1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [111]
Bartley nodded. "That leaves what you might call creative financing."
"That's what I figured—and it's why I called you in."
The lieutenant looked unhappy. "The regular quartermasters are already kinda mad at me, sir. If I—"
"Don't worry about it. To begin with, I'm pulling you out of the quartermaster corps altogether. You'll be in charge of a new unit which I'm calling the Exchange Corps."
"Exchange? Exchange what, exactly?"
Mike gave David the same humorless grin he'd given Jeff an hour earlier. "That's for you to figure out. Whatever you can come up with that'll enable us to obtain supplies from the locals without completely pissing them off. No way not to piss them off at all, of course. But the Poles have had as much experience with war over the last thirty years as the Germans. They'll take things philosophically enough as long we aren't killing and raping and burning and taking so much that people die over the winter."
Again, Bartley went back to staring at the table top with unfocussed eyes.
"Okay," he said eventually. "I've got some ideas. But I'll need a staff, General. Not too big. Just maybe three or four clerks and, ah, one sort of specialist. His name's Sergeant Beckmann. Well, Corporal Beckmann, now. I got him his stripe back but then he ran afoul of—well, never mind the details—and got busted back to corporal."
"Where is he now? And what sort of specialist is he?"
"He's right here in the Third Division, sir. One of the quartermasters in von Taupadel's brigade. As for his specialty . . . Well, basically he's a really talented swindler."
Mike laughed. And then realized it was the first time he'd laughed since he saw the carnage in the streets of Świebodzin.
"Okay, you got him—and we'll give the man back his sergeant's stripe. May as well, since I'm promoting you to captain."
David looked very pleased. That was just another of the many peculiar results of the Ring of Fire, Mike thought. Take a rural teenage kid and put him somewhere he can become a millionaire—but he still gets a bigger charge out of getting a promotion to a rank whose monthly salary was about what he earned in three hours of playing the stock market.
The Ring of Fire might not have cut anyone any slack, but here and there it had certainly played favorites.
Chapter 27
Zielona Góra
At least he was off the damn horse. Which was just as well, since another part of the house wall Jeff was crouched behind came down right then, knocked loose by a shot from one of the Poles' culverins. He was barely able to scramble aside and keep from getting half-buried in the rubble. The Polish guns fired balls that weighed at least twenty pounds. They were old-fashioned round shot, not explosive shells, but they could do plenty of damage to anything they hit directly.
Or anyone they hit directly. Jeff had seen one of Engler's artillerymen cut right in half. The sight had been as bizarre as it was ghastly. The soldier's body from the waist down had stayed in the saddle, his legs still gripping the horse and his feet still in the stirrups. It had still been there the last Jeff saw the horse, which—the beasts weren't always as dumb as they looked—had turned right around and gone galloping back around a bend in the road.
Meanwhile, spewing blood and intestines, the top half of the soldier had gone pinwheeling into the nearby stream the maps called Złota Łącza, however the hell that was pronounced. The half-corpse was still there, too. The Polish counterattack had been so ferocious that Jeff hadn't yet had the time or the spare men to send out burial parties. If a man was wounded, they'd do their best to rescue him. If he was dead, he'd just have to wait.
Jason Linn came running in a crouch and threw himself