Chapter 8 I Don’t Have Enough Time and There Is Way Too Much to Do
“Die zeitt ist mir zu kurtz und die geschefte zu viel.”
Schwarzach
Francisco de Melon offered Grand Duke Bernhard his report, straightening out, to the best of his ability, the mixed-up biography, supposedly of himself, that Matt Trelli had received from the Grantville researchers back during the siege of Kronach, with some trepidation. Sometimes it was not easy to predict how the grand duke would react. Luckily, he found it hilariously entertaining.
“I myself,” Bernhard said, “found the article about me in the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica very gratifying. It was nice to know that I had gone down in history as ‘Bernhard the Great,’ rather than any of the things that my older brothers called me over the years.” He made a general gesture of Phhhhtt! in the direction of those absent older brothers. “Who wants to be remembered as ‘Bernhard the squirt.’ Not that I find the notion that in less than five years, I will be––would have been––dead particularly appealing. I still have far much too much to do and not enough time in which to do it. So I do pay attention to the up-time nurse I hired, whether she realizes that I do or not.”
Bernhard got up and started to stride around the room.
That constant, restless, movement was something that de Melon had noted before, and would report upon to the regent in Bolzen. The man did, quite literally, think on his feet.
“I was odd man out among the brothers in more than one way,” Bernhard was saying. “My older brothers, even Albrecht, all got names that were traditional in the Wettins. This caused a little confusion. We had Johann Ernst and Ernst. We had Wilhelm and Friedrich Wilhelm. We had Friedrich, Johann Friedrich, and Friedrich Wilhelm.”
He turned and tapped his finger on the table. “Actually, we also had Johann Wilhelm and one just plain Johann, but they both died before I was old enough to know them. That, plus we were all so close in age, made things so confusing that the people around Weimar didn’t even try to tell us apart. We were just ‘Die jungen Herrschaften auf dem Hornstein.’ The young lordships. Hornstein was where we lived. Frau Dunn, the nurse I was mentioning, calls this type of name ‘generic.’
“So by the time I came along, Mama had it up to the neck and insisted on naming me something that no Wettin in history had ever been named before. Then, since our father died when I was a year old and I therefore turned out to be the last boy of the crop, and energetic the way she was herself, she spoiled me, especially after my little sister died.”
Bernhard turned again, more abruptly, and leaned an elbow on the mantle of the fireplace.
De Melon emitted an encouraging mumble, designed to keep the discussion going.
For a couple of minutes, it seemed that it might not. The grand duke just looked into the fire.
“I was twelve when she died. She was out riding––we used to ride together, ever since I could sit on a pony. She was jumping the Ilm River when she came off her horse. She hit her head on a rock in the stream and drowned.”
Bernhard pulled himself away from the fireplace and started pacing again.
“If she were alive, she would be prostrate with fury to think that I’m marrying a Catholic. She left directions in her will that none of us should marry outside of the Lutheran faith. So much for filial piety, I suppose. I’ll just add that I’m going into this with open eyes. I recognize that this marriage may cause a catastrophe at some later time. I expect that the regent does as well.”
De Melon prudently remained silent.
“I stayed in Weimar with a tutor until I was fifteen, under the guardianship of Johann Ernst, who was all of twenty-three himself when Mama died. I told you we were all close in age. By 1619, all five of the ‘big boys’ were already in the field, involved with the Winter King and in serious political trouble with Ferdinand II and John George over in Albertine Saxony because of it. They assigned the local administration of Saxe-Weimar to Ernst, who was all of nineteen by then. The older brothers concluded that he would not have what it took to both run the duchy and supervise the two youngest of us, so they sent Friedrich Wilhelm and me off to Jena with a steward and two tutors to keep an eye on us. If nothing else, the family believed in education––especially on Mama’s side. It’s up in Anhalt where you’ll find the literary societies and the educational reformers spilling out the palace doors.”
De Melon did a mental count. The five “big boys” were now down to two––Wilhelm Wettin and Duke Albrecht. The other three were dead, two in battle and one a suicide while mentally disturbed. His brothers had placed him in confinement before that.
Bernhard suddenly, frighteningly, smiled. “Yes, I realize that you will report all this to the grand duchess.”
De Melon nodded.
