“Don’t forget the plague,” said Friedrich, as they began walking in the other direction. He was more chipper already, now that he had catastrophes to dwell on. “Always a reliable guest in such affairs. And I hear there’s a new disease we’ll be encountering one of these days. They call it ‘cholera.’ It’s quite fascinating. Apparently, your bowels turn to water and you shit and puke yourself to death.”
After Gretchen Richter left his office, Ernst Wettin rose from his desk and went to the northern window. That provided him with his favorite view of the valley.
There were settlements over there on the north bank of the Elbe, but the big majority of the city’s populace lived south of the river. He’d been told by a friend who’d gotten a look at an up-time travel guide in Grantville that someday—about half a century from now, during a period they would call “the Baroque”—the city would expand greatly over there. But in this day and age, the walls of the city did not include those north bank settlements. They’d have no protection once a siege began.
They wouldn’t be there much longer, however. One of the things Richter had told him was that she’d ordered the destruction of all buildings north of the river. Most of the inhabitants had already fled into the city, as news spread of the atrocities being committed by the oncoming Swedish army. Richter would have the ones who remained evacuated also, and then they’d burn everything to the ground.
She’d sent orders to have every village within ten miles evacuated and burned also. The inhabitants would either come into the city or find refuge with the Vogtlanders in the mountains to the south. Banér and his army would have no choice but to spend the coming winter in camps.
Technically, the orders would come from this new “Committee of Public Safety.” (Odd title, that. He wondered where they’d gotten it from?) Because of the very visible and prominent place on it given to the Vogtlanders and leaders of some of the important towns in the plain, those orders would probably be obeyed, too.
She hadn’t said so, but Ernst was quite sure that it had been Richter herself who saw to it that the rural folk had plenty of representation on the new Committee. She’d understood that Dresden had to have the support of the surrounding countryside—all of Saxony, not just the city itself—if it was to withstand a siege by an army the strength of Banér’s. And that same support would be a constant drain on the besiegers.
Regardless of who sat on the Committee, the driving will was Richter’s. She made even the notoriously harsh Georg Kresse seem soft, once she’d decided on a course of action. The woman had always been polite and pleasant in her dealings with him, but Ernst had not fooled himself. Beneath that attractive surface lay a granite mind; as unyielding as the Alps and as ruthless as an avalanche.
They had no idea what they were unleashing, those idiots in Berlin. They dreamed of another bloodbath like the one that had drowned the rebellion during the Peasant War, that would once again restore their power and privileges. But even that slaughter had only stemmed the tide for a century.
What was a century? Nothing, if a man was capable of stepping back and measuring human affairs by a yardstick longer than his own life—and what was a life? Also nothing, if a man was capable of stepping back and measuring his soul against eternity.
But…they listened to those parsons they chose to listen to. The ones who assured them that the Almighty who created the sun and the moon and the heavens favored the wealthy and powerful—never mind what the Christ said—and would approve of their butchery. The God who filled oceans would gaze with favor upon the men who filled abattoirs.
Idiots, now; greater idiots still, when they faced judgment.
For butchery it would have to be. Richter would not yield, and neither would her followers—who now included hundreds of soldiers from the regular army’s Third Division. Whose commander had somehow forgotten them.
That would be Mike Stearns. The same man whom Ernst’s brother had once described, half-angrily and half-admiringly, with the up-time expression “he’s got a mind like a steel trap.”
That would be his brother Wilhelm, now one of the idiots in Berlin. What had happened to him? How and when had he lost his judgment and his good sense?
What did Wilhelm think would happen when those soldiers in Dresden came under fire from a Swedish army? Did he—did that still greater idiot Oxenstierna—think Stearns would remain obediently in Bohemia?
For a time, maybe. Probably, in fact. In his own way, Stearns was every bit as ruthless as Richter. He was quite capable of biding his time while the defenders of Dresden bled Banér’s army—and von Arnim’s too, if he ventured out of Leipzig.