The Ram Rebellion(89)

He sighed, took off his cap, and scratched his scalp. "This is going to be a mess, isn't it?"





"Sure is. Like I said, Mr. Piazza showed me some of the reports Steve Salatto sent in. Our administration teams found out very soon that there weren't many people who had been living in Franconia during the winter of 1631-1632 who were likely to ever join a King Gustavus Adolphus fan club. It didn't seem to matter at all whether they were Catholic or Protestant, or whether they lived in the villages or the big towns. At a rough guess, at least ninety percent of the population of Franconia hate the Swedes. They were every bit as rough on people when they came through as any of Tilly or Wallenstein's armies."





Anse hissed. "Rough on people" was a euphemism for what, uptime, would be a roster of every major felony on the books, starting with murder, rape and arson and working your way down. "That bad?"





Noelle started to reply but had to break off to calm down her horse. The beast had gotten a little jittery about something. God knows what. Anse Hatfield wasn't really much more experienced with horses than the young Catholic woman.





"Well, I guess not quite," she said, finally, once the horse settled down. "At least, so far as we know there were no major massacres. Certainly nothing on the scale of what Tilly's army did at Magdeburg. But it was plenty bad enough—and nobody down there has forgotten, or stopped holding a grudge. Real, serious, personal grudges, too. Not just the usual `they made me convert to somebody else's religion' grudges. There were the `they burned my Ma as a witch' grudges; the `somebody's army stole all our horses' grudges; `the Swedes devastated our property when they passed through in 1631-1632 on their way to crossing the Lech' grudges."





"In Suhl, too? They're mostly Lutherans themselves, I thought. Just like the Swedes."





"Yes, they are. For that matter, you can argue till the cows come home whether Suhl is really part of Franconia or Thuringia in the first place. But it doesn't matter, Mr. Hatfield."





"Call me Anse, please."





"Okay. Look, Anse, here's what I've finally figured out about this so-called `war of religion.' Almost every army involved in this war is mostly made up of mercenaries, including Gustavus Adolphus' army. The truth is, you'll find plenty of Protestant soldiers serving in `Catholic' armies, and vice versa. As often as not, religion is just an excuse for a mercenary army to do what it would have done anyway, once it enters territory it considers conquered from the enemy—and their definition of `enemy' is going to be just as sloppy as everything else. From what I can tell, most of this war is just one plundering expedition after another. I think Gustavus Adolphus keeps a tighter rein on his soldiers than most commanders do. But that isn't saying much, and even that gets really frayed when he's just marching through a territory on his way somewhere else."





This, at least, was an area that Anse felt more familiar with. "Well, yeah, that's a given. Not a one of these armies has a `logistics train' that isn't made up of spit, baling wire and chewing gum. In fact, that's the problem us TacRail people are trying to solve. To a point, anyway. Without a good logistics train, an army on the march has no choice but to do what they call `foraging.'"





Noelle's expression got very tight, almost pinched. "What a fancy, antiseptic term."





"Ain't it?" replied Anse, grinning coldly. "Anybody uptime tried to engage in such-like `foraging' at home, they'd be looking at a minimum twenty-year sentence at hard labor. A fair number would be on death row, if West Virginia still had a death penalty."





Noelle shook her head. "I've always been glad West Virginia gave up the death penalty, back in 1976. But sometimes . . ."





Anse shrugged, being careful to keep the motion minimal. Truth be told, he wasn't any too sure how good a control he had over his own horse, especially traveling across snow-covered dirt roads. "It's a moot point, here. I know Mike's just fighting right now to get all the down-timers in the N.U.S. to agree to restrict the death penalty to murder."





Noelle got that pinched look on her face again. At such times, Anse didn't have any trouble at all picturing her as a nun. That might just be his own prejudices at work, though. Unlike most West Virginians, Anse didn't belong to any church. But his background was old-time Protestant, and he tended to share the image of nuns as pale-faced, tight-lipped, mean-spirited old crones who disapproved of anything and everything.





Which wasn't fair, certainly not applied to Noelle. She might have the goofiest mother in creation, by all accounts, but at least so far she'd struck Anse as a pleasant and levelheaded young woman. She was rather pretty, too.