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."