Franz reached down and picked up his violin. He was conscious of everyone looking at him as he stepped forward, which gave him a faint chill . . . playing in public was still a bit of a challenge for him. Raising his bow, he began the introduction to the final song. At the appropriate place the others joined in, and Marla began to sing.
The water is wide, I cannot cross o'er.
And neither have I the wings to fly.
Build me a boat that can carry two,
And both shall row, my true love and I.
A ship there is and she sails the seas.
She's laden deep as deep can be;
But not so deep as the love I'm in,
And I know not if I sink or swim.
The joy of playing with Marla, of making music with his wife, filled Franz. He abandoned himself to the music while she sang, seeking to meld his violin with her golden voice.
I leaned my back against a young oak,
Thinking he were a trusty tree;
But first he bended and then he broke;
Thus did my love prove false to me.
O love is handsome and love is fine,
Bright as a jewel when first it's new;
But love grows old and waxes cold
And fades away like the morning dew.
All the others dropped out. Franz and Marla did the last line together.
And fades away like the morning dew.
They stood together for a moment, then relaxed their posture as the patrons began applauding. They joined hands and—one mind, one heart—bowed in acknowledgment.
* * *
To be continued
Butterflies in the Kremlin,
Part Six: The Polish Incident or The Wet Firecracker War
Written by Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett
Third Lieutenant Boris Timrovich, Tim to his friends, was savoring the victory. Right up to the time he was called into the commandant's office. He had beaten Third Lieutenant Igor Milosevic in the Polish invasion scenario two weeks ago. And cleaned up on the deal. The betting had been five to one against him. Tim had been playing the Polish and he had won by ignoring Smolensk. After all, Poland already held Smolensk; They had held it since the Time of Troubles. And Poland, just like Russia, only had to worry about Smolensk if they didn't have it. Now he was trying to figure out what he had done wrong.
"The commandant will see you now, Lieutenant."
Tim put his shoulders back and tried not to gulp. He entered the commandant's office not looking left or right, stood at attention and saluted as smartly as he was able. The commandant returned the salute with a casual half wave. Then he asked him the last question he ever expected to hear. "So, Third Lieutenant Timrovich, tell me how you managed to defeat the entire Russian Army and take Moscow, in just ten weeks?"
"Sir?"
"Come now, Timrovich. It's all over the Kremlin. I understand the odds were five to one in favor of that baker's son, Igor Milosevic?"
"Sir? Are you talking about the Polish invasion scenario?" Tim was out of his depth. It wasn't one of the official war games.
"Yes, of course, Timrovich." The commandant pointed to a map on the left wall. The map showed part of Russia and part of Poland. "Show me how you did it."
So Tim did. "Russia is not Moscow; Russia is the Volga." He walked over to the map pointed where he placed his troops and how he moved them using the river Volga as the supply line. "In the Time of Troubles, Poland took Moscow but they couldn't keep it. But the Volga controls transport. . ." Just as Tim was getting into his description of what he'd done, he heard another voice.
"Would it interest you to know, Lieutenant Timrovich, that Polish troops took Rzhev three days ago? From the somewhat vague first reports we have, there are around ten thousand troops there now, a mixture of Slacha, mercenaries and Cossacks."
"What?" Tim spun and faced the new voice and recognized General Mikhail Borisovich Shein. Then, in a state of shock, he blurted out the first thing that come to mind. "But that's the wrong place."
"I'm relieved to hear it," General Shein said wryly.
Tim stood mute.
"Speak up, Timrovich," the commandant said. "Why do you think Rzhev is the wrong place?"
"It's too far up river, sir. The Volga is navigable at Rzhev but only barely. Tver would be a better choice, even if it is farther. You'd want to take Rzhev, too. Later. After the first strike. But if you take Rzhev first, you warn Tver and give them time to fort up and block any river traffic from going past."
General Shein looked at the commandant. "Very well. He'll do."
* * *
After that things moved quickly. Third Lieutenant Boris Timrovich found himself suddenly assigned as aide de camp to General Artemi Vasilievich Izmailov, "Third Lieutenant Boris Timrovich reporting as ordered."
