As if the reason for their "protracted absence" had not been that they were serving in the king's own army! As if they had been luxuriating at some mineral hot springs rather than fighting in his campaigns!
Kanoffski had heard it often enough. From Bernhard's point of view, the common perception that he had "betrayed" Gustav Adolf stood reality on its head. The truth was the other way around. He'd simply repaid the Swede's infidelity with its just reward.
They were quite a quartet, those brothers, Friedrich mused. Saxe-Weimar had never been a very important principality in Germany, even before the Americans overran it with their rebellion. Yet, even though dispossessed from what little they'd had, at least three of the four brothers looked to be emerging as major players in the great game of the continent, almost entirely due to their own capabilities. They were an exception-not the only exception, to be sure, but perhaps the most startling one-from the usual run of German princelings, whose pretensions were generally in inverse proportion to their measly land-holdings and still measlier talents.
The day might even come when the oldest of the brothers, Wilhelm, faced the youngest across the field of battle. Not as two generals, but as two heads of state.
Who could say, any longer? The war that had begun at the White Mountain in Bohemia fifteen years earlier had steadily pulled more and more of Europe into its maelstrom. And then God had thrown the Ring of Fire into the very center of it. For what purpose, neither Friedrich nor Bernhard had any idea at all.
But to what effect?-oh, to that question, they had found an answer, with Bernhard leading the way.
When the youngest duke of Saxe-Weimar broke his oath to Gustav Adolf, he also broke all his ties to established custom. Whether you viewed him as a traitor or-as Bernhard did himself-the one betrayed, the end result was the same. He was now a man on his own, with no limit to his ambition and no restraints beyond whatever objective reality might pose.
In their smaller and less ambitious ways, all of the Cloister shared the same view. They were new men, in a new world.
Altogether a new world, even if most of Europe's powerful and mighty persisted in closing their eyes to the reality. Bernhard and his intimates thought most of the American prattle about equality and liberty was just that-prattle-but they'd all come to accept what they saw as the heart of thing. Which Bernhard himself, something of a patron of the arts like all the Saxe-Weimars, said he'd found best expressed in an up-time book of poetry he'd run across in Grantville. A line penned by an English poet of the future.
A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a Heaven for?
So, Der Kloster. As Bernhard had put it to them, in what Friedrich had whimsically come to think of as their own-very different-version of a constitutional convention, held four months earlier at Schwarzach:
"If Wallenstein can do it, why can't we?"
That really meant me, not "we," since Bernhard was not proposing any sort of constitutional monarchy, much less a republic. But none of the seven officers in the room had objected to that aspect of the matter. That there would be a first among equals-and quite a long ways first, at that-was a given. They remained monarchists, at bottom; they'd simply shed the false and illusory notions concerning so-called legitimacy with which the powers-that-be cloaked themselves. Legitimacy, to a new man with eyes to see, was simply what you made of it. Nothing more-and nothing less.
Friedrich Kanoffski had been the first to speak. Verbally if not in writing-of course not in writing, since they weren't fools-putting down what the Americans would call his John Hancock.
"Wallenstein is Bohemian, you know. So am I."
That brought a circle of grins. They probably should have called it the Wolfpack rather than the Cloister.
Bernhard turned away from the view below. "I think it would be prudent for the time being, Friedrich, for me to take quite a few companies into the Breisgau. Put the cardinal's mind at rest. Send Caldenbach and Ohm, maybe Rosen as well, toward Mainz. All three of those units can move very fast when they need to."
"Yes, your Grace. Anything else?"
Bernhard looked down at the ground beneath his boots. "Here," he said, stamping his foot on Saint Etienne. "We'll put the big fortress here. Tell Bodendorf to have his military architect start working on the plans while I'm away."
Chapter 28
Magdeburg
"I'd recommend we include Nils Krak's men, too," said Frank Jackson. "They're all dragoons as well as sharpshooters, and with their rifled muskets they should give the Thuringian Rifles whatever extra support they might need. We can only send one squad of the Rifles with the combat team."
John Chandler Simpson was half-amused and half-irritated at Jackson's stubborn insistence on using the up-time phrase "combat team" to refer to the special combined arms force they'd be sending as an escort for the ironclads as they made their way downriver to Hamburg. They'd all agreed that sending the ironclads without a land escort would be foolish. As powerful as the war machines were, there were just too many ways in the narrow confines of a river for the enemy to set traps. It could be something as simple as obstructions in the river bed that required the ironclads' accompanying service craft to pause for a bit, while the crews removed the obstacle-easy targets for snipers firing from the river banks. In much the same way that a main battle tank working its way through the narrow streets of a city needed infantry support, so long as they were on the river the ironclads did as well.
The problem-tiny, tiny problem-was that the down-timers had no fixed terminology to use for most such military purposes, just as they tended to use terms like "lieutenant" and "captain" in a very loose and fluid manner. That didn't bother Simpson much, but it drove a former sergeant like Frank Jackson half-crazy. So, once he got on Torstensson's staff, Jackson had insisted on developing precise terminology.
The Swedish general had been willing enough to accommodate him, in principle. But, alas for Jackson, Torstensson insisted on picking the actual terms. And after Simpson had casually mentioned that the sort of combined arms land force they were putting together, as a temporary unit for a specific task, had a different term in the up-time German tradition than the American "combat team" appellation Jackson proposed, Torstensson had chosen it instead. He thought it sounded better.
So, "battle group" it was to be-but Jackson wouldn't budge from using combat team instead. Granted, no one who knew the man could accuse Frank Jackson of being xenophobic, especially after they met his Vietnamese wife Diane. But in many ways, the former coal miner's American chauvinism was so unthinking and deeply ingrained that it was impossible to uproot. In that respect, he was very unlike his long-time close friend and former union associate Mike Stearns, who was generally quite cosmopolitan.
Fortunately, the Swedish general whom Gustav Adolf had placed in overall command of the USE's military seemed more amused than anything else by his American adjutant's recalcitrance.
"Of the two other squads," Jackson continued, "one of them is in Luebeck and I'm assuming"-he cocked his head toward General Torstensson-"that you'll want to keep the third squad in reserve, for whatever you might need them for."
"Whatever Gustav Adolf might need them for," Torstensson grunted. He smiled thinly. "Or are you foolish enough to think the king will let me remain in command after he's broken the siege?"
Admiral Simpson half-scowled. "He certainly should."