No, what bothered him was his own ability to lie so smoothly and cold-bloodedly. Granted, the Mike Stearns he'd left behind hadn't run around compulsively telling everyone about every cherry tree he'd cut down. Still, he'd felt guilty on those occasions he had told a lie-and there hadn't been all that many to begin with.
To this day, he'd never felt the slightest twinge of remorse over his actions after the Dreeson Incident. None.
How many times could a man do something on the grounds that the end justifies the means before he rubs away his conscience altogether?
Mike didn't know. What he did know was that today he was scraping away some more of it.
Christopher Long came racing up. The English officer was such a superb horseman that he didn't think anything at all about galloping his horse across any terrain as long as it was reasonably flat and dry. Here on the southern edge of Zielona Gora, Long's definition of "reasonably dry" bordered on lunacy as far as Mike was concerned. True, there hadn't been any rain lately so the soil wasn't muddy. But there were little streams and rills all over the place, some of which you couldn't see until the last moment. In fact, Long was about-
The Englishman came to the rill in question and casually leapt his horse over it. Ten seconds later he was drawing his mount alongside Mike's. His face was flushed with excitement, but that had to do with the military situation, not the trivial issue of jumping a horse while going twenty-five or thirty miles per hour.
"The Third Brigade is about to engage the enemy, sir!"
Two things struck Mike immediately.
The first was the invariably antiseptic nature of military terminology, which he had noticed before. "Engage the enemy." That meant that three thousand men under the command of Brigadier Georg Derfflinger were about to start murdering and/or maiming an as-yet-unknown number of Polish soldiers-who, for their part, would do their level best to return the favor. Do unto others before they do unto you.
Mike was pretty sure that sort of veiled language had been intrinsic to the military since the foot soldiers of Sargon "engaged" their Sumerian counterparts by running them over with chariots and hacking them to pieces with bronze axes.
The second thing Mike noticed was a lot more modern.
Once again, one of his brigade commanders had forgotten to use his radio. Instead, as commanders on battlefield had done since horses were domesticated, he'd sent a courier. That peculiar forgetfulness seemed to be ingrained in seasoned veterans like Derfflinger, even though the man was only twenty-nine years old.
For that matter, Long had obviously overlooked the radio as well-and he'd just turned twenty-six.
But now was not the time to berate anyone for being technological challenged.
"Where are von Taupadel and Schuster?" They were the commanders, respectively, of the 1st and 2nd Brigades. Along with Derfflinger, they were the Third Division's brigadiers.
Long pointed to the northeast. "Schuster's brigade has closed off the road to Wroclaw. Von Taupadel's continuing to push around the city to the east."
Of the two brigadiers, von Taupadel was the senior. He'd have instructed Schuster to fortify positions cutting the Wroclaw road while he took the more challenging task of continuing the flanking maneuver. That made sense, and it's what Mike would have told him to do had he been there. (Or if von Taupadel had thought to get in touch with him by radio, but never mind.) Schuster's brigade was the weakest in the division because Mike had stripped troops out of the Black Falcon and Gray Adder regiments to form Jeff's new Hangman Regiment. Its morale was shaky, too, because except for the Finnish cavalrymen all the soldiers who'd been executed for the atrocities at Swiebodzin had come from that brigade.
Mike hadn't punished Schuster or the colonel commanding the Gray Adder regiment. Schuster, because he'd been elsewhere at the time and couldn't in fairness be held responsible. The colonel, because he was dead. His killing at the hands of a sniper, in fact, was one of the things that had triggered off the slaughter.
But while he hadn't penalized Schuster, Mike had privately made clear to him that if the 2nd Brigade was guilty of another such incident, the brigadier could expect to be cashiered on the spot. For a while, at least, Schuster was bound to be excessively cautious. So would his soldiers, for that matter. Guarding a road from behind fixed positions would be a good way to start rebuilding their confidence.
Mike spent a minute or so considering the situation. Ideally, he'd wait until von Taupadel had moved his brigade far enough around Zielona Gora to cut the road to Poznan. But that could take quite a bit more time. They'd come by a circuitous route, following the Bobr river and then marching cross-country in order to approach Zielona Gora directly from the west. The easier route would have been to follow the Odra, which would have brought them close to the city. But, of course, the Poles had planned for that and built fortifications guarding the river.
The problem that Mike was now presented with was that the road to Poznan started on the northeast side of Zielona Gora. The 1st Brigade had to march almost two-thirds of the way around the city in order to reach it. If Mike waited until they got there, the Hangman Regiment might get destroyed in the meantime.
He decided the chance they might encircle and capture all the Polish forces in Zielona Gora just wasn't worth the possible cost to Higgins and his men. That had always been something of a long shot, anyway.
He turned to Long. "Colonel, we'll send the Third Brigade directly into the city. Let Duerr take the word to Brigadier Derfflinger." Mike pointed to some nearby woods. "He's in there, taking care of urgent business."
Long frowned. "If it's urgent business, he may be occupied for a while yet."
Mike smiled. "He should be finishing up any second now. It's the sort of pressing business that never makes its way into fiction."
After a moment, Long chuckled. "I see. And myself?"
"I want you to get in touch with von Taupadel. I want him to forget about reaching the Poznan road and just go straight at whatever part of the city he'd closest to right now."
Long was back to frowning. "It'll take me some time to reach him, General. By the time I do-"
"Radio," Mike said. "Use. The. Radio."
He turned in his saddle and pointed back to his communications tent, which had been set up twenty yards away. Jimmy Andersen was standing outside the entrance flap, looking lonely and forlorn.
"Sergeant Andersen will operate it. He knows what he's doing. So goes Brigadier von Taupadel's radio operator, if he hasn't died of neglect and boredom yet."
Long stared at the tent much the way a man might stare at an ogre's lair.
"The, ah, radio, sir?"
"Use. The. Radio. Now."
Duerr went straight to the radio tent as soon as he got out of the woods. Oddly enough, given his age and acerbic temperament, Duerr was more at ease around electronic technology than most younger officers. Within five minutes, all three brigade commanders had gotten their orders.
A minute later, the artillery barrages began. Ten minutes later, even at a distance of half a mile, Mike could hear the sounds of infantry regiments advancing on the city.
"About fucking time," grumbled Jeff Higgins. He and two of his captains were crouched over a map inside a small bakery. They'd been trying to figure out if there was any route that might extricate them from what had essentially turned into a trap. Unfortunately, the map was in as bad a shape as the regiment was by now. Being fair to the regiment, Jeff was sure that map had been lousy even in its prime.
Within thirty seconds, the noise produced by the artillery barrage made it impossible to talk anyway. Jeff signaled the two captains to return to their units. All they could do now was wait.
After it was all over, Mike's aides estimated that about half of the Polish forces who'd been defending Zielona Gora had made their escape to the northeast. The failure to cut off the Poznan road had allowed for that.