The Baltic War(248)

For d'Angoulême, as for most of France's top generals, war was essentially a matter of sieges. Capturing important cities and towns as part of the chess game of the factional struggles in France. The fact that the nearest major foreign war, for decades, had been the struggle between the Spanish crown and the Dutch rebels—a struggle in which, until the recent formation of the League of Ostend, the French had always sided with the Dutch—had simply reinforced that attitude. The struggle in the Netherlands was certainly a war of sieges, yes. But that was inevitable, given the nature of the terrain. It did not follow that a war fought on the open terrain of northern Europe was going to have the same characteristics.



Indeed, it most certainly didn't. Jean-Baptiste's friend Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar was openly derisive of the French military command. "Every other army in Europe," he'd pointed out to Jean-Baptiste, "tries to have as powerful a cavalry force as it does an infantry force. Why? Because the only way you can win battles on the open field is with cavalry."



He was right about that, Jean-Baptiste was pretty sure. Which would not be surprising, given that the youngest of the dukes of Saxe-Weimar was a veteran commander of the German wars. Unless you could mass enough artillery, as Gustav Adolf had managed to do at Breitenfeld, it was effectively impossible to shatter a large force of well-trained infantry on the field with other infantry. With pikes and muskets, it simply couldn't be done. What you could do, however, was use powerful cavalry forces on the flanks to drive off the enemy cavalry—at which point you could launch attacks on the great blocks of infantrymen from the rear or the flanks. The same tercio-style formations which were unbreakable when attacked from the front, were extremely fragile if attacked elsewhere.



But those were lessons that the duke of Angoulême had not only refused to learn, he'd even refused to study. What does a French prince need to learn from barbarous Germans and Swedes? War was siegecraft, and by God he'd come to lay siege to Luebeck—and any idiot knows that you fight a siege, on either side, with infantry and artillery.



So, France's army suffered from a severe shortage of cavalry units. The only powerful one that had been put together was Turenne's—and the enmity and animosity of the French military establishment to that young upstart was so intense that Richelieu had had no choice but to give him an independent command far distant from the main theater of war.



Being fair to Richelieu, Jean-Baptiste knew that the cardinal was aware of the problem, and had promoted a number of young officers in order to deal with it. But Turenne's appointment as a marshal had stirred up such a firestorm of protest that Richelieu had not been able to pursue the project as far as needed.



Which brought Jean-Baptiste Budes, the count of Guébriant, to his third firm conclusion.



He was himself an ass. A veritable idiot. An idiot twice over, in fact. Turenne had offered him a position in his small cavalry army, and Jean-Baptiste had declined. The count of Guébriant had the normal ambition of any capable thirty-two year old officer, and he'd thought Turenne's forces would spend the whole war simply twiddling their thumbs.



Which, indeed, they might be. Jean-Baptiste was on cordial terms with Turenne, but they were not personally well acquainted, so he'd had little contact with the young marshal since the campaign at Luebeck began. He really had no idea what Turenne and his forces had been doing for the past few months. But at least Turenne wouldn't come out of the war with a major defeat on his record—and a major defeat was precisely what the situation looked like to Guébriant, here in northern Germany.



Then—twice an idiot!—he'd also declined Bernhard's offer to give him a commission in Saxe-Weimar's mercenary army defending the frontier in the Franche-Comté. Partly because Jean-Baptiste was reluctant to resign from the regular French forces, but mostly because his assessment was that Bernhard's army would not be playing a particularly glorious role in the war either.



Which, indeed, they probably wouldn't. But lack of glory, modest as it might be, was far superior to inglorious defeat.



"Cowards, I say! Cowards!" The duc d'Angoulême was still indulging himself in his denunciation of the Danes, which had now gone on for several minutes. Several more minutes in which an army of Germans led by the Swede Torstensson and armed with American military technology had closed still tighter the noose around the French army at Luebeck.



No, say better, inglorious and humiliating disaster.





"Let the Danes go, Lennart," Gustav Adolf commanded over the radio. "You probably couldn't catch them anyway, but even if you could I'd still feel the same. At this point, I'm looking for a political settlement with Christian. Killing a lot of Danes for no good reason won't help that in the least. It's the French I care about now."