He’d chuckled then, quite humorlessly. “The way Murad seems to view the matter, ‘developing’ new weapons means training with them—and fighting with them as well. By now, according to my correspondents, the cebeci are eight or nine thousand strong and growing every day. The armored flame-throwing wagons which appeared before Vienna, for instance, were manned by cebeci. They include many zimmis in their ranks although the top officers are all Muslims.”
He’d finished with a summary, and a supposition. “All told, Sultan Murad brought somewhere between ninety and one hundred and ten thousand men on this campaign. I am not including in that number any of his naval units or the new air force the Turks have. He will leave no more than ten thousand of those men as a garrison in Vienna, mostly cebeci and akinci with perhaps a thousand janissaries to keep order over them. So, here at Linz, we will be facing approximately eighty thousand men—perhaps as many as ninety-thousand—at least a third of which will be sipahi cavalry.”
Then, rather grimly: “I think we can expect Murad to bleed his sipahis badly. If I’m right, he’s using this war to rebuild his army; from the inside out, you might say. He’ll break the janissaries and sipahis—not destroy them, certainly, but bend them to his will and eliminate their fractiousness—while he raises up new corps and units who have no traditional privileges or ties to the Turkish aristocracy and answer to him alone.”
Drugeth had then looked at Thorsten, and Pappenheim. “It will get brutal, I’m thinking. For you volley gunners and the Black Cuirassiers, especially.”
* * *
By now, with the battle experience he had, Thorsten Engler thought he could gauge the right time to sally his volley guns just by the sound of the oncoming cavalry.
On most fields. Not on this one. Thorsten had faced thousands of cavalry before, but not tens of thousands. The sound made by that many big animals running at once seemed more like a vibration than a sound. He found it quite confusing—not to mention disturbing, because the most critical task he had right now as the commander of the volley gun squadron was to gauge the right time to order a sally.
Frustrated, he ran out of the bunker and hurried onto the roof, in order to get a better look at the oncoming enemy.
What he saw startled him. The sound had seemed not loud enough to him, from his position in the bunker, since he’d been extrapolating from his experience at Ahrensbök and other battlefields. What he realized now was that the Ottoman sultan—or whoever had given the command for this mass charge of sipahis—had made a mistake. Possibly a very bad one.
There simply wasn’t enough room for thirty to forty thousand cavalrymen on this field. The space available for the Turkish horses wasn’t more than half a mile—if that—measuring from the line of trees covering the first hills on the north to the marshy terrain that extended out from the left bank of the Danube. Murad had set up his command center with its observation post too far to the rear. At that distance, even with a telescope, he hadn’t gauged the terrain properly. He was probably assuming his sipahis could advance across a front that was at least a mile and a half wide, when what they really had was less than a third of that room.
To make things worse for the sipahis, the terrain was only flat in places. It wasn’t hilly, no—from Murad’s distance, it had probably seemed quite level—but it was cut here and there by rises, dips and streams. From his position atop the bunker, Thorsten could see a dirt road whose embankment would provide his volley guns with superb cover—and his squadron could reach it before the enemy could.
“Forward!” he shouted. “All batteries forward!” Most of his men wouldn’t have heard him, or not clearly if they did, but Thorsten could rely on his officers to pass the command along.
He rushed back into the bunker, which he’d shared with Jeff Higgins. The commander of the Hangman regiment was waiting for him.
“What’s up?” Jeff asked.
By now, accustomed to up-timers and their sometimes peculiar idioms, Thorsten knew better than to glance at the roof to see what Higgins might be referring to. “Murad—whoever—screwed up, Jeff. They’re already getting bottlenecked. If your regiment backs us up, we don’t have to do a mere sortie. We can position the volley guns in a good defensive position and cut them up. If we have infantry defending us, we can stay there for a lot of volleys.”
He headed for the rear exit. His horse was being held for him just beyond. “I haven’t got time to talk! Check with Stearns if you need to!”
He was gone.
* * *
Jeff looked at his radio operator, a young fellow from Hesse-Kassel who had replaced Jimmy Andersen. “You heard, Reitz?” he asked.
The radio operator nodded.
“Call General Stearns. Tell him Colonel Engler thinks he can hold a position forward of the line of bunkers if he has infantry support—and I’m taking the Hangman out there to give it to him. Got that?”
He didn’t wait for an answer before charging out of the bunker himself and looking for his own horse.
* * *
When Mike got the message, he cursed for maybe three or four seconds before he ran out of his own bunker to climb on top of it.
Unfortunately, his bunker was farther to the rear than the one where Engler and Higgins had been stationed—and its roof was several feet lower. He couldn’t see anything; not enough, at least, to gauge whether the assessment of his subordinates was accurate or not.
There was no time to dilly-dally. Whatever he was going to do, had to be done now.
“Stick with those who got you here, Mike,” he muttered to himself. Then, raced back into the bunker.
He had three radio operators but he ignored them in order to address his two aides, Christopher Long and Ulbrecht Duerr.
“Order all regiments forward. Out of the bunkers and trenches.”
