high school together, expressed their delight at the reunion by first banging each other hard on the shoulders and then starting to wrestle.
Marcie Abruzzo made them stop.
“I’m sorry, Your Grace,” she said that evening. “It’s some kind of a guy thing.”
“A ritual.” The regent nodded. “Rituals are an important part of civilization.”
Chapter 10 Too Much Going On to Write Regularly
“Das ich bishero etwas unfleisig in schreiben gewesen, bitte ich nicht in ungutem zu vernehmen, und hatten mich abgehalten die stets werenden occasionen und travailli.”
Hüfingen in Fürstenberg, Swabia
Count Egon von Fürstenberg, the eighth of his line to bear that name, was born a younger son. Fully realizing that the income he drew from his family’s mountainous hereditary lands could never support the family he hoped some day to have, he entered the service of Austria as a boy.
Faithfully, for a quarter of a century, he carried out the tasks that Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor and advocate of the Counter Reformation, assigned to him. He fought for the Empire, for the Catholic League, and for the Empire again.
Now, having survived both of his older brothers and his younger brother, with only one nephew to claim a share, his income was larger than he had originally expected it ever would be.
So were the calls upon it. He had his family. In the course of their fifteen years of marriage, his wife had borne him eleven children. Ten of them were alive, healthy, flourishing, and likely to grow up. They would need educations, dowries,... A fatherly mind boggled at the very thought of the expense involved.
So here he was, in his mid-forties, looking at a world in which the emperor he had served was dead, his heir had replaced the Holy Roman Empire with an Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Austria had abandoned his hereditary lands around Heiligenberg, as far as he could tell, to the un-tender mercies of a Swedish Lutheran, an up-time Calvinist heretic, and a United States of Europe that conducted popular elections.
The fact that Wilhelm Wettin had won the election was no consolation. Wettin was as Lutheran as the Swede, not to mention that he had renounced his title.
He could lie down on the floor.
If you were willing to be a doormat, you would always find someone willing to walk on you.
Or he could do something, before it was too late.
Upper Swabia had one advantage over many parts of the Germanies. It was a long way away from Magdeburg. It was not yet firmly under the Swedish heel.
Count Egon did what a man’s gotta do. He called a meeting.
✽ ✽ ✽
“While I realize that my status as a former commander in the imperial forces may make my motives suspect in the eyes of some of you, I am in no way ashamed of my allegiance to a Holy Roman Empire that had endured for over eight hundred years until the imprudence of Ferdinand II’s heir...” Count Egon von Fürstenberg paused in his oration. He had managed to gather together a considerable delegation from the Catholic Reichsritterschaften and small principalities of southern Swabia. He had no expectation that they would all join him, but...while other people––Gustav Horn, mainly, but others as well–– were distracted by Irish dragoons in Württemberg, he could focus on what, in his opinion, amounted to saving whatever could be saved from the debacle of the USE and its up-timers.
He wasn’t going to suggest to any of them that they submerge themselves into his own County of Fürstenberg, Heiligenberg sub-line. Aside from its being Catholic, no one here was like to see much advantage in that offer over being submerged in Gustavus Adolphus’ proposed Province of Swabia. No...
“At which time the advantages of forming a wholly voluntary Fürstenberg Union or, if you will a Fürstenberg Confederation on the model of the Swiss cantons in Swabia, occurred to me...”
Count Egon glanced around, taking in the temperature of the room. A vigorous man, he had fought under Tilly; fought under Maximilian of Bavaria. Right now, he was fighting for a way of life he had no wish at all to abandon.
“No matter what the Swedish emperor of the United States of Europe may promise us, no matter what provisions in regard to freedom of religion have been placed in their constitution, it remains the case that in June of last year, at the Congress of Copenhagen, he appointed Margrave Georg Friedrich of Lutheran Baden-Durlach as his administrator of their proposed Province of Swabia.”
There were isolated hisses at the name.
“Don’t hiss. Cheer. Remember what happened to him at Wimpfen in 1622.”
A few people did cheer.
“Gustavus Adolphus has kept his Lutheran general, Gustav Horn, at the head of regiments that have been moving through and battening upon our Swabian lands and people for the past three years.”
True enough. No reason to mention that most of Horn’s activities had gone into Fabian tactics designed to keep Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar, equally Lutheran, out of those same lands.
“No province governed by such men will be an easy place for Catholics to live.”
He gestured toward his guest of honor, Heinrich von Knöringen, the prince-bishop of Augsburg. Or, more precisely, the bishop of Augsburg who had been a prince-bishop until quite recently when Georg Friedrich of Baden-Durlach had informed him, not too gently, that in the USE, ecclesiastical princes no longer exercised secular jurisdiction.
Not much reaction. People read the newspapers. The margrave’s tame publicists had been careful to ensure that a lot of words about freedom of conscience and untrammeled right to worship had appeared in print, wafting and swirling around the hard fact of the vanishing of Bishop Heinrich’s court system into the developing Province of Swabia’s bureaucracy. Time to lighten the presentation.
“Gentlemen, like so many others, I have sent researchers to the up-time town of Grantville, the source of so much of the technology used in the Swede’s recent successes. I found...”
He paused for dramatic effect.
“I found that in another three-hundred-fifty years, the names of our lands had been expunged from the history books. Heiligenberg was a winter spa, to which people came to ski on the mountains and sit on balconies as they admired Lake Constance. The only significant amount of material on a Count Egon von Fürstenberg who existed in the twentieth century that my agents could locate pertained to...”
He paused again, to allow the others to realize just how seriously he was willing to embarrass himself for a worthy cause.
“...a designer and manufacturer of women’s clothing. Admittedly, the man appears to have been a wealthy, socially prominent, and successful, if somewhat eccentric, designer of women’s clothing––but still, in essence, he was a common tailor. The thought of my descendants having degenerated to that...”
He paused again.
“It simply turns my stomach.”
The room erupted in a buzz of whispers.
“On the table in the antechamber,...”
A servant swept open a curtain that had divided the two rooms.
“On the table in the antechamber, each of you will find what little––and I do emphasize the word ‘little’––my agents were able to locate in their encyclopedias that pertains to your lands as they were known in that world. May I now suggest a pause for refreshments as you take this opportunity to look at these materials that show so clearly what is in store for us if this appalling ‘modernization’ process cannot be halted, or at least slowed.”
✽ ✽ ✽
Diane Jackson frowned. “You couldn’t persuade your father not to do this?”
Friedrich of Baden-Durlach shook his head. “I know that you think that he should focus primarily on your apprehensions in regard to Bavaria, especially considering that Augsburg is right on the border and very likely to be a first target if Maximilian decides to take advantage of the emperor’s focus on Saxony and Brandenburg this spring. However, the task he has been assigned is the creation of a USE Province of Swabia. With Horn absorbed in the cooperative mission with Brahe and Utt and...” He paused. An expression of profound distaste crossed his face. “...and Bernhard, he felt obliged to use part of the garrison stationed in Augsburg to, ah, emphasize to several of the smaller territorial rulers along the Swiss border just how unfortunate it would be if they took the temptation being offered by Egon von Fürstenberg seriously.”
Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence Page 10