1635:The Dreeson Incident

Chapter 68

Kassel

The first thing Landgrave William did upon his return to his capital city was summon his military commanders.

"Here," he said. He placed a small sheaf of papers on the table in the salon where they'd gathered. "I want every man named here-every member of every organization named here-arrested immediately. And I don't care what level of force you need to use to bring them in. Dead is fine. I'll have a fair number of them executed anyway."

One of the officers picked up the list and studied it. By the time he got to the third sheet, his eyebrows were lifted.

"If you don't mind me asking, Your Grace, where did you get this list?"

"It was handed to me on the border of the province, as we passed across," William said grimly, "by the commander of a large force of the Committees of Correspondence. A large and well-armed force. The same flintlocks provided for the federal army-and better guns than most of our own soldiers have. They seem quite well disciplined, too."

The officer's eyebrows lifted still further.

"Just do it, colonel. I don't need to see anti-Semites and witch-hunters hanging from gibbets in Hesse-Kassel, or lying by the road where they were shot by firing squads. I saw quite enough of that already on our way here from Magdeburg. The best way to keep out the CoCs is to make them unnecessary."

He sat down heavily in a chair by the table. "I'm sick of those bastards anyway."

"Stinking CoCs," agreed the colonel.

"Not them," said the landgrave. "The anti-Semites. The witch-hunters. As if we didn't have enough trouble!"

The worst bloodshed was in Mecklenburg. The nobility in that province was still solidly in place, and it had long been the most grasping, piggish and narrow-minded in the Germanies. The reason for the Fourth of July Party's popularity in that largely rural province was due to the aristocracy's greed, in fact. The peasantry hated them.

The Mecklenburg nobility actually had very few ties to anti-Semitism. They were an impoverished, hardscrabble sort of aristocracy. Really, more in the way of what in England would have been considered country squires or, at a later period in Russian history, the class of rich peasants known as "kulaks." There just wasn't a lot of blood to be squeezed out of the turnip of north German agriculture-which meant the aristocracy squeezed very hard. But it also meant they tended to rely on the Jewish populations in the towns for a number of needed services. It was actually among the peasantry that anti-Semitism had traditionally been most deeply rooted.

But, as often happens, social customs were trumped by politics. Everyone in the Germanies except village idiots understood perfectly well that the Committees of Correspondence, in Operation Krystalnacht, were using the anti-Semites and witch-hunters as scapegoats-in another of history's little ironies. When one of their columns marched into a town and rounded up known anti-Semitic agitators or known witch-hunters and summarily executed them after a summary trial, what they were really doing was baring their teeth at the establishment while, simultaneously, making clear to their own supporters what was henceforth to be acceptable or unacceptable conduct. Directly, they didn't threaten the noblemen or the city patricians or the guildmasters, no. Achterhof's orders on that subject had been crystal clear and fairly blood-curdling as to the consequences if they were disobeyed.

But who was fooled, really? Hardly no one. So, often enough, the CoC columns were cheered as they marched through a town by the same lower classes of people who, for generations, had actually provided most of the members of lynch mobs. And were glowered upon, from their shelters behind fancy windows, by people of the upper classes who were in fact often quite guiltless of persecuting Jews or hunting witches. It just didn't matter. The CoC leaders had ordered Krystalnacht as a combined mass education for their own followers and form of intimidation toward their enemies. That was the essence of it, not the several thousand anti-Semites and witch-hunters across the USE's provinces and imperial cities who wound up being killed in the process.

In every other province, even Pomerania, the nobility as a whole was shrewd enough to step aside and let the CoC columns do their work. Except those of them who were directly part of one or another anti-Semitic organization on the CoC lists, of course. But most noblemen were not. Almost none, in some provinces.

Mecklenburg was the exception. There, the pigheaded nobility rose to the bait. They didn't care in the least about the anti-Semites being shot by the CoC columns. They were simply by-damn and by-golly not about to tolerate the CoCs operating openly in their territory.

The result amounted to an outright civil war.

The noblemen had the upper hand, at first. The CoC columns who first appeared in the province came from Mecklenburg itself. Mostly from the towns of Wismar, Rostock and Schwerin. They were well-armed but not very numerous, and they were caught off guard by the fierce reaction of the local aristocracy.

