The Saxon Uprising-ARC

Chapter 36


Königstein fortress, in southern Saxony

The four guards at the main gate to the fortress didn’t think much when they saw the wagon approaching, except to wonder at the fortitude of the drivers. Night was falling and it was starting to snow. It was cold, too, but that was a given in February.

“F*cking Hans,” muttered one of the guards. “He has got to be the greediest provisioner in Saxony.”

“In Königstein, anyway,” agreed one of his mates. He shifted the musket strapped over his shoulder. “Of course, he’s the only military provisioner in the town.”

“All the less excuse he has,” said a third guard. He was the corporal in charge of the little detachment. “He’s got no competition. So why is he forcing poor Heinrich out in this miserable weather?”

The fourth guard was more philosophically inclined. “It’s February and we’re in Saxon Switzerland. When is the weather not going to be miserable? At least this way, coming this late, Heinrich and his son can spent the night here. Better than that hovel they live in down in the valley.”

The cart had come nearer. The first guard frowned. “That’s not Heinrich’s son with him. It’s some fellow I don’t know.”

He wasn’t alarmed. There could be any number of reasons the teamster was being assisted today by someone other than his son.

“That’s a new cart too,” said the second soldier. “Big damn thing. What’s he hauling in it, do you think?”

“Turnips, what else?”

As it turned out, Heinrich’s big new wagon was full of soldiers. Soldiers who were better armed than the four guards and a lot more alert.

The teamster’s new assistant turned out to be a captain in the fabled Hangman Regiment of the Third Division. Who would have guessed?

There was no violence. The guards were quick to see reason. Besides, they didn’t much care anyway. They worked for General von Arnim, who hadn’t moved once out of Leipzig since all the trouble started. What clearer signal could one ask for?

“We’re not part of this,” insisted the corporal, as he handed over his musket.

“Not any longer, for sure,” agreed the Hangman captain cheerfully. “Now, fellows, we’d appreciate it if you’d open the gate. And show us to the mess hall. Most of your mates will be gathered for supper now.”

They had good intelligence too.

Once the gate was opened, hundreds of soldiers materialized out of the woods below the fortress, like ghosts. They were wearing peculiar white camouflage outfits. Quite superb, really, for Saxony in winter. Who could have known they were there?

The capture of most of the garrison in the mess hall went smoothly and easily. Those soldiers were even less inclined to put up a fight than the guards, since most of them were completely unarmed.

Who brings weapons to eat supper in the mess hall? Only someone expecting a surprise attack, and who would expect that?

The garrison’s commander was captured in his own rooms, where he was having a private supper with the servant who doubled as his concubine.

She screeched with outrage. He put up no fight at all.

The captain in charge of the armory was a jackass and proved it once again. He did put up a fight—such as it was; a pistol against four rifled muskets, and he fumbled the wheel-lock mechanism to boot—and got shot to pieces for his efforts.

Good riddance, was the general attitude. A man like that could get you killed.

And for what? Von Arnim was late with the pay again. To make things worse, that probably wasn’t even his fault. The Swedish chancellor was turning out to be every bit as unreliable a paymaster as the late and unlamented Elector of Saxony.

“You want a different job?” Heinrich asked the corporal who’d been at the gate. The teamster was in a good mood now that the danger had passed with no harm done to himself or his equipment. He’d quite forgiven the soldiers of the Hangman Regiment for high-jacking his wagon and locking his son in a closet. “I think business is going to pick up. The Hangman pays with beckies. And people I know in Tetschen say they never stiff you either.”

It was worth thinking about. The soldier’s trade had some major drawbacks. It wasn’t as dangerous as handling livestock, if you could keep from getting sick. But the erratic pay could get nerve-wracking. Besides, the corporal was getting to an age where he should start thinking about getting married. Not too many women were willing to marry a soldier, unless he was an officer, and the ones who were…

Tetschen, near the border between Saxony and Bohemia

“I wasn’t expecting you here this soon, sir.” said David Bartley.

Mike Stearns looked around the airfield. A platoon of soldiers from the Hangman was standing at attention nearby. An honor guard to escort him to the regiment’s headquarters, obviously. Next to them stood a group of worried-looking civilians.

Very worried, apparently. They were up early. The sun was just above the horizon. Colonel Wood and Mike had taken off from the airfield at České Budějovice at the crack of dawn, as soon as there was enough light to fly.

“Since Jesse had come by for a visit, I figured I might as well fly up here ahead of the division.” Mike turned back to look up at Colonel Wood, who hadn’t gotten out of the cockpit of the Gustav. “You coming in?” He had to raise his voice to be heard over the engine, which the colonel hadn’t shut off.

Jesse shook his head. “No!” he shouted back. “I don’t know how long this clear weather will last!”

