That was pretty much a given. Cavalrymen couldn't be trained quickly, the way infantrymen and artillerymen could. In the nature of things, in the seventeenth century, most people who already had the horsemanship skills to serve in cavalry units came from the nobility. The lower nobility, as a rule-what Germans called the Niederadel as opposed to the much smaller Hochadel class comprised mostly of dukes and counts. But such men still considered themselves part of the aristocracy and most of them were not friendly to the Stearns administration that had governed the USE since its formation.

So, the USE army had always found it difficult to enlist as many cavalrymen as they would have liked. The new nation's army made up for it by having what they considered the continent's best infantry and artillery.

Duerr liked to suck on a pipe instead of chewing a lip, when he was pondering something. Mike found it annoying, not because tobacco smoke irritated him particularly but because Ulbrecht was not smoking. Very rarely did he actually fill his pipe with tobacco and light it up. Instead, he just sucked-and sucked and sucked and sucked-on an empty pipe.

So be it. Mike had found good staff officers to be a lot like computer geeks. Handy to have around, as a rule, and occasionally indispensable; but also given to gross personal habits.

"I'll strip one of the new artillery companies from the Teutoburg Regiment. That'll give Higgins four guns, which ought to be plenty. And we can strip a couple of the heavy weapons units from them as well, which will provide him with the additional mortars he wants."

Leebrick made a face. "Brigadier von Taupadel is going to raise bloody hell. Not to mention Leos Hlavacek! That's his regiment you're proposing to skin. It won't help any that he ranks Higgins."

Unlike every other regimental commander in the Third Division, Jeff was a lieutenant colonel instead of a colonel. He was the only lieutenant colonel in the entire USE army, in fact. The title was not officially recognized in the army's table of organization. Mike Stearns had created it as a brevet rank when he set up the Hangman Regiment-which was also not part of the T/O.