The Gallian military had a significant number of problems during the Second Europan War…Leadership was by far the worst issue. While it was good at and below the brigade level, leadership among the general officers tended to be far more variable, largely due to the influence of Chancellor Borg, who saw capable generals as threats to his power. While the field-grade officers were usually able to mitigate the worst of the damage, it was impossible to completely keep it from influencing day-to-day operations.

Excerpted with permission from A History of the Second Europan War, William Hackett; University of Chimay; 1968

Heinrich Lannes was not a happy man. They were just about to get a new draft of militiamen, and he'd had to decide how he wanted to parcel them out within the squad.

He'd had two options. The first was to keep the present three-team structure, and put the new drafts in with them. There were some interesting possibilities with that, but the fact was that each team would have thirteen or fourteen members, depending on how he split the engineers and lancers—snipers, as far as he was concerned, needed to be either let to do as they would or concentrated, not tied down to a team—under that arrangement, and that was far too unwieldy.

The second was to shift to a four-team arrangement. This, frankly, made the most sense. It meant having slightly uneven numbers of scouts and shocktroopers between teams, but that was going to happen in the other arrangement anyhow. However, it also meant that someone was going to need to command the team, which meant that someone needed to be promoted.

The question at that point was simple.

Who?

He knew who his preference was—Friedrich. There were some theorists who thought each specialty should have a representative in the squad leadership, but that didn't make much sense to him, at least not in this case. None of the snipers were leadership material—they were good snipers, and good people, but being a good sniper and being a good noncom required two entirely different mentalities. The engineers had a lot of the same problems, which was why doctrine required that they not be team leaders unless it was a team composed entirely of engineers.

So, the new team leader had to be a scout, shocktrooper, or lancer, the squad already had two shocktroopers in command, and scouts came before lancers in the rotation. And Friedrich was the best out of all the scouts, something he'd heard from Traherne that even Derfflinger acknowledged.

So far so good. The problem was this idiot new rule that had been announced three days after the Princess' kidnapping—rumor was that General Damon and Chancellor Borg had collaborated on it. Lannes wasn't sure why Damon was still in command of the army, but he was, which meant that he got to let his aristocratic snootiness and general asininity run free. As a result, promoting a Darcsen to corporal or higher—Heinrich Lannes cursed the fact that they were readily identifiable by the lack of a last name—required the approval of three levels of the chain of command.

Which meant paperwork, and lots of it. He hated his life, sometimes.

Then again, it wasn't the paperwork that was the problem.

Mostly.

If that was the case, he really was in trouble when the war was over, although the fact that he thought it onerous at all was somewhat worrisome.

No, the problem was that the whole thing was pointless. No one was going to be promoting undeserving dark-hairs—even Gunther, who was known to discuss their virtues and the wrongs done them at the drop of the hat and at tedious length. No, this was pure prejudice, directed both at Darcsens and junior officers, and that angered him to no end. Although he wasn't sure, truth be told, which prejudice angered him more. Either way, he was more than ready to kidnap Damon and Borg and stick them on patrol with Friedrich. If they came back, maybe they'd learn something. If they didn't—well, he could think of a lot of things that would be worse for Gallia, like the Captain developing hemorrhoids. That would impair the war effort.

But this remained in the realm of fantasy, and the reality was that he was having to deal with this asinine paperwork.

There was a knock on the door.

"Come in," he said, somewhat crossly.

"Paperwork trouble, sir?" Traherne said as he stepped in.

"Just this stupid rule about promoting Darcsens," Lannes replied. It was probably unprofessional to express such negative views about the decisions of the higher-ups around one of his subordinates, but he had a pretty good idea about the sergeant's views on the topic and his general trustworthiness.

Traherne winced, but shrugged. "It could be worse, sir. Back in the last war we didn't get to promote Darcsens until the last six months. Lost a lot of good men because of that."

Lannes looked at Traherne for a moment. "Was there trouble, when it finally happened?"

The grizzled sergeant shook his head. "No sir, not in my unit, anyway. We were mostly from the south of the country, and a few from along the Imperial border."

