1636： The Saxon Uprising ARC - By Eric Flint Page 0,154

been doing the same thing as Jeff—except he was searching for a whole regiment, not just a volley gun battery.

Jeff’s regiment, damn his irresponsible geek heart. What had possessed him, to race ahead like that?

The radios were turning out to be almost useless. Mike could get in touch with his regiments, yes. But what good did that do when nobody knew where they were to begin with?

Christopher Long rode up. “That way, I think, sir.” He was pointing a bit to the right, in the directions where Mike thought Dresden probably was.

What idiot had thought launching an attack in the middle of a snowstorm was a good idea?

By now, even Johan Banér had run out of curses. He could still manage one every two minutes or so, but the pleasure had entirely vanished from the exercise.

This was turning into a nightmare. He was still quite confident he could rout the rebels—if he could find his blasted army. More than bits and pieces of it, anyway.

The problem, insofar as Banér could reconstruct what had happened, was that one or another unit of the Third Division had punched a big hole in the middle of his line. “Line,” at least, if you could dignify a string of camps set up to ride out the storm by the name.

The Östergötland Horsemen had been at the center of that hole. Somehow they’d been routed, and in their confused retreat had precipitated panic among their neighboring units. That, in turn, has led to the whole center starting to unravel.

Whatever else, Banér had to put a stop to that. If he could stabilize the center, he was sure he’d win this bastard of a battle. By now, Stearns’ soldiers had to be even more disorganized than his own.

They probably were, in point of fact, on the level of the division itself. But it didn’t matter because all of the regiments had stayed intact, even if none of them were really quite sure where the rest of the army was.

So, it devolved into a brawl, a pure melee in the snow, USE army regiments matched against whatever Swedish units they stumbled across. It took a while, half an hour to an hour of savage struggle with heavy casualties on both sides, before the mercenaries began to yield.

But yield they did. They simply didn’t have the stomach for this sort of fight. Drifting at first, and then moving faster and faster, they headed back toward the lines around Dresden.

In the middle of all this, Mike Stearns and his staff stumbled around trying to make sense out of senselessness.

They never succeeded. They never even came close.

Somehow, though, none of them died.

Quite.

Early on, Anthony Leebrick was struck in the leg by a stray bullet, just above the ankle. Although he didn’t know it, then or ever, the ball had been fired by one of his division’s own infantrymen and had struck him by sheer mischance. A lot of men were killed or wounded in that battle from friendly fire. Most of them were mercenaries working for the Swedes, since they were more confused and directionless than the oncoming USE troops, but by no means all of them.

It was a nasty wound, in the way that such wounds so often were, when gun battles were fought with muskets. The balls were slow but heavy, and shattered bones if they struck them full on—as this ball did.

Stearns ordered him taken to the rear by two of the adjutants who accompanied the staff officers. Leebrick lost his foot in a surgeon’s tent, but he survived. Men usually did if the amputation was of a lower extremity, so long as they didn’t get infected—and the Third Division’s sanitation practices were just as good among the surgeons as anywhere else.

Christopher Long was struck twice, again by stray bullets—although these were both fired by the enemy. The first ball caused a minor flesh wound on his left shoulder, which he had bound up and then ignored. The second wound, however, he couldn’t ignore. That one struck him in the ribs. A glancing hit, it didn’t penetrate the heavy buff coat he was wearing in lieu of armor. But it must have been a canister ball, twice the weight of a musket ball, because it broke at least two of his ribs. He tried to keep going but the pain was excruciating. Within minutes, over the young colonel’s protest, Stearns had him taken to the rear as well.

That almost killed him. The two adjutants guiding him completely