1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [76]
So be it. What remained was simple. As dangerous as it might be, there was nothing in the world quite as exhilarating—to a Polish hussar, anyway—as a cavalry charge.
They were into a canter now. Next to him, Adamczyk started whooping.
Chapter 18
The single thing that Mike Stearns would always remember most clearly about his first battle was the noise, the sheer volume of sound. And the second thing he would always remember clearly was the smell; the way the huge clouds of gunsmoke would roll over everything like an acrid fog.
Not the sights of the battle, so much, although he remembered those too. In fact, his whole memory of the battle was actually pretty good. At no point did he feel that his mind had gotten overwhelmed. That was because he expected the sights he saw. Mike had a good imagination and he'd been able to prepare himself for those shocks. Insofar, at least, as anyone can be prepared for such things in the abstract.
But what he hadn't considered—just hadn't thought about, ahead of time—was the incredible effect that firing tens of thousands of gunpowder weapons within a relatively small space would have on the other human senses. Especially the cannon fire. It didn't help, of course, that everyone was still using black powder.
He soon gained an appreciation of the way that same black powder almost immediately shaped control of the battle; what he thought of as its command structure. Within less than five minutes he was fervently wishing a strong wind would spring up—which was not likely, on such a clear and sunny day. He couldn't see anything, most of the time. The huge clouds of gunsmoke impeded vision, except when odd and unpredictable eddies would suddenly—and usually all too briefly—clear them away.
Until that moment, Mike had always assumed that Gustav Adolf's recklessness in charging forward into the fog at the battle of Lützen—that's what had gotten the king of Sweden killed in that other universe, in 1632—was because of the man's personal impetuousness. A childish inability to control his emotions, essentially.
No doubt some of that was involved. But Mike could also now understand how much the driving power of pure frustration must have compelled Gustav Adolf. A commanding general was supposed to be in charge of this mayhem, damnation—and he couldn't see anything. On at least four occasions, Mike had to restrain himself from riding into the smoke clouds, just so he could find out what the hell was actually happening. On two of those occasions, he might not have managed if Leebrick, Long and Ulbrecht Duerr hadn't been right there to urge him to stay put. Quite forcefully. Indeed, you might almost say impolitely, and in a manner that bordered on disrespect and insubordination.
Leebrick and Long would apologize after the battle. Duerr, true to his nature, would not. His only comment would be, "It's always nice to see that a new commander isn't a coward, even if he sometimes acts like the fucking village idiot." Thereby clearing away again, if such was needed, any uncertainty as to the man's failure to get promoted.
Thorsten Engler had expected the noise and the smoke, so he simply ignored them. In fact, he barely noticed them at all. He was far too preoccupied with the need to get his flying artillery company up to the front in time to blunt the coming cavalry charge.
They'd done that before at Ahrensbök, very successfully, and most of his men were veterans of that battle. So it all went fairly smoothly, in the way that men experienced with a task and confident they could carry it out manage such things.
They had no trouble seeing, either. Hardly surprising, since they were the ones who produced most of the initial gunsmoke—and were happily racing to the rear by the time the resultant clouds obscured the battlefield. It was up to the infantry then, and those oafs were so naturally dull-witted it hardly mattered if they could see anything or not.
They'd learned