(Part 244.3)
Vanaheimr Aerogarrison, Island of Als, Scandinavian Empire
February 28th 1899
Lieutenant Valdemar Bjerg gave an affirmative gesture to the ground crew with one gloved hand, then pulled the goggles of his flying helmet down to protect his eyes. The propellor of his brand new Jepsen V bi-wing aerodrome roared to life and the boys pulled the chocks of wood from her wheels. He patted his yoke reassuringly. A factory-new drome usually had a bad reputation among the flagermus (a disparaging Army nickname for pilots that had been defiantly seized upon by the pilots themselves). A new drome hadn’t had the usual kinks worked out of it yet, and that was doubly true of a new model of drome. But Valdemar had been satisfied with the Jepsen V so far: her engine was sweet, she was responsive in the air, and the new interrupter-gear mechanism had proved perfect. He still knew a lot of pilots very reluctant to actually shoot through their own propellors, no matter how well-tested the system was.
Not that shooting was the primary part of his duty. While aerodromes were increasingly being used to drop bombs or rockets on enemy positions—especially as steerables grew scarcer on both sides, frequently shot down by dromes—Valdemar’s main task was reconnaissance. The Emperor’s speech when war had been declared, nearly two years ago, had optimistically forecast that the whole rotten structure of Germany would come crashing down as soon as the door was kicked in. At least Valdemar II (Valdemar’s own namesake) had been wise enough to avoid giving specific date targets. There had been too many optimistic comments on all sides in the early stage of this terrible war that it would be over by Christmas, then by Easter, then by some other reassuringly imminent date.
The bi-wing rose into the air. Whereas other dromes worked in groups, nicknamed flying companies, the scouts were lone wolves. Or at least that’s what Valdemar and his comrades told themselves—if they ran into one of those flying companies, he reflected grimly, they might as well be lone sheep. But he had his duty, and he did it.
No matter how many sorties he flew, Valdemar felt he would never cease to have his breath taken away by the sight of the island of Als from the air. He was used to seeing the map at headquarters, which had originally been a naval sounding map with the water in shades of blue, and aside from the land being greyish-green rather than white, viewing it from the air felt bizarrely as though he was looking down on that map right now. It was easy to lose one’s sense of reality, and Valdemar strongly suspected that not all the pilots that had crashed for no apparent reason had done so due to mechanical failure of their machines. Some of the more controversial alienists argued, grandfather’s Automaton Fiction novel in hand, that the human brain was nothing more than a particularly advanced solution engine made of flesh rather than steel. Valdemar wasn’t sure he believed that, but if there was any truth to it, he supposed that just as a solution engine could lock up from being presented with a problem unlike the type it was designed for, so too might the human brain regard looking down on the earth from a perspective that had hitherto belonged only to the angels.
But then, there had been steerables for decades, so it was probably as much to do with speed as it was with height. Valdemar repositioned his colourful scarf before his lips before they became chapped, and grinned behind it. He had dived between sluggish enemy steerables before, counter-drome fire exploding all around him, marvelling at the speed at which they shot past. It made even an express train seem slow by comparison, and indeed sometimes he saw supply trains proceeding across the landscape at a speed that seemed, from his perspective, utterly incompatible with what he knew they would look like on the ground.
There was no time for such idle thoughts, however. Valdemar flew high, above the clouds, as he crossed the complex set of trenches cutting across the peninsula that reached out to Als. All of that had been German territory until the outbreak of war, but over the course of months, and with grievous losses, the Scandinavians had driven the Germans from the city that had been named Sonderburg for four decades. Valdemar had seen the newspaper which depicted the name Sønderborg being proudly daubed once again on a road sign. He hadn’t been able to help noticing, though, that the asimcon had been carefully cropped to avoid showing any view of the city behind it. Since arriving at the aerogarrison, he had seen in plenty of times, and it resemble the pitted and ruined artists’ impressions of the Moon’s surface he had seen in astronomical magazines. Had it been worth it? Was it worth it now, for all those other young men to throw away their lives in the trenches around the town that the Germans called Baurup and the Scandinavians called Bovrup?
