1635: The Eastern Front

Chapter 34

The Warta river, between Gorzow and Poznan

The reports had been accurate. Hidden within a small grove of trees, Lukasz Opalinski looked onto the Warta. Just as the Cossacks had said, there on the road running by the river was one of the huge American war machines. An "APC," it was called, whatever that meant. Lukasz had forgotten to ask Jozef Wojtowicz what the initials stood for.

The thing was enormous, even bigger than Lukasz remembered from the battle of Zwenkau. It looked every bit as terrifying, too.

Or would have, had there not been one critical difference. At Zwenkau, the APCs had been moving almost as fast as horses. Faster, on good terrain. This APC wasn't moving at all. The rain-soaked road had given way as it passed, and the machine was now stuck.

It must have slid down and sidewise, Lukasz figured. The rear axle and its grotesquely fat wheels-those were called "tires," if he was remembering Jozef's account correctly-were off the road entirely, hanging out over the river.

Hanging into the river now, almost. The swollen waters of the Warta were not more than a foot below the tires. What was worse, those same swollen and rushing waters would be undercutting the riverbank. Before too much longer-a day, perhaps; not more than two-the APC would fall completely into the river.

Judging from the expressions on the faces of the machine's crew, who were standing around staring at the APC, they'd come to the same conclusion. They had placed ropes to tether the machine, but eventually those ropes would give way.

Judging from the marks in the mud, they'd tried to use those same ropes to haul the APC to safety.

With no success, obviously. All they had at their disposal were a half dozen horses, from what Lukasz could see. That wasn't nearly enough in the way of draft power to move something as immensely heavy as the war machine. On a dry, flat road, perhaps. But not here, in this pouring rain, on this soil.

No, for this you needed oxen. Lots of oxen.

Happily, since Lukasz had learned from Koniecpolski to trust the reports of Cossack scouts, if not the Cossacks themselves, he had brought oxen with him. He'd expropriated them from a nearby landowner, who'd objected at first but then seen his Polish duty after Opalinski pointed out that with as many Cossacks as he had with him he could easily just rustle the cattle. A process which, sadly-Cossacks being Cossacks-could get out of hand and result in the unfortunate demise of the landowner and his family and retainers after the most hideous travails along with the crops destroyed, the livestock slaughtered, the house burnt to the ground, the flowers in the meadows trampled, the…

The oxen weren't with him any longer, of course. They were now at least five or six miles back, and moving slowly as oxen always did. But nobody was going to be moving quickly here, so much was obvious.

This was a backwater in the war, now. The armies had passed on to the south. Gustav Adolf must have left this APC behind, secure in the knowledge that it was too far behind the lines to be at risk. Even if a passing unit of Poles did stumble across it, what could they do besides slaughter the crew and the soldiers he'd left as guards?

There weren't many of those soldiers. Just a platoon, large enough to frighten away bandits.

There was something profoundly satisfying to Lukasz in the thought that Poland was going to capture its first APC with the descendants of draft animals used by the Babylonians.

Southwest of Poznan

He'd miscalculated, Koniecpolski realized. He'd simply underestimated how much the rain-soaked terrain would slow down his own troops. His army had a much larger percentage of cavalry than Gustav Adolf's. A large enough number, in fact, that he'd taken the risk of dividing his own forces in order to maneuver with cavalry and artillery alone-the latter being the Polish equivalent of flying artillery, except they were armed with small sakers instead of volley guns.

He'd left his infantry behind to hold Poznan while he circled around Gustav Adolf's troops in order to attack the northernmost column of Torstensson's USE forces. That was their First Division, under Knyphausen's command. Koniecpolski's Cossacks reported that Knyphausen's column had become dispersed by the difficulties of crossing swollen streams in the area they were passing through. He'd decided that if he moved immediately, taking cavalry and flying artillery alone, he could hammer them badly. By now, with casualties, desertion, illness and the inevitable straggling caused by a march under very difficult conditions, Koniecpolski didn't think Knyphausen had more than seven thousand effective troops. The number was probably closer to six thousand, in fact.

He could bring twelve thousand hussars, giving him an almost two-to-one numerical superiority. He'd decided the risk was worth it. He was more afraid of the USE's army than he was of the Swedes and Hessians. It was a slower-moving army, true, because it was so heavily based in the infantry. But slow as that army might be, it was immensely powerful if any commander ever got the entire army on a single battlefield, as Torstensson had against the French at Ahrensbok. Almost all units of the USE Army had been equipped and trained with rifled muskets by now, for one thing. And those odd-looking volley gun batteries had proved very effective on every battlefield they'd made an appearance.

