The Baltic War(225)

He'd given orders to maintain reconnaissance parties a bit farther out than he would have normally done, just in case the plane did come back. The signal would be three shots, fired in quick succession. That was probably an excessive precaution, but until he got more experience dealing with the flying machines, Turenne would rather err in that direction. Even without the outriders, he was pretty sure the machines made enough noise that his officers could disperse the column before the aircraft got close enough to bomb.



Bridges would be the trickiest places, of course, with nowhere to disperse. He could see that even two or three small bombs dropped on a column of men trapped on a bridge could be dangerous. Turenne decided to establish as new doctrine that soldiers crossing a bridge should always leave a wide space between the units, just in case an airplane appeared. That'd be something of a nuisance, and not always possible in any event. But anywhere within range of enemy aircraft, a nuisance worth tolerating.



What was their range, anyway? He was fairly certain that information had been included in the intelligence reports, but he couldn't remember the details. He hadn't paid much attention to that, because he'd known he would be within range during the entire operation—and had ignored the issue, because he'd assumed the enemy would concentrate the few aircraft they had near Luebeck.



And so, indeed, they had done. With hindsight, Turenne could now see that his luck had been mostly due to the fact that the enemy had so few aircraft to begin with. Literally, not more than a handful. With their resources so badly stretched, in that respect, they'd simply not bothered to devote any of them to patrolling so far southwest of the theater of operations.



A year from now, however—certainly two or three years from now—that would no longer be true. Once an enemy had enough aircraft, an army would have no choice but to assume at all times that its operations would always be under observation, unless it could match the enemy's aircraft with its own. The ability to operate unseen, at least much of the time, had been a central aspect to all military planning and generalship for millennia. Now, gone up in smoke!



The bridge at Minden finally came into sight. Even at a distance, it was obviously still under the control of Philippe de la Mothe-Houdancourt and his men. More than that, judging from the number of visible French soldiers. Jean de Gassion must have already returned from his feint at Hesse-Kassel.



The lead units of Turenne's cavalry force began cheering. But Turenne did not participate. He was glaring at the bridge, calculating how many men he could send across at a time.



"We have got to get our own air force," he muttered.





That evening, in the tavern at Minden that de la Mothe-Houdancourt had set up as their operational headquarters, Turenne was finally able to get full reports from all of his lieutenants.



"One of my men went missing entirely," reported one of the junior officers. "I have no idea what happened to him."



That turned out to be the only case of a man missing in action, in the end. Several killed and wounded.



It was unfortunate, of course. Not so much the absence of the man, as the absence of his carbine. Most likely, the enemy already had possession of one of the Cardinals. It wouldn't be long at all before they started duplicating the weapon.



But Turenne had never thought he could keep it a secret, anyway, once the weapon was used in operations. It was simply impossible to put together in one place thousands of energetic and aggressive young men without something going wrong. You couldn't do it even in big markets and trade fairs, much less on military campaigns. Only idiot fat generals like the ones claiming to lead the war from the comfort of the Louvre—most of whom hadn't seen combat in years, even decades—could contemplate such nonsense.





As it happened, the missing man's horse had thrown him during the raid, startled by one of the refinery's pots exploding. The French cavalryman had the bad luck to suffer a concussion as well as a broken arm.



Nothing worse than that, in the end. Bad luck had been followed by good luck, when the fire spreading from the pot hadn't moved in his direction. But by the time he recovered consciousness, not only had his own horse run off but he discovered he'd been left behind by the rest of the expedition. Apparently, no one had witnessed the accident.



So, more bad luck. But, again, followed by good luck. The soldiers who found him and took him prisoner turned out to be from a Hessian unit. They'd suffered no casualties at all from the marshal's raid, so they weren't in a particularly foul mood. A couple of mild butt-strokes, more as a matter of principle than passion, was all the cavalryman suffered beyond the broken arm itself.