1635_ The Eastern Front - Eric Flint [81]
"Sound the retreat," von Arnim said grimly. "We'll withdraw into Leipzig."
Colonel Carl Bose looked skeptical. "We may not be able to make it, General. They'll be pushing the pursuit hard, from the looks of things."
Von Arnim shook his head. "No, they won't, once they're sure we're retiring from the field. I am quite certain that Torstensson has orders to take Dresden as fast as possible. He won't waste time with us"—now that he's beaten us out of his way, but von Arnim left that unspoken—"when he has a chance to catch the elector."
Von Arnim tightened his lips. His military career might be over, as of today. There was no chance he could move his troops into Poland, which was a pity since he was sure King Wladyslaw would hire him. But Torstensson would immediately pursue if the Saxon army—what was left of it—made any move in that direction. If need be, he'd postpone taking Dresden.
The French wouldn't hire him, not given his reputation as a staunch Lutheran. Richelieu wouldn't care himself, but with the political situation as tense as it was in France he couldn't afford to give Monsieur Gaston any more political ammunition. The Bavarians wouldn't even consider the possibility. Not with Duke Maximilian's Catholic fanaticism at the fever pitch it was today.
That left the Austrians. Which . . . might actually be possible. Von Arnim felt his spirits lifting a bit. Even under Ferdinand II, the Austrians had been willing to employ Protestant soldiers. Now with his son on the throne—Ferdinand III had a reputation for being far more tolerant—and with the tensions with Bohemia . . .
A detail intruded.
"Oh, yes." He had promised the man, after all. "Colonel Bose, see to it that a courier gets off to Dresden immediately. Warn the elector that we've lost the battle and Torstensson will be moving on Dresden. And . . ."
He studied the distant enemy observation balloon. He wasn't sure of this, but . . .
"Also warn the elector that Torstensson has probably got cavalry units watching the Polish border. I'd advise the elector to seek exile in Bavaria instead."
He went back to contemplating more important things. There did, of course, remain the awkwardness that he'd once resigned from Austrian service in something of a high dudgeon and not so long ago at that. Still . . .
Chapter 19
Eric Krenz never remembered much of what happened after he collapsed from his wound until he woke up in an army hospital tent. All that remained were inchoate images of being moved on a litter and people staring down at him. The clearest of those images was that of a harried surgeon impatiently saying: "This one'll live if he doesn't bleed out. Put him over there."
He had no idea where "over there" was, but some part of his brain understood that he'd just gotten a reprieve from a death sentence. It was probably that same part of his brain which enabled his eyes to observe a line of wounded men lying in a different part of the surgeon's tent who quite obviously had not met the surgeon's criteria for survival. The only attention being paid to them was by a single orderly, and all he was doing was giving them water. Or, more often, giving them cups of a brownish liquid that Eric couldn't identify but which that more-or-less sentient part of his brain figured was probably laudanum. The mixture of opium and liquor had been around for at least a century. Its only real medical use was to comfort the afflicted and serve as a crude anesthetic during surgery.
But these men, clearly enough, weren't going to be operated on. They were just going to die.
Some time later, Eric was given some of the liquid himself. In his case, as an anesthetic. The surgeon was replacing the jury-rigged bandages the medics had used with stitches.
The process hurt. A lot. As far as Krenz was concerned, if that bad-tasting liquor was laudanum, it had a grossly inflated reputation.
When Eric woke up, he was no longer in the surgeon's tent. He was still in a tent, but this one was larger and much cleaner. More precisely, since the surgeons in the USE