1635: The Eastern Front (2 page)

Holk's army was notorious for committing atrocities, and there was no reason to believe that deserters from that army would be any less vicious. A large part of Kresse's success in withstanding the pressure of the Saxon elector's forces was that he had the firm support of the farmers and townsmen in the Upper Vogtland. That support, in turn, was contingent upon Kresse's ability to protect them from the sort of freebooting raids that had become all too common in the course of the long war in the Germanies. Most soldiers were mercenaries and many of those mercenaries were barely more than bandits. Holk's men were a particularly brutal bunch, but they were by no means unique.

Harsh he might be, but Georg Kresse was neither careless nor reckless. He spent three days preparing the attack on the band of deserters. Part of the reason for the delay was because he didn't want anyone associating the attack with the whereabouts of the mine. If need be, Kresse's people could relocate easily enough. They'd done it several times over the past few years. But the abandoned mine was the best of all the bases they'd had, and Kresse didn't want to lose it.

Mostly, though, the delay was simply because Kresse was an experienced commander of irregular forces engaged in the sort of combat that the Americans apparently called "guerrilla warfare." As if a peculiar-sounding Spanish term was needed to depict what was blindingly obvious to any sensible German farmer or townsman! Kresse was always careful to keep his own casualties to a minimum, even when facing a group of undisciplined deserters who didn't number more than perhaps three dozen all told.

One of the methods he used to keep his casualties low was to maneuver his foes in such a way as to take advantage of the local militias. Almost every town and village of any size in the Germanies maintained a militia force. They were often quite effective, within their limits—and the limit was that they generally fought well on the defensive, especially behind fortifications of some sort, but were inept if they were forced to fight in the open field.

Kresse and his men were quite effective in the open field, on the other hand. Kresse used the fortified villages as so many anvils, and used his own troops as a hammer. Against a large force of regular soldiers, such tactics wouldn't succeed. But they worked very nicely against smaller units or simple marauders.

Kresse had the Holk deserters under constant observation throughout those three days. His own scouts provided him with some of that intelligence, but more was provided by the villagers in the area through which the enemy was moving. At least half a dozen times a day some young lad from one of the villages would come racing up—"racing," insofar as the term could be applied to a village plow horse—to report on the latest movements of the mercenary band. The youngsters were far more excited than they were scared. Partly that was because they were teenagers, but mostly it was because over the past few years Kresse and his men had demonstrated their capabilities many times.

Kresse liked to attack at first light. His own people knew the area quite well—certainly better than their enemies—and so moving into position under cover of darkness was not too difficult. Only the most disciplined military units kept proper vigilance through the night. Deserters like these would only maintain a small number of sentries, and those would most likely be careless.

Wilhelm Kuefer's task was harder, in terms of sheer effort, since Kresse had given him the assignment of bolstering the militia forces with one of their handful of cannons. The largest cannon in their possession was a demi-culverin with a four-inch bore, but the gun taken by Kuefer on this occasion was a smaller Spanish-built five-pounder saker. Even the saker weighed almost a ton, despite having a bore not much more than three inches. Hauling it through the mountains was no one's idea of a pleasant outing.

On the other hand, Wilhelm and his squad had left a day earlier and were taking a more circuitous route to the selected ambush spot. So, unlike Kresse and the rest of their forces, they'd been able to move in daylight. They hadn't had to worry about moving quietly, either, which was fortunate. The horses didn't like the saker one little bit, so it required a fair amount of cursing to keep them to the task.

Again, experience counted. Kresse's little army of irregulars had captured quite a few cannons over the years. But they'd learned long since to just destroy—or better yet, sell if they could find a neutral buyer—any guns larger than demi-culverins. Even the smallest full culverin weighed two tons. A cannon that large and heavy was just too difficult to maneuver through the rough terrain of the Upper Vogtland, without having the resources of a large professional army.

When he arrived, Wilhelm was pleased to see that the militiamen had already constructed an abattis to block the road. The militias from three of the local villages would wait in ambush while Kresse and his men drove the Holk deserters toward them. The road had steep slopes on either side here, as it passed through a crest in the mountains. It would be hard to scramble up those slopes while under fire.

