by Eric Flint
“Exactly. What the king of Sweden wanted us to handle were the dioceses of Wurzburg and Bamberg and the abbey of Fulda-even though, to a fussy geographer, Fulda is only sort of marginally Franconian. But since it was definitely Catholic and sort of between Franconia and Hesse-Kassel, President Stearns decided that Gustavus Adolphus intended the NUS to take over there. So we did. By last November, the NUS picked out its administrative teams, with Steve Salatto in overall charge, and President Stearns and Secretary of State Piazza sent them on their way.”
He sighed, took off his cap, and scratched his scalp. “This is going to be a mess, isn’t it?”
“Sure is. Like I said, Mr. Piazza showed me some of the reports Steve Salatto sent in. Our administration teams found out very soon that there weren’t many people who had been living in Franconia during the winter of 1631-1632 who were likely to ever join a King Gustavus Adolphus fan club. It didn’t seem to matter at all whether they were Catholic or Protestant, or whether they lived in the villages or the big towns. At a rough guess, at least ninety percent of the population of Franconia hate the Swedes. They were every bit as rough on people when they came through as any of Tilly or Wallenstein’s armies.”
Anse hissed. “Rough on people” was a euphemism for what, up-time, would be a roster of every major felony on the books, starting with murder, rape and arson and working your way down. “That bad?”
Noelle started to reply but had to break off to calm down her horse. The beast had gotten a little jittery about something. God knows what. Anse Hatfield wasn’t really much more experienced with horses than the young Catholic woman.
“Well, I guess not quite,” she said, finally, once the horse settled down. “At least, so far as we know there were no major massacres. Certainly nothing on the scale of what Tilly’s army did at Magdeburg. But it was plenty bad enough-and nobody down there has forgotten, or stopped holding a grudge. Real, serious, personal grudges, too. Not just the usual ‘they made me convert to somebody else’s religion’ grudges. There were the ‘they burned my Ma as a witch’ grudges; the ‘somebody’s army stole all our horses’ grudges; ‘the Swedes devastated our property when they passed through in 1631-1632 on their way to crossing the Lech’ grudges.”
“In Suhl, too? They’re mostly Lutherans themselves, I thought. Just like the Swedes.”
“Yes, they are. For that matter, you can argue till the cows come home whether Suhl is really part of Franconia or Thuringia in the first place. But it doesn’t matter, Mr. Hatfield.”
“Call me Anse, please.”
“Okay. Look, Anse, here’s what I’ve finally figured out about this so-called ‘war of religion.’ Almost every army involved in this war is mostly made up of mercenaries, including Gustavus Adolphus’s army. The truth is, you’ll find plenty of Protestant soldiers serving in ‘Catholic’ armies, and vice versa. As often as not, religion is just an excuse for a mercenary army to do what it would have done anyway, once it enters territory it considers conquered from the enemy-and their definition of ‘enemy’ is going to be just as sloppy as everything else. From what I can tell, most of this war is just one plundering expedition after another. I think Gustavus Adolphus keeps a tighter rein on his soldiers than most commanders do. But that isn’t saying much, and even that gets really frayed when he’s just marching through a territory on his way somewhere else.”
This, at least, was an area that Anse felt more familiar with. “Well, yeah, that’s a given. Not a one of these armies has a ‘logistics train’ that isn’t made up of spit, baling wire and chewing gum. In fact, that’s the problem us TacRail people are trying to solve. To a point, anyway. Without a good logistics train, an army on the march has no choice but to do what they call ‘foraging.’”
Noelle’s expression got very tight, almost pinched. “What a fancy, antiseptic term.”
“Ain’t it?” replied Anse, grinning coldly. “Anybody up-time tried to engage in such-like ‘foraging’ at home, they’d be looking at a minimum twenty-year sentence at hard labor. A fair number would be on death row, if West Virginia still had a death penalty.”
Noelle shook her head. “I’ve always been glad West Virginia gave up the death penalty, back in 1976. But sometimes . . .”
