So it went. Mike was no stranger to negotiating tactics himself. He'd probably agree to whatever Simpson wanted, if it was within reason. But, push came to shove, he'd never been a stranger to the magic word "no."
After Simpson left, Mike gave Frank Jackson a sly little smile. "I take it from the vehemence of your arguments that you lost the debate you'd been having with Lennart here."
Jackson gave Torstensson a look that was unkind enough to be right on the edge of insubordination.
"Well. Yeah. I did."
Torstensson sniffed. "As if we down-timers are so stupid that it never occured to us that skirmishing tactics are a lot safer than standing up in plain sight, all of us in a row. Ha! Until a good cavalry charge-even good pikemen, with good officers-shows us the folly involved."
The jibe made and properly scored, Torstensson relented. "Frank, when your mechanics can start providing us with a sufficient quantity of reliable breechloaders, we will rediscuss the matter. But, for now, even with the new SRGs, we simply do not have a good enough rate of fire to be able to risk dispersing our troops too much."
Jackson didn't say anything. He just stared out of the window gloomily.
"C'mon, Frank, fill me in," Mike said. "What happened in the exercises?"
Frank took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. "Pretty much what this cold-blooded damn Swede said would happen. The skirmishers did just fine-until the OPFOR's cavalry commanders decided they'd accept the casualties to get in close. After that, it was all over. Even the best riflemen we've got need twenty seconds to reload those SRGs. They're still muzzle-loaders, Minie ball or no Minie ball. Cavalry can come a long ways in twenty seconds."
He gave Torstensson another unkind look. "As he so cheerfully rubbed salt into my wounds, so can a good line of pikemen, if their officers are decisive enough. Which his were."
Jackson sighed again. "After that, it's just no contest. The skirmishers are scattered, not in a solid line with their mates to brace them and their officers right there to hold them steady. And a cavalry charge is scary as all hell. Most of them just took off running. The ones who did try to stand their ground got chopped up piecemeal. Bruised up, anyway." Another unkind look was bestowed on the Swedish general. "They weren't any too gentle with those poles and clubs they were using instead of lances and sabers, let me tell you."
"Spare the rod and spoil the recruit," Torstensson said cheerfully.
Mike nodded. He wasn't really surprised, though. One of the things he'd come to learn since the Ring of Fire, all the way down to the marrow of his bones, was that if the ancestors of twentieth-century human beings didn't do something that seemed logical, it was probably because it wasn't actually logical at all, once you understood everything involved. So it turned out that such notorious military numbskulls as Ulysses S. Grant, Robert E. Lee, Phil Sheridan, Stonewall Jackson, William Tecumseh Sherman and all the rest of them hadn't actually been idiots after all. It was easy for twentieth-century professors to proclaim loftily that Civil War generals had insisted on continuing with line formations despite the advent of the Minie ball-armed rifled musket because the dimwits simply hadn't noticed that the guns were accurate for several hundred yards. When-cluck; cluck-they should obviously have adopted the skirmishing tactics of twentieth-century infantry.
But it turned out, when put to a ruthless seventeenth-century Swedish general's test in his very rigorous notion of field exercises, that those professors of a later era had apparently never tried to stand their ground when cavalry came at them. After they fired their shot, and needed one-third of a minute-if they were adept at the business, and didn't get rattled-to have a second shot ready. In that bloody world where real soldiers lived and died, skirmishing tactics without breechloading rifles or automatic weapons were just a way to commit suicide. If the opponent had large enough forces and was willing to lose some men, at least.
Seventeenth-century armies did use skirmishers, to be sure, but they were literally just that-skirmishers, usually called "light companies" attached to the regiments and battalions. When two heavy formations closed for battle, the respective skirmishers who'd often started the fighting withdrew back into the safety of the main formations when the two sides closed within long gun shot.
"So be it," he muttered. That meant high casualty rates, of course. But it was also the reason he'd come down on the army's side over the issue of the new volley guns. True enough, the navy could put them to good use. But for the army, they could be a Godsend. If enough volley guns could be provided for the army in time for the spring campaign, Torstensson could put together heavy-weapons units for all of his regiments and incorporate their capabilities into his plans. That still wouldn't allow for real skirmishing tactics, but it would go a fair distance in that direction. At least the infantry could spread out a little, instead of having to stand shoulder to shoulder and make the world's easiest target.
"How'd the two volley gun batteries do against the cavalry?" he asked.
Finally, both of the generals smiled in unison.
"Oh, splendidly," said Torstensson. "It was almost as humiliating an experience for my arrogant cavalry captains as a colonoscopy would have been. By the way, are there enough of those devices in Grantville that I could get one for the army? I'm thinking it would do wonders for discipline."
Chapter 6
After the waitress brought them steins of beer, Eric Krenz started drinking right away. But Thorsten Engler just stared at his stein for half a minute before, almost desultorily, beginning to sip from it. After setting down the stein, he let his eyes wander about the tavern for another half minute. Seeing, but not really thinking about what he saw. No matter what he looked at, the image that kept flashing back into his mind was that of Robert Stiteler having the life swatted out of him as if he'd been nothing but an insect. He'd had a nightmare about it the night before, too.
Eric's voice startled him. "If you can't get it out of your head, you should go see those American women. The ones I told you about. The 'social workers,' they call them."
Engler stared at him, for a moment, trying to bring his mind to bear on what his friend was saying.
"What are 'social workers'?" he asked.
Eric shrugged and drained some more of his beer. "I'm not sure, really. I think-"
A voice coming over Thorsten's shoulder interrupted him. "They're a variety of what the up-timers call 'psychologists.' Except real psychologists-so I'm told, anyway, I don't think the Americans actually have any here-only handle customers one at a time and they charge a small fortune for it. These 'social workers' are apparently the type that get assigned to the unwashed masses."
Grinning in his vulpine sort of way, Gunther Achterhof pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. "Like you and me," he finished.
He leaned back in his chair, turned half around, and waggled a hand at a nearby waitress. When she came over, he ordered a beer for himself. Then he turned back to look at Thorsten. "And I agree with Eric. Especially if you find you're having regular nightmares about it."
Thorsten winced a little.
"Thought so," Gunther said, nodding. "They have a name for it, even. They call it PTSD. The letters stand for 'post-traumatic stress disorder.' "
He used the actual English terms rather than trying to translate. Engler and Krenz had been in Magdeburg long enough to have a good grasp of the peculiar new German dialect that was emerging in the city-as it was in Grantville and many other towns in the USE. People were starting to call the dialect "Amideutsch." It was a blend of Hochdeutsch and Plattdeutsch, essentially, but with a very large number of American loan words and a more stripped down grammar than that of most German dialects. The new dialect had adopted the simplified English system of verb conjugations, for instance. Newcomers to Amideutsch found it a bit peculiar to say Ich denk instead of Ich denke, but they soon got used to it.