1637 The Polish Maelstrom Read online

  “Oh. Well. Okay, then. Off to Kraków we go! I just have to refuel. You’re sure there’s plenty of fuel in Kraków, because”—here he gave Laura Goss a reproving look—“I’m sure she drained most of what was in those two drums.”

  “Stop crabbing, Eddie,” said Laura. “I left you half of the second drum. Kraków’s just a hundred and fifty miles away. You could get there on ten gallons and some fumes.”

  * * *

  Before they could leave, however, a new complication arrived.

  Princess Kristina, with Caroline Platzer in tow.

  “I want to go! I want to go! Wherever it is. I love to fly! I’m going to become a pilot myself, you know. Papa promised me I could learn when I turned sixteen. But I’m sure he meant fourteen. Maybe even twelve.”

  Eddie kept busy with the refueling. Above his pay grade, this was. He could only imagine the diplomatic repercussions if the heir to the thrones of the USE, Sweden and the Union of Kalmar arrived in Kraków at this particular juncture.

  Not to mention that the city was about to be put under siege.

  “Well… Kristina, I am afraid—”

  “You’re just the secretary of state! You can’t tell me what to do!”

  Caroline Platzer intervened. “Kristina, stop it. She can in fact forbid you to go.”

  Kristina was a Vasa, bred and born. Even at the age of ten, she could lawyer like nobody’s business.

  “Only as the future empress! As the future queen of Sweden and the Union of Kalmar, she can’t order me to do anything! And that’s how I’d be going. Wherever we’re going.”

  She pointed a stiff finger at the Steady Girl. “And don’t try to tell me that’s an official plane! With that painting on it? Ha!”

  Laura Goss intervened. “Your Highness, with the secretary of state’s permission, of course, I could give you some flying lessons. The Dragonfly has dual controls, you know. And it’s a twin engine six-seater. Way better than that raggedy old thing Eddie’s flying.”

  Under other circumstances, Eddie might have taken offense. Under these…

  Bless you, Captain Goss.

  “That’s a splendid idea,” said Caroline. “With the secretary of state’s permission, of course.”

  Bless you, Caroline Platzer. Governess Excelsior.

  “Well… I suppose there’d be no harm in that,” said Rebecca. “I won’t need the plane for a day or so.”

  Bless you, Rebecca Abrabanel. Diplomacy’s Reigning Queen.

  Kalisz, capital of Kalisz Voivodeship

  Greater Poland

  As they had planned, the people who’d broken out of Poznań stopped for the night in Kalisz, a town about sixty-five miles to the southeast. A distance that the APC could have traveled in an hour on up-time roads had taken a full day. That sixty-five miles was “as the crow flies.” As the APC lumbered along, it had been at least half again as far, and the roads in the Polish countryside in the year 1637 resembled up-time highways about as much as the ox carts that used them resembled a sports car.

  Kalisz was still a major center of trade, despite having declined somewhat in importance since its heyday in the Middle Ages. They’d be able to replenish whatever supplies they needed except fuel, and they had plenty of that.

  Thirty hussars were immediately sent to seize the town’s famous Jesuit college to keep the instructors and students locked up for the night. Partly that was to prevent any of them from escaping the town and bringing word to any pursuers. That was of minor concern, though. There had been no sign of pursuit for hours, and although they no longer had the advantage of Eddie Junker’s aerial reconnaissance, before he left the area to refuel he’d told them the pursuers from Poznań had turned back already.

  The likelihood that anyone escaping from the college would be able to find anyone worth reporting to, stumbling around in the middle of the night in the Polish countryside, was…minimal, to say the least.

  No, the main reason they locked up all the residents of the college was that the Jesuits of Poland had made very clear that they were siding with Borja in the civil-war-in-all-but-name that was raging within the Catholic church. That also meant they were rabid partisans of King Władysław and bitter enemies of the USE. It wouldn’t be long before they were bitter enemies of the revolutionaries in southern Poland as well.