It was the sheer ferocity of the reaction that carried the field, at first. It certainly wasn't any splendid organization or discipline on the part of the nobility. The truth of the matter was that Mecklenburg's aristocracy was a sorry lot. For generations, not having the English custom of primogeniture, they had been dealing with the poverty of their rural estates by sending their more competent sons out to earn a living by serving in the armies and bureaucracies of more powerful rulers, while keeping the dumbest ones home to administer the estates. As breeding systems went, this was counter-productive.

Nor did Mecklenburg's aristocracy have the luxury of maintaining large bands of well-armed and well-trained retainers. Most of the Mecklenburg nobility didn't have any "armed retainers" at all, in the sense that an Elizabethan era English duke would have understood the term. What they had instead were their huntsmen, their stable hands, their household staff-the steward, the butler, a few footmen, the driver for the family carriage. And while many of the huntsmen, stable hands, and household staff, given the situation in the Thirty Years War, had military experience, most of them by this time who'd been in one or another of the armies had left because of some kind of physical problem that made continuing military service impractical.

So, there it was. The small CoC columns who moved incautiously into the Mecklenburg countryside were driven back into the towns by mobs of often one-armed butlers and one-eyed dog-trainers led by profane and semi-literate "noblemen" whose clothes were likely to be filthy and who almost invariably stank of drink.

Had the peasants come into the fight at that stage, things would have been different. But while the peasants might be sympathetic, the peasant militias-quite unlike the situation in Franconia, where the militias worked hand-in-glove with the Ram movement-were not coordinated with the CoC columns. The peasants armed themselves; but having done so, the militias simply guarded their own villages. Leaving the outnumbered CoCs to fight the nobility's private forces in the field.

Very quickly, the CoCs were driven back into the towns. In fact, the noble bands started following them into the towns, intending to scotch this snake while it was still small.

But then the army reacted. More precisely, the air force, which had a large base in Wismar. The air force's three warplanes assigned to the province began bombing the aristocracy's armed bands in the field, and even carried out bombing raids on some of the most prominent noblemen's estates.

They did so in complete defiance of military law, of course. They did not even have the excuse, as so many army regiments did, of being largely composed of soldiers recruited by the CoCs. Unlike the army, there was not much in the way of direct CoC influence in the USE's air force.

What there was instead, however, was a much higher degree of direct American participation. Half the air force's pilots were still up-timers from a small town-and they were furious about Henry Dreeson's murder. They'd known that kindly old man all their lives.

So, their commanders looked the other way, while "training flights" used up a preposterous quantity of munitions.

That was enough to produce a stalemate, for a week. And a week was all that Gretchen Richter and Gunther Achterhof and Spartacus needed to bring in reinforcements.

CoC columns started pouring into Mecklenburg from everywhere. By then, two weeks into Operation Krystalnacht-which actually lasted more than a month, not a single night, despite the code name-the CoCs were finished with their task in most of the provinces.

It all came to a head in what became known as the Battle of Gustrow. Seven CoC columns converged-more or less; it was a rather ragged affair-on the town and clashed in a field just to the south of it with approximately eighteen hundred armed retainers led by dozens of noblemen.

Numerically, the forces were pretty evenly matched. But it wasn't much of a contest. With their military-issue flintlock muskets, the CoC forces were far better armed than the semi-feudal retainers. They even had three six-pound cannons, whose provenance remained mysterious.

They also had radios, and were provided with constant information on the movements of their opponents by the planes flying reconnaissance overhead. (Although the aircraft weren't dropping bombs any longer. The air force's commander Jesse Wood had finally been pressured enough by Torstensson to order a stop to that.)

Within two hours, it was a rout, and the rout turned into a slaughter. Any CoC member who'd been captured by the Mecklenburg aristocracy in the early stages of the fighting had been murdered, often quite sadistically. So the CoC fighters were in no forgiving mood, now that the tables were turned. They wouldn't be taking any prisoners either. The only reason that several hundred of the enemy survived was because the battle only started in the afternoon. So, they escaped come nightfall.

As word of Gustrow spread, a peasant rebellion erupted across much of the province. The now-weakened aristocracy found themselves under siege. Their schlosses and estates burned; they and their own families massacred, if they were reckless enough to stay and try to put up a defense.

Torstensson might have finally felt compelled to intervene with the army, then. Try to, at least. But Gretchen had foreseen the danger and had already arrived in Wismar to take charge of the CoC forces in the province. Because Achterhof had been shrewd enough to keep her from indulging in pointless expeditions earlier, the CoC's most famous national leader was available when she was really needed.

