An Uneasy Kind of Peace, Episode Two
Magdeburg
“Yes. Bloodless surrenders are always better.” The abbess of Quedlinburg smiled. “I’m sure that you, if I understand the up-time teachings of ‘Quakerism’ to which you adhere, will be happy to make that point to Princess Kristina.”
“But why was the king in the Low Countries negotiating with this Fabert man? Why not with the bishop of Metz? It says right here in the paper that it’s an imperial prince-bishopric, even though the French have been occupying it for the last eighty years.”
“Negotiate with the bishop of Metz himself? What good would that have done Fernando?” the dowager countess of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt asked, honestly bewildered. “He’s a completely political appointment and completely French. Henri de Bourbon, duc de Verneuil. He’s an officer in the French army that Fernando is fighting against.”
“I’m just a little confused,” Caroline Platzer answered. “Well, I’m more than a little bit confused. It says that the bishop, or prince-bishop, has been in office for a long time, but also it says that he’s only thirty-five years old.”
“Well, yes, he does seem young to have held the position for over twenty years already, if you think of bishops the way you up-timers seem to think of bishops, that is. The way that Cardinal-Protector Mazzare definitely thinks of bishops, I have discovered. But you have to realize that he’s an illegitimate son of King Henri IV of France—King Louis XIII’s half-brother, that is. Henri IV legitimized him, but of course he has no inheritance rights to the throne. He was only ten when he got the appointment. Henri de Navarre found that a mass got him not only Paris, but also any number of lucrative sinecures for his extramarital brood.”
Lorraine
“It may not be so bad for Arpajon’s men to stretch themselves a little,” Monsieur Gaston said. “Make sure to clean out anything that whoever comes after us could use. Fernando’s bound to send someone after us, I suppose?”
“Yes, Your Royal Highness,” Clicquot said. “Yes, I do believe that he is.”
“Pity. I was hoping he’d be too busy on his eastern border to pay attention to such a minor detail as our little jaunt, but the man’s really concerned about details. Irritatingly so. Well, back to the regiments. Let the men enjoy their little tricks. They’re bound to have been dulled by these last two years sitting in a camp. I would think that at the very least, since he was feeding them, the king in the Netherlands would have used them for something.”
“He didn’t make the assumption that he could trust them to obey orders.”
“That’s why I say we shouldn’t keep them on too tight a rein now. Let them get it out of their systems while we’re on the move. Then, when we reach our goal, they’ll be ready to settle down and fight.”
Clicquot looked at him. “Precisely what is our goal, Your Royal Highness?”
Gaston waved. “Our final goal is the removal of Richelieu as the first minister of France. You may define everything else as interim.”
Luxemburg
“It’s not just the mud,” Zuñiga’s lieutenant colonel said, “ although I will grant that the artillery is mired down. Again. The damned day-in-and-day-out rain has the rivers running high. Too high for the infantry to wade and too fast for the horses to swim.”
“Get boats. We’ll have a ship bridge.”
“We’ll have to hire them.” Salcido, an annoyingly talented Basque, was a stubborn man. “The king expects us to pay. He’s in a mood according to which the people of the Low Countries are to love their rulers as well as fear them.”
“Better to be feared than loved. Everyone knows that.”
“He’s working on both. In the meantime, though, we’ll have to find the boats and then we’ll have to lease the boats. We’re not allowed to just ‘borrow’ them. I calculate that it’s going to cost a good thousand guilders per day while we bring them here, put the bridge together, cross over, and then . . .” Lieutenant Colonel Salcido looked at the instructions with outrage, “. . . pay the stupid boatmen to take them back where we got them.”
“I don’t have that much cash. Will the locals take promissory notes?”
“Not willingly. Some of them, maybe.”
“Make a start on it with the ones who will. If those boats aren’t enough . . .”
“Then you’ll have to send a messenger to Brussels to get money, with a suitable written justification in quadruplicate. You know what they say.”
Zuñiga grumbled. “ ‘Money is the sinews of war.’ Just in case, send the messenger off today, as soon as my secretary gets the requisition forms filled out and I sign them. I just hope that the king and queen realize that this attachment to procedural niceties could cost us at least three days of not being in hot pursuit of Monsieur Gaston and the Lorraine regiments.”
Lorraine
“They’re out of Stenay ahead of us,” Zuñiga’s scout reported.
