1634: The Baltic War

Chapter 50

"They're trashing the whole place, Mike," Jesse's voice came over the speaker. "There's a good two thousand of them. I think they're starting to pull out now. There's smoke everywhere. They're burning everything they can."

Sighing, Mike lowered his head. "Can you get any sense of the casualties?"

"That's not too bad, from what I can tell. I think most people just ran off, rather than trying to put up a fight."

Mike didn't bother asking about Underwood. There was no way, even from a slow, low-flying Belle, that Jesse could see faces well enough to recognize anyone. He'd just have to hope that Quentin's stubbornness had given way soon enough to get him out of danger. Mike didn't like Underwood personally, but he didn't wish him any ill beyond political failure in the next election.

"Okay, Jesse, you may as well come on back."

"Give me a minute. They're all staring up at me, but I can't see any signs that anyone's getting ready to shoot. I want to take one really low pass, to see some more details."

"Jesse…" But Mike broke off the rest. Colonel Wood wasn't reckless. If Jesse thought it was safe to get within musket range, Mike wasn't going to second-guess him.

Seeing how low the airplane was coming this time, Turenne realized abruptly that he'd been so fascinated by watching the flying machine that he'd overlooked a simple duty. That was an enemy machine, after all.

But when he looked around, he saw at once that it was too late. All of his cavalrymen were mounted, and all of them were doing exactly what their commander had been doing: sitting in their saddles, staring up, their mouths half-open. Not more than one out of three even had a rifle in their hands any longer, most of them having scabbarded their Cardinals in preparation for the march.

On the other hand, Turenne's carelessness probably didn't matter anyway. Now that he'd finally had a chance to observe one of the fabled American aircraft in person, Turenne could see how much luck had been involved when the Danes shot down one of them in the battle at Wismar.

Luck-and the recklessness of the pilot himself, who'd flown directly at a warship with a company of marines mustered on deck and ready to fire a volley.

But this pilot had never given Turenne that chance, even if the marshal had been ready to take advantage of it. He'd stayed too high for muskets, and, even then, had never flown a straight path long enough for men on the ground to have been able to predict where his course might be intersected with a volley of musket balls.

And the thing was so fast. Turenne hadn't realized that, at first, because of the airplane's altitude. But now that the pilot was bringing it very low, the machine's real speed was evident. Turenne had hunted birds with a shotgun. He knew how difficult it was to track the creatures and bring them down-and this plane was coming faster than almost any bird could fly.

It swooped by, almost right over Turenne's head. The marshal watched it go, off toward the Elbe.

"Mike, we've got a real problem on our hands."

Mike winced. "Yeah, no kidding. Our small petroleum industry just got a really big monkey wrench tossed into it."

"Worse than that, Mike. They couldn't really have done that much damage to the oil field. We'll lose a few weeks' production, that's all. Two months, tops."

Mike's wince turned into an outright grimace. As the air force commander, Jesse knew better than almost anyone how tight the petroleum reserves were for the campaign Gustav Adolf was about to launch. They had enough in reserve to cover the needs of the campaign itself, most likely. But the king of Sweden had just had a lid placed on any further ambitions he might have had. At least, if those ambitions required anything that needed petroleum to operate on.

Which meant there had to be something really bad on the way.

Sure enough:

"They've got breechloaders, Mike. Carbines, I'm pretty sure. Probably every damn one of them. I was pretty sure they did, just from what I saw from higher up. That's why I wanted to make that last low run. I saw at least three of those cavalrymen reloading."

Mike drew in a breath. "They might be flintlocks."

"Yeah, maybe. I couldn't see that much detail, of course. But I'm willing to bet you dollars for donuts that they're using percussion caps. Prepared cartridges, for damn sure, since no cavalryman wants to be fumbling with a powder flask. And whether they're flintlocks or percussion locks, Mike, there's no way in God's green earth those guns aren't rifled. I can't say I ever much cared for the French, but nobody ever accused them of being morons. Why bother with a smoothbore breechloader?"