“We were at the university for one five-month term. At the end of it, we were invited to go on a big hunt at Georgenthal. We caught smallpox. Friedrich Wilhelm died. I recovered and brought his body back to Weimar.
“One thing I’ll give Ernst credit for is that along with being the most incredibly idealistic person I’ve ever met, he’s also an utterly pragmatic realist. I get along with him a lot better than I do with Wilhelm. I refused to return to the university. He knew I meant it, so no matter what Johann Ernst wanted, he sent me to our Great-Uncle Johann Casimir at Coburg. I spent what were honestly the best two years of my life since Mama died in the Ritterakademie there. That’s what I wanted to be learning. Military skills, advanced riding. Practical stuff. Then I joined the army under Wilhelm, full-time, in 1622. I was eighteen and that’s where I’ve been ever since.”
Bernhard flung out a hand.
“All of that means that I don’t have a lot to offer to an Italian court lady in the way of companionship. I don’t have the education that my brothers got. I didn’t want it then and now I regret not having it, but there’s nothing to be done. Here’s what I was taught until I was fifteen: religion, Latin, French, geography, history, political theory, mathematics, and every imaginable form of physical education, including weapons training. Plus a really heavy dose of the legal system of Saxony as interpreted by Friedrich Hortleder, especially with a view to the rights of the Ernestine line vis-a-vis the Albertine line, and the rights within the Ernestine line of the Weimar line vis-a-vis the Altenburg line. Nobody could call old Hortleder impartial when it comes to defending the constitutional rights of Saxe-Weimar.
“Since then, I’ve learned war.
“If she wants to back out before we sign the pre-nup and make the betrothal official, give her the chance.”
✽✽✽
“No, it damned well isn’t want I wanted to be doing right now. It’s the very last thing I wanted to be doing this spring.” The grand duke of the County of Burgundy was not a happy man. “I need to be here. I don’t have enough time for this, and I have way too much to do.”
While a Catholic monastery was not Bernhard’s normal habitat, he had gotten used to it over the past several months. Schwarzach had a convenient set of large buildings in the Rhine river bottoms and was not far from what had once become Fort Louis. What was now becoming Fort... Well, it didn’t have a name yet. He was, in his few frivolous moments, considering Fort Independence.
“Whether or not you wanted to be doing it or not isn’t the issue, Bernhard. More to the point, is it avoidable?” von Erlach asked.
“I don’t see how. Not if we hope to continue getting the French subsidy––which, for the time being, we still need rather badly, considering all the expenses associated with constructing the citadel. Not considering our...inaction...before Mainz last spring. Not if we hope to maintain even the thinnest façade of acting in accordance with the agreement I signed with the cardinal.”
Rosen chewed on his moustache. “Do I have this straight. ? Richelieu wants you to move your cavalry into Lorraine. Reinforce the troops he has occupying the duchy.”
“Not precisely. That’s what the letter says. He sees, or states that he sees, Gaston’s movements as a potential threat to the French garrisons already in place. That’s what the letter says. What Richelieu wants is for me to use my cavalry to get Gaston out of Lorraine, while keeping Charles’ regiments in Lorraine. What he really wants me to do is separate Gaston from the command of the duke’s regiments. They haven’t been active these last couple of years, but they were really quite effective fighters. While I’m sure that Louis XIII doesn’t like seeing them in Lorraine, I’m sure that he’d like seeing Gaston bringing them into France proper as a personal army even less.”
Bernhard paused. “And reading between the lines, the French would like us, of course, to get the Habsburgs, in the person of Fernando, out of Lorraine at the same time.”
Der Kloster sat around the table, chewing on that.
“You think we have to move into Lorraine?” Erlach said.
“No way to avoid it. Not with what Bernhard just said. But...” Kanoffski paused.
“But what?” Rosen asked.
“The king in the Low Countries is already there,” Sydenham Poyntz interrupted. “Already chasing after Gaston. I can’t see that it would be prudent to risk coming into conflict with the Low Countries over a region that isn’t crucial to our aims. Not even if it’s crucial to French aims.”
Bernhard assumed an impassive expression. “There is no necessary reason for us to come into conflict with him.”
“How not?” Rosen released one side of his moustache and gathered in the other.
