He could bring twelve thousand hussars, giving him an almost two-to-one numerical superiority. He'd decided the risk was worth it. He was more afraid of the USE's army than he was of the Swedes and Hessians. It was a slower-moving army, true, because it was so heavily based in the infantry. But slow as that army might be, it was immensely powerful if any commander ever got the entire army on a single battlefield, as Torstensson had against the French at Ahrensbok. Almost all units of the USE Army had been equipped and trained with rifled muskets by now, for one thing. And those odd-looking volley gun batteries had proved very effective on every battlefield they'd made an appearance.
They'd be the most effective soldiers Gustav Adolf had when it came time for sieges, too. Koniecpolski had always assumed-and still did, despite his recent successes-that any war with the USE would soon enough become a war of sieges and attrition. The Swede had simply become too powerful to hope to defeat him on the open field except under ideal weather conditions such as these.
Koniecpolski hadn't gotten a clear account yet of what had happened at Zielona Gora. His units stationed in the city had had only one radio-not surprisingly, since the Poles had few radios to begin with-and it had somehow been lost or destroyed in the fighting. So the reports he'd gotten had been piecemeal; and, to make it worse, were coming from the sort of men who were the first to flee a battlefield. Koniecpolski had learned long ago to discount much of what such men reported. Invariably, the enemy force had been immense in number, armed with impossibly powerful weapons, which had a rate of fire that would have depleted all of Europe's gunpowder stores within an hour.
Still, although Stearns had managed to take the city with surprising speed, he had to have suffered significant casualties in the doing. Taking cities was a costly business. His division had taken the brunt of the fighting at Zwenkau, as well. By now, the Third Division had to be in fairly bad shape. Not demoralized, probably. They'd won all of their battles, after all. But even soldiers with good morale can only take so much of a beating before exhaustion sets in; an exhaustion that was as much mental as physical.
Let those other bastards do the fighting for a while. Damn shirkers.
That was the attitude that would inevitably spread through the ranks. The one exception would be if their commander was the sort of rare individual who could instill a great sense of pride in them. What his nephew Jozef had told him the up-timers called esprit de corps, a French term which the Americans had stolen, as they so often did. When it came to language, they were a tribe of magpies.
In that event, the situation changed. Units which developed a sense of themselves as being special, an elite, the ones who could always be counted on in a crisis-such units would remain dangerous even after suffering heavy casualties.
But was Stearns such a commander? As inexperienced as he was?
Koniecpolski didn't think so. From what he could see-all of it, admittedly, at a distance and filtered through the reports of others-the American general had simply blundered his way to success. A courageous commander, yes; by now that was quite evident. But such a commander would wear out his own men, soon enough.
So. Those were the parameters of the grand hetman's calculations. He'd effectively destroyed the Hessians and he'd stymied the Swedes. One of the USE's three divisions had to be worn out by now. If he could shatter a second division, he'd have created the best possible conditions Poland and Lithuania could have hoped for. The war that followed would be the sort of protracted affair that a people defending their own lands would fight tenaciously, and the invaders would grow weary of soon enough. The great danger had always been that Gustav Adolf could successfully wage a rapid campaign.
He might well have been able to do so, had God not intervened and blessed Poland with such a tremendous storm.
But even this storm would not last for more than another day, possibly two. It was not the Deluge, after all. As slowly as his cavalry was moving, by the time Koniecpolski reached the USE First Division and could grapple with it in battle, it would have regrouped itself. Knyphausen was a competent general.
Koniecpolski had no intention of attacking a USE infantry division with hussars alone, unless it was spread out. Which it would no longer be-and to make things still worse, the weather would probably have cleared by then.
He had only two options left. Retreat back to Poznan-or try to find Gustav Adolf himself. His forces were more than a match for the Swedish units his opponent had at his immediate disposal. If he could fight a battle before the weather cleared…
One of his adjutants came into the command tent. "We just got a radio report. Scouts have spotted the Swede. The king himself, that is. He's marching south and his units have gotten spread out a little."
"How far away is he?" the grand hetman asked sharply.
"Ten miles, maybe twelve."
For the first time that day, Koniecpolski smiled. "Mobilize the men. Immediately. We're going to meet the bastard."
After the aide left, Koniecpolski made a mental note to himself. As soon as the war was over, he'd see to it that his nephew was legitimized. No one had done as much to aid the cause of Poland as Jozef Wojtowicz. In addition to his weather reports that had guided the grand hetman's tactics, he'd been the one who obtained the radios for Koniecpolski's army, that had proven so invaluable in the campaign.
Koniecpolski was unusual among hetman for the importance he attached to building an extensive espionage network. An army without such was half-blind, in his opinion. Once again, he'd been proven right.
Wismar, Germany, on the Baltic coast
"All good things come to an end," murmured Jozef Wojtowicz. He turned away from the window and quickly gave the room a final inspection to see if he was leaving anything incriminating behind. It was time to go.
As he'd always done before meeting the American radio operator in the tavern, he'd arrived in the area two hours early and gone to the hotel room he'd rented for the purpose of observing the tavern before he entered. The room was on the third floor and its windows opened onto the same street where the tavern was located, a short distance away.
He had no fear of arousing suspicion. Wismar now had a lot of transient traffic, which had inevitably produced the sort of hotel whose managers asked no questions-didn't even think of the questions, in fact-so long as the room was paid for. Since the Danish fleet had been repelled here two years earlier, Wismar had become a much larger town than it had been before. The air force base was no longer very active, but the navy had built a base of its own here. Wismar's harbor was deep enough to handle fairly large ships. The navy's main base on the Baltic remained at Luebeck, but they found Wismar convenient for many purposes. They'd improved the harbor, too, which had naturally drawn commercial enterprises to the port city as well.
Jozef's German was almost without accent in the most common dialect spoken along the Baltic, but it hardly mattered since the lingua franca in Wismar was the recently arisen Amideutsch. That bastard language, basically German with stripped down English conjugations and a lot of borrowed English terms, was so new that it had no standard pronunciation and probably wouldn't for many years. No one "spoke it like a native," so Jozef didn't stand out at all.
For that matter, even if he'd spoken Polish he probably would have gone unnoticed. Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century was still a place where nationalism was just beginning to develop. War was traditionally viewed as a matter between dynasties, not peoples. Trade went on between countries officially at war with hardly a pause or a stumble. Not more than two blocks from the tavern where Jozef got his weather reports from Sergeant Trevor Morton was a tavern that catered mostly to Polish fishermen. Two blocks from there, toward the west, was another tavern where Polish was also the only language normally spoken. That tavern was what the Americans called "high end," its clientele being mostly Polish grain dealers.