The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (31 page)

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Michael was having trouble keeping his eyes open, and it was getting painful. He had been awake for more than a whole day, but once the company had swished through the entrenchments and traps, things were looking a lot less dangerous. He still felt like he was in no condition to go on like this, however. Whenever he was ordered to stop he worried that he would fall asleep when the noise from the engines fell to a much lower level. He didn’t want to moan about being tired since everybody else had been awake for just as long, and they were all in desperate need for at least a damn nap, just a couple of hours or so of good, quiet rest. The tank was an older model, not the new better armed and armored things that were slowly replacing the old ones still in service, and the worst part of it was the uncooperative gears and his joints were aching from all the work with the pedals and the levers. When would this bloody nightmare be over so he could get some well-earned sleep?

They weren’t the tip of the vanguard, but they were not far from the leading tanks. The company, battalion, regiment, brigade, the whole division was running far past the original line. The engines had run almost constantly for 24 hours as they were rushing towards the bay
to seal in the enemy in an iron kettle. Michael didn’t need to know the exact place they were going; he was driving where the sergeant was telling him to go, and the sergeant had the instructions from his superior who had instructions from his and so on. Except for an ambush around noon, the battalion had, as far as Michael could tell, spent most of the day in that ghastly mode of transport between just going down a road and being in full-blown combat.

As they were going through the woods they were knocking over small trees and tearing through bushes, but they had to frequently stop while the sergeant was tiredly talking on the radio while gripping a map that was pretty much falling to pieces. The paper was soaked with sweat and motor oil, and he was obviously exasperated from the confusion about where they were in relation to where they were going.

Michael had no idea how Feldmann and the others in his tank were doing. The smoldering wreck had been left behind after the Russian ambush as the company sped on, and he had mouthed a quick, vain encouragement to God to let them all be fine. Mostly, Feldmann’s tank being knocked out served as a reminder of the danger they were in and it made him see yet again how quickly a single shell could turn the steel machines into immobile graves. Michael’s current
Panzerkampfwagen IV
had been knocked out twice, but it had been returned with a kiss of life from the expert craftsmen who had quickly patched it up after working their primitive field repair magic on it. The sergeant was still plastered from the slight burns he had gotten from a close shave when a hot, discarded shell had set fire to the floor inside the vehicle just a couple of days ago, and Michael had taken his empty appeals to God a lot more serious ever since when he had thought that the whole tank was going to burn up.

He had seen death before, but the feeling of panic from when the oil on the floor had ignited had left him imagining what might have happened
if the sergeant had not bolted down to help smother the flames with a wool blanket. Try as he might, he couldn’t stop picturing the flames continuing unabated until he roasted or the ammunition would ignite and blow them all to bits. The higher faculties of his mind told him that fire would blow up the ammunition and it would all be over in an instant, but the image of horrific immolation like hell of Earth was still sending shivers down his spine when he thought about it. Why did his mind have to return again and again to that hypothetical disaster?

Isuzu was hugging Atsuko and Otsu
tightly—one girl under each arm—and Atsuko’s sobbing didn’t make it easier on her to cope with her responsibility to be their stoically fearless big sister who could inspire them to shrug off anything. She kept repeating a protective mantra she had learned from the priest in her head to try to keep her mind off bad thoughts. The sudden alarm had forced her to remember where to go, and despite the confusion they had made it to the shelter so they could huddle down with their neighbors while they waited and listened to the unnerving sounds of airplane engines and the horrible explosions and tremors which—thank the gods—seemed distant. The shelter was crowded with people hiding just a few feet under the street, and there was no telling what was going on above ground. Everyone knew about the planes that had attacked the city early on in the war and had blown out a whole tenement building just a few blocks from their neighborhood and martyred scores of elderly, women, and children, but Isuzu had almost forgotten that it was even possible that it could happen again, and this time it was not her big brother who shepherded the family to the shelter. It was Isuzu—his nervous, insecure replacement.

