The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (15 page)

God, please make it stop!

Meryem had never felt as comfortable by the thought of dying as she did when she awoke with her insides feeling ready to rupture. Squatting by the frosty, dormant shrubbery it took probably a good minute before she noticed that the wind was actually pretty cold on her naked behind. She wasn’t retching, but she had that horrific feeling of bad bile inside her like it might at any moment try to get out, and she was reluctant to move her body even after her bladder was all empty. She really didn’t want to throw up, since it felt like it didn’t make it better at all. If she thought she could rid herself of the noxious bile by vomiting, then by all means she would not mind the transient disgusting taste of it. Yet from recent experience, throwing up didn’t make any difference whatsoever.

Daryn was still soundly asleep
, and Meryem hoped that she wasn’t disturbing him. She kept squatting, feeling like if she got up she might upset the relatively harmonious bodily balance she had struck that kept her feeling a lot less sick than she had been when she first woke up. However, the increasing discomfort from the wind tickling and nibbling on her skin made the experience a lot less gratifying. She couldn’t squat with her pants down for the rest of the night.

Straightening he
rself slowly she pulled up her pants, sighing pitifully to herself for being so incapable of shaking off her bad gall. Was she just scared? Could her feelings of nausea just be some kind of psychotic thing, or whatever it was properly called when your brain was going bad? Was it just some kind of hysteria? Pretending to be a whore was obviously something that would be an immoral thing in and of itself, but after living this strange way for so long she doubted that she would suddenly feel sickly afraid. Besides, like the officers and Daryn had said, she wasn’t going to actually do something dirty or wrong. That couldn’t be it. She had been close enough to Russian soldiers to be molested, raped, and cut open, yet that had never bothered her to the extent that she would feel sick. It might be an infection of some kind. Maybe she needed to see a doctor?
Maybe I’m dying
… It felt like she just might be.

The noise of the wind across the plain was a little bit annoying, and she didn’t find this kind of living interesting anymore. Her first weeks of nomadic life had been great fun and all, but now peeing out in the plain was just normal; there was no gratification, and she had begun to miss bathing and just doing simple things like combing her hair and maybe even practicing her needlework—she was still so bad at it that she could never hope to teach a child. Hopefully she wouldn’t have a bunch of daughters to teach—she had no doubt that sons were easier and better just from her own experience growing up.

All her excitement about doing quirky or strange things had been replaced by some degree of apathy. The sight of nature without buildings, streetlights, or any other faint reminder of civilization didn’t make an impact on her anymore. The plain was just a dark, empty space and the wind was blowing really cold this time of year. The freezing pressure from the chilling wind prompted her to crawl back under the rudimentary bedding, and to help warm her hands as quickly as possible she stuffed them down her pants to try to take some of the heat from her thighs to heat them up.

There was still time left to sleep before they would have to be off, but she had trouble sleeping, and not sleeping didn’t help with the recurring nausea.
Maybe she simply was a coward like Daryn seemed to think. Maybe it was her girlishness that was catching up with her. As much as she wanted to pretend, she would never be a fearless warrior like Daryn. They were just different and she didn’t have a warrior’s manly soul. She was his wife, the person who should stand behind him and give him the comfort and support he needed while he was being heroic. Brave and fearless wives were the ones who held the fort while their warrior husbands were away and they would wait patiently until they would return home in victory or not at all—heroic martyrs left to rot on a distant battlefield. She had seen that in movies, and like any girl she had learned about female resilience in school from the plethora of historical examples going back to ancient times of bearing any necessary sacrifice for the good cause. Yet other than Tomoe Gozen, what inspirational example was there of the manly kind of courage and strength in womankind? What kind of female warrior saints were there? None at all. The only woman venerated as a war god was probably Tomoe Gozen, but there had to be dozens of individual war gods beside the collective spirits of all the National Martyrs.

Meryem really had to fall asleep, but the more she tried to focus on doing just that, the more she realized that she was actually completely awake. Just that quick walk over to the frozen shrubbery and a quick pee, and now it was like she had been up and about for hours with no trace of drowsy sleepiness in her body. It was so hard to fall asleep, and she tried to just shut her eyes hard and clear her head. Counting. Waiting.
Damn it!
It wasn’t working at all.