Anse shrugged, being careful to keep the motion minimal. Truth be told, he wasn’t any too sure how good a control he had over his own horse, especially traveling across snow-covered dirt roads. “It’s a moot point, here. I know Mike’s just fighting right now to get all the down-timers in the NUS to agree to restrict the death penalty to murder.”
Noelle got that pinched look on her face again. At such times, Anse didn’t have any trouble at all picturing her as a nun. That might just be his own prejudices at work, though. Unlike most West Virginians, Anse didn’t belong to any church. But his background was old-time Protestant, and he tended to share the image of nuns as pale-faced, tight-lipped, mean-spirited old crones who disapproved of anything and everything.
Which wasn’t fair, certainly not applied to Noelle. She might have the goofiest mother in creation, by all accounts, but at least so far she’d struck Anse as a pleasant and level-headed young woman. She was rather pretty, too.
“Keep talking,” he said softly. “This is a help.”
“Well, the gist of what Mr. Salatto told Mr. Piazza in his reports was that there doesn’t appear to be any reason why the Franconians should like the Swedes any more than they do any of the other armies that have gone trampling through Franconia during the past fifteen years. Fortunately, we-the up-timers, I mean-do have some legacy of goodwill in the Suhl area, because it was our people who defeated that expedition Wallenstein sent into the area a while back. That doesn’t extend into Franconia itself, however. So the NUS administrators have to take this into account in their policies, which they are doing. They don’t talk about Gustavus Adolphus very much. Just sort of leave him on a back burner, so to speak.”
Anse grimaced a little. “I can understand the logic, but . . . That might backfire, you know. When you come right down to it, ‘guv’mint’ means ‘we’re the guys with the big guns’ and the truth is the NUS has hardly any guns at all down there in Franconia, big, small or medium-sized. If the crap hits the fan-pardon my language-we’re going to have to call on Gustavus Adolphus to bail us out.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” Noelle shook her head. “It might, though. To make things worse, when the NUS took over the administration of Franconia, the economy was shot. Conditions were a lot worse than in southern Thuringia, where things were bad enough. The only industry that was still doing well on the south slope of the Thueringerwald was munitions, in places like Suhl, Schmalkalden, and Schleusingen. Which aren’t exactly Franconia, I remind you. And even there, although Suhl itself is one of our states now, most of the arms manufacturers-maybe all of them-just don’t see this as an ‘us against them’ business. They’ll sell to anyone who has the money to buy, even if the guy is likely to use the stuff to invade the NUS the next year. They seem to think that since somebody is probably going to invade the region no matter what they do, and they can’t really predict in advance which side it’ll be, they might as well make as much as they can from the war. Especially since it’s pretty much the only good business going.”
Again, she shook her head. “And that’s not all. There are also a lot of people who weren’t in Franconia during the winter of 1631-1632. That is, there are those Protestants who had gone into exile, mostly into Ansbach or Bayreuth or Nurnberg, after the Bishop of Wurzburg started his re-Catholicization campaign, and who came tumbling back after the Swedes drove the bishop out. Some of them are demanding their own back-and some of them are demanding not only their own, but more, as compensation for all the pain and suffering they experienced. It’s sort of like letting all the Cuban exiles in Miami go home and then trying to manage all the property claims that popped up in Cuba.
“Most of them hire lawyers. The lawyers have clerks. The clerks have apprent
ices. The NUS administrators don’t have three dozen up-timers total, counting the military attaches. At that-being honest-we’re pretty much scraping the bottom of the barrel. Small towns of thirty-five hundred people like Grantville just aren’t prime material for all of a sudden running a government for nearly a million people, counting southern Thuringia as well as Franconia, especially when it wasn’t even the county seat in the first place. And somebody has to stay home and keep things running there. Franconia is a sideshow, really. Anybody who takes a look at the comparative budgets for running Thuringia and running Franconia can figure that out.”
