"All twenty thousand of us?" Thorsten Engler shook his head. "Don't be stupid, Eric. I was told by Mark—Lieutenant Reschly—that the emperor gave General Torstensson orders not to weigh too heavily on the local populace. Seeing as how he intends to make them his own citizens, soon enough."
Silently, he reminded himself that he needed to restore a certain formality in his references to Mark Reschly. Captain Witty had suffered a minor accident shortly after the march began from their camp below Hamburg. Nothing really serious, just one of the almost-routine casualties suffered by cavalrymen—a broken foot from his horse stepping on him. But it was a significant enough injury that he'd had to stay behind in Hamburg until the bones healed, which had made Reschly the new commander of their volley gun company. After the battle group had been dissolved and they rejoined the rest of their company in Hamburg, that put Reschly in command of six batteries instead of the two he was accustomed to. The young officer from the Moselle was a bit frantic, these days, trying to catch up on things. He didn't need Thorsten's private familiarity with him to undermine his authority, which was a bit shaky to begin with.
Eric's capacity for grousing, alas, had become something of a legend in the batteries. "Torstensson has a billet in the town."
"I said, don't be stupid. Of course he does—and in the town's biggest tavern, at that. Do you really want the commander of your own army to be making battle plans scratching in the mud?" He waved at the Wardersee, whose banks were only twenty yards away. "Maybe you, but not me, seeing as how I'm not an idiot Saxon."
That got a little laugh from the other men in the battery around the campfire. Most of them, like Engler himself, were from parts of the Germanies west of Saxony. Thuringians and Magdeburgers, mostly, although Engler himself was from the Oberpfalz and there were several men in the battery from Franconia.
"Ha! Should have stayed in Saxony," Eric grumbled. "I'd be sleeping in a warm bed in Dresden."
Thorsten grunted softly. "Yes. This year. Next year"—he jabbed a thumb at one of the nearby volley guns—"you'd be looking at those from the business end. With that idiot John George for a commander instead of Gustav Adolf or Torstensson."
Krenz shook his head. "Nonsense. I'd desert. Join you fellows." He gave everyone a smile. "A year from now. Maybe in the summer, when it's warmer."
That got another laugh. Everyone liked Krenz personally, and certainly didn't hold the treachery of the Saxon elector against him. Why should they? Another of the many American loan words in Amideutsch—phrase, in this case—was equal opportunity. The joke had long become a staple in the regiments that John George of Saxony was an equal opportunity traitor, since he'd stabbed just about everybody in the back by now.
Like Thorsten—and Krenz himself, for that matter—most of those soldiers expected to be fighting Saxony and Brandenburg next year. Those of them who survived this war, at least. Their term of enlistment ran for three years, and none of them thought the war with the Ostenders was going to last more than a few months.
Thorsten wasn't so sure, himself. Not because he had any less confidence in their army than any of the other soldiers, but simply because his twenty-six years of life thus far had convinced him that the truest and most useful of all the American saws was shit happens. In war, who could say for sure?
In the main room of the tavern in Segeberg, General Torstensson straightened up from the big map spread out over a table in the center, then turned to Frank Jackson. Unlike the other top officers of the army who served Torstensson as his immediate lieutenants, Frank had no clear and definite duties on his staff. As tactfully as possible—with Frank's own cooperation—Torstensson had essentially removed him from any direct authority over large bodies of soldiers. Frank's training and temperament were entirely those of a sergeant, not an officer, and he was really not well-suited to be a commander of any body of soldiers much larger than a squad. He'd only been elevated to a generalship by the now-defunct New United States because no one else in Grantville had been any more qualified.
On the other hand, with his extensive practical knowledge of up-time technology, Frank made an excellent aide for anything that involved the interplay of the new American military equipment with the army. He jokingly referred to himself, in private, as "Lennart's utility infielder."
"Do we have radio contact yet with the emperor?" Torstensson asked.
"Just got it up and running. It's a good link, too, so we don't need to wait for the evening window."