1635: The Eastern Front

by Eric Flint

  "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 particularly 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 weighing 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!

  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 whatsover. 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."

  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, reconnaisance 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-cent
ury 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 capacilities 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, that 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.

  "Here we go," said Lukasz Opalinski. He and his Polish hussars had been ordered to join the Saxon cavalry in their charge against the overextended 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.

  Lukacz 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.

  Chapter 18

  The single thing that Mike Stearns would always remember most clearly about his first battle was the noise, the sheer volume of sound. And the second thing he would always remember clearly was the smell; the way the huge clouds of gunsmoke would roll over everything like an acrid fog.

  Not the sights of the battle, so much, although he remembered those too. In fact, his whole memory of the battle was actually pretty good. At no point did he feel that his mind had gotten overwhelmed. That was because he expected the sights he saw. Mike had a good imagination and he'd been able to prepare himself for those shocks. Insofar, at least, as anyone can be prepared for such things in the abstract.

  But what he hadn't considered—just hadn't thought about, ahead of time—was the incredible effect that firing tens of thousands of gunpowder weapons within a relatively small space would have on the other human senses. Especially the cannon fire. It didn't help, of course, that everyone was still using black powder.

  He soon gained an appreciation of the way that same black powder almost immediately shaped control of the battle; what he thought of as its command structure. Within less than five minutes he was fervently wishing a strong wind would spring up—which was not likely, on such a clear and sunny day. He couldn't see anything, most of the time. The huge clouds of gunsmoke impeded vision, except when odd and unpredictable eddies would suddenly—and usually all too briefly—clear them away.

  Until that moment, Mike had always assumed that Gustav Adolf's recklessness in charging forward into the fog at the battle of Lützen—that's what had gotten the king of Sweden killed in that other universe, in 1632—was because of the man's personal impetuousness. A childish inability to control his emotions, essentially.

  No doubt some of that was involved. But Mike could also now understand how much the driving power of pure frustration must have compelled Gustav Adolf. A commanding general was supposed to be in charge of this mayhem, damnation—and he couldn't see anything. On at least four occasions, Mike had to restrain himself from riding into the smoke clouds, just so he could find out what the hell was actually happening. On two of those occasions, he might not have managed if Leebrick, Long and Ulbrecht Duerr hadn't been right there to urge him to stay put. Quite forcefully. Indeed, you might almost say impolitely, and in a manner that bordered on disrespect and insubordination.

  Leebrick and Long would apologize after the battle. Duerr, true to his nature, would not. His only comment would be, "It's always nice to see that a new commander isn't a coward, even if he sometimes acts like the fucking village idiot." Thereby clearing away again, if such was needed, any uncertainty as to the man's failure to get promoted.

  Thorsten Engler had expected the noise and the smoke, so he simply ignored them. In fact, he barely noticed them at all. He was far too preoccupied with the need to get his flying artillery company up to the front in time to blunt the coming cavalry charge.

  They'd done that before at Ahrensbök, very successfully, and most of his men were veterans of that battle. So it all went fairly smoothly, in the way that men experienced with a task and confident they could carry it out manage such things.

  They had no trouble seeing, either. Hardly surprising, since they were the ones who produced most of the initial gunsmoke—and were happily racing to the rear by the time the resultant clouds obscured the battlefield. It was up to the infantry then, and those oafs were so naturally dull-witted it hardly mattered if they could see anything or not.

  They'd learned one lesson from Ahrensbök, though—the infantry had to move up quickly. At Ahrensbök, the volley gun crews had survived because their fire alone had been enough to stop to French cavalry charge. But you couldn't assume that would always be true, and volley gunners were almost helpless against cavalry that got in among them. All th
ey had were partisans and some muskets. Against experienced cavalrymen armed with sabers and lances and wheel-lock pistols, they'd have no chance at all.

  That too went smoothly. Not as smoothly, but smoothly enough. Most of the infantrymen had been at Ahrensbök also.

  The flying artillery companies fired three volleys. They might have managed four, but their commanding officer didn't want to take the risk. Colonel Straley had seen how close a thing it had been at Ahrensbök.

  The crews could get off those three volleys in less than a minute, and they had four companies on the field instead of the three they'd had at Ahrensbök. That sent over ten thousand balls into the ranks of the oncoming Saxon cavalry. Those weren't musket balls, either. The volley guns fired canister rounds weighing three ounces, twice the weight of the balls fired by the infantry. Any hit on an enemy cavalryman except a glancing one would usually kill or maim.

  The Saxons hadn't started their final charge yet, when the volley guns started firing. You simply couldn't start galloping a horse carrying a heavily armed and armored man until you were close to the enemy. A hundred yards or so. Even then, most heavy cavalry wouldn't move at a full gallop. There was just too much risk of tiring out the horses too soon and having your units fall out of formation.

  The one exception were Polish hussars. They would gallop into a battle, although the great wings they sometime wore—as they were today—slowed their horses down. Hussars prided themselves on their horsemanship, and with good reason. The same be-damned-to-the-world szlachta insouciance and arrogance that made Polish political disputes so similar to children fighting in a playground also made them brave to the point of sheer recklessness. Nobody who'd ever faced Polish hussars in a battle forgot the experience.

  Thorsten never had, himself, but he knew their reputation. So, far more cold-bloodedly than the farmboy he'd once been had slaughtered pigs, he had his volley gun company concentrate their fire on the Poles rather than the Saxons. The hussars were impossible to miss, even at a distance of several hundred yards. The reason they were called "winged" hussars was their bizarre habit of carrying huge feather-covered wooden wings attached to their saddles into battle. The feathers used were usually eagle feathers, or sometimes ostrich feathers.