by Eric Flint
Unfortunately, while any gunmaker and most apothecaries knew how to make gunpowder—so did lots of other people, for that matter—this Teuber jackass was the only one in the city whose shop was set up to make it in quantity.
Thankfully, he was not making the grenades themselves. That work was being handled by a little consortium of two gunmakers and two blacksmiths. The weapons they produced were a bit crude, heavier than Jozef would have preferred, and he wasn’t entirely happy with the fuses. But they’d work well enough and he hadn’t expected anything better under the circumstances. Making grenades was normally specialized work.
Eric Krenz and Friedrich Nagel weren’t any happier with the sled-maker.
“More,” said Eric.
“Many more,” qualified Friedrich.
The sled-maker’s way of expressing disbelief was spitting. The more spittle, the greater the skepticism, as nearly as Krenz could figure.
“Why don’t you just have me make you a few big sleds?” he demanded crossly. “All these little ones…”
He threw up his hands. “Child’s toys! You are expecting to find hordes of children somewhere?”
Eric set his teeth. “Herr Meissner, as I told you before—”
“Twice, already,” Nagel interjected.
“Yes, twice already. We want these sleds to carry grenades. We need to be able to move quickly and we don’t know in which direction we will need to go or how many of us will be together at any one time. It will be snowing, as I already mentioned.”
“Twice,” said Nagel.
“Yes, twice. So perhaps you can see why a few big sleds will not—”
The most irritating part of it was that Meissner had not been a soldier and had spent some time making that clear. So why was he arguing the point? Based on what self-professed lack of expertise?
Gretchen Richter came into the shop. “I was told there is a problem,” she said, as soon as she came in. “What is it?”
Eric sketched the problem. Very briefly. We want a lot of small sleds not a few big ones and this assho—Herr Meissner here—seems unhappy with the order.
Gretchen pointed to Krenz with a thumb. “Do as he says, Herr Meissner. Please do exactly as he says. Or many little Herr Meissners will replace one big one.”
And off she went. Alexander the Great had nothing on Gretchen Richter when it came to cutting Gordian knots.
“I don’t know,” said Minnie dubiously. She walked around to the other side of the roller that the wagonmaker had designed. It was rather ingenious, admittedly. Three barrels in a line on one axle with two others following on a second axle, offset in order to flatten the ridges that would be produced between the first three barrels. The whole thing was held together by a very sturdy frame—which even came with platforms on which more weight could be placed in the form of bags full of rocks.
Yes, very ingenious, assuming it didn’t fall apart under the strain. But it probably wouldn’t. Herr Kienzle seemed to know what he was doing. The problem that remained was…
Denise had spotted it too. “That’s going to take a big team of horses to pull around. Oxen would be better.”
Kienzle inclined his head. It was the sort of nod an august and dignified guildsman would bestow upon two ignorant, prattling, but well-meaning young girls.
“Oh, yes. No question about it. The draft animals will help compress the snow also, of course.”
Denise was looking exasperated. Minnie figured she better speak up quickly. The capabilities of Denise Beasley when it came to the aggravate-the-hell-out-of-pompous-middle-aged-men department were extraordinary. One might even say, astronomical.
“The problem, Herr Kienzle, is that finding such draft animals—on any notice, much less short notice—is likely to be difficult.”
“We’re in a city under siege,” Denise growled, “you—”
“Difficult, as I said,” Minnie rode over her.
The wagonmaker shrugged. “Yes, no doubt. You’ll just have to do your best. My job is done.”
Minnie sighed. There’d be no way to hold back Denise now.
By mid-afternoon, they’d drawn a blank in their negotiations with the city’s stables. Unfortunately, stable-keepers were also middle-aged men and for some peculiar reason Minnie couldn’t figure out, they all seemed to be afflicted with pompous-male-middleageditis. Denise aggravated all of them. By late afternoon, they’d almost given up.
Then they were approached by a couple of young hostlers from the second stable they’d visited. The lads, definitely short of middle-age and not pompous at all, offered to provide the girls with draft horses behind their employer’s back. They said that he was a lazy man who paid little attention to his business and left the details to his employees.
When Denise inquired as to the price, the lads spurned money and offered a more gallant alternative form of payment.
Had Denise been in a good mood, she would have handled the matter casually. She was truly superb in the brush-off-boys-with-delusions-of-grandeur department. Since she wasn’t in a good mood—quite the opposite—she fell back instead to threatening to pistol-whip the dirty rotten bastards if they weren’t out of her sight in five seconds. She was accomplished in that department also.
As was Minnie herself, for that matter. Before Denise had finished the first sentence, Minnie already had her pistol in hand. So did Denise, of course.
At that point, the day began improving. One of the lads raced off but his partner proved surprisingly stout and adaptable.
“Look, it was worth a try,” he said, smiling and raising his hands in a pacific gesture. “No offense meant. If you’d rather pay us with money, so be it. What’s your offer?”
By sundown, they had everything in place. All negotiations had been successfully concluded and all arrangements made. The only hitch was that Minnie had to unruffle Herr Kienzle’s feathers first, which were still ruffled as only Denise could ruffle feathers. She made Denise wait outside the shop until she took care of that problem.
