The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (32 page)

The Greeks
and the French fielded an estimated ten divisions opposite the Macedonian Front along with their allies, and the size of the Bulgarian divisions left the Bulgarian side with more troops than their enemy had. The French had sent at least five divisions to support the Greeks in the first year of the war, but as the naval advantage had been slipping further into the hands of the German and Austrian navies, the enemy had much more difficulty of strengthening their forces in the Balkans and could only effectively draw on Greeks. The Austrian navy had been incompetent, and it had allowed the Italians and the French to rule the Adriatic and Aegean Seas until Germany had deployed a sizeable force of ships to the Mediterranean. There were a couple of Italian divisions in the Balkans as well, in addition to parts of the Serbian army that had escaped the successful Austro-Bulgarian campaign against Serbia and Montenegro, but the Italians had been rather absent from the fore of battle, placed primarily to maintain the defenses at the western edge of the enemy line.

Of the enemy nations, Serbia and Montenegro had been effectively conquered and were under occ
upation, as well as most of Romania. However, both Romania and Serbia had large armies in the field, and the occupied territory required the equivalent of two Bulgarian divisions to maintain the occupation of Serbia and Montenegro, and several Serbian military bases had been claimed as garrisons and training grounds for the Bulgarian army.

Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, and Serbia and Montenegro
combined were all of similar populations, but as far as Boris understood, Bulgaria had the largest and best equipped army of all. Unfortunately, it had had to be divided at first into three parts and now into two to face the armies in the south and the Russo-Romanian armies to the north. Added to that were the terrible effects of inflation that had rendered Bulgaria completely dependent on Germany and Austria financially, and the draft had left the labor intensive agricultural sector in disarray, adding acute shortages of food to the list of national crises.

Karoline wasn’t sure what she wanted to write in her letter. Her sister’s letter had taken its merry time to get to her, and she worried that she might be concerned about the long wait for a reply. She had to write one as soon as possible and have it mailed. Viktoria had always been so much older than Karoline that she had never known her well as a child, and the two had been very different as girls. It was only when their brother Max had gotten married and Viktoria and Prince Boris had come to Luxemburg for the wedding that Karoline had become really familiar with her oldest sibling after being just two girls living in the same palace. She had started to go by her Bulgarian name—Miroslava Maximilianova—when she had returned home to celebrate Max’s wedding. She had been dressed rather colorfully in Slavic clothes not that different from the kind Karoline had seen recently on the Duchess of Clarence, the Countess of Antrim, and the countess’ bastard sister.

It had been peculiar to think of your older sister as being part of an entirely foreign, primitive people, even if she was not married to an enemy like her oldest daughter. Miroslava’s oldest girl Radoslava had married the second grandson of Grand Duke Georgiy—the uncle of the Russian emperor—which made Radoslava’s young daughter Olga—who had been born just after the war began—a Grand Duchess of Russia. Any sons she might have would be spare, distant heirs to the Russian throne, just like Karoline’s own children were distant heirs to the British crown. She understood that it must be difficult for Miroslava that her daughter was living with the enemy, and Karoline had tried to write Radoslava on her behalf, but she had been very rude to her aunt. Karoline had only hoped that she would write a letter which she could send to Miroslava, and Radoslava should have been cooperative. Karoline hadn’t actually met Radoslava since the time when she was just a young child long before she became a Russian grand duchess, and she had no real reason to care about her wellbeing, but she did care about her sister and the difficult position she was in with her oldest daughter not even bothering to tell Karoline how her daughter fared.

Karoline had hoped to be able to write Miroslava to let her know that her little Russian grand duchess was healthy, and perhaps even let her see a picture of her, but Radoslava had only given her a single sentence. “
Kindly inform Her Royal Highness the Crown Princess of Bulgaria that Her Imperial Highness Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia is in good health
.” Perhaps it was something about them that had made both Miroslava and Radoslava so strangely assimilated into their respective Slavic countries, but Karoline didn’t understand it.

In Karoline’s direct family, there was little connection to the enemy nations other than through Radoslava of Bulgaria. There was Karoline’s and Miroslava’s cousin Elfriede who had been married to a grand duke too, but most of her family had married German princes and princesses rather than Russians, Italians, Spaniards, Serbians, and Romanians.

