1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  Chapter 22

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  While Jeff waited for the Hangman Regiment to come up, he got on the radio and gave the forward battery firm—you might almost say blistering—instructions to quit entertaining themselves blowing up an already demolished barbican and start firing further into the city.

  Eric Krenz arrived right after he finished the transmission. He’d gotten there that quickly only by riding a horse, which Eric detested even more than Jeff did. But Krenz was a veteran and understood the unpleasant realities of life for someone who got to put the prestigious monicker “Major” in front of his name. Seeing the somewhat pickled expression on his friend’s face, Jeff didn’t doubt at all that at this very moment Eric was cursing himself—again—for having been stupid enough to accept an officer’s commission.

  But he didn’t say anything once he pulled up beside Jeff. A bit of a wonder, that—Krenz was usually quick to lament his woes, volubly and out loud. To Jeff, at least. He didn’t piss and moan in front of his troops.

  Instead, the major’s first words upon gazing at the now collapsed barbican were: “What the hell happened?” He looked around, feigning puzzlement. “Did Admiral Simpson somehow bring his ironclads across fields and meadows in order to bring down the walls with his ten-inch rifles?”

  “Very funny. What happened, Eric, is that apparently this stupid barbican was on the verge of collapsing anyway. It didn’t take more than a few minutes before the mortars brought it down.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Yes, it is. Sadly, it’s also true.”

  Jeff had never known anyone who could simultaneously crab and complain and think quickly at the same time. Krenz had immediately come to the right conclusion. “No help for it, then. We’ll have to do a mass frontal assault right into the teeth of enemy fire.”

  “Well, there’s the good news. According to Junker”—he pointed at the airplane which was passing over Kraków again—“the soldiers guarding the gate have already fled. If we move fast enough, we could get over the wall without suffering too many casualties.”

  There were bound to be some casualties, even if they encountered no enemy fire at all. Some of the men racing to clamber over a collapsed wall would stumble or trip or just lose their footing. The same would happen to men racing over a corduroy road laid atop a jury-rigged “bridge” made of rubble and fascines.

  That was one of the dark secrets of war, rarely mentioned in the history books. Jeff could still remember how surprised he’d been when he discovered, as a teenager who read a lot of military history, that a sizeable percentage of “deaths in combat” were due to accidents. That was not really surprising, when you thought about it. Men in a battle would take risks they’d never do in peacetime—and it didn’t help any that most of the men taking the risks were still too young to have a good gauge of risk in the first place.

  Krenz rose in his stirrups, trying to get a better view of the moat. Then, looked to the side and over his shoulder. Back there, hidden in the trees, would be the combat engineers and their fascines.

  “You want to order them up now, then?” he asked. “If there’s no enemy to fire on them, they can get a head start.”

  Jeff hesitated. He’d been considering the same thing himself. The sticky problem was that…

  “I’ll lead the charge,” Eric said. His lips twisted into something between a whimsical smile and a snarl, an expression that Jeff didn’t think anyone but Krenz could manage to pull off.

  That had been the sticky problem, however. If the combat engineers saw one of the regiment’s top officers leading the way, they’d be a lot more willing to press the matter forcefully, with a minimum of dithering.

  Jeff glanced at his friend’s hip. “You’re going to do it with that to wave around? And what did you do with your sword, anyway?”

  “Oh, I sold it long ago. Got a good price for it, too—enough to buy this fancy quirt and still have plenty left over for beer.”

  He reached down and drew the quirt from his belt, where it had been attached by a simple loop on the handle. Then, raised it and gazed upon it admiringly.

  It was a fine quirt, true enough. It had a longer handle than most, and the forked lashes at the tips were comparatively short. The main purpose of it was clearly to brandish about, not to drive livestock.

  “So light,” he said. “Best of all, if—more like when—I fall off the horse I can’t stab myself like I’d surely do if I was using a stupid sword.”