The CoC columns now placed themselves at the head of the peasant rebellion. Informally, if not formally. The peasants were willing enough. They had no great familiarity with the CoCs themselves. But by now, Gretchen Richter was famous across most of Europe.

Gretchen made no attempt to actually lead the struggle in military terms. She was not a soldier. She was a political organizer, with the experience of the Amsterdam siege to guide her.

The key thing she brought was a new slogan.

Long Live the Duke!

It was well-known that Gustav Adolf, the duke of the province along with his greater titles, had clashed frequently with the pigheaded Mecklenburg nobility.

So, Long Live the Duke it was. Preposterous, that slogan might be, looked at from one angle-certainly if you knew Gretchen Richter's attitudes towards dukes in general. But it was under that slogan that the nobility of Mecklenburg was for all intents and purposes expropriated and destroyed as a class. Most of its members survived, to be sure. But they would henceforth be living as refugees in the mansions and castles of their relatives elsewhere. Mecklenburg had become as plebeian-dominated a province as the SoTF or Magdeburg, and every bit as much of a stronghold for the CoCs and the Fourth of July Party.

Emperor Gustav Adolf would be flooded with petitions in the time that followed, demanding that he do something about the horrid state of affairs in Mecklenburg.

But…

The Mecklenburg nobility really had been a monumental nuisance for him. Given their preferences, which they continued to express with extraordinary tenacity at meetings of the Estates even after Gustav Adolf became duke, the nobles of Mecklenburg would have turned the duchy into a mini-Poland with its duke having no more financial or military authority than Wladyslaw IV. So he always found reasons to delay doing anything about those petitions. Figuring that, as the years went by, the disgruntled older Mecklenburg noblemen would start dying off and their younger kin start blending in elsewhere.

There was very heavy fighting in the Province of the Main, too, although it never assumed the scale of the civil-war-in-all-but-name that it did in Mecklenburg. The critical difference was that the nobility and the town elites stayed out of it, at least as organized groups.

The Rhineland had been the hotbed of anti-Semitism in the Germanies going back well into the Middle Ages. Anti-Semitism was common everywhere, but it was among the urban artisan classes that it developed the most fervor and violence, and no part of the Germanies was as urbanized as the Rhineland.

That meant the CoC columns were clashing with people from the very same classes that provided most of their strength and support-and were doing so in areas where the CoCs themselves hadn't yet sunk the very deep roots they had in provinces further to the east. To a large degree, what was happening in the Province of the Main and the neighboring areas amounted to a civil war within a civil war. The Committees of Correspondence were establishing in towns up and down the Rhine and the Main-by force, when need be-the same authority among their own supporters which they had established in the eastern and central Germanies over a longer period, using only persuasion and moral agitation.

To make the situation still more chaotic, the neat lists of "agitators" and "groups" and "organizations" that Francisco Nasi had provided the CoCs were more a reflection of the needs of efficient record-keeping than the actual reality on the ground. In the eastern and central Germanies, as a matter of self-defense if nothing else, every political movement no matter of what stripe or persuasion had begun adopting the rigorous organizational methods of the CoCs. Which had, in turn, been heavily influenced by the habits and attitudes of the Americans, accustomed as they were to the level of social and political organization common to advanced industrial societies of the late twentieth century.

But the Rhineland, for the most part, was still in the past. Anti-Semitic "organizations" were really more in the way of loose associations that formed and disintegrated in response to specific impulses. As a rule, those impulses were provided by a particularly effective or charismatic individual agitator, who would be the one to actually incite the violence.

These men were usually clerics of one sort of another. Low level clerics, at that. Itinerant mendicant friars, in Catholic areas; junior clergy looking to make a reputation and get a permanent parish assignment in Lutheran regions. Such were the names that appeared in Nasi's lists as "leaders" and "central figures" of anti-Semitic "groups."

The reality was quite a bit more fluid-which made for a very fluid sort of armed struggle. Typically, these anti-Semitic agitators would react to the approach of a CoC column by inciting a mob of locals, who would in turn form themselves into a militia-not infrequently, they were the town's official militia-to sally forth and meet the invaders in a small battle.