Valdemar flew over those trenches now, the clouds mostly hiding him from view, though a few black blooms of half-hearted counter-drome fire blotted out the sky. He suspected some of those were from his own side, which was a depressing thought that drome pilots rapidly had to get used to. His wings and tails were prominently daubed red squares with yellow crosses, the awkward compromise choice of symbol as the blue background of the Swedish flag, and the white of the Dannebrog, were both too easy to mistake for those colours in the German flag painted on German dromes. Valdemar himself always looked for the green first.
And now the Belgians were in the fight as well. He wondered what their dromes looked like, and if they would ever cross the same territory. There was hopeful talk in the papers of Belgian ships, and possibly dromes, supporting the Army in the west and north of the Peninsula, where the Germans had been grimly holed up for over a year around Esberg (or Esbjerg), cut off from their comrades in the south. Perhaps the Belgians might be able to finally break General Stamitz’s men, whom the papers described as stubborn fools too stupid to know when they were beaten, and rapaciously living off the innocent people of Jutland. Of course, Valdemar had noticed that, by contrast, the Scandinavian troops that had been grimly defending the enclave of Kiel for months were brave heroes, as were the courageous Russian allies hanging on in Noochaland in North America as the vile and cowardly Americans surrounded them. It was the latter that stood out to him. The worst the government had always said about the Americans was that too many people wanted to immigrate to the ENA rather than staying here and being good loyal Scandinavians. Russia, meanwhile, had always vied with Germany for the title of bête noire. It was particularly bizarre to see news headlines actually praising the Russians, and Valdemar suspected that if things had been only slightly different, the Emperor would have asked him to fight with the Germans against the Russians, and the papers’ opinions would have been reversed. It almost made one question the righteousness of this war, or of war in general. But that was a simplistic view, a child’s innocent objection to why he couldn’t have another biscuit. This was real life.
Valdemar flew north now, marvelling at the increased range that the Jepsen V’s new improved engine efficiency allowed her. Her. He kept using that word. He should give her a name. Gertrud, maybe. He’d always had a thing for Gertrud, back home in Odense. He hoped he’d live to return home and tell her...
His job was not to look at the trenches near Baurup/Bovrup, nor the still-frantic fighting around the Kiel Pocket, but at the main front line between the Scandinavian forces pushing down through Jutland and the Germans trying desperately to hold on. After rapid advances back in ’97 as German control had collapsed amid the Jutish uprising, ’98 had turned into a stalemate as General Kirschner had successfully built and held onto the Haderslev Line. While much of the Peninsula had been reclaimed, that had only encouraged people to fight on to try to recover the rest. That had been a grinding, fruitless task until Belgian entry into the war, and—as some had predicted—the number of opponents was finally breaking the back of the German war effort.
But there were still plenty of bullets flying, plenty of enemy trenches to report on. Valdemar checked his compass and his map, folded the latter, and then took a deep breath of the thin air and emerged from the clouds.
He had calculated well, and only small adjustments were needed to find the trench system near Gjenner (or Genner, as German names on maps still had it) which he had been assigned to. At first glance, the network of trench lines across the landscape looked like those he had seen farther south, the same sense of the earth being torn up and abused by the scribblings of a madman. However, Valdemar’s practiced eye showed that there were differences. Whereas the trenches around Kiel and Baurup/Bovrup had remained fairly static for a while and had been gradually improved and refined as a result, these ones had clearly been dug in a near-panic by retreating troops attempt to rally. Unlike the now-broken Haderslev Line, this one was not defensible. It was too long and full of holes, and Scandinavian troops were shifting to war-of-manoeuvre tactics to roll up the Germans. But to do so, they needed to know where they were.
Bursts of counter-drome fire filled the sky around him. Valdemar ignored them, waggling his yoke as best he could to evade. His mind was not on shooting back with his cingular gun—that would be pointless—but in using the Jepsen V’s real weapon.