“In this case, we can interpret Richelieu’s reticence––his reluctance to put a casus belli with the Habsburgs into writing on a piece of paper which might fall into the hands of foreign powers––to our advantage. So. Why not suggest cooperation to Fernando, instead? We do have a common interest in removing an irritant––in de-flea-ing the dog, so to speak.”
“Who talks to whom?” Kanoffski had a tendency to get straight to the point.
“Since you asked, you do. You and...,” Bernhard looked around the table. “...Poyntz. Sydenham, Henry Gage, your fellow countryman, has been poking around this whole matter for Fernando. Go find him. Talk to him. See if he can get you in to talk directly to Fernando’s closest advisers––with Fernando himself, if possible. Explain that we will be moving, that we have no option but to move, and that we have good reason to wish to act in coordination with him rather than in conflict with him.”
“We do? Have good reason to wish any such thing, I mean?” Rosen managed to chew on both sides of his moustache at once.
Kanoffski laughed. “I expect that Poyntz may, if he considers it prudent, drip out information in regard to Tyrol. And its regent. I would certainly include that in the discussion.”
“Drop by little tiny drop, presumably,” Erlach said.
“Well, of course. But Friedrich is right. By putting it into the context of house politics...the desirability of amicable relations with my fiancée’s in-laws and all that.” Bernhard winked.
Lorraine
“It’s not that easy to move east-west in Lorraine,” Johann Bernard von Ohm said. “The French found that out when they invaded in 1632. The rivers all, basically, run north-south. The Meuse, the Moselle, the Meurthe. To get Lunéville , basically, we would have to send a separate force up the Meurthe valley.”
“We don’t need to get there,” Moritz Pensen von Caldenbach pointed out. “Not unless Gaston comes a lot farther south than he has so far. He’s supposedly somewhere around Verdun right now, so we can pretty much ignore the southeastern quarter of the duchy.”
Bodendorf scratched one ear. “The simplest, of course, would be to follow the Moselle through Épinal to Toul; then swing around to Nancy. That would take us half way, or almost. Leave the northern half for Fernando to worry about.”
“The half where Gaston actually is?” Caldenbach laughed.
“I’ll occupy Toul for Fernando,” Bernhard said, “if I can talk the commander into surrendering, given that I didn’t bring the siege guns along, but I don’t want Toul. Not at all. Lorraine is pretty solidly Catholic––not a mixed bag like Alsace and the Breisgau. I have enough Catholic dioceses on my hands already. There has to be some other way to sort this out once we’ve disposed of Gaston. Find some local people for me to talk to about Toul. And, as always, ‘May God be with us.’”
✽✽✽
“So this Lutheran who usually has his military headquarters in a Catholic monastery on the other side of the Rhine had me hauled out of my bed to tell him about the inner workings of the imperial diocese of Toul before he moved his regiments farther north,” Remiot said.
“This calls for another bottle of wine.”
“So I told him. ‘The prince-bishop of Toul? Ah, well, that was the duke’s brother who dispensed himself from being a cardinal and eloped with his cousin. He’s up in the Spanish Netherlands now with your friend Fernando keeping him under arrest.’”
Apremont pulled the cork. “Did you tell him that the chapter hasn’t gotten around to electing a new one, yet, though Gournay has been suffragan all along, has kept doing the work, and probably will be elected once things calm down. Well, maybe. The king of France insists that he has the right to nominate, the cathedral chapter claims that it still has the right to elect, and the pope insists that it’s an appointment reserved to him, so it could take a while.”
Remiot nodded. “It will depend on the Habsburgs in the Low Countries, now. Gournay has the favor of Duchess Nicole, though––and of Vincent de Paul, for what that may be worth. I’d be more likely to place my bets on the duchess.”
“The ex-cardinal was just ten years old when he was appointed to the succession and fifteen when he succeeded. He never took holy orders. The pope gave a dispensation because he hadn’t reached the canonical age, of course. The church tends to do that sort of thing for brothers of dukes. If he wants to talk to someone, he’d better talk to Gournay.” Apremont laughed until he cried, but, then, he was rather drunk by now.