Anse nodded. “Yeah, same old story. All the members of the NUS congress are from Thuringia, and like politicians anywhere, they think that their main job is to take care of their own constituents first. And, generally speaking, their constituents see eye-to-eye with them on the matter. Which means, until things in Franconia can settle down enough to hold elections-and figure out how Franconia fits in terms of Thuringia-they’ll keep getting the short end of the stick. So how are Steve and his people handling it?”
“The first problem that Mr. Salatto and his teams have is to try to sort out which of the down-time Franconian administrators will be willing to work with them. Not support them, necessarily, but at least carry out orders and not deliberately undermine what they are trying to accomplish. That takes time, and they’re still working at it. The main problem with finding local administrators to work with, of course, is that any Franconian official who does agree to work with them is in serious danger of being denounced as a collaborator and taken out by his enemies if, in a couple more years, it turns out that Gustavus Adolphus can’t hold on to his conquests in Germany and the Habsburgs or Bavarians come back with a different slant on who should be running things.”
“Can’t really blame ‘em, I guess,” said Anse. “Self-preservation’s about the most basic instinct there is. And it’s not likely to be just them if things go pffftt! It’ll be their wives and children, elderly parents.” He sighed. “The way things seem to work in this day and age, probably even their servants would suffer for the decisions they take, if it all goes sour.”
“It’s helped a lot that the other Thuringian states that have joined the NUS sent along a fair number of down-time lawyers and clerks to help out. It doesn’t help at all that the Franconians consider Thuringians to be just as much ‘foreigners’ as up-timers and Swedes and, overall, consider the NUS to be just one more occupation force.”
“Well, honest to God, what are we? Noelle, we are just one more occupation force. We may have better intentions than the others, but that’s what we are.”
He broke off, watching Captain von Dantz trotting his horse past them toward the front of the party. “Well. Some of us have better intentions.”
The pinched look came back on Noelle’s face. So strongly, in fact, that Anse involuntarily looked down at her hands, holding the reins. He was a little surprised to see that they were the smooth-skinned, rather delicate hands of a slender and attractive young woman. He’d been expecting to see heavy, gnarled fists. The sort that, arthritis be damned, hold and wield a great big ruler.
* * *
At noon, not far east of the town of Ilmenau, Anse called a halt to rest and water the horses and to have a quick lunch. As everyone else loosened the tack on the horses, Wili passed out the rations: dried hard sausage, cheese and bread, with a small apple for dessert.
“Hey this sausage is good,” Gaylynn said at her first bite. “Wili, I want the recipe. Will you ask Mrs. Schultz to send it to me?”
“Ja, Dora loves it when people ask how she made food.”
“You know that’s mixed meat sausage, Gaylynn,” Anse teased. “Bit of this and a bit of that. Venison, pork, beef-and horse, if I remember correctly.”
“Nein, nicht beef. Und it is just a little horse.”
“Well, whatever, it’s good.” Gaylynn answered. Anse noticed that the captain, however, put down his portion and ate only the cheese.
“Herr Hatfield, how long are we going to wait here?” von Dantz demanded. “We should be moving.”
“I thought we would rest the horses for an hour.” Anse pulled out his pocket watch. “We’re about thirty minutes short of that.”
“Remember, the general wants a report this year,” said von Dantz sarcastically.
“Captain, the report will be a lot later if we have to walk to Suhl because our horses gave out.”
“You should have brought a change of horses for the wagon, or left the wagon.”
Anse restrained his temper. “And was the Swedish garrison in Grantville going to provide them? Look, my family has only three horses, these. Wili and I had to kill the former owners to get them. You might be used to traveling on other people’s money, but we ain’t. And the wagon is going because I want to bring something back from Suhl.”
The captain got up and went to tend his horse, his shoulders stiff with anger.
* * *
That afternoon, traveling was much like it had been in the morning. The road wasn’t up to the quality that was becoming standard around Grantville. But it was well marked, and the cold weather combined with plenty of travel close to Ilmenau had packed the snow into a hard surface.
Captain von Dantz was continually riding ahead. Anse, who had walked point a few times in Vietnam, was happy to leave the scouting to him. So it came as no surprise, in the late afternoon, to find von Dantz waiting, when the little convoy rounded a curve. “Herr Hatfield, there is a small village up ahead. We will spend the night there.”