Mike waved a farewell and moved away from the plane, which began taxiing back onto the runway.

“Who’re the civilians?” he asked.

“Merchants and tradesmen. They’re fretting on account of the Hangman left town. Most of the regiment, anyway. They’re worried what’ll happen to business.”

“For a while, it’ll drop. No way around that. Afterwards, who knows?” Mike gave the quartermaster officer a grin. “We may all be dead. Well, except you and the detachment I leave behind.”

Bartley looked unhappy. “About that, sir…”

“No, David. N. O. Under no conditions, under no circumstances, am I taking you with me.” He clapped a friendly hand on the young man’s slender shoulder. “You’re ten times more valuable here than you’d be anywhere else. Unless your progress reports are a pack of lies, anyway.”

“Uh, no, sir. They’re not. But—”

“Which letter in ‘n-o’ is giving you the most trouble, Captain? You’re the best quartermaster in the army, hands down. And I’m about to launch a campaign in the middle of winter against one of the most capable and experienced generals in the world. One of the few things I’ve got on my side is that I’m damn sure I’m going to be better supplied and provisioned than Banér—so long as you’re handling the logistics. That means you stay here until we take Dresden. Assuming we get that far, of course.”

Again, he gave Bartley that somewhat savage grin. “But I suppose I don’t need to worry that my army will freeze to death before we get to Dresden, do I?”

David looked glum. “No, sir, you don’t. You won’t starve, either.” He nodded toward the town. “I’ve got enough winter outfits in the warehouses for the whole division, with a couple thousand suits to spare and at least that many extra pairs of boots. There are only enough skis and snowshoes for a couple of battalions, though.”

“That’ll be enough. I’d just be using them as scouts in really bad weather.”

“And enough food and water to keep you going for a month.”

“Wagons? Sleighs?”

“Plenty of both.” Bartley smiled. “The most worried-looking of those gents over there is the guy who made them. He just had the biggest boom of his life.”

“Well, then, I’d better go talk to them. A happy and secure base is always a big asset.”

Mike did a much better job of cheering up the merchants and tradesmen than David could have done. Bartley was handicapped by having the mind of a financier and quartermaster. Precise numbers, predictable outcomes, sure bets—those were his stock in trade. Watching one of the world’s best politicians at work was simultaneously dazzling and disturbing.

When it was over, David still couldn’t figure out how many lies Mike had told them. If he’d told them any at all. Politicians seemed to operate in an alternate universe where concepts like cause and effect, action and result, premise and conclusion, had at least eleven more dimensions than they did in the workaday world inhabited by normal human beings.

“That’s what they mean by ‘campaign promises,’ isn’t it? Uh, sir.”

“Yup.” The grin came back. “Think of it as a promise that you’ll campaign to make it happen. Now, show me these winter outfits. I’m dying to see the things, after hearing the reports.”

David was awfully proud of them, in point of fact. He was something of a military history buff. He’d designed the outfits himself—well, allowing for a whole lot of input from actual tailors—based on what he remembered of the telogreika, the padded winter jacket that the Soviet army had used in World War II. That had been one of the great advantages the Russians had had over the Nazis.

Most of the outfits were gray, but he’d had about two thousand done in white for camouflage. The Hangman Regiment had taken almost half of them for their assault on the fortress at Königstein.

The jackets all came with matching padded trousers, and there were good winter boots and plenty of wool socks. The Third Division would be one of the few—maybe the only—large military unit in this day and age that would fight a winter campaign while properly equipped for the task.

What impressed Mike the most, though, was something David hadn’t even mentioned in his reports.

“You made sleighs for the volley guns?”

Bartley shook his head. “It’s better than that, actually. Uh, sir. These are more like detachable skis that you can add onto the regular gun carriages if you need to operate on snowfields. Here, I’ll show you how they work.”

Mike had half-forgotten than David Bartley had gotten started as a tycoon by helping to design down-time sewing machines based on up-time models. The young man was a good artificer as well as a whiz at finance.

“The town’s blacksmiths figured out most of it,” David admitted. “But it was my idea to start with.”

The design was downright cunning. The ski attachments didn’t weigh all that much and could be fixed to the carriages ahead of time. Once the rig was in place, it wouldn’t significantly impede the teams of horses which pulled the volley guns. But with a simple cranking mechanism, the skis could be lowered in less than two minutes—at which point the carriages became sleighs, for all practical purposes.

Mike scratched his jaw. “I wonder if anyone’s ever tried to tried to use cannons in winter using sleighs instead of regular carriages?”

“I know of at least one instance when it was done,” said David. “During the revolutionary war, Henry Knox hauled a bunch of cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston in the middle of winter using sleighs. I don’t think they kept them on the sleighs while they were firing them, though. They wouldn’t really need to, since they were using them against fixed British positions, not on a battlefield.”

