The Baltic War(253)

Thorsten thought about it, for a moment, and then decided to play devil's advocate. Not out of any spirit of contrariness, but simply because he always found it very difficult not to ponder all sides of a problem once he got it into his head.



"Why not, Lieutenant? What I mean is, it doesn't matter whether the French are stupid or not. They're the ones—not us—who have to get somewhere. So why doesn't General Torstensson just stay on the defensive? If they try to move around us, we just move to block them. Sooner or later, they'd have to attack."



Reschly scratched his jaw. "Good point, in fact. I think the answer—though I'm not sure—is that the emperor wants this all done quickly. The sort of maneuvers and countermaneuvers you're talking about could take days, even as much as a week or two. And that brings up another problem, which is that we're getting low on supplies and the French have no supply lines at all. That means their army will have to start foraging almost immediately, and we'd probably have to follow suit soon enough, if the maneuvering took us very far from Luebeck. It'll still be some time before the TacRail units can catch up with us, even as fast as they work."



He cocked his head slightly, peering at Engler. "You're from a farm family, Sergeant Engler. You know better than most what 'foraging' really means."



Thorsten's jaws tightened a little. What it meant—at best—from a farmer's standpoint, was seeing his livestock and crops seized. Often enough, it also meant being killed and his womenfolk ravished. If they were lucky, the women would then be carried off as camp followers. If they weren't, their corpses would join those of their fathers and husbands and sons.



Farmers hated soldiers. It really didn't matter whose army they belonged to, even their own. Supposedly their own, rather—since from the standpoint of most farmers, as a rule, it hardly mattered. Let an army be badly beaten on a battlefield, and the survivors of the defeated side were likely to find themselves hunted if they couldn't reform their units. For a few miles, they'd be hunted down by the cavalry of the victors. Thereafter, by any farm villagers they ran across, who'd pursue them and murder them pitilessly.



"You see what I mean?" said Reschly. "The emperor plans to incorporate all of this area into the United States, even if he's never quite come out and said it in so many words. But you know it and I know it and probably even the local village idiots know it. So he'll not want the populace ravaged, and a quick decisive victory is the best way to make sure it doesn't happen."



Put that way, Thorsten could not only see the logic but he approved of it. The bugles blew again at that point, however, followed by the fifes and drums. He and Reschly fell silent for a while as they watched over the batteries' evolutions.



That went smoothly enough. The volunteer regiments of the new USE Army still didn't have much in the way of combat experience. But they'd been well trained, and trained for months—far more so than most armies of the day. So there were no major problems in simply carrying out a maneuver. How well they'd do once the fighting started, remained to be seen. But their morale was high and they were quite confident they'd do well. Thorsten thought so, himself.



A few minutes later, he asked Reschly another question. "They're putting us farther out on the flank than we usually go. Any idea why?"



In fact, the way Torstensson was ordering the formations, the three volley gun companies by now were almost at the very edge of his army's right flank. There were only a few units of skirmishers and a thin cavalry screen beyond them



Reschly sucked in a breath. His jaws weren't exactly clenched; but he had his teeth pressed together and his lips spread. It was an expression that was half-apprehensive and half-thoughtful.



"I'm guessing, Sergeant. But the way you break a big army on a battlefield is by tearing at their flanks with cavalry—and, unfortunately, we don't have enough cavalry for the purpose. We've got more than the French, but not enough. You really need to be able to hammer at them to manage it."



He closed his lips and blew the breath back out. "One of the problems, you know, with the way this army was created. We simply don't have enough mercenaries"—here he smiled almost gaily—"and we sure as hell don't have enough noblemen."



That was true enough too, once Thorsten thought about it. The regiments mainly drew their volunteers from the CoC strongholds. With some exceptions here and there, those were in the cities and big towns. Such recruits might have splendid morale and determination to fight, but it was just a fact that not too many of them were good horsemen. Not even most farmers were, really. Almost any man of the time had some familiarity with horses, including riding them. But there was a world of difference between being able to guide a stodgy cart-horse and being able to ride the sort of horses a cavalrymen needed, in the way they needed to be ridden, and using weapons at the same time.