Long stared at him. Duerr reacted more quickly. “To where, sir?”
“I don’t think they’ll have any trouble figuring it out—but they can look for the division’s flags.”
He had two flag-bearers in the bunkers as well. The mounts for both of them were tethered outside next to his own.
“Follow me, lads.” And out he went.
The confluence of the Danube and the Traun
A few miles southeast of Linz
“What are they doing?” demanded General von Colloredo. The words were almost shrieked. He lowered the spyglass and turned to the emperor. “Have they gone mad?”
Gustav Adolf kept his binoculars to his eyes. Partly to see what was unfolding; mostly, because he had no good answer to the question.
Steyregg, on the north bank of the Danube across from Linz
“What are they doing?”
Pappenheim ignored the question asked by one of his officers, for a moment, while he studied the development through his own spyglass. He had a good view of the field east of the town, because his vantage point was in the belfry of the town’s church. He had one boot planted on the bell, which he’d cut down to give himself a better view.
It didn’t take him more than a few seconds to figure out the answer.
He handed the spyglass to one of his aides. “What are they doing?” he said. His face was creased with a savage grin and his famous crossed-swords birthmark stood out more prominently than usual.
“What are they doing?” he repeated. “They’re fighting, that’s what they’re doing. Order the Black Cuirassiers to mount up.”
Vienna, former capital of Austria-Hungary, now occupied by the Ottoman Empire
When she was within a quarter mile—just a quarter of a mile!—of the detached wing of the Hofburg which held the hidden cellars, Minnie finally had to accept the fact that she’d have to wait until nightfall before she could approach any closer. There were simply too many sentries stationed in the vicinity of the palace. Already, she’d been accosted twice by Ottoman patrols, demanding to know what she was about. Her pretense of not speaking any of their languages—which was mostly true, after all—co
mbined with her appearance and smell, had been enough to avoid any repercussions. But if she tried to get any nearer, that would stop being true.
Fortunately, there were plenty of abandoned buildings nearby. Most of the Austrian population had fled before the Ottomans took Vienna, and the garrison Murad had left behind when he marched on Linz was not big enough to fill the city. Not too far away, she found a deserted bakery that would serve to hide her until the sun went down.
There wasn’t any danger that Turkish soldiers might loot the place, either, because it was obvious that they had already done so. After moving her cart out of sight of anyone who might casually look in from the street, Minnie went upstairs to see if there was a bed she could use.
Her good fortune held. There was one. Not in very good shape, and after she’d spent a few hours on it the bed would stink as well as be disheveled. But at the moment all she wanted was some rest.
Hauling the cart halfway across the city and back had been arduous, and there was also the accumulated effect of the tension she’d been under. Despite her anxiety, she was asleep in minutes.
Steyregg, on the north bank of the Danube across from Linz
The first three volleys fired by the squadron were devastating. The oncoming sipahis, already tangled up by their own numbers and the terrain, were being mowed down. What was perhaps even worse was that their horses were being mowed down as well—and in even greater numbers, because they were a much bigger target.
So, the corpses of big animals added still further to the jumble. What was to have been, in theory, a charge of tens of thousands of cavalrymen, was, willy-nilly, degenerating into an infantry battle—and one where all the advantages were on the side of the Third Division.
By the time contact was made between the first ranks of the sipahis and the volley gun squadron, Thorsten had most of his units in good position. They were partially shielded across most of the line by the embankment formed where the road had been dug into the terrain.
The height of the embankment varied from a few inches to almost three feet. What was perhaps more important was that the volley guns were positioned on the road rather than on a field, as was normally the case. A dirt road in the Upper Austrian countryside wasn’t much, but it made a more stable foundation for light artillery and one that was much easier to maneuver the guns upon.
After four volleys, a number of sipahis abandoned their horses and charged forward on foot. They were encumbered by heavier armor than janissaries wore and were mostly armed with lances and sabers rather than guns. But there were enough of them to overrun the volley gunners, and their ferocity had been aroused by the casualties their front ranks had suffered.
The volley guns were deadly, but they had one great vulnerability. Once an enemy got close enough, they stopped being useful, and the soldiers who manned them were reduced to being light infantry—emphasis on “light”—and poorly trained in that function to boot.
But by then the Hangman regiment had arrived and taken up positions to guard the volley guns. Against them, armed with their SRGs and grenades, the sipahis had no real chance.
Still, for a while they put up a fierce fight, and groups of them broke through in several places.
Thorsten Engler was close to one of those breaches and rode his horse forward to rally the men.
Which he did quite well, everyone present agreed afterward. But a man on horseback waving a sword around and not paying much attention to what was happening right next to him is at a severe disadvantage when he’s attacked by a sipahi wielding a lance whose sole interest and concentration is on killing him.
Thorsten saw the sipahi at the last moment. Frantically, he swung his sword down just in time to deflect the lance thrust away from his ribs—
—and into the flank of his horse. The spear-tip penetrated at least six inches, maybe more. Squealing with fear and pain, the horse rose up and threw Thorsten out of the saddle.
