1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [139]
True, all of the Swedish troops were now armed with SRG rifled muskets firing Minié balls. Some of their units, in fact, had copies of the French Cardinal breechloader that USE armories were now making. (It seemed fair enough to swipe the French design, seeing that they'd swiped it from the up-time Sharps rifle.)
The problem was that the officers and noncoms of Gustav Adolf's Swedish army were mostly old school veterans, set in their ways and slow to adjust to the new realities produced by the SRGs. That was quite unlike the situation in the USE Army, which had been created almost from scratch over the past two years. Some of the officers were hidebound, yes; but almost all of the sergeants were young men who'd recently volunteered. They didn't have any bad habits to get rid of.
The fact that Jeff Higgins had taken it upon himself to pester the division's commanding general with a trivial issue he should have taken up with the quartermasters was making Mike even more irritated. Captain David Blodger, the up-time quartermaster who handled technical supplies and material, could have done Jeff a lot more good than Mike.
But since he was still feeling a little guilty over the way he'd handled Jeff at Zielona Góra, Mike did his best not to let his aggravation show. They were taking a brief halt in the march anyway, to let the units in the rear close up the column, so he didn't really have anything pressing at the moment. A "forced march" didn't actually mean soldiers were constantly marching, despite the term itself.
"I don't understand why you brought this problem to me, Colonel Higgins." Mike leaned over in his saddle and looked down at the object in Jeff's hand, a radio transmitter and receiver that had obviously seen better days. At a guess, a horse had stepped on it. "Captain Blodger can get your regiment a replacement radio, I'm sure."
Jeff shook his head. "I guess I didn't make myself clear, sir. This isn't one of the regiment's radios."
Mike was finding it harder and harder not to snarl at Higgins. What was he? A major general doubling as the division's lost and found department?
"Not that I see why you care, but if you're that concerned about it—again, see Blodger. He can find out which regiment lost the damn thing and get—"
"Sir! Excuse me, sir, I'm still not making myself clear. This radio doesn't belong to anybody in this division. Anybody in the whole USE Army, in fact."
Mike stared at the radio again. It looked like one of the division's radios.
Well . . . sort of. In a way. The same way any such radio looks about the same as its equivalent to someone who doesn't know much about radios and doesn't really care about the differences anyway so long as the thing works.
In short, someone like Mike Stearns.
"It's not?"
"No, sir. I didn't think I recognized it, but just to be sure I checked with Jimmy Andersen. He says this is a knock-off made in Hamburg of one of the models that the army uses. He says we've never used this brand because the manufacturer had fly-by-night financing and went bankrupt after making not more than a few dozen of them. Jimmy says the whole lot was bought at an auction in Hamburg by somebody in Amsterdam. Well, by an agent for somebody in Amsterdam who was probably serving as an agent for somebody else. You know how it is."
Mike felt his face stiffen. He was probably going pale, too. "Where did you find this?" he asked.
"I just spotted it this morning, by accident, when I was passing by one of the soldiers who had it stuck in his pack. When I asked him, he said he'd found it in an alley behind one of the houses in Zielona Góra. He figures a horse stepped on it and broke it. But he liked it as a war souvenir. It's different."
"Oh, Jesus," Mike whispered. "It's a Polish radio. It's got to be."
Jeff nodded. "That's what I'm thinking. And it's why I brought it to you. I got to thinking about it and it occurred to me I've never heard anyone mention anything about the Poles having radios."
"That's because we didn't know they