“If Gaston were trying to establish himself on the Seille River, that would make some sense. It makes sense for him to avoid Marsal itself, for I have garrisoned the fortress heavily with sufficient provisions for any contingency and he has no siege engines, but he has also avoided Vic, Château-Salins, and Moyenvic. Because he does not follow the main roads, I can’t predict which direction he will head next or tie his movements to an intent to occupy any particular city or fortress. Aside from the fact that he is avoiding your heavily garrisoned strongholds, the only common thread is the destruction he leaves behind him.”
✽ ✽ ✽
Aldringen was a thorough man. His field reports to his employers covered everything.
“Occasionally,” Maria Anna commented in a letter to Claudia from Amsterdam, where she was presiding over the ceremonial ribbon-cutting for a new orphanage, “more than I really want to know.”
“Better too much than too little,” was the regent’s pragmatic reply, sent from Schwarzach. “I loathe surprises. They are so often unpleasant.”
Thus, Aldringen warned in a timely fashion that plague had been discovered in the Low Countries regiments stationed in the Metz region.
Both Fernando and Bernhard, with some reluctance, agreed with their man on the spot that he could not afford to impose a complete quarantine on those regiments until after he had dealt with the problem posed by Gaston’s renewed presence in the duchy.
Claudia admonished him not to move them into or through other portions of the duchy unless he absolutely had to, though.
Fabert, with Aldringen’s cooperation and Claudia’s sanction, imposed an absolute quarantine on the city of Metz itself, no matter how some members of the merchant community howled about the economic losses that resulted from a drying up of trade.
✽ ✽ ✽
Bernhard sent Claudia a long letter explaining what they thought Gaston might be up to, not that anyone could make sense of it.
Moving to matters back in Burgundy, he sent instructions for her––since he could not tell how long he would be tied down in Lorraine–– before the end of the summer, as his representative, to ensure that his officials took oaths of allegiance to him throughout the county––not just from the nobles, but from every artisan and peasant, male and female, over the age of twenty-one, down to any vagrants, beggars, and gypsies who happened to be present on oath day.
With the nobles and city officials, of whatever faith, she was to make it clear that they had three choices:
● take an oath to me and keep it, “which will be the best for them;”
● depart from the County of Burgundy, taking their movable goods but leaving their real property behind to be granted to my deserving officers, “which will be endurable for them;”
● take an oath to me and break it, “for which they and all their relatives will find themselves very, very, sorry once I get back from this campaign.”
Claudia imagined that wherever he was in Lorraine, the grand duke was doing a lot of restless pacing, because the instructions arrived rapidly and regularly.
She noted idly that in the letters he wrote or dictated himself, he never used the formal “We.” He just wrote ich––the singular word “I.”
It seemed so personal somehow––as if he were a person rather than the occupant of an office. Almost wrong. It was hard to get used to.
She was to make it clear to every city within his realm that sick soldiers from the garrisons were to be admitted to the city hospitals and cared for as they would care for their own citizens; the grand duke would, if he perceived that they acted with good will in this matter, make every endeavor to see that they were repaid as soon as times became better.
If there were not enough funds to pay the officers and men in the garrisons regularly (consult with Rehlinger; pay schedule enclosed), she should compel the cities and rural districts to advance sufficient funds to satisfy the troops stationed for their protection. Although they might––indeed, would at least claim to––find these contributions painful, she should remind them that orderly contributions were preferable to having the troops mutiny and begin to plunder and forage amid the civilian population.
She was to have a pamphlet prepared on the impossibility of maintaining excellent discipline in an unpaid army. The pamphlet should point out that since the situation in Burgundy was now comparatively stable, with the army not just moving through the region, the men, once paid, would turn around and spend most of their money locally in any case, so the merchants and shopkeepers would get most of the contributions back. With this, the grand duke enclosed the draft of a press release produced by Moscherosch, “who insists that the term ‘mandatory advances’ is much preferable to ‘forced contributions,’ though I personally perceive no difference whatsoever.”
She looked at Knorr, one of the chancery secretaries, and asked, “What does the grand duke do for entertainment? How does he spend his leisure time?”
The man looked at her. “He doesn’t have any leisure time, Your Grace. Ever since I’ve been working for him, I’ve known that he sleeps very little. When he is in residence, when we arrive in the morning, there is always a pile of work on our desks that he has placed there overnight. He never signs a letter or requisition that he hasn’t read. As far as he can, he oversees absolutely everything himself.”
“Do you suppose he would enjoy equestrian ballet?”
“Not until such time as he doesn’t have to worry about remounts for his cavalry or sufficient teams for the supply wagons. The grand duke is a superb rider, but he looks upon horses as a means of transportation.”
Chapter 20 So Much Disease and Death
“...auch das sterben und kranckheit zimblich einreissen thut,...”
Fulda
May 1635
“I
can’t stay here, Major Ramboldt,” Joel Matowski said. “Not after the things I saw in Swabia. I’ve done my assignment. I brought Geraldin and McDonnell––the archbishop of Cologne’s Irish colonels––safely in for trial after what they did to Schweinsberg and the others. I’ve made my depositions. But we’re not done with what they left behind them. Think what’s going on over in the Province of the Upper Rhine, with the plague. They brought it and they left it behind the regular quarantine lines on the border.”
