1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  But the Polish engineer didn’t pursue the matter any further. He just said: “How soon?”

  It was all Jozef could do not to rub his hands. Finally! They’d be dealing with operational matters now. On such subjects, Tarnowski was an asset rather than a pain in the ass.

  * * *

  Eric Krenz would never know it—and Gretchen saw no reason to tell him, since the man tended to get swell-headed enough all on his own—but his actions on the morning they seized the barbican paved the way for the decision made over the succeeding weeks by a large portion of Kraków’s garrison to switch sides and join the growing army of the Democratic Assembly.

  Kozłowski was key to the process. The sergeant was well known and liked in the garrison, and his word carried quite a bit of weight, even among the officers. And he’d have all winter to spread the tale in the taverns of an officer who was simultaneously capable, good-humored and kind. Unlike so many of the bastards.

  But Eric didn’t know any of that. All he knew was that his commanding officer, Colonel Higgins, released him temporarily from the Hangman Regiment to concentrate on recruiting and training a unit from the surrendered garrison.

  “But I don’t speak Polish!” Eric protested.

  “So? Learn. Give me a break, Eric. One third of Kraków’s garrison is German, and of the rest, plenty of them come from all over Europe. You can get by in German well enough, while you learn to speak Polish.”

  At that point Jeff swelled out his chest. “I’ve been learning Polish myself.”

  “Ha! You, an American? Learning another language? You people are as bad at that as I am at riding a horse.”

  “Not really. You’ve got to make allowances, Eric. Our nation had a population of two hundred and eighty-some-odd million people. For most of us our borders were hundreds—even thousands—of miles away, and the people on the other side of one of those borders spoke English anyway.” He shrugged. “People don’t usually learn something until and unless they need to”—here he bestowed a look of stern reproof on Major Krenz—“as you of all people should know. Since the Ring of Fire, most of us Americans have been pretty good at picking up other languages.”

  Seeing his friend’s highly skeptical—you might almost say, derisive—expression, Jeff smiled. “Well, not bad at it, anyway.” The expression didn’t flicker. “Not too bad. Better’n you can ride a horse, that’s for sure.”

  Military training camp

  Just outside Magdeburg

  United States of Europe

  Thorsten Engler was startled at who he saw coming into his office. Initially, until he knew who it was, he was startled that his receptionist had given him no warning. Given who his visitor was, however, the lack of warning was not surprising. Very few if any receptionists in the world are inclined to tell their monarch that he’d have to cool his heels while she went to see if the commanding officer had time to see him.

  He rose immediately to his feet. “Your Majesty. I wasn’t expecting you.”

  “Papa!” Gustav Adolf’s daughter Kristina jumped to her feet, raced over and gave the emperor a hug. Given that she was a smallish girl and he was a large man, the end result was a bit comical.

  The princess’ governess, Thorsten’s wife Caroline, rose to her feet and curtsied. She’d gotten quite good at that. She used the form of the curtsy that was standard in the seventeenth century, being just an outward bending of one knee while sweeping the other foot behind her. It was very similar to a male’s bow, from which it had derived, and had none of the elaborate flourish of the later Victorian era, where the woman also held her skirt out as well.

  Which would have a neat trick, since Caroline was wearing pants. Doing so was considered questionable for a woman, but the habit had been catching on since the up-timers arrived.

  “Your Majesty,” she repeated. “To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  “Papa wanted to see me!” Kristina provided.

  That explanation of the emperor’s presence was…dubious. First, because he’d had no way of knowing that his daughter was in Thorsten’s office, given that Caroline and Kristina’s visit had been impromptu. Secondly, because while Gustav Adolf was a doting father he wasn’t a particularly attentive one. As was the custom of the day, especially among society’s upper crust, fussing over children was considered unnecessary—even a bit absurd. That was what governesses and servants were for.

  The emperor was not unkind, however. So his response was to beam down at his daughter and say: “I most certainly did.”

  Gently, he pried her loose. “But I also have business with Colonel Engler.”

  Kristina had not expected her father to actually dote on her, so she returned readily to her chair.

  Gustav Adolf now bestowed an equal beam of approval on Thorsten. “Brigadier Engler, I should say.”

  Thorsten felt that hollow feeling in the stomach that invariably accompanies the realization that no good deed goes unpunished.

  Pescia, Grand Duchy of Tuscany

  Italy

  “I believe we’re done, then,” said Fakhr-al-Din. “At least for the moment.”

  Mike Stearns smiled a bit ruefully. “More than a ‘moment,’ Your Highness. There is a great deal that will have to be done before we can make our landing in Beirut.”

  He didn’t have to glance around to see if there were any servants present. By now, two months after he’d arrived in Tuscany, he’d persuaded Fakhr-al-Din that having servants in the room when discussing critical affairs of state was a bad idea. He’d worn him down, at least. Mike was pretty sure the emir thought he was a bit obsessive over the matter.

  “You will be leaving, then? We will miss your company, Michael.” That sounded actually sincere, and Mike thought it probably was. On a purely personal level, he and the emir had gotten along quite well, and the same had been true of his wife Khasikiya once she lowered her guard. (Lowered it up to a point. She always kept her veil on in his presence.) “How soon?”