The watchmen
had said that they would carry Mother to the shelter, but Isuzu couldn’t see her anywhere in the thick crowd squatting and sitting around in the concrete room. It was a basement with large columns holding up the heavy ceiling overhead that felt like it was not really made for people but for things. Some people had talked about bombs just as the war had been beginning, but before the first raid Isuzu had had no idea that Russia was this close to Tekika. The loud sirens and the horrible wait underground made it feel like the war had suddenly struck the city, and it just felt so much worse than she could remember it had been like before. She paid attention to the papers she sold in the store and even read them sometimes when she had nothing to do but wait for customers, so Isuzu knew that the heroic boys were punishing the evil Russians away on the frontlines, but she wasn’t feeling very triumphant with Atsuko hiding her face against her chest and Otsu shaking under her arm like a frightened animal, and she had herself to blame. When Atsuko had not obeyed her, Isuzu had said that the Russians were coming to set fire to her, and the exchange had excited her little sister in a very bad way and she had continuously been crying and squealing more than she should.

The war had been so distant, like something happening far away, but she was really scared now
, even more scared than she was for her husband and her brother when she was praying for them at the home altar or the neighborhood shrine. It was a different kind of feeling with the people packed together, and the heat made her sweat a great deal. Would Tekika look like Altay City when the evil planes were done? That brave city had been brave for a reason, and she had no desire to be a part of the war in that way. She had no desire to see her little sisters and brothers suffer. Men were supposed to kill each other on a battlefield; that was a real war. Anything else was just evil violence—antisocial, depraved barbarism.

Atsuko was tugging on Isuzu’s kimono, and she tried her best to console the crying girl
who was so horribly different from her usual chirpy self. The sunny girl was nudging her head against Isuzu’s chest, and Isuzu could only rub her head against hers in the hope that she would instill some mature stoicism in her. They were sitting tightly on a bench together with other women and children, and a couple of men wearing steel helmets and with armbands labeled “watchman” were restlessly walking around the huddled people. She wanted to ask for some reassurance that everything would be fine, but with Atsuko and Otsu to look after she didn’t dare leave even to make her way just a few yards to get to the closest watchman.

The shelters in the neighborhood had to be filled with people
waiting for this airborne terror to pass with the horrible noise of aircraft engines reaching down through the thick ceiling. The wooden houses and buildings around the train station rarely had basements, and so they had to rely on the neighborhood’s watch for protection against harm. After such a long respite from the alarms early in the war Isuzu had become complacent and had forgotten about the threat. She had somehow thought that the warplanes couldn’t actually reach the city anymore—maybe the Imperial Army had destroyed all the evil machines? But here she was, listening to the puffing explosions she could hear over the quiet murmuring and noise inside the shelter and the terrible engines up in the sky far above.

She quietly prayed for D
addy, His Majesty, Amaterasu, Hachiman, or anyone else to keep a hand over them and keep them safe and shoot down all the evil whites so the soldiers could beat the nasty pilots to death—they should beat them to death with bamboo swords rather than cut off their dirty heads with steel swords, like parent-murderers. Kazuko was sitting next to Kan and was staring into empty space with lifeless eyes. She had been sick lately, and she obviously didn’t feel any better that they were under direct assault from the evil enemy. Isuzu kept her mind preoccupied with consoling her frightened little sister, even though she was just as frightened as they were. She didn’t want anything bad to happen to them—they were still her precious little sisters even if she was not their sister anymore after she married. The war was supposed to be in Russia. Sekiji and Ota were supposed to be fighting the war, not Atsuko and Otsu.

When at long last the watchmen told everyone that they could leave the shelter
Isuzu led her family home, and the tired Atsuko had calmed down and was only quivering a little, but she wasn’t sobbing anymore after the watchman said that the cowards had run away. The very moment things had settled down Isuzu crawled over to the small house shrine and prayed, grateful that they were all safe and sound after the ungodly hours spent in the suffocating crowd inside the shelter. The evil Russians had missed their building; indeed, the whole neighborhood seemed to be safe from harm, no doubt thanks to divine protection. When she knelt in front of the shrine, she put in a small appeal to her father whose picture decorated the shrine as a family god. He was bound to have kept the neighborhood safe, and she felt stupid for being afraid of the loud noise from the airplanes. She wouldn’t tell Atsuko that she was afraid; she had to be fearless no matter what. Little girls were allowed to be afraid—even Otsu was fine to be scared. But not Isuzu. She should be happy to risk her own death and her only legitimate worry should be to worry about her family and other precious people. Before she had gone inside she had run all the way to her in-laws home to make sure that they were unharmed too, and she had been overjoyed to see that they were as safe as ever.