Karoline had had no bad feelings towards Russians. She really hadn’t. She had been happy for Augusta—the oldest granddaughter of the German Emperor—who had married a Russian grand duke and lived with him in Moscow. Even before the war a lot of people who knew nothing about Russians had thought of them as a barbaric people, and she wasn’t sure what she thought about her father’s dismal opinion of their race. Karoline was no intellectual, but she knew enough about intellectuals to understand that a fair number of them had been very antipathetic towards Slavs in general and Russians in particular for decades. In her busy life she had no time to read books on societal competition, the forces that like Darwinism pitted different nations and peoples against each other to compete for space and resources. Well, she shouldn’t call it Darwinism. As a German, she should prefer to think of biological evolution as the Rietz-Angler Biological Development Thesis rather than to associate it with the later—but more internationally familiar—Englishman.

She had believed Prince Joachim, her first cousin who was titular governor in German Kongo when he had told her about how the Neo-Malthusian Social Darwinist case for the inevitability of war between Germany and Russia was all wrong. He had explained to her and other cousins and relatives that the future was in Africa where there was so much room that Germany would never risk being suffocated by the Russians. For example, German Southwest Africa which was slightly bigger than all of Germany but home to almost no people, just a few handfuls of Hottentots. So there really was no need for space and resources in Europe, no need for a battle of civilizations to unseal Germany from her box in the saturated middle of the European continent. A hundred or even two hundred million Germans could easily live in the German colonies of the Kongo, Southwest Africa, the Cameroons, Togoland, and East Africa.

Slowly Karoline began to answer Miroslava’s questions about family as she worked on her first draft of a letter—she always did one draft and then used it to write the real letter. She wrote about how her children and in-laws were doing and the sort of things Miroslava would want to hear about. It was a bit funny how spread out the family was, and although Karoline had been born in Luxemburg, her father had not been. Her grandfather was the grandson of Friedrich Wilhelm III, the Prussian king who had saved Germany from Napoleon together with his generals like Gneisenau and his foreign allies Archduke Karl of Austria, the Duke of Wellington, and Emperor Paul I of Russia. Her foremothers had been princesses from across the German realms, and although she took great pride in her Prussian ancestry, she was a product of all of Germany—and even royal houses from other parts of Europe—over the generations. Her first cousin Waldemar—known in the English family as Wally—had become the first
Herzog
of the reestablished Duchy of Lothringen and his brother Heinrich—Ludo to the English family—the first
Grossherzog
of the German realm of Burgundy, moving the family further westwards, and Waldemar’s and Ludo’s sister was her sister-in-law Paulie—the Princess of Wales and presumably soon Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland whenever the incapacitated old king would pass away. Karoline was worried that Waldemar’s family would be in danger from the French since his capital was so close to France. Lothringen was just to the east of France, and its capital had been bombed by French airplanes. If the French would break the Gneisenau Line, then the city of Metz would surely be in danger. Her mother still lived at the grand ducal palace in Luxemburg, and she too was much too close to the French for Karoline to rest easily when the newspapers reported on changes on the frontlines between France and Germany.

If the radical French in the 1700s could murder their own king, then what atrocities would they commit on her family? She knew that Uncle Willy—so dashing and manly despite his old age—would do what he could to protect all of Germany, and she had been pleased by his assurances that there was no need for her to worry. Although she did not want to sound sycophantic and did not say it to him in her letters, she thought of Willy as a reborn Frederick the Great, a new Emperor Frederick Barbarossa who would lead the German realms to victory against the French who had dominated and brutalized Germany for so many centuries. The work of Friedrich Wilhelm IV in uniting Germany had left France powerful enough to band together with most of Europe against Germany, but now Uncle Willy had the opportunity to forever destroy France and secure Germany for all future—perhaps even leave it as divided as the French had left Germany before the Unification set in stone with the Treaty of Schönbrunn when the princes and kings of Germany—and the conquered Austrians—came together to offer Friedrich Wilhelm IV the crown. She felt that Willy would be the one to do end the French threat against the German people. Willy might become Wilhelm the Great, far superseding all their ancestors as the greatest conqueror in German history who had finally freed Germany from the French bullies.

