political shadings, and well-nigh innumerable layers in its populace. The Americans and their allies had been able to politically dominate it since the Ring of Fire primarily because they had provided stability and security. They had put a stop to mercenary plundering, fostered the economy, built and maintained roads, schools and hospitals.
Whether or not they agreed with the Fourth of July Party's program-and a great many of them didn't-the majority of the population of the State of Thuringia-Franconia kept voting for them, election after election. For some, out of radical conviction. But for just as many, for the opposite reason-a conservative reluctance to upset the applecart. The very full applecart.
It helped a great deal, too, that the president of the SoTF was Ed Piazza. He was not a flamboyant, exciting, romantic-and rather scary-figure like Mike Stearns. Rather, he exuded steadiness and stability. He governed his province much the same way, as a high school principal, he had governed his teaching staff and his students, with relaxed confidence and equanimity.
So, despite the many features of Thuringian and Franconian society that resisted the democratic movement, even resented it bitterly, that movement continued to broaden and deepen its influence.
'Don't give them a clear target,' Michael had told her. 'Let them wear themselves out for a while. They haven't got the wind for a long fight. As long as you keep them from winning by knockout, you're staying ahead on points.'
Her husband was fond of boxing analogies. She decided to share one of them with the group.
'We've been discussing this for hours,' she said. 'I think we are ready to take a vote.'
She looked around the table and was greeted by nods. From Gunther, Anselm and Albert, also. They'd been the most intransigent of her opponents.
'Very well. All in favor of Gunther's proposal to seize official power in Magdeburg, raise your hands.'
The number was clearly short of a majority.
'Very well. All in favor of my approach-which, following my husband's guidance, I shall call 'rope-a-dope'- raise your hands.'
The jest was perhaps unwise, since there was an immediate outcry to explain it that delayed the vote. But in the end, her viewpoint was adopted.
Afterward, Achterhof grunted and leaned back in his chair. 'Easy for us to say 'rope-a-dope.' But it'll be Gretchen and her people in Dresden who have to take the punches.'
Chapter 13
Dresden, capital of Saxony Jozef Wojtowicz watched workmen laying gravel onto the cobblestones of the huge city square. What madness possessed me, he wondered, to come to Dresden?
He was still possessed by the same madness, to make things worse. He had more than enough money to have gotten out of the city any time he wanted. His employer was his uncle Stanislaw Koniecpolski, the grand hetman of Poland and Lithuania and one of the Commonwealth's half-dozen richest men. He was no miser, either. Jozef had never lacked for the financial resources he needed.
Yes, here he still was. And if he didn't leave by tomorrow-the day after, at the outside-he probably wouldn't be able to leave at all. Baner's army was already setting up camp just south and west of Dresden's walls. It wouldn't take the Swedish general very long to have regular cavalry patrols surrounding the city.
Jozef might still be able to pass through, if the cavalrymen were susceptible to bribery. Mercenaries usually were. It would be risky, though. There were already reports that Baner's troops had committed atrocities in some of the villages northeast of Chemnitz, in their march through southern Saxony. Baner was known for his temper and his brutality, and commanders usually transmitted their attitudes to their soldiers. A cavalry patrol that Jozef encountered might decide to murder him and take all his money rather than settle for a bribe.
But…
He couldn't bring himself to leave. Dresden was just too interesting, too exciting, right now. When he'd lived in Grantville, Jozef had come across the up-time term 'adrenalin junkie' and realized that it described him quite well. Since he was a boy he'd enjoyed dangerous sports-he was an avid rock-climber, among other things-and part of the reason he'd agreed to become his uncle's spy in the USE was because of the near-constant tension involved. Whenever he contemplated his notion of Hell it didn't involve any of the tortures depicted in Dante's Inferno; rather, it was to be locked in a room for eternity with nothing to do. Jozef had a very high pain threshold, but an equally low boredom threshold.
Besides, he could always justify the risk on the grounds that staying in Dresden gave him an unparalleled opportunity to study the Committees of Correspondence in action. Gretchen Richter herself was in charge here! What better opportunity could you ask for?
That very moment, as it happened, he saw her entering the square from the direction of the Residenzschloss, surrounded by a dozen or so people. She and her CoC cohorts had effectively taken over the palace of the former Elector of Saxony, John George, as their own headquarters.
You had to add that term 'effectively' because Richter still maintained the pretense that the Residenzschloss was primarily being used as a hospital for wounded soldiers. She'd also been heard to point out that the province's official administrator-that was Ernst Wettin, the USE prime minister's younger brother-also had his offices and quarters in the Residenzschloss. The fanciest ones available, in fact, the chambers and rooms that had been used by John George and his family before they fled the city.
Both claims were thread-bare. True enough, Richter was reportedly always polite to the provincial administrator and made sure his stay in the palace was a pleasant one. She even provided him with a security detail, since Wettin had no soldiers of his own. But that fact alone made it clear who really wielded power in the city.
As for the soldiers who'd been sent to Dresden to recuperate from their wounds, by now most of them had regained their health. They still lived in the section of the Residenzschloss that had been designated as the hospital, but that was simply because there were no barracks available and Richter had decreed that no soldiers would be billeted on the city's inhabitants. Nor had the few officers objected, although the woman had absolutely no authority to be making any decisions concerning soldiers in the USE army.
And there was another thing Jozef found interesting about the situation. All of the USE officers here were very junior. There was not so much as a single captain among them, much less any majors or colonels. They were all lieutenants-and newly-minted ones, at that, for the most part.
How was that possible? How could an army division fight as many battles as the Third Division had fought during the summer and fall without any of its company commanders or field grade officers being wounded?
Had they all been killed? The odds against that happening were astronomical.
And they had to have been engaged in the fighting. No army could possibly win battles if the only officers who placed themselves in harm's way were lieutenants.
There was only one possible answer, from what Jozef could see. For whatever reason, the commanding general of the Third Division had deliberately sent only his most junior officers and his enlisted men to Dresden. Those of higher rank who'd been wounded he must have sent elsewhere.
Jena, probably. The USE had a big new hospital there, already reputed to be one of the very best in the world. General Stearns could have sent the more senior officers there on the grounds that there was only limited space in Jena so he was making a priority of giving them the best treatment available.
Whatever his thinking had been, the end result was that several hundred combat veterans-almost all of them no older than their twenties-were in a city about to undergo a siege, and they had allied themselves with Dresden's inhabitants. And this was no grudging alliance, either. Jozef had seen for himself that tactical command of the city's defenses had been taken over by the dozen or so USE army lieutenants present. The one named Krenz seemed to be in overall charge.
Could Stearns have foreseen that?
He…might. By all accounts, he was a canny bastard. And a labor organizer, in his background, not a military man. That meant he was accustomed to fluid relations of command and obedience, where a man's authority derived almost entirely from his ability to gain and retain the confidence of the men around him. To use an up-time expression, he had to have very finely honed 'people skills.'
