1637 The Polish Maelstrom

by Eric Flint

  But he left it unsaid.

  Jozef was now looking at Mark Ellis. “In case you’re wondering, I’m with them. Part of my agreement with Richter—that’s Gretchen Richter, yes, that Gretchen Richter—when she let me out of prison—”

  “You were imprisoned?” That came from Caspar.

  Jozef shook his head. “It’s a long story which I can tell you some other time. The short version is that I was exposed as the grand hetman’s spy, they arrested me, and then they let me go after my uncle was murdered because I told them I wasn’t going to support the king or the Sejm. But I also wasn’t going to go over to the USE. That was the deal we made—me and my friend Lukasz both. That’s Lukasz Opalinski, by the way. You know him, I’m sure.”

  “Yes,” said Caspar. Czesław nodded.

  “What we are doing instead is giving our support to the revolutionaries gathered around Lukasz’s brother Krzysztof and some other people.”

  “The ones in Galicia? The ones who declared themselves a konfederacja?”

  “Yes, them.”

  He looked back at Ellis. “So you have to understand that. If we break out of here with you, we’re not taking you back to the USE Army. We’d be taking you to Galicia. After that…” He shrugged. “If you can work out a way to get back home, we won’t stop you. But keep in mind that Galicia is a long way from the USE.”

  “What is it?” asked Ellis. “About five hundred miles, thereabouts?”

  “Not that far. You’d only have to get to Breslau, since the USE now controls Lower Silesia. Say…four hundred miles. Maybe a bit less.”

  “Might as well be the moon,” said Ellis. Then, with a shrug: “It’s still better than being trapped here. Okay, here’s my idea. It’s not really a plan. If we take the APC, we can travel faster than cavalry can pursue us.”

  “Not really,” said Christin. “Over open country, those coal trucks can’t do better than ten, maybe fifteen miles an hour. The roads aren’t much better—and don’t argue with me; I had the joy of traveling on them to get here. A horse can travel faster than that.”

  “Yes, but not for very long,” said Jozef. “Especially not if it’s carrying a hussar in his armor. You might have to fend them off for a while, but after a short time the cavalry would start falling away. And what’s a better mount to fend off cavalry than an armored coal truck with gunports?” His eyes narrowed. “Assuming we can find hussars who aren’t so narrow-minded they don’t know how to fire a gun.”

  Czesław grinned. “No hussar is that narrow-minded, Jozef.”

  His partner was less sanguine on the matter. “You might be surprised. What about Andruss Kozłowski—or Mieczysław Kaczmarek?”

  Czesław scowled at him. “Excuse me. I should have been more precise. No hussar who would go with us in the first place would be that narrow-minded.”

  Caspar nodded judiciously. “That, I will accept. But, Jozef, that still leaves a problem. I’ve seen that APC. As big as it is, there can’t possibly be enough room in it for all the hussars who’ll come with us to fit inside. Especially since at least two of the ones I can think of who’ll want to join us have families they won’t be willing to leave behind.”

  “How big are the families?” Christin asked.

  Caspar though about it for a moment. “Fiedor and his wife have…three children. I think. Hriniec’s wife died two years ago and he’s only got one son, who’s about five years old. But there’s something wrong with the boy. His mind is… Well, he thinks slowly. And he looks funny.”

  The radio operator stretched his eyes with his fingers. “Like this.”

  “He’s got Down syndrome,” Christin said immediately. “But what’s his disposition like? That’s really what matters.”

  “Oh, he’s a nice boy,” said Czesław. “Quite cheerful almost all of the time and not disobedient.”

  “In other words, he won’t be a problem.” Christin nodded and turned toward Jozef. “We can fit the families inside the APC. Four kids and one mother to look after them shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Yes, but what about the hussars themselves?” asked Caspar. “If they can’t keep up with the APC, won’t the pursuers fall on them?”