“Regular field pieces might be too heavy to fire on a sleigh. Shouldn’t be a problem with volley guns, though.” Mike gave Bartley a smile. “We’ll find out, won’t we? In the meantime, see if you can mount a field piece on something like this.”

That’d keep the blacksmiths happy, at least.

Three days later, accompanied by the same platoon that had been waiting for him at the airfield, Mike left for the fortress at Königstein. He’d had to wait those three days because of a snowstorm that had passed through Brandenburg and Saxony and the southern fringes of which had touched northern Bohemia.

He traveled by horse-drawn sleigh. Mike’s horsemanship was perfectly good enough to have enabled him to ride a horse even in such heavy snow, but David had managed to cobble together the design for a carriage suitable for a light artillery piece and the general wanted to test it.

Not himself, of course. He didn’t weigh nearly enough to substitute for an artillery piece. Instead he rode on an accompanying sleigh that would serve an artillery company as the winter equivalent of a battery wagon.

Half of the experiment—the half that involved him directly—proved to be successful. Unfortunately, Bartley’s artillery sleigh turned out to suffer from some rather serious design flaws. The damn thing either wouldn’t stay on the tracks; the skis would dig in too deeply; or, finally, one of the skis broke altogether.

As Mike had pretty much expected, things were trickier than they looked. Murphy was alive and well, obviously.

He wasn’t disheartened, though. He hadn’t really thought the experiment would work to begin with. Episodes from American history notwithstanding, he’d been skeptical that a hastily-assembled sleigh would be up to hauling such a heavy load in such heavy snow through a mountain range. Even given the advantage of traveling alongside a river, there were just too many ways for things to go wrong.

It would be nice, certainly, to be able to field light artillery pieces in a winter battle. But what Mike was really counting on was all the rest of his equipment—starting with the fact that his soldiers wouldn’t be freezing their butts off the moment they broke camp. Once Banér pulled his troops out of their siege lines, on the other hand, they’d get into sorry shape very quickly, as cold as this winter was turning out to be.

One of the major drawbacks to the seventeenth century’s libertarian method of paying troops was that everybody at every link in the money chain had an incentive to chisel. That was true even of the troops themselves, who were far more likely to spend their pay on wine, women and what passed for song in siege lines than they were to keep their gear up to snuff. Their officers certainly weren’t going to make up the difference, with a few rare exceptions. Any supplies they bought their men usually had to come out of their own pockets.

That was not the least of the reasons that Mike, in his days as prime minister, had insisted that the USE’s soldiers be paid from the national coffers directly. The money did not pass through a chain of officers except those assigned to payroll duty, who could be easily monitored. What was just as important, the army’s supplies all the way down to socks and boots were “government issue.” The USE army’s soldiers were GIs, not independent military sub-contractors.

It wasn’t impossible to chisel, of course. A black market in government-issued supplies and weapons had accompanied every army in history, and Mike didn’t doubt for a moment that it accompanied his own. Still, almost every soldier who marched out into the Saxon plain a week or two from now to meet Sweden’s Finest would have socks and good boots on his feet and be wearing an outfit designed to enable him to march, maneuver and fight in the cold and the snow and the ice. Which was a lot more than Banér’s mercenaries would have at their disposal.

Mike’s biggest worry was actually that Banér would choose to hunker down in his siege lines and not come out to meet him in the open field. The Swedish general hadn’t bothered to build lines of contravallation to guard his siegeworks—the lines of circumvallation, to use the technical term—from the possibility of being attacked by an army in the field. He hadn’t expected to find any such field army to face in the first place. Still, it wouldn’t be that hard to adapt siege lines for the purpose, especially in winter.

But Mike didn’t think that was likely. In the end, this was more of a political than a military contest. It was now obvious that Axel Oxenstierna had bitten off more than he could chew. Even before Princess Kristina showed up in Magdeburg, the Swedish chancellor had been losing the all-important so-called “war of public opinion.” His opponents’ shrewd tactics of avoiding open clashes and positioning themselves as the bulwarks of stability and order had put him on the defensive. (Mike was quite sure that was largely Becky’s doing, although she’d said nothing about it in her radio messages.)

Now that Kristina had placed the prestige of the dynasty on the side of Oxenstierna’s opponents, he would be thrown completely off balance. The ability of Dresden to defy him had been the great wound in his side from the beginning, and Kristina had now torn the wound wide open. The chancellor had no choice any longer. He had to take Dresden—and quickly, so he could marshal his armies to march on Magdeburg itself. He had no options left except naked force and violence. And if that lost him still more public support, so be it. He could rule the Germanies by dictatorship, if need be.

Or so he thought, anyway. Mike had his doubts. Five years ago, yes. Oxenstierna could probably have succeeded in such a project. Today? Mike thought it was not likely at all. Not in the long run, for sure.

