1635: The Eastern Front (24 page)

Then, stared at his side. The uniform was soaked with blood and there seemed to be more coming. Nothing seemed to be spurting, though, so maybe he'd gotten lucky and no artery had been cut.

"Lucky," of course, only by certain values of luck. Jeff was getting to his feet now, shaking his head as if he was a little confused. He'd lost his helmet in the fall.

"This really sucks," said Eric. He collapsed to the ground.

By the time Lukasz got his senses back, his horse—being no hussar himself, and thus no damn fool—had turned around and was galloping toward the rear. A full-bore gallop, too. A dumb beast he might be, but he wasn't dumb enough to stay in this area any longer than he had to.

In all likelihood, if Opalinski hadn't had the by-now almost instinctive horsemanship of a hussar, he'd have been spilled on the ground. As it was, he needed to use both hands to stay in the saddle. That was easy enough, though, since he'd lost his lance somewhere along the way.

He couldn't remember exactly what had happened. Had he killed that big infantry officer? Or perhaps the little big-eared one who'd come racing up waving his sword?

He simply couldn't remember. He hoped he'd killed at least one of them. Not because he had any personal animus against either of those officers but simply because it was already obvious that this battle was turning into a disaster and he liked to think he'd accomplished
something
in the process.

He looked around, but he simply couldn't tell how many of his hussars had survived. They were too mingled with the Saxon cavalrymen and all of them were racing off. This was not a retreat, this was a pure and simple rout.

Lukasz felt bitterly shamed. This was the first time in his life either he or any hussars he'd fought alongside had been routed in a battle. The worst of it was that he couldn't understand how it had happened.

Opalinski couldn't understand it because he hadn't seen it. He'd been so preoccupied with his personal duel with the two USE officers that he hadn't noticed the effect of the volleys fired by the infantry. Coming on top of the damage already inflicted by the volley guns, that had been enough to bring the charge to a complete halt.

At which point the APCs had arrived. Five of the monstrous machines, charging in from the side and raking the confused cavalrymen with rifle fire from the gunports along the sides of the vehicles. All the while, making the most hideous piercing shrieks from some sort of horns.

The horses had panicked then, and it had all been over.

"That's it," said Torstensson. "Send in Dodo and George's divisions. Nothing fancy. Just straight ahead, firing volleys as they go."

Two of his aides raced off. Colonel Schönbeck and three others remained at his side. After a moment, Schönbeck said: "You were right, General. Stearns did quite well."

Torstensson glanced at the Third Division. They were starting to move forward again. He could see that Stearns—or his staff, more likely—had already organized measures to take care of the wounded.

Stearns
had
done well. To all intents and purposes, in fact, his division had won the battle on its own. Allowing, of course, for the critical assistance of the flying artillery and the APCs. Still, he'd kept his men solid, confident, and fully in the fight from beginning to end—and now had them back in action.

"This could get interesting," he said softly.

"Excuse me, sir?"

"Never mind, Colonel Schönbeck." Torstensson saw no point in explaining to a capable but stolid military aide that he really hoped the new prime minister of the USE wouldn't allow himself to be rushed into doing anything rash. Or things could get . . . interesting.

Besides, there were other matters to attend to. He glanced back to make sure the observation balloon was still in place. As an observation balloon, the device had been only minimally useful in this battle. But as a radio platform, it would now prove most useful indeed.

"Colonel Schönbeck—" Torstensson broke off and turned to a different aide. "Major Ziegler, rather. See to it that our cavalry units get word immediately that the Saxon army has been defeated. John George will try to escape now, and I want him intercepted before he can reach the Polish border."

Ziegler was a young man, attuned to the new technological possibilities. He'd use the radios immediately where Schönbeck would probably waste time sending out couriers first.

"Sound the retreat," von Arnim said grimly. "We'll withdraw into Leipzig."

Colonel Carl Bose looked skeptical. "We may not be able to make it, General. They'll be pushing the pursuit hard, from the looks of things."

Von Arnim shook his head. "No, they won't, once they're sure we're retiring from the field. I am quite certain that Torstensson has orders to take Dresden as fast as possible. He won't waste time with us"—
now that he's beaten us out of his way,
but von Arnim left that unspoken—"when he has a chance to catch the elector."

