You had to add that term “effectively” because Richter still maintained the pretense that the Residenzschloss was primarily being used as a hospital for wounded soldiers. She’d also been heard to point out that the province’s official administrator—that was Ernst Wettin, the USE prime minister’s younger brother—also had his offices and quarters in the Residenzschloss. The fanciest ones available, in fact, the chambers and rooms that had been used by John George and his family before they fled the city.
Both claims were thread-bare. True enough, Richter was reportedly always polite to the provincial administrator and made sure his stay in the palace was a pleasant one. She even provided him with a security detail, since Wettin had no soldiers of his own. But that fact alone made it clear who really wielded power in the city.
As for the soldiers who’d been sent to Dresden to recuperate from their wounds, by now most of them had regained their health. They still lived in the section of the Residenzschloss that had been designated as the hospital, but that was simply because there were no barracks available and Richter had decreed that no soldiers would be billeted on the city’s inhabitants. Nor had the few officers objected, although the woman had absolutely no authority to be making any decisions concerning soldiers in the USE army.
And there was another thing Jozef found interesting about the situation. All of the USE officers here were very junior. There was not so much as a single captain among them, much less any majors or colonels. They were all lieutenants—and newly-minted ones, at that, for the most part.
How was that possible? How could an army division fight as many battles as the Third Division had fought during the summer and fall without any of its company commanders or field grade officers being wounded?
Had they all been killed? The odds against that happening were astronomical.
And they had to have been engaged in the fighting. No army could possibly win battles if the only officers who placed themselves in harm’s way were lieutenants.
There was only one possible answer, from what Jozef could see. For whatever reason, the commanding general of the Third Division had deliberately sent only his most junior officers and his enlisted men to Dresden. Those of higher rank who’d been wounded he must have sent elsewhere.
Jena, probably. The USE had a big new hospital there, already reputed to be one of the very best in the world. General Stearns could have sent the more senior officers there on the grounds that there was only limited space in Jena so he was making a priority of giving them the best treatment available.
Whatever his thinking had been, the end result was that several hundred combat veterans—almost all of them no older than their twenties—were in a city about to undergo a siege, and they had allied themselves with Dresden’s inhabitants. And this was no grudging alliance, either. Jozef had seen for himself that tactical command of the city’s defenses had been taken over by the dozen or so USE army lieutenants present. The one named Krenz seemed to be in overall charge.
Could Stearns have foreseen that?
He…might. By all accounts, he was a canny bastard. And a labor organizer, in his background, not a military man. That meant he was accustomed to fluid relations of command and obedience, where a man’s authority derived almost entirely from his ability to gain and retain the confidence of the men around him. To use an up-time expression, he had to have very finely honed “people skills.”
It was all quite fascinating.
“I’m warning you,” said a voice from behind him, “there’s no point trying to seduce her.”
Turning around—and feeling quite stupid; had he really been ogling the woman that openly?—he saw one of the men he’d met the night before in the Rathaus. The basement tavern of the city hall had been taken over by the CoC, for all practical purposes.
Another Pole, as it happened. Tadeusz Szklenski, a Silesian from a town near Krakow.
The only thing Jozef remembered about him from the previous evening was that the man’s Amideutsch was pretty decent if heavily accented and he insisted on being called by the up-time nickname of “Ted.”
The grin he had on his face was just friendly, so Jozef decided to return it with a grin of his own.
“And why would you think I’d have that in mind to begin with?”
“Three reasons. The first is that Gretchen Richter’s very good-looking. The second and the third are named Ilse and Ursula.”
Jozef couldn’t stop himself from wincing. Ilse and Ursula were waitresses in the Rathaus tavern. He’d slept with both of them in the course of the past week. Once again, and for perhaps the hundredth time, he cautioned himself that his attraction to women was foolish for a spy.