'Which letter in 'n-o' is giving you the most trouble, Captain? You're the best quartermaster in the army, hands down. And I'm about to launch a campaign in the middle of winter against one of the most capable and experienced generals in the world. One of the few things I've got on my side is that I'm damn sure I'm going to be better supplied and provisioned than Baner-so long as you're handling the logistics. That means you stay here until we take Dresden. Assuming we get that far, of course.'
Again, he gave Bartley that somewhat savage grin. 'But I suppose I don't need to worry that my army will freeze to death before we get to Dresden, do I?'
David looked glum. 'No, sir, you don't. You won't starve, either.' He nodded toward the town. 'I've got enough winter outfits in the warehouses for the whole division, with a couple thousand suits to spare and at least that many extra pairs of boots. There are only enough skis and snowshoes for a couple of battalions, though.'
'That'll be enough. I'd just be using them as scouts in really bad weather.'
'And enough food and water to keep you going for a month.'
'Wagons? Sleighs?'
'Plenty of both.' Bartley smiled. 'The most worried-looking of those gents over there is the guy who made them. He just had the biggest boom of his life.'
'Well, then, I'd better go talk to them. A happy and secure base is always a big asset.'
Mike did a much better job of cheering up the merchants and tradesmen than David could have done. Bartley was handicapped by having the mind of a financier and quartermaster. Precise numbers, predictable outcomes, sure bets-those were his stock in trade. Watching one of the world's best politicians at work was simultaneously dazzling and disturbing.
When it was over, David still couldn't figure out how many lies Mike had told them. If he'd told them any at all. Politicians seemed to operate in an alternate universe where concepts like cause and effect, action and result, premise and conclusion, had at least eleven more dimensions than they did in the workaday world inhabited by normal human beings.
'That's what they mean by 'campaign promises,' isn't it? Uh, sir.'
'Yup.' The grin came back. 'Think of it as a promise that you'll campaign to make it happen. Now, show me these winter outfits. I'm dying to see the things, after hearing the reports.'
David was awfully proud of them, in point of fact. He was something of a military history buff. He'd designed the outfits himself-well, allowing for a whole lot of input from actual tailors-based on what he remembered of the telogreika, the padded winter jacket that the Soviet army had used in World War II. That had been one of the great advantages the Russians had had over the Nazis.
Most of the outfits were gray, but he'd had about two thousand done in white for camouflage. The Hangman Regiment had taken almost half of them for their assault on the fortress at Konigstein.
The jackets all came with matching padded trousers, and there were good winter boots and plenty of wool socks. The Third Division would be one of the few-maybe the only-large military unit in this day and age that would fight a winter campaign while properly equipped for the task.
What impressed Mike the most, though, was something David hadn't even mentioned in his reports.
'You made sleighs for the volley guns?'
Bartley shook his head. 'It's better than that, actually. Uh, sir. These are more like detachable skis that you can add onto the regular gun carriages if you need to operate on snowfields. Here, I'll show you how they work.'
Mike had half-forgotten than David Bartley had gotten started as a tycoon by helping to design down-time sewing machines based on up-time models. The young man was a good artificer as well as a whiz at finance.
'The town's blacksmiths figured out most of it,' David admitted. 'But it was my idea to start with.'
The design was downright cunning. The ski attachments didn't weigh all that much and could be fixed to the carriages ahead of time. Once the rig was in place, it wouldn't significantly impede the teams of horses which pulled the volley guns. But with a simple cranking mechanism, the skis could be lowered in less than two minutes- at which point the carriages became sleighs, for all practical purposes.
Mike scratched his jaw. 'I wonder if anyone's ever tried to tried to use cannons in winter using sleighs instead of regular carriages?'
'I know of at least one instance when it was done,' said David. 'During the revolutionary war, Henry Knox hauled a bunch of cannons from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston in the middle of winter using sleighs. I don't think they kept them on the sleighs while they were firing them, though. They wouldn't really need to, since they were using them against fixed British positions, not on a battlefield.'
'Regular field pieces might be too heavy to fire on a sleigh. Shouldn't be a problem with volley guns, though.' Mike gave Bartley a smile. 'We'll find out, won't we? In the meantime, see if you can mount a field piece on something like this.'
That'd keep the blacksmiths happy, at least.
Three days later, accompanied by the same platoon that had been waiting for him at the airfield, Mike left for the fortress at Konigstein. He'd had to wait those three days because of a snowstorm that had passed through Brandenburg and Saxony and the southern fringes of which had touched northern Bohemia.
He traveled by horse-drawn sleigh. Mike's horsemanship was perfectly good enough to have enabled him to ride a horse even in such heavy snow, but David had managed to cobble together the design for a carriage suitable for a light artillery piece and the general wanted to test it.
Not himself, of course. He didn't weigh nearly enough to substitute for an artillery piece. Instead he rode on an accompanying sleigh that would serve an artillery company as the winter equivalent of a battery wagon.
Half of the experiment-the half that involved him directly-proved to be successful. Unfortunately, Bartley's artillery sleigh turned out to suffer from some rather serious design flaws. The damn thing either wouldn't stay on the tracks; the skis would dig in too deeply; or, finally, one of the skis broke altogether.
As Mike had pretty much expected, things were trickier than they looked. Murphy was alive and well, obviously.
He wasn't disheartened, though. He hadn't really thought the experiment would work to begin with. Episodes from American history notwithstanding, he'd been skeptical that a hastily-assembled sleigh would be up to hauling such a heavy load in such heavy snow through a mountain range. Even given the advantage of traveling alongside a river, there were just too many ways for things to go wrong.
It would be nice, certainly, to be able to field light artillery pieces in a winter battle. But what Mike was really counting on was all the rest of his equipment-starting with the fact that his soldiers wouldn't be freezing their butts off the moment they broke camp. Once Baner pulled his troops out of their siege lines, on the other hand, they'd get into sorry shape very quickly, as cold as this winter was turning out to be.
One of the major drawbacks to the seventeenth century's libertarian method of paying troops was that everybody at every link in the money chain had an incentive to chisel. That was true even of the troops themselves, who were far more likely to spend their pay on wine, women and what passed for song in siege lines than they were to keep their gear up to snuff. Their officers certainly weren't going to make up the difference, with a few rare exceptions. Any supplies they bought their men usually had to come out of their own pockets.
That was not the least of the reasons that Mike, in his days as prime minister, had insisted that the USE's soldiers be paid from the national coffers directly. The money did not pass through a chain of officers except those assigned to payroll duty, who could be easily monitored. What was just as important, the army's supplies all the way down to socks and boots were 'government issue.' The USE army's soldiers were GIs, not independent military sub-contractors.
It wasn't impossible to chisel, of course. A black market in government-issued supplies and weapons had accompanied every army in history, and Mike didn't doubt for a moment that it accompanied his own. Still, almost every soldier who marched out into the Saxon plain a week or two from now to meet Sweden's Finest would have socks and good boots on his feet and be wearing an outfit designed to enable him to march, maneuver and fight in the cold and the snow and the ice. Which was a lot more than Baner's mercenaries would have at their disposal.
Mike's biggest worry was actually that Baner would choose to hunker down in his siege lines and not come out to meet him in the open field. The Swedish general hadn't bothered to build lines of contravallation to guard his siegeworks-the lines of circumvallation, to use the technical term-from the possibility of being attacked by an army in the field. He hadn't expected to find any such field army to face in the first place. Still, it wouldn't be that