She didn’t have a watch, so it was hard to tell how long she had been trying to fall asleep. Maybe she just needed a bit of water, so she crawled out over to one of the saddles on the ground, hoping that it hadn’t all frozen solid now when the night was so cold. The saddle had one of the several canteens lying beside it, and she picked it up, feeling the water move and slosh inside it as s
he unscrewed the cap and took a drink. The horrible taste made her cough and almost drop the stainless steel canteen to the ground, spitting and retching from the disgusting shock to her throat. Vodka. It tasted so horrible.

Yet as
she began to screw the cap back on, her hand instinctively stopped. She hesitated for a moment, shuddering from the lingering taste of awful in her throat before she began screwing the cap the other way, and once she had opened the canteen again, she quickly took several deep gulps. Once she was ready for it, the taste was not that bad as long as she was drinking. After several deep consecutive mouthfuls she stopped to let the horrible burning run through her throat. It tasted really horrible now when she had stopped imbibing the liquid, and for a few seconds of unease, she slowly figured that there was no risk that she would throw it all up again. She had no idea why men loved this kind of drink—and that was ignoring the drunkenness and all those bad things. As much as she tried to understand, it didn’t make sense to her why anybody would want to pay to drink this. Maybe they just pretended, or they were just somehow different. After all, there were people who could eat disgusting, filthy things like dog or pig.

Once she had put the canteen back where she had found it, she looked around for a different one and once she found water she drank several deep gulps
before she sat down on the cold frosty ground. The water in the metal canteen was icy to the point where it almost hurt to drink it, but it was liquid enough to drink, at least for now. She hated really cold weather like in the winter when water just froze off into stupid ice and you had to warm it up just to drink.

While she sat idle on the ground the cold frost on the ground slowly melted against the warmth from her buttocks through her pants, and the faint, biting cold had a go at her butt again. However, coupled with the lingering, disgusting taste from the liquor, the sting on her buttocks helped take her mind of the nausea. Was it over? For now? Maybe vodka was a good medicine.

It was not all that cold, and the dark sky was illuminated by an endless scattering of stars, and the less she had to bother about her body, the more she could just enjoy the slight burning on her buttocks from the frosty ground and look up at the dark blanket shrouding the world. It was pretty, like art. She had all sorts of ideas about why the sky looked like it did, and there were countless songs, poems, and stories about its origins. The exact reason was not really that relevant, and she knew that the folk stories were untrue, since God had created the world and everything in it, yet you could still allow yourself to ask pointless questions about why the sky looked like it did. It was a bit like asking why Russians looked the way they did. That was one of the strange things about the world. Russians were so profoundly different, and she didn’t understand why. Whatever the reason, the Europeans had spread far away from their homelands, and somehow that included passing over the great barrier between Europe and Asia, the towering Ural Mountains God had put to help cartographers tell where Europe ended and Natural Japan began.

Europe had conquered the whole world from
India, America, Africa, and too much of Asia. Japan was the singular anomaly, a non-European country that had not been dominated by the European Christians. And while Japan was a large power in its own right that stood against the barbaric enemy, what if they would lose? The British were sure to want to expand their colonies. Maybe southern Japan would be a part of India? Russia would probably want Shinkyou, Mongolia, and Manchuria. It was easy to take a map and divide the country between the insatiable Europeans like they had divided the rest of the world between them from Alaska Province in the northwestern Americas to Central Asia.

And there were so few of them! There was more than ten hundred million people in Japan, and how many Europeans were there? She remembered
one of her teachers saying that there were five hundred million white devils. Five hundred million! And still they owned almost the whole world apart from Japan and wanted to take the rest of it. She didn’t get it; they were just greedy for the sake of being greedy. There had to be more than enough room for them in America and Europe without bothering the rest of the world, but that didn’t stop them from putting their grubby little feet on other people’s land. For as long as Meryem could remember, she had known that there would be a holy war between Japan and the impious Occident. It was just a matter of fact, a result of natural law as some wise legalist scholars had said.
Evil can’t leave goodness alone…
She had never been very good at memorizing the famous writings of Kaei Era, Meiji Era, Taisho Era, and Contemporary Era scholars, so she had only at most remembered the ideas, and before the war she had actually not really thought too much about Japan’s destined holy war. The knowledge of the inevitable war had been lurking in the background far away from her daily life. Although she should worry, she had always known that no one could ever beat the Imperial Army, so there wasn’t any real reason for her to fret about that. As long as people were good and loyal, Japan was unbeatable even by all the evil nations of the world put together.