He pulled a lever and felt (rather than heard, amid the wind whipping past) a satisfying clunk as a panel slid aside somewhere beneath his feet, exposing the bright lens of a high-grade asimcon camera. Valdemar’s previous drome, the Thomsen IIa, had required him to take asimcons blind, with no way of knowing if his lens was appropriately lined up and focused or not; another improvement the new Jepsen had made was that an ingenious periscope arrangement allowed him to see what the camera saw. Using this, still ignoring the black clouds of counterdrome fire exploding around him, Valdemar sighted in on the main trench system and took the drome down in a low dive. His left thumb clicked the green-painted trigger on his yoke, opposite the one that fired his gun; the camera snapped asimcon after asimcon, using four of his eight plates.
At this altitude, the counterdrome weapons largely fell silent, but instead bullets rose from the green-clad Germans in the trenches. Valdemar tended to feel complacent about those. Even when the drome was travelling as slowly as this through the air, the chance of any mud-chewing infantryman being able to lead it enough to aim an accurate shot was—
CRNK! SNAP!
A jet of savage pain raced up Valdemar’s left leg. Far more seriously, for the pilot’s mind, was that his engine jerked and stuttered. The propellor before him, usually an invisible blur, began to show up as a vague shape before him as it slowed and sped up again.
He had been hit.
Valdemar was only twenty, but he had been flying for four months, which in this bitter war might as well be a lifetime’s experience. He acted calmly, without thinking. He shoved the lever that closed the camera compartment (the clunk sounding muffled, as though the shot had damaged the mechanism), worked the rudder controls to bring the drome climbing away from the enemy trenches again, and aimed it for what looked like an area of farmers’ fields he could spot on the horizon. Maybe he would get there, maybe he wouldn’t. But he needed a flat surface to have more than a ghost of a chance of surviving the landing.
The Germans kept shooting, but soon he was out of range, still too low for the counterdrome guns to have much effect. Smoke began to trail from his engine. This was bad. This was very bad. Hot dampness was pooling around his trouser leg. That was also bad. He tried to brace the yoke while he made his scarf into a tourniquet, but it was useless. He’d just have to land and see what he could do if he survived.
He played with the oil pulsator and the rotary throttle. It was no use. The engine coughed, spluttered, and finally gave up the ghost. This was it. A farmhouse, a grassy meadow, perhaps a field given over to nature for the sake of crop rotation this year, though given the shortages that would be a bold decision. Valdemar didn’t care. He gripped the yoke with both hands, trying for as much control as he could of what had suddenly become a glider.
It all happened so suddenly. One minute he was in the cockpit of a brand new drome, the next he found himself lying on his back surrounded by wreckage. Everything seemed to hurt, but especially his leg.
Incredibly, though, he was alive.
Valdemar unstrapped himself as swiftly as he dared, hands shaking with shock, a nasty bruise throbbing on his shoulder. What was left of his cockpit jerked as the wind caught a fragment of wing. He hastily dragged himself free, wondering if he would feel the pain of a broken limb if he tried to stand.
He did not, and it turned out that the mysterious leg wound was nothing more than a small scrape from a bullet which looked much worse than it was. There was still the possibility of infection, of course, so he sloshed a little of his emergency brandy on the wound and drank the rest, then finally made the scarf tourniquet he had planned, though it really only needed a bandage. He considered trying to retrieve the asimcon plates, but one glance showed those had been exposed to light by the damage of the landing. Dammit. A wrecked drome and nothing to show for it. At least he was alive, but the Germans were uncomfortably near.
He set out for the farmhouse, favouring his wounded leg slightly, but the injury was really quite minor. Before long, he was confronted by a door. He shrugged and knocked. The mess room was full of stories of pilots who had gone down over the German-controlled parts of the Peninsula and had been hidden and smuggled back by the oppressed locals.
The door opened a crack and the muzzle of a shotgun emerged, pointed right at Valdemar’s head. This was not so unexpected, of course. He raised his hands. “Please. I am Scandinavian. They will be looking for me.”
The door opened a little more. A suspicious-looking farmer in his forties gave Valdemar a long look. “Wie heißen Sie?”
Valdemar grinned glassily. Of course, it would be just his luck to get the one family of German immigrant transplant farmers for miles around. “I said, I’m Scandinavian. My name is Lieutenant Valdemar Bjerg.”