They'd be the most effective soldiers Gustav Adolf had when it came time for sieges, too. Koniecpolski had always assumed-and still did, despite his recent successes-that any war with the USE would soon enough become a war of sieges and attrition. The Swede had simply become too powerful to hope to defeat him on the open field except under ideal weather conditions such as these.

Koniecpolski hadn't gotten a clear account yet of what had happened at Zielona Gora. His units stationed in the city had had only one radio-not surprisingly, since the Poles had few radios to begin with-and it had somehow been lost or destroyed in the fighting. So the reports he'd gotten had been piecemeal; and, to make it worse, were coming from the sort of men who were the first to flee a battlefield. Koniecpolski had learned long ago to discount much of what such men reported. Invariably, the enemy force had been immense in number, armed with impossibly powerful weapons, which had a rate of fire that would have depleted all of Europe's gunpowder stores within an hour.

Still, although Stearns had managed to take the city with surprising speed, he had to have suffered significant casualties in the doing. Taking cities was a costly business. His division had taken the brunt of the fighting at Zwenkau, as well. By now, the Third Division had to be in fairly bad shape. Not demoralized, probably. They'd won all of their battles, after all. But even soldiers with good morale can only take so much of a beating before exhaustion sets in; an exhaustion that was as much mental as physical.

Let those other bastards do the fighting for a while. Damn shirkers.

That was the attitude that would inevitably spread through the ranks. The one exception would be if their commander was the sort of rare individual who could instill a great sense of pride in them. What his nephew Jozef had told him the up-timers called esprit de corps, a French term which the Americans had stolen, as they so often did. When it came to language, they were a tribe of magpies.

In that event, the situation changed. Units which developed a sense of themselves as being special, an elite, the ones who could always be counted on in a crisis-such units would remain dangerous even after suffering heavy casualties.

But was Stearns such a commander? As inexperienced as he was?

Koniecpolski didn't think so. From what he could see-all of it, admittedly, at a distance and filtered through the reports of others-the American general had simply blundered his way to success. A courageous commander, yes; by now that was quite evident. But such a commander would wear out his own men, soon enough.

So. Those were the parameters of the grand hetman's calculations. He'd effectively destroyed the Hessians and he'd stymied the Swedes. One of the USE's three divisions had to be worn out by now. If he could shatter a second division, he'd have created the best possible conditions Poland and Lithuania could have hoped for. The war that followed would be the sort of protracted affair that a people defending their own lands would fight tenaciously, and the invaders would grow weary of soon enough. The great danger had always been that Gustav Adolf could successfully wage a rapid campaign.

He might well have been able to do so, had God not intervened and blessed Poland with such a tremendous storm.

But even this storm would not last for more than another day, possibly two. It was not the Deluge, after all. As slowly as his cavalry was moving, by the time Koniecpolski reached the USE First Division and could grapple with it in battle, it would have regrouped itself. Knyphausen was a competent general.

Koniecpolski had no intention of attacking a USE infantry division with hussars alone, unless it was spread out. Which it would no longer be-and to make things still worse, the weather would probably have cleared by then.

He had only two options left. Retreat back to Poznan-or try to find Gustav Adolf himself. His forces were more than a match for the Swedish units his opponent had at his immediate disposal. If he could fight a battle before the weather cleared…

One of his adjutants came into the command tent. "We just got a radio report. Scouts have spotted the Swede. The king himself, that is. He's marching south and his units have gotten spread out a little."

"How far away is he?" the grand hetman asked sharply.

"Ten miles, maybe twelve."

For the first time that day, Koniecpolski smiled. "Mobilize the men. Immediately. We're going to meet the bastard."

After the aide left, Koniecpolski made a mental note to himself. As soon as the war was over, he'd see to it that his nephew was legitimized. No one had done as much to aid the cause of Poland as Jozef Wojtowicz. In addition to his weather reports that had guided the grand hetman's tactics, he'd been the one who obtained the radios for Koniecpolski's army, that had proven so invaluable in the campaign.

Koniecpolski was unusual among hetman for the importance he attached to building an extensive espionage network. An army without such was half-blind, in his opinion. Once again, he'd been proven right.

Wismar, Germany, on the Baltic coast

"All good things come to an end," murmured Jozef Wojtowicz. He turned away from the window and quickly gave the room a final inspection to see if he was leaving anything incriminating behind. It was time to go.

As he'd always done before meeting the American radio operator in the tavern, he'd arrived in the area two hours early and gone to the hotel room he'd rented for the purpose of observing the tavern before he entered. The room was on the third floor and its windows opened onto the same street where the tavern was located, a short distance away.