The weather
was getting warmer as winter was giving way, and while she was happy to see the end of the cold, she did not feel like it mattered all that much. She just wanted to sleep, yet she didn’t feel sleepy at all. She felt like she was all ready to go, even though dawn had to be hours away. Why couldn’t she will herself to fall asleep? Berating herself for not being able to just doze off, she started to quietly sob, so tired of everything. Why couldn’t she just go to sleep already?!

A sudden acid surge burning up through her throat made her press her hands to her chest in a vai
n attempt to get the pain away. The uncomfortable feeling from her hand grazing the outside of her jacket over her breast reminded her of the soreness. She had been acting up lately, and she hoped it was just an odd cold. Maybe it was acting somehow in concert with the recurring bleeding and discomfort that was an annoying part of adult life and had required small adjustments out here. In Tekika she had worn kimono dresses most of the time after she left school, but now she wore Russian pants except on occasions when they stopped and she was afforded an opportunity to change into a dress that was not particularly pretty.

As she crawled down into the bedding, she could feel that the vod
ka had reached her fingertips. Rubbing them against each other felt good. Really good. It was soothing, and as she tried to fall asleep, she kept rubbing her numb fingertips together, quietly humming an old Japanese children’s song she had learned in school about a bird going into town and getting run over by a tram.

Heinz looked out over the field, watching for the possible sudden appearance of the enemy. The breastworks were part of the big network of fortifications called the Gneisenau Line that had been built as an impenetrable barrier to keep the French from invading Burgundy, Lothringen, and Luxemburg along the western frontier. Small parts of Burgundy, Lothringen, and Luxemburg were on the wrong side of the line because of the geography the engineers had taken into account when they first started building the modern Line eighteen years ago and were in enemy hands until they could be liberated at some point in the future. The fortified line had to be sustainable, and the military engineers who had constructed the fortifications had built them to utilize the landscape to good effect. The enormous network of small bunkers, trenches, and blockhouses were supported by minefields and artillery emplacement, and as the war had gone on the line had been deepened to militarize large sections of Burgundy and Luxemburg, particularly with the French advances into Luxemburg last year when Heinz had thought for a moment that it might have been possible that the line would be completely penetrated at the northern end and they had all been waiting and listening to the distant sound of shells from the hard fighting to the north of them.

The Bisanz Sector to the west of the capital of Burgundy it had been named after had been quiet throughout most of the war, and Heinz was thankful that the French had made no great attempts to attack it since he had been called up and sent to a regiment stationed in this quiet sector of the Line. Early on in the war the French had attacked the sector fiercely, but they had been fought back and their gains annulled by the counteroffensive that had stabilized the frontline at this part of the front at the prewar Line.

The regiment had been fighting in the East before he was called up, and he thought it was probably for the better that he had ended up so far from home. His home city had been just a hundred miles or so from the farthest the Russians had come before they were pushed out of the Province of South Prussia last year, and it seemed a lot better to be assigned to the Gneisenau Line than to take part in fighting the great Asian horde in the East like most of the soldiers had to do. It seemed like the worst the Frenchies could do was bomb the shit out of the Line, but so far his particular sector had been in the shadow of the neighboring sector which featured the path the engineers had designed for the enemy to use, and the most serious attacks from the French had been up in Luxemburg at the feet of the Ardennes.

The basic idea of the Line was to force the French through strongpoints that would bleed them along the way, and after the French had been turned back in a sector near the Swiss border last summer the newspapers had proclaimed that an excess of a quarter of a million French casualties had resulted in smaller German casualties before the French were forced to break off their offensive and the Line was refortified along its original lines after the counterattacked returned the front to basically its pre-offensive state. As far as Heinz and just about any right-thinking German was concerned, it had been a great victory that had shown the frogs that they were no better soldiers than the miserable wops or the Asiatic hordes of Russia.