He didn’t intend to let things get that far, though. Kristina’s action had done one other thing—it had given Mike the fig leaf he needed to bring his army back into the USE. Even technically, it would now be difficult to charge him with leading a mutiny. But that really didn’t matter because a civil war was never settled by lawyers. By very definition, a civil war was a state of affairs in which the rule of law had collapsed. What remained was, on one side, the field of arms; and on the other, the battle for the populace’s support.

Under those conditions, Mike didn’t think Banér could stay in his siege lines once Mike entered the Saxon plain and challenged him openly. He was almost certain that Oxenstierna would order him to fight in the field.

Where he might very well win, of course. On paper, at least, his army was larger than Mike’s—fifteen thousand to the Third Division’s nine thousand. But Mike was certain that Banér’s forces had suffered a lot of attrition by now. Mercenary armies always did, especially in winter. That was disease, mostly, although desertion was always a big factor also.

The Third Division, on the other hand, hadn’t suffered at all. Mike had made sure their quarters were good, with good sanitation, and he’d kept his men well-fed and well-supplied. They still lost soldiers, of course, but they replaced them with new recruits. In fact, the division was a little over-strength. His paymasters told him there were now almost ten thousand men on the active rolls. Some of those added men were specialists, of course; repairmen or supply troops of one kind or another. Part of the so-called tail rather than the teeth of an army. But at least a third of them were in combat units, especially heavy weapons units.

So, Mike figured the armies were relatively even, in purely numerical terms. In the end, it would come down to leadership. Banér was one of the Swedish army’s handful of top generals—and going by the record, the Swedish army could lay claim to being the best army in Europe over the past half decade. Mike, on the other hand, was still largely—not quite—a neophyte general. He didn’t begin to have Banér’s experience and proven skill on the battlefield.

But he didn’t intend to match that skill and experience, in the first place. The one lesson Mike had learned by now was that “generalship” was a vacant abstraction. There was no such thing, really, in the sense that most people meant by the term—a definable and distinctive skill set, such as one might learn in school to become a doctor or an accountant or an architect.

There were many specific skills involved in leading an army, of course. And experience mattered, as it did in any line of work. But what there really was, at the heart of the matter, was simply leadership. And leadership was never defined abstractly. A man did not “lead.” No, he led specific people with specific goals and motives to accomplish specific tasks.

In this instance, he would be leading an army of citizen soldiers intent on defending their nation’s liberties and freedoms from the depredations of a mercenary army paid for by a foreign occupier. So long as Mike committed no outright blunders, he was confident he could triumph in that specific task. Banér would try to match one general against another, where Mike would be matching one army against another.

Morale would decide it, in the end. Mike was sure of that—as long as he didn’t just purely screw up, at any rate. His army’s morale was excellent. He’d made sure it wasn’t sapped by lack of food, disease, and freezing toes, and he never failed to maintain the division’s regularly-published broadsheet that kept his soldiers well-informed and motivated.

That was the other reason Mike had decided to travel by sleigh. He had one of his beloved portable printing presses on board. The devices were more dear to him than anything except his wife and children.

Live by the word, die by the word. The Swedes had already lost that battle. Mike figured the rest was bound to follow.

The Third Division started arriving in Tetschen two days after Mike left. It took the division a day and half to pass through the town. Not from the marching, but from the time it took to get every man outfitted with winter clothing that fit him properly.

Properly enough, anyway. Soldiers don’t expect sartorial perfection and David had made sure to err on the side of getting boots and outfits that were too big rather than too small. A man could wear two pair of socks, if need be, and there were a number of ways to pad an oversize winter outfit with jury-rigged insulating material. A lot of soldiers specifically asked for oversized clothing, in fact.

By the time it was all over and the division was on its way up the road that followed the Elbe toward Königstein and Saxony, David Bartley was the most popular officer in the division. Hands down.

He was especially popular with the flying artillery units. Those men had become deeply attached to their volley guns, in the battles they’d fought starting with their great victory over the French cavalry at Ahrensbök. Now that winter was here and they knew they’d be fighting in the snow, they’d been glumly certain they’d have to leave their volley guns behind and suffer the indignities of becoming wretched infantrymen.

No longer. Not with the new auxiliary ski attachments, which they were already calling Bartley rigs.

David was tickled pink, truth be told. It almost made up for being left behind with just two companies of supply troops.

On the down side, he was the only significant officer left in Tetschen—and now, quite famous to boot. The campaign waged by the town’s matrons kicked into high gear. If there was a single eligible daughter or niece to be found anywhere in the region who was not introduced to the newly-promoted Major Bartley, she had to be deaf, dumb and blind.

Literally deaf, dumb and blind. Merely being hard of hearing, tongue-tied and myopic was no disqualification at all, from what David could tell.