by Eric Flint
"Why you? It ought to be obvious, Jeff. You're the one commander I've got who's guaranteed to put the fear of God in every man in this division."
Jeff stared at him. He was trying to make sense of that last sentence and coming up blank.
"Huh?"
"That's ‘huh, sir.' For Pete's sake, Jeff, do you think there's one single soldier in this division who doesn't know you're Gretchen Richter's husband?"
"Huh? Uh, sir."
"Talk about the innocence of babes. I can guarantee you that at one time or another every soldier in this division has wondered what she sees in you and come to the conclusion that you must have one huge pair of brass balls. Given that she makes kings and dukes shit their pants."
Mike shook his head. "So do they really want to run the risk of pissing you off, Captain Higgins? No, Colonel Higgins, rather. Now that I think about it, I'll have to jump you up to lieutenant colonel since I'm going to put a whole regiment under your command."
"Huh? Ah . . . Huh, sir. Mike—General, I just got put in charge of a battalion three months ago, and now you want to hand me a whole regiment? But—but—"
He was spluttering a little, he was so agitated. "But, first of all—uh, sir—we don't have the rank of lieutenant colonel in the USE army. And second of all—uh, meaning no disrespect, sir—but which regiment are you planning to give me? I mean, that's really gonna piss off whichever colonel—real colonel—you take it away from." He took another deep breath. "Sir," he added, not knowing what else to say. He didn't think Mike would have him put up in front of a volley gun, but . . .
Mike smiled. There was no humor at all in it, but it beat a scowl hands down. "I'm a major general, Colonel Higgins. That means I can do damn near anything I want. I can sure as hell create the brevet rank of ‘lieutenant colonel' for a special purpose. Just to keep all the other colonels happy, you'll stay at a captain's pay grade."
"Thank you, sir. I'd appreciate that. I, ah, don't actually need the money anymore."
Mike's smile widened. There still wasn't any humor in it, though. "As for your other objection, I'm not planning to give you any existing regiment. I'm creating a new one. It'll consist of your Twelfth Battalion, and a battalion taken from the Gray Adder regiment. That'll leave them a rump regiment, and ask me if I care, since they're the shitheads who let two of their companies run wild."
Jeff swallowed. Mike had had the major in command of that battalion executed also, along with the captains in command of the two companies—although he'd done them the courtesy of using a regular firing squad, not the volley guns. Then he'd broken every officer in the battalion to the ranks and replaced them with newly promoted sergeants from other battalions.
As a display of savage discipline, Jeff thought the ghosts of Roman tribunes past were applauding somewhere. The whole division was in something of a state of shock. Until Świebodzin, Stearns had seemed like a very easy-going sort of general.
"Then I'm giving you Captain Engler's flying artillery company instead of a regular artillery unit. For the purpose of your new regiment, he fits the bill perfectly."
Stearns had used Engler's unit to carry out the executions. Between that and the man's well-known composure at Ahrensbök and Zwenkau, everyone in the division would take him dead seriously. Nobody made jokes any longer about "the Count of Narnia."
Well, Eric Krenz probably still did. Jeff wondered how he was doing. And then wondered who he'd put in charge of the 12th now that he was being kicked upstairs. Krenz would have been his natural replacement as battalion commander, but he wasn't available and Jeff had no idea when or if he might be.
"Your new regiment will fight alongside all the others in a battle," Mike continued. "But it has a special function as well whenever I call on it. You're the unit I'll be depending on to keep everyone else in line. Do you understand me, Colonel Higgins? I want no repetition of Świebodzin. Ever."
Jeff looked around. They were holding this private conversation in one of the rooms of the small village tavern Mike had taken for his field headquarters. "Taken" as in "expropriated," although no one had gotten hurt because the people who owned the tavern along with everyone in the village had fled before the division arrived.
You could hardly blame them. The news of Świebodzin had spread widely and rapidly. But the expropriation of the tavern itself illustrated the fundamental problem, which was practical at its very core.
