A Boy and His Tank (28 page)

The Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, lasted for another thousand years, except for falling temporarily in the thirteenth century to the French during the Fourth Crusade (where it was felt to be more profitable to sack a rich Christian city rather than to bother with some poor heathen hovels in the Mideastern desert). Not until the fifteenth century, when the Islamic Turks took Constantinople permanently, did the long saga of Rome come to an end.

So about the time that the Roman Pope was making converts in the north of Yugoslavia, the Metropolitan of Constantinople was doing equally good works in the West, among the Serbians.

The big problem was that in the intervening centuries since the fall of the City of Rome, the two largest branches of Christianity had grown apart in ceremony, in language, and in doctrine. Worse, they disagreed as to who was boss, with both the Pope and the Metropolitan firmly convinced that
he
was the rightful head of the one true Church. Neither side was about to buckle under to some foreign upstart.

The two bands of missionaries met in an area that would later be called Bosnia-Hercegovina, and they immediately started fighting. Like the engineer who became so involved with fighting alligators that he forgot that his mission was to drain the swamp, these pious clerics spent so much of their effort bad-mouthing the opposition that their potential converts became disgusted with both groups of them.

"A pox on both their houses!" was the general public feeling.

When someone found out that there was yet a third flavor of Christianity available, the Bogomils, the Bosnians quickly joined. As it turned out, this particular cult proved to be short-lived, but then these people were never very good at picking winners.

Not that the Bosnians really had any desire to become good Christians, mind you, but simply that it had become a political necessity. A pagan at the time could be safe only when he was surrounded by other pagans. Surrounded by followers of the
Prince of Peace
, they could easily be murdered by Christians who wanted to a good deed, or by some warrior out doing penance for his sins.

So things went calmly for another few centuries. Oh, the Bulgarians invaded and conquered for a while, as did other peoples riding in off the sea of grass, and there were always little fights going on over one thing or another, but for the bulk of the population, living in small, inaccessible mountain valleys, things were often pleasantly peaceful.

Then the Balkans were rather brutally invaded and conquered by the Ottoman Turks. But once having conquered, it was not the policy of the Turks to be needlessly brutal or to directly force anyone into joining Islam, since what they wanted mostly was to have a steady flow of booty coming in the form of taxes. To this end, they usually set up a convenient local puppet as king, provided him with Islamic advisers, and within certain limits actually allowed him a small amount of freedom, provided the taxes were delivered on time.

Under the Turks, a Moslem lived under Islamic law, a Christian under Christian law, and a Jew under Jewish law. Each group had its own set of courts and judges, and were expected to handle things in such manner that the Ottoman Empire wasn't disturbed.

When a person of one religion disagreed with someone of another, there were special courts to handle it, but these courts inevitably had an Islamic judge and were often conducted in Arabic. Everyone was equal, but some were more equal than others.

Soon, all of the tax collectors were Islamic, as were most of the policemen and other officials. Taxes were low to nonexistent for a well-connected Moslem.

A follower of Islam had many civil rights that were denied to Christians. For example, it was absolutely forbidden to kidnap a Moslem child and sell him or her into slavery, whereas doing so to a Christian child was a misdemeanor, if the courts and police bothered with it at all.

The price of ordinary slave girls in Constantinople dropped to that of ordinary horses—on a kilo for kilo basis. That is to say, a horse was worth about six slave girls, since horses were harder to steal.
Superlative
horses and slaves always brought premium prices, of course, and could be worth hundreds of times what an ordinary one would fetch, but an old or crippled one wasn't worth feeding.

Suffice it to say that there were a lot of incentives for changing religions.

A Christian could always convert to Islam, and among the Bosnians, who had rarely been fervent believers in Christ in the first place, conversion soon became commonplace. Soon, they were working their way up in the civil service, as tax collectors, judges, and other annoying officials.

Those peoples who had voluntarily become Christians in the first place, the Croatians and the Serbians, among others, were more devout in the faith of their fathers' religion and far less likely to convert to Islam. But seeing another, who is racially and linguistically identical to yourself, lording it over you solely because he has renounced the old, true religion breeds a special sort of hate.

While the Serbs maintained their Greek Orthodoxy, they were soon willing to serve loyally in the army. This estranged them from the Croatians, since the army was occasionally used against the Croats themselves when they were in revolt.

The South Slavs stayed under the thumb of the Turks for many centuries, and mutual hate grew.

When the Turks were finally driven out, the Yugoslavs were soon inducted into the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and their condition was somewhat better than before. But it still wasn't freedom, and a bomb thrown by a South Slav in Bosnia proved to be the spark that touched off the first World War.

This bloody affair was followed by a short period of internal disorder, and after that the Russian Communists exercised overt control, through World War II (where the Croatians fought on the side of the Germans, until the Serbs eventually threw the Nazis out). They stayed under the Communist thumb until the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics' state withered away (although not quite in the manner that Karl Marx had predicted).

And after another short, bloody interval, the Europeans under NATO invaded Yugoslavia, for their own good, of course.

Time and time again, throughout history, with never a chance to decently recover, they were invaded, plundered, and conquered. And every time, one or more of their subgroups went to the side of the conquerors for status, for safety, and for profit.

And with equal regularity, every time over the ages they had a bit of freedom, they used it to fight, not so much their former oppressors, but rather those of their own people who had supported their last invader.

It ended for a while with the War of Serbian Reunification, which pretty much obliterated the Islamic portion of their population, and drastically decimated the others. Cleansing, they called it.

Perhaps, outsiders thought, perhaps they had finally learned. But all that they had learned was that they no longer needed an outside conqueror. Over the centuries, they had learned to do it all for themselves.

