Anse laid his head down, and played dead. The situation wasn't critical and he wasn't Alvin York, anyway—as he'd just proved, by missing his first shot at von Dantz at point-blank range.
Besides, he consoled himself, he'd read once that after the battle of New Orleans was over, several hundred "dead" British soldiers had risen from Chalmette Field. Most of them completely uninjured. Veteran soldiers all—elite soldiers, even—they'd quickly realized that their commanders had led them into a bloodbath that they didn't have a chance of winning.
He was pretty sure the same thing had happened on just about every battlefield in history, at least since the invention of gunpowder.
Tradition, as it were. Inglorious as it might be.
He still felt like a damned fool.
Fortunately, it was all over within thirty seconds. The garrison soldiers broke, and began running away. They didn't slow down any, either, as they neared the safety of the next street over. The gunmakers of Suhl were in a fine fury, and kept firing on them the whole way.
Anse peeked up, then rose.
Blumroder came out of the door, smiling.
"You are a brave man, Herr Hatfield. And what is better, a very sensible one."
Anse gave him a look that was none too friendly. "I guess you've proved you're brave enough, yourself. We'll just have to see how sensible you are."
Blumroder's smile faded. Some, at least, if not enough to suit Anse.
A woman, followed by a man, came out of one of the shops farther up the street, carrying a musket. She marched over to one of the corpses lying in the snow, aimed the musket, and fired. Brains that had already been spilled were scattered still further.
The man with her went to another corpse. Aimed, fired. A dead man died again.
That both men had already been dead wasn't in question. In fact, it looked as if they'd each taken several bullets during the fighting. Those had already been the most shot-up corpses on the street.
"Hey!" said Anse. He didn't approve of mutilating corpses, and if this got out of hand . . .
Blumroder put a hand on his arm. "It is a personal matter, Herr Hatfield. The people in that shop were looking for two men in particular. It seems they found them."
"Oh." After a moment, Anse shrugged. It was a pretty crude form of justice, but . . .
What the hell. If he didn't feel any particular guilt over playing dead in the snow—which he didn't—he had no business getting all huffy and puffy about proper judicial procedure. As long as it didn't get out of hand, at least.
The woman and the man, methodically and stoically, reloaded their weapons. Then, fired again.
"That's enough!" he called out. "Genug!"
The couple raised their heads and looked at him. After a moment, the man nodded. The woman took a bit longer to make her decision. But she, too, turned and went back into their shop.
"Okay," Anse said. He looked up the street, in the direction of the garrison's compound. It was out of sight, but it wasn't more than a quarter of a mile away.
"Okay," he repeated. "I guess we'd better finish it."
Blumroder began shouting orders. Within a minute, dozens of gunmakers, apprentices and Jaeger were out in the street, lining up in a remarkably good military formation.
Perhaps not that remarkable, really. One of the things Anse had learned in the twenty months since the Ring of Fire was that a lot of his preconceptions of "law-abiding, orderly Germans" were myths. Or, maybe not myths so much as transposing the reality of a much later Germany onto the seventeenth century.
The truth was that, in a lot of ways, Anse felt quite at home among Germans of this day and age. Germany—"the Germanies," rather—was often a raucous and freewheeling sort of place. Just like good and proper West Virginians, most Germans who weren't dirt poor owned guns and knew how to use them. Most towns and many villages had a militia, just as surely—and with just as much civic pride—as they had their own printing presses.
True, there were differences. Already, Germans had a devotion to bureaucratic regulations and legal fussiness that precious few uptime Americans ever did. Outside of Washington, D.C., at any rate. Still, Germans of the seventeenth century had a lot more in common with the frontiersmen of pre-Civil War America, in terms of their basic attitudes, than they did with the regimented populace of a much later Prussia. The Jaeger would have found the old Mountain Men sadly rootless, but other than that, they wouldn't have had much trouble understanding them.
Anse led the way. Thankfully, nobody made any wisecracks about dead men lying in the snow being miraculously resurrected. After a while, he realized that very few of them had even noticed.