"Who are you?"
"Sir, I'm to be your Cadet aide de camp."
"I asked for Milosevic! The baker's boy." General Izmailov was clearly not pleased.
"Igor?"
"You know him?"
"Yes, sir. We're friends at the Кадетский Корпус." Which was the semiofficial name of the still semiofficial officer training school that was growing in the Kremlin.
General Izmailov paused and give Tim's uniform a careful once over. "Let me guess. Your father is a Boyar or Duma man?"
Suddenly it clicked for Tim. "A great uncle, sir." The pride that Tim's voice usually had in that announcement was notably missing. The general had asked for the best student in the Cadet Corps, Igor Milosevic. Instead he had gotten . . . well not the highest in family rank. There were a lot of high family kids among the cadets. It was quite the fashion these days. No, what the general had received was a cadet of acceptable social rank and lesser skill. Even if Tim had beaten Igor once.
General Izmailov was not usually placed in independent command. For the same reason . . . he didn't have enough social, family rank. In fact, he was officially second in command of the army they were raising right now, placed temporarily in command of the advance column.
General Izmailov shrugged and got down to business. "I'll be leading a reconnaissance in force and—if necessary—a delaying action while the reserves are called up. The reconnaissance force is made up in part from Musketeers Prince Cherkasski has loaned us from the Moscow Garrison." Prince Ivan Borisovich Cherkasski was the chief of the Strel'etsky prikaz, Musketeer Bureau. "They're under Colonel Usinov. We have small detachments from the Gun Shop and from the Dacha. And two regiments of cavalry under the command of Colonel Khilkov." General Izmailov gave Tim a look. "Usinov has more experience but Khilkov's family is of higher rank. We have peasant levies for labor battalions. About four thousand of them. We have four brand new cannons from the Gun Shop and the Musketeers we're getting have been equipped with the new AK3s. From the Dacha we're getting the Testbed, the flying machine. I am told it is to be used only for reconnaissance. And we're getting thirty of the scrapers. There won't be time to use them much on the march, but they should help a lot with fortifications when we find our spot."
Tim nodded his understanding. The assumption was that they would meet the advancing Polish forces somewhere between Rzhev and Moscow. Meanwhile Tim was assigned fourteen different jobs, some of them in direct conflict with the others. Or at least that's how it seemed. He was to coordinate with the labor battalions, the Musketeers, the Dacha contingent as well as the Gun Shop contingent, and make sure that all the various units were in the right marching order. Except that the people in charge hadn't actually decided the marching order yet. So he was given one order and then fifteen minutes later given a different order by someone else.
By noon Tim was considering the value of getting rid of the beards, as he'd read Peter the Great had done. But in his own mind, "the beards" were the idiots who kept harping on their noble rank, regardless of their true ability at war. At this rate we'll meet the Poles thirty miles out of Moscow.
***
On the first day Nikita—c
all me Nick—Ivanovich's dirigible contingent ended up at the back of the line of march, which meant that by the time they reached the campsite it was already getting dark. Tim watched as Testbed lifted into the night sky and disappeared. All Tim could see was the rope from the wagon, climbing into a bit of deeper blackness which hid the stars.
"Of course, it could be that there simply wasn't that much to see," Nick reported a half hour later. Tim could see that General Izmailov was less than pleased. But Nick didn't seem to be worried about it. Which Tim thought was very brave or very stupid. Then he looked over at the Testbed, which the crew was still tying down for the night. He remembered the Nikita Ivanovich had been the first person to climb into it and had flown it without ropes to keep the wind from carrying it away. Tim still wasn't sure whether it was brave or stupid, but the 'very' gained a whole new level of magnitude.
"Timrovich! The Testbed will be placed near the front in tomorrow's order of march," General Izmailov gritted. Tim knew that the general had seen the demonstration at the Dacha and had been planning to use the dirigible and pleased to get it. But how were they supposed to know that it didn't work at night? Granted it was pretty obvious when you thought about it. Dark is no time to observe things.
