The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (11 page)

Shinkyou Province
was very different from most of Japan. Only a small fraction of the population was Kazakh, and most of the people were from other minority peoples, but there were a lot of Chuuka too, especially in Tekika where most people were Chuuka. She had quickly learned that the way she talked with her siblings and parents had little currency in the rest of the city where almost everyone spoke the Patriotic Language. As she had grown older she had been addressed by her father in Japanese rather than the language she had imbibed from her mother, and once she had started school Japanese was the only language she spoke with people who weren’t family.

When she
had finished school at the age of twelve she spent most of the time looking after her younger siblings alongside the family nurse. It had been by sheer accident that she stumbled across Daryn when Father had taken her and her younger sister Kulyash to meet a nice old man. He had had three sons, and Daryn was one of them. However, he had not been the one her father had been interested in for her sake—it was Daryn’s older brother who had been in need of a wife. She had quickly realized that Daryn’s older brother was not nearly as magnetic as Daryn, and she had since become sure that God had meant for her to be Daryn’s wife long in advance. His uniform with its epaulettes and stiff collar and his foreign air had aroused her interest in getting to know him and she had started to write him in secret, and even when he had gone to Russia the first time he had sent her letters telling her how pretty the country was and had promised to take her there.

And now here they were
, husband and wife. Sure, this wasn’t the Russia he had promised to show her when he had written about the majestic country, but Petersburg would have to wait. Maybe after the war she could go there and see it for herself, if there would still be something left to see after the Imperial Army had seized it. She didn’t necessarily hate the white devils, and Daryn had described the big cities in Europe like Petersburg and Kiev in both letters and words that still made her want to see those places with her own eyes.

In some ways
she still felt like she was still thirteen even though it was ages ago by now, and she had known her dear husband for nearly five years, for much of that time dreading having to marry another man than the one God had picked out for her. At some point while she had been sleeping out in the steppe the past month she had turned eighteen, but she didn’t feel like she was that old. She felt more like she was still fifteen, still as childish as she had been when she had thrown a fit when Daryn had gone off to Russia again, again without bringing her. His return right before the war had prompted her to force herself away from just reading, drawing, and jotting down bad poetry on her own to become his fellow traveler and make him take her away from her father. She had stoutly refused to listen when he had warned her that it was dangerous to come with him, and she had managed to convince him to let her come and be by his side. Her father had been negotiating with a rich camel breeder in a village far from the city, and the timing of the war had been like God had invited her to escape being a rich old widower’s new wife. She didn’t want to be the wife of a man who was not brave and manly like Daryn, even if he was very rich and owned hundreds of camels. Despite the irregular way of living with so many small inconveniences, she was sure that it was all a long string of events concocted by fate that had led her to where she was right now. Perhaps it was not the most wifely thing to be taught how to use a gun or practice riding, but she had learned the basics as they had set out to meet the other officers across the border when she for the first time had left her native city, prefecture, county, province, and even the Empire itself. The revolver Daryn had given her was perhaps not the thing most wives would expect to receive after their wedding, but she was eager to show that he had not made a mistake in letting her come along rather than let her become another man’s wife.

She couldn’t tell her family where she was going, so she had said that she
and Daryn were going to Africa for a short time. Things had not really been all that tranquil after her revolt, and so she understood that Mommy and Father did not quite think of her as their child anymore. It was bad to not listen to your father, but she was sure that if she could tell him all that she and Daryn had done he would weep tears of joy and forgive everything she had done. Father had always said that you should obey the Emperor, and she was sure that the Emperor would be absolutely excited that she was out here doing her best to help His soldiers beat the evil Russians rather than be the mistress of a camel breeder’s household.

Father was sure to love her more than ever for it
and regret ever laying a hand on her and saying those very hurtful things, and her mother would probably be happy anyway. Wasn’t that sort of how women worked? She wasn’t sure, but she thought so. At least most women. Maybe not her, but Meryem wasn’t ordinary, so she couldn’t really tell. How many women were working for the government as soldiers behind enemy lines?

The train station was a chao
tic scene as curious onlookers tried to get a glimpse of the large metal monstrosities arrayed on top of the large cargo cars slowly passing through the station, each of the fierce steel tractors topped with a cannon tower that drew hundreds of people eager to see with their own eyes what they had only seen in pictures before. On top of some of the cars on the passing train were large gun emplacements surrounded by sandbags manned by soldiers wearing helmets. Train cars built for passengers as well as freight were packed with men in tan-colored tunics and long winter coats heading off bravely to the frontier, and boys in particular tried to run up as close to the trains as they could get and try to wave or shout at the soldiers who waved back at them.

