1636: The Ottoman Onslaught

by Eric Flint

  Even in World War I, with a much broader and more advanced industrial base than anything that existed in Tom’s new world, it hadn’t been until the fall of 1916 that British airplanes were finally equipped with machine guns and incendiary rounds capable of shooting down zeppelins. During the first two years of the war, a number of German airships were destroyed by ground fire, but there did not exist any guns in the year 1636 in this universe which had anything comparable to the anti-aircraft capability of their World War I counterparts. And wouldn’t be for some time.

  Tom knew that was Gustav Adolf’s big worry. The emperor was one of the most experienced captain generals of the era—perhaps only Grand Hetman Koniecpolski was his equal, now that Tilly had been killed. He could gauge the capabilities of his infantry, artillery and cavalry, even adding in all the factors produced by the new weaponry.

  He could even calculate the use of airplanes, since, for the time being, they were mostly useful simply for reconnaissance.

  But airships? Those, Gustav Adolf did not have a good sense for. The giant dirigibles had played the key role in enabling the Ottomans to seize Vienna so quickly. Could they play a similar role here at Linz?

  Tom didn’t know the answer to that question himself. But he was betting on Julie Mackay and he thought it was a bet he’d be winning soon. He’d know sooner than just about anybody whether he had or not, since he’d have the ringside seat.

  Steyregg, on the north bank of the Danube across from Linz

  Jeff Higgins and Thorsten Engler were standing on the roof of a house at the eastern edge of the town of Steyregg. Perched on the roof, rather; it was too steep to actually stand erect. The position still gave them an excellent view of the terrain stretching to the east.

  The terrain was fairly flat, and had been completely stripped of trees. The absence of trees was common near towns of the period, as it had been in most periods of history when wood was still the principal fuel for fires and cooking. Jeff had once seen a photograph of some part of New England in the nineteenth century and it had looked much the same way.

  The hills rising to the north were still fairly heavily wooded, though. That wouldn’t have been true this close to a big city like Munich, but Linz had a considerably smaller population.

  “Are we going to try to hold the hills?” Thorsten asked.

  Jeff shook his head. “Mike says no. We don’t have the men.”

  “That’s probably true, but if we don’t…” Thorsten pursed his lips. “There’ll be no way to hold Steyregg and the north bank if the Turks move into the hills.”

  “True. But what Mike’s figuring—which means Gustav Adolf is figuring, I figure—is that Murad is going to continue with the same tactic that got him Vienna. He’ll start with one big hammering blow, right off. Which he’ll send across the flats because if he sends that many men into those hills they’ll slow down to a crawl.”

  “And we do the butchering then.”

  “That’s the plan.” Jeff shrugged. “Afterward—assuming we beat back the Turks—Murad will probably settle in for a siege. That’s when he’ll send troops into the hills. At which point we’ll have to give up the north bank and retreat across the bridge into Linz.”

  They fell silent for a while, as they continued their steady of the terrain. Eventually, Thorsten pointed to a stretch of land that was flatter than any other. “That’s where any cavalry charge will come. It’s a narrow front; ideal for the volley guns. The trick will be getting back in time.”

  He gave his companion a calculating look. “I don’t suppose there’s much chance I could count on an infantry change by the stalwart Hangman regiment to provide us with protection.”

  “Sorry, but that’d just expose us to rocket fire even if we could drive off the sipahis. No, I’m afraid you’ll have to depend on your own nimbleness. ‘Flying artillery,’ remember? That, and Pappenheim’s men.”

  Engler grimaced.

  “The Black Cuirassiers do have a reputation, you know.”

  “Yes, I recall. Aren’t they the ones who started the butchering at Magdeburg?”

  Now it was Jeff’s turn to make a face. “Well, besides that.”

  Thorsten now looked to his left, where the Steyregg Schloss was quite visible on a nearby hill. “Are we setting up our headquarters in the castle?”

