1634: The Baltic War

Chapter 55

Luebeck

Colonel Nils Ekstrom didn't think he'd ever seen Gustav Adolf in this good a mood, not even after the birth of his daughter Kristina. Not in terms of sheer exuberance, at any rate. The king of Sweden and emperor of the United States of Europe was practically prancing on the walls of Luebeck.

"Ha! Ha!" he shouted, making gestures toward the Danish and French forces beginning to pull out of the siege lines surrounding Luebeck. Those gestures fell short of being technically obscene, but only because the emperor was too excited to take the time to shape them into anything coherent. But the spirit that infused them, as it did the tone of voice-he wasn't shouting anything too coherent, either-was completely and thoroughly derisive toward his opponents. If the enemy forces had been close enough, Nils suspected the emperor would have unlaced his trousers and urinated on them.

At the very moment that thought crossed the colonel's mind, the emperor did unlace his trousers. Unlaced them, shoved them down to his knees, turned around, bent over, and exposed his naked buttocks to the foe. That done, he pulled the trousers back up and gave Ekstrom a huge grin.

"Probably pointless, but who knows? Maybe that bastard de Valois is watching through an eyeglass."

Ekstrom wasn't quite sure how to respond. The protocol that governed discourse between a Swedish monarch and his subjects was less ornate than that favored in many kingdoms, but it was still fairly elaborate. Normally, that was a comfort for a man in the colonel's position, since it enabled him in a pinch to retreat into meaningless formalities. But nothing really seemed applicable to this particular display of royal prerogatives.

"Probably not, Your Majesty," seemed safe enough, though.

Gustav Adolf was still grinning as he laced back up the trousers. "No, I'm afraid not. That fat old bastard is probably squatting somewhere with his own trousers down, shitting all over the place. As well he should!"

The trousers restored to their proper condition, the emperor waved his hand in summons and began hurrying toward the stairs. "But come! Come! The radio room! There are orders to be given! Foes to smite! And smite again!"

He even broke into song, as they made their way down the stairs. No solemn hymn, either, of which Gustav Adolf had composed many for the Lutheran church. This seemed to be a pastiche that he was putting together on the spot. Most of it was from a well-known Swedish drinking song, but there were lines interspersed in English from something Ekstrom didn't recognize. Probably one of the American songs which he played on a peculiar device his daughter had sent him in December, as a gift in honor of Gustav Adolf's thirty-ninth birthday.

A "tape recorder," it was called, if Nils remembered correctly. He wasn't positive, though, because he tried to spend as little time as possible in the emperor's company whenever he used the device. Nils himself thought the music that emerged from it was hideously raucous. As a rule, the emperor had told him, he had much the same opinion-but he felt obliged to listen since Kristina had included some of her own favorite songs.

The emperor had quite a nice singing voice, actually, but it was still painful to listen to such musical bedlam. The portions from the drinking song came as a relief, for all that it was raucous in its own right. Extremely bawdy, too-but at least Ekstrom could make sense of it.

As it happened, the commander of the French forces outside Luebeck had been studying buttocks through an eyeglass. But they weren't the naked buttocks of a Swedish king, they were the still-trousered rear ends of thousand of Danish soldiers beginning their retreat back to Denmark.

"Those stinking Danes," snarled Charles de Valois, duc d'Angouleme, after he finished his study and returned to his headquarters. "Cowards!"

Standing toward the back of the tavern in the large inn that had served the duke of Angouleme as his headquarters over the course of the siege, one of his officers made very sure to keep his face expressionless. Months earlier, Jean-Baptiste Budes, comte de Guebriant, had begun coming to certain conclusions. As of today, he decided those conclusions could now be considered as firm.

His first conclusion-this one had actually become firm by the end of December-was that Charles de Valois was an ass. An old man with an unpleasant disposition, none too keen-witted with regard to anything, and particularly prone to stupidity when it came to military matters.

Of course the Danes were lifting the siege and returning to their defensive lines at the Danewerk. That wasn't cowardice, it was simply common sense. Now that the American admiral Simpson had shattered the blockade of Luebeck, how in the name of God did the duke of Angouleme think the siege could be maintained?-even leaving aside the not-small problem that the Swedish general Torstensson had brought an army north from Hamburg to relieve the siege. Even if Torstensson hadn't come, what difference would it make? How could any general with the sense of a goose think he could "besiege" a port when the enemy had control of the sea?

