Justiz von Dir.
Scott sat quietly, trying to translate as he listened. The German seemed like it had sort of been crammed into the tune, by someone writing too fast to make it a good match. The heavy Franconian accented German of the singers wasn’t helping, either. A lot of the village dialects didn’t bear much resemblance to what was spoken in Wuerzburg.
“God of our fatherland, of freedom, of reason, we praise you.” Was that right?
“Give us the possibility.” Did that make sense, or did it mean something else?
“Your love,” then-a “Geleit” for a soldier was a military escort, “from eternity, justice from you.”
The singers were well into the second verse, now.
Gib uns das taeglich’ Brot,
Spar’ uns des Elends Not,
Dich ehren wir.
Wende den Kriege ab,
Bis wir den Frieden hab’
Nie mehr des Hochmuts Raub,
Das beten wir.
“Give us our daily bread, spare us the famine of suffering. We honor you.” Okay. “Avert war until we have peace, no longer the loot of arrogance. We pray that.”
Johnnie F. leaned over and whispered: “There’s several more verses in the whole thing, mainly a run through the beatitudes, but they mostly only sing those two to open a meeting. Must be a cinch to write verses in a language where most of the abstract nouns end in either “heit” or “keit” and can be made to rhyme with one another.”
“It’s sort of… calming, as revolutionary songs go.”
“I told you all that Meyfarth wasn’t writing stuff that cries for vengeance and bloodshed. You can’t expect him to be a re-run of Spartacus, either. He’s a preacher, for Pete’s sake. He’s bound to use a lot of religious stuff in what he writes. None of the ‘be a revolutionary atheist’ gig for him.”
“Meyfarth, again?”
“Yeah. Some of the farmers have written other verses that say rude things about tithes and taxes, but this is the ‘official’ version. As far as Orville and Stew and I know, they, the Ram people, are opening all of their meetings with it.”
A middle-aged man got up. A quite ordinary man, a person might think, aside from the booming voice that emerged from his thick body. The kind of voice that could be heard by a couple of thousand people gathered in an open field.
He was holding a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order, and proceeded to conduct the meeting in accordance with it. Starting with a pledge of allegiance to the flag of the State of Thuringia-Franconia. Ending, a couple of hours later… something was so familiar. Scott’s mind went back to that meeting last fall.
Scott scribbled again. “Did Meyfarth really translate the ‘Concord Hymn’ into German?”
“Yeah. And they’ve all memorized it. They sing it to the tune of ‘From Heav’n Above, To Earth I Come.’ That’s a children’s Christmas song that Martin Luther wrote. Same number of syllables in each line and everybody knows the tune.”
“In Aprils Luft entfalten sich die Flaggen."
* * *
In the “few days” that Johnnie F. had asked for, they attended several more meetings. The man with the booming voice was speaking at most of them. Carefully guarded by a dozen Jaeger wearing the ram badge on their armbands. They let Johnnie F. and Scott approach him.
“Who am I?” he asked. “Why, who but an actor on this stage that is life? A pupil in the Coburg Gymnasium when I was much younger than I am now. A scholarship boy, brought in from a border village by the duke’s charity, because the pastor recommended me. A failed university student, once upon a time, a would-be-lawyer who had to leave because he not only got a baker’s daughter pregnant, a bad enough scandal, but married her-a far worse one in the academic world. A village schoolmaster in Frankenwinheim, more recently. A thinker of thoughts and a dreamer of dreams.”
He looked at the pamphlet in his hand and laughed uproariously. “Now a pupil of inspired fools. A student who takes what they say and shapes it so that the farmers of Franconia understand.”
Blackwell looked over the man’s shoulder. The man was reading Common Sense, by Thomas Paine.
“Will we meet you again?”
“Probably, very probably. Unless it should happen that I am unlucky.”
Chapter 10:
“Just A Truce In A Little Corner Of It”
Wuerzburg, late March, 1634
“I think they’ve harnessed it,” Scott said to the morning briefing. “This Common Sense guy, using Meyfarth and the Thorntons. If they haven’t accomplished miracles, then at least near-miracles. I’m not going to try to tell you how deeply it has all sunk in, or how widely. They’ve had, what, a few months? On top of grievances and grudges that have been building for years. But the stuff is all over the place. It’s being read, and sung, repeated in this guy’s speeches, talked about. They’ve made us a harness.”
“So now,” Scott said, “we get to ride the ram.”
“Speaking of which…” Johnnie F. tossed a newspaper on the table. It was one of the ones printed in Franconia. “Have you seen ‘Brillo’s Little Red Rider’? They’ve got Princess Kristina riding Brillo in that one. You’ve all got to read it.”
“Later,” Steve said firmly. “Right now, we need to deal with the petition that the knights and lords have sent to Gustavus Adolphus. This is what I’ve gotten back from Ed and Arnold in Grantville. And from Mike Stearns.”
“They’re different?”
“Mike’s language is considerably more colorful, and…”
“And?” Scott asked.
Steve sighed. “We have an intervention from Margrave Christian of Brandenburg-Bayreuth. Diplomatic, at the moment. Very diplomatic. Just asks us to consider the difficulty in which our policies are placing the Protestant nobility of Franconia. Doesn’t say anything about a military action, not even obliquely. Dr. Lenz, however, the agent representing the Freiherr Fuchs von Bimbach, claims that the margrave is prepared to undertake an invasion of Franconia in support of the petitioners.”
David Petrini interrupted. “Of course, they’re trying to take advantage of the fact that Gustav Adolf himself is very busy in the north dealing with the League of Ostend, so they presume that they’re really appealing to Oxenstierna. Who, in his heart, believes that the nobles really should rule.”
“Aren’t they forgetting,” Anita asked, “that he’s all the way up in Stockholm and unless someone radios the petition to him, he isn’t going to get it very soon?”
“Unless it’s really meant for Wilhelm Wettin-a stick he can use against Mike,” Steve answered.
“Oh, holy shit!” Scott said. “I go out of town for a few days and all hell breaks loose!”
“Brandenburg-Bayreuth?” Johnnie F. asked. “I’d just heard it called Bayreuth before. Brandenburg, I know, turned into Prussia later on. But what are the Hohenzollerns doing down here?”
“The Hohenzollerns started ‘down here’,” Weckherlin answered. “These men, now, Margrave Christian in Bayreuth and his nephews in Ansbach, are a cadet line of the family represented by Margrave George Wilhelm up in Berlin, who is a brother of Gustavus Adolphus’ wife. The Hohenzollern family though, back in the middle ages, began here. As the Burggrafen in Nuernberg, holding the big castle there for the Holy Roman Emperors. Acquisitive bunch, overall.”
He hesitated a moment; then, added: “This is perhaps more serious than you may assume. By themselves, the knights and small lords will have a difficult time getting organized. They will not hesitate to become violent, but the violence is likely to be disjointed. For a fact, it seems to me, the farmers are much better organized. Better led, too, from what I can determine.”