Ring of Fire III (68 page)

“All told, I think there’s another five hundred or so cavalry on your tail,”
she continued.
“They’re a lot closer, but they’re hard to count because they’re scattered all over east Jesus. I can’t for the life of me figure out what their commanding officer thinks he’s doing. Over.”

“They’re probably foraging,” Tom replied. “We haven’t been leaving anything behind for them.”

He was feeling a little guilty about that, but only a little. His troops were taking all the foodstuffs they could find as they marched down the Danube, and burning everything behind them. That wasn’t much, in midwinter, but it was enough to keep his men and—most important of all—their horses going. They hadn’t been able to bring much fodder with them when they left Ingolstadt. If they lost the horses, they lost their cannons, and without those guns they didn’t have much chance of fighting off a force as big as the one pursuing them.

That was hard on the population, of course. But if Tom’s soldiers hadn’t taken the stuff, the Bavarians would have. At least the Danube Regiment was passing out promissory notes for it. What was probably more important, from the immediate standpoint of people living in the towns and villages they passed through, was that Tom’s rump regiment provided them with an escort. Refugees were now streaming away from the Bavarian onslaught, but these were the only ones who had military protection.

A lot of the refugees were coming out of Ingolstadt itself, according to Rita, some of whom were being savaged by Bavarian cavalry as they tried to flee. Her voice had been tight when she reported that; taut with anger.

Tom’s own fury was near a boiling point. It was a near-constant struggle to keep his temper under control. The Bavarians were clearly making no effort to restrain their troops. The reports he got from Rita on the
Pelican
kept reminding him of the horror that the collapse of the Danube Regiment had allowed to spill over the inhabitants of Ingolstadt and stretches of the Oberpfalz near or on the Danube.

Some of his rage was sublimated guilt. Whatever the reasons might be, in the end he and Colonel Engels had been responsible for the regiment. He was by no means blind to that reality. But most of Tom’s anger was not directed at himself. It was not even directed at Duke Maximilian. The ruler of Bavaria had only been able to suborn the 1st Battalion because of the political crisis produced in the USE by the actions of the Swedish chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna. So far as Tom was concerned, every murder, every mutilation, every rape, every act of arson and every theft committed by Bavarian soldiers could be laid at the feet of that bastard.

Not that he was giving Maximilian or his commanding officers a pass, either. There was no excuse for the conduct of their troops. The mayhem being inflicted on USE civilians went far beyond the occasional atrocities and excesses that were an inevitable feature of war. These soldiers hadn’t simply been set loose, they’d obviously been given the green light to run wild by Bavaria’s leaders.

Why?
Tom wondered. Even in narrowly military terms, the policy made little sense to him. The Bavarians were not nomadic raiders, who simply intended to return to the steppes with their booty. Duke Maximilian planned to seize the Oberpfalz—as much of it as he could grab, at least—in in order to use its assets. So what was the point of ravaging the area? Of all those assets, the human resources were far and away the most valuable. Leaving aside the people being killed, there was now a flood of refugees heading north, east and west. There were close to a thousand such people being shepherded ahead of them by his own troops.

He hadn’t been able to spare much time—no time at all, really—for the needs of those people. Fortunately, Johann Heinrich Böcler had taken charge of that task. Some initial prodding from Bonnie Weaver had been necessary, because Böcler didn’t think of himself as an “authority.” Partly that was his youth, partly that was his modest origins; but mostly, Tom suspected, it was just the man’s personality. The provincial administrator’s secretary was one of those people whose natural relationship to the world’s affairs was that of an observer more than a participant.

That didn’t necessarily mean such people were incompetent, however, whenever they set their minds to a practical task. Often they were not, and in some cases that same detachment made them very good at such work. They were more objective about the decision that needed to be made, and less prone to letting their own aspirations and ambitions influence them unduly.

How good would Böcler be at such an assignment? Tom had no idea. But he was pretty sure they’d know within a day or two. This column of people moving down the Danube might be going slowly, but so did a pressure cooker.

