by Eric Flint
Elsewhere, the process would be more ragged. In some places-Hesse-Kassel and Brunswick-the local committees had been instructed not to push matters to an open confrontation with the official authorities. Just… strike some hard blows, and then pull back and see. It was quite possible that Landgrave William and Duke Georg would decide to finish the job themselves, once they realized the peril of doing otherwise. The landgraves of Hesse-Kassel had never allowed anti-Semitism much leeway anyway, not for centuries. And Duke Georg was now far too reliant on Jewish financing for his booming new petroleum industry to have any truck with the anti-Semitic swine either.
But, however long it took, and however it was done, it would be done. That long-festering boil in German politics would be lanced, finally. Crushed; shattered; destroyed; drowned in its own blood and gore. Reaction would have to make do thereafter without that sturdy support. And the same with witch-hunting.
And-best of all, from Gretchen's viewpoint-by the time it was all over the Committees of Correspondence would have been transformed. For the first time, that often fractious and disorganized movement would have acted coherently, in unison, on a national scale. And in a directly military manner.
There was no way to know what the future might bring. But whatever came, the CoCs would be ready for it.
Francisco still had his doubts. But…
First, he did understand the reasoning, as Mike Stearns had laid it out. Harsh and cold that reasoning might be-even cruel, you could fairly say. Within two weeks, the Germanies would have several thousand more corpses than they would have had otherwise.
But Francisco didn't question the reasoning. Like his employer, Nasi had now spent a great deal of time studying the history of another universe. Not, as many foolish people did, because he thought he could predict the future in this one, but simply to find the underlying patterns. The logic of developments, as it were.
One thing was clear. Anti-Semitism had always played an important role in European politics, but the phenomenon could be quirkier than it looked. Francisco had been quite fascinated to discover, for instance, that during the Holocaust the two safest places for a Jew in those parts of Europe under the Nazis had been Italy and Bulgaria-both of which had fascist governments themselves.
He still didn't know the reasons for that, beyond the fact itself, in the case of Bulgaria. Grantville's records concerning Bulgarian history were essentially non-existent, and even that seemingly endless fount of historical knowledge Melissa Mailey had admitted she knew hardly anything on the subject.
But Grantville's records on Italian history were quite good. Not surprisingly, given the high percentage of its inhabitants who came from Italian stock. And the logic in the case of Italy was quite clear, once you knew where to look.
In Germany, anti-Semitism had become a tool of the emerging nationalist movement and became an integral part of it. One of the early nationalist leader Father Jahn's complaints against the foreign tyrant Napoleon had been that the French bastard prevented the Germans from indulging in their ancient custom of pogroms.
The logic developed in an opposite manner, in Italy. There, anti-Semitism was seen as a tool of the papacy-and it was the papacy and the papal states who were the principal internal obstacles to Italian unification. As it emerged, therefore, Italian nationalism was deeply hostile to anti-Semitism. Where Germany's Father Jahn had stirred up anti-Semitism, one of the first acts of the revolutionists in the great 1848 revolution in Rome had been to tear down the walls of the ghetto.
So. Who was to say that the rise of German nationalism in this universe couldn't develop in a nicely Latin manner?
Not Francisco Nasi. Who was, after all, himself a Jew.
He began humming a tune.
"Catchy," commented Achterhof. "What is it?"
"Oh, it's an up-time melody. Composed by a fellow named Verdi."
And then, of course, there was the second reason. Whatever doubts Francisco might have had were simply overwhelmed by the delightful possibility that opened up in the course of the final discussion between himself and Stearns and the CoC leaders.
"We need a name for this operation," Gretchen had said at one point. "Something striking and memorable."
Mike scratched his chin, thoughtfully.
It came to Francisco, in a flash. And by the sudden change of expression on Stearns' face, to him as well. They exchanged glances, and much as the poet said:
Looked at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
"I have it," said Francisco. "You should call it 'Operation Krystalnacht.' "
"Absolutely," said Mike.
Gretchen and Gunther and Spartacus rolled the name around.
"Krystalnacht," mused Achterhof. "I like it. It's catchy and memorable. 'Crystal Night.' It doesn't make any sense, but I like it."
"Krystalnacht' it is, then," said Gretchen.
Later, when the two of them were alone, Mike shook his head. "I can't believe we did that."
"Don't be silly," said Francisco. "It's perfect."
Chapter 68
Kassel
The first thing Landgrave William did upon his return to his capital city was summon his military commanders.
"Here," he said. He placed a small sheaf of papers on the table in the salon where they'd gathered. "I want every man named here-every member of every organization named here-arrested immediately. And I don't care what level of force you need to use to bring them in. Dead is fine. I'll have a fair number of them executed anyway."
One of the officers picked up the list and studied it. By the time he got to the third sheet, his eyebrows were lifted.
"If you don't mind me asking, Your Grace, where did you get this list?"
"It was handed to me on the border of the province, as we passed across," William said grimly, "by the commander of a large force of the Committees of Correspondence. A large and well-armed force. The same flintlocks provided for the federal army-and better guns than most of our own soldiers have. They seem quite well disciplined, too."