“Nicht Waldemar Berg?” asked the farmer suspiciously. “I do not like these tests of loyalty,” he added, still in German. “I pay my taxes to the Emperor. You have no right to do these little acts of theatre.”
“I’m not acting! I AM SCANDINAVIAN! I’ve been shot down! I’m a pilot!” Valdemar said, a bit of anger bursting through. It was mixed with pity, though. What had these people been put through, during the years of Kulturkrieg, to regard even the possibility of liberation with such cynical suspicion?
Something hit him on the back of the knees and Valdemar went sprawling forward, almost falling headlong into the gun-toting farmer. He managed to catch himself on the doorframe before he bruised himself all over again. He glanced behind him in anger, saw nothing, then thought to look down.
A pig was there, rubbing itself against the back of his thighs, giving an intent and impatient look at his pockets. It could probably smell the iron rations he had in there.
Valdemar supposed a pig wasn’t an unusual thing to find on a farm, but his eyes widened at the animal’s appearance. Most of its body was a deep reddish-brown, but a white stripe wrapped around it near the head end, with a suggestion of a horizontal stripe around the belly too...
He spun around, back at the farmer, who was trying to look serious while stifling a laugh. “Your pig looks like a Danish flag!” he said stupidly, adrenaline still crashing.
“Of course it does,” said a new voice, speaking Danish but with the flat vowels of Jutland, which Valdemar had only heard described in books. It was a woman, clearly the farmer’s wife and of a similar age. “It’s a Protestsvin. We bred them to protest being unable to fly the Danish flag thanks to the Bundeskaiser’s law.” She spat.
Relief flooded through Valdemar. “Then you will help me?” he asked desperately.
The farmer’s wife nodded. “Come on, Jens, let’s get him in the barn under cover.”
The farmer, Jens, lowered his gun uncertainly. “Come on, Dorothea, don’t call me that,” he said in hushed tones, glancing frantically in the direction of the German lines. “We can’t afford to slip...”
“The Germans are being pushed back,” Valdemar said. “Most of the Peninsula is already liberated. This group is going to be destroyed soon—that’s what I was doing, taking pictures for our artillery to target them.” He hesitated, realising he had given away too much, especially when the man seemed to have divided loyalties.
The farmer sighed. “Well, it would be good to get rid of the Germans,” he conceded, contradicting Valdemar’s last thought, “and to be able to call myself...” he hesitated, then smiled daringly, “Jens Snedstrup again, instead of Hans Schnedstrup.”
His wife nodded eagerly. “I would like that. Jens and Dorthe, not Hans and Dorothea.”
Valdemar was nodding along, but then frowned. “What did you say? Dorthe, not Dorte? Is that a Jutland thing?”
“That’s not how it’s spelled over on the Islands?” she asked. “I suppose...it’s been a while.”
“It has,” Valdemar agreed. “But that’s all over now. Nobody’s going to force you to be Germans anymore. You’re free to be Danes.”
Jens laughed harshly at that. “Yes. We’re not going to be forced to be Germans. But I wonder if my wife will be able to spell her name with an H. Will we simply now be forced to be Danes?”
“But...you are Danes,” Valdemar said in confusion. “You have a Danish flag pig!”
Jens put his hand on his wife’s shoulder and hugged her to him. “We’re Jutes, he said baldly. “That’s what we’ve fought to remember, under the long years of foreign rule. Whether we’ll ever be free to call ourselves that, or pick a flag for ourselves, is another matter.” He laughed again. “Meet the new landlord, same as the old.”
The barn was comfortable enough, and Dorthe gave him hot water and herbs to bathe his leg. In the night, shells began falling on the German lines—clearly one of Valdemar’s fellow pilots had been more successful in his reconnaissance mission—and the enemy began to retreat, fortunately not picking the farmhouse as a strongpoint. A day later, the whole area was secured by the Scandinavian army, and the Dannebrog flew over the local villages.
All the same, with that conversation in the back of his mind, Valdemar couldn’t quite read the triumphal newspaper headlines quite as happily as he had hoped.
