1636： The Saxon Uprising ARC - By Eric Flint Page 0,45
or not. Her husband had said much the same thing to her, many times. He’d used different words, but the gist was the same.
The aristocracy and the city patricians needed formal power in order to maintain their control over the Germanies. The democratic movement didn’t—although holding such power was certainly helpful. Its influence spread everywhere, every day, down a thousand channels. Schools, unions, insurance associations, all manner of co-operatives and granges. Steadily, if sometimes slowly, the strength of the reactionaries faded.
Constantin could see it also, probably because he came from Franconia. Achterhof and the other Magdeburg militants suffered from a perhaps inevitable myopia. Say rather, tunnel vision. Everything in the nation’s capital was clear, crisp, sharp. Magdeburg was a place of factories and working-class apartments. Over here were the toiling masses, who constituted the city’s great majority. Over there, in the palaces, were the class enemies.
There were not many of them, either. So why not just sweep them aside?
Franconia—still more so, Thuringia—was a very different place. The USE’s most populous province had many political shadings, and well-nigh innumerable layers in its populace. The Americans and their allies had been able to politically dominate it since the Ring of Fire primarily because they had provided stability and security. They had put a stop to mercenary plundering, fostered the economy, built and maintained roads, schools and hospitals.
Whether or not they agreed with the Fourth of July Party’s program—and a great many of them didn’t—the majority of the population of the State of Thuringia-Franconia kept voting for them, election after election. For some, out of radical conviction. But for just as many, for the opposite reason—a conservative reluctance to upset the applecart. The very full applecart.
It helped a great deal, too, that the president of the SoTF was Ed Piazza. He was not a flamboyant, exciting, romantic—and rather scary—figure like Mike Stearns. Rather, he exuded steadiness and stability. He governed his province much the same way, as a high school principal, he had governed his teaching staff and his students, with relaxed confidence and equanimity.
So, despite the many features of Thuringian and Franconian society that resisted the democratic movement, even resented it bitterly, that movement continued to broaden and deepen its influence.
“Don’t give them a clear target,” Michael had told her. “Let them wear themselves out for a while. They haven’t got the wind for a long fight. As long as you keep them from winning by knockout, you’re staying ahead on points.”
Her husband was fond of boxing analogies. She decided to share one of them with the group.
“We’ve been discussing this for hours,” she said. “I think we are ready to take a vote.”
She looked around the table and was greeted by nods. From Gunther, Anselm and Albert, also. They’d been the most intransigent of her opponents.
“Very well. All in favor of Gunther’s proposal to seize official power in Magdeburg, raise your hands.”
The number was clearly short of a majority.
“Very well. All in favor of my approach—which, following my husband’s guidance, I shall call ‘rope-a-dope’—raise your hands.”
The jest was perhaps unwise, since there was an immediate outcry to explain it that delayed the vote. But in the end, her viewpoint was adopted.
Afterward, Achterhof grunted and leaned back in his chair. “Easy for us to say ‘rope-a-dope.’ But it’ll be Gretchen and her people in Dresden who have to take the punches.”
Chapter 13
Dresden, capital of Saxony
Jozef Wojtowicz watched workmen laying gravel onto the cobblestones of the huge city square. What madness possessed me, he wondered, to come to Dresden?
He was still possessed by the same madness, to make things worse. He had more than enough money to have gotten out of the city any time he wanted. His employer was his uncle Stanislaw Koniecpolski, the grand hetman of Poland and Lithuania and one of the Commonwealth’s half-dozen richest men. He was no miser, either. Jozef had never lacked for the financial resources he needed.
Yes, here he still was. And if he didn’t leave by tomorrow—the day after, at the outside—he probably wouldn’t be able to leave at all. Banér’s army was already setting up camp just south and west of Dresden’s walls. It wouldn’t take the Swedish general very long to have regular cavalry patrols surrounding the city.
Jozef might still be able to pass through, if the cavalrymen were susceptible to bribery. Mercenaries usually were. It would be risky, though. There were already reports that Banér’s troops had committed atrocities in some of the villages northeast of Chemnitz, in their march through southern