  “Where else? It’s got the rooms, it’s got the elevation, and the plumbing’s no worse than the latrines we’re digging in the field.”

  Thorsten’s gaze went back to the flattish terrain to the east. The men of the Third Division were busy down there, digging trenches and putting up bunkers. Given them another two days, and they’d be in good condition to face the oncoming Turks. There was no intention to fight a battle here on open ground, not for the infantry and the field artillery. They’d stay in their fieldworks and fight from behind shelter.

  It would be nice if Thorsten and his men could do the same. But… “Flying artillery,” they were called. Very soon, they’d find out if they could live up to the reputation.

  Vienna, former capital of Austria-Hungary, now occupied by the Ottoman Empire

  “This has got to be the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done,” complained Judy Wendell. She hoisted another bucketload out of the oubliette in the corner of the far cellar, taking care to move slowly and not spill any of the contents on herself.

  Or on her clothing, which would be even worse. They had enough of a water supply in the cellars to manage a spare regimen of bathing. Not every day, of course. But they didn’t have enough to do any sort of regular laundry. The only reason their garments weren’t getting too foul yet was because they weren’t doing anything except sitting around, chatting, and playing endless rounds of word games.

  Hadn’t been doing anything physical, rather. Until Minnie set them all to work making the necessary—gross; nauseating; loathsome—preparations for her expedition.

  “Why couldn’t we do this at the last minute?” she said, trying not to whine.

  “Stuff has to dry out for a while,” Minnie explained, “or it’ll be too hard for me to use. I’ve got to hide stuff in it, remember?”

  “Thank you for sharing that. The most disgusting thing I’ve ever done just got disgustinger.”

  “I don’t think that’s a word in English.”

  “No, it’s not. I just added it to Amideutsch, where anything can be a word.”

  “Please stop talking,” said Cecilia Renata, as she finished emptying the contents of the bucket into the cart. Her voice was tight and thin. “I’m almost throwing up as it is.”

  Leopold appeared out of the gloom. They never had more than one or two lamps and candles burning at a time. For weeks, they’d lived in a sort of perpetual twilight except on the rare occasions when they ventured into the tower.

  “How much longer will this take?” he asked. “It’s stinking up the whole place.”

  All three women glared at him. “It occurs to me,” said Cecilia Renata, “that this would go faster if we pitched my useless brother into the well.”

  “True enough,” said Minnie. “That’d raise the shit level at least two feet.”

  Leopold retreated back into the gloom.

  Brzeg, thirty miles southeast of Breslau

  “I think we may have found the bastard, Eddie,” said Christin George. She was looked through a pair of binoculars at the town they were flying past. Or she had been—right now she was studying the small castle perched on a low cliff on the west side of the Oder river.

  Jozef Wojtowicz peered through the small window he had available to him in the rear seat of the Dauntless. It was cramped and the visibility was poor. If he’d been as big as Lukasz he’d have been utterly miserable. As it was, he found the experience of flying to be exhilarating enough and nerve-wracking enough that he wasn’t bothered too much by his physical discomfort.

  “That’s one of the Piast castles,” he said.

  “Who or what are the Piasts?” asked Christin.


  “They were Poland’s first dynasty. They ruled for more than four hundred years until the last of their kings died. That was Casimir III, the one they called ‘the Great.’ The Piasts built several of these castles in the area. There’s one in Lignica and another one in Gliwice—what the Germans call Gleiwitz.”

  He struggled to get his head a bit higher. “I think Christin may be right, Eddie. This is exactly the sort of place Holk would set up his headquarters. Can you fly back around? And get us closer?”

  “Let’s take it in stages,” Eddie said, as he brought the plane back around. “I’ll start with a fast and not too low approach right over the castle. Tell me what you spot, if anything.”

  As the plane neared the castle again, Christin could see soldiers coming out of the structure. Stumbling out of it, some of them—one fellow did a silent-era movie pratfall as soon as he came into the courtyard that would have turned Buster Keaton green with envy.