He had no fear of arousing suspicion. Wismar now had a lot of transient traffic, which had inevitably produced the sort of hotel whose managers asked no questions-didn't even think of the questions, in fact-so long as the room was paid for. Since the Danish fleet had been repelled here two years earlier, Wismar had become a much larger town than it had been before. The air force base was no longer very active, but the navy had built a base of its own here. Wismar's harbor was deep enough to handle fairly large ships. The navy's main base on the Baltic remained at Luebeck, but they found Wismar convenient for many purposes. They'd improved the harbor, too, which had naturally drawn commercial enterprises to the port city as well.

Jozef's German was almost without accent in the most common dialect spoken along the Baltic, but it hardly mattered since the lingua franca in Wismar was the recently arisen Amideutsch. That bastard language, basically German with stripped down English conjugations and a lot of borrowed English terms, was so new that it had no standard pronunciation and probably wouldn't for many years. No one "spoke it like a native," so Jozef didn't stand out at all.

For that matter, even if he'd spoken Polish he probably would have gone unnoticed. Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century was still a place where nationalism was just beginning to develop. War was traditionally viewed as a matter between dynasties, not peoples. Trade went on between countries officially at war with hardly a pause or a stumble. Not more than two blocks from the tavern where Jozef got his weather reports from Sergeant Trevor Morton was a tavern that catered mostly to Polish fishermen. Two blocks from there, toward the west, was another tavern where Polish was also the only language normally spoken. That tavern was what the Americans called "high end," its clientele being mostly Polish grain dealers.

Jozef had never been worried that he'd be spotted as a "hostile alien." Still, he'd learned early on in his career as Koniecpolski's chief espionage agent in the USE that caution was always a virtue for a spy. So, the day after he'd made his arrangement with the American sergeant, he'd rented this room so that he could reconnoiter the tavern before entering it. He rented the room on a monthly basis rather than a weekly or a daily one, but that was so common for this hotel that the managers thought nothing of it-so long as he paid the rent on time. But one of the advantages of being a spy for the grand hetman of Poland and Lithuania was that Stanislaw Koniecpolski was immensely wealthy and not given to stinginess.

Jozef glanced out the window a last time. Two more uniformed policemen were just entering the tavern. As with the four who'd preceded them a few minutes earlier, these were USE Navy military police, not the city's constabulary. They were probably on loan to the air force, whose base here was too small to maintain its own police force.

Too bad for Morton, of course. But the man was so stupid that the only thing that really surprised Wojtowicz was that he hadn't been caught sooner. Luckily for Poland, the American sergeant was a sullen sort of man. He had as few friends as he did brains, so he hadn't let anything slip sooner simply because he talked to few people about anything and didn't talk to them for very long.

There was nothing in the room to worry about. There'd never been much anyway, because Jozef never slept here. For that purpose, he had a room in a private boarding house on the outskirts of the city. What little he had in the way of personal possessions was kept there.

He was tempted to retrieve those few belongings but that would be foolish. It was unlikely that any suspicion had been aroused at the boarding house. The owner was an elderly woman so hard of hearing she was almost deaf, and so nearsighted she carried a magnifying glass with her at all times. Whether as a result of those ailments or her innate nature, she was also one of the most incurious people Jozef had ever met. Which made her a perfect landlady for his purposes, of course.

No, Wojtowicz was almost certain that the USE authorities had been alerted by some misstep on the part of Morton, not Jozef himself. And they could torture the sergeant for eternity without learning where Jozef was living, because he'd never told him.

Still, he might be missing something. It was best simply to leave Wismar immediately, abandoning the possessions he had at the boarding room. Nothing there had any sentimental value; it was just practical stuff.

Jozef passed through the door and locked it behind him. He'd leave the key with the concierge on the way out of the hotel, as he always did. Excessive caution led merely to annoyance. Too little caution could lead to far worse places.

Such as the one Sergeant Morton was probably going to inhabit for the rest of his life. Assuming that life didn't end shortly at the end of a hangman's noose or in front of a firing squad.

Jozef's guess, though, was that the USE authorities would be satisfied with a life sentence. They might even be satisfied with the minimum sentence under USE law of twenty years for treason. Anyone who interrogated the sergeant would soon realize the man was every bit as dumb as he seemed. Jozef was quite certain that at no time during his dealings with Morton had it even occurred to the radio operator that the information he was passing on was for any purpose except the one he'd been told-improving the odds for grain speculators.

Sadly for Morton, so far as Jozef knew, the laws of the USE did not allow for a plea of innocent on account of imbecility. The laws of Poland certainly didn't, despite the astonishing concentration of imbeciles in its government.

Wojtowicz had never wished any personal ill on the American sergeant, but he'd always thought this day would probably come. So be it. His nation had not invaded the USE, after all. Poland was rather the victim of foreign aggression. If one of the aggressor's minor minions wound up dangling at the end of a rope, the nephew of the grand hetman of Poland and Lithuania would lose no sleep over the matter.