1636_ The Saxon Uprising - Eric Flint [139]
Or so he thought, anyway. Mike had his doubts. Five years ago, yes. Oxenstierna could probably have succeeded in such a project. Today? Mike thought it was not likely at all. Not in the long run, for sure.
He didn’t intend to let things get that far, though. Kristina’s action had done one other thing—it had given Mike the fig leaf he needed to bring his army back into the USE. Even technically, it would now be difficult to charge him with leading a mutiny. But that really didn’t matter because a civil war was never settled by lawyers. By very definition, a civil war was a state of affairs in which the rule of law had collapsed. What remained was, on one side, the field of arms; and on the other, the battle for the populace’s support.
Under those conditions, Mike didn’t think Banér could stay in his siege lines once Mike entered the Saxon plain and challenged him openly. He was almost certain that Oxenstierna would order him to fight in the field.
Where he might very well win, of course. On paper, at least, his army was larger than Mike’s—fifteen thousand to the Third Division’s nine thousand. But Mike was certain that Banér’s forces had suffered a lot of attrition by now. Mercenary armies always did, especially in winter. That was disease, mostly, although desertion was always a big factor also.
The Third Division, on the other hand, hadn’t suffered at all. Mike had made sure their quarters were good, with good sanitation, and he’d kept his men well-fed and well-supplied. They still lost soldiers, of course, but they replaced them with new recruits. In fact, the division was a little over-strength. His paymasters told him there were now almost ten thousand men on the active rolls. Some of those added men were specialists, of course; repairmen or supply troops of one kind or another. Part of the so-called tail rather than the teeth of an army. But at least a third of them were in combat units, especially heavy weapons units.
So, Mike figured the armies were relatively even, in purely numerical terms. In the end, it would come down to leadership. Banér was one of the Swedish army’s handful of top generals—and going by the record, the Swedish army could lay claim to being the best army in Europe over the past half decade. Mike, on the other hand, was still largely—not quite—a neophyte general. He didn’t begin to have Banér’s experience and proven skill on the battlefield.
But he didn’t intend to match that skill and experience, in the first place. The one lesson Mike had learned by now was that “generalship” was a vacant abstraction. There was no such thing, really, in the sense that most people meant by the term—a definable and distinctive skill set, such as one might learn in school to become a doctor or an accountant or an architect.
There were many specific skills involved in leading an army, of course. And experience mattered, as it did in any line of work. But what there really was, at the heart of the matter, was simply leadership. And leadership was never defined abstractly. A man did not “lead.” No, he led specific people with specific goals and motives to accomplish specific tasks.
In this instance, he would be leading an army of citizen soldiers intent on defending their nation’s liberties and freedoms from the depredations of a mercenary army paid for by a foreign occupier. So long as Mike committed no outright blunders, he was confident he could triumph in that specific task. Banér would try to match one general against another, where Mike would be matching one army against another.
Morale would decide it, in the end. Mike was sure of that—as long as he didn’t just purely screw up, at any rate. His army’s morale was excellent. He’d made sure it wasn’t sapped by lack of food, disease, and freezing toes, and he never failed to maintain the division’s regularly-published broadsheet that kept his soldiers well-informed and motivated.
That was the other reason Mike had decided to travel by sleigh. He had one of his beloved portable printing presses on board. The devices were more dear to him than anything