1636_ The Saxon Uprising - Eric Flint [176]
“He won’t tell me anything. Me, his own king.”
“That’s because…”
Where to begin?
The king solved that problem himself. “Is my daughter…?”
“She’s quite well, Your Majesty,” Erik said hurriedly. “In good health. Even in good spirits. Just yesterday, I listened—well…”
“What? Damn you, Erik, what’s happening?”
Ah, that familiar temper. A good solid kingly sort of temper. Not a wild and unfocused rage.
Also a far more dangerous temper, of course.
“Yesterday I listened to a speech she gave over the radio. Quite a good one, too, allowing for her age. Very enthusiastic.”
Gustav Adolf frowned. “Why is my daughter giving speeches? Over the radio, you said?”
“It’s a long story, Sire.”
“Then sit.”
Chapter 50
The United States of Europe
All of the major newspapers in the country and many of the smaller ones came out with the story the next morning. It didn’t matter what day of the week they normally published. It didn’t matter whether they were morning papers or evening papers. Even if the edition was just a two-page special edition, nothing more than a broadsheet printed on both sides, they all published something.
The headlines varied from city to city and province to province, but the gist of them was essentially the same:
great battle at dresden
terrible casualties
the prince triumphant
swedish army routed
general banér killed in the fighting
siege of dresden lifted
The emphasis varied from one newspaper to another. Some stressed the drama and pathos of the terrible struggle in the middle of a snowstorm. Others focused more on the tactical details, still others on the political ramifications.
None of them were restrained. Purple prose was alive, well, thriving—you might even call it the kudzu of contemporary journalese—and most writers laid it on as thickly as they could.
Fussy and slavish devotion to the facts was the poorest of cousins. The claims made in the newspapers that day would by and large become fixed in the nation’s mythology. These in particular:
The Prince of Germany had waged a tactical masterpiece of a battle, anticipating his hapless Swedish opponent’s every move and thwarting him at every turn.
Colonel Higgins led his Hangman Regiment in the decisive charge that routed the Swedes. On horseback, waving his sword—and a fair number of accounts had that sword responsible for sweeping off the head of Johan Banér.
Gretchen Richter personally led the sortie that took the Swedish siege lines. Some of the accounts had her bare-breasted in the doing. In February, in a snowstorm.
And the silliest of them all:
Every soldier in the Prince’s army was a stout-hearted German. Every soldier in Banér’s, a brutal and rapacious Swede.
The last fabrication was perhaps a necessity, for the nation that exploded that morning. For eighteen years, the great war had washed back and forth across German soil. Every nation, it seemed, had either plundered the land and brutalized the populace or (in the case of the French) paid others to do it.
(The one nation that could legitimately claim to be quite blameless in the matter was Poland—which the USE had repaid by invading. Once again illustrating the adage that no good deed goes unpunished.)
The Germanies had been helpless in the face of the catastrophe. And yet—
Almost every army that had wreaked havoc for all those years had been heavily or even largely German in its composition. The rulers who commanded the brutal deeds might have been foreigners and so might the generals. But most of the soldiers had come from the same people who were being savaged.
That had been just as true in the snowfields southwest of Dresden on February 26, 1636 as it had been on almost every battlefield of the war. Johan Banér himself was a Swede, and so were many of his officers. But at least two-thirds of his mercenaries had been Germans and at least half the officers who commanded them as well. The truth was, there were probably more Scottish officers and soldiers in