Von Arnim tightened his lips. His military career might be over, as of today. There was no chance he could move his troops into Poland, which was a pity since he was sure King Wladyslaw would hire him. But Torstensson would immediately pursue if the Saxon army—what was left of it—made any move in that direction. If need be, he'd postpone taking Dresden.

The French wouldn't hire him, not given his reputation as a staunch Lutheran. Richelieu wouldn't care himself, but with the political situation as tense as it was in France he couldn't afford to give Monsieur Gaston any more political ammunition. The Bavarians wouldn't even consider the possibility. Not with Duke Maximilian's Catholic fanaticism at the fever pitch it was today.

That left the Austrians. Which . . . might actually be possible. Von Arnim felt his spirits lifting a bit. Even under Ferdinand II, the Austrians had been willing to employ Protestant soldiers. Now with his son on the throne—Ferdinand III had a reputation for being far more tolerant—and with the tensions with Bohemia . . .

A detail intruded.

"Oh, yes." He had promised the man, after all. "Colonel Bose, see to it that a courier gets off to Dresden immediately. Warn the elector that we've lost the battle and Torstensson will be moving on Dresden. And . . ."

He studied the distant enemy observation balloon. He wasn't sure of this, but . . .

"Also warn the elector that Torstensson has probably got cavalry units watching the Polish border. I'd advise the elector to seek exile in Bavaria instead."

He went back to contemplating more important things. There did, of course, remain the awkwardness that he'd once resigned from Austrian service in something of a high dudgeon and not so long ago at that. Still . . .

Chapter 19

Eric Krenz never remembered much of what happened after he collapsed from his wound until he woke up in an army hospital tent. All that remained were inchoate images of being moved on a litter and people staring down at him. The clearest of those images was that of a harried surgeon impatiently saying: "This one'll live if he doesn't bleed out. Put him over there."

He had no idea where "over there" was, but some part of his brain understood that he'd just gotten a reprieve from a death sentence. It was probably that same part of his brain which enabled his eyes to observe a line of wounded men lying in a different part of the surgeon's tent who quite obviously had not met the surgeon's criteria for survival. The only attention being paid to them was by a single orderly, and all he was doing was giving them water. Or, more often, giving them cups of a brownish liquid that Eric couldn't identify but which that more-or-less sentient part of his brain figured was probably laudanum. The mixture of opium and liquor had been around for at least a century. Its only real medical use was to comfort the afflicted and serve as a crude anesthetic during surgery.

But these men, clearly enough, weren't going to be operated on. They were just going to die.

Some time later, Eric was given some of the liquid himself. In his case, as an anesthetic. The surgeon was replacing the jury-rigged bandages the medics had used with stitches.

The process hurt. A lot. As far as Krenz was concerned, if that bad-tasting liquor was laudanum, it had a grossly inflated reputation.

When Eric woke up, he was no longer in the surgeon's tent. He was still in a tent, but this one was larger and much cleaner. More precisely, since the surgeons in the USE army did use sterilization and kept their tents washed with antiseptic, this tent had a lot less blood and gore. The cots in a double line on either side of a central aisle were filled with soldiers who, though most of them were heavily bandaged, seemed in far better condition than the ones Krenz had seen in the surgeon's care.

Apparently, then, he'd survive. Eric was quite cheered by the thought. He enjoyed life.

He didn't even lose much of his cheer when Jeff Higgins came to visit and gave him the bad news.

"It's not a magic wound, buddy. Sorry. You'll be out for a while, but they'll have you back in the ranks sooner'n you probably want."

Eric would have shrugged, but he'd already learned that any movement of his upper body hurt. So he grimaced in such a way as to express the same sentiment.

"Just as well. Don't listen to the silly fools, Captain Higgins. Just about any so-called ‘magic wound' is going to be awful. You've almost always got to lose some body part you really don't want to lose. Besides—"

He swelled out his chest and immediately regretted it. "Ow! Besides, the girls like the medals, sure, but they like them a lot better if they're attached to a fellow who looks like a fellow instead of a side of beef in a butcher shop."