The abattis was a sturdy thing. Not up to the standards of a professional army with a corps of engineers, of course, but it was far more than just a haphazard pile of branches and brambles. The war that had raged in central Europe since the Bohemian incident had been going on for seventeen years. Villagers such as these were experienced by now with jury-rigged fieldworks.

This was a well-chosen spot for an ambush in other respects, too. The ambush site was not right on the crest but forty yards below it, just after a bend in the road. Holk's deserters, as they came rushing over the crest, wouldn't spot the abattis until they were within fifteen yards of it. They'd be coming downhill, so the men in front would have a hard time preventing those behind them from piling up.

A pity, of course, that the abattis had to be half-disassembled in order to make room for the cannon. But the militiamen didn't grumble at the added work. As usual, the cannon was proving to be a tremendous morale-booster. Only the militias of the larger towns had such guns. Villages in the mountains rarely even saw the weapons. The fact that Kresse's men possessed several was an important factor in establishing their reputation as a serious military force.

On the positive side, the hand guns owned by the villagers were actually better than those of most soldiers, even regular forces. They were rifles, for the most part, not smoothbore muskets. Far more accurate, especially in the hands of men who'd been hunting all their lives.

Their great limitation on a battlefield was their terribly slow rate of fire compared to smoothbore muskets. That was the reason that professional armies generally used muskets. Wilhelm had heard that the Americans had introduced a method for rapidly rearming front-loading muskets. It involved something called a Minié ball. But he'd never seen one and had no real idea how it was done.

For an ambush like this, however—with Kresse and his men in hot pursuit of the enemy—the villagers didn't really need to worry much about reloading quickly.

* * *

Wilhelm Kuefer had participated in many fights under Kresse's command. He knew Georg would launch a savage assault on the deserter camp just as dawn was breaking. Then, as the panicked band of mercenaries tried to escape, he would harry them relentlessly—always keeping them to the road and not letting them veer off into the countryside.

The road would seem like the safest escape route, anyway. So, they'd follow it for two hours after the initial assault—well over six miles of a mountain "road" that was more in the way of a trail for pasturing cows. By the time they arrived at the ambush site where Kuefer and his cannon and militiamen were waiting, they'd be exhausted as well as terrified.

When the first deserters appeared around the bend, the militiamen began shooting them down. But, at Kuefer's prior orders, only a handful of them were firing, their best marksmen, and they were not firing volleys. Their fire was deadly because of its accuracy, but it wouldn't seem to the deserters that they were facing a sizeable opponent. Just some mountaineers trying to defend a local village; at worst, a small number of skirmishers from the same partisan group who'd attacked them.

Either way, especially as they were in a panic over the oncoming and relentless pursuit, Kuefer had figured the deserters would try to rush the barricade and simply drive over the presumed handful of men guarding it.

So it proved. At the last moment, one of the deserters spotted the mouth of cannon barrel hidden behind some branches, and tried to call out a warning.

But by then it was too late. "Fire!" Wilhelm shouted. The saker belched a double load of canister. At that point-blank range—the nearest deserter was less than ten feet away—the canister slaughtered every man in its path. It didn't spread very far, but Kuefer didn't care. The noise and the carnage would be enough to stun the now-completely-disorganized crowd of deserters. And as soon as he shouted the command to fire, all of the militiamen behind the abattis fired a volley. That took down another dozen men. By now, almost half of the band of deserters had been killed or wounded.

Such horrendous casualties would have routed even a disciplined unit of good soldiers. This rabble immediately tried to flee back up the road. Several of them dropped their weapons along the way.

Three of them tried to scramble up the slope to find safety in the forest beyond. But militiamen had been waiting in the woods also, and gunned them down as soon as they reached the crest.

Then, before the last of the Holk deserters had disappeared around the bend, Kuefer could hear more guns firing. Kresse had arrived, obviously.

It was almost comical, in its own way. Now the deserters came racing back. The cannon wasn't reloaded yet, but many of the militiamen had been able to reload their rifles. They started firing again. Not in a volley, but it hardly mattered.