It would be nice if atrocities resulted solely and simply from the wickedness of men. Were that true, they could be suppressed by the simple use of harsh discipline. Unfortunately, the world was more complicated—and if Mike Stearns didn't understand that, Jeff would have to explain it to him.
He hesitated, and took another deep breath.
To hell with it. If he shoots me, he shoots me.
And to hell with military protocol, too.
"Mike, this ain't gonna work. Sure, I can probably put a stop to crazy shit like what happened at Świebodzin. But that's just the tip of the iceberg—and you oughta know it. We have to get supplies. And how are we going to do that? We've already pretty much run out of what we brought with us from Berlin. That means foraging, and foraging means stealing, and the way Koniecpolski's been running us ragged there's no way to round up enough supplies except to send out lots and lots of foraging parties and there's no way in hell you or me or anybody can stay in control of that and before you know it some cavalry unit or some infantry squad is going to kill a farmer who squawks too much when they take his one of his pigs and then they're likely to rape his wife or daughter or likely both and kill the rest of the kids while they're at it. And what good is my shiny new regiment gonna be?"
Mike put a hand on Jeff's shoulder. "Relax. I know the realities of this kind of warfare and I'm going to start taking some steps to ameliorate it. I don't expect perfection, Jeff. I know there'll be incidents. And even if I come down on them as I hard as I did after Świebodzin—and you can bet your sweet ass I will—some of those crimes will go unpunished because there's no one left alive to report them except the culprits and they sure as hell won't. But that's still not the same thing as wholesale slaughter. That, we can control—with your new regiment."
Jeff took another deep breath, and slowly blew it out. "Okay, then. We'll need a name."
Somehow or other, the tradition had gotten started in the USE army of using names instead of numbers for the regiments. The names had no official existence, but nobody except idiot accountants used the regiments' numbers anymore.
"Call it the Death Watch," said Mike. "Better yet, call it the Hangman."
Jeff thought about it, for a few seconds. "The guys'll probably like that, actually. Well, the ones in the regiment, anyway. Don't know about the others."
"Yeah, I think you're right."
They were silent, for another few seconds. Then Jeff said, "Off the record, Mike, you know how fucked up that is?"
For the first time, a trace of humor crept into Mike's smile. "The Ring of Fire didn't cut us any slack, did it?"
After Mike finished explaining what he wanted, David Bartley frowned. The young financier-turned-army-lieutenant stared at the surface of the table he and Mike were sitting at, in the back room of the tavern that Mike was using for his headquarters. His eyes didn't seem quite in focus.
"Pretty tricky, sir," he said after perhaps a minute. "There's no chance of using TacRail like we did in the Luebeck campaign?"
Mike shook his head. "We're not fighting French and Danes here, Lieutenant Bartley. Leaving aside his own cavalry, Koniecpolski's got several thousand Cossacks under his command. They're probably the best mounted raiders in Eurasia, except for possibly the Tatars. TacRail units would get eaten alive before they'd laid more than a few miles of track, unless we detailed half our battalions to guard them. Which we can't afford to do."
Bartley nodded. "That leaves what you might call creative financing."
"That's what I figured—and it's why I called you in."
The
lieutenant looked unhappy. "The regular quartermasters are already kinda mad at me, sir. If I—"
"Don't worry about it. To begin with, I'm pulling you out of the quartermaster corps altogether. You'll be in charge of a new unit which I'm calling the Exchange Corps."
"Exchange? Exchange what, exactly?"
Mike gave David the same humorless grin he'd given Jeff an hour earlier. "That's for you to figure out. Whatever you can come up with that'll enable us to obtain supplies from the locals without completely pissing them off. No way not to piss them off at all, of course. But the Poles have had as much experience with war over the last thirty years as the Germans. They'll take things philosophically enough as long we aren't killing and raping and burning and taking so much that people die over the winter."
Again, Bartley went back to staring at the table top with unfocussed eyes.
