Ring of Fire III(28)

To make things still worse, most of the companies von Lintelo had assigned to them were infantry companies!

For a pursuit? In Captain von Haslang’s professional opinion, that practically constituted criminal negligence.

Initially, in fact, von Lintelo had assigned them nothing but infantry units. After Colonel von Schnetter protested vigorously, the general had at least given them an explanation—which was unusual for him.

“I need all the cavalry I can muster to send to Amberg,” von Lintelo said. “Above all else, we must rescue the heirs to the duchy!”

Rescue the heirs to the duchy. There was another phrase that begged for a coherent translation.

Duke Maximilian was childless himself, so the heir to the throne was—had been—his younger brother Albrecht. But the uproar that resulted when the duke’s betrothed, the Austrian archduchess Maria Anna, fled before the wedding, caused a rupture between Maximilian and his brother. Who, with his wife and three sons, had also fled Bavaria.

Or tried to. Duke Maximilian and his soldiers caught up with them and in the fracas that followed, Albrecht’s wife Mechthilde and his oldest son Karl Johann Franz had both been killed—Mechthilde at the duke’s own hand.

Albrecht had become separated from his two other sons. He eventually managed to escape and had been given exile in Prague by Wallenstein. The tutor for his two younger sons, the Jesuit priest Johannes Vervaux, had managed to smuggle the boys out of Bavaria by a different route. They’d found exile in the United States of Europe; in Amberg, specifically, the capital of the province of the Oberpfalz. There was still a Jesuit school there, where the boys could continue their Catholic education.

Thankfully, the USE’s formal stance of religious toleration and freedom was actually practiced in the Upper Palatinate. The province adjoined and was heavily dependent upon the State of Thuringia-Franconia, the province of the USE which, along with Magdeburg, took the principles very seriously. So there was no immediate danger of a forced conversion of the two boys—who, since their father had been outlawed, were now Maximilian’s only heirs.

In short, rescue the heirs to the duchy meant bringing back to the custody of their uncle two boys who’d seen him slay their own mother and had placed their father under a death penalty. So that one of them could eventually succeed him as the duke of Bavaria.

Such were the established principles of aristocratic and royal inheritance, as ridiculous as the results might sometimes seem.

But what made the project itself ridiculous was that it had no chance at all of succeeding, anyway. So why waste the time and efforts of good cavalry units, who could be put to much better use bringing down Simpson and his men?

Even before the Ring of Fire, von Haslang was skeptical that such a mission would have succeeded. In essence, a large force of cavalry was being tasked with racing to a city at least fifty miles away, measuring as men and horses travel. In midwinter. They could not possibly arrive in less than a day and a half, and more likely two or three.

Then, upon arriving, they were to assault a well-fortified city garrisoned by a full regiment—with no artillery at their own disposal—in order to reach and capture two boys being held in a school within.

Not...impossible, in the old days. But very close to it.

Today? Almost five years after the Ring of Fire? Did Duke Maximilian and General von Lintelo think there had been no radio in Ingolstadt? Or, even if the attempt to reach Amberg had failed initially, that the retreating artillery unit didn’t have a portable radio with them with which they could try again?

And even if by some near-magic luck the cavalry did manage to reach Amberg before a warning arrived, what then? They couldn’t possibly break into the city in time to prevent the boys from being spirited away again. Von Lintelo was sending no more than five thousand cavalrymen to Amberg. The capital of the Oberpfalz was not a small town, and the surrounding terrain was hilly and wooded. There was no chance they could encircle the city and invest it tightly before any number of people could escape.

That would be true even if the means of escape were restricted to horse and foot. But they weren’t. For the love of God, von Lintelo had seen the airship in the sky over Ingolstadt last night with his own eyes.

Nor was that the only airship at the enemy’s disposal. Leaving aside any airplanes which could only land at the airfield outside of Amberg’s city walls, the State of Thuringia-Franconia was home to a fleet of no fewer than four dirigibles. They could only hope that all of those airships were out of the province at the moment, having flown somewhere to the north.

Finally—it failed only this!—the one and only cavalry company that von Lintelo had finally agreed to provide them was the one commanded by Colonel Johann von Troiberz. Who was probably the most incompetent field grade officer in the Bavarian forces and certainly the most obnoxious.