The Eastern Front(3)

Some part of Rebecca wondered if she would ever see her husband again, but she squelched that quickly enough.

He's a general, she told herself firmly. Ignoring, just as firmly, her knowledge that in the seventeenth century army generals often led from the front and were quite apt to be killed in battle.



Rebecca spent some time thereafter restlessly moving about the house, doing her own investigations. She spent a fair amount of that time in the several toilets and bathrooms scattered through the huge dwelling, testing their various devices and taking what comfort she could from them.

Which was considerable, actually. Newly designed and built, the house had modern plumbing. Rebecca had grown up with seventeenth-century sanitation facilities, and was certainly capable of managing with such. She'd been doing so again for the past two years, after all. But her stay in Grantville had spoiled her in that regard.

Fortunately, it had done the same thing for every down-timer who passed through the up-time American town. By now, there was a flourishing new industry in central Europe and the Low Countries producing the wherewithal for modern plumbing. The same industries were beginning to appear in France, Italy and Poland, if not yet in Spain and England.

The adoption of those new techniques was especially rapid in the Germanies and Bohemia. That was partly because the industries involved were further developed there. But another important factor was the stance of the Committees of Correspondence, who were more prominent in those areas than they were elsewhere in Europe. The CoCs were firmly convinced—adamant, it would be better to say—that proper sanitation ran a very close second to godliness, and they matched deed to word. The rapidly spreading network of credit union    s that was fostered by the CoCs in lower class communities always extended low-interest loans for any sanitation project. And in cities like Magdeburg where they were powerful, the CoCs maintained patrols that were quite prepared to use forceful means to put a stop to unsanitary practices.

There were still towns in the Germanies where people emptied their chamber pots in street gutters as a matter of course. Magdeburg was not one of them. Doing so would certainly result in a public harangue; persisting in the practice would just as certainly lead to a beating.

There were people who denounced the CoCs for that practice, but Rebecca was not one of them. Such people were usually either down-time reactionaries or up-time liberals. The reactionaries were against anything connected to the Ring of Fire. Their objection was not to beatings—they were generally all in favor of that practice, applied to lower class folk—but to the cause involved and the persons engaged in it.

As for the up-time liberals, Rebecca understood their qualms. But they'd never lived through a major episode of disease, except the few who'd been in the western Germanies during the ongoing plague epidemic this year or had lived through the diphtheria scare in the Oberpfalz the year before. Any epidemic, even when it was more "benign" than smallpox or typhus, was bad enough. It was quite noticeable that those up-timers who'd survived the experience were not given to wincing at the CoC methods of sanitation enforcement. Better some bruised feelings and even bruised flesh to bodies being carted off by the hundreds, or sometimes thousands.



She then spent some time watching the small horde of children playing with electricity. Within limits, of course. She let them switch the lights on and off in the various rooms, as long as they were reasonably gentle in the process and didn't overdo it. Like most technology patterned on up-time design and theory but constructed using down-time methods and materials, the switches were sturdy things. Still, they could be broken if they were over-stressed, and—again, like almost everything of that nature—they were rather costly. The light bulbs were even more expensive.

She kept them away from the computer. In fact, she kept the door to that room locked. But she allowed them to plug in and operate Michael's battered old up-time toaster in the kitchen. Every child present—there were no fewer than nine participating in the project—got to make and eat his or her own slices of toast.

The toast was on the crumbly side. Down-time bread was much tastier than the up-time varieties which were by now long gone, to no one's regret other than some up-timers themselves. But it didn't slice as cleanly or evenly, probably because it lacked what up-timers called "additives" and down-timers called low-grade poisons.

But the children didn't care. They'd never had toast before, leaving aside some baked flatbreads. They were quite taken by the stuff.

Their interest faded soon enough, though. There were greater thrills in store. It wasn't long before the children were racing down to the basement to start up the mansion's sure and certain center of attraction. For them, anyway.