The real problem now was that army of Torstensson's, which had already reached Segeberg and thereby stood across the French line of retreat up the Trave. If d'Angouleme had had the sense of even a chicken, much less a goose, he would have ordered the French forces to begin their retreat before the Danish commander had done so. The Danes didn't have far to go, and they didn't have to worry about Torstensson intercepting them before they got back to Denmark.

It was a long way to France, and the way had just gotten a lot longer.

Jean-Baptiste's second conclusion was that, as much as he generally thought well of Cardinal Richelieu in political terms, France's effective ruler was woefully lacking when it came to providing the nation with military leadership. Unfortunately, Richelieu had a long history and habit of handing out military posts primarily for reasons having to do with France's internal-and seemingly interminable-political faction fights. In that sphere of combat, Richelieu was the master, no doubt of it. But the resultant damage to the French army could be severe.

In some instances, Richelieu's factional purposes wound up being beneficial. He'd appointed Charles de la Porte because he was Richelieu's cousin, for instance-but there was no question de la Porte was a good officer. Far more often, however, the results were insalubrious.

D'Angouleme was a case in point. French political factionalism was often closely tied to the influence wielded by the great families of the princes legitimes-the "legitimated princes" who amounted to royal bastards given official recognition, and were among the wealthiest and most powerful families in the French aristocracy. For years, Richelieu had maneuvered to crush the power of the Guise and Vendome families. He'd done so, but his success had been due in large part to lavishly rewarding the other two great lines of the princes legitimes, the Angouleme and the Longueville.

A brilliant political maneuver, yes-but one of the side effects was that the French army laying siege to Luebeck had been given to Charles de Valois, a man whose principal qualification for high military command was that he was the bastard of King Charles IX. He was sixty-one years old but often seemed to think like an octogenarian. De Valois was firmly set in old ways of fighting wars; ways which might have made sense in the days of the wars of religion, but were now completely inadequate.

For d'Angouleme, as for most of France's top generals, war was essentially a matter of sieges. Capturing important cities and towns as part of the chess game of the factional struggles in France. The fact that the nearest major foreign war, for decades, had been the struggle between the Spanish crown and the Dutch rebels-a struggle in which, until the recent formation of the League of Ostend, the French had always sided with the Dutch-had simply reinforced that attitude. The struggle in the Netherlands was certainly a war of sieges, yes. But that was inevitable, given the nature of the terrain. It did not follow that a war fought on the open terrain of northern Europe was going to have the same characteristics.

Indeed, it most certainly didn't. Jean-Baptiste's friend Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar was openly derisive of the French military command. "Every other army in Europe," he'd pointed out to Jean-Baptiste, "tries to have as powerful a cavalry force as it does an infantry force. Why? Because the only way you can win battles on the open field is with cavalry."

He was right about that, Jean-Baptiste was pretty sure. Which would not be surprising, given that the youngest of the dukes of Saxe-Weimar was a veteran commander of the German wars. Unless you could mass enough artillery, as Gustav Adolf had managed to do at Breitenfeld, it was effectively impossible to shatter a large force of well-trained infantry on the field, with other infantry. With pikes and muskets, it simply couldn't be done. What you could do, however, was use powerful cavalry forces on the flanks to drive off the enemy cavalry-at which point you could launch attacks on the great blocks of infantrymen from the rear or the flanks. The same tercio-style formations which were unbreakable when attacked from the front, were extremely fragile if attacked elsewhere.

But those were lessons that the duke of Angouleme had not only refused to learn, he'd even refused to study. What does a French prince need to learn from barbarous Germans and Swedes? War was siegecraft, and by God he'd come to lay siege to Luebeck-and any idiot knows that you fight a siege, on either side, with infantry and artillery.

So, France's army suffered from a severe shortage of cavalry units. The only powerful one that had been put together was Turenne's-and the enmity and animosity of the French military establishment to that young upstart was so intense that Richelieu had had no choice but to give him an independent command far distant from the main theater of war.

Being fair to Richelieu, Jean-Baptiste knew that the cardinal was aware of the problem, and had promoted a number of young officers in order to deal with it. But Turenne's appointment as a marshal had stirred up such a firestorm of protest that Richelieu had not been able to pursue the project as far as needed.

Which brought Jean-Baptiste Budes, the count of Guebriant, to his third firm conclusion.