He stood up and turned around impatiently. “I’ve got to go over there. I’m just a supernumerary here––my company is still with the colonel.The least you can do is let me radio Colonel Utt for permission to go with the men he’s sending over there. General Brahe is sending another regiment from Mainz, too. Send me to rejoin my own unit.”
✽ ✽ ✽
“Joel’s right, you know.” Andrea Hill looked at the SoTF administrator in Fulda. “Ask Nina, Mel. Ask your wife, who’s working down at the clinic. Remember her? She’ll tell you about the danger of a plague epidemic. We can’t just sit here, nice and safe. We need to go help.”
Melvin Springer steepled his fingers under his chin. “There is nothing in my job description which permits me to assign state civil service personnel to this kind of task.”
“Well, then, I am damned well taking a vacation. A long one, of which I have had none at all since December of 1632, because two weeks isn’t long enough to get to Grantville and back on what the state pays me, so there didn’t seem to be a lot of point in taking one and just twiddling my thumbs in my room. I have five weeks coming and I’m taking it. Going with Joel. Leaving tomorrow. Good-bye.”
Harlan Stull watched her go. “And I thought I had a temper.”
“She’s my mother-in-law,” Fred Pence said. “I can’t just let her go kiting off over there by herself. Kortney would never forgive me. So if it’s all the same to you, Melvin, I’m putting in for my accumulated vacation time.”
“Anyone else?”
Gus Szymanski, their EMT, raised his hand.
Merkwiller-Pechelbronn
“When are the extra men due?” Matt Trelli shook the fr
ying pan over the campfire. There was a cafeteria at the oil field, but it was expensive and served the down-time version of cafeteria food. He could make a mean johnny-cake if he did say so himself.
“Last we heard, the men that Colonel Utt is sending will be here tomorrow.” Orville Beattie helped himself to a slab of nice, fat, salty boiled bacon, which tasted awfully good when the dew was still on, even if it was bad for your arteries. “The Fulda Barracks aren’t just a single regiment, now, so he’s not stripping Buchenland. He’s grown the original regiment up to almost four since those problems last summer, but none of them wanted to give up the identification, so they have Roman numerals. Barracktown is a pretty big military base. There will be about five hundred coming.”
“Marcie heard that some of the civilian administrators are coming from Fulda, too, to check the situation for themselves.”
“I hope they know that they won’t be able to go back until the epidemic dies down.” Orville reached for the bacon again. “That’s one of the rules. No going from a plague-infected region to a plague-free region.”
“If they don’t already know, they’ll find out when they get here.” Matt dumped the johnny-cake onto Orville’s plate and tilted a little of the bacon grease into the frying pan before pouring in the batter for his own.
Besançon
“Well,” Marcie wrote to Matt, “this is the first time since she hired me that I haven’t had the Duchess Claudia right here to back me up, and I’m finding out that it sure makes a difference. It’s been sort of like jumping right into the deep end. I don’t really know any of the other up-timers hired by Bernhard and they aren’t much help in learning how to cope here, because most of them only arrived in January, anyway. I’m sure glad that I didn’t bother to learn French in Grantville, because what the people here talk isn’t anything that Mrs. Hawkins would recognize.
“Kamala Dunn (she’s gone back to her maiden name and given the kerfruffle with Johnny Lee Horton, I sure don’t blame her) is now toting around the grandiose title of Assistant Director of Public Health Programs for the Grand Duke of Burgundy. Dr. Guarinonius, a down-timer, is the director, and I have to say that he seems very efficient at it. Sometimes I wonder if we up-timers aren’t too squeamish and qualm-y for the world in which we’ve been dumped.
“Carey Calagna is supposed to be giving Bernhard’s chancery officials a crash course in how up-time governments worked. Given that in Grantville, her government experience is that she was clerk of the Probate Court, I’m not sure how that project will pan out. They’re both eight or ten years older than I am and have kids who eat up all their spare time.
“The others are all practical mechanics or construction workers, including the two women. I expect I’ll be working with them later, when I’m trying to transform some of my ideas into applications, but currently they’re setting up a radio array and training down-timers to use it. It’s not the most modern––it’s based on the one that the SoTF sent to Amberg in the Upper Palatinate with our people nearly two years ago, with the Leiden jars for battery power and such. Big and awkward, taking up a lot of dedicated space, but workable. It makes a person suspect that someone around here has been talking to someone else: if not Grand Duke Bernhard to his brother Duke Ernst, since I doubt either one of them is into the finer points of radio technology, then along the lines of ‘I’ll have my people call your people.’
“Once they finish the training, you’ll be getting set-ups in other places. Breisach, Schwarzach, and the like. I have no idea how they could modify anything so fragile to make it mobile enough to take on campaign. I won’t think about that until somebody asks me. I’m already learning a lot about stuff I never expected to be working with. ‘Specialization’ just isn’t one of the down-timers’ watchwords.
“Right now, most of my time is spent with Faulhaber, the military engineer from Ulm, and with some of the native English-speakers on Bernhard’s staff who are busy turning what I explain in up-time technical English into words that the average down-timer can understand.
