field guns that would certainly be loaded with canister.
Von Haslang had even considered-it was quite possible his commander had done the same-that it might be wisest to simply slack off a bit in the pursuit. Stay on the heels of the Danube Regiment but let them make their escape into Regensburg. A siege of Regensburg was going to be necessary, in any event. While there was no doubt the addition of Simpson’s forces would strengthen the defense, that was a problem for a later day.
A sound from above distracted him. The enemy airship had returned and was again passing over the Bavarian column. It was no more than five hundred feet from the ground, but that was enough to put them out of range of infantry firearms. Effective fire, at any rate. It was conceivable that if a volley were fired at it, one or two bullets might strike the thing. But at that height, even if it struck the small boatlike appendage that held the passengers, it would hardly do much damage.
The contraption made a surprising racket. Von Haslang hadn’t expected that. From a distance, the dirigible’s flight seemed serene and effortless. But up close, the engines that drove the fans that propelled it forward were extraordinarily loud.
The distraction was brief. Captain von Haslang went back to his grim thoughts and prognostications, now made all the worse for the irritating noise yammering at his ears.
Chapter 12
That very moment, as it happened, Rita was looking down on Captain von Haslang-or rather, at the small group of mounted officers at the front of the Bavarian column, among whom he was riding. At that height, even with up-turned faces not hidden by hats, it was impossible to distinguish individual persons. And it wouldn’t have mattered if she could. She’d never met the captain, or, indeed, any of the Bavarian officers.
She’d never met Duke Maximilian either, for that matter. But she could probably have recognized him at close range, because she’d seen a good likeness of him in a portrait.
Not that she’d want to be in close range of the man. By all accounts she’d ever heard, Bavaria’s ruler was as cold and deadly as a viper.
The Pelican had just returned from its first refueling stop at Regensburg. That had gone quite smoothly, much more so than Rita had expected and certainly more smoothly than she’d feared. Not only had there been no quarrels, but the city’s authorities had already had barrels of fuel brought out to the airfield. It seemed that the administrator of the Oberpfalz and the president of the SoTF had both sent radio messages to Regensburg instructing the city’s officials to do everything possible to aid Major Simpson and his one-craft air force.
Even that might not have done the trick, by itself. German city officials could set the world standard for narrow-minded parochialism, in Rita’s experience. But General Schmidt had also gotten on the radio and explained that:
A. If Regensburg did not provide Major Simpson with sufficient aid and assistance-in a timely and efficient manner-then Major Simpson would almost certainly run into severe difficulties and setbacks in his attempt to save his regiment from the depredations of the Bavarians. Who set the world standard for wickedness, in the general’s professional military opinion.
B. That being so, General Schmidt himself-now already marching his National Guard division to come to the assistance of Regensburg-would have no choice but to divert his troops in order to rescue Major Simpson. Who, by then, would be engaged in a desperate last stand against that selfsame Bavarian wickedness.
C. In which case, Duke Maximilian, a man whose wickedness was only matched by his cunning, would immediately launch the most furious assaults upon Regensburg, intending to seize the city while it remained lightly defended. In which project he would almost certainly succeed, since the relieving force under General Schmidt was unfortunately preoccupied rescuing Major Simpson from the predicament he had been placed in by the slothful and selfish behavior of the authorities of the very same city about to fall into the hands of Bavarian wickedness.
D. Which wickedness, he reminded the officials listening to his radio message, had been demonstrated not five years earlier in the unspeakably barbaric sack of Magdeburg, carried out largely by troops on Maximilian’s payroll.
So there they were, three full barrels of gasoline, ready to be loaded as soon as the Pelican was tethered. With six more barrels, they were assured, already on their way to the airfield.
Rita didn’t wait for those next barrels. Stefano told her that they now had enough fuel for the burners and engines to stay in operation another day. So she ordered him to fly back to the location of the Danube Regiment.
That location had moved a few miles downstream, but only a few. Being married to a soldier, Rita had been abstractly aware that large military forces other than cavalry units-and those also, more often than not-simply could not and did not move quickly across a countryside. But seeing the phenomenon for herself at first hand drove home that reality in a way that listening to Tom talking with fellow officers never had.
The problem began with the very term that people used to refer to the process. They would say that an army “marched.”
Marched. The word brought up images of parades, or newsreels Rita had seen of GIs during World War II passing through a bombed-out French or German town. No longer in formation, just walking. But unless they were moving carefully because there were enemy troops in the immediate vicinity, they were still making quite rapid progress. A person in good physical condition, like a young soldier, can easily walk two miles in an hour, even carrying a heavy pack, and maintain that rate for hours. They can move fifteen or twenty or even twenty-five miles in a day.
But that presupposed, first of all, twentieth-century macadamized roads. Wide roads, at that. Rita didn’t usually think of up-time two-lane country roads as being “wide,” but compared to the roads that existed in central Europe in 1636 they were practically boulevards. A standard up-time lane measured somewhere between ten and twelve feet, which made a two-lane road somewhere between twenty and twenty-four feet wide-not even counting whatever shoulders might exist. Half a dozen men could comfortably march abreast on that sort of road. Place them in rows spaced six feet apart-again, a very comfortable distance-and you could fit an entire regiment of a thousand men in a stretch of road that was less than a quarter of a mile long.
And those World War II-era newsreels usually only showed the infantrymen, or perhaps the armored fighting vehicles. They rarely showed everything else that was needed to keep an army marching, such as the long line of trucks carrying all the necessary supplies, equipment and ammunition. You saw the quickly-moving teeth of an army, not the massive tail that came behind it-a tail which was itself mechanized and therefore able to move pretty quickly.
None of that applied here. The road that Tom’s men and the refugees were traveling on that ran more-or-less alongside the north bank of the Danube was no more than ten feet wide and often narrower than that. It was not macadamized. In fact, it was rarely even a gravel road. Most of it was just a dirt road. Hardened by the passage of many feet and hooves and wagon wheels over the years, to be sure, but still just a dirt road.
And now, in mid-January, very often covered in thin ice and snow. The ice and snow didn’t last long, of course, with hundreds of people and livestock moving over it. No, it melted and started turning a dirt road into a mud road, at least in patches.
Things weren’t helped any, of course, by the fact that Tom had decided to put the refugees ahead of the army so his soldiers could provide them with some protection from the pursuing Bavarians. But, in truth, that probably wasn’t slowing them down all that much. There simply wasn’t any way to move some fifteen hundred people and close to two hundred horses, mules and oxen at anything faster than a crawl.
From high in the air, the army and its accompanying crowd of refugees made Rita think of a giant caterpillar inching its way down the Danube. Just as with a caterpillar, the center would expand as the soldiers in the rear pressed against the refugees ahead of them, forcing some of the refugees to move off the road. Then the officers would order a halt while the refugees were able to move a little farther, and the whole process repeated itself.
The situation would have been horrendous if the enemy cavalry had been doing what it should have been doing, moving ahead of the column and tearing at its flank. But the cavalry was still nowhere to be seen. Not from the ground, at least. From her vantage point two thousand feet in the air, Rita could see cavalry units moving about in the distance. But the closest cluster of Bavarian horsemen she could spot was at least half a mile from the