✽✽✽
“I damned well hope that God is with us. I don’t mind saying that I’m uneasy,” Ohm swigged deeply from his beer stein. “We aren’t ready for this adventure in Lorraine. Overall, our troop strength is down to about sixteen thousand and, at least in my opinion, too much of that is infantry. Untrained infantry, a lot of it, or at least untested infantry, recruited out of Burgundy itself. We should have at least six thousand horse.”
“Ah, Papa. Such gloom.” Caldenbach laughed. “For you, there will always be too much infantry and not enough cavalry. Infantry is good enough for garrisons.” Caldenbach had once, before the Ring of Fire, been Ohm’s son-in-law. Although the young Maria Justina had died in childbirth after only a year of marriage, the two of them remained as close as father and son could be.
“He could be right.” That was Bodendorf. “Rotenhan is worried, too. Lieutenant Colonel Rehlinger has a lot of concerns.”
“Conrad Rehlinger’s father is the grand duke’s banker, for God’s sake. Conrad always has a lot of concerns. If Bernhard doesn’t pull the County of Burgundy scheme off, that firm is going to take a really deep bath.”
“Is Schaffelitzky going to bring his men?” Caldenbach asked. “I know that Rohan thinks highly of his performance when he was in the service of Venice and he’s done well under Gustavus, too.”
“The grand duke is negotiating,” Ohm said gloomily. “It’s a matter of money, I expect. If he does, it will be a help––bring us up close to strength. The last time I heard, he had over two thousand effectives under contract.”
“He’s an exiled Bohemian, isn’t he? Like Kanoffski.” That was Bodendorf again.
Ohm shook his head. “Not recently exiled. His father, already worked for the dukes of Württemberg and got estates in the duchy. I’m pretty sure that’s where he grew up––somewhere near Besigheim. ‘Von Muckodell’ tacked onto their name from somewhere in the east is just a historical memory.”
“Schaffelitzky actually is coming. Definitely.” Bodendorf was firm about that. “I heard that much from Erlach. He’s somewhere in the Sundgau, with nearly two thousand horse.”
“Last time I heard, it was ‘over two thousand,’” Ohm protested.
“He’s been on the move and you always lose some in transit.” Bodendorf was a practical man.
“I have to say that relieves my mind. Some.” Ohm took a huge swig of beer. “But the grand duke is still leaving Schon by himself in Besançon and sending Hattstein to Dôle. That splits the cavalry badly. Damn, but I wish that Taupadel hadn’t decided to stick with the Swedes. I expected it of Nassau and the Rhinegrave, since they had lands that might fall into Gustavus’ power, and Birkenfeld never was able to bring himself to be subordinate to Bernhard. No man whose house had a seat in the old Reichstag was likely to risk not having one in the CPE Chamber of Princes, but losing Taupadel hurt.”
Caldenbach laughed sharply. “They got their just deserts––every single one of them has lost those precious seats in the new USE House of Lords, the way Gustavus set up the provinces at the Congress of Copenhagen.”
“There’s no way to avoid splitting the cavalry.” Bodendorf’s interest in the wider political implications was minimal. “Bernhard has to protect both his own new capital and the Franche Comté’s old capital. He can’t afford to lose the court system. Nor, certainly, the tax records. Also, Dôle is where the parlement meets. That’s what they call their Estates. They’ll have to keep meeting there for a while, at least. Besançon doesn’t have a big enough assembly hall yet.”
“And Rotenhan is at Belfort,” Ohm grumbled.
“Bernhard could scarcely leave the main pass between the Vosges and the Jura undefended.”
“That’s what I said to start with, Bodendorf. The grand duke is spreading himself too thin.” Ohm got up, a little unsteady on his feet.
“At least he plans to bring de Guébriant’s command up into Lorraine with us.” Caldenbach stood also, pulling Ohm’s arm over his shoulders.
“Oh, sure. A Frenchman to fight another Frenchman in Lorraine. None us have been in the field with him before.”
“I think––hope––the man is loyal. He has a good reputation.”
“He doesn’t know it was Bernhard who ransomed him out after Ahrensbök.”
“He isn’t supposed to.”
✽✽✽
“It’s an eagle on his standard. See.” Private Joachim Karpff, with the dignity and prestige that went with having served under the grand duke since the days when he was just a colonel fighting under the Danish crown, gestured toward the waving banner under which Bernhard was marching. “White. That shiny fabric is called damask. The embroidery is real gold thread. The eagle is his.”
