They'd be hearing more of those, Jeff figured, the farther the regiment pushed into the town.
On the plus side, it wasn't that big a town. On the minus side, every square foot seemed to have a damn Pole in it.
None of them were civilians, either, so far as Jeff could tell. Those had apparently skedaddled before the Third Division got within five miles of the place. At least Jeff wouldn't have to worry about atrocities committed against innocent bystanders.
Swell. Now he could concentrate on the problem of atrocities committed against him and his. The Poles were no sweethearts, and God help you if you fell into the hands of Cossacks. Whatever romantic notions about them Jeff could vaguely remember having back up-time had vanished the first time he came across the mutilated corpse of one of his soldiers who'd been taken prisoner four days earlier. The Cossacks had obviously spent some time on the project.
About the only virtues possessed by Cossacks other than their strictly martial abilities, so far as Jeff could tell, was the dubious one of being equal opportunity savages. From the evidence he'd seen, they were just as dangerous to Polish civilians as they were to anyone they were fighting.
Jeff had made clear to his men that he wouldn't tolerate atrocities, no matter who they were committed against. But his definition of "atrocity" was reasonably practical. He wasn't going to look into the fact that nobody seemed to be taking Cossack prisoners, as long as there was no evidence they'd been tortured.
Of course, they hadn't taken many prisoners of any kind so far. The only way you'd get a hussar to surrender was if he'd been knocked off his horse, and even then he pretty much had to be knocked senseless. Polish infantrymen weren't as cussed crazy belligerent, but they were still plenty feisty.
Jeff had been surprised by that, more than he'd been surprised by anything else. He'd known the set-up in Poland, in broad outlines. A small class of great landowners—they called them magnates—lording it over a population that was mostly dirt-poor peasants, many of them outright serfs. But what he was now learning was that broad outlines don't really tell you very much about a given people's fighting capabilities.
After all, in broad outline, the antebellum American South had been a land dominated by a small class of great plantation masters who lorded it over the poor whites as well as their black slaves. That hadn't stopped the poor whites—talk about dumb!—from fighting for the slaveowners, had it?
What Jeff was now learning firsthand was just how savagely a class of people will fight to defend whatever small privileges they might have, even if they're purely social privileges, so long as those privileges loom large in their minds. That was especially true if the official casus belli was clear and straight-forward. We've been invaded!
Southern whites may have been poor, but at least they weren't black. Likewise, most of the szlachta weren't really much if any wealthier than the peasants they lived among. But at least they weren't peasants. They had status.
Poland and Lithuania were peculiar in that way, compared to most European countries. Their aristocracy was huge—probably a full ten percent of the population, where England's aristocracy wasn't more than three percent and even the sprawling German one wasn't more than five percent.
Only a few of those szlachta were really what Jeff would consider "large landowners." Those were the magnates, like Koniecpolski himself. Plenty of the szlachta didn't have the proverbial pot to piss in. But that only made them cherish even more their social position. In theory, at least, any member of the szlachta could marry the daughter of the richest magnate in the land and rise to any position in society.
So, the Polish infantry and artillery weren't the half-baked forces Jeff had expected. He'd known the hussars would make ferocious opponents, but he'd figured the rest of the Polish army would be like the Persian foot soldiers who'd faced Alexander the Great and his Macedonian phalanxes. When the crunch came down, they hadn't been worth much.
From what he'd been able to determine so far, however, szlachta made up a big chunk of the infantry and artillery they'd face since they closed in on Zielona Góra and the fighting started in earnest. These were some genuinely tough bastards, much more so than the Saxons had been. The soldiers working for John George—and that was exactly the relationship; a purely commercial one—had been professionals who, once a reasonable fight had been put up, were quite willing to surrender. In fact, any number of them were quite willing to go to work for the same people who'd just defeated them.
This was a whole different kettle of fish, now that they were moving into territory that was clearly and definitively Polish. That wasn't always clear, in border areas. Many of the towns near Brandenburg had been technically Polish in political terms, but the populations were often heavily German and Protestant. That was true of Zielona Góra itself, for that matter. Most of the town's population were Lutherans and they called it by the German name, Grünberg.