The trains rolled through the station day and night, and civilian traffic had been almost completely shut down. The trains headed towards the en
d of the tracks in Dushanbe, Altay City, and the other staging areas where the newly organized divisions were being deployed to bolster the frontlines, and Tekika was a major crossroads between both the western frontier of the mountain ranges and the northern frontier just at the border between Shinkyou Province and Great Mongolia Province.

Mos
t of the people in the crowd trying to see this passing train with its military cargo of soldiers, tanks, and large freight cars that were presumable loaded with weapons or ammunition were boys who had stopped on their way to school, prepared to be scolded and perhaps swatted for being late but too curious to see the weapons and soldiers to ignore the sight. Since the trains usually would pass through the station at night and with the station lamps turned off, it was something of a sight to be able to see the large mysterious “tanks” that were lined up on open cars. The “elephant tractors” looked so mysterious, but helpful pictures in newspapers, newsletters, magazines, and motion pictures as well explained the powerful machines and how they would crush the white devils under their tracks. The newspapers had printed helpful articles explaining that the ingenious machines would destroy the evil enemy, and how quickly the sophisticated machines were assembled in the big factories in Mongolia and Manchuria by the thousands.

The children became very excited and waved
back to the soldiers hanging out of windows and waving towards them, delighted by the spectacle of all the little patriots cheering for the men, and the children and the soldiers seemed to excite each other. The children that had learned enough Chinese characters could spell out the patriotic slogans written on the cars, and many boys would shout them proudly at the trains.

Isuzu was far from the only girl who had been drawn by
curiosity to walk outside the row of small shops facing the railroad tracks. Although most of the children down close to the long train passing through were waving at the soldiers, she waved a quick “hello” over at other merchants who had gone outside to look rather than to wait for customers since most of the pedestrians around the district had stopped to cheer on the soldiers. Most soldiers on the train were sure to come from the villages, towns, and cities of central Japan, far from the desolate northwest, and Isuzu had never really thought much about outsiders before now, despite her parents having come to Tekika as young settlers from Central Chuuka so far from here.

She knew that there were soldiers from Tekika too
who had left for the front. As soon as Ota had received his letter back in July, their marriage had been oddly interrupted only a few short months after they had made their vows before his ancestors and she had been accepted into the family. It was very kind of Ota’s father to let her return to help her mother since her in-laws did not need her nearly as much as her beloved mother. Ever since father died her mother had needed the help of her children, and with her big brother Sekiji called up like her husband, someone had to help out in the small shop and look after the family.

Seeing the large, ominous tractors and cannons was both a reason to be intrigued and curious for someone like Isuzu, but she was also reminded that there was a reason why they were heading out to the distant frontier to join Ota and the
others who were already there. The newsreels from Altay City had made her realize just how dangerous the war was, and she had been patriotic enough to write a heartfelt wish on Ota’s war flag that she hoped he would kill as many white devils as he had to and that he would return safe and proud to his patriotic wife a devil-slayer. She knew that the villages in Altay and even parts of Altay City and other settlements had been burned down by the Russians, cattle and humans slaughtered en masse. The moving pictures of stacks of human corpses, dead townspeople murdered by the barbarian invaders and their horrific flying machines had made a strong, discomforting impression on her, and she pushed aside all her complaints about her husband and big brother being called up and wished that they would make the family, their country, and the Emperor proud.

For all her life, she had never quite seen anything like the destruction the newsreels in the theater
had showed from up north, and it was very distressing to think that Tekika was not that far from the horrific devils. She had no time to help work to avenge the dead, however. Her husband and brother would have to settle the score with the white devils on her behalf while she patiently waited for their victorious return. With her younger siblings and sick mother to help—as well as Sekiji’s pregnant wife—she could not do the right thing and serve the country herself. That was why she hoped that Ota, Sekiji, and everyone else who went to fight would quickly kill the foreign devils and come back home, safe and sound.

“Oh, good morning young lady,” an old woman said, Isuzu jumping a little from the sudden appearance of a customer while she was standing in the doorway like a lazy silly girl looking down at the train station.

She excitedly led the way into the shop, eager to make a bit of business from the woman. Every customer counted, and she hoped to make a sen or even just a couple of rin with each customer. Ten little one rin coins made for a sen, and with just a hundred sen to the yen, a five rin coin was quite valuable. In a day she was bound to get several five rin coins from customers who bought small things, and each yen, sen, and rin was important.

The large group of uniformed men had gathered down in the hall as soon as a lieut
enant had spotted the car driving up into the courtyard of the wing of the large complex where the large department had its offices. Junior and senior officers alike had hurried, like giddy little boys down the stairs to the chamber just inside the brick building. It might be unprofessional to be rushing about like children, but many of the officers had kept themselves awake with wine, tobacco, and drying rice balls while they had been going over photos, maps, meteorological data, and surveys of land, infrastructure, and so forth to finish the work on time, and they were eager to know what the Emperor thought about their work.