“Okay, I finally got him settled down,” she said when she came out. “He’ll have the roller ready as soon as we tell him the hostlers are on the way.”
Denise scowled. “You did tell him the hostlers were as young as we are, right? We don’t need that fat sorry swell-headed son-of-a-bitch to go all Yesyourmajesty on them when they show up.”
“Yeah, I told him. At this point, I don’t think he cares. Not once he started figuring out what that roller was going to cost him given that you’d made it pretty clear he wasn’t getting the back half of the money on account of the agreement was ‘satisfactorily built’ and we didn’t think it was even though a judge would probably rule in his favor but the only operating judge right now is Gretchen and most of these guildsmen are leery of dealing with her.”
“Gee, wonder why?”
“Gretchen would probably rule in his favor too, you know? We were maybe a little vague about exactly what we needed.”
“Well, maybe. He’s still a fat sorry swell-headed son-of-a-bitch.”
Denise’s skills in the forgive-and-forget department, on the other hand, were minimal. One might even say, microscopic.
Noelle had just finished her report when she heard Denise and Minnie clumping up the steps to the front entrance. She’d been using a quill pen and down-time ink, since she’d seen no reason to hurry her writing and the few up-time pens she still had left were things she was now saving for special purposes. So she had to wait a bit for the ink on the last sheet to finish drying before she stacked it with the rest of the pages.
There were twenty-three pages all told, hand-written. Francisco had asked for a full report; a full report he’d be getting. It would have to be sent by courier, for sure. The cost of sending that long a message by radio didn’t bear thinking about, not even for someone with Nasi’s wealth. The cost was a moot point, in any event. There was no way the CoC people running the radio operation would have allowed that much time to be monopolized for a private t
ransmission.
While she waited for the page to dry, she rose from the writing desk, stretched her arms and began walking about. She’d been sitting nonstop for the last three hours and was feeling stiff.
She heard a screech from outside. Denise’s voice, clearly enough, although no words could be made out. It had just sounded like a screech of fury.
Now alarmed, Noelle raced to the stairwell, stopping only long enough to draw her own pistol out of the drawer of the side table where she kept it.
The screech came again. Noelle hurried down the stairs and threw open the door, pistol in hand and ready to fire.
Not quite. She still had the safety on but this time she’d remembered it was on and was ready to flick it off. There’d be no repeat of…well, any number of embarrassing moments on the firing range. Noelle’s capabilities in the Annie Oakley department were risible. One might even say, the laughing stock of the continent.
But there was nothing. No danger she could see, although she couldn’t see far. It was evening and there was a very heavy overcast.
Minnie was standing right by the entrance, looking up at the sky with a frustrated expression on her face. Denise had moved back into the street and was also staring up at the sky. She had her palm out-stretched.
“What’s the matter?” Noelle asked.
“Look at this shit!” Denise screeched.
“It’s starting to snow,” Minnie said glumly. “Now we’ll have to wait at least another day. Maybe two or three.”
Chapter 45
The Saxon plain, near Dresden
Mike was tempted to order a night attack, but yielded to the advice of his advisers. All of whom were against the idea.
“Even in daylight, fighting will be hard enough, sir,” said Anthony Leebrick. His expression made clear that he’d have liked to add: And it’s a really bad idea to begin with.
“No way to control the troops,” added Colonel Duerr gruffly.
Mike chewed on the problem, trying to sort out how much of the advice he was getting came from his staff’s unhappiness with the whole idea of launching an attack in the middle of a snowstorm. They’d been almost aghast at the notion when he first raised it, although by now they’d reconciled themselves to the inevitable. Their commanding general usually took their advice, but not always—and there was nothing indecisive about him. If, after listening to their objections, he said he was still going to do something, then it was going to be done.
Christopher Long, the third of Mike’s regular trio of staff officers, was marginally less pessimistic than his two fellows. He was usually the more aggressively-inclined of the three. But even Long was dubious about fighting in a storm. He said nothing now, but his expression made it clear that he fully agreed with Leebrick and Duerr on the subject of launching a night attack.
In the end, Mike decided that his own instincts were probably not reliable in this situation and he’d do better to listen to his staff. His eagerness to start fighting was likely to be his emotional reaction to days of tension and anxiety. As a boxer, his biggest weakness had been a tendency to start swinging too quickly, too furiously, more as way of settling his nerves than anything else.
“At first light, then,” he said. “And I mean at first light. We’re not waiting for the sun to come up. We’ll just be waiting long enough for a man to be able to see ten yards ahead of him. Is that understood?”
As soon as he finished, he regretted the statements. That was just his nerves acting up again. He sometimes thought his staff officers were a bit too inclined toward caution, but he had no reservations at all about either their courage or their willingness to obey orders. There was no reason to have piled on that unnecessary verbiage.
Was that a slight smile on Duerr’s face?
Colonel Ulbrecht Duerr was fighting down a grin, as it happened. He’d added his own words of caution to those of Leebrick and Long, because he agreed with them as a pure matter of tactics. Fighting at night in the middle of a snowstorm was just piling on too many uncertainties.