“Hell and damnation. Well, I’ll give orders for us to settle in at Montmédy for tonight. Salcido, prepare for an early start in the morning. We’ll catch them yet.”
****
“Fog,” Salcido said. “Fog all over the place. Ground fog. It came up during the night.”
“Move out anyway,” Zuñiga said. “Even in these miserably overcast portions of northwestern Europe, fog isn’t something that can stop an army from moving. It will burn off. We’re just following the roads.”
****
“Hail Mary!” Éric de Thysac drew a deep breath. “Haraucourt, will you come here and listen to what Sergeant Hennemant has to say.”
The dragoons’ senior scout repeated what he had seen.
“A gift!” Jean Jacques de Haraucourt, seigneur de Saint-Baslemont, threw his hat into the air. “Two years of being disgusted because Fernando kept us penned up in quarters. Two years during which I had a hard time keeping my men disciplined and trained when they weren’t being exercised in the field, especially with that snake Arpajon letting his run wild. Now weeks of being equally disgusted by the fact that Gaston and Clicquot apparently have no idea what they are doing, and Marchéville doesn’t have the guts to tell them so. All of that, and now the Spaniard gives himself to us. Where are your dragoons in the line?”
In a world run according to the great chain of being, Éric de Thysac would not have been here with him, a tough and experienced sergeant of battle, the man responsible for organizing the men sent into combat, commanding just under nine hundred dragoons. Thysac’s family were glass makers from down in the Vosges, the southernmost part of the duchy. Successful glass manufacturers, to be sure, who had bought estates from some feckless nobles of the vicinity—even married their daughters, some of them—and, by the middle of the last century, done homage to the dukes for their land. Glass was one of the few ways that a man could make a fortune from a desolate wasteland and Thysac’s father had picked up court connections by marrying the governess of the young duchesses of Bar, Nicole and Claude.
Still, in a rightly ordered world in which there were those who were born to fight, to pray, or to work, Thysac should have been among those who worked.
Haraucourt looked around. If he could choose the man he wanted next to him in an action, either the king of France’s brother or the glass maker’s grandson from Belrupt, he wouldn’t even have to think about it.
What if Éric had murdered his cousin? It was a hot-tempered family. The duke had pardoned him and there were men in this world who had done far worse.
“At the back,” Thysac said. “He assigned us to the rear guard.”
“And mine are next to last.”
They looked at one another.
“Shall we do it?”
“Turn around and ambush the Spaniards?” Haraucourt threw his hat again. “Nom de dieu! Of course we shall. Sergeant Hennemant, bring Clinchamps and Vernier to us.”
“What about?” Thysac nodded his head in the general direction where Monsieur Gaston and the senior officers of the expedition had last been seen.
“They’d just muck it up. We can tell them about it when it’s over.”
****
Zuñiga was caught in the fog, completely off guard. As the sun cleared off the mist, Haraucourt started the pursuit.
Then he slowed it.
“What’s up?” Vernier halted his horse next to the colonel’s.
“They’re falling back, but they’re not falling back in disorder. Let’s not risk the possibility that they could provide us with a nasty surprise in return.”
Night came late at this latitude and at this season.
When darkness did fall, the Spaniard kept going.
“What’s he doing?” Clinchamps asked.
“Sergeant Hennemant says that he’s changing out the rear guard by small units. They’ll still be tired, but not as tired as if the same men were constantly on the skirmish lines.”
“We’ll catch them at the river. There’s no bridge here. It’s running too high for his infantry to wade.”
Which it was, except that Salcido directed the men to unhitch the draft horses, rope spans of the heavily loaded baggage wagons together, and push them into the stream.
They held against the spring current long enough for the Spaniards to cross.
Then they sent swimmers out to cut the ropes.
“Well, damn,” de Thysac said.
By the time they got across themselves, the Spaniards were some distance ahead.
This time, the scouts reported that there was a village and the stream, narrow but deep, had a stone bridge.
“Same damned river,” Sergeant Hennemant said. “It wiggles all over the map. We’ll probably have to cross it a couple times more.”
“Will they blow the bridge?”
“They probably would if they had powder, but my men are pretty sure that they sank their powder with the baggage wagons.”
The village, though, had stuff. Stuff as in furniture, stuff as in clothing, stuff as in chicken coops, stuff as in barrels.
Stuff that would burn.
The cursed Spaniards piled a village worth of stuff onto the narrow bridge and set it on fire behind them.
It was amazing just how hot the stones in a bridge could get.