“What do you mean, ‘the eagle is his’?” Private Hallier was a new, very young, recruit, out of Burgundy. They weren’t in formation yet. As the rear guard, they would move out last.
“It’s his own eagle. When he was born, they say, an eagle flew over the castle in Thuringia where his mother was in labor. Hardly any eagles over there. It was an omen that he would do great things.”
“What’s the motto?”
“Something Latin.”
“That’s no help.”
“Ask the chaplain.”
“They say there was a bad omen at his birth, too,” Ensign David Sinclair said, holding their own company’s banner carefully upright. “That he was born with a caul. He’ll come to a bad end.”
“Not while I’m alive, you superstitious Scotsman,” Karpff said. “I’ll follow him wherever he goes. To hell itself and back, if I have to. And while I’m alive, I’ll make sure you do the same. If that banner ever goes down, you’ll answer to me.”
Corporal Caspar Klumpe shook his head. “Don’t let the preacher hear you saying that. He’s a Lutheran, but the grand duke makes him keep an eye on us Catholics and Calvinists, too.”
“There goes Captain Starschedel with the grand duke’s war horse,” someone behind them yelled.
“Ugly beast.” Hallier wrinkled his nose. “Black as a raven.”
“That’s the fellow’s name. Rabe. Tip your hat.” Karpff reached out and grabbed the offending hat.
“To a horse?”
“It’s the custom. The raven’s carried the grand duke through a lot of battles. Tip your damned hat.”
✽✽✽
Inside the command tent, Bernhard finished signing a pile of letters, orders, reports, directives, and requisitions. “That finishes the routine stuff. I wish we were in harvest season, not early spring. It would be so much easier to get grain. It would be so much cheaper to get grain.”
His secretary, Michael John, nodded impassively.
“Have we received a reply from Rohan?”
“He accepts your offer of becoming Statthalter in the Franche Comté during your unavoidable absence, given your willingness to let him have Tobias von Ponikau as his second-in-command.”
“Thank goodness. A permanent, or even semi-permanent, rift between us now would not have done either of us any good at all. “Now.” The grand duke pulled out another letter. “As for our honorable ally in the Low Countries.”
John waited.
“I’m perfectly willing to cooperate with Fernando on this. However, if he gets annoying or starts acting overbearing and generally Habsburg-ish, tweak his tail a little. You can always remind him that I descend from Sybilla of Cleves and could, if I took the notion, go play in his sandbox up around Essen. In my younger days, I was even known to include ‘Duke of Jülich, Cleves, and Berg’ among my titles when I was in the mood.” Bernhard stood up.
“Not that I’m in the mood. The USE ambassadress in Basel, Frau Jackson, has taught me a great deal about sandboxes.” He stretched and laughed. Out loud. For the first time in as long as he could remember. “Go get some sleep. I’ll finish the rest of this myself.”
John bowed his way out.
Bernhard picked up a quill and pulled out a clean sheet of paper. He would at least start a letter to Claudia before he dropped with exhaustion. “I don’t know whether I ought to start this note with an apology or a narrative...” The letter got to be rather longer than a note. He ended by saying that he wouldn’t bore her with his problems any longer.
✽✽✽
“He’s learning,” John said with a grin. “Thank goodness.”
“What is he learning?” Erlach, finishing up his own daily pile of paper work, yawned. “I’ve absolutely got to get back to Breisach. Who knows what the fucking hell is going on there while I’m pinned down here.”
“That territories don’t administer themselves.” The secretary stretched. “That running one is even more work than organizing an army on the move. Kanoffski needs to get back to Freiburg, too. If you want to know what I think... Well, Johann Hoffmann thinks so, too––he used to serve the grand duke as secretary, but now he’s back working for Wilhelm Wettin. He knows all of the Saxe-Weimar brothers pretty well.”
“I’d be fascinated.”
“All these years, when he was dreaming of having a duchy of his own...or a county, I suppose, now.”
“Yes.”
“What he really saw was a plinth somewhere. Or a pedestal. Up on it, a statue of himself in armor. On the base, an inscription that read ‘Bernhard the Conqueror.’ With all the daily or near-daily military field reports long behind him and somewhere, in a back room, one of his brothers doing the civilian work for him. But now, with all the older ones busy doing other things...”