"Okay," he said eventually. "I've got some ideas. But I'll need a staff, General. Not too big. Just maybe three or four clerks and, ah, one sort of specialist. His name's Sergeant Beckmann. Well, Corporal Beckmann, now. I got him his stripe back but then he ran afoul of—well, never mind the details—and got busted back to corporal."
"Where is he now? And what sort of specialist is he?"
"He's right here in the Third Division, sir. One of the quartermasters in von Taupadel's brigade. As for his specialty . . . Well, basically he's a really talented swindler."
Mike laughed. And then realized it was the first time he'd laughed since he saw the carnage in the streets of Świebodzin.
"Okay, you got him—and we'll give the man back his sergeant's stripe. May as well, since I'm promoting you to captain."
David looked very pleased. That was just another of the many peculiar results of the Ring of Fire, Mike thought. Take a rural teenage kid and put him somewhere he can become a millionaire—but he still gets a bigger charge out of getting a promotion to a rank whose monthly salary was about what he earned in three hours of playing the stock market.
The Ring of Fire might not have cut anyone any slack, but here and there it had certainly played favorites.
Chapter 27
Zielona Góra
At least he was off the damn horse. Which was just as well, since another part of the house wall Jeff was crouched behind came down right then, knocked loose by a shot from one of the Poles' culverins. He was barely able to scramble aside and keep from getting half-buried in the rubble. The Polish guns fired balls that weighed at least twenty pounds. They were old-fashioned round shot, not explosive shells, but they could do plenty of damage to anything they hit directly.
Or anyone they hit directly. Jeff had seen one of Engler's artillerymen cut right in half. The sight had been as bizarre as it was ghastly. The soldier's body from the waist down had stayed in the saddle, his legs still gripping the horse and his feet still in the stirrups. It had still been there the last Jeff saw the horse, which—the beasts weren't always as dumb as they looked—had turned right around and gone galloping back around a bend in the road.
Meanwhile, spewing blood and intestines, the top half of the soldier had gone pinwheeling into the nearby stream the maps called Złota Łącza, however the hell that was pronounced. The half-corpse was still there, too. The Polish counterattack had been so ferocious that Jeff hadn't yet had the time or the spare men to send out burial parties. If a man was wounded, they'd do their best to rescue him. If he was dead, he'd just have to wait.
Jason Linn came running in a crouch and threw himself down alongside Jeff. The two of them along with three infantrymen were taking shelter behind what was left of the house. During battles, the mechanical repairman who kept the flying artillery's equipment operational served Captain Engler as a gofer. In this case, as a message runner.
The newly formed Hangman Regiment had had six radios in its possession. One of them was not working for reasons yet unclear. Another had been broken when its operator took cover too enthusiastically. A third one had just gone missing. Jeff was pretty sure the operator had sold it on the black market in a drunken stupor. They'd probably never know, however, since the operator in question had gotten himself killed in the first two minutes of the battle.
Of the three remaining radios, only one was still functional. The other two had taken direct hits from musket balls—just the radios; the operators had been completely untouched. Jeff was still outraged at the statistical absurdities involved. Murphy's Law by itself was one thing. Any sane person learned to take it into account by the he or she was fourteen years old. But in time of war, that mythical son-of-a-bitch went on steroids. It was no longer the fairly reasonable and straightforward principle if it can go wrong, it will go wrong. Oh, hell, no. Now the clause got added: it'll go wrong even if it can't, too.
Jeff had had no choice but to keep the sole remaining radio in reserve, for use whenever he needed to reach divisional headquarters. For the purposes of communicating with his own units, he'd had to fall back on the old-fashioned method. Send somebody and hope they don't get killed and use bugles and hope they could be heard over the unholy racket.
Another little chunk of the wall went flying. That had been caused by a grazing hit. Most of the ball's energy went into turning the rubble that had once been a house thirty yards back into slightly less organized rubble.
The second law of thermodynamics also went into overdrive during wartime, Jeff had learned. Entropy in the fast lane.
