The Baltic War(16)

"Skin-deep," however, meant a lot of skin, spread out of that much expanse of water. Gloomily, Simpson was quite certain that the USE had just suffered a noticeable dent in its stock of petroleum products—which had been none too extensive to begin with.



"The thing is, Mrs. Simpson," Chomse continued, "however much the prime minister might frighten many people in the nation, his own people are ferociously loyal to him." He did not need to add—in fact, Simpson was sure, didn't even think about it—that by "his own people" Chomse was referring mostly to German down-timers.



That thought was more than a bit of a rueful one, for Simpson. He knew he'd been wrong about many things, in the period after the Ring of Fire. But about nothing had he been more wrong than his assessment that seventeenth-century Germans would be oblivious to the appeal of democracy. Many of them, especially from the lower classes, had adopted Mike Stearns' ideology quite readily. Often, in fact, with a fervor that made Simpson himself uncomfortable.



"So tonight will simply deepen that loyalty," Chomse concluded. "In private, you know"—he made a little sweeping motion with his forefinger at the apartment buildings visible through the opposite window of the carriage—"these folk are more likely to call him 'Prince of Germany' than they are to use his actual title of prime minister."



Prince of Germany. Simpson had overheard the term once or twice himself, spoken by his sailors. But he hadn't realized it had become so widespread.



He had to fight down another wince. There were at least three edges to that sword. One, he approved of; one, he didn't; and of the third he wasn't sure.



The edge he approved of was the obvious one. The informal title bestowed on its prime minister was a focus of militant enthusiasm for the new nation, which translated in time of war into a determination to defeat its enemies. Simpson would be depending on that determination himself, in a few months, when he finally took the ironclads down the Elbe to deal with the Ostender fleets. If a smaller proportion of his sailors were members of the Committees of Correspondence than the volunteers in the new army regiments, they were still plenty of them—and most of the men who weren't actual CoC members shared many of their opinions.



But there was also the second edge, which worried him. Mike Stearns was leading a revolution in Europe. It was as simple as that, regardless of the fact that he was now doing it wearing his fancy dress as a head of government, and sitting in an office. And it was just a fact, attested to by all of history, that charismatic revolutionary leaders often wound up becoming tyrants. "Tyrants," in the literal and original Greek meaning of the term, which was not a sloppy synonym for dictators but a reference to men who led the lower classes in revolt and whose determination to champion their interests often led them to crush ruthlessly everything that stood in the way. You did not have to impute wicked motives to such men to understand that, carried too far, their virtues could become vices. In fact, those very virtues—real ones, undoubted ones—could make them ten times more dangerous than men whose motives were simply personal ambition.



Now that he'd gotten to know Stearns much better, Simpson didn't believe any longer that the man's character and temperament would incline him in that direction. But a political leader's personality was only one factor in history. Given enough pressure, any personality was malleable. And there was a great deal of pressure on Mike Stearns in the last month of the year 1633—and there would be still more in the years to come.



Finally, there was the third edge. Prince of Germany. No other man of the time would be given that title, because there were no other princes of Germany. Plenty of princes in Germany, to be sure—or "the Germanies," as people usually expressed it. Most of those princes could even be called German princes, for that matter.



But there was no Germany, as such. In the world they'd left behind, Germany would not become a nation of its own for another quarter of a millennium. In this world, it was already emerging—largely because of Mike Stearns. And so, that third edge, that Simpson was very ambivalent about. A genuine national consciousness was emerging here, two hundred and fifty years ahead of schedule. The name for the nation might be the neutral "United States of Europe," but for all intents and purposes what was really happening was the unification of the German people and the German lands. A phenomenon that, in the universe Simpson came from, had had very mixed results indeed.



His wife, who knew far more general history than he did, was more sanguine about the matter. So, at least for the moment, he deferred to her judgment.