  Jeff had considered that option himself. Unfortunately, as the commanding officer of the regiment… There were limits to protocol that even the DM couldn’t cross.

  “All right,” he said. “Have at it.”

  * * *

  Giving credit where credit was due, Krenz did a fine job of leading the combat engineers up to the moat. Calling it a “charge” was mangling the term. Men rolling big bundles of sticks and brushwood tied up into crude cylinders—which was all fascines were, never mind the fancy Latin—could hardly be said to “charge.” Still, they were crossing a level plain with not much in the way of obstacles. The plain was so devoid of vegetation, in fact, that Jeff wondered if the garrison had kept it so in order to provide a good field of fire. That didn’t seem to match the general decrepitude of the fortifications, though.

  They had about three hundred yards to cross, which a man walking could have done in three minutes. It took the engineers at least ten minutes to do the same. Happily, Eddie’s intelligence proved to be accurate. No one fired on them.

  Once they reached the moat, they began filling it with the fascines wherever the rubble hadn’t already done the job. By the time they were finished, the engineers bringing up the pre-made corduroy road had arrived. They’d brought the road on a wagon, of course. The thing was much too heavy for men to carry and while it could theoretically have been rolled, there wasn’t much chance of doing it without mishaps.

  That took no time at all to lay across the support provided by rubble and fascines. The end result was undoubtedly the most wretched road within fifty miles—probably anywhere in Poland—but it would do the job.

  And by then the Hangman Regiment was more than halfway across the field. With Jeff leading the way riding his horse and looking suitably martial. He even waved his sword a few times.

  * * *

  For a wonder, Murphy was slacking off. The leading companies got all the way over the rubble and into the city itself before they came under any kind of enemy fire—and that was pretty skimpy. A few snipers, nothing more than that. To make things even better, the snipers didn’t seem to be armed with anything other than muzzle-loading muskets, judging from their inaccuracy and rate of fire.

  Or they could just be lousy shots. Either way, they were soon driven off by the regiment’s counterfire. Jeff’s men were armed with breech-loading rifles that were far more accurate than whatever Kraków’s defenders had.

  Jeff didn’t pay much attention to the sniper duel, though. A quick study of the collapsed barbican showed that it was just as badly ruined as it had looked from the outside. It would take at least two hours to clear a path wide enough for cavalry to come through, and he didn’t want to lose that much time. In any event, there wasn’t enough room for more than a company of one hundred men to work on clearing away the rubble. Any more would just start getting in the way.

  So…

  He turned to Eric, who had also dismounted. “Take the Nineteenth Battalion to the closest gate, which is…”

  He thought for a moment, bringing up the map of the city in his mind. He had it well enough memorized not to have to haul it out of his saddlebag. “That way,” he said, pointing to the northwest.

  “How far away is it?” asked Eric.

  “It shouldn’t take you more than ten minutes to get there.” Kraków in this day and age wasn’t a big city—about one mile north to south and half that distance east to west. Jef
f didn’t know exactly how far away the nearest gate was, but it couldn’t be more than three hundred yards. Of course, that was the distance as the proverbial crow flew. The battalion would have to make its way through the city’s convoluted streets, which would take some time, especially if they faced opposition from the city’s defenders.

  Krenz smiled. “Don’t need a horse for that.” He handed the reins to the nearest courier and trotted off, shouting orders as he went. It would take him at least ten minutes before he got the battalion organized. Men were still swarming over the collapsed walls and they’d have to be reorganized into coherent units.

  Jeff had to do the same with the 20th Battalion, working with its commanding officer, Major Casper Havemann. The major was new to the job, having recently been promoted to replace the former commander, who’d himself been promoted to serve as one of the regimental commanders for the new divisions being trained by Thorsten Engler. But Jeff let Havemann do most of that work while he concentrated on other matters. The man didn’t have much experience yet commanding a battalion, but he had plenty of experience getting troops in order.