  Jozef had been thinking ahead and had already come to a conclusion on that matter. “I don’t really think it’s that big a problem, especially if we break out of the city early in the morning. This has been a long siege and Torstensson’s troops haven’t pressed any attacks on the city for quite a while. At least, that was the situation when I was here last. Has anything changed?”

  Caspar and Czesław both shook their heads. Seeing that, Jozef displayed a derisive, lopsided smile.

  “Right. So, that early in the morning—we’re talking just before daybreak—how many hussars are likely to be alert and awake? And without hangovers?”

  Caspar and Czesław both smiled at that. Their smiles were as lopsided as Jozef’s own.

  “Three, maybe?” That came from Czesław.

  “That’s what I figured,” said Jozef. “By the time a pursuit gets organized and underway, we’ll have a good head start. By the time they catch up—and it won’t be soon—their horses will be tired. More tired than ours because we won’t have been pushing them as much. And a lot of them will have fallen by the wayside. So then we pick a good spot for an ambush, we have one pitched battle with the APC as an anchor, and I think that will be all we need.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Mark. “Although I admit this isn’t something I specialize in.”

  Czesław transferred the lopsided smile to him. “Who does? Unless my knowledge is a lot worse than I think it is, this will be the first pursuit of an armored motor vehicle by cavalry in Polish history.”

  “Anybody’s history,” said Jozef. “That’s another advantage we’ll have. It’s not as if the commanders of the garrison will have a contingency plan to deal with it.”

  “What’s a contingency plan?” asked Caspar.

  “It’s what your mother did every time she made hot soup for you,” said Christin, “in case you spilled some in your lap. She knew how to handle it right away. Trust me on this one.”

  “Ah. A mother’s foresight. Contingency plan.” The lopsided grin came back. “No, I’m quite certain the garrison commanders will not have one for this.”

  “Okay, then.” Jozef planted his hands on the table, preparing to rise.

  But Mark had one last issue to raise.

  “What about Tarnowski?” he asked. “What do we do about him?”

  “Who is Tarnowski?”

  “Walenty Tarnowski,” Czesław provided. “He’s the mechanical genius from the university in Kraków who figured out how the APC worked. He’s been trying to get the authorities to approve his plan to build one of our own, but so far they’ve turned him down.”

  “‘Turned him down,’” said Caspar. “More like ridiculed him for a daydreaming dolt and told him to stop pestering them.”

  Jozef looked at Ellis. “What’s your opinion?”

  “Let me talk to him. I think I might be able to persuade him to join us.”

  “That’s a real risk,” said Jozef. “What if he runs to the authorities?”

  “That’s…not like Walenty,” said Mark.

  “Ha! That’s one way to put it.” Caspar turned to Jozef. “Tarnowski is one of those fellows who thinks he’s much smarter than anyone around him.”

  “Which he probably is,” added Czesław.

  Caspar nodded. “You’re probably right. But the point is that he’s not likely to betray us to people he considers imbeciles. Even if he refuses our offer.”

  “That’s what I think, too,” said Ellis. “But it doesn’t matter, because unless we can get Walenty to go along we won’t have the APC to begin with. He’s the only one who can start the engine.”

  Jozef squinted at him. “You’re an American. Surely you know how to—what do you call it?—hotrod the engine? Something like that.”

  “Hotwire,” said Chri
stin. “If he doesn’t know how to do it, I do. Buster taught me the trick.”

  Jozef looked at her. “You?”

  It was a day for lopsided, derisive smiles, it seemed. Christin now bestowed one on him. “Don’t look so surprised. I told you I’m an adrenaline junkie when it comes to men. Buster used to take me on joyrides when we were dating.”

  “And ‘joyrides’ are…?”

  “Not what you’re thinking. Boy, have you got a dirty mind.”

  Mark interrupted. “Doesn’t matter,” he repeated. “I know how to hotwire a car too. But it won’t do a bit of good because Walenty takes the battery out every night and keeps it in his room.”

  “He distrusts you that much?”

  “He doesn’t distrust me at all. He says hussars are all a pack of thieves and they’d steal the battery just to sell it so they could keep getting drunk.”