She did not feel confident enough to ask Willy if he was worried about his granddaughter Augusta living in Moscow. Although she was Willy’s beautiful granddaughter, she had been on bad terms with her grandfather over her conversion to Slavic Christianity rather than the Unified Prussian Protestantism that was the family faith since the Protestantisms of Prussia were merged into a single state church by Friedrich Wilhelm III, and Uncle Willy had been very upset about her apostasy. Karoline disliked the Asian penchant for gilded rituals, and she understood why her precious King of Prussia would be concerned about the eternal future of the crown prince’s daughter Augusta. Karoline could understand that it was hard for a woman to live in a religiously different country, and she did not blame Augusta for not wanting to remain apart from the Russians. Miroslava had converted to Slavic Christianity too, and her daughters were all raised exclusively as Orthodox Christians in the adopted faith of the once German Protestant royal house of Bulgaria.

Karoline was firmly at home at the house outside Brighton and would not want to go anywhere else, but she still wished to keep in touch with her big sister and all her other distant relations. As much as Karoline had many nostalgic memories from the palace in Luxemburg where she and her siblings had been raised and many other places far from the house, she was so at home here, and in her most impious moments she thought that it would have been nice if she had not been a princess. As long as she had her children, her friends, and Heinrich within easy reach, she was content, and she did not envy her first cousin and sister-in-law the Princess of Wales who was by virtue of their incapacitated father-in-law the de facto queen and closely examined by all sorts of strangers. As much as Karoline liked her family and the symbolism of the royal houses, she detested the idea of pageantry for herself in practice and did not regret her frequent absence from fancy events—she rationalized away her local commitments as simply those of a member of an ordinary community rather than a princess of the royal blood of Prussia. The ceremonies of monarchy—that singularly noble and good state institution—was good for people like Uncle Willy or the Prince of Wales, but she was sure that an ordinary woman could enjoy that institution without being a member of it.

“You have your
duty, Your Highness,” the old man said, his tone of voice like that of an adult scolding a child.

Maria shuddered, annoyed enough as it were with her life without being chastised by a stranger
speaking to her in a difficult language. If Peter wanted to make these outrageous demands he should make them in person, not send this mustachioed officer to treat her like a disobedient little girl who had run away from home. The colonel was an adjutant to her father-in-law, but she only recognized him, she didn’t actually know him, which made it all the more humiliating to be spoken to like this. He had asked to see her in private, and she had feared that something had happened to Peter—that he would tell her that she was a widow. Her boys had hardly had time to get back to Sofia, and she doubted that they would be in danger there. Peter on the other hand was up in Moldova, and she could only hope that the officers would make sure that he would be kept safe.

She preferred to not know what was going on, and the only thing that kept her from retreating
to her ancestral home in Mecklenburg was the king’s refusal to permit her to take Nadia and Helene with her. She had accepted his decision that they had to stay in the country, but this was too much to ask of her. She didn’t want Nadia and Helene to worry; she wanted them to enjoy themselves as girls should, which was why she had first taken them away when she had caught on to what the king expected of them.

“
The girls are too young
,” she said, genuinely feeling like it was far too much to demand that Nadia and Helene should have to get involved in this silly, horrible conflagration like their cousins.

“I am under orders to bring
all three of you to the capital,” Georgi repeated, annoyed that the spoiled, arrogant princess spoke to him in a foreign language.

The Germans might be allies, but Georgi nevertheless felt that a princess should at least make some effort to speak the language of her people.
He would have had no problem to speak to her in German, but as a matter of principle he would not. She should speak the language of her own country, not the language of a foreign place.

“
I can go
,
but the girls stay here
,” she said, knowing that she should obey an order from her father-in-law, but still hoping that there might be room to negotiate.

The king and Peter could both be so stubborn, and she knew that she couldn’t really fight either of them if they had made up their minds.
Peter had always been a good man, but she didn’t care for this country, and his inability to understand her feelings about the children had made her feel like he had become something quite different from the young, handsome prince who had courted her when she was still a romantic girl who had been so delighted by his attention. Time had not been kind on the bonds between them, and they had all but disintegrated over the years, and even before the war they had hardly ever privately engaged as husband and wife. Why was it her father-in-law and not Peter who sent for her? If Peter would have looked her in the eye and made these demands she would have acquiesced, but this was just too humiliating.