He was himself an ass. A veritable idiot. An idiot twice over, in fact. Turenne had offered him a position in his small cavalry army, and Jean-Baptiste had declined. The count of Guebriant had the normal ambition of any capable thirty-two year old officer, and he'd thought Turenne's forces would spent the whole war simply twiddling their thumbs.

Which, indeed, they might be. Jean-Baptiste was on cordial terms with Turenne, but they were not personally well acquainted, so he'd had little contact with the young marshal since the campaign at Luebeck began. He really had no idea what Turenne and his forces had been doing for the past few months. But at least Turenne wouldn't come out of the war with a major defeat on his record-and a major defeat was precisely what the situation looked like to Guebriant, here in northern Germany.

Then-twice an idiot!-he'd also declined Bernhard's offer to give him a commission in Saxe-Weimar's mercenary army defending the frontier in the Franche-Comte. Partly because Jean-Baptiste was reluctant to resign from the regular French forces, but mostly because his assessment was that Bernhard's army would not be playing a particularly glorious role in the war either.

Which, indeed, they probably wouldn't. But lack of glory, modest as it might be, was far superior to inglorious defeat.

"Cowards, I say! Cowards!" The duc d'Angouleme was still indulging himself in his denunciation of the Danes, which had now gone on for several minutes. Several more minutes in which an army of Germans led by the Swede Torstensson and armed with American military technology had closed still tighter the noose around the French army at Luebeck.

No, say better, inglorious and humiliating disaster.

"Let the Danes go, Lennart," Gustav Adolf commanded over the radio. "You probably couldn't catch them anyway, but even if you could I'd still feel the same. At this point, I'm looking for a political settlement with Christian. Killing a lot of Danes for no good reason won't help that in the least. It's the French I care about now."

"Yes, Your Majesty. I can deal with the French."

"I want that French army crushed, Lennart. Defeated isn't good enough. I want it crushed. I want France-that bastard Richelieu-so thoroughly whipped that they'll hide in their holes for at least a year. Come next spring, I'll be giving John George of Saxony and that treacherous brother-in-law of mine in Brandenburg what they deserve-and I don't want to have to be watching over my shoulder for a French army coming, while I'm about it."

"Understood, Your Majesty. But I can't do anything about that cavalry force that overran the Wietze oil fields."

"No, of course not. But we've found out more about that. Turenne was in command, in turns out. A splendid commander, no question about it-but he's in very bad odor with the French high command. His success at Wietze combined with their humiliation here at Luebeck will tie the French army up in a faction fight that'll go on for… God knows how long. Nobody holds grudges like those arrogant French noblemen."

"True enough. Very well, Your Majesty. I'll be off to my work, then."

The Thames

"Just leave the boat," said Anthony Leebrick. "But make sure you tie it up properly, Richard. Adrift, it's likely to draw attention."

Towson gave him a look that was not filled with admiration. "Indeed. And what other sage advice do you have, O my captain? Make sure that I don't drive the wagon stark naked, shouting in every village we pass through that we're the ones who just carried out the biggest escape from the Tower of London in English history?"

Leebrick gave him a grin that was somewhat sheepish. "Well… point taken."

Gayle Mason, meanwhile, had been giving the wagon that Patrick Welch had brought out of the nearby village's stable a look that was even less admiring. "I thought Harry's coffers were the envy of Midas. He couldn't afford anything better than this?"

"Which is exactly why I'm riding one of the horses," Julie said. "No way I'm trusting my spine to that thing."

"Swell." Gayle gave the horses in question an equally skeptical examination. "But as I believe you know, 'Gayle Mason' and 'horseback' go together about as well as ham and-and-and-whatever. Not eggs. Maybe tofu. Or rutabagas."

Spotting the smile on Oliver Cromwell's face, Gayle asked him: "And what's so funny?" The expression on her face, however, removed the crossness of the words themselves. Now that she and Oliver had been able to spend some time together in person, the very peculiar quasi-romance that had developed over months of nothing but conversations on walkie-talkies seemed to be…

Coming along quite nicely, she thought. Still early days, of course.

"Actually, I think your Harry Lefferts is something of a genius at this work." Cromwell nodded toward the beat-up old wagon and the four nags that drew it. "This won't draw any attention at all. Not anywhere in the English countryside, and certainly not in the Fens."