  Jozef rose. “All right. See what you can do. In the meantime, I will start talking to some of the hussars I know best. We meet again—here—in…one week?”

  Nods all around.

  “We’re off, then.” Jozef extended a hand to help Christin to her feet, which she didn’t need at all but made no objection to using. Like her daughter, Christin’s feminist attitudes were idiosyncratic.

  Once they got out of the noisy tavern, they linked arms.

  “I still want to know what a ‘joyride’ is,” said Jozef.

  “No, you don’t. You want to figure out one that suits you.”

  “Well…”

  Chapter 20

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  Gretchen wasn’t normally all that interested in the technical aspects of warfare, however keenly she might pay attention to their practical results. But despite that usual indifference, this time she found herself engrossed in what was happening.

  Why? The simplest explanation might be that this time it was her husband overseeing the technical aspects, and she was always interested in her husband. As was usually the case with simple explanations, Gretchen was partial to them.

  “What are they doing, and why are they doing it?” she asked, looking at the crew handling the three-and-a-half-inch mortar. More precisely, since the mortar itself had been set off to the side, the crew was handling a heavy wooden platform about eight feet long by four feet wide with some holes drilled in it—one in the center and one in each corner.

  The same crew had spent the day before digging up and leveling the ground upon which the platform now rested. That had been hard work—so hard that Jeff had worried that his whole plan might have to be scrapped. The same prolonged cold spell that had frozen over the Vistula and made it possible for their army to get quickly into position outside of Kraków had also frozen the ground. Digging into it, which would have been easy at most times of the year, had been just this side of impossible.

  But, they’d managed. The one thing that had made it doable was that the terrain the scouts found to set up the mortar battery was already very flat and level. It had been more a matter of scraping soil and filling in some low places than what people normally thought of as “digging.”

  She and Jeff were standing in the center of the battery’s position, just far enough back that they weren’t getting in the way of anyone who was actually working. Looking in either direction, Gretchen could see half a dozen such level spaces on either side of her. In all of those positions, the mortar crews were now checking to make sure that the wooden platforms were indeed level, and doing whatever was needed to make them so.

  “I’ll start with why they’re doing it,” Jeff said. “There’s one big problem with my plan.”

  He paused for a moment, thinking of how to best explain himself. While he did so, Gretchen found herself a bit amused by her husband’s unthinking use of the term “my plan.” Officially—this would certainly be how the historical accounts would report the matter—the plan was Prince Ulrik’s. He being, of course, the commander of the entire army that had marched here from Silesia. But in the real world, Jeff had been the one to develop the plan, with the help of his immediate subordinates and the leaders of the Bohemian forces who had arrived two days earlier, just a few hours after the Silesian army took its positions. Ulrik’s contribution—Morris Roth’s also—was just to observe and let the real military professionals go about their work without interference. Gretchen had been there and done the same.

  “The problem,” Jeff continued, “is that everything has to unfold pretty quickly. Essentially, we’re laying a trap for the city’s garrison. We’ll start with the half dozen mortars that we’ll move into position during the night, not more than three hundred yards from the gate we’ll be seizing.” He pointed to the east. “You can’t see it from here—or any part of the city except the castle on Wawel Hill down by the river—because of that rise in front of us. We need that rise to hide”—here he swept his hand around—“this much bigger battery of mortars. We’re about five hundred yards from the gate here.”

  Gretchen visualized what he was describing. It seemed simple enough, but… “Can you reach the gates from here with these mortars?”

  “Oh, yeah. We’re well within range. If we were using black powder propellant, we wouldn’t be. But we’ve got enough nitrocellulose donuts for about one thousand rounds, and those are quite capable of firing the bombs that far. Although, I’d like to use as few of them as possible. It’s hard to get replacements for them—especially out here, this far into Poland—and it’s even harder to get the RDX we use for the bombs themselves.”

  She decided to forego asking any questions about the way the mortars worked and the logistics involved. She could find that out from Eric Krenz later, if she felt it necessary.