"Captain Engler is ready, Colonel!" Even positioned two feet away, Linn had to half-shout. The din wasn't quite as bad as it had been at Zwenkau, for the simple reason that there weren't as many guns involved. But the soldiers manning those various weapons were firing them as enthusiastically as you could ask for, on both sides. And now, here and there, the distinctive claps made by hand grenades were being added to the bedlam.
They'd be hearing more of those, Jeff figured, the farther the regiment pushed into the town.
On the plus side, it wasn't that big a town. On the minus side, every square foot seemed to have a damn Pole in it.
None of them were civilians, either, so far as Jeff could tell. Those had apparently skedaddled before the Third Division got within five miles of the place. At least Jeff wouldn't have to worry about atrocities committed against innocent bystanders.
Swell. Now he could concentrate on the problem of atrocities committed against him and his. The Poles were no sweethearts, and God help you if you fell into the hands of Cossacks. Whatever romantic notions about them Jeff could vaguely remember having back up-time had vanished the first time he came across the mutilated corpse of one of his soldiers who'd been taken prisoner four days earlier. The Cossacks had obviously spent some time on the project.
About the only virtues possessed by Cossacks other than their strictly martial abilities, so far as Jeff could tell, was the dubious one of being equal opportunity savages. From the evidence he'd seen, they were just as dangerous to Polish civilians as they were to anyone they were fighting.
Jeff had made clear to his men that he wouldn't tolerate atrocities, no matter who they were committed against. But his definition of "atrocity" was reasonably practical. He wasn't going to look into the fact that nobody seemed to be taking Cossack prisoners, as long as there was no evidence they'd been tortured.
Of course, they hadn't taken many prisoners of any kind so far. The only way you'd get a hussar to surrender was if he'd been knocked off his horse, and even then he pretty much had to be knocked senseless. Polish infantrymen weren't as cussed crazy belligerent, but they were still plenty feisty.
Jeff had been surprised by that, more than he'd been surprised by anything else. He'd known the set-up in Poland, in broad outlines. A small class of great landowners—they called them magnates—lording it over a population that was mostly dirt-poor peasants, many of them outright serfs. But what he was now learning was that broad outlines don't really tell you very much about a given people's fighting capabilities.
After all, in broad outline, the ant
ebellum American South had been a land dominated by a small class of great plantation masters who lorded it over the poor whites as well as their black slaves. That hadn't stopped the poor whites—talk about dumb!—from fighting for the slaveowners, had it?
What Jeff was now learning firsthand was just how savagely a class of people will fight to defend whatever small privileges they might have, even if they're purely social privileges, so long as those privileges loom large in their minds. That was especially true if the official casus belli was clear and straight-forward. We've been invaded!
Southern whites may have been poor, but at least they weren't black. Likewise, most of the szlachta weren't really much if any wealthier than the peasants they lived among. But at least they weren't peasants. They had status.
Poland and Lithuania were peculiar in that way, compared to most European countries. Their aristocracy was huge—probably a full ten percent of the population, where England's aristocracy wasn't more than three percent and even the sprawling German one wasn't more than five percent.
Only a few of those szlachta were really what Jeff would consider "large landowners." Those were the magnates, like Koniecpolski himself. Plenty of the szlachta didn't have the proverbial pot to piss in. But that only made them cherish even more their social position. In theory, at least, any member of the szlachta could marry the daughter of the richest magnate in the land and rise to any position in society.
So, the Polish infantry and artillery weren't the half-baked forces Jeff had expected. He'd known the hussars would make ferocious opponents, but he'd figured the rest of the Polish army would be like the Persian foot soldiers who'd faced Alexander the Great and his Macedonian phalanxes. When the crunch came down, they hadn't been worth much.
From what he'd been able to determine so far, however, szlachta made up a big chunk of the infantry and artillery they'd face since they closed in on Zielona Góra and the fighting started in earnest. These were some genuinely tough bastards, much more so than the Saxons had been. The soldiers working for John George—and that was exactly the relationship; a purely commercial one—had been professionals who, once a reasonable fight had been put up, were quite willing to surrender. In fact, any number of them were quite willing to go to work for the same people who'd just defeated them.