“I say ‘English-speakers’ deliberately, because only a few of them are actually from England, and most of those seem to come from just one county called Norfolk. One of the actual Englishmen, named Jacob Astley, is going to be in charge of setting up a geological survey for Burgundy. Like most of the guys close to Bernhard, he’s a professional soldier and fascinated with boomenstoff. Also, like a lot of the English and Scots we’ve met here, he’s been on the continent for years and has a German wife. In his case, there are also a half-dozen kids, who seem to get along great with Kamala and Carey’s offspring.
“He tells me that the Doubs, the river here, is the weirdest one he ever saw. It starts out heading north, makes a U-turn, and goes south. In the world of twists and turns, it manages to flow for nearly two-hundred-seventy miles but there aren’t even sixty miles as the crow flies between the source and where it runs into a bigger stream. That should give you some general idea of the landscape. It’s the one thing that makes a West Virginia girl feel right at home.
“William Baillie is a Scotsman and like Alec Mackay, born out of wedlock, so he went off to find his fortune in someone else’s army. His wife is Scottish, too. John Hurry is another Scot.
“Thomas Morgan is Welsh and doesn’t fit the pattern of the others. He’s a scrawny little guy with a high-pitched voice and smokes a pipe. He tells me that he only spoke Welsh when he joined the army at age sixteen, even though his father counted as gentry. He speaks several languages now, but can barely sign his name. He’s supposed to be a ferocious fighter, though. When I go out to inspect things in the field, he’s in charge of the local ‘make sure Marcie stays alive’ squad. Me, with a bodyguard! Can you believe it?”
“Yesterday, there was a big announcement by von Ponikau that they’re going to start a new university here. Bernhard sent a charter and assigned some property as a starting endowment, with a long letter to be read in public about how education is important and he’s sorry now that he dropped out of Jena. Overall, from what I’ve seen so far, I’ve got to say that His Grand Dukeship has big plans–plans as big as his title.
“Look, be careful, will you. I heard about Mrs. Hill and Fred Pence and the others going over to volunteer, like Doctors without Borders or something. Makes it hard not to worry.”
Merkwiller-Pechelbronn
“Andrea has plague,” Gus Szymanski said. “I don’t know how she caught it. I can’t even guess. I’m sure she was taking all the proper sanitary precautions and I haven’t been using her as a nurse. She’s been in the office ever since she got here, keeping records.”
“Chloramphenicol?” Fred Pence was married to Andrea Hill’s daughter Kortney.
“I’ve put her on a course of it. But, honestly, I’m not sure that I caught it fast enough. I’ve never seen a clinical case move along so fast, and I’ve seen a lot of them since I got to the lazarette here.”
“Oh, hell.” Fred stood up. “I guess I’ll go find some scraps for that miserable specimen of a kitten she took in. Move him over to my place.”
✽ ✽ ✽
“Fred, too?” Gus sighed. This wasn’t the news he needed at what should be the end of the day.
“Yeah. We took him over to the lazarette.”
“Oh, hell. Who’s he been rooming with?”
“Johnny Furbee. Contrary to protocol, but they came over from Fulda at the same time and since the army’s short on billets,...”
“Check Johnny out.”
✽ ✽ ✽
“Both of them?” Matt Trelli’s voice was dull.
“Yeah, Johnny and Fred both.” Orville Beattie stared at the ground. “The bodies went out to the burial pit on this morning’s wagons, Gus said. It just about broke my heart to have to radio Grantville and give the news to Kortney about her husband, less than a week after she heard about her mother. And Johnny’s wife in Fulda––Antonia’s a down-timer and they lost their first baby. She’s expecting again. It’ll
be hard on her.”
“Maybe this has contained it. Those three spent most of their off-time with one another. It could have been just one original contact for all three of them.”
“I damned well hope so. I think about Lisa––what she’s she’d do if anything happened to me. I guess you worry about Marcie the same way.”
“She’d survive.”
“Did you hear that Derek Utt is coming by this way instead of staying in Swabia until it’s clear for him to go back to Fulda?”
“No. Any special reason why?”
“Worried, I guess. Horn, the Augsburg garrison under the margrave of Baden, and one of Bernhard’s colonels––Kanoffski in Freiberg––are providing personnel to carry the burden of plague quarantine in Swabia. Utt’s checking out Germersheim on the way north. That’s where the first team of medics that we sent out from Fulda sent out has been working. They’re all down-timers from Buchenland, so you wouldn’t know them. We sent six, along with a whole company of volunteers that Sergeant Hartke picked from the Fulda Barracks Regiment.” Orville grabbed his hat of a tent pole. “Time to get back to work.”
✽ ✽ ✽
“Sorry, Joel. I didn’t mean to snipe at you.” Derek Utt stretched his legs out. “The news you met me with just wasn’t the best. Andrea, Fred, Johnny. We’ve been working together at Fulda so long now that it’s more than a little like losing family.”
“Bad news is mostly what we have here at the oil field. Are things better further south?”
Ring of Fire - 1635_ The Legions of Pestilence Page 18