The Baltic War(203)

It was the French army that Gustav Adolf wanted destroyed. Not simply beaten, but shattered. Defeated so thoroughly that France would be knocked completely out of the war, and wouldn't be able to resume hostilities until the following year. By then, hopefully, they'd either have a peace settlement or Richelieu would be under such pressure from disgruntled elements in the French nobility that he couldn't afford to send any troops out of France even if there was no settlement.



It was a good plan, Torstensson thought. He'd marched so quickly that he was now astride the only good route the French army could take, in their retreat from the siege. His was a better army than theirs to begin with—he was quite sure of that—and the fact that he would be slightly outnumbered didn't bother him in the least. Especially since the French suffered from a serious shortage of cavalry, which was the critical arm in terms of winning battles.



"Will the emperor be joining us, do you think?" Thorpe asked.



Torstensson smiled. "With him, who knows?"





As it happened, Gustav Adolf was coming to that decision almost the same moment Torstensson asked the whimsical question.



He didn't like the answer much, though. He even lapsed into blasphemy, something he did rarely.



"God damn it, Nils," the emperor said, "I had been looking forward to that. After six months of this miserable siege! A straight clean battle, on the open field! Do wonders for me!"



Colonel Ekstrom said nothing. It was always best, in a situation like this, to let Gustav Adolf argue with himself. However impetuous he might be on the battlefield, he was as canny a ruler as any in Europe. Certainly canny enough to recognize, once he pondered the matter, that he was indispensable in the coming negotiations with the king of Denmark—and quite dispensable meeting the French. Torstensson was perfectly capable of dealing with that matter himself.



Besides, his plaintive outcry had been more in the way of habit than anything heartfelt. Truth be told, as sieges went, this one at Luebeck had been very far from "miserable." Once the American scuba divers had destroyed several Danish ships anchored in the Trave, early in the war, the Ostender fleet had moved too far down into the bay to pose any real danger to the city. The enemy had never even been able to completely invest Luebeck. There'd always been a corridor open northeast of the city through which enough in the way of supplies had been sent to keep Luebeck's citizens and garrison from being too badly strapped.



That was due, in large part, to the USE Air Force. As few planes as the air force had, and as limited as its real fighting capabilities were, Colonel Wood's people had provided the best possible reconnaissance—and were likely to scare off whatever enemy cavalry forces were sent to cut the supply line, anyway. Even if they couldn't, there was never any possibility of the Ostenders launching a surprise attack on a supply convoy. The worst that happened was that a convoy had to return to the fortified and garrisoned supply depot at Grevesmühlen, halfway between Luebeck and Wismar, and wait a day or two for the enemy's cavalry to leave.



So, Gustav Adolf had been able to spend the past six months in Luebeck without any great immediate cares or worries. He'd even spent them in a certain amount of luxury. If not so much in terms of his accommodations—he'd settled for a fairly spartan room in the Rathaus—then certainly in terms of his library. Among the items brought into Luebeck with the supply convoys had been a large number of books. Replicas, for the most part, of certain up-time titles the emperor was keenly interested in studying.



Gustav Adolf had read a great deal, over those months. And spent as much time thinking as he did reading. The first time he'd really been able to do so, since the Ring of Fire.



The conclusions he came up with were . . . often very interesting, to Colonel Nils Ekstrom. Fortunately, unlike Chancellor Axel Oxenstierna, he felt under no compulsion to try to talk the emperor out of them.



"How do you propose to get to Copenhagen?" the colonel asked. "Aboard one of the ironclads?"



"No, no. Mind you, it's tempting. Ha! The pleasure I'd take, staring at that drunken bastard Christian over the barrel of a ten-inch gun! But . . ."



Gustav Adolf shook his head in an almost comically lugubrious manner. "No, I shall forego the pleasure. Best, I think, not to arrive in quite so martial a manner. Besides, it would be a nuisance for Simpson to have to delay things just to wait for an emperor to come aboard one of his ships. A man after my own heart, there. He'd have made a superb cavalry commander, you know."



The emperor looked out the window, which gave him a view to the east. "No, I'll take one of Admiral Gyllenhjelm's ships. That should do for the purpose."