There were thousands of individual variables that had to be taken into acc
ount, and it had taken three weeks of hard work for the plan to be reworked by the officers working not only in General Planning, but also the commands of the armies and army groups in question. A group of generals had even traveled to meet with several of the generals to assess the local readiness of all army groups, their armies, corps, and divisions. Once the readiness, meteorological data, troop numbers, intelligence on the enemy, and everything else had been gathered together, a feasible plan could be formulated that went much farther into detail than something done in all haste.

Sugahito had been worried about the supply of munitions and fuel, but it seemed that he had underestimated the continuous storage of supplies in the large network of depots throughout Shinkyou and Mongolia
where supplies had been sent through for months in preparation for an inevitable offensive. Even when there was no immediate need, it had been apparent that there would be an offensive at some point, and preparations had been almost constant since the close of the Altay Campaign all the way back in the first six months of the war declaration. The army groups had much of their necessary supply already in place and were being continuously rearmed with ammunition, guns, and food to be put into depots for the future.

The final
revised plan which Supreme General Shirokuchi and the other senior generals had approved was classified, but thanks to Sugahito’s position as a senior member of the group he had been reading it since the supreme general left to present it to His Majesty for personal approval just two hours ago over at his palace just across the temporary buildings cluttering Tenanmon Square.

13
fresh divisions would move into southwestern Russian Turkestan and puncture the base of the enemy defenses just north of the Tenshan Mountains before they would move to secure the territory between the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea. The Russians were expected to have defenses in the region amounting to about half the strength of the Japanese troops, and together with the experienced mountaineers, the reinforced army group would finish the job of routing the enemy troops still holding on to the mountains. The Western Sector would receive almost 300,000 troops with a reserve of 6 cavalry divisions and 2 mechanized divisions, bringing up the total forces in the Western Army Group to well over half a million.

In the Baikal Sector
to the west of Yakutia, 21 divisions, mechanized, infantry, and cavalry, just short of 480,000 troops would secure Irkutsk and roll up the enemy line towards the Arctic north with the bulk being dedicated to supporting the primary push towards Krasnoyarsk and to support the central attack while using the Russian railroads to optimize their transport westwards before they would link up with the troops attacking farther west.

58 divisions with over one and a quarter million men—almost a third of the present manpower of the combat elements of the troops in the border region—would advan
ce up towards Novonikolayevsk and the other major cities in Central Turkestan and Western Siberia, but as the units would move into Russia they would splinter into half a dozen distinct advances spreading out across the wide landscape to secure cities, towns, villages, and strategic targets like railroads, bridges, and airfields.

The remaining 46 divisions—a million
-odd troops—would remain in defensive and reserve positions while the three separate advances would aim to force the Russians to abandon their strongholds to keep from being enveloped and destroyed completely. The estimate was that combat and the long travel would require several months before the operation could be a success, but several benchmarks had been chosen at which time the Staff had prepared the next phases for individual subsectors of the larger sectors of the borderland.

Unfortunately, experience and history taught Sugahito and the rest of the Staff that all plans were preliminary, and weather, fighting, and even chafes and depleted stores could drastically hamper a good plan. If a great plan was all it took, then the initial invasion
of Central Turkestan should have been much more successful than it had been. Only the swift retreat into central Shinkyou had saved the Imperial Army from losing almost a fifth of its entire peacetime strength, and Russian folly had allowed the troops to retain their footing near the original border between the two countries in the west while the army had continuously been securing and occupying Russia east of Lake Baikal, including Yakutia up in the extreme north where a regiment of camel cavalry had left its scent at the Lena Delta where that long and mighty river poured its water into the Arctic Sea.

The new plan was bold, but it depended on the army, corps, and division commanders t
o be capable of following the overall plan rather than try to make up their own minds too much. If His Majesty would approve of the plan, then the plan would be distributed as was already being prepared for by some of the junior clerks who were in the process of copying the orders and sealing the copies in anticipation of sending couriers out to the airfield to have them flown to Shinkyou, Mongolia, and Eastern Siberia for distribution.

The air generals would probably enjo
y the order that perhaps as soon as within six weeks, they would be allowed to begin hostilities in earnest by going on bombing runs all along the front to target bridges, roads, arms dumps, and enemy forces directly. In particular the areas around Verniy, Akmolinsk, Irkutsk, Omsk, Tobolsk, Novonikolayevsk, and Tomsk would be targeted, but there were plenty of specific small targets which the Intelligence Department and Air Corps Command had picked out from reconnaissance all throughout Russia. The plan included the “disablement” of all rail connection from Orenburg and Yekaterinburg in the west to all towns, villages, cities, and military positions east of the Urals, and that was a fairly tall order.