“We could try to go around,” Clinchamps said. “There must be someplace else that we could ford it.”
“I, for one,” Vernier answered, “would be happy to follow them through Luxemburg all the way to Brussels and smash them for good.”
****
“We’ve been hauling the wagons out,” one of the captains said. “No point in wasting a decent wagon just because it’s wet. One reason they were so heavy is that they put the ones containing the fire bricks for the field ovens at the bottom.”
Thysac looked around. “Where there are ovens, there should be flour. Or did they take it across with them?”
“They didn’t take any wagons at all across that cobbled-together artificial ford. Just men and horses. But there’s no flour barrels in the creek.”
“Get the scouts on it. Somewhere around here, stashed in one of these side valleys, there’s flour.”
“Even better, if they baked when they overnighted at Montmédy, there may be bread.”
****
Monsieur Gaston and his senior advisers did muck it all up, just as Haraucourt and de Thysac had been afraid they would.
Monsieur caught up with the forward companies and forbade them to pursue Zuñiga’s retreat any farther, on the theory that doing so would violate Low Countries territory and—as Marchéville had pointed out, that would not be bright, considering that Gaston’s pregnant wife was in the Low Countries.
Gaston and Clicquot insist on making the men turn around and go back south, deeper into Lorraine.
“That won’t make the men happy,” Arpajon, the last to arrive on the field, warned. “They haven’t taken many prisoners and they didn’t get much in the way of plunder and supplies from those sunken baggage wagons.”
His regiment hadn’t gotten any prisoners, plunder, or supplies, because it had been a couple of miles away from the crucial events.
****
“It’s just bread, for God’s sake,” Monsieur Gaston said the next morning. “Why are you making such a fuss about it?”
“Monsieur,” the wagon master said patiently. “Haraucourt and Thysac captured the products of the Spanish ovens. A ten-day supply of bread. It will be invaluable for us on the march, but when one loads eighty thousand pounds of bread on wagons to move it, it weighs just as much as eighty thousand pounds of powder or eighty thousand pounds of ammunition. There must also be horses to pull it, and for an army on the march, bread is as valuable and necessary as either of the others. Therefore, this expedition cannot move out until I have obtained the necessary number of horses. The Spaniards saved their horses.”
****
“Overall,” Haraucourt said, “I think my wife would be proud of me for this one. She’s a ferocious lady in her own right. She’s fought off every band of marauders that came foraging their way by our place. A regular Amazon.”
“Where do you live?”
“Off in the godforsaken noplace, somewhere between nowhere and nowhere else, not near anything. Why in hell do you think I’m spending my life in the duke’s army?”
Brussels
“Under the circumstances, General Zuñiga, the council cannot fault you. In all ways, right up until the start of the action at Mouzay, you were acting according to reasonable expectations and in accordance with the instructions you had been provided. The enemy’s actions were wholly unexpected. From then until your safe, if unexpected, arrival at Arlon with the troops . . .”
“That’s a relief,” Salcido said on their way out. “I had more expectations of a court martial than such reasonableness on the part of the queen.”
“It was still a retreat,” Zuñiga muttered. “So it was a great retreat. From the military standpoint, it was a magnificent retreat—the kind of retreat that will go down in the manuals to teach aspiring officers how to do it if they get caught with their pants down. But, let me tell you, we got caught with our pants down and it was still a retreat.”
Lorraine
“There’s no point in trying to take Verdun. It’s too strongly garrisoned. We’ll just bypass it. This expedition is more in the way of a demonstration than a conquest, after all. Making a statement.”
Ignoring the last two sentences, Marchéville focused on the first two, which contained more sense than he’d heard from Monsieur Gaston since they left Flanders. Verdun not only had a French garrison, but a commander with considerably more spine than the man at Stenay.
“You’re absolutely right, Your Highness,” he said. “It’s not even as if we could negotiate with the bishop of Verdun to use him as some kind of a counterweight to the administrator named by your brother. François de Lorraine-Chaligny-Mercoeur has been in exile, under the protection of the archbishop of Cologne, since 1626. His mistress is a charming woman and they have two darling little girls. Her father was a gentleman-in-waiting to the late prince of Phalsbourg.”
Clicquot looked up. “I wonder where Chaligny is now, given the archbishop’s own troubles?”
“Either on the run or already in the Low Countries, frantically negotiating terms with the monarchy.” Marchéville was nothing if not a practical man.
