That gesture could be interpreted in two different ways, of course. Good luck or I hope you crash and burn, you fucking jackass.
Either way, Eddie was cheered up. He took off with a grin on his face.
Chapter 32
Dresden, capital of Saxony Eric Krenz woke to the sound of gunfire. He didn't need Tata, this time, to roll him out of bed. Before she'd fully awakened herself, he was already half-dressed.
Those weren't simply the sounds of cannon fire. There was also the unmistakably distinctive sound of volley guns being fired. That could only mean one thing.
'What's happening?' Tata asked, her voice still a bit fuzzy from sleep.
'They're coming across the ice! I didn't think even Baner was that fucking crazy!'
He finished jerking on his boots and practically flew out of the door. 'If a man insists on being an idiot, he could at least try to be intelligent about it!'
As soon as Eric reached the street, he realized why Baner had launched the attack. There was a heavy overcast, enough to make it impossible to see more than thirty yards in any direction, even with a half-moon. The Swedes would have been able to get most of the way across the Elbe before being spotted.
Not that it would do them much good now. As he hurried toward the fortifications along the river, he could see rockets firing. These weren't artillery rounds. General Stearns-his staff, rather-had never been fond of the temperamental devices and didn't use them as weapons. So, none of the soldiers from the Third Division who'd been sent to Dresden to recuperate from injuries had any experience with the heavy rockets used by some units as artillery.
The Third Division did, on the other hand, use rockets as flares and signaling devices. Krenz and his fellow officers had ordered a number made by the city's artisans, for precisely the purpose they were being put to now- illuminating the area in the event of a night assault.
They were some real advantages, Eric had discovered, to fighting a siege when you were the ones inside the walls. At least, if they were the walls of a major city like Dresden, with its many workshops and manufactories, and hundreds of skilled craftsmen. The volley guns he could hear rattling away in the distance had been made here also. Dozens of them, in just a few weeks.
By the time he got to the bastion guarding the western end of the river wall, the battle was raging. The sound of grenades had now been added to the mix, which meant the enemy had gotten all the way up to the walls along the river bank. Some of those grenades were being thrown by the Swedes, trying to clear an area wide enough to get infantry over the walls on ladders. He could tell the difference from the sounds of the explosions.
Friedrich Nagel was already there when Eric got atop the bastion. 'I think they're mostly coming at the east end!' he shouted, pointing in that direction.
'Can you handle everything here?'
Nagel nodded. 'It's not so bad, really. The volley guns make a lot of difference. I don't think they were expecting them.'
Eric turned and went back down the stairs. He had to force himself to move a little slowly. The snow covering the steps made them slippery.
He'd thought the volley guns would help. They were easy to make, once you understood the trick of the things. Most of these weren't rifled, the way the division's own volley guns were. But for the purposes of these guns, that didn't matter so much. They were intended for the close range work of repelling assaults, not firing on an open battlefield. The key was the firing mechanism itself, the use of a single breech-loading firing strip that enabled the gun crew to fire a volley of twenty-five rounds five or six times a minute-even seven times a minute, if the crew was good enough.
These Dresden-made guns couldn't match that rate of fire, of course, because they weren't using percussion caps. No one in the city was set up to make such firing devices. Instead, these volley guns used a more primitive powder train. That cut the rate of fire in half.
Still, most of the volley gun crews along the walls could manage three volleys a minute-quite a bit better rate of fire than three-pounders loaded with canister, and far better than that of larger cannons. In fact, they could almost keep up with infantrymen firing muzzle-loading muskets.
The volley guns were quicker and cheaper to make than cannons, too, since they didn't require the specialized equipment and skills needed to make large cannon barrels. Dresden had plenty of gunsmiths able to make the simple two-foot-long musket barrels, even if only one of the gun shops was set up to rifle the bores. The same was true for the carriages. A number of artisans in the city were able to manufacture them, where making the massive carriages for a cannon would have been difficult.
Another advantage of the volley guns was that they didn't require a big crew-three men, where most cannons required at least twice than many. The ordnance was lighter and easier to handle, as well. That had made it possible to train a large number of the militiamen in their use, far more than they could have done with larger artillery.
Eric was sure that Nagel was right. The Swedish mercenaries coming across the river wouldn't have expected to run into that heavy a fire. One or two bad volleys, certainly-canister fired out of cannons. Probably only one volley, with the limited visibility caused by the darkness and the overcast. Instead, once they'd been spotted, they'd been under continuous fire.
And once the battle had started, the visibility factors would be working against them. The same darkness and overcast would make crossing the frozen river-already bad footing-more difficult still. Whereas the defenders didn't really have to worry about any of that. They weren't firing at specific individual targets anyway. No one did, in a battle, not even with rifled weapons.
Eric's own footing wasn't that good, for that matter-as he was forcibly reminded twice along the way, when he slipped and fell. Luckily, he didn't suffer anything worse than a bruise. Maybe not even that. Several inches of snow isn't much of a shock absorber, of course, but the slipperiness meant that any fall except a perpendicular one tended to have much of its energy transferred into a skid instead of a direct impact.
He wouldn't know for sure until he could remove his clothes and examine the places he thought might be bruised. Better still, have Tata examine them and do her healing wonders while he sipped hot broth in front of a fire. As he ought to be doing this very moment, if the general in command of the Swedes hadn't been a madman.
'War sucks,' he muttered. But, never faltered on his way. Krenz was one of those people who always did their duty. The grousing that went along with it was just a necessary lubricant.
Ernst Wettin spent the first fifteen minutes of the battle simply watching it from one of the windows in his bedroom in the Residenzschloss. Then, spent the next fifteen minutes pondering his own duty.
The decision, in the end, came down to a simple inability to do nothing at all-which was his only course, if he opted to stay out of the fray. He couldn't very well go back to working on his manuscript. Not even Ernst's devotion to educational reform was enough to keep him scribbling at a desk when the fate of an entire city was in the balance.
He tried his best not to let personal preferences shape his choice. It was hard, though. He detested Johan Baner, from the months he'd been forced to work with the brute in the Upper Palatinate. And, on the flip side, had grown rather fond of the young people who'd taken charge of defending the city against the Swede. Gretchen Richter, Tata, the troll-ugly but surprisingly genial Joachim Kappel-certainly the dozen or so stalwart lieutenants from the Third Division-all of them were people whom he thought would fare rather well, when their time finally came to face the Almighty.
And should that time be now? Ernst Wettin thought not.
So, he left his little suite and made his way to the great chamber at the center of the palace where Richter had set up a command center. Surely he could be of some use, whatever it might be.
Not sure whether she should be amused, bemused, anxious or appalled, Noelle Stull watched her two young companions as they set about barricading the entrance to their townhouse.
