But those were lessons that the duke of Angouleme had not only refused to learn, he'd even refused to study. What does a French prince need to learn from barbarous Germans and Swedes? War was siegecraft, and by God he'd come to lay siege to Luebeck-and any idiot knows that you fight a siege, on either side, with infantry and artillery.
So, France's army suffered from a severe shortage of cavalry units. The only powerful one that had been put together was Turenne's-and the enmity and animosity of the French military establishment to that young upstart was so intense that Richelieu had had no choice but to give him an independent command far distant from the main theater of war.
Being fair to Richelieu, Jean-Baptiste knew that the cardinal was aware of the problem, and had promoted a number of young officers in order to deal with it. But Turenne's appointment as a marshal had stirred up such a firestorm of protest that Richelieu had not been able to pursue the project as far as needed.
Which brought Jean-Baptiste Budes, the count of Guebriant, to his third firm conclusion.
He was himself an ass. A veritable idiot. An idiot twice over, in fact. Turenne had offered him a position in his small cavalry army, and Jean-Baptiste had declined. The count of Guebriant had the normal ambition of any capable thirty-two year old officer, and he'd thought Turenne's forces would spent the whole war simply twiddling their thumbs.
Which, indeed, they might be. Jean-Baptiste was on cordial terms with Turenne, but they were not personally well acquainted, so he'd had little contact with the young marshal since the campaign at Luebeck began. He really had no idea what Turenne and his forces had been doing for the past few months. But at least Turenne wouldn't come out of the war with a major defeat on his record-and a major defeat was precisely what the situation looked like to Guebriant, here in northern Germany.
Then-twice an idiot!-he'd also declined Bernhard's offer to give him a commission in Saxe-Weimar's mercenary army defending the frontier in the Franche-Comte. Partly because Jean-Baptiste was reluctant to resign from the regular French forces, but mostly because his assessment was that Bernhard's army would not be playing a particularly glorious role in the war either.
Which, indeed, they probably wouldn't. But lack of glory, modest as it might be, was far superior to inglorious defeat.
"Cowards, I say! Cowards!" The duc d'Angouleme was still indulging himself in his denunciation of the Danes, which had now gone on for several minutes. Several more minutes in which an army of Germans led by the Swede Torstensson and armed with American military technology had closed still tighter the noose around the French army at Luebeck.
No, say better, inglorious and humiliating disaster.
"Let the Danes go, Lennart," Gustav Adolf commanded over the radio. "You probably couldn't catch them anyway, but even if you could I'd still feel the same. At this point, I'm looking for a political settlement with Christian. Killing a lot of Danes for no good reason won't help that in the least. It's the French I care about now."
"Yes, Your Majesty. I can deal with the French."
"I want that French army crushed, Lennart. Defeated isn't good enough. I want it crushed. I want France-that bastard Richelieu-so thoroughly whipped that they'll hide in their holes for at least a year. Come next spring, I'll be giving John George of Saxony and that treacherous brother-in-law of mine in Brandenburg what they deserve-and I don't want to have to be watching over my shoulder for a French army coming, while I'm about it."
"Understood, Your Majesty. But I can't do anything about that cavalry force that overran the Wietze oil fields."
"No, of course not. But we've found out more about that. Turenne was in command, in turns out. A splendid commander, no question about it-but he's in very bad odor with the French high command. His success at Wietze combined with their humiliation here at Luebeck will tie the French army up in a faction fight that'll go on for… God knows how long. Nobody holds grudges like those arrogant French noblemen."
"True enough. Very well, Your Majesty. I'll be off to my work, then."
The Thames
"Just leave the boat," said Anthony Leebrick. "But make sure you tie it up properly, Richard. Adrift, it's likely to draw attention."
Towson gave him a look that was not filled with admiration. "Indeed. And what other sage advice do you have, O my captain? Make sure that I don't drive the wagon stark naked, shouting in every village we pass through that we're the ones who just carried out the biggest escape from the Tower of London in English history?"
Leebrick gave him a grin that was somewhat sheepish. "Well… point taken."
Gayle Mason, meanwhile, had been giving the wagon that Patrick Welch had brought out of the nearby village's stable a look that was even less admiring. "I thought Harry's coffers were the envy of Midas. He couldn't afford anything better than this?"
"Which is exactly why I'm riding one of the horses," Julie said. "No way I'm trusting my spine to that thing."
"Swell." Gayle gave the horses in question an equally skeptical examination. "But as I believe you know, 'Gayle Mason' and 'horseback' go together about as well as ham and-and-and-whatever. Not eggs. Maybe tofu. Or rutabagas."
Spotting the smile on Oliver Cromwell's face, Gayle asked him: "And what's so funny?" The expression on her face, however, removed the crossness of the words themselves. Now that she and Oliver had been able to spend some time together in person, the very peculiar quasi-romance that had developed over months of nothing but conversations on walkie-talkies seemed to be…
Coming along quite nicely, she thought. Still early days, of course.
"Actually, I think your Harry Lefferts is something of a genius at this work." Cromwell nodded toward the beat-up old wagon and the four nags that drew it. "This won't draw any attention at all. Not anywhere in the English countryside, and certainly not in the Fens."
Alex Mackay swung into the saddle of one of the other horses. Gayle thought there was something vaguely comical about the motion. He went into the saddle with all the ease and grace you'd expect from an experienced cavalry officer, of course. Much the way a champion motocross racer might climb onto a tricycle.
Those other horses weren't quite nags. Not quite. But she hoped they didn't pass any glue factories along the way, or the horses would head for it unerringly.
"All right, all right. Oliver-you too, Darryl-give me a hand loading the radio gear into this heap, will you?"
To Gayle's gratification, "give me a hand" meant that Oliver took one end of the heavy damn thing and Darryl took the other. To her was left the proper chore of giving orders.
"But careful putting it into the wagon. Be very careful."
Cromwell grunted, as he helped lift the thing up to the wagon's bed. "Fragile, is it? You wouldn't think so."
"I'm not worried about the radio."
By the time the Achates and its little flotilla reached the estuary of the Thames, Mike was starting to recover from his seasickness. So he was able to have an actual conversation with Greg Ferrara when the radio call came in, relayed from Amsterdam, instead of simply half-listening and being unable to speak in fear the effort would just make him vomit.
"Jesse freed up one of the Belles to fly me into the airfield at Wietze, Mike. By the time I got here, some of Hesse-Kassel's cavalrymen had already arrived and secured the area. What's left of it, anyway."
"How bad's the damage?"
"Well… in one sense, not all that bad. The French-it was Turenne in command, by the way; he left us a note-couldn't have carried enough in the way of explosives in a purely cavalry expedition to really demolish something like an oil field. So they didn't even try. They just wrecked or carried off as much equipment as they could and torched all the buildings."