The Baltic War(247)

A "tape recorder," it was called, if Nils remembered correctly. He wasn't positive, though, because he tried to spend as little time as possible in the emperor's company whenever he used the device. Nils himself thought the music that emerged from it was hideously raucous. As a rule, the emperor had told him, he had much the same opinion—but he felt obliged to listen since Kristina had included some of her own favorite songs.



The emperor had quite a nice singing voice, actually, but it was still painful to listen to such musical bedlam. The portions from the drinking song came as a relief, for all that it was raucous in its own right. Extremely bawdy, too—but at least Ekstrom could make sense of it.





As it happened, the commander of the French forces outside Luebeck had been studying buttocks through an eyeglass. But they weren't the naked buttocks of a Swedish king, they were the still-trousered rear ends of thousand of Danish soldiers beginning their retreat back to Denmark.



"Those stinking Danes," snarled Charles de Valois, duc d'Angoulême, after he finished his study and returned to his headquarters. "Cowards!"



Standing toward the back of the tavern in the large inn that had served the duke of Angoulême as his headquarters over the course of the siege, one of his officers made very sure to keep his face expressionless. Months earlier, Jean-Baptiste Budes, comte de Guébriant, had begun coming to certain conclusions. As of today, he decided those conclusions could now be considered as firm.



His first conclusion—this one had actually become firm by the end of December—was that Charles de Valois was an ass. An old man with an unpleasant disposition, none too keen-witted with regard to anything, and particularly prone to stupidity when it came to military matters.



Of course the Danes were lifting the siege and returning to their defensive lines at the Danewerk. That wasn't cowardice, it was simply common sense. Now that the American admiral Simpson had shattered the blockade of Luebeck, how in the name of God did the duke of Angoulême think the siege could be maintained?—even leaving aside the not-small problem that the Swedish general Torstensson had brought an army north from Hamburg to relieve the siege. Even if Torstensson hadn't come, what difference would it make? How could any general with the sense of a goose think he could "besiege" a port when the enemy had control of the sea?



The real problem now was that army of Torstensson's, which had already reached Segeberg and thereby stood across the French line of retreat up the Trave. If d'Angoulême had had the sense of even a chicken, much less a goose, he would have ordered the French forces to begin their retreat before the Danish commander had done so. The Danes didn't have far to go, and they didn't have to worry about Torstensson intercepting them before they got back to Denmark.



It was a long way to France, and the way had just gotten a lot longer.



Jean-Baptiste's second conclusion was that, as much as he generally thought well of Cardinal Richelieu in political terms, France's effective ruler was woefully lacking when it came to providing the nation with military leadership. Unfortunately, Richelieu had a long history and habit of handing out military posts primarily for reasons having to do with France's internal—and seemingly interminable—political faction fights. In that sphere of combat, Richelieu was the master, no doubt of it. But the resultant damage to the French army could be severe.



In some instances, Richelieu's factional purposes wound up being beneficial. He'd appointed Charles de la Porte because he was Richelieu's cousin, for instance—but there was no question de la Porte was a good officer. Far more often, however, the results were insalubrious.



D'Angoulême was a case in point. French political factionalism was often closely tied to the influence wielded by the great families of the princes légitimés—the "legitimated princes" who amounted to royal bastards given official recognition, and were among the wealthiest and most powerful families in the French aristocracy. For years, Richelieu had maneuvered to crush the power of the Guise and Vendóme families. He'd done so, but his success had been due in large part to lavishly rewarding the other two great lines of the princes légitimés, the Angoulême and the Longueville.



A brilliant political maneuver, yes—but one of the side effects was that the French army laying siege to Luebeck had been given to Charles de Valois, a man whose principal qualification for high military command was that he was the bastard of King Charles IX. He was sixty-one years old but often seemed to think like an octogenarian. De Valois was firmly set in old ways of fighting wars; ways which might have made sense in the days of the wars of religion, but were now completely inadequate.