Alex Mackay swung into the saddle of one of the other horses. Gayle thought there was something vaguely comical about the motion. He went into the saddle with all the ease and grace you'd expect from an experienced cavalry officer, of course. Much the way a champion motocross racer might climb onto a tricycle.

Those other horses weren't quite nags. Not quite. But she hoped they didn't pass any glue factories along the way, or the horses would head for it unerringly.

"All right, all right. Oliver-you too, Darryl-give me a hand loading the radio gear into this heap, will you?"

To Gayle's gratification, "give me a hand" meant that Oliver took one end of the heavy damn thing and Darryl took the other. To her was left the proper chore of giving orders.

"But careful putting it into the wagon. Be very careful."

Cromwell grunted, as he helped lift the thing up to the wagon's bed. "Fragile, is it? You wouldn't think so."

"I'm not worried about the radio."

By the time the Achates and its little flotilla reached the estuary of the Thames, Mike was starting to recover from his seasickness. So he was able to have an actual conversation with Greg Ferrara when the radio call came in, relayed from Amsterdam, instead of simply half-listening and being unable to speak in fear the effort would just make him vomit.

"Jesse freed up one of the Belles to fly me into the airfield at Wietze, Mike. By the time I got here, some of Hesse-Kassel's cavalrymen had already arrived and secured the area. What's left of it, anyway."

"How bad's the damage?"

"Well… in one sense, not all that bad. The French-it was Turenne in command, by the way; he left us a note-couldn't have carried enough in the way of explosives in a purely cavalry expedition to really demolish something like an oil field. So they didn't even try. They just wrecked or carried off as much equipment as they could and torched all the buildings."

"Turenne left us a note? Why?"

"That's part of the bad news, Mike. Quentin Underwood is dead. Shot by French soldiers. The gist of Turenne's note was an explanation that he was killed in the course of combat, and the French had no idea who he was until afterward. Turenne gives his word of honor that it was not an assassination and says he'll provide us with a full report later if we request it."

Mike took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. "Damn it. I was afraid of that. I tried to talk him into getting out, but…"

"Yeah, I know. Quentin Underwood. As pigheaded a man as any who ever lived."

"That he was. Where did Turenne leave the note?"

"He left it with one of his junior officers. The man showed up under a flag of truce early this morning, just a couple of hours before I got here. What do you want me to tell him?"

"Tell him we accept Marshal Turenne's explanation. No, better write a short note to that effect. But we'd appreciate it if he'd send us the report as soon as convenient. If for no other reason, because Quentin's family will want to know what happened."

"Okay, will do. But, Mike, the worst news isn't really what happened to the oil field. We'll lose a few weeks' production, but there's no permanent damage done. What matters a lot more is that we found a French soldier who'd gotten hurt in an accident and was left behind. More than that-we found his rifle. And Jesse's guess was right. It is a breechloader. In fact, it's basically just an American Sharps rifle from back in the middle of the nineteenth century."

There was a pause, on Ferrara's part, then, "Mike, I feel terrible about this. I really dropped the ball."

"Hey, look, Greg-"

"No, I mean I really dropped it big time. It's a percussion-cap design, Mike. The French somehow managed to mass produce production caps after I convinced everybody on our side it couldn't be done quickly enough for this war. On account of all the problems you have trying to work with fulminate of mercury."

"Yeah, I remember. So I guess the French were more willing to absorb a lot of casualties in their production force than-"

"Goddamit, Mike-I don't think they're using fulminate of mercury. I won't be sure until I get it into the lab, but I'm willing to bet they're using potassium chlorate."

Mike frowned. "I thought-"

"Yeah, yeah, I did think of it myself, back when. What I told you was that the production process would be way too complicated. But now that I'm looking at this… Oh, shit. I half-remember, now-now that it's too late-that I think you can probably make the stuff just by-"

From the way his voice was rising, it was obvious to Mike that Ferrara was on the edge of tears. "Greg! Stop it! For Christ's sake, man, you're a high school chemistry teacher who got the world dropped on your shoulders. We asked you to become a one-man military research and development team that would have employed thousands of people up-time and had a budget in the umpteen God-knows-how-many billions of dollars. You've worked miracles as it is. So, fine, maybe you dropped a stitch here. I'm just amazed you haven't dropped a hundred by now."