“And to think that you look so harmless, John.”
“As I said. He’s learning. Thank goodness.”
“Is he learning fast enough?”
✽✽✽
“I have it,” Johann Michael Moscherosch said triumphantly.
“Have what?”
Bernhard’s poet and public relations man looked up irritably. “The campaign theme, of course. I’ve been working on the press releases.”
Michael John winced.
“This campaign demonstrates that anyone who criticized the grand duke’s withdrawal of his cavalry from before Mainz into southern Alsace in the spring of 1634 was sadly misled about the intentions of this upstanding general and now sovereign prince. Grand Duke Bernhard is fully prepared to defend by force, when necessary... etc. etc. etc.”
Moscherosch stood up. “We need to hire a cartoonist. There’s no point in risking what some satirist like van de Passe might make of what we’re doing in Lorraine. We’ll issue our own––plates, ready for the printers to use. Let me think. I need another writer, too. No matter how I try to disguise my style, somebody might figure out that I’m writing all the articles and distributing them. The grand duke just doesn’t have enough staff. Simplicity is all well and good, but he’s still trying to live like an ordinary mid-level officer rather than a ruler.”
✽✽✽
“We have received,” Rosen said, “another charming missive from Père Joseph, this one enclosing a rather large chart. He has ideas, it seems, in regard to what the French subsidy should be buying for France in the way of conquests.”
“Our dear friend the Capuchin,” Kanoffski said, unrolling the chart and looking around. “One of Richelieu’s new cardinals. Give me that mug, will you. We’ll need something substantial on every corner. It doesn’t want to straighten out. They used tape with flour paste to hold the sheets of paper together and it’s stiff. It must have gotten damp since they rolled it up.”
“Here.” Erlach added both his gauntlets to the cause of making it lie flat. “Dear Father Joseph. Friar and war minister. A man who was, in the other world, happy to ally France with Gustavus Adolphus as long as both of them were opposing the Habsburgs.”
“On the theory, let us not forget, that one poison will counteract the other.” Kanoffski weighted down the final corner with his dagger.
Bernhard looked at the elaborately drawn plan. “War would be much simplified,” he remarked drily, “if a general could take cities by touching their names with his finger on a map.”
✽✽✽
“What the hell is Gaston doing in Commercy, already,” Bodendorf exploded. “The last we heard, he was somewhere around Verdun.”
“Count your blessings,” Rosen admonished. “He’s still north of Toul.”
They needed to keep Gaston from moving any farther south. That was what the king in the Netherlands had tasked them to do. Hopefully, they would be able to force him out of Commercy and back into the north of the duchy, to a point where Fernando’s forces could get behind him and herd him back into the Low Countries.
They were counting, possibly without sufficient justification, on his not being able to turn west into France. This latest undertaking had destroyed the latest of his many reconciliations with his brother. How often could he burn his bridges with Louis XIII? As long as there was no nearer heir to the throne, who knew? Maybe he would go west. Gaston was utterly unpredictable.
What they hadn’t counted on were the Lorrainers, who were getting tired––very tired––of having foreign armies rampaging through the duchy. At Rémiremont, the abbess, an aunt of Charles IV, had a garrison in place. A local nobleman, with a scrambled together body of peasant militia, managed to throw himself into the town ahead of Bernhard. The commander then, at her orders, refused to open the gates.
With a sigh, Bernhard sent for some artillery, which he had not expected to need. That was a delay in itself. Without the artillery, they assaulted with ladders.
Without success.
Once the cannons arrived, they opened a breech breach in the walls.
They next thing they saw was not only soldiers and townsmen, but a squadron of nuns, hauling rock through the streets to close the breechbreach.
That night, the guns opened another breechbreach.
The next morning, not only the nuns but, it appeared, every woman in the town, was out hauling rock to the barricades.
On the sixth day, Bernhard reluctantly assigned a sufficient number of men to Rémiremont to keep the garrison from coming out, told the artillery to stay put, just in case, and moved around the town.
“There is,” he wrote to Claudia with reluctant humor, “very little military glory to be gained by fighting nuns. Please forgive my disorganized writing and assure yourself that I am and remain your very humble servant.”
