Commander Cantrell in the West Indies(35)
Du Barry took the glass; he raised it slightly in Turenne’s direction. “I toast the assured success of your plans, my lord, for they are so well-crafted as to need no invocation of luck.”
Turenne halted his glass’s progress to his lips. “Plans always need invocations of luck, du Barry. For we can only be sure of one thing in this world: that we may be sure of nothing in this world. A thousand foreseeable or unforeseeable things could go wrong. But this much we know, for we have seen it with our own eyes: France has a workable observation balloon, now. But the rest, this quest for New World oil?” Now Turenne sipped. “I avoid overconfidence at all times, my dear du Barry, for I am not one to snub fate. Lest it should decide to snub me in return.”
Thuringia, United States of Europe
Major Larry Quinn of the State of Thuringia-Franconia’s National Guard led the way down the last switchback of the game trail, which spilled out into a grassy sward. That bright green carpet of spring growth sloped gently down to where the river wound its way between the ridge they had been on and the rocky outcropping that formed the opposite bank.
Quinn looked behind, as the other two people in the group were navigating the declination. One, a young man, did so easily. The other, a middle-aged woman, was proceeding more cautiously.
Larry smiled. Ms. Aossey had never been particularly fleet of foot, even when she had been his home room and science teacher in eighth grade. And she was more careful now. Which, Larry conceded, only made good sense: a broken leg in the seventeenth century was nothing to take lightly, not even with Grantville’s medical services available.
The young man with Ms. Aossey looked back to check her progress, putting out a helping hand. She accepted it with a brief, sunny smile. He returned a smaller one, complete with a nod that threatened to become a bow.
Larry’s own smile was inward only. The understated politesse he had just witnessed was typical of twenty-year-old Karl Willibald Klemm. Larry had spotted the telltale signs of intentionally suppressed “good breeding” the moment the young fellow arrived in his office, having been referred there by Colonel Donovan of the Hibernian Mercenary Battalion.
Although admitting that he was originally from Ingolstadt, Klemm had not divulged the other details of his background so willingly. And Larry understood why as soon as the young Bavarian’s story started leaking out. At fourteen years of age, Klemm had been recruited to play for the opposing—and losing—team in the Thirty Years’ War. As a Catholic, Klemm explained that he’d been impressed into Tilly’s forces in 1632, but not as a mercenary. He had been made a staff adjutant for a recently-promoted general of artillery. That general had not survived the battle against Gustav Adolf at Breitenfeld. At which point Klemm decided that his next destination would be any place that was as far away from the war as he could get to on foot.
Larry Quinn had been unable to repress a smile at the young man’s careful retelling of the events surrounding his induction. Young Klemm had been “impressed” by Tilly’s own sergeants at the age of fourteen, and then just happened to be assigned to a general of the artillery. Larry had wryly observed that this was not typical of the largely random acts of impressment whereby youths had been made to serve under the colors of both sides, usually as unglorified cannon-fodder.
Klemm had the admirable habit of staring his questioner straight in the eye when addressing a ticklish topic. No, Klemm admitted, he had not been randomly recruited. He had been plucked out of school by members of Tilly’s own general staff.
And at what school had that occurred?
Again, Klemm had not batted an eye, but his jaw line became more pronounced when he revealed that he had been in classes at the University of Ingolstadt.
The rest of Larry’s questions met with similarly direct, if terse answers. Yes, Klemm had been in his second year of studies at the tender age of fourteen. Yes, he had been in mathematics, but also the sciences and humanities. Yes, he supposed the work did come easily to him, since he was usually done before the most advanced students in each of his classes. Except in the humanities. But he somberly observed that this “failing” was because he often lacked the adult sensibilities to adequately unpack the layered meanings in most art. He had still been “just a boy” at school. Then, he had gone to war.
Tilly’s “recruiters” had apparently been well-briefed by young Karl Klemm’s predominantly Jesuit tutors. The youth not only had an extraordinarily sharp and flexible mind, but possessed what later researchers would call an “eidetic” memory. Larry doubted the existence of such savantlike powers, but was suitably impressed when Klemm scanned a paragraph, then a list of numbers, then a set of completely disparate facts, and was able to recall them perfectly afterwards.