The others had gone to sleep
before her—Otsu and Atsuko already sleeping when she returned from visiting her real home. She would also try to get some rest in a moment, just as soon as she would finish expressing gratitude to the sacred protectors of the household. Isuzu had been relieved once she saw that Mommy had got to the shelter by being carried by a couple of men, and a couple of watchmen had helped to take her back home once the signal had sounded and allowed the watchmen to tell people that the evil
white ghosts
had flown off again. She was sure that His Majesty and the brave heroes would put an end to those nasty devils who made her and her little siblings so scared. What sort of men were they, riding around in flying machines and dropping bombs on people? Real men would fight other men, but of course the
white ghosts
were too cowardly to fight like real warriors. Even the evil Qing had been braver than the cowardly, malicious Russians. Of course, the Qingists hadn’t been evil
white ghosts
. They had been evil Chuuka—like Isuzu, only evil and depraved, but they had been like her.

Fight like men!
Not even children would be so cowardly as to harass people needlessly. War was about defeating the enemy, not terrorizing women and children for no good reason. She clenched her hands hard together so it hurt, feeling at ease in the safety in front of the sacred little altar devoted to her family gods. In the shop she had a couple of pictures of His Majesty like the one on the wall where the handsome Son of Heaven looked down on her, Otsu, Kan, and Tatsuji. Atsuko and Kazuko slept with her mother in the other room where she had put up another picture of the Emperor that could keep an eye on Mommy. Nobody bought the pictures that had been in the shop for as long as she could remember, probably because everybody already had at least one already, and there was a limit to how many pictures of the Emperor anyone could use—you shouldn’t bother the Emperor’s face by putting it up everywhere you could.

While she properly offered a bit of water for the gods at the shrine, she made a quiet appeal to her father and her other family gods to help His Majesty kill all those nasty people who had upset Atsuko so much tonight.
She knew that her dear father looked after the family, and he would surely do what he could to keep them safe. All the good gods of the world were sure to hate the Russians for being so mean, and she was proud that she was protected by His Majesty, even though she had never met Him. However, both her brother and her husband were sure to help Him sweep them all out of Asia, and maybe even out of the world if they had to in order to punish them for all their crimes. Terrorizing children! Horrible monsters! They should all just die and stop trying to hurt Atsuko. There shouldn’t be any white devils in the world.

The room was big enough for the long, dark table with two dozen chairs around it. It was still dark outside the window, and some of the men were still wearing their overcoats. The contrast between the somewhat elegant interior of the room and the rough sight of men dressed for the outside didn’t seem as significant as it would have looked to an observer unacquainted with the cause of the congregation
as their muddy boots left the floor a dirty mess. Even when the mud dried, it fell off in cakes on the floor in big brown sprinkles.

Crown Prince Boris was still shaken by the news, and he tried to remain calm after one whole day of confusion
that had lasted until nightfall and through to the early hours of the new day. An orderly had notified him almost immediately, but it took a long time—almost a full day—before it was realized how serious the situation was after some prisoners had been secured and their nationality and unit could be confirmed by their captors. The commander of the Macedonian Front was Field Marshal Nikolov who often met with senior officers, but for this particular meeting most of the senior generals of the army group had been assembled in a single room on very short notice to properly discuss the sudden development. There were seven Bulgarian divisions and four foreign divisions, and the divisions were organized into two Bulgarian field armies, one Austrian corps, and one independent German division-sized command that served as a special, mobile shock unit. Apart from the army and corps commanders and a couple of division commanders, most of the men in the room were major generals and colonels—staff officers—subordinated to the most senior men who had made it to attend in person. The timing of the attack was not bad in that way, since several of the officers had already come to see the field marshal to discuss the plans for a renewed offensive after the German offensive in Russia had begun so successfully just two weeks ago and was still going strong, but the meeting had been rescheduled from noon tomorrow to the middle of the night.

The Germans
attached to the Macedonian Front were fierce fighters, but Boris felt obliged to remind himself that they had superior equipment to his countrymen, and he was sure that the average Bulgarian soldier was not inferior to their German allies if one took equipment and training into account—surely a Bulgar was just as brave and energetic as a German. The general who commanded the Germans had made quite an impression, and he was clearly a very talented commander. Boris had been promoted to general and placed in command of the Second Field Army, but in reality, it was under the command of his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Georgiev. Although Boris was crown prince, he was only referred to as General Boris Petrov Tarnovsky from his title as crown prince and Grand Prince of Tarnovo, and there was no mention of his royal titles when he was talking to other officers.