Next stop, Épinal. At least they were, to the best of their knowledge, still south of Gaston’s forces.
He sent back to the Franche Comté for more artillery, with all that meant in the way of diminished mobility. It wasn’t as if one just brought up the guns. To be useful, guns had to be provisioned even more than men did, which meant wagons full of powder; wagons full of shot. More draft horses to be fed. More teamsters to be fed.
He spent several evenings just working on the calculations. To Fernando, he reported, “everything so far, because of the bad weather and other inconveniences, has been going very slowly.”
✽✽✽
All of the intelligence reports, to both Bernhard and Fernando, concentrated on tracing Gaston and the regiments he brought out of the Low Countries. Even though Fernando expressed a wish to know where Henriette and Puylaurens had gone, this didn’t seem to be a priority, for the simple reason that they didn’t have soldiers. At most, everyone knew, they had a very small escort. It couldn’t be more than two dozen men.
That was quite true, Because they had a very small escort, they managed to go east, come down the Saar, and get into her territories around Phalsburg and Lixheim without attracting much notice. A generous application of the funds they raised along the way scrabbled together a regiment of experienced ex-mercenaries.
A certain number of those ex-mercenaries had dribbled away from the four Irish dragoon regiments that left the archbishop of Cologne earlier in the spring. They, like the rest of the colonels’ men, had encountered plague long the way. They brought it with them. It wasn’t a lot of plague, though, and there was always some plague around.
Henriette thought about it. Admittedly, neither the officers nor the men had experience working with one another, but it was still a regiment.
What’s more, Grand Duke Bernhard wouldn’t be expecting to see a regiment coming at Épinal from St-Dié.
It was worth a shot. At worst, it would be a distraction for the joint protectorate’s forces.
Not that she had any particular sympathy for Gaston. She had less every passing day, but she would rather like to see her brother back in the ducal palace in Nancy. Not to mention that she truly, truly, truly would like to see the French out of Pfalzburg.
“You’re not coming with us, Your Highness,” the colonel exclaimed, appalled. He was unhappy enough at the thought of babysitting Puylaurens.
“If I pay for something,” Henriette answered, “I see for myself whether or not it works.”
✽✽✽
Ohm had been drinking too much all spring. He knew it, Caldenbach knew it, the rest of the Kloster knew it, and probably Bernhard knew it. He’d admit that he wasn’t at the very top of his form. Still, he was perfectly functional. When his scouts reported the appearance of a foreign regiment just this side of St. Dié, he sent them back to identify it and got his own into battle order.
He didn’t expect the scouts to come back with the news that they couldn’t identify the enemy. If nothing else, he’d been paying enough attention at the staff meetings that he knew which players were on the board.
Hell, no. He had not been having blackouts.
He put the captain of his guards company in charge of holding his men where they were and rode out with the scouts himself. There weren’t a lot of advantages to getting old, but one of the few was that you had met a lot more people than any eighteen-year-old was likely to have done.
Another advantage of getting old was that sometimes it improved a fellow’s distance vision. The trade-off was that he had to wear glasses to read, but given his vocation, he preferred the way it fell out.
He tied his horse to a tree and followed the scout to the edge of the low bluff.
Grinned.
At least, now someone knew where Henriette and Puylaurens had gotten to, and that someone just happened to be him.
Bernhard and Fernando would thank him for this.
Sliding down as quietly as he had climbed up, he headed back toward his regiment, fumbled his glasses out of the sturdy metal case in his saddle bag, wrote hurried notes, and sent off three messengers.
Then he turned around.
He knew they were coming.
Unless they had better scouts than he thought they did, scouts who had managed to hide from him, they didn’t know that he was here.
Now what could he do about it?
A fair amount, but he had three hundred men to their––at a guess––five or six hundred.
Henriette and Puylaurens, thanks to the perfectly competent colonel she had hired, managed to withdraw from the engagement in good order, back toward St-Dié.
Ohm came out of it with a terrible headache. If he hadn’t been wearing his helmet, he’d be dead.
He wasn’t as fast as he used to be. He couldn’t do anything about time, but he could cut back on the drinking.
✽✽✽
Schaffelitzky, crossed southern Alsace from the Breisgau and brought his two thousand men toward Bernhard via the alternate route up the Meurthe.