He landed on top of an overturned volley gun. There was a spike of agony running up his spine and he heard, more than he felt, his leg break. Then his head struck something hard and his vision got blurry.
The last thing he saw, vaguely, was the huge shape of his horse as it lost its footing and came down upon him.
The confluence of the Danube and the Traun
A few miles southeast of Linz
“What are they doing?” demanded General von Colloredo. “What are they doing?”
Gustav Adolf kept his binoculars to his eyes. Partly to keep from striking the hysterical wretch with them; mostly, because he was fascinated by what he was seeing.
Steyregg, on the north bank of the Danube across from Linz
By the time Mike Stearns and most of the regiments started arriving at the dirt road which had become the front line of the battle, the volley gunners were falling back in disarray—some of them retrieving their guns, many leaving them behind—and the steadiness of the Hangman regiment was getting frayed. Say what you might about the semi-feudal pigheadedness of the Ottoman Empire’s sipahis, they were brave men and not ones to flinch from savage fighting.
But they’d suffered terrible casualties by now, and once the rest of the Third Division started pouring fire into them, they began to fall back.
At which point—he’d timed it perfectly—Pappenheim’s Black Cuirassiers struck them like a sledgehammer. The cuirassiers began by firing their heavy wheel-lock pistols; then, as the sipahi retreat turned into a rout, went after them with their sabers. At least another thousand sipahis fell, dead or wounded, before Pappenheim pulled them back.
As stubborn as he was himself, Pappenheim had learned some lessons over the years. The imperialist defeat at Breitenfeld had been partly due to the recklessness with which he’d pushed his cavalry charges. Here, facing a much larger enemy army than the Swedes had brought to Breitenfeld, Pappenheim did not make the mistake of over-extending himself.
The Turks had been bloodied today; bloodied badly. But the main body of Murad’s army was still in position—and the fearsome janissaries hadn’t even fought at all.
The confluence of the Danube and the Traun
A few miles southeast of Linz
Gustav Adolf tucked away his binoculars and turned to Colloredo. “The Third Division is my rock, General. Do not forget it.”
He almost smiled when he said it, for all that he found Colloredo annoying. There was an irony here. Gustav Adolf didn’t doubt for a moment that the historians would credit him with today’s victory, even though he’d had very little to do with it beyond standing on this spit of land and looking properly august.
Well, no, he’d done a bit more than that. Gustav Adolf had been the one who’d made the judgment that Michael Stearns would make a decent general, hadn’t he? And the heart of that judgment was that Stearns would be able to make the same judgments himself—which he so clearly had, as today proved once again.
Vienna, former capital of Austria-Hungary, now occupied by the Ottoman Empire
When she finally reached the entrance to the detached wing of the palace, moving carefully in the darkness so as not to make any noise, the door swung open. Leopold emerged and took the handles of the cart from her; then, gently, nudged her inside. He followed with the cart.
Judy was inside, as was Cecilia Renata.
“What’s he doing here?” Minnie hissed. “I told you to keep him away from me until I was clean.”
“He insisted,” said Cecilia Renata. “You know how stubborn my little brother can be.”
By then, Leopold had the cart inside and closed the outer door. He took Minnie by the arm. “Come,” he said. “There’s a bath ready for you in the cellars.”
“The radio—”
“We’ll take care of it,” said Judy. “You just take care of yourself.”
* * *
Once they were in the cellars, Leopold helped Minnie get out of her clothes and into the bath. The water was tepid and the wine mixed into it was a little dizzying—or maybe that was j
ust her own light-headedness. Now that it was over, she was starting to shake.
Leopold took her filthy garments into the back chamber and disposed of them in the oubliette. When he returned, he brought some clean cloths with which he began cleaning her.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said.
“Be quiet.”
“I don’t want you to see me like this. Or smell me.”
“It doesn’t matter. Be still.”
It took a while. Twice, she had to get out of the tub while Leopold and Judy poured the vile contexts into the oubliette and refilled it with fresh water and wine. But eventually, she was clean again—or at least, as clean as anyone could hope to be when they had to hide out for weeks in hidden cellars.
After drying off, she and Leopold huddled together under their bedding in the chamber they now shared. Minnie began crying. She didn’t even know why.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” he said, “for all the time you were gone. I’ll just remain a bishop. That way I can’t get married to anyone and you and I can stay together.”
She stopped snuffling, sat up, and looked down at him. “That’s ridiculous. They’ll never let you.”
“Why not? My brother has heirs, and they’re in good health. My oldest sister is carrying on the family tradition in the Netherlands. If need be, Cecilia Renata’s still available for a diplomatic marriage, too. I’m the youngest. There’s no reason I can’t stay a bishop.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she repeated.
He smiled. “Let’s not worry about it right now. We’re still hiding out from the Turks, remember?”
“You said they weren’t really Turks. Make up your mind. And it’s still a ridiculous idea.”
“You don’t like the idea?”
“I didn’t say that. I just said it was ridiculous.”
“So is going out alone into an occupied city and bringing back a radio in a cart full of shit. But you did it, didn’t you?”
She didn’t have a ready answer for that.