Not a good ending, but it seemed to be an ending, nonetheless.

Or everyone hoped the sad tale would end there, but trouble was starting to bubble up yet again when the Wealthy Nations Group gave them their very own planet, far, far away.

Which was where we poor Kashubians came into the bloody picture.

All told, it was a depressing history, and one that didn't seem to have a resolution, except perhaps for the total obliteration of everyone concerned.

With regards to our stay at Oxbridge, about the only thing that happened that was really weird started one Saturday in our third year.

I was in a loincloth and a
very
deep suntan, playing the Zulu King Cetshwayo at the Battle of Isandhlwana. Neto was playing Chelmsford, my British opponent, and the other staff members were acting as officers on one side or the another.

It was beginning to look like the Zulus would win this time when suddenly we were fighting in a totally different battle!

We were blasting off at twenty gees from the surface of a planet in modern tanks equipped with rocket thrusters of the sort that had a Hassan-Smith transporter connecting back to a fuel supply dump on the planet, which was New Yugoslavia, from the look of it.

Agnieshka was my tank again instead of being my servant, I only had command of five subordinates, a small squad, and the battle wasn't over in a day or so the way they usually were. The damned thing went on for three weeks straight!

Agnieshka couldn't tell me a thing about why the study program had been so disrupted, the professor couldn't be reached, and I was operating under the command of an uncommunicative Combat Control Computer that I hadn't met before.

The battle went on and on until we eventually got scattered out over so much sky that I had trouble communicating with my own people. Not only were there problems like radio static and poor signal-to-noise ratios on our lasers, but the time lag caused by the speed of light often got to be over two and a half hours! What's more, they kept it realistic to the point that we couldn't even meet together in Dream World. I got to missing Kasia
real bad
, although not quite to the point of making love with Agnieshka.

The good guys finally won, but in doing so we had exhausted the fuel stores in the supply dumps, and such fuel that was being manufactured had to go to bringing in the rest of the army from the far reaches of the local solar system.

For my squad, the final act of the battle involved a dead stick landing from orbit that burned the rockets and most of our weapons right off us. We splashed down without parachutes into a shallow ocean and had to crawl our way underwater to the shore.

Hairy!

Eventually, the exercise was over, with our squad losing only Neto.

He had had the bad luck to ram an enemy tank early in the battle. I mean
really
ram it. He was in an equatorial orbit around a moon of the gas giant Woden while his unfortunate opponent was in a polar one. Not even a Mark XIX Main Battle Tank could withstand
that
kind of a collision!

When we were back in class again, we found somebody new sitting behind Neto's desk. The professor sadly announced that he had been forced to wash Neto out for psychological reasons.

We were all at first shocked and then furious about this!

Neto was as stable as a man could be and his grades were the best in the class, next to mine. He was a good friend and a member of the team, and now we weren't even permitted to wish him good-bye!

But the professor was adamant and wouldn't budge a centimeter. The Combat Control Computer was in complete charge until our training was completed, Neto was out, and that was that. I was so mad that I stormed out of class and the rest followed me, except for the new kid.

It wasn't until the next day that somebody asked about the purpose of the long training battle.

"It was simply that you students were getting in a rut. You were getting so that you were all worrying more about next Sunday's entertainment than about the task at hand. You are studying the Art of War, and warfare happens when it does, not when you feel like fitting it into your precious schedules!"

He said this even when
he
was the one who set up the schedule in the first place!

Well, maybe he was right about us getting a little lax, but dropping Neto was absolutely stupid, and everybody knew it.

The new guy, a Croatian with the improbable name of Lloyd Tomlinson, had started out in artillery. He wasn't a bad sort, but he was three years behind the rest of us, and while we were in school he never did catch up, academically or socially.

I mean, in class, it seemed to him that he was studying with the rest of us, as we were during the earlier stage of our course. Talking to him about it during our weekends, when we met with each other in battle or socially, we decided that he was mostly seeing recordings of us, from Neto's viewpoint. Mostly, but not exactly. A few times, what he remembered simply never happened, as far as the rest of us were concerned. But the slip-ups were few, and somehow the computer made it all work.

Still and all, our team was never quite the same again.

During all this time, the Serbs never caught on to what was happening to their prized division. Occasionally, patrols came around, looked things over, and then went away. They always heard exactly what they wanted to hear, because that's what we told them.

Eventually, Kasia and I graduated
cum laude
, the only ones in the group to do so.

Along with our diplomas, we also received commissions in the forces of New Croatia. I made general and the others, except for Lloyd, who had yet to graduate, were made colonels.

I asked the professor how we could be commissioned without the knowledge of the New Croatian government.

"My boy, that could be a bit of a problem, I admit. On the one hand, it is traditional to commission you as I have done, if you were not already officers in your country's military. The government should simply confirm your commissions once they are properly informed of the circumstances."

"And if they don't?"

"In that unlikely circumstance, I would imagine that you would be the
de facto
owner and leader of a very powerful independent mercenary company. I don't think that the government would want that to happen. Acknowledging your commissions and paying you your salaries would be so much cheaper than any of the possible alternatives that I simply can't imagine them not doing it."

"I don't think that I'd want to be a mercenary."

"Are you really sure of that? Among other things, since you've obtained your forces at no cost other than a bit of time, the profit potential is enormous. Also, it could be a great deal of fun."

"Your definition of fun must be much different from mine, professor. But as you say, the whole situation would be most improbable."

After graduation, Kasia and I took a month's vacation still in our coffins but in real time. The group had decided that the troops could use another month's training, and Lloyd needed to finish his course. Neither Kasia nor I wanted to wait another four years before settling the Serbians' hash, and getting on with our plans for a ranch, a marriage, and a family.