Ring of Fire III(31)

Some of his rage was sublimated guilt. Whatever the reasons might be, in the end he and Colonel Engels had been responsible for the regiment. He was by no means blind to that reality. But most of Tom’s anger was not directed at himself. It was not even directed at Duke Maximilian. The ruler of Bavaria had only been able to suborn the 1st Battalion because of the political crisis produced in the USE by the actions of the Swedish chancellor, Axel Oxenstierna. So far as Tom was concerned, every murder, every mutilation, every rape, every act of arson and every theft committed by Bavarian soldiers could be laid at the feet of that bastard.

Not that he was giving Maximilian or his commanding officers a pass, either. There was no excuse for the conduct of their troops. The mayhem being inflicted on USE civilians went far beyond the occasional atrocities and excesses that were an inevitable feature of war. These soldiers hadn’t simply been set loose, they’d obviously been given the green light to run wild by Bavaria’s leaders.

Why? Tom wondered. Even in narrowly military terms, the policy made little sense to him. The Bavarians were not nomadic raiders, who simply intended to return to the steppes with their booty. Duke Maximilian planned to seize the Oberpfalz—as much of it as he could grab, at least—in in order to use its assets. So what was the point of ravaging the area? Of all those assets, the human resources were far and away the most valuable. Leaving aside the people being killed, there was now a flood of refugees heading north, east and west. There were close to a thousand such people being shepherded ahead of them by his own troops.

He hadn’t been able to spare much time—no time at all, really—for the needs of those people. Fortunately, Johann Heinrich Böcler had taken charge of that task. Some initial prodding from Bonnie Weaver had been necessary, because Böcler didn’t think of himself as an “authority.” Partly that was his youth, partly that was his modest origins; but mostly, Tom suspected, it was just the man’s personality. The provincial administrator’s secretary was one of those people whose natural relationship to the world’s affairs was that of an observer more than a participant.

That didn’t necessarily mean such people were incompetent, however, whenever they set their minds to a practical task. Often they were not, and in some cases that same detachment made them very good at such work. They were more objective about the decision that needed to be made, and less prone to letting their own aspirations and ambitions influence them unduly.

How good would Böcler be at such an assignment? Tom had no idea. But he was pretty sure they’d know within a day or two. This column of people moving down the Danube might be going slowly, but so did a pressure cooker.

* * *

By the time they made camp for the night, Bonnie had already come to a conclusion on that subject. Once again, pudgy little Johann Heinrich Böcler was proving to be a man of greater substance than he looked.

True, he fussed a lot. Unflappable under pressure, steady at all times...well, no. He tended to get agitated, he talked a lot, and he dithered back and forth before coming to a decision. But he always did come to a decision, and he didn’t dither for long. And insofar as the fussing and talking was concerned, that might well be an asset under these conditions. He was dealing with large numbers of frightened, uncertain and often confused people. His willingness to talk with them, once his authority was established, probably helped to calm them down.

Even in the seventeenth century, Germans tended to be a law-abiding folk. They were not particularly orderly, though—Bonnie had never seen a trace of the automatic obedience ascribed to Germans in the folk mythology of her own universe—and they were quite willing to argue with the powers-that-be. At the drop of a hat, in fact. But that those powers existed legitimately was not something they disputed. They just felt keenly that they had a right to be consulted before they were commanded to do something, and they were always sensitive to issues of fairness.

Böcler’s authority derived from his status as the personal secretary of Christian I of Pfalz-Birkenfeld-Bischweiler, the imperially-appointed administrator of the Oberpfalz. The fact that he’d served in the same post for the previous administrator bolstered his status also. Ernst of Saxe-Weimar had been a popular figure in the province. “A fair-minded man,” was a phrase you heard often when people spoke of him.

Böcler had that sense of fairness also. Perhaps that was his detachment at work, but Bonnie couldn’t do more than guess at that. She still barely knew the man, although working with him in such close proximity and under such severe conditions was drastically speeding up a process that would normally have taken months, given his reserved nature. By late morning, at his invitation, she’d started calling him Heinz. That nickname was not used by many people who knew the secretary.