The longer he associated with the younger brother of the king of France, the more clearly he could foresee a day when he, too, would be frantically negotiating terms with a monarchy—just about any monarchy.
****
The French garrison at St. Mihiel was also too strong. Not as strong as that in Verdun, but still too strong and also commanded by a stubborn man. Even Gaston admitted that. Where, then? Commercy would do. There was a French governor in place, but Marchéville knew him. Réance was a man who could be bribed.
Once they were safely inside Commercy’s walls, Clicquot dared to ask what the next stage in Monsieur’s plan might be.
Gaston waved his hand. “By being here, I am making a statement that though I have proclaimed all along that I am in Lorraine on my dear Marguerite’s behalf, still, from this standpoint I could head up the Meuse to Neufchâteau and take these regiments into France itself. In a sense, I am just reminding my brother and Richelieu that I am still around.”
Marchéville left the room in disgust.
“Under Richelieu’s influence,” Gaston continued to Cliquot, “my brother does not give the great nobles of France the respect they deserve.”
Cliquot bowed slightly. Beheading did, in many ways, indicate a lack of respect for the beheaded.
“Should I raise my banner against the tyranny of this man who has so misled my brother, many French peers would flock to it.”
They actually might. That was the kind of thinking that resulted in . . . well . . . beheading.
Clicquot began to consider his options.
****
The ten-day supply of captured Spanish bread ran out. Commercy was not sufficiently provisioned to easily absorb some three thousand hungry soldiers at this time of the year. Within a few days, there were . . . hardships.
Colonels Haraucourt and Thysac took a stand against letting the other regiments with Gaston maraud through the countryside around Commercy.
Gaston made noises about mutiny.
Haraucourt and Thysac made noises about being patriotic sons of Lorraine.
Once they had left the room, Marchéville pointed out that they were also currently the heroes of the expedition because they had chased Fernando’s Spaniards back into Luxemburg, which made it possible that if Monsieur pressed them to the point of actual mutiny, the lower officers in the other companies might not obey an order to arrest them.
“Well,” Clicquot said, “see what you can do, then.”
“We could always try offering to pay in cash.”
Section 2: “Die zeitt ist mir zu kurtz und die geschefte zu viel.”
Schwarzach
Francisco de Melon had offered his report on the mixed-up biography, supposedly of him, that Matt Trelli had received from the Grantville researchers 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. 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.
Section 3: “Gott mit uns.”
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 halfway, 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 desserts—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 William 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 Low Countries 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 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 breech.
That night, the guns opened another breech.
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 along 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 hubris 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?”
Section 4. “. . . nit zweyflende, der Allerhöchste werde seine gnade verleihen
undt ergebige mittel weisen . . .”
Besançon
Hyppolitus Guarinonius looked at Kamala Dunn. “You are preaching to the converted,” he said. “That was a very favorite statement of young Matt Trelli during our stay in Kronach, when he thought we were telling him something he already knew.”
“You certainly are,” Kamala admitted. “And you, and you.” She waved toward Christoph Gatterer and Paul Weinhart. “Perhaps I am just rehearsing for when I speak to those who still aren’t persuaded. They don’t want to hear the message that the up-timers cannot provide, simply do not have the resources to provide, some kind of miracle cure for a major plague epidemic. They will have to listen to you. They will have to apply—and as rigorously as possible—the methods you already have in place.”
Guarinonius leaned his elbows on the table, steepling his fingers. “Out of curiosity . . . that is, we did not, generally, find the up-timers in Bamberg, when the regent first sent us to assist at Kronach, to be quite so certain that we could make a positive contribution. Yet they were lay people—not, that is, medical professionals. I truly expected . . . well, all three of us truly expected, before you arrived, that you would have nothing but scorn for the measures we had spent two months trying to put in place here in Burgundy.”
“I rather noticed that you were dubious. But—let me start over. The biggest epidemic there had been in the twentieth century happened a long time back, toward the end of World War I, in 1917 and 1918. It was not just nationwide, in America. It was world-wide.”
Kamala stopped suddenly. “Just be glad we’re not expecting flu. We can’t provide a miracle plague cure for the whole continent of Europe, but at least the plague is bacterial and chloramphenicol works on it. Influenza is a virus. Whole different story. Anyway.”