Mike didn't doubt it himself. Which meant that if the French had been able to manufacture enough of those breechloaders to supply their whole army, one of the major technical advantages the USE had been counting on in the coming campaign had just vanished. Instead of being-by far-the best hand weapon on the field, the SRG rifled musket would be second-best. The French would have the same range, with the added advantage that their soldiers didn't need to stand up to reload.

"Thanks, Jesse. I'll get someone in there as fast as I can, to see what we can find out. In the meantime-I've already talked to him-General Torstensson is sending down three cavalry companies and a full regiment."

"You can tell him there's no point in sending the infantry regiment. He may as well keep them, with a battle looming. These guys are pulling out of here, Mike. The lead elements were already on the road by the time I got here. They'll be long gone before the cavalry arrives, much less the foot soldiers."

After Jesse got off the air, Mike took another deep breath before he began a new round of radio calls. Gustav Adolf was not going to be a happy man.

After the plane finally disappeared, Turenne ordered the march to resume. He spent the rest of the day until they reached the bridge at Minden mulling over the airplane.

He came to two conclusions. The first was that, under the right circumstances, he was fairly certain that a large enough volley could bring down one of the aircraft, if it flew low enough. Muskets might even do it, but Turenne was sure that Thibault could figure out something better. Bombards of some sort, firing canister or perhaps grapeshot, that were specifically designed for the purpose.

The other conclusion was obvious. France had to get its own air force. Give it more than a few years, and no army without aircraft could possibly hope to win a war.

Turenne had never really understood that, until this raid. He'd read the reports compiled by French intelligence agents concerning the USE's use of airplanes in the fighting around Luebeck, of course. But, in truth, he hadn't been that impressed. The flying machines simply couldn't carry that great a load of munitions. Aside from the occasional lucky hit, they were more of a nuisance than anything else. The real damage they did was to the morale of the soldiers, since the pestiferous devices were so very hard to defend against.

After the past few days, Turenne understood how much he'd underestimated the things. True enough, as weapons they didn't amount to much. Not yet, at least. But he'd simply overlooked the monstrous advantage they provided an army in terms of reconnaissance.

Which should have been blindingly obvious from the beginning, especially to a cavalry officer like Turenne. Reconnaissance, after all, was one of the primary missions of cavalry.

By the end of the first day of the raid, Turenne had started peering nervously into the sky every few minutes. Realizing, finally, that all his plans could be wrecked by one airplane that flew overhead and spotted him. It wouldn't take any more than that. The aircraft didn't need to fire a single shot or drop so much as a stone or an empty bottle. All it had to do was pass along the word to the enemy's commanders-who, until the last day or two, could have gotten a large military force into position at the oil fields before Turenne arrived.

In the event, no enemy aircraft had made its appearance until it was too late to stymie the raid. The plane that came then hadn't even bothered to drop any of the small bombs it might have been carrying. Nor would there had been much point if it had, unless the pilot waited until the cavalry column had formed up. At the oil field, the men had been scattered into small groups. At most, a few small bombs couldn't have done more than injure or perhaps kill a few men. And what did that matter, really? There were always casualties, in military operations, simply from accidents if nothing else. They'd suffered a few on this raid, even as smoothly as it had gone.

He'd given orders to maintain reconnaissance parties a bit farther out than he would have normally done, just in case the plane did come back. The signal would be three shots, fired in quick succession. That was probably an excessive precaution, but until he got more experience dealing with the flying machines, Turenne would rather err in that direction. Even without the outriders, he was pretty sure the machines made enough noise that his officers could disperse the column before the aircraft got close enough to bomb.

Bridges would be the trickiest places, of course, with nowhere to disperse. He could see that even two or three small bombs dropped on a column of men trapped on a bridge could be dangerous. Turenne decided to establish as new doctrine that soldiers crossing a bridge should always leave a wide space between the units, just in case an airplane appeared. That'd be something of a nuisance, and not always possible in any event. But anywhere within range of enemy aircraft, a nuisance worth tolerating.