  The enmity of the Jesuits in Kalisz could be shrugged off easily enough. What couldn’t be shrugged off was the certainty that if they observed which people in the town were helping the escapees, they would be sure to report that to the Polish authorities when they arrived tomorrow or the day after.

  There were two such groups. Kalisz had a large Jewish population, among whom were some hidden agents for Morris Roth. More importantly, the town also had a sizeable settlement of Bohemian Brethren, pretty much all of whom had already decided to become allied with the Galician revolutionaries who had now seized Kraków.

  While Jozef went about his master spy affairs, Christin climbed into the APC. She was exhausted. Although she knew how to ride a horse—quite well, in fact—she’d never in her life spent a whole day on horseback, and if she had she would have been wearing something sensible instead of hussar armor.

  Before stripping off the armor, though, she went to see how the children were doing. Tekla and Pawel and the other four children had ridden in what amounted to a large, lidless wooden crate that had been fixed to the APC’s floor and piled full of blankets and quilts to keep them from being too badly battered by the vehicle’s lurchings. They had been tended to during the escape by the mother of three of them.

  Everyone inside the APC looked just as exhausted as she felt. The soldiers who had been stationed at the gunports had been provided with some cushioning also, but for the most part they’d kept themselves from being slammed around by holding onto the handgrips provided. A day of that was at least as tiring as a day spent on a horse, even if they hadn’t had to wear armor.

  When Christin peered over the side of the Kiddie Krate, as she thought of it, six anxious little faces looked up at her. The mother of three of the children was slumped in a corner of the crate, either asleep or just too exhausted to open her eyes.

  Pawel said: “Mama, Tekla’s really scared.” After a couple of seconds, he added: “I am too.”

  The other four children said nothing, but it was obvious they were just as frightened except the boy with Down syndrome. He seemed in fairly good spirits.

  So…taking off the armor would have to wait. It would probably help bolster the kids’ spirits.

  Clambering into the Kiddie Krate while wearing armor was no fun at all. But eventually Christin squeezed herself into a space the children made for her and—blessedly—could lean back into the blankets. Her butt felt like it was about to come off, if butts were built to do that.

  “Okay, kids. There’s nothing to be afraid of. Let me tell you a story. Several stories.”

  Christin had told her daughter a lot of stories when Denise had been a little girl. She still remembered most of them quite well.

  She didn’t know if seventeenth-century Polish kids were familiar with Aesop’s Fables. If so, they might get a little bored. But she was absolutely, one hundred percent, dead sure they’d never heard the Uncle Remus stories.

  “Okay, children. Let me tell you the story about a rabbit—he was called Brer Rabbit—and the tar baby and the briar patch.”

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  When the mysterious person who’d arrived in Eddie Junker’s plane came into the conference room that served as the revolution’s headquarters, his face couldn’t be seen because of the wide-brimmed floppy hat he was wearing.

  Then he swept it off in a manner that was barely short of flamboyant, and Jeff felt an enormous sense of relief.

  So did Prince Ulrik.

  So, after trying to resist it for a couple of seconds, did Gretchen.

  So did Morris Roth, until he saw that Rebecca had
entered the room behind Mike Stearns and was looking right at him. He would never understand why, but he knew in that instant what she had come to tell him. Wallenstein was either dead or dying—and the weight that Morris had felt on his shoulders ever since the king of Bohemia had handed him the Anaconda Project just doubled.

  Red Sybolt grinned. He and Mike went back a long ways and had generally gotten along, even if Mike sometimes found Red’s in-your-face stance toward the UMWA’s enemies reckless and a bit childish, and Red sometimes thought Mike suffered from the can’t-we-all-just-get-along? heresy.

  Lukasz Opalinski was simply curious. So this was the famous Prince of Germany?

  “I am sure glad to see you,” said Jeff. “Uh, General.”

  Stearns held up a cautioning hand. “I’m just here as an adviser. Actually, I’m not here at all.”

