'I'll strip one of the new artillery companies from the Teutoburg Regiment. That'll give Higgins four guns, which ought to be plenty. And we can strip a couple of the heavy weapons units from them as well, which will provide him with the additional mortars he wants.'
Leebrick made a face. 'Brigadier von Taupadel is going to raise bloody hell. Not to mention Leos Hlavacek! That's his regiment you're proposing to skin. It won't help any that he ranks Higgins.'
Unlike every other regimental commander in the Third Division, Jeff was a lieutenant colonel instead of a colonel. He was the only lieutenant colonel in the entire USE army, in fact. The title was not officially recognized in the army's table of organization. Mike Stearns had created it as a brevet rank when he set up the Hangman Regiment-which was also not part of the T/O.
Officially, the USE army had a very clear and simple structure:
Each division consisted of nine thousand men commanded by a major general.
Each division had three brigades of three thousand men, commanded by a brigadier.
Each brigade had three regiments of one thousand men, commanded by a colonel.
Each regiment had two infantry battalions of four hundred men, commanded by a major, and an artillery company of two hundred men usually commanded by a captain.
Finally, the infantry battalions were composed of four companies of one hundred men, commanded by a captain. A company consisted of three platoons of thirty men commanded by a second lieutenant, and a heavy weapons unit of ten men commanded by a sergeant. The company's first lieutenant usually served its captain as his executive officer.
Such was the neat theory reflected in the official table of organization. Mike was pretty sure the ink hadn't dried yet before reality began to diverge from theory.
To begin with, the T/O didn't include cavalry forces at all. Officially, all cavalry forces were under the direct command of the army's commanding officer-that was Lieutenant General Lennart Torstensson-and he assigned the units to whichever divisions he chose in whatever manner he saw fit. Right now, for instance, Mike's Third Division had only one cavalry regiment assigned to it. Torstensson didn't think he needed more than that, since he'd be operating in the fairly constrained terrain of Bohemia and (if open hostilities broke out with Austria) the even more constrained terrain around Linz. Torstensson wanted to keep his cavalry concentrated against the Poles, in the more open terrain of northern Germany and Poland.
Secondly, almost as soon as they were formed the various major units of the army began changing. To give one example, Mike's Third Division had ten regiments instead of nine. The oddball was Jeff Higgins' Hangman Regiment, which Mike had created to maintain discipline in the division after some units ran amok following the capture of the Polish town of Swiebodzin.
Jeff's regiment was an oddball in more ways than one. Instead of having the usual artillery company-which the artillerymen themselves invariably and stubbornly insisted on calling a 'battery' and to hell with what the T/O said-he'd had Captain Thorsten Engler's flying artillery unit attached instead. Like the cavalry, the flying artillery were not part of the table of organization of the divisions, but were under Torstensson's direct authority.
Now, he'd have most of a regular artillery unit attached to his regiment as well-which would make it grossly oversized according to the T/O. Jeff's sergeants had been assiduously recruiting ever since Zielona Gora had given the Hangman the reputation of being the division's toughest regiment as well as the one which would be disciplining any miscreants. As a result, most of the regiment's companies were oversized also, with an average of one hundred and twenty men instead of the neat one hundred stipulated by the army's powers-that-be. Jeff and all of his officers were firmly of the opinion that the bigger the gun, the better, so most of that added personnel had been assigned to heavy weapons units. Jeff had been able to provide them with the heavy weapons they needed because he now had a close relationship with David Bartley; who, despite being the youngest quartermaster officer in the division, was easily its smartest.
And now, he'd be adding still more heavy weapons units to his regiment, swiped from Hlavacek's Teutoberg Regiment. So what? Jeff saw nothing wrong with hauling coal to Newcastle, and Hlavacek would make up the loss soon enough through recruitment. Unlike most armies in the here and now, the USE army regularly met its payroll. There were always men willing to sign up, even leaving aside the ones-most of them, actually-who joined for ideological reasons.
Jeff didn't have much sympathy for Hlavacek, anyway, since he didn't like the sour Czech mercenary officer. Still, there was no percentage in rubbing salt into the wounds of another regiment.
So all he said was: 'Okay.'
Chapter 2
'Run that by me again, Lieutenant.' Jeff Higgins shook his head. 'I'm having some trouble with the logic involved.'
Captain David Bartley looked a bit lost, as he often did when other people couldn't follow his financial reasoning. 'Well…'
He sat up straighter on the stool in a corner of the Hangman Regiment's HQ tent. 'Let's try it this way. The key to the whole thing is the new script. What I'm calling the divisional script.'
Higgins shook his head again. 'Yeah, I got that. But that's also right where my brain goes blank on account of my jaw hits the floor. If I've got this right, you are seriously proposing to issue currency in the name of the Third Division?'
'Exactly. We'll probably need to come up with some sort of clever name for it, though. 'Script' sounds, well, like script.'
'Worthless paper, in other words,' provided Thorsten Engler. He, like Bartley and Colonel Higgins himself, was also sitting on a stool in the tent. The flying artillery captain was smiling. Unlike Jeff, he found Bartley's unorthodox notions to be quite entertaining.
'Except it won't be-which is why we shouldn't call it 'script.' '
'Why won't it be worthless?' asked Major Reinhold Fruehauf. Unlike the others, he was standing. Slouched against one of the tent poles, more precisely. Fruehauf commanded the regiment's 20th Battalion. Battalions were numbered on a divisional basis, with the 1st and 2nd battalions assigned to the division's 'senior' regiment, the Freiheit Regiment commanded by Colonel Albert Zingre. Jeff Higgins' Hangman Regiment being the bastard tenth regiment of the division, its two battalions got the numbers nineteen and twenty.
Bartley squinted a little, as if puzzled by the question. 'Why won't it be worthless? Because…Well, because it'll officially be worth something.'
The regiment's other battalion commander cocked a skeptical eyebrow. 'According to who, Captain? You? Or even the regiment itself?' Major Baldwin Eisenhauer had a truly magnificent sneer. 'Ha! Try convincing a farmer of that!'
'He's right, I'm afraid,' said Thorsten. His face had a sympathetic expression, though, instead of a sneer. Engler intended to become a psychologist after the war; Major Eisenhauer's ambition was to found a brewery. Their personalities reflected the difference.
'I was once one myself,' Engler continued. 'There is simply no way that a level-headed farmer is going to view your script-call it whatever you will-as anything other than the usual 'promissory notes' that foraging troops hand out when they aren't just plundering openly. That is to say, not good for anything except wiping your ass.'
Bartley looked more lost than ever. 'But-but- Of course it'll be worth something. We'll get it listed as one of the currencies traded on the Grantville and Magdeburg money exchanges. If Mike-uh, General Stearns-calls in some favors, he'll even avoid having it discounted too much.' He squared his slender shoulders. 'I remind all of you that they don't call him the 'Prince of Germany' for no reason. I can pretty much guarantee that even without any special effort money printed and issued by Mike Stearns will trade at a better value than a lot of European currencies.'
Now, it was the turn of the other officers in the tent to look befuddled.
'Can he even do that?' asked Captain Theobold Auerbach. He was the commander of the artillery battery that had been transferred to Jeff's unit from the Freiheit Regiment.