Heinz had some vague understanding of the plan for his own sector, although the more intricate details were obviously unknown to him since there was no way—or need—for him to know what everyone was supposed to be doing. The soldiers were rotated within the deep defense network, and every third week was spent in barracks in the town of Bisanz which was by far the most pleasant week in the rotation. It was a much quainter place than his hometown and clearly the sort of town where you could enjoy the greenery and not be distracted by an assortment of disgusting smells. Lodsch was an industrial city, and Heinz had lived in his parents’ crowded little apartment before he was drafted to serve in the 204th Infantry Regiment, one of the three prewar regiments of Lodsch—which had apparently been quite augmented with several reserve regiments raised in the city and the neighboring districts. There was nothing about the city of Lodsch to like, and any man with half a brain would want desperately to get out, but would probably end up working either in the local textile industry or for the huge IG Farben works that were said to employ a hundred thousand people across the city. One of the IG Farben factories in particular smelled like they might as well be producing synthetic shit for manure, and it was impossible to tell just what all the chemical plants in the city were actually supposed to be good for, other than to put Lodsch in the running as possibly the biggest chemical city in the world—and the world’s dirty asshole. As if that was supposed to be some damn proud distinction.

Heinz’s older brother Gottfried had been injured when the regiment had fought the Russians, but he had returned to duty with the regiment’s II Battalion that was up to the north of Heinz’s I Battalion at the moment. Presumably, if the frogs would attack, it would be bad for the future virility of Lodsch, though that was hardly unique to the 204th. After all, pretty much all regiments were recruited from catchment areas that would mean that if a regiment would be wiped out, it would be devastating to a whole generation in one particular geographic area. There had been newspaper stories and just rumors to that effect about this rural district or that town being badly depopulated after a regiment had taken horrendous casualties.

It wasn’t fun to just look across the field for any frogs that might come and attack. Presumably air reconnaissance and broader intelligence might detect a big offensive before an army of charging Frenchies would suddenly pop up in Heinz’s field of vision, but he had no idea how much he could really depend on that. The inaction in the sector was a pretty nice thing, yet Heinz didn’t relax. How could he? This place was only a safe and quiet sector as long as the French didn’t attack. If they would launch a big offensive, then it would become a battleground and not a safe place at all to be. All sectors that weren’t being assaulted were peaceful, but only until they weren’t anymore. It was impossible to know what the enemy was up to, and all they could do was to keep on their toes and relish the news from Italy and Russia. Particularly Italy, since if the French were fighting there, then they might be reluctant to undertake massive operations around the Gneisenau Line. Better the Austros and the boys in Army Group Lombardy take all the punches than Heinz and his comrades. If the shoe had been on the other foot he had no doubt some guy down in Lombardy would think the exact same way about the men being chewed up in Burgundy.

“No frogs out there?” a cheerful voice asked, prompting Heinz to look over his shoulder and stop looking out with the periscope sticking up past the edge.

The observation post was intended to give some time for the gunners and artillery observers to get a head start if the French would attack, but it wasn’t clear what might happen to Heinz and the other forward observers. There were dozens of such posts along the sector’s front, and it was dull work, and it was sort of like being sent out as a human shield in front of the main fortifications.

“None so far,” Heinz mumbled when he saw Lehmann puffing on his pipe while taking a bit of a leisure stroll through the trench.

Friedrich Lehmann was originally from the same neighborhood, and Heinz had vague memories of him from school. Lehmann’s father had a successful little neighborhood bank, and he was a respectable member of the community, or at least as respectable as his lot might be. Despite the man’s gregarious and kind demeanor, Heinz didn’t particularly like him. The Lehmanns were bloodsuckers who didn’t care whose money they got away with, and it was impossible for Heinz to separate Fritz Lehmann from his father’s ruthlessly exploitative business that was built around making money off the poorest people around.

“I wish it’d get warmer soon,” Fritz said as he absentmindedly stepped up to the breastwork and just barely managed to peek out over the top with his own eyes rather than use the periscope.

The trench was deep and allowed for a short man to walk through it leisurely without keeping his head down to stay in cover from the field the French would have to come through. The machinegun emplacements and barbed wire rather than ordinary rifle fire was intended to delay any Frenchies that would try to come at the position while the radio operators would be calling in fire from the big guns miles back behind them.