* * *

By the time they made camp for the night, Bonnie had already come to a conclusion on that subject. Once again, pudgy little Johann Heinrich Böcler was proving to be a man of greater substance than he looked.

True, he fussed a lot. Unflappable under pressure, steady at all times...well, no. He tended to get agitated, he talked a lot, and he dithered back and forth before coming to a decision. But he always did come to a decision, and he didn’t dither for long. And insofar as the fussing and talking was concerned, that might well be an asset under these conditions. He was dealing with large numbers of frightened, uncertain and often confused people. His willingness to talk with them, once his authority was established, probably helped to calm them down.

Even in the seventeenth century, Germans tended to be a law-abiding folk. They were not particularly orderly, though—Bonnie had never seen a trace of the automatic obedience ascribed to Germans in the folk mythology of her own universe—and they were quite willing to argue with the powers-that-be. At the drop of a hat, in fact. But that those powers existed legitimately was not something they disputed. They just felt keenly that they had a right to be consulted before they were commanded to do something, and they were always sensitive to issues of fairness.

Böcler’s authority derived from his status as the personal secretary of Christian I of Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler, the imperially-appointed administrator of the Oberpfalz. The fact that he’d served in the same post for the previous administrator bolstered his status also. Ernst of Saxe-Weimar had been a popular figure in the province. “A fair-minded man,” was a phrase you heard often when people spoke of him.

Böcler had that sense of fairness also. Perhaps that was his detachment at work, but Bonnie couldn’t do more than guess at that. She still barely knew the man, although working with him in such close proximity and under such severe conditions was drastically speeding up a process that would normally have taken months, given his reserved nature. By late morning, at his invitation, she’d started calling him Heinz. That nickname was not used by many people who knew the secretary.

Heinz would have been a disaster as a politician. Glad-handing, back-slapping—the thought of him kissing babies was downright hysterical—these were not his skills, to put it mildly. But he was conscientious and he listened to people. So, with few exceptions, his decisions were accepted with good grace, even by people who had wanted a different one.

Those were usually people who just wanted to rest for a while, something that Heinz never allowed them to do until the army itself halted the march and began making camp. Then, Heinz chivvied his charges relentlessly, insisting that they had to help the soldiers set up the camp. Not until that was done—yes, that included digging latrines; of course it did!—would he allow the civilians to finally rest.

But he’d been chivvying the cooks and sutlers just as relentlessly, so when the time finally came when labors could cease, there was food ready—and he saw to it that it was fairly distributed. He did not eat himself until he was sure that everyone else had been fed.

He was quite a guy, actually, in his own sort of way. Bonnie realized he was growing on her. And was surprised again.

* * *

Captain von Haslang was in a much fouler mood than the American woman two miles downstream, whom he’d never met and whose name he didn’t even know. The day’s pursuit—by now he was using the term derisively—had been a disaster from daybreak to sundown.

The retreating force was doing a very good job of destroying everything behind them. (So much, if further evidence was needed, for the absurd notion that Major Simpson was a fumbling novice.) In some places, where the conditions were suitable, they’d felled trees across the road. And not one bridge spanning the occasional smaller streams that entered the Danube was left intact.

Worst of all, the enemy hadn’t simply destroyed the bridges. The first one that Colonel von Schnetter’s soldiers had come across had seemed in fine shape—until they crossed over it and discovered it had been mined. Eight men were killed in the explosion and twice as many badly wounded.

Thereafter, the enemy had simply brought down the bridges, figuring that the surprise wouldn’t work twice. But they left other mines hidden alongside the road. Given the hurried manner in which the mines had been designed and laid, the Bavarian troops spotted and disarmed all but one of them before any damage was done. The single mine they missed had been set well to the side and only injured one man when it went off, and him not badly.

But that didn’t really matter, because the mines were doing the critical task for the enemy—they were drastically slowing down the pursuers.

