Eroica made no answer to this but a snort, and deliberately tore into his own cows quite raw, devouring them down to the hooves; the other Prussian dragons at once followed his example.
“It is better not to give in to their whims,” Dyhern added to Laurence now. “It seems a small thing, I know—why not let them have all the pleasure they can, when they are not fighting? But it is just as with men. There must be discipline, order, and they are the happier for it.”
Guessing that Temeraire had once again broached the subject of his reforms with the Prussian dragons, Laurence answered him a little shortly, and went back to Temeraire’s clearing, to find him curled up unhappily and silent. What little inclination Laurence had to reproach him vanished in the face of his disappointed droop, and Laurence went to him at once to stroke his soft muzzle.
“They say I am soft, for wishing to eat cooked food, and for reading,” Temeraire said, low, “and they think I am silly for saying dragons ought not to have to fight; they none of them wanted to listen.”
“Well,” Laurence said gently, “my dear, if you wish dragons to be free to choose their own way, you must be prepared that some of them will wish to make no alteration; it is what they are used to, after all.”
“Yes, but surely anyone can see that it is nicer to be able to choose,” Temeraire said. “It is not as though I do not want to fight, whatever that booby Eroica says,” he added, with abrupt and mounting indignation, his head coming up off the ground and the ruff spreading, “and what he has to say to anything, when he does not think of anything but counting the number of wingbeats between one turn and the next, I should like to know; at least I am not stupid enough to practice ten times a day just how best to show my belly to anyone who likes to come at me from the flank.”
Laurence received this stroke of temper with dismay, and tried to apply himself to soothing Temeraire’s jangled nerves, but to little success.
“He said that I ought to practice my formations instead of complaining,” Temeraire continued heatedly, “when I could roll them up in two passes, the way they fly; he ought to stay at home and eat cows all day long, for the good they will do in a battle.”
At last he allowed himself to be calmed, and Laurence thought nothing more of it; but in the morning, sitting and reading with Temeraire—now puzzling laboriously, for his benefit, through a famous novel by the writer Goethe, a piece of somewhat dubious morality called Die Leiden des jungen Werther—Laurence saw the formations go up for their battle-drills, and Temeraire, still smarting, took the opportunity to make a great many critical remarks upon their form, which seemed to Laurence accurate so far as he could follow them.
“Do you suppose he is only in a savage mood, or mistaken?” Laurence privately asked Granby, afterwards. “Surely such flaws cannot have escaped them, all this time?”
“Well, I don’t say I have a perfectly clear picture of what he is talking about,” Granby said, “but he isn’t wrong in any of it so far as I can tell, and you recall how handy he was at thinking up those new formations, back during our training. It’s a pity we’ve never yet had a chance of putting them to work.”
“I hope I do not seem to be critical,” Laurence said to Dyhern that evening. “But though his ideas are at times unusual, Temeraire is remarkably clever at such things, and I would consider myself amiss not to raise the question to you.”
Dyhern eyed Laurence’s makeshift and hasty diagrams, and then shook his head smiling faintly. “No, no; I take no offense; how could I, when you so politely bore my own interference?” he said. “Your point is well-taken: what’s right for one, is not always fair for the other. Strange how very different the tempers of dragons can be. He would be unhappy and resentful, if you were always correcting or denying him, I expect.”
“Oh, no,” Laurence said, dismayed. “Dyhern, I meant to make no such implication; I beg you believe me quite sincere in wishing to draw to your attention a possible weakness in our defense, and nothing more.”
Dyhern did not seem convinced, but he did look over the diagrams a little longer, and then stood up and clapped Laurence on the shoulder. “Come, do not worry,” he said. “Of course there are some openings you here have found; there is no maneuver without its points of weakness. But it is not so easy to exploit a little weakness in the air, as it might seem upon paper. Frederick the Great himself approved these drills; with them we beat the French at Rossbach; we will beat them again here.”
With this reply Laurence had to be content, but he went away dissatisfied; a dragon properly trained ought be a better judge of aerial maneuvers than any man, it seemed to him, and Dyhern’s answer more willful blindness than sound military judgment.
Chapter 12
THE INNER COUNCILS of the army were wholly opaque to Laurence; the barrier of language and their establishment in the covert, far from most other divisions of the army, distanced him twice over even from the usual rumors that went floating through the camp. What little he heard was contradictory and vague: they would be concentrating at Erfurt, they would be concentrating at Hof; they would catch the French at the River Saale, or at the Main; and meanwhile the weather was turning to autumnal chill and the leaves to yellow around their edges, without any movement.
Nearly two weeks had crept by in camp, and then at last the word came: Prince Louis summoned the captains to a nearby farmhouse for dinner, fed them handsomely out of his own purse, and to their even greater satisfaction enlightened them a little.
“We mean to make a push south, through the Thuringian forest passes,” he said. “General Hohenlohe will advance through Hof towards Bamberg, while General Brunswick and the main army go through Erfurt towards Würzburg,” he went on, pointing out the locations on a great map spread out over the dinner table, the destination towns near the known positions where the French Army had been established over the summer. “We have still not heard that Bonaparte has left Paris. If they choose to sit in their cantonments and wait for us, all the better. We will strike them before they know what has happened.”
Their own destination, as part of the advance guard, would be the town of Hof, on the borders of the great forest. The march would not be quick; so many men were not easily supplied, and there were some seventy miles to cover. Meanwhile along their route supply-depots had to be established, particularly with herds for the dragons, and the lines of communication secured. But with all these caveats, still Laurence went back to the clearing with much satisfaction: at last, to know something and to be moving was a thousand times better, no matter how slow it would seem to abruptly be bounded by the speed of infantry and cavalry, dragging their guns along in waggons.
“But why do we not go farther out ahead?” Temeraire said, when an easy two hours’ flight had brought them, the next morning, to their new covert. “It is not as though we are doing anything of use here but making ourselves some clearings; even those slow dragons can manage flying a little longer, surely.”
“They don’t want us getting too far off from the infantry,” Granby said. “For our sake as much as theirs; if we went off on our own and ran into a troop of French dragons with a regiment of their own infantry and a couple of guns to back them up, we shouldn’t enjoy it above half.”
In such a case, the enemy dragons would have a clear advantage, the field guns giving them a space of safety in which to regroup and rest, and providing a zone of danger against which the dragons without infantry support could be pinned. But despite this explanation, Temeraire still sighed, and only grumblingly reconciled himself to knocking down some more trees, for firewood and to clear space for himself and the Prussian dragons, while they waited for the marching infantry to catch up.