A small and quick battle. These hastily formed military bands, even the ones who constituted formal militias, were simply no match for the CoC columns in an open battle. The CoCs were, first, better organized and more disciplined; second, they were far better armed; third, many of their troops and the majority of their commanders were veterans of the recent wars. Almost a third of the column commanders, in fact, had been at the great battle of Ahrensbok.

Soon enough, their opponents realized they couldn't match the CoCs in straight battles, and they fell back on the standard tactic used by town and village militias for centuries when facing more powerful regular troops-which amounted to urban guerrilla warfare.

That would have been savage fighting under any circumstances. It was made still more savage by the harsh attitudes of the CoC soldiers.

By now, in the central and eastern Germanies, the political program of the CoCs had assumed the proportions of a social crusade for its members and supporters. There was more at stake than simply this or that specific issue, this or that specific grievance. What was ultimately involved was the very soul of a new nation coming into birth.

And they were fiercely determined that that nation would be "modern," as they understood the term. A term which was of course heavily influenced by American ideas and attitudes but which stemmed still more from long-gestating German ideas and long-festering German injustices. What the Americans had brought through the Ring of Fire was really not so much their "new ideas." What they mostly brought was the deep and abiding confidence that those ideas worked. That, so far from being airy and impractical, they were vastly more practical than the notions and methods advocated and used by the existing rulers of the Germanies.

So, all that was medieval and barbaric and primitive was to be destroyed. First and foremost, those two prominent and long-standing traditions in the Germanies of anti-Semitic pogroms and witch-hunts. Traditions which, in fact, were very closely related not simply in spirit but in the persons who carried them out.

The fact that many of the CoC soldiers didn't know any Jews or care about Jews-even, in plenty of instances, were themselves prejudiced against Jews-was neither here nor there. Some of them even still, somewhere deep inside, probably believed in "witchcraft." Half-believed, at least.

That didn't matter, anymore than it mattered whether this or that soldier in Sherman's army burning its way across Georgia in the march to the sea liked or disliked black people. The Confederacy was an abomination, a gross act of treason to the republic, and the Confederacy would damn well be destroyed. Period.

So it was, with the attitude of the soldiers in the CoC columns fighting on the Rhine and the Main. The ancient customs of anti-Semitic pogroms and witch-hunting were damn well going to be destroyed. Because so long as they remained they would keep the nation shackled to barbarity and medievalism.

Not compromised with; not alleviated; not diluted; not "reformed."

Destroyed. Razed to the ground. Turned into rubble-and if the bodies of the defenders of medieval barbarism lay bleeding to death beneath the rubble, not a one of those fighters in the CoC columns cared in the least. Good riddance.

It had taken several years to entrench those new attitudes in the central and eastern provinces of the USE. The CoCs planned to finish the job in the western provinces in a few weeks.

And…

For the most part, they succeeded. Mike Stearns had predicted they would.

"It's simply a myth," he told Francisco Nasi, "that social attitudes are so deeply rooted that they'll last for generations under any circumstances. And the reason it's a myth is because attitudes in the abstract require actions in the concrete in order to remain solid and well-entrenched. It's not enough to 'feel' or 'think' this or that bias or prejudice. To keep those biases and prejudices solid-give them meat and blood and bone-you have to be able to act on them. And you've got to be able to do it frequently and regularly and in the public eye. Destroy the ability to act, and you will-very quickly-see the attitudes crumble and fade away. That's because you can't dragoon everybody else into tacitly supporting you, any longer."

He studied the Elbe from the window, for a moment. "I've seen it happen in my own lifetime. Well… most of it actually happened while I was still a kid, or hadn't even been born yet. Americans don't like to talk about it now, but the truth is that there were as many lynchings of black people in America in our not-so-distant past as there are lynchings of Jews and so-called 'witches' in Germany in the here and now. Yet by the time I was an adult, the lynchings were over. In a few short years, a social habit and custom that had lasted for centuries and had seemed as deeply ingrained as any had just vanished."

He swiveled his head and gave Francisco a fierce, hawkish look. "And you want to know how it was done? Forget all that vague twaddle about changes in so-called 'social consciousness.' Yeah, sure-those changes did happen and they were both real and important. But it's what lay beneath them and anchored them solidly that really counted-and that was as crude and simple as it gets."

He transferred the hawk glare to the river. "There was a time in America when you could lynch a black man with impunity. And then the time came when if you did so, you would get your ass handed to you. Often enough, by a black man wearing a badge and carrying a gun."