  “Yeah, that’s got to be them,” she said. “Of course, I can’t tell if Holk himself is here.”

  The plane passed right by the square tower that adjoined the castle. More soldiers were coming out of that structure.

  Jozef got a good look at it. “I think that’s what they call the Tower of Lions. If Holk’s in there, that’s most likely where he’d be.”

  “One more time, Eddie,” said Christin. “How low can you go?”

  “Safely? That depends on several things, but…” He’d been studying the surrounding terrain and nodded toward something below. “I can follow the Oder behind that line of trees until we get close. They won’t have enough time after they spot us to get a proper volley ready.”

  “Assuming those fucks can do a volley in the first place,” jeered Christin. “I think half of ‘em are drunk.”

  Drunk or sober, Eddie’s assessment proved to be correct. When he brought the plane up over the tree line and swept around the tower, not more than two hundred feet off the ground, they were met by nothing more than sporadic gunfire. Jozef was fairly sure that all of the shots had simply been fired out of pique.

  “That’s it, then,” he said, as they flew back toward Breslau. “One bombing raid coming up.”

  Chapter 52

  Breslau (Wroclaw), Lower Silesia

  Poland

  Rebecca always found the way Gretchen studied a map to be quite striking, because of the sheer intensity of the blonde woman’s scrutiny. It had been more than two years since Rebecca had spent a lot of time in Gretchen’s company, during the Spanish siege of Amsterdam. She’d forgotten, a little, the nature of the woman’s character when she was facing a major challenge. Someone had once described Gretchen as a force of nature, and there were times Rebecca thought the depiction was quite apt.

  This being one of them. Ever since she’d brought her motley army into Lower Silesia and taken control of the big towns, Gretchen had been squeezing the province as if it were a lemon in her hand—bound and determined to force Holk and his thugs out of hiding. By now, at least a third of the province’s Polish rural folk had either come into the towns or taken shelter beneath their walls, with more still coming every day. And if Lower Silesia’s agriculture and commerce was suffering as a result, so be it. The inhabitants—the Poles even more than the Germans—had grown sick and tired of the mercenary army that was theoretically there to protect them but, in reality, behaved like a pack of thieves and extortionists.

  On their own, they would not have put up any resistance. For that, leadership was necessary. And, with the exception of her husband, Rebecca had never met anyone who could project raw leadership the way Gretchen Richter did. It was as if the woman had a fierce halo surrounding her that called out: Follow me.

  Holk and his men were still refusing to come out to face her challenge. But now, it seemed they might have discovered the beast’s lair.

  “You’re sure?” Gretchen asked; then, immediately, waved her hand as if brushing away smoke. “Never mind, stupid question. But you think there’s a good chance of it?”

  Jozef Wojtowicz nodded. “It makes sense that Holk would have set himself up in Brzeg, Gretchen. He’s just the sort of greedy bastard who’d be taken by the idea of setting himself up in one of the Piast castles, and the one at Brzeg is really the only one that’s available. We hold the castle at Lignica, of course.”

  “There’s the one you told me about in Gleiwitz, too,” she pointed out.

  Lukasz Opalinski now spoke up, shaking his head. “Gliwice’s too close to Katowice. There’s still a Polish garrison in that town, and even if there weren’t Holk has to be worried about getting too close to Bohemia. Wallenstein claims all of Upper Silesia and he might still be angry enough at Holk because of the raid on Prague to launch an expedition against him, if he knew Holk was close by.”

  Rebecca found the subtle tug-of-war between Gretchen and her two Polish advisers a little amusing. Gretchen invariably used the German name for the big towns with mostly German populations, although she was quite willing to use the Polish names for the Polish-inhabited villages. A fundamental issue of democracy was apparently at stake.

  The two Poles, on the other hand, insisted on using the place-names of their own native tongue. A fundamental issue of national pride was apparently at stake.

