Anthony Mayer ;  alternative history ;  Sydney Webb's Just Another Thirty Years War With Steam - Part 7
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Contents

1. The Spanish Match

2. A Walk in the Bohemian Forest

3. Soupe de Canard

4. A Song for Europe

5. The Imperialists Return

6. The King of Spain's Daughter

7. Never Mind the Uzkoks

8. The Day of the Dupe

9. The Black Adder

10. Every Man an Elector

11. Oliver's Army

12. I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night

Just Another Thirty Years War With Steam

Part 7

"For 'Ferdinand' read 'Frederick' throughout and vice versa."

- '1618 and All That', RJ Sellar and WC Yeatman

[From the diary of Captain Rudolf von Goisern]

The Feast Day of St Barnabas the Apostle, the Year of Our Lord Sixteen-hundred and thirty-nine.

The Spanish engineers say that the repairs to the tracks should be completed on the morrow. So our company will be able to ride to Saxony to rejoin the rest of the regiment that has marched ahead. My men chafe when their duties are to guard stationary locomotives. They dream of battles and glory. I have seen too many battles and too little glory.

The men did get to burn a peasant on Wednesday. He was a Satanist or an Anabaptist, I misremember which. In my mind religion is a circle and not a road. An excess of piety always leads to devilry. Savonarola being a case in point. [1]

Nothing has pleased me this day. I had some time to myself and meant to pass it reading a pamphlet. I sought to learn more of our Protestant foes. If the Protestants do be our real foes for I see the fine Italianate hand of Monsieur le Cardinal Mazarin, as he styles himself now, at every turn in the events of the War these days.

Yet the pamphlet was fit only for women. "Martin Luther gazed hungrily through the window into the refectory" indeed! I desire to know history, not some tattle tale from a writer who could not know whether such ephemera happened a century past or no.

This was just prior to my luncheon with my lieutenant, George. George is from a good family but being North German there is a certain woodenness about him. He is not as stupid as my manservant Švejk, obviously, but he is by no means a Wallenstein.

Švejk served George and I the last of the salt pork we had rescued last month from Castle Krumbach. To think of those villagers killing and eating each other when such plentitude was amongst them! What times, what manners, indeed.

I told George that I had been reading as to the causes of the War. To George it was a simple matter, foul Protestants in rebellion against their lawful lord the Emperor. They needed a short sharp lesson at the end of a four yard pike, that would mend them their ways. I explained that this short sharp lesson had been going on for more than a score of years.

Švejk begged our pardons. He had heard that it was the fault of the buzzcocks praying for the Venetians. I corrected him, no it was the Uzkoks preying on the Venetians, specifically their merchantmen. George was puzzled. Who was an Uzkok when he was at home?

I explained that it was the nature of an Uzkok not to be at home. George was looking more lost so I pressed on. The word is Serbian and means 'refugee'. They settled in the Emperor's domains, many at the port of Zengg, and promised to keep the Adriatic free of Turkish shipping. The Uzkoks took a very broad definition of the word 'Turkish' and generally attacked any vessel that looked weaker than they. It was their activities that lead to the rise of the Orient Express as it became safer for the Venetians to deliver their goods by rail. Furthermore the Venetians responded to these so-called provocations by attacking the territories of Archduke Ferdinand. The Uzkok War only ended a year before the present war broke out. And the Venetian allies of this earlier war, the Protestant Union and the French, prefigure the alliance we now oppose.

I was warming to my theme now. But never mind the Uzkoks George, I said, cast the Uzkoks from your mind. If you would understand a war you must know four things: politics, religion, finance and what the French call logistique. I told George he was partly right, the rebellion of the Bohemian Protestants was important. But first he had to understand the importance of the railroad.

Those steel bands that hold our empire together? he asked. I nodded. I suspect he had read the phrase in some woodcut cartoon. The Spanish Railroad connected the Spanish Netherlands with the Northern Italian possessions and with Vienna. It is the coal of Silesia that powers this road, saving the cost of more expensive wood. And Bohemia sits astride Silesia and Austria. You can pass around Bohemia to the north by travelling through unreliable Saxony and Bavaria or to the south through the hostile Ottoman lands but it is a longer journey.

And there was religion too. You couldn't determine the religion of a province simply by what the majority of the souls there wanted. Why, only a generation or so ago, Austria herself had been mostly Protestant. George looked genuinely shocked. One of the signs of a successful counter Reformation in a land is that it should be done as quietly as possible. Yes George, I explained, fifty years ago nine nobles in ten in Austria had been Protestant. George spluttered, had their not been 122 monasteries in Lower Austria alone? Indeed, I countered, but these were peopled with only 400 hundred monks and nuns, but 200 concubines, 500 children and an incontinent ferret named Maximilian. [2]

If you let the people of Bohemia have their head, religiously speaking, then you would have to do the same for Hungary. And what if Lower and Upper Austria backslid into their heretical ways? What lands could the Emperor call his own?

Besides, the politics of the thing was wrong. The Bohemians had rebelled by electing Frederick as King in place of the previously elected Ferdinand. If elected monarchs could lose their thrones simply because they displeased their subjects then, in a very real sense, it would be the electors who were reigning. A recipe for anarchy. What if an ambitious man like Wallenstein could convince electors that he could do a better job than some fat-headed, inbred Hapsburg? No, it simply wouldn't do.

We could have continued in this vein for some time but the hour for luncheon was over. I sent George to find Sergeant Schultz to assemble the men for drill. We were to ride into battle in the morrow and I fain that they were ready.

As I write these words by candlelight this night, I wonder when I will next find time for my diary. War is a chancy business and I have seen too many men die. But that cannot be undone and tonight's camp follower is most comely. And so to bed!

[To be continued]

[1] SingAlongASavonarola: http://www.cyberhymnal.org/bio/s/a/savonarola_g.htm

[2] George's figures match those of our timeline but Rudolph's seemed plucked from the air. The correct figures are 463 monks, 160 nuns, 199 concubines, 55 wives and 443 children. See RJW Evans 'The Making of the Hapsburg Monarchy 1550-1700: An Interpretation' (Oxford, 1979). Evans omits any reference to the ferret.


Last modified: Fri May 16 09:47:49 BST 2003