“Your reserves should be focused towards the line there,” Nikolov said as he drew a finger over the quite large and detailed map of the sector of Macedonia
that was under attack.

Lieutenant General Lyubomsky nodded thoughtfully, perhaps picturing the possibility that his corps would help absorb a more general offensive
that might come to support the parachutists. The Greeks were fierce fighters, and during the past year they had built up their strength, and the French expeditionary forces that had originally landed in Greece way back in 1934 were still substantial and had been augmented with Serbs and Montenegrins who still refused to lay down their arms. It was a national disgrace that Greece had not yet been pacified, but also testimony that Greeks were fierce men—you surely had to be fierce to put up with Ottoman rule for centuries.

With the German offensive against the
Russians in Courland, and the calm now broken here by the Greeks, it seemed like offensives were all the rage right now. The Germans in Russia, the Austrians in Italy, the French in Luxemburg, the Chinese in Asia… The Bulgarian-German-Austrian forces to the north, occupying most of Romania and a small sliver of Russian Moldova and the Austro-German front in the Ukraine were the only major frontlines where relative peace still reigned.

“How many troops can they have landed?” asked Lieutenant
General Shishkov.

The commander of one of Boris’s corps was a portly man who was quite aggressive and had successfully led the offensive that had pushed the Greeks back to Salonika this pas
t fall. Shishkov’s corps was not immediately affected by the Franco-Greek offensive that had begun yesterday, but there was still the possibility of new attempts to redraw the boundaries of the two sides on the eastern part of the front.

The field marshal looked towards his chief of staff sitting between him and Boris. The middle-aged man with the graying beard got to his feet, and he gently pulled the large
map a little closer to himself and several of the officers leaned forward or tried to make themselves tall enough to see on the map what the general was indicating.

“We suspect that the forces attacking the garrison at Edessa is at l
east the size of a regiment,” the front’s chief of staff Krasnov said, pointing to one of the points where the enemy parachutists had been engaged with the small forces behind the frontline.

The swift, surprise landing of paratroopers behind the front was obviously not a thing the enemy would undertake without some planning and purpose. A frontline attack by armor or regular land forces could be assembled quickly and canceled almost as quickly
unless it was a lightning strike involving large numbers of troops that went far into hostile territory. To have the audacity to try to inject forces behind the frontline was too ambitious to be a simple distraction—at least as it was becoming apparent that there were significant numbers of troops involved rather than just suicidal raiders trying to blow up supply depots or bridges like some of the Serbs had been doing in the past.

When Boris looked down at his watch he noticed that t
he airborne invasion had begun almost exactly twenty-four hours ago from this moment, and no one could yet say just how big the enemy operation was. The close proximity of the two sides meant that it was impossible to tell where or when they might try to attack, and the officers had to maintain a constant state of readiness just in case the Greeks would suddenly strike. It was a massive standoff involving hundreds of thousands of soldiers, and there was no telling when the other side would decide to go for a big break.

The Macedonian Front occupied a long stretch of land in Greece as well as
a sliver of Albania—territory that had fallen under wartime occupation—and the territory which was rightfully Bulgarian but usurped by the impious Serbs. After over two years of fighting it was hard to remember that the war had begun as a war between Bulgaria and Serbia, joined by Romania and Greece a couple of days later, and then by the great powers as their national leaderships decided to follow through on their treaty obligations. Boris still did not fully understand why Russia—the country that was the natural friend of Bulgaria—would support the ignominious Serbs and the unjust division of the Balkans. He had thought that Russia would support Bulgaria reclaiming its rightful title to Macedonia since it was the single most powerful nation of the Balkan states, yet at this moment over two hundred thousand Bulgarians were facing off against the Russian hordes north of Bulgaria.

“The frogs have engaged the 3rd
Division with several battalions in this area,” Krasnov said, moving his fingers to circle the plain where the enemy had clearly been focusing a substantial force. “It is likely that the French intend the armor attacking the 4th Division to relieve the parachutists, but we cannot yet tell what the broader operational goals are. All we know is that we can expect that at least two divisions are attacking the 4th Division and perhaps they dropped as much as a division of parachutists.”

“A whole division?” one man said out loud, as surprised as anyone about the possible scale of the operation.

