He reserved particular venom for what had been his own bête noire, automated phone systems.
"—always changed their menus. Call the next day and the lying bastards would insist the menu had changed again. There were stories of people dying of thirst and ruptured bladders trying to figure how to actually talk to anybody. And the one phrase you never heard those fucking computer voices say was ‘call volumes are unusually low so we'll connect you to your party immediately.' Oh, hell no. Call volumes were always high. It was like grading on a bell curve where everybody flunks."
By the time he was done, Krenz was looking downright chipper.
From atop the closest thing his scouts could find to a hill—it was really just a hillock, a slight rise in the landscape—Hans Georg von Arnim studied the surroundings. And, just as Eric Krenz had done, mused on the fact that in another universe the king of Sweden had died in battle not far from this very place.
Exactly where, no one knew. The up-time accounts referred to "the battle of Lützen," but provided few details. The battle hadn't taken place in the town itself but in some field nearby. There was supposed to have been a monument erected where Gustav Adolf died, but of course that did not exist in the world on this side of the Ring of Fire.
Von Arnim himself had once been in Swedish service, for several years. That had been two decades back, not long after Gustav Adolf ascended the throne. The new Swedish king had been seventeen years old at the time. He was only nineteen when Arnim came into his employ.
That had been a long time ago. Two decades. Two decades during which von Arnim, like most professional soldiers of the time, had served many employers. Having been born in Brandenburger Land, naturally enough he'd begun his military career as a soldier for the duchy of Prussia. That had been before Prussia was absorbed by Brandenburg. He'd had to leave hastily due to a duel, which was how he'd wound up on the Swedish payroll.
From there, he'd fought for the Poles for a time. In 1624, Wallenstein—then a general for the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II—had hired him. Just a few years later, the Austrian emperor sent an army to support the Polish king Sigismund III against the Swedes. Arnim had been one of the commanders of those forces.
So, on June 17, 1629, he'd faced Gustav Adolf at the battle of Trzciana. His Polish allies had been commanded by Stanislaw Koniecpolski. That had been a ferocious battle, which ended with a slight advantage for the Poles and imperials. But the Austrian troops had mutinied when the Poles failed to pay them, and von Arnim had wound up leaving imperial service in disgust and going to work for the elector of Saxony.
Two years later, in one of the twists that were so common in the Thirty Years' War, von Arnim had wound up fighting alongside Gustav Adolf again, when he met Tilly at the battle of Breitenfeld. That had been a great victory for the Swedish king, but the Saxon troops had been ignominiously routed early in the battle.
However, von Arnim himself had not been blamed for the fiasco. It would have been hard to do so, since the elector John George had been present on that battlefield himself and had been one of the first to flee. So von Arnim had remained in Saxon service.
Today, he was regretting it. For the past four years, the elector of Saxony had generally refused to listen to von Arnim's advice. That was true with matters both large and small.
With regard to the largest, John George had ignored von Arnim's advice when the Ostend War broke out. Von Arnim had been confident that Gustav Adolf would eventually emerge triumphant, and thus it would be folly not to support him as Saxony was required to do by the provisions of the agreement that had set up the Confederated Principalities of Europe.
But the elector had chosen to do otherwise. He'd been resentful for years at Gustav Adolf's preeminence among the Protestant nations and principalities of Europe, and John George was unfortunately prone to being sullen and stubborn. His legal argument was based on a differing interpretation of the relevant provisions of the CPE agreement, but von Arnim was sure that the elector's real motive was profoundly irrational. He felt he'd been dragooned against his will into the CPE by Gustav Adolf's bullying—which was true enough, of course—and now with the Ostend War he saw a chance to get out and regain his independence.
In purely legal terms, John George's position was probably as valid as Gustav Adolf's. Those provisions were not what anyone would call a model of clarity. But regardless of the letter of the agreement, John George was certainly breaking its spirit—and the king of Sweden was just as certain to become furious over the issue. Politics and the law were related but ultimately quite different realms. If Gustav Adolf did triumph over the Ostenders, as von Arnim thought he would and John George insisted he wouldn't, the repercussions on Saxony would be severe.