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.