  Mike shrugged. “Hard to say. I will send a radio signal to my—ah, to the people I need to—asking them to send an airship to Italy.”

  The emir looked somewhat alarmed. “Not here, surely? Not to Pescia.”

  Mike smiled reassuringly. “Oh, no. That would be a bad diplomatic mistake—not to mention a potential security risk. Those things are very hard to conceal, to put it mildly. No, I will instruct them to send the airship to Venice.”

  Fakhr-al-Din frowned. “That’s quite a distance.”

  “Not so bad. A little less than two hundred miles, I estimate.”

  “In the middle of winter.”

  Mike shrugged. “Once I get over the Apennines, that shouldn’t be a problem.”

  In point of fact, he had no intention of going all the way to Venice. Before he made this trip, he’d gone over the plans for his extraction at some length with Estuban Miro, who doubled as the new chief of intelligence for the USE as well as being one of the continent’s largest airship operators. As soon as he got the word from Michael, Miro would make plans to send one of his newer hydrogen airships to be on call at Venice. That might take a few days—even a few weeks—depending on where his various airships were. But once Mike heard from Miro that the airship was waiting in Venice, Mike would leave Pescia and they’d make arrangements as he went for the airship to pick him up somewhere in the countryside.

  It would have been simpler just to leave from Venice, since a two-hundred-mile trip on horseback really wasn’t that much of a chore. Mike could easily make it in two weeks and be waiting for the airship when it arrived. The problem was that they’d gone to some lengths to disguise the fact that he’d stayed in Italy after Rebecca left, and if he went to Venice there was just too much chance he’d be spotted.

  People would certainly spot the airship landing in the Tuscan countryside, of course. But they wouldn’t know to whom the vessel was giving transport.

  All in all, this had been a very productive trip, but Mike was looking forward to gettin
g back to Linz and seeing his wife again.

  Assuming she wasn’t off gallivanting about somewhere. The woman had become a veritable globetrotter. But even if she was, sooner or later she’d come back home.

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  “But…can you find room for all your troops in Kazimierz?” asked Gretchen.

  “No, we can’t,” replied Morris Roth. He made a face. “Well…we could, but we’d have to take over the whole city, including the Polish neighborhoods. That would be likely to open a can of worms we’d all prefer to leave sealed.”

  Gretchen matched his grimace with one of her own. “True. But how will the Jewish residents react? Most of your troops are gentile.”

  “Yes, but six hundred of them are Jews from Prague—and we’ll make sure to mix the Jewish troops up with the rest of them, so that every family that has soldiers billeted in their house will have at least one—usually more—Jews they can go to when they have grievances.”

  He didn’t say if they had grievances. Grievances were bound to arise when civilians had thousands of troops sharing their homes. But as long as they could avoid the most severe transgressions—rape and murder, especially—they could get by all right. Happily, Morris’ reputation as the “Prince of the Jews” had spread to Kraków, so Kazimierz’s very large Jewish population was already inclined in his favor.

  Gretchen moved to a window in the town hall’s tower that faced to the south. The window was closed, it being a particularly cold January day, but the glass was clear enough that she could see Kazimierz in the distance. Morris came to join her.

  Although most people considered it a district of Kraków, Kazimierz had been legally an independent city since the fourteenth century. It lay on an island south of Kraków formed by a branch of the Vistula River. The Jewish quarter was formed by a wall separating it from the rest of Kazimierz, and was known as the Oppidum Judaeorum.

  From the corner of her eye, Gretchen could see the sour expression on her companion’s face. Morris Roth was what up-timers called a “Reform” Jew, a variant of Judaism that so far as Gretchen could determine was extremely cosmopolitan and relaxed in its religious views. She knew how much Morris detested the still-standing wall that delimited Prague’s Jewish quarter from the rest of the city. What made him detest such walls all the more was that, often enough, they were there at the insistence of the Jews themselves, not because gentiles forced the walls upon them. That had been true here in Kazimierz, and it was still the more conservative elements in Prague’s Jewish community that insisted on keeping the walls up there.

  “It looks awfully small,” Gretchen commented.

  “It is—and the population density in the Oppidum Judaeorum is worse than it is in the rest of Kazimierz.” Morris shrugged. “But as long as we keep the Bohemian forces out of Kraków proper, we can deflect at least some of the chauvinist propaganda that will soon be spewing out of Warsaw. It’s worth avoiding that—minimizing it, at least—to have most of the Grand Army camping outside the city walls. I’ll set up a rotation, of course, so everyone gets some time in the relative comfort of Kazimierz.

  “Speaking of which,” he said, seamlessly changing the subject, “it would help—a lot—if the Galicians sent us some of their forces. Right now, we’re relying on Krzysztof and the two Galicians who came with him and the none-too-numerous Polish militiamen from Breslau to be our fig leaf. Very skimpy fig leaf.”

  “It’s not a perfect world, Morris,” Gretchen said mildly.

  “You’re telling this to a Jew?”