* * *
"I don't believe this," Tim muttered. "We'll never get there at this rate." The march had put them about twelve miles west of Moscow. Worse, they were trying to move fast and doing it over good roads. The scrapers had improved the roads around Moscow quite a bit.
His friend and fellow student at the Cadet Corps, Pavel, nodded in agreement. "Bad enough the delays because of the confusion. But Colonel Khilkov and the fit he threw when we were setting out and he discovered that we were ahead of him in the line of march was just plain stupid."
Tim figured the flare up was at least half Usinov's fault with all the gloating he was doing. But he didn't say so. Pavel was Colonel Usinov's cadet aide de camp, and thought quite highly of him. "Just wait till he hears that General Izmailov is going to put the Testbed near the front of the line tomorrow." Tim threw his arms up and pretended to be having a fit. "Never let it be said that mere military necessity should trump social position in the Russian army. 'My cousin is of higher rank than your uncle, so of course my company must be ahead of yours in the order of march.'" Tim spat on the ground. "Idiots. We're all idiots. If we go on like this we'll be defending Moscow from another Polish invasion and we'll be doing it right here. You can bet that the Poles aren't sitting on their asses in Rzhev arguing about who should be first in the line of march."
* * *
Pavel could have bet that, but he would have lost. Because sitting on his ass arguing was precisely what Janusz Radziwiłł, the commander of the Polish forces, was doing. Not about the order of march, but what they should do now. Janusz, in his early twenties. was already the Court Chamberlain of Lithuania. That was a high post in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth which he had gotten because of the influence of his cousin Albrycht Stanisław Radziwiłł, Grand Chancellor of Lithuania. Janusz was sitting with his two main subordinates discussing the lack of the arms depot that they had been expecting. It was a rerun of several discussions they had since they had gotten to Rzhev and discovered that the Russian invasion Janusz' spy had informed him of was not nearly so near as they had expected.
"Ivan Repninov has confirmed everything?" Janusz insisted again.
Mikhail Millerov, commander of his Cossacks snorted. "You can't depend on anything that rat faced little bureau man says. I've questioned many men and his sort is the hardest to get the truth out of. Not because he's a strong man, but because he's weak. He'll tell you anything you want to hear and change his story five times in as many minutes."
"Yet what he said makes sense and fits with what the agent reported," Eliasz Stravinsky, the commander of the western mercenaries disagreed. "Ivan Petrovich Sheremetev is as crooked as a dog's hind leg."
"Yes!" Janusz exclaimed. "That by itself explains the situation to anyone familiar with Russia. Ivan Petrovich commits graft as other people breathe, with very little thought and continuously. And as the nephew of Prince Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev, the third power behind Cherkasski and the patriarch.
"Fourth, if you count the czar." Mikhail Millerov corrected.
"I don't," Janusz insisted "Mikhail Romanov is his father's puppet and everyone knows it. In any case, Ivan Petrovich has ample opportunity for that corruption. He got the contract for the depot and pocketed the money."
Millerov nodded a little doubtfully, and Janusz continued. "My agent in the Muscovite Treasury Bureau spent considerable time putting together the pieces. Fedor Ivanovich Sheremetev was clearly in charge of making the arrangements. And naturally shifted contracts to where they would do his family the most good. Corrupt, every last one of them." It didn't occur to Janusz to wonder what someone on the outside might think of the Polish nobility.
"Possibly . . . or possibly your man misinterpreted a scam of the Sheremetev family and the only place the depots were ever intended to be was in the pockets of the Sheremetevs." Millerov shrugged. "At this point we'll likely never know for sure and it doesn't matter anyway, because we are sitting here in Muscovite territory. They aren't going to apologize. They're going to deny and the depot isn't here. They'll demand reparations. Granted, the Truce of Deulino expired in July of 1633. His Majesty has refused to give up his claim on the Russian throne and Russia hasn't given up its claim to Czernihów or Smolensk. So legally Poland is at war with Muscovy, but up to now it's been a pretty phony war. Little fighting and even less talking. The war is going to get a lot more real now, one way or the other. So it would be best to win it. Yes?"