The pursuing
infantry,
that was to say. If the cavalry had been doing their job properly, they’d have been constantly harassing the enemy—which would have accomplished the same task of delaying the opponent’s movements. All other things being equal, a mostly-infantry force should be able to overtake an enemy that was primarily made up of artillery units.

And why wasn’t the cavalry doing its job? Because its donkey of a commander, Colonel Johann von Troiberz, had sent his men all over the countryside—everywhere, it seemed, except in the vicinity of the retreating Danube Regiment.

“Foraging,” he claimed. And stubbornly kept claiming, no matter how angrily Colonel von Schnetter demanded that he bring the cavalry units back into the pursuit. The claim was either a lie—nothing but a fig leaf for looting—or, which might even be worse, an attempt to cover up gross negligence or outright corruption.

It was true enough that cavalry—infantry too, for that matter—needed to forage from the countryside if they undertook a long march that outstripped the ability of the supply train to keep up. But that should not be necessary
on the very first day.
Any experienced cavalry unit with even half-competent officers had enough sense to load their mounts with ten to fifteen pounds of hay and a bit of oats or bran.

It was conceivable that von Troiberz was that much of a bungler. The officers he surrounded himself with were not much if any better. But von Haslang was almost certain that the real reason von Troiberz’s cavalry had set out with no supplies for their horses was because their commander—probably in cabal with his top subordinates—had sold those supplies on the black market.

Whatever the explanation, von Schnetter and von Haslang were pursuing a well-led enemy with nothing more than infantry companies. Even if they did manage to catch up with them, the ensuing battle would be ferocious. Without cavalry to threaten and tear at the enemy’s flanks, they’d be forced to launch frontal assaults in the face of field guns that would certainly be loaded with canister.

Von Haslang had even considered—it was quite possible his commander had done the same—that it might be wisest to simply slack off a bit in the pursuit. Stay on the heels of the Danube Regiment but let them make their escape into Regensburg. A siege of Regensburg was going to be necessary, in any event. While there was no doubt the addition of Simpson’s forces would strengthen the defense, that was a problem for a later day.

A sound from above distracted him. The enemy airship had returned and was again passing over the Bavarian column. It was no more than five hundred feet from the ground, but that was enough to put them out of range of infantry firearms. Effective fire, at any rate. It was conceivable that if a volley were fired at it, one or two bullets might strike the thing. But at that height, even if it struck the small boatlike appendage that held the passengers, it would hardly do much damage.

The contraption made a surprising racket. Von Haslang hadn’t expected that. From a distance, the dirigible’s flight seemed serene and effortless. But up close, the engines that drove the fans that propelled it forward were extraordinarily loud.

The distraction was brief. Captain von Haslang went back to his grim thoughts and prognostications, now made all the worse for the irritating noise yammering at his ears.

Chapter 12

That very moment, as it happened, Rita was looking down on Captain von Haslang—or rather, at the small group of mounted officers at the front of the Bavarian column, among whom he was riding. At that height, even with up-turned faces not hidden by hats, it was impossible to distinguish individual persons. And it wouldn’t have mattered if she could. She’d never met the captain, or, indeed, any of the Bavarian officers.

She’d never met Duke Maximilian either, for that matter. But she could probably have recognized him at close range, because she’d seen a good likeness of him in a portrait.

Not that she’d want to be in close range of the man. By all accounts she’d ever heard, Bavaria’s ruler was as cold and deadly as a viper.

The
Pelican
had just returned from its first refueling stop at Regensburg. That had gone quite smoothly, much more so than Rita had expected and certainly more smoothly than she’d feared. Not only had there been no quarrels, but the city’s authorities had already had barrels of fuel brought out to the airfield. It seemed that the administrator of the Oberpfalz and the president of the SoTF had both sent radio messages to Regensburg instructing the city’s officials to do everything possible to aid Major Simpson and his one-craft air force.