Still, he’d been pleased to see the general’s combative spirit. A commander who wanted to launch an assault even in the dark was a commander who would press through an assault in daylight. And that’s what this mad little scheme of Stearns’ was going to require—pressing on, pressing on, pressing on. Damn the cost, fuck the Swede bastards, just keep shooting and throwing grenades and firing everything you’ve got and keep at them and keep at them and keep at them.
Banér’s army was going to break. Ulbrecht Duerr was as sure of that as he had been of anything in his life, on the eve of a battle. There was a flow to these things, a sort of tide summoned by Mars rather than the sun or the moon.
People, including the division itself, thought of the Third Division as “inexperienced” compared to most other military units. And so they were, by the standards of mercenary soldiers. But Duerr knew those standards, and how hollow they really were. He should, after all, being a mercenary himself. Very few armies of his day fought major pitched battles in the open field. Gustav II Adolf’s great victory at Breitenfeld four years earlier had been the exception, not the rule. It was quite possible for a man to spend his entire life as a soldier—even in the middle of great wars such as the one that had wracked central Europe since 1618—and never participate in a single battle.
War in the seventeenth century was a thing of marches and counter-marches and, most of all, sieges. Sieges big and small. Sieges of cities, sieges of towns. Sometimes, sieges of villages or even hamlets.
A furious assault launched across open fields? At any time, much less February in the middle of a snowstorm?
It just wasn’t done. Too imprudent—and being prudent was in the nature of a mercenary. There was nothing at stake except pay, after all.
But the soldiers in the ranks of the Third Division didn’t think that way, and they had a commander who didn’t think that way either. Stearns’ inexperience was now actually working in his favor, just as it was working in favor of his entire division.
Because they were veterans, by now, even if they still didn’t think of themselves that way. Many of them—more than half, probably—had fought at Ahrensbök. The greatest battle on the continent since Breitenfeld.
Stearns himself hadn’t been on the field that day. But even in the time since he’d taken command of the division, the Third had fought the battles of Zwenkau and Zielona Góra. And while they hadn’t fought at Lake Bledno, that was only because the Poles had withdrawn from the field before they arrived. They would have fought—and not one man in the division doubted for a moment that they would have whipped them, too. Piss on the famous Grand Hetman Stanislaw Koniecpolski. Just another bum to be beaten senseless.
Just as, tomorrow, they were going to piss on the famous Johan Banér and beat his army senseless.
The soldiers of the Third Division were full of confidence. Confidence in themselves, confidence in their weapons and equipment, confidence in their officers; perhaps most of all, confidence in their commander. They’d been in more battles than most soldiers of the day, and they’d won every one of them. They knew everything they needed to know in order to win a battle—and hadn’t been soldiers long enough to learn all of the ways an army could fail and usually did fail.
Colonel Duerr was in a splendid mood, actually. If he survived another day—no way to be sure of that, of course—he’d be looking back on it fondly for the rest of his life. Great victories came rarely to a soldier, even one like him whose career had now spanned three decades.
After night fell, Mike spent the better part of three hours moving among his men, visiting each unit around its campfires. He had nothing particularly intelligent to say, but the soldiers didn’t need a speech, much less a lecture. They just needed to see their commander, see that he knew what they would all be doing come dawn—most of all, see that he was completely confident that they could do it.
Jeff Higgins spent less than two hours at the same task. First, beca
use he only had a regiment’s worth of men to deal with. Secondly, because unlike Mike Stearns he wasn’t comfortable striding around the stage. Any stage.
He didn’t really need to do it anyway. No regiment in the division had higher morale this night than the Hangman. They were ready to go at Banér’s throat. Many of the standard bearers weren’t even planning to carry the regiment’s colors into battle the next day. They’d made jury-rigged substitutes, straw figures supposed to be Banér hanging from a gibbet. They’d carry the gibbets themselves into the fight, with their straw Swedish generals blowing in the wind along with the snow.
Thorsten Engler spent even less time at the task. No more than forty-five minutes. First, because he only had two hundred men under his command instead of a thousand. Secondly, because the morale of flying artillery units was a bit eccentric. The volley gun crews considered themselves an elite force. So, unlike common garden variety soldiers, they needed no artificial stimulants like silly speeches from officers to get them ready for battle. No, no, no. They were the cold-eyed killers, the deadly ones, the men who broke cavalry charges.
They needed nothing, thank you. Beyond a commander who passed through their ranks, from campfire to campfire, quietly checking to make sure no one lacked anything in the way of equipment or supplies.
A commander like Engler, in short. Detached, intellectual, reasoned. They all knew his ambition to become a psychologist after the war. Once the meaning of the term was explained to them, each and every man in the company agreed that he would make a superb psychologist.
And not one of them would consider using his professional services as such. Even by volley gun crew standards, that man was a little scary.
Berlin, capital of Brandenburg province
Colonel Erik Haakansson Hand was also contemplating the use of poison that night. In his case, though, the thought was neither idle nor fanciful. He had a real problem on his hands.