One of the major drawbacks to the seventeenth century’s libertarian method of paying troops was that everybody at every link in the money chain had an incentive to chisel. That was true even of the troops themselves, who were far more likely to spend their pay on wine, women and what passed for song in siege lines than they were to keep their gear up to snuff. Their officers certainly weren’t going to make up the difference, with a few rare exceptions. Any supplies they bought their men usually had to come out of their own pockets.
That was not the least of the reasons that Mike, in his days as prime minister, had insisted that the USE’s soldiers be paid from the national coffers directly. The money did not pass through a chain of officers except those assigned to payroll duty, who could be easily monitored. What was just as important, the army’s supplies all the way down to socks and boots were “government issue.” The USE army’s soldiers were GIs, not independent military sub-contractors.
It wasn’t impossible to chisel, of course. A black market in government-issued supplies and weapons had accompanied every army in history, and Mike didn’t doubt for a moment that it accompanied his own. Still, almost every soldier who marched out into the Saxon plain a week or two from now to meet Sweden’s Finest would have socks and good boots on his feet and be wearing an outfit designed to enable him to march, maneuver and fight in the cold and the snow and the ice. Which was a lot more than Banér’s mercenaries would have at their disposal.
Mike’s biggest worry was actually that Banér would choose to hunker down in his siege lines and not come out to meet him in the open field. The Swedish general hadn’t bothered to build lines of contravallation to guard his siegeworks—the lines of circumvallation, to use the technical term—from the possibility of being attacked by an army in the field. He hadn’t expected to find any such field army to face in the first place. Still, it wouldn’t be that hard to adapt siege lines for the purpose, especially in winter.
But Mike didn’t think that was likely. In the end, this was more of a political than a military contest. It was now obvious that Axel Oxenstierna had bitten off more than he could chew. Even before Princess Kristina showed up in Magdeburg, the Swedish chancellor had been losing the all-important so-called “war of public opinion.” His opponents’ shrewd tactics of avoiding open clashes and positioning themselves as the bulwarks of stability and order had put him on the defensive. (Mike was quite sure that was largely Becky’s doing, although she’d said nothing about it in her radio messages.)
Now that Kristina had placed the prestige of the dynasty on the side of Oxenstierna’s opponents, he would be thrown completely off balance. The ability of Dresden to defy him had been the great wound in his side from the beginning, and Kristina had now torn the wound wide open. The chancellor had no choice any longer. He had to take Dresden—and quickly, so he could marshal his armies to march on Magdeburg itself. He had no options left except naked force and violence. And if that lost him still more public support, so be it. He could rule the Germanies by dictatorship, if need be.
Or so he thought, anyway. Mike had his doubts. Five years ago, yes. Oxenstierna could probably have succeeded in such a project. Today? Mike thought it was not likely at all. Not in the long run, for sure.
He didn’t intend to let things get that far, though. Kristina’s action had done one other thing—it had given Mike the fig leaf he needed to bring his army back into the USE. Even technically, it would now be difficult to charge him with leading a mutiny. But that really didn’t matter because a civil war was never settled by lawyers. By very definition, a civil war was a state of affairs in which the rule of law had collapsed. What remained was, on one side, the field of arms; and on the other, the battle for the populace’s support.
Under those conditions, Mike didn’t think Banér could stay in his siege lines once Mike entered the Saxon plain and challenged him openly. He was almost certain that Oxenstierna would order him to fight in the field.
Where he might very well win, of course. On paper, at least, his army was larger than Mike’s—fifteen thousand to the Third Division’s nine thousand. But Mike was certain that Banér’s forces had suffered a lot of attrition by now. Mercenary armies always did, especially in winter. That was disease, mostly, although desertion was always a big factor also.
The Third Division, on the other hand, hadn’t suffered at all. Mike had made sure their quarters were good, with good sanitation, and he’d kept his men well-fed and well-supplied. They still lost soldiers, of course, but they replaced them with new recruits. In fact, the division was a little over-strength. His paymasters told him there were now almost ten thousand men on the active rolls. Some of those added men were specialists, of course; repairmen or supply troops of one kind or another. Part of the so-called tail rather than the teeth of an army. But at least a third of them were in combat units, especially heavy weapons units.