The officer's eyebrows lifted still further.
"Just do it, colonel. I don't need to see anti-Semites and witch-hunters hanging from gibbets in Hesse-Kassel, or lying by the road where they were shot by firing squads. I saw quite enough of that already on our way here from Magdeburg. The best way to keep out the CoCs is to make them unnecessary."
He sat down heavily in a chair by the table. "I'm sick of those bastards anyway."
"Stinking CoCs," agreed the colonel.
"Not them," said the landgrave. "The anti-Semites. The witch-hunters. As if we didn't have enough trouble!"
The worst bloodshed was in Mecklenburg. The nobility in that province was still solidly in place, and it had long been the most grasping, piggish and narrow-minded in the Germanies. The reason for the Fourth of July Party's popularity in that largely rural province was due to the aristocracy's greed, in fact. The peasantry hated them.
The Mecklenburg nobility actually had very few ties to anti-Semitism. They were an impoverished, hardscrabble sort of aristocracy. Really, more in the way of what in England would have been considered country squires or, at a later period in Russian history, the class of rich peasants known as "kulaks." There just wasn't a lot of blood to be squeezed out of the turnip of north German agriculture-which meant the aristocracy squeezed very hard. But it also meant they tended to rely on the Jewish populations in the towns for a number of needed services. It was actually among the peasantry that anti-Semitism had traditionally been most deeply rooted.
But, as often happens, social customs were trumped by politics. Everyone in the Germanies except village idiots understood perfectly well that the Committees of Correspondence, in Operation Krystalnacht, were using the anti-Semites and witch-hunters as scapegoats-in another of history's little ironies. When one of their columns marched into a town and rounded up known anti-Semitic agitators or known witch-hunters and summarily executed them after a sum
mary trial, what they were really doing was baring their teeth at the establishment while, simultaneously, making clear to their own supporters what was henceforth to be acceptable or unacceptable conduct. Directly, they didn't threaten the noblemen or the city patricians or the guildmasters, no. Achterhof's orders on that subject had been crystal clear and fairly blood-curdling as to the consequences if they were disobeyed.
But who was fooled, really? Hardly no one. So, often enough, the CoC columns were cheered as they marched through a town by the same lower classes of people who, for generations, had actually provided most of the members of lynch mobs. And were glowered upon, from their shelters behind fancy windows, by people of the upper classes who were in fact often quite guiltless of persecuting Jews or hunting witches. It just didn't matter. The CoC leaders had ordered Krystalnacht as a combined mass education for their own followers and form of intimidation toward their enemies. That was the essence of it, not the several thousand anti-Semites and witch-hunters across the USE's provinces and imperial cities who wound up being killed in the process.
In every other province, even Pomerania, the nobility as a whole was shrewd enough to step aside and let the CoC columns do their work. Except those of them who were directly part of one or another anti-Semitic organization on the CoC lists, of course. But most noblemen were not. Almost none, in some provinces.
Mecklenburg was the exception. There, the pigheaded nobility rose to the bait. They didn't care in the least about the anti-Semites being shot by the CoC columns. They were simply by-damn and by-golly not about to tolerate the CoCs operating openly in their territory.
The result amounted to an outright civil war.
The noblemen had the upper hand, at first. The CoC columns who first appeared in the province came from Mecklenburg itself. Mostly from the towns of Wismar, Rostock and Schwerin. They were well-armed but not very numerous, and they were caught off guard by the fierce reaction of the local aristocracy.
It was the sheer ferocity of the reaction that carried the field, at first. It certainly wasn't any splendid organization or discipline on the part of the nobility. The truth of the matter was that Mecklenburg's aristocracy was a sorry lot. For generations, not having the English custom of primogeniture, they had been dealing with the poverty of their rural estates by sending their more competent sons out to earn a living by serving in the armies and bureaucracies of more powerful rulers, while keeping the dumbest ones home to administer the estates. As breeding systems went, this was counter-productive.
Nor did Mecklenburg's aristocracy have the luxury of maintaining large bands of well-armed and well-trained retainers. Most of the Mecklenburg nobility didn't have any "armed retainers" at all, in the sense that an Elizabethan era English duke would have understood the term. What they had instead were their huntsmen, their stable hands, their household staff-the steward, the butler, a few footmen, the driver for the family carriage. And while many of the huntsmen, stable hands, and household staff, given the situation in the Thirty Years War, had military experience, most of them by this time who'd been in one or another of the armies had left because of some kind of physical problem that made continuing military service impractical.
So, there it was. The small CoC columns who moved incautiously into the Mecklenburg countryside were driven back into the towns by mobs of often one-armed butlers and one-eyed dog-trainers led by profane and semi-literate "noblemen" whose clothes were likely to be filthy and who almost invariably stank of drink.
Had the peasants come into the fight at that stage, things would have been different. But while the peasants might be sympathetic, the peasant militias-quite unlike the situation in Franconia, where the militias worked hand-in-glove with the Ram movement-were not coordinated with the CoC columns. The peasants armed themselves; but having done so, the militias simply guarded their own villages. Leaving the outnumbered CoCs to fight the nobility's private forces in the field.