Captain von Hersbach leaned down from his saddle. This child with three sheep was the first sign of life he had seen for miles.
“Are you Croats?”
This was one suspicious little girl.
“Why do you ask?”
“You are on horses. The soldiers on horses, we call Croats.”
“No.”
“Are you the duke’s men?”
“Which duke?”
“Our duke. Duke Charles.”
“No. We are soldiers of duke Bernhard.”
“I don’t know him. Where are you going?”
“To Épinal.”
“They have already burned down the villages between here and Épinal. You won’t find any grain.”
“Our commander sent food for us. There is bread at Épinal, baked and waiting for us. We are looking for other soldiers.”
“People have been fighting,” the little girl said, “but they are still a long way away. Almost five miles, over by where the second husband of maman’s aunt lived before he died. We never pay attention to soldiers unless they come much closer than that.”
“Do you know who the soldiers are?” Captain von Hersbach asked carefully, not wanting to alarm her.
“The village council met last night. The mayor said they come from Pfalzburg. I don’t know where that is.”
“Do you know the name of the place where your mother’s aunt’s second husband lived.”
She nodded. “Bruyères.”
“Thank you very much.” He started to hand her a coin, thought again, reached into his saddle bag, and gave her a quarter-loaf of stale bread and a little jerky. “What is your name?”
“Barbeline, mon capitan. Barbeline Cayel.”
✽✽✽
When Henriette’s scouts reported that Schaffelitzky, who was recognized by one of them, was approaching with a couple of thousand cavalry, she decided that there were times when prudence should trump glory. She had considerable prudence––she just wished that someone else would notice. Over the vociferous objections of Puylaurens, she insisted that they withdraw their forces to Pfalzburg. Antoine sulked.
This withdrawal was also made in good order. Of course, they lost some deserters. As the colonel said, that always happened.
Some of those stragglers attached themselves to Schaffelitzsky’s baggage train, carrying plague down the Meurthe in the direction of Nancy.
✽✽✽
“How in hell did Gaston get this far south?”
“If we wait,” Bodendorf said, “the artillery will eventually come.”
“If we wait long enough, judgment day will arrive and we will all be carried up into heaven to the sound of trumpets.” Bernhard pushed his abundant hair back impatiently and clubbed it into a knot at the back of his neck. “I am not so thrilled with being at Charmes that I’m inclined to stay longer than I have to. With the reinforcements Schaffelitzky brought, we can overrun it.”
The ordinary soldiers considered the grand duke’s tendency to place himself in the middle of the action to be charismatic.
His senior staff considered the grand duke’s tendency to place himself in danger of life and limb, especially when he didn’t absolutely have to, to be a form of hybris and a constant irritation.
As it turned out, they couldn’t overrun it.
✽✽✽
“Well, my lady,” he wrote to Claudia, “I won’t delay you any longer with such insignificant items as the loss of my index finger, luckily on the left hand or my scribbles would be even more illegible than they usually are, but rather will end this note and herewith I recommend you and yours to God’s gracious protection.”
✽✽✽
The artillery did eventually show up and his army went into siege status.
As it turned out, the fortifications at Charmes had underground tunnels. Most of the soldiers eventually surrendered, but by then, Monsieur Gaston was long gone, back to Commercy.
Basel
“Tony,” Diane Jackson said.
“Yes, ma’am.” Tony Adducci––the younger Tony––looked up from the book he was reading.
“Have you read this about Lorraine?”
“Saw it in the papers this morning. Looks to me like the grand duke is possibly biting off more than he can chew.”
“I am very disappointed. Hasn’t he learned his lesson?”
“What was that joke someone made about Gustavus Adolphus and Christian IV last year? Back when they were setting up the Union of Kalmar? ‘Kinkering kongs.’”
Diane looked blank.
Tony explained why turning “conquering kings” into “kinkering kongs” was supposed to be funny.
The ambassadress didn’t think so. “We don’t need another one of those. Not on the doorsteps of Basel.”
Diane snorted in disgust the morning she saw the newspaper reports of events at Charmes. “Frank’s mother,” she informed her trusty bodyguards, “used to say that ‘the good Lord protects fools and small children.’ Why does He bother?”