The barbed wire and mines coupled with tank traps would hopefully slow down the enemy while mortar and artillery fire would savage them before the machineguns could join in and stop them dead in their tracks or at least bleed them badly before they would advance farther through the series of perimeters. The steep hillsides and virtually impassable slopes would force the attackers to run through the prepared ambush sites that were intended to become the scenes of slaughter if the enemy ever tried his luck. Heinz was only vaguely familiar with the basic tactics the French had used somewhat successfully to overcome what should be similarly well-planned and prepared defenses to the north, and they had taken a good shelling more than once in the past from French artillery—that was the worst Heinz had experienced so far and he hoped that there wouldn’t be any more of those unpleasant hours just praying and waiting for the guns to stop. It was rather frightening to think that an artillery shell could be fired from miles and miles away from its target, and as far as Heinz could tell, artillery was the worst mass-killing device ever designed by man.

The newspapers were good at quoting estimations of enemy losses inspired by foreign correspondents in Paris, and if they were true, it looked like France was bleeding itself dry in Italy rather than up here. Even in a time of war, it was impossible for the Frenchies to completely mask their losses, and the reporting of American and English journalists was picked up by German foreign correspondents and reported in newspapers back in Germany. That was where the most reliable information seemed to come from since the Imperial War Information Office was bound to have a big old portion of wishful thinking in its own estimations.

“You ever been to Paris?” Fritz asked before he took another puff on his pipe, turning his head to look down at the soldier.

“No,” Heinz said as he continued to disinterestedly look through the periscope, slowly sweeping back and forth to cover his part of the field.

“It’s a dirty city,” Fritz said. “Dirty, and chaotic. Streets everywhere. As hard as it is to believe, Lodsch is a much nicer place.”

That was indeed hard to believe. Lodsch was a damn shithole, and Lehmann had to know that as well as anybody. Although Heinz could accept that Paris wasn’t much better, no place in the whole wide world could be dirtier and more disgusting than Lodsch. It was like something out of a dystopic novel come to life as a powerful argument against the modern, dirty world.

Fritz had traveled a bit before the war. In fact, he had returned from America just after the war started and had then been promptly called up from his place in the reserves. Since his graduation from Friedrich Wilhelm III University in Warsaw back in 1932 he had spent much of the time when he wasn’t working traveling the globe like a modern trekker, spending weeks and months in cities and countries far away from Lodsch. He had no interest in banking, and he worked for his father as a matter of familial obligation rather than any desire to follow in his footsteps. Although his father might dream of becoming a Max Warburg, a Fritz Thyssen, or some other financial bigwig, Fritz was content with just enough money to travel the world. Money was just money, and it didn’t do anybody good to rake it up into a huge pile and just sit on it. There was so much to spend it on that would make life worth living.

“Damn Frenchies,” he mumbled, smiling as he imagined the different places he could be rather than here.

New York was pretty dirty too, but he would have liked to see more of America before his father insisted that he return home, and the war had naturally prevented him from going anywhere ever since. His diary was filled with different places he wanted to go ranging from the Cameroons to Rio de Janeiro to Australia to the eastern reaches of the Orient.

“Did you see Second Lieutenant Siegfried’s girl?” the little NCO asked, seemingly oblivious of Heinz’s complete disinterest in anything the little ponce had to say.

The smarmy little piece of
—

“No,” Heinz answered, keeping his eyes firmly on the landscape shown through the mirrors of the periscope to act busy in the hope that Lehmann would move along.

“She’s pretty,” Fritz said, genuinely impressed by the appearance of the new Mrs. Siegfried. “Far too pretty for
Doctor
Siegfried.”

Fritz would have assumed that everyone had seen the photo from Siegfried’s wedding since he had been quite happy to show it even to the enlisted men. Siegfried was a good man, and Fritz had been very happy to find that he was not the sort of officer he dreaded since he did his one year military service before he attended university in Warsaw. Fritz was on good terms with most of his fellow non-commissioned officers, and he enjoyed talking to Siegfried who was also a university graduate, although he had been a reserve officer rather than a reserve NCO like Fritz. Even if Fritz might be slothful, he liked to discuss philosophy and history, and Siegfried and Sergeant Weiner were excellent opponents and allies in an argument depending on the issue. Weiner was probably the most serious thinker in the whole company when it came to philosophy, so it was quite a challenge to try to argue with him when he was clearly wrong. Siegfried was a lawyer, so Fritz enjoyed referring to him as doctor on account of his doctorate. After all, if you considered some of the men who were commissioned officers, it had to be a bigger distinction to earn a law doctorate.