His smile managed to be wry and savage at the same time. "It's amazing, Francisco, how quickly 'deeply ingrained attitudes' will change-when the consequences of not changing are so immediate and obvious and detrimental to your health and well-being. Oh, yeah. It's really amazing how fast that can happen."

The CoC columns which marched up and down the great rivers of the western provinces for several weeks shooting and hanging anti-Semites and witch-hunters, and burning down their homes and shops if they fled, did not really care whether anyone liked or disliked Jews or believed or did not believe that witches were real. That was a private and individual matter, by itself.

What they did care about was forging a modern nation. And that meant all medieval and barbaric public behavior- especially if it was done by the classes of people who provided most of their own support-was now at an end. A complete and total end. There would be no compromises, no bargaining, no dickering.

The murder of an old gentile had been the last straw. The Dreeson Incident was going to be the end of it.

It was over. Period.

Start a pogrom, you die. Burn a witch, you die. Accept and yield to the demands of a modern nation or be buried in the rubble of its medieval past. That is the only choice we give you.

Often enough in the past-the Fettmilch revolt in Frankfurt had not been not particularly exceptional-the mobs who carried out pogroms against a town's ghetto were also hostile to the town's patricians. Yet that brought little or no comfort to those same patricians, as they watched, day after day, while the CoC columns established a new law and a new authority in their towns on the Rhine and the Main.

Today, they posed no threat, true. You could even, if you squinted really hard, fool yourself into thinking they were protecting you.

But this did not bode well for the future. Especially if-some of the more far-sighted began rethinking their plans-the Crown Loyalists were reckless enough, now that they were in power, to try to force through all the provisions in their program.

As for Vincent Weitz, he made his escape from the State of Thuringia-Franconia and headed for Bavaria, only to be caught up in the CoC's sweep of the Oberpfalz. He and a dozen or so of his followers and associates tried to find refuge in Nurnberg, the independent city-state completely surrounded by USE territory. But the authorities in Nurnberg wanted no part of the madness. They denied Weitz and his people entry into the city.

In the end, they died at a crossroads just north of Amberg, hunted down by a detachment from a CoC column.

Weitz was no coward, so it was a fierce little battle. But a short one, also. Afterward, Weitz and his men were shoved into a shallow mass grave in a nearby meadow.

By then, he'd been identified. But there was no marker placed over the grave, and never would be. By the time the bones started weathering through, many decades later, the local village legends would place him and his men as a lost unit of mercenaries from a much earlier period. It was an understandable confusion. The weapons in the possession of Weitz and his men at the end had been quite antique.

When it was all over, and the peculiarly-named affair-why "crystal night"? it made no sense-had entered Germany's history books, Gretchen and Achterhof and Spartacus summoned all the CoC columns into the capital city.

They came, some twenty thousand combatants by then, and paraded in an orderly manner right through the city. The CoC even set up a reviewing stand in front of the parliament, on Hans Richter Square.

Prime Minister Wilhelm Wettin and the entire leadership of the Crown Loyalist Party found reasons to be absent from Magdeburg that day. But Princess Kristina-over-riding the advice of all of her ladies-in-waiting except Caroline Platzer-chose to accept Gretchen's offer to join her on the reviewing stand.

It was hard to know if the child really understood all the political subtleties involved in the heir to the imperial throne accepting that invitation. It was quite possible, though, that she did-well enough, at least. Kristina was almost frighteningly precocious.

But, perhaps there was nothing more involved than the emotional enthusiasm of an eight-year-old girl who knew that those thousands who marched past the stand would be very friendly and would return her cheery waves with roars of applause and appreciation.

(Which, indeed, they did. Another great large stick to shove up the rumps of the Crown Loyalists.)

General Torstensson came to watch also. For understandable political reasons, however, he felt it would be unwise to watch the parade from the reviewing stand. So he satisfied himself with a good view from the steps of the palace.

"Nicely done," he commented to one of his aides. "They don't march as well as real soldiers, of course. But it's still quite impressive."

He glanced back at the parliament building. "I do hope Wettin and his people have learned some prudence from all this."

The aide was a Swede, like Torstensson. So, like his commander, he felt a certain detachment from all this messy German business.

"I wouldn't count on it, General. I really wouldn't."