Although a nation as small as Bulgaria did not possess airborne forces, the Germans and the French had displayed a great interest in the idea of quick deployment of troops by aircraft. The Germans had been using them as part of their mobile warfare operations against the Russians, and the worst German defeat early in the war had partly been due to French gliders landing raiders on top of the fortifications in western Luxemburg prior to the attack that had almost managed to smash through the Gneisenau Line. Only through outstanding initiative and hard fighting had the Germans been able to contain the assault at the cost of sacrificing a few dozen square miles of territory to reestablish their lines slightly farther inside Germany.

Between Bulgaria and Greece t
he frontlines had been stabilized over the winter months after some attempts by the Macedonian Front to “bleed” the Greeks, but there was a concern which Boris had heard from people more understanding of politics than him about the country’s increasing disillusionment. Over the winter, riots over rationing had broken out across the countryside, and he worried that all the sacrifices of the army would be undermined by the radicals at home who targeted in particular poor, ignorant peasant women with seditious propaganda. Some troops had been diverted to garrison duty in part for recuperation, but also after the activities of agrarian agitators had prompted the prime minister to request military forces to be available. Several deserters had been shot in recent months—more up north than down here—while the army was simultaneously trying its best to listen to specific demands from soldiers about improving their conditions and defuse the bad feelings some of the peasants had towards their officers. It was disgraceful that the soldiers would be so unruly, but if you looked at their troublemaking mothers back in the rural provinces, it was perhaps no surprise that they might have been raised to be undisciplined and just a little seditious.

“We have t
o be on the safe side,” Krasnov said, agreeing that it sounded quite bizarre to deploy not just hundreds or even a thousand troops by air but perhaps ten or fifteen thousand.

“Our main concern must be to stop the further advance of the frontal assault against General Atanasov,” the field marshal said, thinking that the airborne men should be viewed primarily as an indicator of intent rather than an inherent danger.

Major General Atanasov’s division had been attacked at several points, and already French armor had been making its way through the mountainous roads that led up into northwestern Macedonia. It was a bad situation, and if Atanasov’s division would be broken tomorrow or at some other point before it could be reinforced, the whole line would be at risk of being divided in two which would require the surrender of hard-fought ground to protect the integrity of the Front.

“How are the Alpines?” Krasnov
asked, looking over at the German colonel who was a senior member of the German staff.

The
commander of the German Alpine Corps was not present, partly because he was already supposed to be planning and preparing to ambush and attack the Franco-Greek forces coming up through the holes in Atanasov’s line. Like a ghost, he would appear with his men where they were needed to help beat the enemy before quickly moving out to the next place. The German general was a miracle-worker who could expertly move enough troops and supplies to effectively offer support across much of the central part of the frontline.

“There have been no engagements so far,” the colonel said, preferring not to speak in the atrociously difficult language
but nevertheless using it on behalf of his absent commander.

Slavic speech was bizarre, and Thomas Peter had to put in a bit of effort to even understand them after first being forced to learn it. Knowing their language had the advantage of the general sending him to represent his views to their allies, but Thomas resented their being junior to these pompous, unintelligent creatures
who could not do much right.

“W
e count on your magic,” Krasnov smirked, “but it is imperative that you coordinate major attacks with Major General Tsonchev.”

Thomas wasn’t sure who this
man thought he was—other than the chief of staff of the whole army group. Obviously coordination was part of the effort, and the general had been in close contact with the commander of one of the adjacent Slavic divisions and that division’s corps commander. The Alpine Corps was technically a division in size, but it was a special command, and Thomas was proud to be part of it. Its men had been trained to fight in mountainous terrain, and as a special task force on the front between the Slavs and the Greeks, the Alpine Corps was capable of launching counterattacks and attacks with far better results than the men it was here to defend.

“The reserve division of I Expeditionary Corps is moving down t
o support the Germans,” Krasnov said as he glanced up at one of the Austrians—a tall and striking Croat—who commanded one of the two Austrian corps that helped buttress the front. “It will be necessary for all units to be kept in good communications and move with great coordination.”

Boris winced
as Krasnov kept repeating the same point over and over to the German officer. He almost wanted to interject and serve as an interpreter to make it clear to Krasnov that the German surely got the message without having to hear it said half a dozen times. Yes, the Germans would have to be in close liaison with all nearby units to make the best of the potential of incurring a bad defeat on the frogs. However, the German general had proven himself a very capable man, and Boris had thought that he would be an excellent candidate to be employed after the war to reorganize and modernize the army.