Anse studied the sky for a minute, then pulled out his watch. “Captain, I figure we still have a couple of hours traveling time. But if you don’t want to sleep in a tent, we can stop.”
Clearly the captain was primed for an argument. “You think we should press on?”
“No, in this case I think you’re right. We should stop and get the horses under shelter. I’m not all that good at judging the weather, but it sure looks like we’re going to get some more snow tonight. A barn to sleep in would be mighty welcome.”
When they arrived at the village, though, Anse was surprised to find there were no separate barns. In a village of six houses, there was only one that had two stories, with the lower floor being a stable. All the rest were one-story with an attached lean-to providing shelter for what few animals the owners had. While four of the one story houses had smoke coming from their chimneys, one was obviously unoccupied.
Someone in the village must have been keeping watch. As the travelers stopped, the door of the largest house opened and a prosperous looking man came out.
“Ah, Amerikaner,” he said, after seeing the rubber tires on the wagon. “Ich bin der Schultheiss des Dorfs, Horst Stoltz. Sie mochten die Nacht bleiben, ja.”
Anse, whose German had improved under Wili’s tutoring, realized this was the head man of the village and he was asking if they needed a place to spend the night. A bit of bargaining and only mentioning the tents on the wagon twice got the party the use of the empty house for the night in exchange for five old silver dimes.
After the seven horses were crowded into the lean-to and most of the supplies were transferred from the wagon to the house, Lieutenant Ivarsson commented to Anse. “We actually made a good distance today, better than twenty of your miles, I think. I was impressed by the wheels on the wagon. They do make it travel better. How does it work?”
“The tires are solid rubber and give a wider area on the ground. It makes them roll easier. The real secret is the bearings in the wheel hubs.”
Captain von Dantz called from the door of the house. “We need to get settled in for the night. If we cover as much ground tomorrow, we can be in Suhl before nightfall.”
As the captain vanished into the dark interior, Anse noticed Rau waving from the back of the house.
When Anse and Ivarsson joined him, Rau said softly: “I talked to the Schultheiss like you asked. He says nothing unusual is going on to the sout
h, but I noticed the villagers are keeping their animals closer than normal. Then I talked to the boy who keeps the village pigs. He said that there have been a lot of people on the road. All traveling north-well, toward Grantville. That’s actually east from where we are now. And all carrying all they own.”
Ivarsson looked thoughtful. “Now, that is odd. There have been no reports of any army moving down that way. What else could put people on the road, this time of the year?”
“The pig boy didn’t think it was an army. He just said people were moving. I did a run through the woods close to the village. Just off the road to the south there are a couple of families camped. Three men, four women and eight Kinder. One of the boys is man tall. They are keeping a sharp watch and a cold camp, no fire.”
“They didn’t see you, I take it?” Anse asked. Rau just grinned.
Anse thought a bit. It was not likely at all that an army could have penetrated Franconia and reached as far as the Thueringerwald without news coming to Grantville. There was a radio in Suhl, after all. Besides, armies rarely moved in the winter, here and now, unless they had to.
He turned and looked at the house they were using. “Okay, change of plans. We keep two people on watch all night. Jochen, I want you to knock a couple of tiles loose on the roof to make a firing point in the loft on the side that overlooks the road. Lt. Ivarsson, I want you and Mrs. Reardon up there with your rifles, if anything happens. Jochen, you and me can cover the windows and door on the ground floor. Wili can cover the lean-to, through the door that connects it to the house. I don’t think anyone is going to jump us, but it doesn’t hurt to plan ahead.”
“What about the captain?” Rau asked.
Anse shook his head. He didn’t trust von Dantz to be an alert sentry, with his arrogant attitudes. “We’ll let him sleep. Hopefully nothing will happen. If it does, he stays with us on the ground floor. Now go make that loophole. I’ll bring Wili up to speed. Anything you want to add, Lt. Ivarsson?”