  Then he looked at the large table in the center of the room. “Is that a campaign map I see before me?” he asked, moving toward it.

  Chapter 43

  Kraków, official capital of Poland

  Actual capital of Lesser Poland

  The next day, the advance elements of the magnates’ army began taking positions northwest of the city. By then, Eddie had returned from Prague and had done a reconnaissance flight over the oncoming enemy forces.

  “And you’re sure about the guns?” Mike asked him. He and Eddie were at the big table in the headquarters, every side of which was packed by people.

  “Positive, Mike. There are nine of them. I can’t swear I’m exactly right about their size, but they’re at least culverins. Some of them might be forty-two-pounders.”

  “How did they get them so close already?” wondered von Mercy.

  Lukasz Opalinski had a wry sort of smile on his face. “You’re not accustomed to Polish warfare, I take it. You always have to remember that in Poland and Lithuania the great magnates have their own private armies. We know of at least five magnates who’ve contributed forces to this campaign—and while their estates will usually be concentrated in the Ruthenian lands they will have them all over the Commonwealth.”

  He leaned over the big map spread across the table and planted his finger on a spot south of Warsaw. “We knew they were assembling their forces at Radom. But there’s no reason they couldn’t also have been moving up their heavy artillery still closer to Kraków. At a guess…” He moved his finger southward. “Here. Somewhere in or around Kielce. That’s no more than eighty miles away.”

  “It doesn’t matter how they got them here,” said Mike. “By Eddie’s reckoning, they’ll have those siege guns moving into position three days from now. Once they start firing, it won’t take them long to bring down enough of the walls to launch an assault. Kraków’s fortifications were never designed to withstand heavy artillery.”

  “What do you recommend we do, then?” asked Prince Ulrik. “They outnumber us. Not by enough to overcome the advantage we’d have of fighting behind fortifications, but if the fortifications are brought down…”

  “Make a sortie as soon as they bring the guns up,” said Mike immediately, “but before they’ve had time to build fortifications for them or siege works for the rest of their army. If we don’t—ah, you don’t—capture or destroy those guns, you can’t hold Kraków.”

  Mike took off his hat and set it down on the table. Barely, he managed to restrain himself from wiping his brow with the back of his sleeve. Even though it was a chilly spring day, the fireplace in the chamber in the Cloth Hall they were using for a headquarters had a roaring fire going which was heating the room to an uncomfortable degree.

  “I’d go farther than that, too,” he added, “depending on how well the sortie looks to be going. I think there’s a fair chance we could send that magnate army packing.”

  They’d been using Amideutsch as their lingua franca. Seeing the puzzled looks on the faces of von Mercy and his two adjutants, Mike realized their familiarity with the language didn’t extend to all the American slang expressions which peppered it.

  “‘Send them packing’ means rout them,” he explained.

  Von Mercy’s expression changed from puzzlement to doubt. “General Stearns, even doing a sortie that soon in the siege is a gamble. Pushing it strongly enough to have any chance of defeating the enemy in the open field strikes me as very risky.”

  “It is risky,” said Mike. “But I don’t think it’s as risky as being cautious. If we use what you might call a traditional strategy, we’re bound to lose. If they didn’t have those siege guns, we could probably stand them off, given that we—you’d—have the advantage of being behind fortifications and they don’t outnumber you all that much. But they do have them, and it won’t take them long to breach Kraków’s medieval walls.”

  He picked his cap up and put it back on his head. For some obscure reason rooted in military tradition, wearing it made him feel more general-like. He’d put up with the sweat if it would help him persuade the other people standing around the table.

  “There’s another factor at work here, as well,” he said. “A political one. You don’t just need to defeat this army. You have to be able to defeat the next army, and the one after that, and the one after that. There is no way the king and the Sejm will allow Lesser Poland to rebel successfully. If need be, they’ll cede Poznań to Torstensson in order to free up the royal army. They can afford to lose Poznań permanently. They can’t afford to do the same with Kraków.”

