So, Mike figured the armies were relatively even, in purely numerical terms. In the end, it would come down to leadership. Banér was one of the Swedish army’s handful of top generals—and going by the record, the Swedish army could lay claim to being the best army in Europe over the past half decade. Mike, on the other hand, was still largely—not quite—a neophyte general. He didn’t begin to have Banér’s experience and proven skill on the battlefield.
But he didn’t intend to match that skill and experience, in the first place. The one lesson Mike had learned by now was that “generalship” was a vacant abstraction. There was no such thing, really, in the sense that most people meant by the term—a definable and distinctive skill set, such as one might learn in school to become a doctor or an accountant or an architect.
There were many specific skills involved in leading an army, of course. And experience mattered, as it did in any line of work. But what there really was, at the heart of the matter, was simply leadership. And leadership was never defined abstractly. A man did not “lead.” No, he led specific people with specific goals and motives to accomplish specific tasks.
In this instance, he would be leading an army of citizen soldiers intent on defending their nation’s liberties and freedoms from the depredations of a mercenary army paid for by a foreign occupier. So long as Mike committed no outright blunders, he was confident he could triumph in that specific task. Banér would try to match one general against another, where Mike would be matching one army against another.
Morale would decide it, in the end. Mike was sure of that—as long as he didn’t just purely screw up, at any rate. His army’s morale was excellent. He’d made sure it wasn’t sapped by lack of food, disease, and freezing toes, and he never failed to maintain the division’s regularly-published broadsheet that kept his soldiers well-informed and motivated.
That was the other reason Mike had decided to travel by sleigh. He had one of his beloved portable printing presses on board. The devices were more dear to him than anything except his wife and children.
Live by the word, die by the word. The Swedes had already lost that battle. Mike figured the rest was bound to follow.
The Third Division started arriving in Tetschen two days after Mike left. It took the division a day and half to pass through the town. Not from the marching, but from the time it took to get every man outfitted with winter clothing that fit him properly.
Properly enough, anyway. Soldiers don’t expect sartorial perfection and David had made sure to err on the side of getting boots and outfits that were too big rather than too small. A man could wear two pair of socks, if need be, and there were a number of ways to pad an oversize winter outfit with jury-rigged insulating material. A lot of soldiers specifically asked for oversized clothing, in fact.
By the time it was all over and the division was on its way up the road that followed the Elbe toward Königstein and Saxony, David Bartley was the most popular officer in the division. Hands down.
He was especially popular with the flying artillery units. Those men had become deeply attached to their volley guns, in the battles they’d fought starting with their great victory over the French cavalry at Ahrensbök. Now that winter was here and they knew they’d be fighting in the snow, they’d been glumly certain they’d have to leave their volley guns behind and suffer the indignities of becoming wretched infantrymen.
No longer. Not with the new auxiliary ski attachments, which they were already calling Bartley rigs.
David was tickled pink, truth be told. It almost made up for being left behind with just two companies of supply troops.
On the down side, he was the only significant officer left in Tetschen—and now, quite famous to boot. The campaign waged by the town’s matrons kicked into high gear. If there was a single eligible daughter or niece to be found anywhere in the region who was not introduced to the newly-promoted Major Bartley, she had to be deaf, dumb and blind.
Literally deaf, dumb and blind. Merely being hard of hearing, tongue-tied and myopic was no disqualification at all, from what David could tell.
Chapter 37
Osijek, the Balkans
“You look tired, Doctor,” said Janos Drugeth.
“I am in fact very tired.” Doctor Grassi wiped his face with a handkerchief. “I’ve been traveling almost constantly for weeks now.”
He tucked away the handkerchief and slumped back in his chair. The chair lent itself well to that, being one of the two very plush armchairs in the small suite of rooms Janos had rented in the town’s best tavern. Normally, he would have kept himself less conspicuous, but he hadn’t had a choice. Osijek had been packed with refugees when he arrived. Not poor refugees, who couldn’t have afforded to stay in taverns at all, but more prosperous people. By the time he arrived in the town, they’d already taken all of the cheaper housing.