An idiot notion, of course. If Witty were the emperor, he'd damn well see to it that his soldiers bore as much of the financial burden of war as possible. Let them make up for it by looting.
Which the up-timers also considered outrageous-to the point where they'd even persuaded General Torstensson to ban looting altogether, under pain of draconian punishments. There seemed to be no end to the silliness they could generate out of their heads. Perhaps the absurdly lavish care they devoted to their teeth made their brains rot instead.
Ah, well. Witty had calculated everything carefully, before he agreed to take a commission, and decided it was still worth doing. The pay was decent, after all, and he figured that whatever he'd lose by not getting a captain's share of the loot, he'd make up for by also not having to pay a captain's share of the expenses.
Still, old habits died hard. Every time he saw one of the inexperienced gunners misusing a horse, he couldn't stop calculating what that was likely to cost a few weeks down the road, even if he wasn't the one who'd be paying for it.
On the positive side, the road was good. Very good. However fantastically impractical the up-timers might be in their politics, there was no question they designed good roads. The best roads Europe had seen since Roman times were now those in the Germanies. Well, some of the Germanies, at least. Pomeranian roads were still said to be as bad as ever.
But Pomerania was the armpit of the continent anyway. Witty had been there once. Hopefully, he'd never go again. He was thirty-three years old now. A few more years and he'd be able to return to Switzerland with enough money to set himself up nicely.
Who knows? He might even have enough to pay a dentist before he retired. Not likely, of course.
The river was unpleasantly cold in the bright morning light.
Well, of course it was. It was only late March, and the Elbe River was never exactly what one might have called toasty warm, Admiral John Simpson reflected as he stood with hopefully impressive calm in the conning tower of SSIM Constitution. He'd been a bit surprised that the river hadn't frozen, although intellectually he'd understood that the past winter hadn't really been as cold as it had sometimes felt, Little Ice Age or not.
It was still cold enough to offer the very real threat of hypothermia to anyone who found himself immersed in it, though. A thought which John Chandler Simpson found rather reassuring as he contemplated the intelligence reports about possible threats his command might face. Not that there weren't entirely enough purely physical problems, without any need for enemy action behind them, to make his current task sufficiently daunting.
Captain Franz Halberstat maneuvered Constitution cautiously away from her dockside mooring. "Give me ten degrees of starboard rudder, reverse thrust on the starboard jet, and increase to ten percent power on the port jet," he said.
"Ten degree starboard rudder, ten percent power on the port jet, aye, aye, sir!" his helmsman repeated crisply, and the engine-room telegraph jangled as the quartermaster transmitted the orders.
The ironclad's twin rudders moved, and a curved section of pipe lowered itself over the nozzle of the starboard pump as a pair of engineers spun the geared wheel that controlled it. The pipe clamped tight, capturing the output from the pump and directing it forward, underneath the ship's hull, while the port jet continued to push forward. The combination turned the vessel sharply, and Constitution's five-hundred-ton bulk seemed to quiver slightly underfoot.
That was probably his imagination, Admiral Simpson told himself. On the other hand, maybe it wasn't.
The ironclad moved slowly but smoothly towards midstream and away from her mooring, and Halberstat's quiet orders returned the starboard jet to normal operation. Simpson nodded in satisfaction, and then stepped out onto the bridge wing, looking astern as the other six ships began to move as well.
He wasn't the only person watching them. The navy yard's entire work force was out in strength, standing on the river banks, bobbing about in every rowboat they could lay hands on, shouting and cheering and stamping their feet. The sound of their voices would probably have been deafening, if the raucous sound of the ironclads' sirens (actually, horns purloined from diesel trucks that weren't going to require them any longer), the timberclads' whistles, and the ringing of Magdeburg's bells hadn't drowned out any purely human sounds.
So much for operational security, Simpson thought dryly.
Of course, there'd never been much chance of maintaining any sort of security, even if Mike Stearns-or John Chandler Simpson-had wanted to in the first place. Everyone in Magdeburg, which undoubtedly included literally hordes of spies for everyone from Richelieu to Christian of Denmark to Emperor Ferdinand of Austria to the Wizard of Oz, had known the navy would be moving out as soon as possible for its spring showdown in the Baltic. There'd been no possible way to conceal that. Nor was Simpson particularly averse to letting the other side know what was coming.
There's damn-all they're going to be able to do about it, anyway, he thought with a certain grim satisfaction. It wasn't a thought which someone with his own profound respect for the Demon Murphy was prepared to express out loud, but Simpson was well aware of the potency of the weapon he had forged.
Standing there and simply watching the ships of his squadron was one of the more difficult things Simpson had ever done. Every nerve ending in his body cried out to take the con himself, at least for his flagship. Certainly, even ten or twelve months ago, the mere thought of allowing seventeenth-century officers to command vessels like this would have been a guaranteed source of permanent insomnia. After the exhausting weeks and months he'd spent working with and training the officers in question, that problem at least no longer applied.
Well, he thought, let's be honest with ourselves here, John. It doesn't apply very much, anymore.
He snorted with humor carefully concealed behind his impassive "the admiral is on duty" expression as he admitted the real reason his entire epidermis itched with the need to give the helm and power orders himself. These ships were very much his babies. Building them, and the navy to employ them, had been probably the most satisfying task he'd ever undertaken in a life filled with substantial accomplishments. He wasn't prepared to admit that to anyone except, possibly, his wife Mary, but he knew it was true, and he simply hated the thought of delegating responsibility for what happened to his ships in any way to someone else.
At least the skippers he'd appointed to command the ironclads had all been given the opportunity to practice with the slower, clumsier, smaller river steamers already in commission. In fact, Simpson had used those practice and training sessions to wash out several prospective watch-standing officers. The transition from sail or oar power to paddlewheel steamers had required greater mental flexibility than most up-timers would have expected, for a lot of reasons, and some people-whether up-timer or seventeenth-century-simply lacked that flexibility.
One problem that had caused quite a bit of confusion for the down-timers, at least initially, was the fact that Simpson had insisted upon providing all of his new vessels with wheels, rather than the simple tillers virtually all seventeenth-century ships utilized. There were several reasons for that particular decision, and the opinion which he knew some people had expressed-that it was simply the system with which he was familiar-wasn't actually one of them. The use of a geared quadrant system to shift the rudder not only permitted him to build in a much greater mechanical advantage for the helmsman, but also offered a substantially greater amount of maneuverability.
All contemporary vessels used a tiller. For all intents and purposes, it was simply a stout bar attached to the head of the rudder stock and used to steer much as the tiller was used in a modern sailing dinghy or outboard motorboat. Unfortunately, the length of the tiller had to be in direct proportion to the forces required to shift the rudder, and its maximum length was restricted by the width of the ship itself. In larger ships, a "whipstaff" was required simply to control the rudder, and that made things even worse. The whipstaff was essentially a vertical lever, mounted on a pivoting center and extending from the ship's quarterdeck down to the level of the tiller, where it was attached to the end of the bar. It provided the helmsmen with a powerful mechanical advantage, but meant that the rudder's range of movement was even more sharply restricted. As a result, a large sailing ship (although "large" was a relative term) found it impossible to apply more than five or six degrees of rudder.