  Military training camp

  Just outside Magdeburg

  United States of Europe

  “So that’s the sum of it,” concluded Gustav Adolf. He straightened up from his perusal of the map Thorsten had dredged up and spread across the table in his desk. The map showed all of the USE and its immediate environs. “Oh, my aching back,” complained the emperor, rubbing his spine with a fist. “I’m not as limber as I used to be.”

  A bit desperately, Thorsten tried to find some feature in the emperor’s sweeping plans for troop transfers that he could object to. Sadly…

  It all made quite a bit of sense, actually. At least, if you accepted Gustav Adolf’s basic premise, which was that he could spare enough troops from the war against the Ottomans to seize some Polish territory and—hopefully; this was more complicated and uncertain—overthrow the existing regime of the PLC and replace it with a more congenial one. If nothing else, he was bound and determined to abase that branch of his own Vasa family that had caused the rulers of Sweden so much aggravation since the benighted Poles elected Sigismund III Vasa the king of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1587.

  “If I understand you correctly, Your Majesty, you don’t intend to seize outright any more Polish territory than you’ve—we’ve—already taken in Silesia and west of Poznań.”

  “Lower Silesia.” Gustav Adolf waved a big and meaty hand in a gesture of largesse. “Upper Silesia can remain in Wallenstein’s hands—or the Galicians, if they can squeeze it out of him. All of the territories I will take have a mostly German population anyway. They’d be more comfortable within the USE than under the rule of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth.”

  That was stretching it a bit. No one had ever taken a census in those regions, but Thorsten wouldn’t be at all surprised if the result showed that the majority of the population of northwestern Poland and Lower Silesia was actually Polish, not German. What was true was that the cities and most of the bigger towns were predominantly German.

  Thorsten wasn’t really too concerned about that, however. They were still in an era where national identities were not as predominant as they would become in the world his wife and the other up-timers had come from. So long as their religious freedom and social customs weren’t interfered with, most of the Polish inhabitants of the area would accept USE rule. A fair number would actually welcome it. The branch of the Vasa dynasty that ruled Poland had developed a reputation for being feckless at best, and the Sejm’s reputation was not much better. And no one outside the szlachta had any use for the PLC’s great magnates.

  “I will see to it that Gretchen Richter’s rulings—ha! You may as well call them ukazes—in Lower Silesia are adopted elsewhere as well. The ones granting Poles equal rights with Germans, which includes official equality of the two languages and no religious prohibitions or penalties on the Catholics.” He made a little moue of distaste. Gustav Adolf’s views had been ameliorated to a degree under the influence of his up-timer allies and supporters, but he still had the usual seventeenth-century ruler’s dislike of religious freedom—or religious chaos, as he viewed it.

  Thorsten used his finger to trace routes on the map. “So, you will begin by moving Horn’s troops from Swabia to reinforce Torstensson at Poznań. That’s what, Your Majesty? About fifteen thousand men?”

  “More like twelve thousand. I’ll leave a brigade in Swabia just in case Bernhard gets ambitious. Three thousand men won’t be enough to defeat him, of course, but they’ll be enough to serve us as—what’s that handy up-time term?—tripwire, I believe. In any event, I don’t think there’s much likelihood that Bernhard would take the risk of seriously annoying us.”

  “Certainly not now, with that capricious new king on the throne in France,” said Thorsten. He found himself nodding in agreement, to his dismay. There had to be something wrong with the emperor’s machinations.

  “I’ll leave Brahe and his forces in the Province of the Main,” Gustav Adolf added. “That new French king really is quite unpredictable.”

  “And you want to move most of SoTF’s National Guard to Poznań as well.”

  “Yes—although we’ll leave two regiments in Bavaria. Just in case—unlikely case, granted—that Duke Albrecht gets rambunctious.”

  Thorsten had been doing the arithmetic as they talked. “Add those to Torstensson’s two divisions, the Saxon forces under von Ar
nim—that’s another ten thousand, yes?”

  Gustav Adolf waggled his hand. “Not any more. Von Arnim’s suffered a lot of attrition. Today, I doubt he has much more than seven thousand men.”

  That wasn’t surprising. Von Arnim’s forces had been pure mercenaries, who’d signed on in the expectation that they’d be enjoying what amounted to garrison duty. Instead, they’d found themselves shipped off to siege lines at Poznań. In winter.

  Thorsten leaned over the map again. “What about the troops Oxenstierna assembled at Berlin?”

  “They’re mostly under Swedish colors. I want to keep them away from the Polish front, because, well…” Again, he waved his hand, in a gesture indicating as little as possible.

  Thorsten had no trouble filling in the blanks, though. Because in this day and age there are no troops as hated in Poland as Swedish troops. Leave aside the existing history, which was bad enough. By now, every literate person in Poland—certainly every member of the szlachta—has heard enough of the future history brought by the Americans to have learned of the Deluge.

  The “Deluge” was the name that would be—would have been—given to one of the worst disasters in Polish history. In 1655, less than twenty years in the future, Swedish armies would invade Poland after Russian troops had already done so. Over the course of the next twelve years, Poland would suffer worse devastation than it suffered in the up-timers’ World War II. An estimated one-third of the population would die, and Warsaw would be destroyed along with almost two hundred other cities and towns.