  Rebecca was pretty sure Gretchen was going to win the contest, eventually—certainly if she kept control over Lower Silesia. The policies she was instituting were designed, among other things, to restrain the German townfolk from taking advantage of the current vulnerability of the rural Poles clustering around the towns. For instance, she’d established rigorous price controls and while a black market had inevitably emerged she was keeping it fairly well suppressed.

  It helped a great deal, in that respect, that she had the core of Third Division troops under Eric Krenz’s command. Those soldiers were German themselves and so could move easily among the town folk—but they were also either CoC in their political disposition or at least CoC-influenced. They might not have much in the way of personal empathy for the Polish refugees, but if Gretchen Richter told her regulars that they should squelch any and all attempts to exploit the refugees, squelch them they would.

  It would be interesting to see how it would all turn out, in the end. From veiled comments in the radio messages she was getting from Ed Piazza, Rebecca was now certain that the USE government’s policy toward Lower Silesia would be to keep it—perhaps as an outright new province, perhaps as an expansion of the existing province of Saxony, or, assuming a peace treaty was eventually made with Poland, perhaps as a protectorate of some kind.

  That would certainly be Gustav Adolf’s predilection. And while the initial attitude of the Americans and the Fourth of July Party toward the war with Poland had been skeptical—sometimes even hostile—that attitude was shifting as time went on. Partly that was due to the inherent dynamic of military conflict. Sympathy for an opponent was bound to decline as casualties mounted.

  But there was more involved. As the war continued, the attitude toward the Polish regime on the part of the USE’s population, including—in some ways, even especially—those under CoC influence, was starting to harden. Whatever its faults and however stunted its democratic and egalitarian principles might be in many respects, the government of the USE was far more responsive to the needs of its population than were the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s king and Sejm.

  For all the liberties granted to the Polish nobility and the much-vaunted religious toleration of the PLC, the lot of the commoners was generally wretched and getting steadily worse as the so-called “second serfdom” continued to be forced down the throats of the rural folk. Poland, which had once been among Europe’s most advanced and enlightened nations, was increasingly become a realm where a relative handful of immensely wealthy and powerful landowners—“magnates,” in the Polish parlance—lorded it over a peasantry being reduced to outright serfs. In Poland now, King Wheat ruled in much the same way that King Cotton had ruled the American South i
n a different universe.

  More and more, therefore, the population of the USE—and even more so its soldiers—were becoming partisans of Gustav Adolf’s war against his Vasa cousin. Not because they cared about the dynastic issues involved but simply because they were coming to see the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as yet another bastion of tyranny and reaction, like Spain or the Ottoman Empire.

  So, whatever settlement might eventually come out of the war with Poland and Lithuania, Rebecca was now certain that the USE would keep its control over Lower Silesia, in one way or another.

  Which meant—whether Gretchen liked it or not—that the Lady Protector of Lower Silesia was going to keep her title for quite some time. Rebecca thought it was illustrative of the irony of human history, that a woman who despised grandiose personal titles was so well suited to them.

  As she demonstrated yet again.

  “Well do it, then. Eric—Lovrenc—Georg—start assembling the army. We’ll start the march on Brzeg the day after tomorrow.”

  “How much of a garrison do you want to leave in the towns?” asked Georg Kresse.

  “None in the smaller ones. Two hundred here in Breslau.” Gretchen gnawed on her lower lip for a moment. “One hundred—no, seventy-five should be enough—in Liegnitz. That’s it, I think.”

  The Vogtlander frowned. “No more than that?”

  Gretchen shook her head. “We don’t need any more than that. It’s now clear that Holk has concentrated his forces to the southeast. All of the towns we control—Glogau, Lüben, Bunzlau, all of them—are northwest of Breslau. Holk can’t raid them without getting through our people.”

  Kresse was always stubborn. “He’s got a lot of cavalry. He might raid around us.”

  Gretchen nodded toward Eddie and Christin, who were seated against one of the far walls. “We’ve got airplane reconnaissance, remember? Unless…” She looked at Eddie. “Is your employer making noises that you have to return to Prague?”