By the time Kresse's men appeared, there weren't more than five deserters left alive and uninjured. You couldn't say "left standing," though, because all five of them were lying on the ground, trying to pretend they were dead.

Wilhelm shook his head. Fat lot of good that would do them.

If it had been left to Kuefer himself, he'd have simply had the men shot right then and there, along with any wounded deserters. But perhaps that was the reason Georg Kresse was in command, rather than him.

Unlike Wilhelm, Georg had taken into account the problem of disposing of the bodies. You simply couldn't leave that many corpses lying around, in an area with as many villages as the Upper Vogtland. Leaving aside the problem of the children—some would be terrified and upset at seeing the bodies; still worse, others would be thrilled and begin mutilating them—there was the ever-present danger of disease.

Digging a grave for that many bodies was a lot of work, though. Hard work. Kresse was a popular commander of irregular soldiers not only because he kept their casualties to a minimum but because he kept their labor to a minimum also.

So, he let the wounded live, and had them dragged off to the side of the road. He provided them with no medical care, though. If they died, they died—and, indeed, several did in the time it took the five survivors to dig a mass grave some thirty yards into the woods. Wilhelm knew that the only reason Georg was keeping the wounded alive at all was to give the toiling grave-diggers the hope that they might be allowed to live.

Digging the grave took almost the whole day. By the time all the bodies were hauled to it and dumped in, it was late afternoon. That work was done by the deserters also, of course. Kresse's men and the militiamen spent a pleasant day lounging in the shade and watching.

By sundown, it was all done, except for shoveling the dirt back over the corpses. Unfortunately, that last bit of work would have to be done by Kresse's people and the militiamen.

At Kresse's command, the five survivors were hauled to the edge of the grave. Two of them began shouting protests, but only one made any attempt to resist. He was immediately clubbed senseless and fell into the grave. The other four were shoved roughly to their knees.

"All right," said Kresse. "Shoot them."

Three of the four bodies fell into the grave on their own. The last one was sent in with a rough boot.

Kresse pointed to the one still-living Holk soldier, the one who'd been beaten unconscious. "Him too."

"Bury him alive!" shouted one of the militiamen. That was old Selig Hirsch, the local tanner. Kuefer didn't blame him. One of his sons had been murdered by soldiers a few years back, along with two of the son's children.

But Kresse shook his head. "We're not savages. Shoot him, I said."

Wilhelm had been expecting that order also, and did the shooting himself. Georg Kresse was as harsh a man as ever lived in these mountains. But only his enemies claimed he was cruel. None of his irregulars would have used that term, not would any of the farmers and townsmen in the Upper Vogtland. He was simply, and fortunately, what the times had produced.

By the time they returned to the mine, Kresse had come to a decision. The first person he spoke to was the woman with whom he shared a small cell in the mine constructed from old timbers. That was Anna Piesel, his betrothed.

"Anna, I want you to go to Magdeburg." He hooked a thumb at Kuefer. "I'll send Wilhelm and some other men as an escort until you're into Thuringia. After that, you should be safe enough. Take Friedrich and Hannelore, also. They could both use some rest in a tavern, and they're old enough to pass as your parents."

He smiled, seeing Piesel's little glare. She was a good woman, but a bit vain about her looks. "I said, ‘old enough.' I didn't claim there was any resemblance." Friedrich was downright ugly, and the best you could say for Hannelore's appearance was "dumpy."

"Why do you want me to go to Magdeburg? That'll take weeks, Georg!"

"At least six, I'm figuring. Quite possibly more. But we're not going to be doing much here during that time. It'd be idiotic for us to launch any major attacks, when the Swedes and the USE army are going to be spending those same weeks pounding the Saxon army into a pulp. I figure we may as well just sit and wait. The real struggle will come then, not now. What sort of Saxony will emerge, once the elector's driven out? You know the Swedes, Anna. Gustav Adolf will set up the same sort of military administration he's used in other conquered provinces. That is
not
what we want. We want a republic in Saxony, nothing less."