What was their range, anyway? He was fairly certain that information had been included in the intelligence reports, but he couldn't remember the details. He hadn't put much attention to that, because he'd known he would be within range during the entire operation-and had ignored the issue, because he'd assumed the enemy would concentrate the few aircraft they had near Luebeck.

And so, indeed, they had done. With hindsight, Turenne could now see that his luck had been mostly due to the fact that the enemy had so few aircraft to begin with. Literally, not more than a handful. With their resources so badly stretched, in that respect, they'd simply not bothered to devote any of them to patrolling so far southwest of the theater of operations.

A year from now, however-certainly two or three years from now-that would no longer be true. Once an enemy had enough aircraft, an army would have no choice but to assume at all times that its operations would always be under observation, unless it could match the enemy's aircraft with its own. The ability to operate unseen, at least much of the time, had been a central aspect to all military planning and generalship for millennia. Now, gone up in smoke!

The bridge at Minden finally came into sight. Even at a distance, it was obviously still under the control of Philippe de la Mothe-Houdancourt and his men. More than that, judging from the number of visible French soldiers. Jean de Gassion must have already returned from his feint at Hesse-Kassel.

The lead units of Turenne's cavalry force began cheering. But Turenne did not participate. He was glaring at the bridge, calculating how many men he could send across at a time.

"We have got to get our own air force," he muttered.

That evening, in the tavern at Minden that de la Mothe-Houdancourt had set up as their operational headquarters, Turenne was finally able to get full reports from all of his lieutenants.

"One of my men went missing entirely," reported one of the junior officers. "I have no idea what happened to him."

That turned out to be the only case of a man missing in action, in the end. Several killed and wounded.

It was unfortunate, of course. Not so much the absence of the man, as the absence of his carbine. Most likely, the enemy already had possession of one of the Cardinals. It wouldn't be long at all before they started duplicating the weapon.

But Turenne had never thought he could keep it a secret, anyway, once the weapon was used in operations. It was simply impossible to put together in one place thousands of energetic and aggressive young men without something going wrong. You couldn't do it even in big markets and trade fairs, much less on military campaigns. Only idiot fat generals like the ones claiming to lead the war from the comfort of the Louvre-most of whom hadn't seen combat in years, even decades-could contemplate such nonsense.

As it happened, the missing man's horse had thrown him during the raid, startled by one of the refinery's pots exploding. The French cavalryman had the bad luck to suffer a concussion as well as a broken arm.

Nothing worse than that, in the end. Bad luck had been followed by good luck, when the fire spreading from the pot hadn't moved in his direction. But by the time he recovered consciousness, not only had his own horse run off but he discovered he'd been left behind by the rest of the expedition. Apparently, no one had witnessed the accident.

So, more bad luck. But, again, followed by good luck. The soldiers who found him and took him prisoner turned out to be from a Hessian unit. They'd suffered no casualties at all from the marshal's raid, so they weren't in a particularly foul mood. A couple of mild butt-strokes, more as a matter of principle than passion, was all the cavalryman suffered beyond the broken arm itself.

Not so bad, really. The cavalryman came from a farm family. Who, like all such stock, were accustomed to the perils of farm work. One of his cousins had been killed simply plowing a field. Tripped, somehow, and gotten caught in the equipment the horse was pulling. His leg was so badly gashed he bled to death before he was found. His brother had lost three fingers; his father's shoulder had ached since he was fourteen; one of his uncles-

Why go on? Not the least of the reasons the man had joined the army was that it was generally safer work than farming.

He didn't give a single thought to the Cardinal. None of his business, that.

"You are overreacting, Michael," said the emperor. His tone of voice sounded completely calm. Mike didn't think that was an artifact of the radio, either. It was just the manner of Gustav Adolf, under pressure in a military situation.