The just over 21,000 combat aircraft the
Air Corps had at this moment could not all be utilized because of the lack of airfields and local infrastructure, as well as the poor weather conditions and just the number of available airmen. However, the air generals had strict lists of priorities laid out by the plan and were subordinated to the corps commands they were attached to in the field. The engineers would have to repair and claim all airfields they would come across to allow the Imperial Army to more effectively employ its aircraft, and airfields had been a particular concern for the Air Corps since the Russians had very few airfields across the wide regions, and on both sides of the frontier engineers had been busy building airfields, although the Russians had within just a few short months of the war—particularly after the Altay Campaign and its far more important contemporary, the Russian invasion of South Prussia in Germany—withdrawn most of their ground attack and escort aircraft from Asia after launching some aerial strikes on civilian cities and infrastructure in Japan early on. The short, punitive strategic bombing offensive had remained quite short, and the Air Corps had been able to claim victory not only for managing to shoot down some hundreds of enemy aircraft, but also for the enemy calling off the campaign of wanton air terror. The Russians and the French were a cowardly and barbaric bunch, and apparently enemy aircrews were liable to be summarily executed if they were shot down and captured alive in Japan—the censors had had to suppress certain photographs to avoid national humiliation.

Sugahito was quite
proud of the comprehensively reworked plan they had come up with in such short time through the painstaking labor of the men. However, he was very aware of the sore lack of reliable intelligence about the exact position and strength of the Russians, and intelligence was still quite bad on account of the difficulty of documenting such a wide area of operations through aerial surveillance. The plan therefore detailed a relatively slow advance with well-protected flanks and large reserves close to the frontline units, although there was always that worry that the army group commanders or their subordinate commanders would begin to ignore the plan and do what they pleased instead. Sugahito remembered how eager officers had been when Japan had proclaimed its intention to invade Ottoman Arabia, and even senior officers had competed for the honor of taking villages and being the first unit to reach a particular point. Men could be a bit too keen sometimes.

The original plan had been worked out over months
based on careful analysis of the projected resources of each division at every time, and the revised plan had kept some of the underlying assumptions and figures that had been made based on existing reports from the Weather Bureau, the War Industries Commission, the Intelligence Department, the Central Army War College, and dozens of other military and civilian agencies and bodies with important input. The reworked plan might not have been the kind that Sugahito would have wanted to present to His Majesty, but it did feel like a good plan given the short time they had to come up with it. The recent report of the Austrians holding the Russians fairly decently in Austrian Galicia had tempered the feeling of immediate urgency, but if the Austrians would break, things could quickly turn bad in Europe with a contagion of collapses and breakthroughs.

As the officers crowded around the doors in anticipation to see their supreme general, Sugahito was reminded of some kind of event from his youth with giddy students waiting to surprise a comrade right inside his dormitory after a rumor that he had been with a girl. This was just a tad bit more serious, but the mischievous feel to the crowd seemed quite similar.

Just as soon as the guards opened the doors and the supreme general, Hoshi, and the other generals came in they stopped, no doubt surprised to meet such a reception on the other side of the doors. There were officers and clerks, men of all ages as well as even a few young female clerical assistants crowding the stairs and the upper floor overlooking the hall. Of the thousands involved in the making of the plan, these were the people who were aware of the true significance of the work. Most of the meteorologists, clerks, officials, and officers across the country had simply provided standard, regular information that might or might not seem to have any significance at all to them. These people on the other hand all had some idea of the nature of the plan the Emperor had been presented with by the supreme general on behalf of the General Planning Department and its big wartime brother, the Operational Department.

The
supreme general had to be surprised to see so many officers look at him like little schoolchildren waiting to hear an announcement by their respected teacher. Was he going to flunk them all? Hoshi looked a little embarrassed, but he was too shy to order the crowd to disband.

“What did His Majesty decide, sir?” a man asked from the back
, about as polite as you could be under the circumstances.

Sugahito had no idea who the man was
who made the rude inquiry, but it felt like his impatience was speaking for the whole group. The old supreme general nodded with a humorless smile on his face, surely enjoying the spectacle of facing the big crowd like this.

“Gentlemen... His Majesty is very pleased with your hard work, and I wish to thank all of you for your devotion that h
as received His approval. Thank you all.”

The
supreme general ended his thank you with a bow to the crowd, and what should have been a moment of deep reflection and awe instead led to a reaction more like he had delivered the news that the war had suddenly been won. The crowd clapped their hands loudly, the loud noise in such a cramped space becoming almost deafening with applause and cheers.

“Long live His Majesty,” one man cried near Sugahit
o’s defenseless left ear, and other men joined in, chanting the same patriotic cheer.

Everyone—even the skeptical kind
—had to be pleased to hear that His Majesty had endorsed their plan and justified their exhausting work to refit the massive offensive to a new schedule. Like enthusiastic children, the grown men were eager to see all their work turn into concrete results, but for a minute they were allowed their childish celebrating.