Mike broke off, giving Greg time to compose himself. A few seconds later, he continued. "It isn't the end of the world. So stop beating on yourself, will you? The way I look at it, the whole thing's just a salutary reminder to us not to drop the biggest stitch of all. And you want to know what that one is? It's the arrogant presumption that our side is the only one with any brains. We'll survive this one, well enough. We ever get in the habit of dropping the big stitch, our ass is grass. We are talking about the French, right? Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't they the same people who produced Pasteur, the Curies, ah-hell, I can't remember-"

Ferrara's chuckle was quite audible. "Oh, jeez, there's a whole slew of 'em, Mike. Cuvier, Berthelot, Becquerel-four generations of great physicists, in that family-Ampere, Foucault, Poincare, the list goes on and on. If you include mathematicians and philosophers, you can start with Rene Descartes and Blaise Pascal-and let me tell you it feels really weird knowing they're both alive right now."

"I rest my case. Just take a deep breath or three and relax, Greg. If they can make a Sharps, we ought to be able to catch up before too long. And they didn't make enough of them to make a qualitative difference in this war, so we've got the time. Right?"

When Ferrara spoke next, his tone was firm and resolute. "Yes, we can. Damn right we can, in time for the next war."

"That's assuming there's a 'next war' in the first place. Who knows? Maybe there will be and maybe there won't. Don't forget they're also the same nation that produced the Marquis de Lafayette and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Not all that far down the road from now, either, if you put it all in perspective. We're not trying to destroy France, Greg. We never were. We just want to hurry those folks along a bit, that's all."

"Yeah, you're right. Easy to forget sometimes, though, isn't it?"

Mike hesitated, not wanting to add another bruise to Ferrara's already battered spirit. But some things just had to be said, and damn the bruises.

"I've never forgotten it once, Greg," he said bluntly. "That's what it's all about in the first place. The world doesn't need another fucking empire. They always come out of the mint looking bright and shiny, but the truth is they're a dime a dozen. The human race has been littering the landscape with them for thousands of years. The Mesopotamians alone must have produced a dozen, and nobody except specialists even remembers the names of more than a couple any longer. For every one that did some good, there were at least ten that were just pretentious garbage."

There was silence on the other end, for a moment. Then, quietly, Ferrara said, "Okay, I'll sign off now. I've got things to do and you've got some of our people to rescue. But… ah, Mike…"

"Yeah?"

"In case the chance never comes around again, I'd just like to tell you that I've been really glad, ever since it happened, that you came through the Ring of Fire with us. Most of us just floundered, but you were the one person who seemed made for this time and place."

Mike smiled. "Well, thanks. But you're forgetting Tom Stone, aren't you? Not to mention-talk about predestination-a certain gent by the name of Harry Lefferts."

"And there it is," said George Sutherland cheerfully. "The Tilbury fort. How d'you want it, Captain Lefferts? Scrambled or fried?"

Harry stood in the bow of the barge, his hands on his hips, gazing benignly upon the ramshackle old fort that had just come into view. "Aw, hell, those guys were friendly and polite when me and Don dropped by for a visit. I'd feel downright unneighborly if we went and ruined their day. As long as they don't mess with us, I figure we won't mess with them. Besides, we're getting low on munitions."

Melissa Mailey had seemed to be dozing off, but her eyes popped wide open. "Oh, certainly. You need to save the stuff for more important work. Destroying Stonehenge. The Roman works at Bath. Better yet! I think we should sail back to London. You forgot to blow up Parliament. And as long as we're headed that way, we could hunt around and find the field at Runnymede. Plow it up and sow it with salt."

"Jeez, Ms. Mailey. How long are you gonna hold this grudge, anyway?"

Melissa's expression was dark, dark, dark. "They signed the Magna Carta a little over four hundred years ago. That seems about right."

Harry grinned. "I hate to be the one to break the news, but you aren't likely to live that long."

"You watch, young man. I'm starting an exercise regimen as soon as I get back. Eat nothing but healthy foods, too."

"Fine. I won't live that long."

"Won't do you any good. Might have, back up-time, but not here. Paracelsus and Nostradamus didn't die all that long ago, not to mention John Dee. I'll track down their disciples, find out how to raise the dead. If Dante were still alive, of course, I wouldn't bother. I'm sure I could talk him into adding a tenth level to the Inferno and immortalizing you for posterity."

Sitting on the deck next to her, Rita Simpson rolled her eyes. "Melissa, don't you think you're overreacting just a tad?"

"I most certainly am not. He burned down the Globe theater!"