“You were saying,” Paul Weinhart prompted. Of the three physicians, he was the only one who had noticed that the up-time woman, although much of her learning was more advanced than theirs, was nonetheless sometimes hesitant about speaking her mind to physicians. He suspected it had something to do with the up-time modes of training. The journals coming out of Jena made it clear that the system instituted by the gentle-lady Beulah McDonald, herself a “nurse” rather than a physician, was intended to introduce major changes to the system that had existed before the Ring of Fire.
So the up-timers—some of them, at least—were fully aware that their culture had not achieved perfection. That was good to know.
“Oh. The 1918 flu epidemic. The American Medical Association published a study of the way various cities in our country handled it, from the loosest practices in regard to ‘quarantine and closing down the schools and public meetings’ in Philadelphia to the tightest ones in St. Louis, there was a real difference–even with no medical cure. Those methods are pretty much the ones you’re planning to use here. They won’t prevent an epidemic, but they will . . .” She paused and searched her mind for the right word. “They will ameliorate an epidemic. The grand duke’s representatives, when they hired me, told me what would be coming up, so I had time to do some reading. Philadelphia had an ‘excess mortality per 100,000’ of eight hundred seven people.”
She looked at them. “You understand the concept of ‘excess mortality’?”
Gatterer nodded “More deaths than would usually occur in a year. I have seen church registers that record, in a town which usually had fifty to sixty deaths within a year, ten times that many during the plague of 1625.”
“Good. One more thing I was afraid I would have to explain, but don’t. St. Louis, with the strictest quarantines and closures, only had an ‘excess mortality per 100,000’of three hundred fifty-eight. That’s a significant saving of lives. The same thing showed up, according to the AMA study, when applied to all of the forty-three major metro areas they included.”
Weinhart nodded. “This is like that survey of the prevalence of childhood diseases that the Leahy Medical Center has published for the Thuringian villages around Grantville. Fascinating.”
Dr. Weinhart, Kamala knew, was doing a great deal of pro bono work for the Besançon orphanage. His two wives had presented him with sixteen children of his own. He had served as personal physician to the archducal children in Tyrol. He was a great believer in religious instruction and handed out dozens of stuffed toy lambs with little crucifixes around their necks along with his advocacy for cleanliness, fresh air, proper nutrition, and plenty of exercise. That was fine as long as all the orphaned children were Catholic to start, but might be a problem later on.
Not her problem, though. She belonged to the Disciples of Christ. The Lutherans and Catholics could sort out their differences without her personal participation. Grand Duke Bernhard’s problem.
“So, the truth of the matter is that the measures available and known now, in the 1630s, if rigorously applied, even without modern medicine, can make a really big difference in the severity of an epidemic.” Kamala stood up and turned to the easel hung with oversized sheets of paper. “And if I have anything to do with it, they will. So let’s get to work on the directive for Burgundy.”
• Close the borders, whenever and wherever possible.
• Place restraints on movement from place to place.
“Remember,” Weinhart said, “farmers and retailers of farm produce, such as animal hides, are in constant danger of contracting the plague. It is a normal consequence of the work they do. During a plague epidemic, their constant involvement with flea-bearing animals can be deadly. Still, we cannot forbid the transport of food. If we do, people will avoid plague only to starve. It is very important to define the restraints. No unnecessary movement from place to place.”
Kamala nodded.
Guarinonius sighed. “Generals tend to regard troop movements as necessary. And, of course, we are scarcely in a position to forbid the grand duke to move his military units. Which means baggage trains and camp followers. Not only in the direct theater of action, but on the way to the direct theater of action. That is the worst. They leave behind stragglers. They leave behind the sick. Sources of infection for previously untouched towns and villages.”
• Close all places of entertainment.
“That means no kirmesses, no village fairs, no touring troupes of actors.” Gatterer nodded his head decisively.
“On penalty of what, in case of violations?” she asked.
“Hanging,” Weinhart answered.
Kamala swallowed and moved to the next item on the list.
• Forbid other types of public assembly.
“What about political assemblies?” Kamala asked.
“Wherever possible, postpone them,” Guarinonius said. “Close down the courts, so people won’t be coming for trials. Don’t convene the Estates.”
• Establish pest houses outside of the uninfected walled towns.
“They are useful in two ways,” Guarinonius said. “There should be two buildings. In one, the authorities can place and isolate any travelers suspected of illness. In the other, they can quarantine those who appear to be healthy long enough to be sure of it. The buildings should be some distance apart, of course.”
“That means hiring extra guards,” Weinhart pointed out. “Nobody should get as far as the regular city gate guards without an authentic certificate of health.”
