Well-a man could always hope.
Duke Ernst knew that Baner had his men constantly practicing innovative tactics involving fighting retreats and winter campaigning. He looked at his colleague reproachfully.
"General, you are fully aware of why you and your regiments must remain stationed in the Upper Palatinate. Your presence here is necessary to guard against any Bavarian incursions across the Danube. Even more, the threat caused by your presence along the Danube keeps Duke Maximilian's troops tied in place, so that he cannot bring them to the assistance of the Austrians against Wallenstein in Bohemia-nor to the League of Ostend against whom our monarch is waging war in the Baltic. Your task here is not the one which you have just described as 'doing nothing.'" His face grew a bit tight. "Accompanied, I fear I must say, by a blasphemy that is not acceptable in polite discourse, and which I do not propose to repeat."
He decided an additional remark was called for here. "Moreover," he added, "your troops are being paid. Not as much as they might like, but regularly. That appreciably reduces the immediate risk of mutiny."
"Appreciably! Immediate! You know, Your Grace, you have some adverb or adjective just dripping with pious cant that puts a condition on everything you say," Baner said, all but sneering openly. "The whole Upper Palatinate is an overused cesspit as far as I am concerned! Particularly since my troops, during this winter of 1633-1634, are neither quartered upon the townspeople, whose stores they could eat up, nor allowed to exact more than very limited and rationed contributions, which my honored regent does not permit them to collect themselves-with whatever supplements they might bring in during the process-but is obtaining through contractors with the souls of stiff-necked, constipated bookkeepers and accountants. Calvinist bookkeepers and accountants. Walloons, most of them. Or Genevans!"
"The honored regent, as you call me, feels obliged to point out that Frederick V of the Palatinate and erstwhile Winter King of Bohemia, whose political ambitions were the immediate trigger of this great war, was a Calvinist-whether you like it or I like it. As is his son Karl Ludwig; so far, at least. It seems only reasonable, therefore, to employ at least a moderate number of Calvinists in the administration of the province. If I engaged only fellow Lutherans in this region, it would cause hard feelings unnecessarily."
He leaned back in his chair and continued, in a somewhat milder tone. "The Upper Palatinate is not only that which you rendered so unacceptably as 'an overused cesspit.' Although there are times that I too have been tempted to consider it almost ungovernable-if only because there are three sets of legal claimants, duly but separately appointed or authorized by its former Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic rulers respectively, to almost every piece of property within its borders. Nonetheless, it has industrial resources that are crucial to the technology of the up-timers. That are, therefore, crucial to the war effort being waged by Gustav Adolf. Who is, if I may remind you once more, your king as well as my emperor, the emperor of the USE. The presence and protection of your troops is necessary if we are to restore the mines to full production. Otherwise, a raid from Austria or Bavaria could destroy the infrastructure once more, just as effectively-and just as fast-as Tilly and Mansfeld, between them, destroyed it during this past decade."
Baner, alas, was nothing if not stubborn. He was none too heavily burdened with respect for his superiors, either. "If the king-or, more likely that tight-assed young Torstensson-wants the artillery that might be manufactured from the ore produced by the Upper Palatinate's mines, smelted with the Upper Palatinate's charcoal, and processed in the Upper Palatinate's hammer-mills, then"-here his fist slammed the table-"it should be that fucking Torstensson's troops who get stuck with the hell-designed duties such as protecting mines, assholes, smelters, latrines, hammer-mills, and chamber-pots."
He planted his hands on the armrests of his chair, leaned back, and glared at Duke Ernst. "While real cavalrymen get on with the process of fighting battles."
The two men, odd couple though they might be, had learned a lot from one another in the past several months. They had conducted variations on this conversation so frequently that Duke Ernst didn't even pause.
"We have to consider the problems presented by the other Upper Palatine territories, as well, especially Leuchtenberg. Duke Maximilian's brother is married to the sister of the landgrave of Leuchtenberg. Her brother and nephews fled into Bavaria when we came through on our way to Regensburg."
Baner snorted. "Of course we fucking occupied the whole region! There's really no practical way to conquer part of the squares on a game board and pass by the others."
Duke Ernst ignored him and looked at Bocler. "For your notes. Wolfgang Wilhelm is the duke of Pfalz-Neuburg. He married Duke Maximilian's sister in 1613 and converted to Catholicism in the expedient hope that it would enhance his maternal inheritance expectations in Julich and Cleves. He's been in Dusseldorf for years now. For our purposes, even though his Bavarian duchess has been dead for five years and he has remarried, he's still basically Maximilian's client. Especially since he's got the Bavarian duke's brother, Archbishop Ferdinand of Cologne, looking over his shoulder."
The young secretary nodded gratefully. He was learning fast, but he still was nowhere as close to being on top of the political developments of the past quarter century as his employer, who had been born to the job.
Duke Ernst was still dictating. "Wolfgang Wilhelm, seems, for the moment, to have no immediate intentions of undertaking military action to reclaim those parts of his Neuburg lands that are up here, north of the Danube, intermixed with those of the Upper Palatinate. That's probably because Gustav's main theater of military operation this spring and summer will be against the League of Ostend in the north and thus uncomfortably close to Wolfgang's lands on the lower Rhine and Dusseldorf itself. However, his local administrators are still in place in the Neuburg lands south of the Danube and he has filed a complaint against us with the Imperial Supreme Court on grounds that we have 'unjustifiably dispossessed' him of the north-Danubian lands that interpenetrate those of the Upper Palatinate."
Bocler mentally thanked his father for making him learn shorthand, because Duke Ernst wasn't even pausing between sentences.
"And, I expect, whether the acknowledged emperor of the Germanies be Swedish or Austrian, Lutheran or Catholic, in Magdeburg or Vienna, the imperial chamber court will hear the case. But what is immediately important to us as we sit in Amberg is that most certainly, given the slightest chance, Duke Maximilian will seize upon Wolfgang Wilhelm's grievances as an excuse to invade the Upper Palatinate, citing noble defense of the unjustly dispossessed as the casus belli of a just war."
Baner chimed in. "You can add to your notes that Duke Wolfgang Wilhelm of Pfalz-Neuburg is a son of a bitch-or would be, if his mother hadn't been a perfectly respectable woman. Still, he qualifies as a son of a bitch even though his mother was impeccably virtuous. His character has the kind of son-of-a-bitchiness that overrides such minor impediments. He-"
"What do you think of his brothers-the Lutheran dukes of the Junge-Pfalz? August at Sulzbach-well, he died a couple of years ago, so it's his widow as regent-and Johann Friedrich at Hilpoltstein?" Duke Ernst interrupted Baner's spiel with some apparently genuine curiosity. These cadets of the Pfalz-Neuburg ruling house held appanages, independently-administered lands that checkerboarded with those of the Upper Palatinate. Bocler knew that he dealt with them, or, at least, with their officials, on an almost daily basis.