1636_ The Saxon Uprising - Eric Flint [155]
How many hussars had led a sortie to relieve a city under siege, in the middle of a pitched battle on which the fate of an entire nation pivoted?
Not too damn many. His friend Lukasz certainly hadn’t done it.
“All right, fine,” he said. “I’ll organize your sortie, in case the opportunity comes. But—!”
He raised a stiff, admonishing finger. “We’re not hussars. Bunch of damn fools, I know them well. There is no way I’m going to lead a charge of horsemen across snow, much less a frozen river—certainly not in a snowstorm! If I did make it across, I’d be the only one. No, no, no.”
He gave Krenz a beaming grin. “We’ll adopt the methods of your precious General Stearns. Snowshoes, that’s the trick. Skis too, maybe, for those men good on them. But they’d have to be designed so they can be removed easily. You can’t fight on skis. Not amidst trenches, anyway, which is where we’d be.”
He turned to Gretchen. “Can you organize that? And we’ll need grenades more than anything. Lots and lots and lots of grenades.”
From the look on her face, he thought he was about to be inflicted with another be-damned uptime expression.
“Don’t teach your grandmother how to suck eggs,” she said.
Sure enough. The worst thing about the up-time saws was that they usually made no sense. Why would a grandmother suck eggs to begin with?
Can’t tell the difference between a hawk and a handsaw. Oh, nonsense. A toddler could tell the difference between a bird in the sky and a hand tool.
You can’t have your cake and eat it, too. Well, of course not. But what’s the point? Why would anyone want a cake except to eat it?
A penny saved is a penny earned. Blithering nonsense. A penny saved was money already obtained whereas a penny earned came in the future. How could a people who had travelled through time not understand the difference between the past and the future?
And so it went. On and on. The early bird gets the worm. Idiotic. Did they think mindless worms had—what did they call those miserable devices? Ah, yes, alarm clocks. And why would they, even if they did have minds? Worms lived underground. It was always dark down there.
On and on. Haste makes waste. Did—
“Jozef?” said Gretchen. “If there a problem? You seem pre-occupied.”
“Ah… No. There is no problem. A sortie you want, a sortie you’ll get.”
Chapter 43
The Saxon plain, near Dresden
Jimmy Andersen had an apologetic look on his face when he handed Mike the radio slip. “More good weather, sir.”
Mike nodded, took the slip and gave it a glance—sure enough: No storm fronts in sight or reported—and tucked it away in a pocket of his jacket. He kept his face expressionless. There were some drawbacks to being a commanding general. You couldn’t crumble up such a message, hurl in to the ground and stomp on it while cursing the fates.
He wished he could.
For one thing, it was cold—as cloudless days with blue skies usually were in the middle of winter. A good snowfall would bring a blanket of warmth with it. Well…not “warmth,” exactly, but it would blunt the edge of this icy air.
Thank God for the jackets and trousers. As far as Mike was concerned, David Bartley was worth his weight in gold. Figuratively speaking, anyway. In literal terms, the youngster was probably worth a lot more than his weight in gold.
The whole division felt the same way. Mike was monitoring the sentiments of his soldiers carefully, not just through the chain of command and what his officers told him but through a separate network that ran through Jeff Higgins and the CoC organizers that he was in touch with.
There were lots of those in the division, as there were in almost any large unit of soldiers in the USE’s army. There were some in the navy and the air force, too, but not nearly as many. The army was where the political radicals were concentrated.
CoC organizers and activists in the Third Division had a peculiar relationship with Jeff Higgins. On his own, Jeff was not and had never been a prominent figure in the Committees of Correspondence. His status in