  “All right,” she said. “So why is speed essential?” She smiled. “Other than the fact you’re always going on and on about the central, metaphysical—almost sublime—nature of speed in warfare.”

  “Smart ass. The reason it’s important is because we want to get into Kraków quickly. And the reason that’s important is mostly political, not military. Which is your bailiwick so you can cut it out with the jokes about lowbrow soldiers. We want to do as little damage to the city as possible because we’re going to want to billet all our troops in it for the duration of the winter—”

  “That’s a military issue.”

  “And we don’t want the city’s population to be furious with us.” He cleared his throat. “Seeing as how you and Krzysztof and Red—God knows who else and I don’t want to know—have settled on the grandiose scheme of turning the Galician Democratic Assembly into the Lesser Poland Democratic Assembly. With Kraków as the capital.”

  “Actually, the scheme is a lot more grandiose than that. What Opalinski and Zaborowsky and Sybolt and those around them—I’m just what you might call a consultant—really want is to take over the whole Commonwealth. But in order to do that they have to seem like a serious alternative to King Władysław and they can’t do that if they’ve just got Galicia. That’s why they want Kraków.”

  “Politics, like I said. To get back to the point, we’ve got to lure the garrison—a goodly part of it, anyway—to make a sortie. The way we do that is by positioning a small battery where they can see it along with what looks like a small infantry force, not too far from the gate. Then we start lofting mortar bombs into the city. We’ll walk them back toward the gate as we get the proper range. We think the mortars will come as a complete surprise to them. They have been used in the war against Poland, but that was in the north. Whatever accounts have made their way down here aren’t likely to be very accurate and they’re certainly not going to be long on the details.”

  Gretchen could see the logic. “So they’ll be frightened but seem to be dealing with only a small force, so…”

  “They’ll come charging out to destroy them. Or at least drive them off. And that’s when we hit them with a double whammy.” He stretched his hands out in both directions, indic
ating the line of a dozen mortars. “We start with a barrage that lands right on top of them. That kind of mortar fire hitting men out in the open is devastating—if it’s on target.”

  “I can see that.” She’d heard the plan laid out in the conference, but having it explained again, here where she could see everything, was bringing it into focus. “And the second part of the ‘whammy,’ as you call it?”

  Now Jeff pointed to the north. “There’s a good-sized woods up there—more in the way of a little forest. General von Mercy has been moving his cavalry into position, where they can’t be seen by the garrison. Once the barrage starts, he and his cavalrymen will charge the gate. It’s pretty clear and level ground once you get out in the open. That’ll take a while, getting out from those trees, but the first elements of the cavalry should reach the gate within four or five minutes. We’ll stop firing when they’re three hundred yards out. They can cover that final distance in less than a minute. We figure they’ll be able to seize and hold the gate easily. At which point we start moving the rest of the army in.”

  He waved his hand behind him. “They’ll be positioned around here. Even the infantry can cross a mile within fifteen minutes, at a fast march. Twenty, at the outside. We don’t think the garrison in there is anywhere nearly good enough to get themselves reorganized in time to set up a defensive line inside the city. Especially because most of the cavalry will be rushing in to seize the huge square in the middle of the city. They’ll be at some risk because cavalry always is when it’s operating inside the confines of a city. But they only have to hold the square for half an hour, which we’re pretty sure they can manage given that we expect the garrison not to have been able to reorganize itself in that short a period of time.”

  “Why is half an hour—”

  “Because by then—even sooner, I think; Kraków’s a pretty small city—we can have at least one battalion of the Hangman Regiment reach the square also. With the rifles they have now, they won’t be at great risk, especially because they can fort up inside the town hall and the Cloth Hall. If the cavalry’s coming under bad fire because they’re in the open, we can pull them out of the square at that point. But I don’t think it’ll come to that. Once we hold the central square and the two big buildings in the middle of it with both infantry and cavalry, we’ll control the whole city. Even a top-flight garrison would surrender at that point.”