A dark thought came to him. He gave Higgins a beady-eyed look. "You did put me in for a medal, didn't you? I will remind you that I
did
save your life. All right, I tried to save your life. Probably didn't have much effect on the outcome, but I think intent should count for something."

Jeff grinned. "As it happens, I didn't put you up for a decoration—because I didn't need to. Colonel Straley himself saw your valiant charge and put in for it. He also told me to tell you that only a cretin thinks you can take down a mounted hussar with a sword while you're on the ground, and what the hell happened to your pistol?"

Krenz looked embarrassed for a moment. "I sold the damn thing. It's too heavy to carry around all the time."

Jeff shook his head. "You're lucky it's only the good who die young, Eric." He looked around the inside of the tent. "It's not as bad as the surgeon's tent—you want to talk about a place that'll give you nightmares!—but it still ain't the Ritz. However, you won't be here long."

Krenz got an apprehensive look on his face. "They're not putting me back in the line, are they?
Already?
I just got here! And I must have lost at least ten gallons of blood."

"Nice trick that'd be. Seeing as how there are only five quarts of blood in a man's body to begin with. Probably only four, in a skinny shrimp like you. Well, no, five. Your ears alone must take a whole quart."

Jeff made a little patting motion. "Calm down. That wound you got looks pretty ghastly but it's actually not that serious. The lance blade sliced open your side as messily as you could ask for but didn't penetrate the peritoneum or the abdominal cavity. Once it heals you'll be as good as new—except you'll have a dandy scar to brag about to your grandchildren some decades down the road and girls in the here and now who have the same size brains."

Krenz looked around the tent. "Then why aren't I staying?"

"We'll be marching into Dresden by the day after tomorrow. Torstensson's already announced that all of our wounded are to be billeted in the city as soon as possible."

Eric's smile was a thing to behold. "I'll be in a tavern soon! Probably one filled with good-natured barmaids. With, as you say, the mental acuity of my far-in-the-future tiny little grandchildren."

Jeff grunted. "More likely, you'll be in a stable. With horses a lot smarter and a whole lot more suspicious."

Dresden

Studying the mob packed into the open area south of Dresden's
Residenzschloss,
the seat of the Saxon electors, Noelle Stull thought John George was smart to have gotten out of the city as quickly as he did. According to the reports she and Eddie Junker had gotten, the elector had left the night before just about the same time Noelle and her party had arrived in Dresden. He'd left with all of his family members who'd still been in the city. Apparently, that only consisted of his wife, Magdalene Sibylle, and their youngest son, Moritz. All three of the older boys—Johann Georg, August and Christian—had been with von Arnim's army which had been defeated in the recent battle of Zwenkau. No one in Dresden seemed to know whether or not they had survived the debacle.

If they had, Noelle thought they'd be wise to stay out of the city as well. Dresdeners didn't seem to be as furious with the elector as the residents of Saxony's rural districts, from what she could tell. But they were obviously angry enough to form an impromptu lynch mob should the occasion arise.

That left the elector's three surviving daughters: Sophia Eleanora, Maria Elizabeth, and the mother's namesake, the eighteen-year-old Magdalene Sibylle. None of them were anywhere near Saxony, however. The two older girls had married noblemen living in the western parts of the Germanies and now resided there. The youngest had just married the Danish crown prince Christian.

She whistled softly. Eddie cocked an eye at her. "What?"

"I was just thinking what a royal mess of a succession crisis we're likely to have, assuming Gustav Adolf unseats John George entirely."

Eddie frowned. "Why? He'd disqualify all the sons from the succession too."

"Sure. But that still leaves the three daughters—each and every one of whom, I remind you, is married to a loyal subject of the emperor. Assuming we can refer to Prince Christian as a ‘loyal subject,' which may be questionable but simply raises other problems."

Eddie thought about it. "Bigger problems, actually. Gustav Adolf can shrug off Hesse-Darmstadt and Holstein-Gottorp's claims easily enough. But if there's no one else in line to inherit Saxony, you can bet that King Christian of Denmark will insist the children of his daughter-in-law should. And Gustav Adolf can't ignore him so readily."