That made sense. Anti-Darcsen sentiment was much more rampant in the northern industrial cities, mostly, or so his professors at the university had claimed, because they tended to make up a disproportionate amount of skilled mechanics, engineers, and factory workers. That this was the result of Gallian failure rather than Darcsen perfidy was lost on those who missed out on promotions, overtime, and pay raises, and when combined with the fact that many of the new factory workers were farm laborers displaced by mechanization who needed someone to blame for their problems and the antipathy displayed by the aristocrats towards the changes that Darcsens represented—well, it was a recipe for disaster.

Areas that tended to have shortages of skilled mechanics or were near the border tended to not be as opposed—the former because they could not afford to be so, and the latter out of reaction to the even more virulent persecution of Darcsens over the border. Ghirlandaio town had been an exception, largely due to General Damon's tendency to attract like-minded officers to himself, who communicated that attitude to their subordinates and troops, who in turn communicated it to some of the town's...rougher elements.

Mostly, however, anti-Darcsen prejudices outside of the cities were more out of tradition than anything else, particularly outside the aristocracy, and not one that was particularly well kept-up at that. The few republicans Lannes knew had as part of their reform proposals the elimination of all laws against them, which was one of the few parts of their program that he approved of.

It did seem more than a little petty to deny people a last name, after all.

"Even in some of the units that were mostly from the industrial cities it wasn't too bad," Traherne continued. "If the Darcsens assigned to them had managed to stick around."

He paused, and his face clouded.

"There were…issues, sometimes."

Lannes did not inquire further. When a man like Traherne looked like that and became evasive, there was a very short list of things that could have happened.

Most of them were extremely unpleasant to even think about.

"Anyway, sir," the sergeant continued, "take my word for it, things are a lot better now than they were then."

Lannes grunted. "Well, that makes me feel a little better, I suppose."

"Just don't take too long, sir. We've got a field exercise this afternoon."

"Right. Meeting Engagement?"

"Think so, sir."

"That should be…interesting." And it should give me one last chance to make sure that I'm making the right call.

As Squad 2 stood to attention outside its barracks, Lannes took another moment to grouse at the approval-in-triplicate that had been required. His approval, of course, had been automatic. Captain Varrot had approved it on the same day that she got the form, and had been kind enough to inform him that while in the base camp they were under the command of General Andre Stad. Waiting on that particular approval had been more than slightly nerve-wracking, as it had taken three days from the time he'd hand-delivered the thing to the general's office, but it had finally come in, as had some other promotions he'd been looking forward to.

However, he shook that off as he looked at the squad. They were arrayed by teams, each with their team leader in front of them, while the snipers stood off on their own, as was appropriate. Everyone was there, even the new drafts, who looked like they were well into settling in, even though they'd only been here less than three days.

That was the actual reason he'd been worried—he didn't want everyone to fully adjust to the drafts before he shook the teams up again, for hopefully the last time. Better to get everything over with quickly.

But, enough woolgathering.

He pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. "The following soldiers have been promoted from the rank of private to that of private first class: Harrison Bullfinch, Fritz Cranmer," and so on, until he had read the name of everyone in the squad who wasn't one of the new drafts. The Darcsens were last on the list, but everyone noticed that one person was conspicuously absent once the noncoms had handed over the new chevrons, and as a result looked somewhat confused.

"Friedrich," Lannes said, "step forward."

This, he could tell, confused everyone, including Friedrich.

"With all the new people," he began, "we needed to do a little reorganizing. Part of that was setting up a new team—as you may have noticed, even Sergeant Traherne finds it difficult to keep track of thirteen people at once."

There were a few smiles cracked, but no laughter, as he'd expected, and thus he continued.

"Now, in order to do that, we needed a new noncommissioned officer—and in this case, I was glad we did. Private Friedrich," Lannes said he pulled out a set of chevrons, "congratulations. You're Corporal Friedrich now."

The man looked stunned for a moment, then saluted, and Lannes returned it as he handed the signs of his new rank over to him.

"Wear them well, Corporal," he said, then stepped back. "All right, training's completed for the day. All team leaders meet me in my office in half-an-hour. We need to set the new team rosters up."

He grinned wolfishly. "I want this squad in fighting shape within a week and a half. There's rumors that we're going to be going after Fouzen—and once that city's ours, we can retake the rest of Gallia. I will see you ladies and gentlemen tomorrow morning. Dismissed!"

The squad saluted, and he returned it, and then walked away. He heard Traherne barking orders behind him, and smiled.

The only thing he was worried about was the enemy. The squad would be fine.