outdoor work before, and climbing higher than a church steeple to cut the top off a huge pine tree certainly got your blood going! Evenings spent singing or playing our new musical instruments glow pleasantly in my memory like the coals of the fires we sat around.
We worked five days a week and did military exercises on the sixth, which was the usual routine in the peacetime army.
We came back to civilization rippling with new muscles, and the girls almost fought each other to get at us!
When the ice broke up, we were back at East Gate, and soon we were back on the water again, riding the
Peacetime riverboats had a crew of only twenty-two, and even that many was because most of us were in training. Only two people on board really knew what they were doing, the captain and the engineer. The rest of us were there mostly to learn how to run one of these things. In the course of 1242,1 worked every single job on the boat, from helmsman to fireman, plus ticket salesman, sanitary engineer, radio operator, waiter, cargo master, mail sorter, painter, repairman, purser, steward, and cook.
The boat's captain was not the same thing as an army captain. That is to say, the first was a job position and the second was a military rank. Our current captain was in fact a knight-banner, while our boat captain during the war had been Baron Tados.
Our boat was a standard army riverboat, just like most of those we had seen the year before, although it wasn't a command boat like the
But despite our military capabilities, we were operating like a commercial common carrier. We had cargo space for six standard cargo containers, which were the same size as our war carts had been, six yards long, two yards wide, and a yard and a half high.
The main difference between a cart and a container was that the containers weren't armored, and they were built much closer to the ground, being mounted on railroad trucks, rather than the huge, cross-country wheels we used on the carts.
A container could snugly hold twenty-seven standard barrels. Or it could hold exactly six dozen standard cases, which were each a half yard wide and high and a yard long.
Those cases were just the right height to make a comfortable seat for two, or, upended, they were the right height to make a support for a workbench. Over the years, a lot of our cases ended up as furniture in peasant cottages, since the deposit on them was only a penny each.
We would take cargo that wasn't packed in our standard containers, cases, or barrels, but we charged a lot more to do it.
The army was big on standardization. There were only eight diameters of nuts and bolts, for example, so that when something broke, it was easy to replace. Glass jars came in only six sizes, each about twice as big as the next one smaller.
Each kind of jar was sized so a certain number of them fitted into a standard case, with no wasted space, and when you bought a quart of milk in Sandomierz, it was exactly the same size as a quart in Cracow. This was something new, since up to a few years ago, every city and town had its own sizes for everything.
It once was necessary for a merchant to personally be on hand whenever he bought or sold anything. Now he could purchase a container of army-grade number-two wheat in Plock, and do it by mail or even by radio, if he was in a hurry. He could have it shipped to a purchaser in Gniezno, while all the time he stayed in Cracow, secure in knowing exactly what he had bought and sold.
Many fortunes were made by those who were quick to learn the new ways of doing things. Those of us who worked on the rivers often indulged in this sort of trade whenever we noticed that the price of a given commodity in one place was much different than it was someplace else.
For years we more than doubled our salaries doing this, but eventually some merchants in Poznan set up a service where they systematically queried some two dozen cities on the local prices of three dozen commodities and made this information available, for a price, to other merchants. After that, only modest profits could be made, since no one but a fool would pay much more than the Poznan price for anything.
We carried passengers as well, with two dozen cabins on the second deck, for those who could afford them, and seats on the fighting top, for those who couldn't.
We would cruise up and down the Vistula, and every five miles or so there would be a depot with a dock. If they had business for us, they ran some flags up their pole or some lanterns at night and, by a system of codes, we would know if they had something that we had room for, which we usually did. We heard about really important passengers and cargoes by radio.
Evenings aboard, we sold beer and wine to passengers in the dining hall, earning a bit more money on the side, and I have always liked listening to travelers' tales, or hearing the songs they sang, or the tunes they played on strange, new instruments. To get into a competition, pitting our skills on the recorder, lute, or krummhorn against theirs, was always a joy.
It was a pleasant enough existence on the whole, because we stopped at all of the big cities along the way and there was always something new to see.
My main claim to fame came when, annoyed at doing the laundry, I put the dirty clothes along with some soap in a leaky barrel that had all four bungs missing. I tied the barrel to the rear railing with a long rope and kicked it over the side.
The barrel filled with water, then tossed and turned as it was pulled along, washing the clothes. Eventually, the soapy water was washed out and replaced with clean river water, and the clothes were rinsed.
Two hours later I pulled the barrel on board, and the clothes were clean! Soon, every boat on the river was doing laundry that way, and they named the barrel after me. Now, whenever anybody on the river washes clothes, they get out their Josip Barrel.
As the summer of 1242 came along, the army was preparing for another war, this time with the Teutonic Knights of St. Mary's Hospital at Jerusalem, better known as the Knights of the Cross, or just the Crossmen. It was to be a set-piece battle, with both sides agreeing on the time and place.
Naturally, we wanted to get involved, but our pleas and petitions got us nowhere. Apparently, every outfit in the army wanted to go, and there were only ten thousand Crossmen who needed killing. That wasn't much more than a single one of our battalions.
Also, it soon became obvious that Lord Conrad was planning to try out some new weapons on the Germans. It was all kept very secret, but we hauled some monstrous cannons down to Turon, where the Crossmen were holed up, along with some big canisters of something so poisonous that everybody but the fireman was required to stay up on the fighting top when we had it in the hold.
Lord Conrad and his liege lord, King Henryk, had invited 'observers' from just about every Christian country in the world, and from a lot of those that weren't Christians, too.
We carried passengers from Hungary, Bulgaria, France, Spain, and Scotland, and that was just on our boat alone. There were three dozen other boats involved in the business, as well.
Mostly, it wasn't a war so much as it was a big political convention followed by an execution.
We weren't there when they shot poison gas into the Crossmen's fort, but they say there wasn't much to see, anyway.
We were by a few days later, after the big cannons had spent a few hours blowing down the brick walls, and again there wasn't anything to see. Where once there stood a fine, strong fortification, there was now only broken bricks and rubble.
Most of our troops in that 'battle' never even got to shoot at the enemy, and we boatmen were so busy transporting the visiting dignitaries back to where they'd come from that our soldiers had to walk home, just as they'd had to walk there.
There wasn't any loot to speak of, either, and what there was didn't cover the cost of the war. Most of our knights got a trophy to hang on their walls, and that was about it. After fighting the Mongols, it was something of a comedown.
That winter, which we again spent logging, we looked into the possibility of transferring our lance from the Transportation and Communication Corps over to the Eagles, who built and flew all of the aircraft, but that proved to be impossible.