Eliasz Stravinsky nodded. "If we go back now, we'll look like idiots. Not real good for the career, that."
Janusz Radziwiłł nodded almost against his will. He was still convinced that the reports had been accurate. The Muscovites were planning to take Smolensk and much of Lithuania, just like they had tried in that other history. But probably—as had happened before—corruption in their ranks had interfered. Still, the Cossack was right. It didn't really matter now.
* * *
"Men coming in," the scout said as he rode up to the general.
"That'll be the mercenaries from Rzhev," General Izmailov said, then looked at Tim. "Take word the column is to halt. Officers Call at the front."
"Halt the column. Officers Call, sir, at the leading unit," Tim told the commander of each unit as he rode down the line.
It was the third day of marching toward Rzhev. And this halt would probably cost them two miles. When he got back to the front, Tim saw that General Izmailov was speaking to the sergeant leading the mercenaries who had sent the riders to inform Moscow of the invasion.
"So tell me, Sergeant," General Izmailov was asking, "why did you abandon your post?"
"What post, General? We were ordered to Rzhev to guard a supply depot. When we got there, there was no supply depot. No quarters and no pay. My people were living in tents outside Rzhev. You can't guard what isn't there, sir, and we were never assigned to guard Rzhev." The sergeant pulled a set of orders out of his pack and handed them to General Izmailov.
General Izmailov looked over the orders and snorted. Then he handed them to Tim and went on to the next question. "Did you keep in contact with the invading force?"
The burly sergeant shook his head. "No. We didn't see any more of them and I don't have the men to spare."
"Are the invaders coming this way? Heading to Tver? Did they even continue on past Rzhev, or did they stop there?"
"I don't know, sir," Sergeant Hampstead admitted.
Tim read over the orders and information in the packet, and stopped . Ivan Petrovich Sheremetev. Well, that explained why the foreign mercenaries had had been sent off to guard a nonexistent supply depot. It was almost funny. Sheremetev's greed had, for once, worked to Russia's benefit. If the mercenaries hadn't been in Rzhev the Poles might have bypassed the place altogether and headed
straight for Tver. With no warning to the Kremlin until they had already taken Tver.
General Izmailov turned to a discussion with the dirigible's pilot. After discussing the dirigible and its capabilities for a few minutes, the pilot, Nick Ivanovich, said, "General, if we loose the tether, we can see more. I can usually get twenty miles an hour when I use the engines, assuming the engines work. And if the wind isn't bad when I get up there."
"When they work?" Izmailov looked dubious. "When they work?"
"They do . . . mostly," Nick said. "The engines aren't really the problem. Sometimes there is considerable leakage in the steam lines. If the steam isn't leaking too bad, I can stay up for ten hours or so. If everything goes right, I can get from here to Rzhev and back before dark."
Izmailov thought for a few moments. "All right. We'll try it. But at the least problem abort the mission and get back here." He turned back to the mercenary. "Sergeant, your officers were delayed in Moscow but we expect them to be joining us in a day or so. You and your men are to fall in at the end of the column as we pass."
Everything didn't go right for Nick Ivanovich. It was the winds. They were southerly and fairly strong at five thousand feet. Weaker, but still southerly, at five hundred. The Testbed didn't have a compressor; it couldn't lift the weight. So it couldn't pump hydrogen out of the bladders then get it back. Once the hydrogen was gone, it was gone. It did have a couple of hydrogen tanks so it could go up and down a little bit.
Nick ended up using more fuel than expected to keep on course. There was some steam leakage but it wasn't too bad. All of which meant that he might have made it to Rzhev and back. Or, if he went all the way to Rzhev, he might run out of fuel or water before he could get back.
* * *
"I was forced to abort, General." Nick shook his head. "Wind was awful and kept blowing me off course. But I did get a bit better than halfway and didn't see the first sign of the Poles. No advancing troops, not in this direction."