  First, Jeff called the rear battery and ordered them to come into the city. Then, he called the forward battery and gave them firm—you might almost say blistering—orders to fire at their longest range for another five minutes and then cease and desist and come into the city. He was going to be leading the 20th Battalion right into the center of Kraków and the last thing he needed was for his men to be dodging their own mortar fire.

  Finally, he called Eddie. “Okay, Eddie. Go get Krzysztof.” He forgot to add “over.” Jimmy would have chided him for the lapse.

  “Will do. But I’ll have to refuel first—and I’ll be running low on fuel again by the time I get back. Over.”

  “Understood. As long as you get back before sundown, we’ll be okay. Out.”

  He turned to another of his couriers. As antique as the custom of using couriers might be when it came to communication, the fellows made dandy gofers. “See to it, Lieutenant Vieck.”

  They’d already planned for this in advance. It was politically imperative that before the day was over, a notable Polish figure was present as the official leader of the forces that had captured Kraków. Thankfully, they’d have several hundred Polish soldiers from the Silesian units to surround him with. It would still be obvious to anyone who came near that most of their forces were German and Czech. But by the time word could spread through the countryside—much less reach Warsaw—they should be able to fuzz things up enough not to trigger off an outburst of Polish national resentment.

  It helped that they’d brought with them a large number of the newly designed flag of the soon-to-be-proclaimed Democratic Assembly of Lesser Poland. It was similar to the national flag, in that it had a broad red stripe beneath a broad white one. The existing flag had at its center the combined Polish and Lithuanian coats of arms surmounted by a gold crown. The flag of the Democratic Assembly kept the coats of arms but eliminated the crown and placed them inside a gold eight-pointed star. The star was quite prominent, large enough to make it easy to distinguish from the existing flag in the middle of a battlefield.

  By the end of the day tomorrow, Jeff intended to have the flags flying from every one of the thirty-nine towers and eight barbicans on the walls of Kraków. He’d have to have a pole erected on the rubble of the barbican they had passed through, of course.

  A thought occurred to him. Since he still had a few minutes before the 20th Battalion would be ready to begin the charge toward the central square, he summoned one of the radio operators. The radio squad doubled as the regiment’s tech unit. “Who’s the regimental photographer, Corporal Ollinger?”

  The corporal’s chest swelled. “I’m the regimental photographer, sir.”

  “Have your camera ready, then. We’ll use it tomorrow.”

  What a splendid picture that would make! They could have half a dozen men raising the flag atop the rubble of the barbican, duplicating the U.S. Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima. Of course, there’d have to be one change, since they couldn’t very well use USE troops in their feldgrau uniforms. But they’d planned for that, also—not the flag-raising bit, but seeing to it that the Polish militia organized in Breslau by Lukasz Opalinski had their own distinctive uniforms. They were rather flashy, too, albeit not in hussar league. No ostrich plumes, no leopard skins.

  “Colonel Higgins.” Jeff turned and saw that von Mercy had arrived. He must have dismounted and clambered over the rubble.

  “General von Mercy.”

  “What is the plan now?”

  Jeff pointed toward the 19th Battalion, which Eric Krenz had gotten into formation and was starting to file down the street leading to the nearest barbican. “They’ll take the next gate to the northwest and open it for you. Meanwhile, I’ll take the Twentieth Battalion into the city’s center. If all goes well, we should have the town hall and the Cloth Hall seized by the time your cavalry arrives.”

  “Good,” said von Mercy, nodding his head. “That should eliminate the problem of coming under sniper fire once we get into the square. Reduce it, at least.”

  He turned to go; then, paused and looked back. “My compliments, Colonel Higgins. It’s always a pleasure to serve with an officer who doesn’t get flustered when his plans come unglued. Which they almost always do.”

  Off he went. Jeff allowed himself a few seconds—maybe half a dozen—to bask in the praise of a veteran cavalry officer. A general, no less.

