"What about—"
"Our ambush, at the mouth of the Elbe?" Turenne shrugged. "We can hope for the best, but I can't say I have any great expectations. Unlike their divers last year, ours won't have the advantage of surprise."
He straightened up from the map. "Right or wrong, that's my assessment—and we'll operate accordingly."
There was a quick round of nods from the officers gathered around the table. Whatever reservations any of them might have, Turenne was not only their commander in name but one who had won their confidence.
"When, then?" asked Gassion. "The sooner the better, from a political standpoint."
Turenne smiled thinly. "Don't tell me. The duke of Jülich-Berg is getting nervous."
Lefebvre laughed. " 'Nervous' is hardly the word. By now, he's like a cat on a hot tin roof."
Several of the officers grinned. Oddly enough, given their fierce French patriotism, Turenne's new elite cavalry force had adopted American idiom with equally fierce enthusiasm. Perhaps it was their way of thumbing their collective nose at the French military establishment which most of them had come to detest as much as their commander did.
Turenne rubbed his jaw. Ideally, he'd prefer to wait a few more days before launching his expedition. The great danger he faced, from a purely military standpoint, was that if he moved prematurely Torstensson would still have a large enough army at Hamburg to send a sizeable force down to meet him. Better to wait until he was sure Torstensson had started marching toward Luebeck.
But . . . perfection was a more unobtainable goal in war than it was anywhere else in life. And whatever sarcastic remarks anyone might make about Wolfgang Wilhelm, the duke who ruled the area, it remained a political necessity to keep him from severing his ties with France altogether.
Turenne couldn't blame the duke, really. For even the boldest prince, having five thousand foreign troops quartered in or near his capital city was a very uncertain proposition. Wolfgang Wilhelm had only agreed under a certain amount of duress—and had then insisted that Turenne's force remain as inconspicuous as possible and pass through his lands with the utmost speed.
"Inconspicuous" was an absurd term, of course, applied to five thousand armed men and their horses. The fact that Turenne's officers had only set up an unofficial headquarters in the city fooled exactly no one. Certainly not the innkeeper, as happy as he might be to get the flood of business—and he'd surely have been talking to his relations and friends, over the past few days. So would the farmers outside the city, on whose land most of Turenne's troops were camped. They'd be well-compensated, to be sure—which simply meant they had the money to provide them with idle time in which to gossip.
So. Turenne agreed with Gassion. It was best to leave the city as soon as possible, and just hope that the speed of their attack—and Gassion's diversion—would keep the enemy off balance.
"We'll leave tomorrow morning," he said. "At first light."
Seeing a few frowns around the table, the marshal grinned. "Excuse me. 'Crack of dawn,' I should have said."
The siege lines of the Spanish army in the Low Countries, outside the walls of Amsterdam
"And this is definite?" the cardinal-infante asked, looking down at the message he'd been handed. "No chance of error?"
Miguel de Manrique considered the question, for a moment, before answering. "I don't think so, Your Highness. Not in this instance, anyway. The couriers who sent this report were stationed several miles downstream from Hamburg. They've seen the ironclads for themselves, after—"
"After having passed through the city. Yes, I understand." Don Fernando carefully folded the message, being meticulous simply for the sake of giving himself time to make the decision.
The decision, he knew, in substance if not in form. In all likelihood, at least. There was still a possibility that problems of one sort or another—mechanical, perhaps, or inclement weather, or both—might stymie or at least delay Admiral Simpson. But it would be foolish to depend on such happenstances. Judging from the report, the American admiral's flotilla had passed through Hamburg's formidable fortifications with no significant casualties. Even the three timberclads that accompanied the four ironclads had come through largely unscathed. Whatever casualties they'd suffered had apparently been minor.
The cardinal-infante was fairly certain that the French were planning to ambush the flotilla at the mouth of the Elbe. But he would be very surprised if that came to much. No, if Simpson could get through Hamburg that easily, there was nothing in the way of hostile action that was likely to stop him until he reached the Baltic. The Kattegat, for sure.