1636_ The Saxon Uprising - Eric Flint [44]
“Indeed not,” concurred his immediate superior, Colonel Friedrich Engels.
The third officer present was General Heinrich Schmidt. “We do not lack confidence, certainly, but I think it would be more accurate to say that we are reasonably assured of the matter,” was his judicious contribution.
Theologians, soldiers and teenagers—who would have guessed they shared such a close kinship? But Ed Piazza kept the observation to himself. Taken each on his own, all three of the officers in the room had good senses of humor. But they were quite young for their ranks and in the case of two of them, Schmidt and Engels, newly promoted to boot. Like Ed’s son and daughter, they would be hyper-sensitive to anything that sounded like criticism coming from him, especially if it sounded derisive or sarcastic.
Besides, it didn’t matter. Stripped of their fussiness over terminology, it was clear that the three officers were…call it “relaxed,” that they could keep their troops provisioned in case war with Bavaria broke out again in the Upper Palatinate.
That was really all that Ed cared about. Like many able-bodied West Virginia males of his generation, he was a Vietnam veteran. He’d seen a fair amount of combat too, since he’d been in the 1st Brigade of the 5th Mechanized Division and had taken part in the Cambodia incursion in 1970. But he’d been an enlisted man swept up by the draft, with no more interest in military affairs than he needed to stay alive and get back home. Now in his mid-fifties with the adult life experience of someone who’d worked in education, he made no pretense of being able to second-guess his commanding officers, much less be a backseat driver.
If they said they were “reasonably assured” of their preparedness, that was good enough for him.
“We may never come to it anyway,” said Tom.
Engels, who was his immediate superior, shook his head. “That Bavarian shithead will jump on us with both boots if he sees a chance. Duke Maximilian’s the worst of a bad lot—and that’s saying something, when you’re talking about Hochadel.”
Hochadel was the German term for the upper nobility, the small elite crust—no more than a few dozen families—who lorded it over the much more numerous lower nobility, the Niederadel. Engels came from the fringes of that Niederadel class, but he’d adopted the radical attitudes of the CoCs, most of whose members were commoners.
How much of Engels’ political viewpoint stemmed from serious consideration of the issues themselves was unclear. Tom Simpson had once told Ed that he thought his commanding officer was just tickled pink—tickled red, rather—when he discovered he had exactly the same name as the very famous close friend and associate of Karl Marx in another universe.
“That ‘more revolutionary than thou’ act on Fred’s part is mostly for show,” Tom had said. “The truth is that he’s a professional soldier and doesn’t really think that much about politics. He sure as hell doesn’t read any political tracts. Although”—the huge American major grinned—“he was mightily pleased when I gave him a copy of his namesake’s Socialism: Utopian and Scientific for his birthday.”
“Where in God’s name did you get that book? I didn’t know any of our libraries had a copy.”
“They wouldn’t have sold it to me even if they had,” pointed out Tom. He was still grinning. “From Melissa, who else? The book’s more in the way of a pamphlet, actually, and she had a stack of them in her basement. Well, did have a stack. She says she gave most of them to Red Sybolt before he left for Poland.”
Ed rolled his eyes. The thought of Red Sybolt—before the Ring of Fire, Marion County’s most notorious labor organizer—loose in Poland with a pile of flaming socialist pamphlets was…
Well, rather charming, actually. By all accounts, Poland’s aristocracy could stand to have its feet held to the fire.
“Don’t fool yourself, Tom” said Heinrich Schmidt, after they left the SoTF president’s office. “Leaving aside the great Murphy’s principles, Colonel Engels has the right of it. Maximilian