1636_ The Saxon Uprising - Eric Flint [140]
Live by the word, die by the word. The Swedes had already lost that battle. Mike figured the rest was bound to follow.
The Third Division started arriving in Tetschen two days after Mike left. It took the division a day and half to pass through the town. Not from the marching, but from the time it took to get every man outfitted with winter clothing that fit him properly.
Properly enough, anyway. Soldiers don’t expect sartorial perfection and David had made sure to err on the side of getting boots and outfits that were too big rather than too small. A man could wear two pair of socks, if need be, and there were a number of ways to pad an oversize winter outfit with jury-rigged insulating material. A lot of soldiers specifically asked for oversized clothing, in fact.
By the time it was all over and the division was on its way up the road that followed the Elbe toward Königstein and Saxony, David Bartley was the most popular officer in the division. Hands down.
He was especially popular with the flying artillery units. Those men had become deeply attached to their volley guns, in the battles they’d fought starting with their great victory over the French cavalry at Ahrensbök. Now that winter was here and they knew they’d be fighting in the snow, they’d been glumly certain they’d have to leave their volley guns behind and suffer the indignities of becoming wretched infantrymen.
No longer. Not with the new auxiliary ski attachments, which they were already calling Bartley rigs.
David was tickled pink, truth be told. It almost made up for being left behind with just two companies of supply troops.
On the down side, he was the only significant officer left in Tetschen—and now, quite famous to boot. The campaign waged by the town’s matrons kicked into high gear. If there was a single eligible daughter or niece to be found anywhere in the region who was not introduced to the newly-promoted Major Bartley, she had to be deaf, dumb and blind.
Literally deaf, dumb and blind. Merely being hard of hearing, tongue-tied and myopic was no disqualification at all, from what David could tell.
Chapter 37
Osijek, the Balkans
“You look tired, Doctor,” said Janos Drugeth.
“I am in fact very tired.” Doctor Grassi wiped his face with a handkerchief. “I’ve been traveling almost constantly for weeks now.”
He tucked away the handkerchief and slumped back in his chair. The chair lent itself well to that, being one of the two very plush armchairs in the small suite of rooms Janos had rented in the town’s best tavern. Normally, he would have kept himself less conspicuous, but he hadn’t had a choice. Osijek had been packed with refugees when he arrived. Not poor refugees, who couldn’t have afforded to stay in taverns at all, but more prosperous people. By the time he arrived in the town, they’d already taken all of the cheaper housing.
He hadn’t expected that. Why would a war against Persians fought in Mesopotamia produce refugees in the Balkans?
Doctor Grassi had explained it to him.
“Murad’s campaign caught everyone by surprise, Baron.”
The doctor usually called Janos by that title. It was not technically correct, but Janos saw no reason to fuss over the matter. Rankings in the Austrian empire were complex, especially when it involved Hungarian nobility—and the Drugeth family was of French origin, to make things still more complicated. Janos was one of the handful of men in the Austrian empire who were so powerful and influential in actual fact that the formalities of titles didn’t overly concern them.
“Why?” he asked. “It’s been a foregone conclusion ever since the Persians seized Baghdad in 1624 that sooner or later the Ottomans would try to take it back. And Murad is a young and dynamic sultan.”
Grassi inclined his head. “Yes, that’s true. But copies of the American texts concerning the Ottoman-Safavid war have been circulated quite widely. Even the Persians have read them by now. And in that universe—”
Janos threw up his hands. “Is everyone a Calvinist idiot? For that matter, not even Calvinists