1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [43]
"Why don't you put him in charge, then?"
"Nobody except us has ever heard of him," said Spartacus. "You're famous."
"It's a silly story," she insisted.
Gunther shrugged. "Most stories are. But people still like to listen to them."
Chapter 10
Northeast of Halle, not far from the Saxon border
The countryside between Magdeburg and Saxony reminded Mike Stearns of the American Midwest, except for the absence of corn and soybeans. The crops being grown were different, but the terrain was much the same—flat, and consisting mostly of open farmland but with quite a few wooded areas scattered about. None of the woods could really be called forests, though.
There was one other big difference from the Midwest, but that was not peculiar to this area. It was a common feature throughout central Europe, and Mike suspected you'd find it in most other places in Europe. Unlike the twentieth-century American farm countryside he'd known, with its many scattered individual farmhouses, central European farmers in the seventeenth century all lived in small towns and villages. The farmland itself was largely barren of inhabitants, except during the day when people were working in the fields. By and large, the collective methods and village traditions of the middle ages still applied to farm labor in the German countryside.
To the farmers themselves, at any rate, if not necessarily the aristocracy. Seventeenth-century Germany was no longer in any real sense of the term a feudal society. Labor relations might have resisted change, but the same was not true of property relations. In the year 1635, a landlord was just as likely to be a burgher or a well-off farmer as a nobleman—and still more likely to be an institution of some kind rather than a person: a corporation, a city council, a trust, whatever. Still, farmers lived in villages, not in separated and isolated farmhouses; and still, in many ways, worked the land in common.
His musings were interrupted by one of his staff officers, Colonel Christopher Long, who came riding up bearing some new dispatches.
"Anything important?" he asked.
The young colonel shook his head. "Nothing that can't wait until we make camp this evening."
The English officer was a professional soldier who'd come to Magdeburg to join the USE army—not the Swedish forces directly under Gustav Adolf, as did most mercenaries from the British Isles. The reason, Mike had discovered from a conversation a few days earlier, was that Long had been in Spanish service when the Spaniards invading Thuringia had been defeated by the Americans near Eisenach.
In fact, the Englishman was one of the survivors of the destruction of the Wartburg. His depiction of the nightmare of trying to escape the castle as it was being consumed by napalm bombs was horrific, for all that he recounted the tale in a matter-of-fact manner. He'd come away from the experience convinced that the trade of war was about to undergo a drastic transformation—and thus had placed himself at the service of those who seemed to be the principal agents of that change.
In the world Mike had come from, Long's behavior would have bordered on treason. But nationalism and twentieth-century notions of patriotism were just beginning to emerge from dynasticism, in the seventeenth century. Long's pragmatic attitude was the norm for professional soldiers in this day and age, not the exception. The only thing that made Long unusual was that, unlike most mercenary officers, he was quite willing to accept the rambunctious behavior of the CoC-influenced enlisted soldiers in the USE army, as the price for gaining the experience he wanted.
After handing over the dispatches, Long studied Mike for a moment and then said: "Your horsemanship is very good, General Stearns. I'm surprised. I'd have thought you'd ride like the average American."
Mike smiled. "Badly, you mean."
The tall blond officer shook his head. "That would be unfair. I've found that most Americans—assuming they ride horses at all, that is—are reasonably competent at the business.