Like millions of people, Mike had watched the Ken Burns documentary on the American Civil War, when it came out in 1990. He could remember being particularly struck by a comment made by the southern historian Shelby Foote, with regard to Ulysses Grant. He'd depicted Grant as one of those relatively rare generals who had "four o'clock in the morning courage." Even startled and caught by surprise, as he'd been at Shiloh, he'd remained unruffled and steady.

Gustav Adolf was another. As he'd shown less than three years earlier at Breitenfeld, when the entire Saxon wing of his army had panicked and raced off the battlefield. The king of Sweden hadn't panicked at all-and had gone on to win the battle.

"I never expected we could maintain technological superiority everywhere," continued the emperor. "Foolish to think so. And in this instance, I am quite sure that these new rifles are not in the possession of the forces that Torstensson and I are facing here. Not in significant numbers, at least. We have quite good intelligence in the enemy camps outside Luebeck, you know. There's been no report at all of anything beyond the usual muskets."

There came an odd sound that Mike couldn't quite interpret. At a guess, Gustav Adolf had cleared his throat.

"I will admit-privately, and if you tell Axel I said so I will deny it vigorously-that the Committees of Correspondence have their uses. The point is, Michael, that while a sparrow may fall unnoticed in those enemy lines a short distance from here, I can assure you that no brilliantly designed new muskets could possibly do so. Flintlocks, percussion locks, it is irrelevant. They are not there, except possibly a few in the hands of officers."

Mike didn't doubt it. The ability of the CoCs to serve the USE as an informal intelligence agency was often uncanny, even when it came to purely military intelligence. That was usually because, quite unlike regular spy services with their limited funds, the CoCs could enlist-at no cost-the enthusiastic participation of all sorts of people who could move amongst the soldiers in a seventeenth-century army without being noticed. Servants for the officers, laundresses and cooks for the soldiers, even sometimes outright prostitutes. If nothing else, there was always a ten-year-old boy willing to go on an adventure-and who would pay any attention to such, as he scampered about a military camp playing games with his fellows? Armies of this day and age were always accompanied by camp followers.

That still left the possibility that the French were on the verge of sending a large shipment of the new weapons to their forces outside Luebeck. But before Mike could raise the possibility, Gustav Adolf did himself.

"Yes, I realize the situation might change, within a week or two. Although I doubt it, actually. If the French had that sort of production underway, they'd never have allowed one cavalry expedition to give away the secret on the eve of a major battle. But it doesn't matter. There won't be anything left worth talking about of the Ostender fleet in Luebeck Bay after today. Admiral Simpson's flotilla has already entered the bay and is preparing to engage the enemy. The Ostenders don't have one week left. They have one or two days. Three, at most. By tomorrow or the day after, the Danes will start pulling out of the siege lines. The French will have no choice but to follow. Watch and see if I'm not right."

Mike wasn't about to argue the matter. As the old saying went, his mama hadn't raised no fools. Granted, the advice Mike's mother had given him over the years hadn't included "and whatever else, you young scamp, don't argue military tactics with a general so famous he'll be remembered three and half centuries later." But she'd covered the basics, well enough.

"All right, Your Majesty. That does raise-"

"Yes, Michael, I know. Now that your timberclad has been repaired, what to do with it? Too late for the Achates to play any role in the Baltic, and while I might possibly have some use for it along the Elbe, it's not likely. Lennart has the French bastards trapped, now that he's cut their lines of retreat. They'll never get to the Elbe. Even if they do, I still have the five timberclads in Henderson's flotilla at Hamburg, if I need to use them.

"So go. You have my blessing. Try not to let the ship sink somewhere in the North Sea, would you? I don't want to have to listen to the admiral wailing and moaning about it."

Mike couldn't imagine John Chandler Simpson wailing and moaning about anything. Like most of Gustav Adolf's jests, this one was heavy-handed.

But he chuckled anyway. "London, here we come. Get me Melissa on the radio, please," he said to the radio operator. Doing his level best to sound as calm and unruffled as the man who, from time to time, he really didn't mind calling "Your Majesty."