“What if the infection does get into a town?” Kamala asked.
“That’s the next item. ”
• Quarantine.
“We identify each house where there is a case of the plague. We seal the infected person and all family members inside the house. No one is allowed to leave; no one to enter. We have the house locked and bolted from the outside. For those inside, the disease has to run its course—whether they die or they recover. Watchmen guard the houses. Many do not have enough provisions to last through a quarantine. The inmates may lower a basket from an upstairs window. The watchmen will place food in it. When enough time has passed, we open the house. If there are survivors, we provide them with certificates of health.”
Kamala shuddered. It was all just so—nineteenth century. She had seen photos from the 1800s, taken during epidemics of cholera, with the yellow tape strung across the doors and windows of infected houses.
“How do you handle the bodies?” she asked. “And the houses.”
• Containment.
“For the bodies, they are collected by the death carts. They are collected naked. There must be no clothing, not even a shroud, to tempt the impoverished and greedy to rob the corpse. That only leads to further spread.
“To man the carts, one must have persons who have already had the plague and survived it. It is not a popular occupation. Often, one must draft people for the duty over their very loud objections. There can be no individual burials. Outside of the town or village, one digs plague pits. The best are twenty feet deep. The width can be expanded to accommodate the number of corpses. The diggers should also be persons who have already sickened with the plague in the past and survived. The carts bring the bodies there and throw them in. Each day’s dead are then covered with ashes and lye.”
• Cleansing.
“The living, also, come out of the plague house nude. The city will provide fresh clothing.”
“And the house itself?”
“Ideally, every plague house would be burned to the ground, and everything in it. That is not practical. There is always too much danger that the fire might spread.
“We hire crews of people to disinfect the houses and burn the contents. We hire more guards to make sure that they do burn the contents. Again, many are unwilling and drafted into the duty. Sometimes, on occasion, these people move from city to city, where they hear rumors of plague, offering their services.”
“It’s as hard as hell to keep them from stealing.”
“They are to burn all fabric—clothing, bedding, towels, rugs, curtains and tapestries. We have seen too many cases where plague was brought into a town by a rag-picker’s cart. You have to keep a close eye on paper makers. They are so greedy for old linen, they will be tempted to buy and store even that from plague houses.”
“ ‘The love of money is the root of all evil,’ ” Gatterer interjected.
“Then, once the house has been stripped, they clean it, from top to bottom.”
“Using?”
“Vinegar, primarily. It is believed to kill the infection.” Guarinonius paused. “I am not sure whether it does or not. At the very least, it does no harm.”
“It doesn’t, I’m sure,” Kamala said. “I recommend stocking up on DDT and chlorine bleach.”
****
“Good Lord,” she said to Carey Calagna that evening after getting their respective children bedded down. “Give me a glass of wine. I could use a whole bottle.”
“Bad day at Black Rock?”
“ ‘To recapitulate . . .’ Who was it that used to say that? At least the down-timers are used to having plague doctors wear protective costumes. Masks, and waxed clothing to fend off fleas. So when we require our personnel to use face masks and gloves, it just makes ordinary people think first that we know what we’re doing, and secondly that we’re giving them the kind of treatment that ordinarily only the wealthiest could possibly afford.”
****
She repeated that thought when they got back to work the next morning.
“The wealthiest or, in Italy, those already confined to a pest house,” Dr. Weinhart answered. “The city councils employ doctors to treat them.”
“The up-time treatment protocols require everyone known to have been exposed to a plague victim to receive a seven-day preventive course of antibiotics.”
Everyone in the room just looked at one another, realizing the impossibility of this. The level of chloramphenicol production, in the face of an epidemic the size of the one that was coming . . .
The up-time protocols weren’t irrelevant, exactly. They were just impossible.
“By the grace of God,” Guarinonius said. “By His grace, we will accomplish this, trusting that He will provide us with sufficient and appropriate resources.”
Weinhart looked at the protocol written on the easel. “It’s not as if we haven’t done it before.”
“We have done it for a single walled town, such as Kronach. We have done it for a particular Italian city state, such as Pisa. Sometimes, we have tried to do it for a small principality, such as Tuscany. Never before have we done it on a frontier that will run from the coast of the Low Countries to Venice, from the Atlantic to the Adriatic, in a curving line across central Europe. Without the up-timers, we would never have dreamed of attempting such a thing."
To be Continued . . .