Jimmy Andersen had an apologetic look on his face when he handed Mike the radio slip. “More good weather, sir.”
Mike nodded, took the slip and gave it a glance—sure enough: No storm fronts in sight or reported—and tucked it away in a pocket of his jacket. He kept his face expressionless. There were some drawbacks to being a commanding general. You couldn’t crumble up such a message, hurl in to the ground and stomp on it while cursing the fates.
He wished he could.
For one thing, it was cold—as cloudless days with blue skies usually were in the middle of winter. A good snowfall would bring a blanket of warmth with it. Well…not “warmth,” exactly, but it would blunt the edge of this icy air.
Thank God for the jackets and trousers. As far as Mike was concerned, David Bartley was worth his weight in gold. Figuratively speaking, anyway. In literal terms, the youngster was probably worth a lot more than his weight in gold.
The whole division felt the same way. Mike was monitoring the sentiments of his soldiers carefully, not just through the chain of command and what his officers told him but through a separate network that ran through Jeff Higgins and the CoC organizers that he was in touch with.
There were lots of those in the division, as there were in almost any large unit of soldiers in the USE’s army. There were some in the navy and the air force, too, but not nearly as many. The army was where the political radicals were concentrated.
CoC organizers and activists in the Third Division had a peculiar relationship with Jeff Higgins. On his own, Jeff was not and had never been a prominent figure in the Committees of Correspondence. His status in that regard was almost entirely due to being Gretchen Richter’s husband. That meant that he was trusted, of course, but it didn’t necessarily mean his political judgment was particularly respected.
But his status with CoC people in the division was more complicated, because by now Jeff had a lot of prestige as an officer. Just about every CoC and CoC-influenced soldier considered Higgins the best regimental commander in the division, hands down, and at least half of the other soldiers agreed with them. That was partly a function of the Hangman’s reputation; partly a function of the Hangman’s history; partly the result of the battle of Zielona Góra, where the Hangman had borne the brunt of the fighting; and partly because of Jeff’s reputation for using egalitarian command methods.
The end result was that Jeff had his own network through the CoC organizers, which he maintained at Mike’s request. That gave Mike a binocular view of the morale of his troops, something which few officers ever had.
And the morale was good. Very, very good. The troops knew what his plans were, at least in broad outline. But “broad outline” was about all that Mike had himself. Maneuver; keep away from Banér until the weather turns sour; then go right at him—that pretty well summed it up.
They’d been at the first stage of that for three days now, since Banér pulled his troops out of the siege lines. Mike had been worried, at first, that days of marching and avoiding combat would sap his soldiers’ confidence. But, it hadn’t. Most of his troops were veterans and they understood how much of a toll the maneuvers would be taking on their counterparts in Banér’s army. Except those sorry bastards wouldn’t have good winter equipment. Some of them would literally be marching in rags, including on their feet.
In two feet of snow, temperatures that were well below freezing, and enough of a breeze every day to produce a significant wind chill.
The whole experience was weird, to Mike. Almost surrealistic. It was like waging a war in mud, or while encased in gelatin. Everything moved unbelievably slowly.
Both armies knew exactly where the other one was. Mike got regular reports from the air force, which maintained reconnaissance patrols over the area at least twice a day. He also got reports from his own scouts—most of those, ski patrols—as well as from Kresse’s irregulars.
Banér had a lot of cavalrymen, including Finn light cavalry that he used for scouts. The Finns were accustomed to the cold and, in their own way, were well-prepared for it. They kept a distance from Mike’s troops, after a couple of clashes had proved to them that light cavalry were no match for well-disciplined infantry armed with rifled muskets. But they had no trouble getting close enough to provide Banér with regular intelligence as to the Third Division’s whereabouts.
And…in a way, it didn’t matter. What difference did it make if two armies knew each other’s whereabouts, when neither one of them could move much faster than five miles a day?
Mike’s troops had something of an advantage, in that respect, because of their superior equipment and morale. But that just meant they could move six or seven miles in a day. Equipment and morale only took you so far, faced with some crude physical realities.