1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [2]
Kuefer didn't bother to ask why. Given Kresse, the answer was a foregone conclusion. He was a harsh man, when all was said and done. There was no way he would allow a band of deserters from Holk's army to pass through the Upper Vogtland unpunished.
There were certain obligations involved, as well. Heinrich Holk was one of the worst examples of the sort of condottiere who had risen to prominence during the long wars since the Austrian emperor defeated the Bohemian Protestants at the Battle of the White Mountain in November of 1620. He'd been born into a family of Danish Protestants, but had switched his faith and allegiance to the Habsburgs when that suited his advancement as a professional soldier. He'd switched allegiance again and sided with Wallenstein when he seized power in Bohemia.
Not satisfied with a mere triple-cross, Holk then tried to stab Wallenstein in the back by seizing and plundering Prague when Wallenstein led his army out to confront the Austrians at the second battle of the White Mountain. But he'd been foiled by an alliance of up-timers and the large Jewish community in Prague. Upon hearing that a victorious Wallenstein was on his way back to Prague, Holk had immediately fled north to Saxony, where he'd offered the services of his army to the Saxon elector, John George.
Demonstrating once again his seemingly bottomless stupidity, John George had accepted the offer and placed Holk in charge of "maintaining order" in the Vogtland. Since then, Holk—a man sometimes described as a one-eyed, drunken mass murderer—had turned the unrest in the Vogtland into outright rebellion with his rapacious brutality.
Holk's army was notorious for committing atrocities, and there was no reason to believe that deserters from that army would be any less vicious. A large part of Kresse's success in withstanding the pressure of the Saxon elector's forces was that he had the firm support of the farmers and townsmen in the Upper Vogtland. That support, in turn, was contingent upon Kresse's ability to protect them from the sort of freebooting raids that had become all too common in the course of the long war in the Germanies. Most soldiers were mercenaries and many of those mercenaries were barely more than bandits. Holk's men were a particularly brutal bunch, but they were by no means unique.
Harsh he might be, but Georg Kresse was neither careless nor reckless. He spent three days preparing the attack on the band of deserters. Part of the reason for the delay was because he didn't want anyone associating the attack with the whereabouts of the mine. If need be, Kresse's people could relocate easily enough. They'd done it several times over the past few years. But the abandoned mine was the best of all the bases they'd had, and Kresse didn't want to lose it.
Mostly, though, the delay was simply because Kresse was an experienced commander of irregular forces engaged in the sort of combat that the Americans apparently called "guerrilla warfare." As if a peculiar-sounding Spanish term was needed to depict what was blindingly obvious to any sensible German farmer or townsman! Kresse was always careful to keep his own casualties to a minimum, even when facing a group of undisciplined deserters who didn't number more than perhaps three dozen all told.
One of the methods he used to keep his casualties low was to maneuver his foes in such a way as to take advantage of the local militias. Almost every town and village of any size in the Germanies maintained a militia force. They were often quite effective, within their limits—and the limit was that they generally fought well on the defensive, especially behind fortifications of some sort, but were inept if they were forced to fight in the open field.
Kresse and his men were quite effective in the open field, on the other hand. Kresse used the fortified villages as so many anvils, and used his own troops as a hammer. Against a large force of regular soldiers, such tactics wouldn't succeed. But they worked very nicely against smaller units or simple marauders.