One thing had not changed from Ahrensbök, though. Before they began, battles were magnificent. Things of beauty, you could even say. At no other time and place in the world could you see so many men moving together in such immense formations. And all of it to music, too. (Admittedly, the instrumentation was limited. Bugles, fifes and drums only.) It was as if the battlefield was a gigantic stage and an enormous ballet was about to begin.
Chapter 16
The Saxon plain, near Zwenkau
Mike Stearns was stunned the first time he saw a battlefield. He'd expected to be stunned—horrified, rather—by the carnage of a battle's aftermath. What he hadn't expected was the sheer thrill of the spectacle before the battle had started.
He'd seen more people gathered in one place before, of course. There were somewhere around fifty thousand men assembling on this field not far from the small town of Zwenkau. Any modern baseball stadium in the United States they'd left behind would hold that many, and some of the biggest football stadiums could hold twice as many.
But except for a tiny number of athletes on the field, almost all of those people would be sitting down. Their most strenuous activity would be getting up to go to the bathroom.
Here, every single one of those fifty thousand men was doing something—and doing it in unison, to boot. Marching into position, riding horses, hauling up artillery. Most of them were moving fairly slowly, but individual couriers were racing all over carrying messages from commanders to their subordinates.
There were pennants and banners flying everywhere, and the sound of musical instruments filled the air. Drums and fifes mostly, for the moment. Once the battle started, the brass could come to the fore. Over the din of a battle—so Mike had been told; this would be his first personal experience—about the only instruments that could be heard clearly would be bugles and the like. Torstensson had told him that the Republic of Essen favored bells for the purpose, but Torstensson himself thought they'd be too clumsy.
For the first time, Mike really understood the remark made by Robert E. Lee at the battle of Fredericksburg. It is well that war is so terrible, otherwise we would grow too fond of it.
That ancient notion of the glory of war had pretty well vanished by the time Mike Stearns had been born. Seeing this incredible display, he understood why. By the end of the nineteenth century, battles had grown so great that they could no longer be encompassed by the human eye and brain. What remained what simply the brutality. Death in the trenches during the First World War. Skirmishing tactics and maneuvers on a gigantic scale during the Second World War, far too huge for a man to really see what was happening beyond his own small corner of it.
But here in the seventeenth century, a battle still fit in its entirety on a single stage. Mike could see all of it, except for some cavalry units scouting on the margins. Just to complete the picture . . .
He swiveled in his saddle. The observation balloon Torstensson had brought with the army was hanging in the sky, a mile or so in the rear. The thing was colorfully painted too.
Why not? In the universe Mike had come from, camouflage was an essential part of war. But in this one, military technology was still too primitive. It was more important for a commanding officer to be able to see his troops than for them to be hidden from the enemy. Yes, all units the size of battalions or larger had radios. But the weapons themselves were just coming into the technical range where fighting would have to start taking place at a considerable distance. For a time yet, battlefields would be dominated by men firing in formation.
As for the balloon, why bother camouflaging it when the only other flying objects in the sky were birds? Anyone could and would spot the thing. You might as well make it bright and vivid to improve the morale of your own soldiers.
There should be at least one airplane in that sky, too, but Mike couldn't see it. Gustav Adolf had taken most of the air force with him into Brandenburg. That was fair enough, since he'd left all of the APCs to the USE army. He'd left one plane behind, though—one of the older Belles—so that Torstensson would have a longer-range reconnaissance than the observation balloon could give him.
The plane must be too far away to be spotted. Torstensson had probably ordered it to stay in the vicinity of Dresden. Mike knew that Gustav Adolf had left orders that he wanted John George captured. A reconnaissance plane could hopefully give early warning if the elector tried to make his escape. Torstensson had two cavalry regiments held in reserve, specifically for the purpose of intercepting the Saxon elector if he tried to escape into Poland. He'd already sent one of them to circle around Dresden.
Mike turned back to examine the field where the battle would be taking place soon. There were no woods in sight, and only a handful of trees. The terrain was very flat except for two rises: one where Torstensson had set up his headquarters; the other, across the field to the east, when von Arnim was presumably stationed. The whole area was farmland.