“Those are not my instructions, Your Highness. We are to leave for the capital tod
ay, so you should have the servants prepare for your departure immediately. His Majesty’s order was for all three highnesses to return to Sofia at once.”

She looked at the older man, quietly in
dignant to be treated this way by the king and this old geezer—he was probably just a few years older than her, but the difference was enough to think of him as a geezer. She knew that people didn’t like her, and this man certainly didn’t. Although she didn’t care about the thoughts of idiots, she had been very hurt by one newspaper’s suggestion years ago that her sister-in-law Princess Elena was a foreign agent. As much as she detested the language, culture, and ways of her father-in-law’s subjects, she thought that they shouldn’t question a princess’ honor and sense of duty. Maria was very fond of Princess Elena, and she felt a lot of sympathy for her when she was being victimized by their father-in-law’s subjects who were too boorish and vicious to grasp the complex mind and thinking of a woman like Princess Elena.

“Please don’t be so unreasonable,” she mumbled in her broken Bulgarian.

She had learned the language from Peter while she was pregnant with Nadia, but after her father-in-law had begun to insist on raising her children like peasant children she had started to resent this country and its culture. All the curious fun about learning had gone away, and the exotic culture and language had become alien impositions on her from King Petar who had never seemed to like her.

“It is the king’s instructions,” the man remorselessly pointed out.

She wanted to tell him to leave. She really should. Yet, at the same time, she was not really capable of doing that, not to his face. Her body just would not stand for that sort of confrontation. Besides, this was a servant of the king come to fetch her. He wasn’t just a random geezer come to ask her for a favor. It was a command from her king.
My king
… As a duchess of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, she hadn’t actually had a king before she married. In Germany, the King of Prussia had only been her sovereign on account of his being the Emperor of Germany concurrently with being King of Prussia. Her brother the grand duke was supposed to be an equal of all the other kings, grand dukes, dukes, and princes apart from the King of Prussia whose imperial title made him the sovereign of all the German realms rather than just Prussia.

Mecklenburg-Schwerin was a relatively sparsely populated duchy, yet among the dozens of small and big states, it was still among the more significant ones, in part thanks to her family’s legacy of good relations with the Hohenzollern rulers of Prussia that had left it intact rather than be punished for its disloyalty like some of the states that had fought against Prussia or refused to side with her against Austria. Mecklenburg-Schwerin and Mecklenburg-Strelitz—the legacy of a 17th century division of Mecklenburg into two separate duchies—had been closely aligned with Prussia for more than a century and the two states had strong cultural, religious, and economic ties to each other as well as the surrounding Prussian provinces. The fact that Maria had six sisters of whom two had married into the House of Prussia certainly didn’t change things for the worse, and Maria’s little sisters Irma and Elisabeth had married the presumed future Duke of Anhalt and Grand Duke of the Palatinate respectively.

Although there were no future queens or empresses among Maria’s many sisters, they had many close family connections across Germany and some of the other European countries. Alexandrine, Louise, Magda, and Wilma hadn’t married men in close inheritance of anything, but that was not really what mattered. The days when country and family were synonymous were obviously gone, but the family network was still important for social reasons. Maria looked forward to being allowed to leave the country so she could visit her old mother in Schwerin, but also her sisters spread out across Germany. Her mother and namesake Mary had been born a princess of the United Kingdom, and Maria actually looked forward to going there for a visit, and it was very annoying that she was not permitted to go even with just Nadia and Helene. It was as if she was a prisoner of her family.

“I hope that Your Highness has understood the king’s wishes,” the man said, as if to reinforce his authority over her.

Yet as much as she wanted to tell him to go away and tell Peter or the king to come in person, she just couldn’t. No matter how indignant she felt. That was how it always went, wasn’t it? When it came down to it, she just didn’t have the force of will to refuse.

“I will obey,” she quietly mumbled, resigned to surrender to her mean, domineering father-in-law.