Very quickly, the CoCs were driven back into the towns. In fact, the noble bands started following them into the towns, intending to scotch this snake while it was still small.
But then the army reacted. More precisely, the air force, which had a large base in Wismar. The air force's three warplanes assigned to the province began bombing the aristocracy's armed bands in the field, and even carried out bombing raids on some of the most prominent noblemen's estates.
They did so in complete defiance of military law, of course. They did not even have the excuse, as so many army regiments did, of being largely composed of soldiers recruited by the CoCs. Unlike the army, there was not much in the way of direct CoC influence in the USE's air force.
What there was instead, however, was a much higher degree of direct American participation. Half the air force's pilots were still up-timers from a small town-and they were furious about Henry Dreeson's murder. They'd known that kindly old man all their lives.
So, their commanders looked the other way, while "training flights" used up a preposterous quantity of munitions.
That was enough to produce a stalemate, for a week. And a week was all that Gretchen Richter and Gunther Achterhof and Spartacus needed to bring in reinforcements.
CoC columns started pouring into Mecklenburg from everywhere. By then, two weeks into Operation Krystalnacht-which actually lasted more than a month, not a single night, despite the code name-the CoCs were finished with their task in most of the provinces.
It all came to a head in what became known as the Battle of Gustrow. Seven CoC columns converged-more or less; it was a rather ragged affair-on the town and clashed in a field just to the south of it with approximately eighteen hundred armed retainers led by dozens of noblemen.
Numerically, the forces were pretty evenly matched. But it wasn't much of a contest. With their military-issue flintlock muskets, the CoC forces were far better armed than the semi-feudal retainers. They even had three six-pound cannons, whose provenance remained mysterious.
They also had radios, and were provided with constant information on the movements of their opponents by the planes flying reconnaissance overhead. (Although the aircraft weren't dropping bombs any longer. The air force's commander Jesse Wood had finally been pressured enough by Torstensson to order a stop to that.)
Within two hours, it was a rout, and the rout turned into a slaughter. Any CoC member who'd been captured by the Mecklenburg aristocracy in the early stages of the fighting had been murdered, often quite sadistically. So the CoC fighters were in no forgiving mood, now that the tables were turned. They wouldn't be taking any prisoners either. The only reason that several hundred of the enemy survived was because the battle only started in the afternoon. So, they escaped come nightfall.
As word of Gustrow spread, a peasant rebellion erupted across much of the province. The now-weakened aristocracy found themselves under siege. Their schlosses and estates burned; they and their own families massacred, if they were reckless enough to stay and try to put up a defense.
Torstensson might have finally felt compelled to intervene with the army, then. Try to, at least. But Gretchen had foreseen the danger and had already arrived in Wismar to take charge of the CoC forces in the province. Because Achterhof had been shrewd enough to keep her from indulging in pointless expeditions earlier, the CoC's most famous national leader was available when she was really needed.
The CoC columns now placed themselves at the head of the peasant rebellion. Informally, if not formally. The peasants were willing enough. They had no great familiarity with the CoCs themselves. But by now, Gretchen Richter was famous across most of Europe.
Gretchen made no attempt to actually lead the struggle in military terms. She was not a soldier. She was a political organizer, with the experience of the Amsterdam siege to guide her.
The key thing she brought was a new slogan.
Long Live the Duke!
It was well-known that Gustav Adolf, the duke of the province along with his greater titles, had clashed frequently with the p
igheaded Mecklenburg nobility.
So, Long Live the Duke it was. Preposterous, that slogan might be, looked at from one angle-certainly if you knew Gretchen Richter's attitudes towards dukes in general. But it was under that slogan that the nobility of Mecklenburg was for all intents and purposes expropriated and destroyed as a class. Most of its members survived, to be sure. But they would henceforth be living as refugees in the mansions and castles of their relatives elsewhere. Mecklenburg had become as plebeian-dominated a province as the SoTF or Magdeburg, and every bit as much of a stronghold for the CoCs and the Fourth of July Party.
Emperor Gustav Adolf would be flooded with petitions in the time that followed, demanding that he do something about the horrid state of affairs in Mecklenburg.
But…
The Mecklenburg nobility really had been a monumental nuisance for him. Given their preferences, which they continued to express with extraordinary tenacity at meetings of the Estates even after Gustav Adolf became duke, the nobles of Mecklenburg would have turned the duchy into a mini-Poland with its duke having no more financial or military authority than Wladyslaw IV. So he always found reasons to delay doing anything about those petitions. Figuring that, as the years went by, the disgruntled older Mecklenburg noblemen would start dying off and their younger kin start blending in elsewhere.
There was very heavy fighting in the Province of the Main, too, although it never assumed the scale of the civil-war-in-all-but-name that it did in Mecklenburg. The critical difference was that the nobility and the town elites stayed out of it, at least as organized groups.
The Rhineland had been the hotbed of anti-Semitism in the Germanies going back well into the Middle Ages. Anti-Semitism was common everywhere, but it was among the urban artisan classes that it developed the most fervor and violence, and no part of the Germanies was as urbanized as the Rhineland.