  Lukasz, who’d been stroking his beard, abruptly dropped his hand. “I agree with General Stearns. Even if we hold Kraków, it will be a long siege. What we need is a quick victory. If we drive off the magnates—not just hold them off but drive them off—then we’ll start gaining adherents quickly. A long siege…”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “That will not be enough, even if we hold out.”

  Gretchen spoke up, for the first time since the meeting began. “We did well enough at Amsterdam and Dresden,” she pointed out. “I’m not disagreeing with what Mike is proposing. I haven’t made up my mind about that. I’m just playing devil’s advocate, for the moment. We had a long siege at Amsterdam that did us quite well, politically. And while the siege of Dresden didn’t last long, our ability to hold the city is what forced the Swedes—ah, Oxenstierna and his counter-revolutionaries—to send Banér against us.”

  Prince Ulrik now spoke up. “The situation is different, I think. By holding Amsterdam, you produced an acceptable political settlement between Don Fernando and the Prince of Orange. But I think there is no chance of such a settlement here.”

  “There certainly isn’t!” said Krzysztof Opalinski.

  “No chance at all,” chimed in Jakub Zaborowsky.

  Ulrik nodded. “As for Dresden…” He gestured toward Mike. “Let us be honest. What made the decisive difference at Dresden was the intervention of General Stearns and his Third Division, not the uprising of Dresden itself.”

  “Although without the Saxon revolt, we couldn’t have intervened at all,” said Mike. “But I agree with your general point. There is no equivalent to the Third Division waiting in the wings to come to Kraków’s rescue. We will have to make do with the forces we have at hand.”

  * * *

  As always, General von Mercy found the idiosyncrasies of Amideutsch a bit maddening. Waiting in the wings. Make do. Why did Americans insist on such oblique language?

  Still, he grasped the essence of what was being advanced. He was still skeptical of the wisdom of Stearns’ proposal—which was quite in line with the boldness for which the man had become known since he donned his uniform. On the other hand…

  Mentally, von Mercy shrugged. Stearns had so far been successful with his methods, after all. And, in any event, von Mercy was a professional soldier serving an employer, not a revolutionary. Wallenstein had never had any intention of holding Kraków, once his forces helped to take the city. He wanted the territory south of the Vistula. Even if they took Kraków, the casualties the magnates would suffer would make i
t difficult for them to interfere with Bohemia’s goals.

  Assuming those goals survived Wallenstein’s apparently imminent demise. Either way, von Mercy was fairly certain he could extract his own forces if the defense of Kraków began to crumble. There were advantages to having an army whose principal component was cavalry. They could usually get away if they lost a battle.

  It would be tough in the infantry units Morris Roth had raised, of course. But those were not really von Mercy’s men, when all was said and done.

  * * *

  Mike looked around the table, gauging the degree of skepticism in the various faces gathered there.

  Still too much. “We do have a couple of advantages, you know.”

  “And these are…” That came from Ulrik, whom Mike gauged to be middling-skeptical. Of course, that was the Danish prince’s default stance toward the world in general.

  “The first is that, in a different way, our enemy’s forces are just as disparate as our own. Except theirs is a matter of attitude, not skill. Yes, they’re mostly professional soldiers and most of them will be veterans. But they serve five different paymasters. What is the likelihood that if one of those magnate armies gets hammered badly, the others will rush to their aid?”

  Lukasz chuckled heavily. “About the same as one crocodile rushing to aid another.”

  “That’s not quite fair,” said von Mercy, with a smile. “A crocodile is likely to attack another one in distress. The armies of the magnates won’t go that far. But you’re right. Their instinct will be to look to their own.”

  The Bohemian commander crossed his arms over his chest, and leaned back a little. “What you are proposing, I think, is that we adopt Tilly’s tactic at Breitenfeld, where he focused his initial attack on the Saxons, figuring that he could rout them more easily than the Swedes. I would remind you, however, that Tilly lost that battle, despite his success in routing the Saxons.”