  But it was time, now. He was leaving one company behind to keep working on clearing away the rubble that blocked the gate. With the other three companies and the artillery unit attached to the battalion, he thought he’d have enough to take the two buildings in Kraków’s central square. If worse came to worst, they’d just wait until the rear battery came up and started bombarding the buildings.

  Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that. Raising a flag over the rubble of a barbican would make a dandy propaganda image. Raising a flag over the rubble of Poland’s most famous town hall would not, unless you were Attila the Hun.

  One of the couriers brought up his horse. Jeff waved him off.

  This was a charge down city streets, damnation. He did not have to ride a horse. There were limits.

  He would have to wave the sword, though. Dutifully, he drew it from the scabbard, held it on high, and began striding down the street that led—hopefully—to the central square.

  “Follow me!”

  It was stupid protocol, but… The sound of hundreds of men marching right behind him demonstrated once again that there was a reason for military customs. Better stupid than dead.

  “War sucks,” Jeff muttered.

  Chapter 23

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  “I feel utterly useless,” Ulrik grumbled. He squinted against the rising sun, as he studied the walls of Kraków half a mile distant. “It is ridiculous to say I am in command of this army.”

  Morris Roth, who was officially in command of the Bohemian forces participating in the assault, was more philosophical about the matter. Or perhaps he simply had the advantage of an additional three decades of life. He was in his mid-fifties; the young Danish prince, only twenty-six years of age.

  “It doesn’t matter, Prince,” he said, trying not to sound like he was soothing a grumpy child. “Both you and I are just here for the historical record.”

  But Ulrik was in no mood to be soothed. “No, not both of us. You are the one who assembled the Grand Army of the Sunrise, armed it, provided it with its officers. Me? I am just, as the up-timers would say, along for the ride. I haven’t done anything but nod sagely and agree to whatever Colonel Higgins proposes.”

  “So? Jeff’s advice has been quite good, as near as I can determine.”

  “It’s excellent advice, actually. Which just makes me wallow in uselessness.”

  From their vantage point on horseback a
top a slight rise, Morris and Ulrik had a good view of von Mercy’s cavalry force milling outside the gate that was northwest of the one which had collapsed. They were engaged in a caracole, riding in half-circles close to the barbican and discharging their pistols at the defenders. Who, for their part, were firing back with muskets that seemed to be no more accurate than the cavalrymen’s pistols.

  So far, Morris had seen only one cavalryman fall off his horse; whether because he was hit by a musket ball or just lost his seating couldn’t be told at this distance. It was just as likely to be either one. Unlike Jeff, who’d read about it in a book, Morris had learned of the prevalence of mishaps in war from his own personal experience. One in seven American soldiers who died in Vietnam were killed in accidents, usually involving vehicles. And what Morris had learned since he arrived in the seventeenth century was that riding horses was just about as dangerous as driving cars. True, you weren’t going as fast—but you had no protection and a lot farther to fall.

  If the pistol shots were having any effect on the soldiers defending the barbican, Morris couldn’t see it. Of course, at half a mile he wasn’t likely to.

  “Doesn’t this seem like a waste of effort, Morris?” asked Ulrik, still watching the Bohemians at their caracole. “And a rather dangerous one at that. I wouldn’t have thought a general as experienced as von Mercy would choose this tactic. On a battlefield, it might be worth doing. But against men sheltered behind fortifications?”

  Morris didn’t answer. He’d been wondering the same thing himself.

  * * *

  Which was the reason that von Mercy was a real general and they were essentially just playing a role. The general who had been born in Lorraine, served in both the Austrian and Bavarian armies and now commanded Bohemian cavalry knew perfectly well that a caracole was a silly tactic to use if what you were trying to do was seize fortifications yourself. But it wasn’t really all that dangerous, because at his orders the cavalrymen were staying at least fifty yards away from the walls. Given the quality of firearms in the possession of Kraków’s defenders, that meant they could only be hit by a very lucky shot.