The Saxon Uprising(138)

“At first light, then,” he said. “And I mean at first light. We’re not waiting for the sun to come up. We’ll just be waiting long enough for a man to be able to see ten yards ahead of him. Is that understood?”

As soon as he finished, he regretted the statements. That was just his nerves acting up again. He sometimes thought his staff officers were a bit too inclined toward caution, but he had no reservations at all about either their courage or their willingness to obey orders. There was no reason to have piled on that unnecessary verbiage.

Was that a slight smile on Duerr’s face?

Colonel Ulbrecht Duerr was fighting down a grin, as it happened. He’d added his own words of caution to those of Leebrick and Long, because he agreed with them as a pure matter of tactics. Fighting at night in the middle of a snowstorm was just piling on too many uncertainties.

Still, he’d been pleased to see the general’s combative spirit. A commander who wanted to launch an assault even in the dark was a commander who would press through an assault in daylight. And that’s what this mad little scheme of Stearns’ was going to require—pressing on, pressing on, pressing on. Damn the cost, fuck the Swede bastards, just keep shooting and throwing grenades and firing everything you’ve got and keep at them and keep at them and keep at them.

Banér’s army was going to break. Ulbrecht Duerr was as sure of that as he had been of anything in his life, on the eve of a battle. There was a flow to these things, a sort of tide summoned by Mars rather than the sun or the moon.

People, including the division itself, thought of the Third Division as “inexperienced” compared to most other military units. And so they were, by the standards of mercenary soldiers. But Duerr knew those standards, and how hollow they really were. He should, after all, being a mercenary himself. Very few armies of his day fought major pitched battles in the open field. Gustav II Adolf’s great victory at Breitenfeld four years earlier had been the exception, not the rule. It was quite possible for a man to spend his entire life as a soldier—even in the middle of great wars such as the one that had wracked central Europe since 1618—and never participate in a single battle.

War in the seventeenth century was a thing of marches and counter-marches and, most of all, sieges. Sieges big and small. Sieges of cities, sieges of towns. Sometimes, sieges of villages or even hamlets.

A furious assault launched across open fields? At any time, much less February in the middle of a snowstorm?

It just wasn’t done. Too imprudent—and being prudent was in the nature of a mercenary. There was nothing at stake except pay, after all.

But the soldiers in the ranks of the Third Division didn’t think that way, and they had a commander who didn’t think that way either. Stearns’ inexperience was now actually working in his favor, just as it was working in favor of his entire division.

Because they were veterans, by now, even if they still didn’t think of themselves that way. Many of them—more than half, probably—had fought at Ahrensbök. The greatest battle on the continent since Breitenfeld.

Stearns himself hadn’t been on the field that day. But even in the time since he’d taken command of the division, the Third had fought the battles of Zwenkau and Zielona Góra. And while they hadn’t fought at Lake Bledno, that was only because the Poles had withdrawn from the field before they arrived. They would have fought—and not one man in the division doubted for a moment that they would have whipped them, too. Piss on the famous Grand Hetman Stanislaw Koniecpolski. Just another bum to be beaten senseless.

Just as, tomorrow, they were going to piss on the famous Johan Banér and beat his army senseless.

The soldiers of the Third Division were full of confidence. Confidence in themselves, confidence in their weapons and equipment, confidence in their officers; perhaps most of all, confidence in their commander. They’d been in more battles than most soldiers of the day, and they’d won every one of them. They knew everything they needed to know in order to win a battle—and hadn’t been soldiers long enough to learn all of the ways an army could fail and usually did fail.

Colonel Duerr was in a splendid mood, actually. If he survived another day—no way to be sure of that, of course—he’d be looking back on it fondly for the rest of his life. Great victories came rarely to a soldier, even one like him whose career had now spanned three decades.

After night fell, Mike spent the better part of three hours moving among his men, visiting each unit around its campfires. He had nothing particularly intelligent to say, but the soldiers didn’t need a speech, much less a lecture. They just needed to see their commander, see that he knew what they would all be doing come dawn—most of all, see that he was completely confident that they could do it.