The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (38 page)

Boris was qui
te happy to see that the German officers were conferring around the vehicles, the map laid out on the hood of a truck so they could all see it while the general was talking. The relatively young commanding general had been close to the front during the fighting that had become a bit less fluid as the enemy offensive had ground to something approaching a halt, and the German armor had joined with an enlarged Austrian armored brigade to push back and destroy a whole enemy armored regiment. The enemy had penetrated the line, but counterattacks and withdrawals had stabilized the front with only sporadic attacks as the Greeks had begun to dig in while Boris’s army was primarily concerned with fighting the French airborne forces that had begun to claw their way southwestwards to try to link up with the bogged down Greek relief force. Boris was quite taken by the gallant appearance of the German general, and he felt like a young boy again as he listened to him talking to his officers.

“The heights have to be secure… This valley has to be cut off… Keep a sizeable reserve if they try to go farther to the east…”

He was a confident, affable man, and his Alpine Corps had proved to be the most efficient unit in the whole Macedonian Front. Last year they had managed to force two Greek divisions back twenty miles and taken almost a whole division’s worth of prisoners alongside rifles, ammunition, artillery pieces, and tanks that had been useful for equipping the naked reservists that Bulgaria had mustered to replace losses. There were not nearly enough Mauser rifles to arm the troops, and French and Russian rifles added to the logistical nightmare of keeping the forces properly supplied since there was both a lack of capacity to refit the rifles, and the large stockpiles of captured and surplus ammunition should not be allowed to go to waste. All in all, the Bulgarian logisticians had a terrible job of trying to sort through ammunition stores and the army was doing its best to try to uniformly arm regiments to make resupplying them less of a hassle.

Boris was impressed
by the neat uniforms of not just the German officers but also the common soldiers. His own men wore uniforms dyed in different natural shades of brown and khaki, and there were not nearly enough leather boots, so the army required conscripts to bring their own footwear. And so many of them wore peasant sandals that just couldn’t look nearly as martial as jackboots or ankle boots. The sandals just added to the appearance of the army as a bunch of armed peasants, and compared to these men it was a great embarrassment.

He
had enjoyed the summers he had spent in Germany, both in Miroslava’s native Luxemburg where her brother was the heir to the grand duchy and in Berlin, the city he hoped would be the model for Sofia. By any standard, Boris was a Germanophile, and it was ironic that his wife who was so very German—a daughter of the House of Prussia itself; the dynastic epitome of Germany—was the one who was enamored with the ways of Bulgaria while Boris was embarrassed that his German allies were shown so many of its deficiencies. When he would become king, Boris had every intention to stop his father’s nonsense of embracing the quite retarded culture of the peasants. Bulgaria had to become a member of the first world, a power comparable to Sweden or the Netherlands perhaps, not remain a backwards nation still caught in the 19th century.

His father and brother were Slavophiles, and that was why his father had rechristened Boris’s wife with a name he found far more suitable for a crown princess of a nation where the culture and people were entrenched in the
medieval ways of the European East. Miroslava had been quite happy to have their oldest daughter Radoslava marry a grand duke of Russia rather than a German princeling, and because of that, his own flesh and blood was now on the other side. He had not heard a word from Radoslava since just after the war began, her final letter having been an appeal for Miroslava and Boris to plead with the king to not let brothers fight each other—at the moment when Russia had demanded that Bulgaria relinquish her rightful demands for the territory occupied by the Serbs and surrender the nation’s dignity. He had no idea why she would be so silly, except perhaps that she was too ignorant to understand the politics and honor involved in this sacred war Bulgaria was embroiled in that went far beyond empty-headed nationalism. Perhaps it was as simple as that and Radoslava was just ignorant and too caught up in the defunct Panslavism that even Russia had abandoned. It didn’t seem to matter all that much, although Miroslava was obviously not happy about not being able to write their daughter concerning her first child, Grand Duchess Olga Alexandrovna of Russia.

“Are you going back to your headquarters?”

Boris was stumped when the general addressed him directly. The German general had been so busy talking to his own men, and since Boris did not really effectively hold command over his army, he was a little overlooked. It was perfectly fine of course; Boris assumed that it would be dangerous if the officers would be looking to him for orders. No, war was a matter for professionals, and he would have preferred to not be given a vanity command this senior. His brother was far keener on playing soldier, but Boris knew his own limitations quite well.

“I don’t quite know,” Boris mumbled, quite put off by the question.

He hated having to answer questions.

“We’re moving out now,” the general added as an explanation. “Or is the general planning on supervising the Alpine Corps directly?”

The German was a very gregarious man, and Boris was delighted to be around him.

“I would be quite happy to observe you, general,” he said, feeling like a fawning girl facing a fairytale prince.

“All right, sir, as you wish. It might be a little uncomfortable tonight I fear.”

The German senior officers separated to rejoin their units, and they kept in contact with the general through radios as they set out to bloody the enemy a bit, and Boris was delighted to observe the talented commander at work. He didn’t mind spending the night in a German halftrack in order to see them go at the enemy, and he just had one of his assistant tell his chief of staff that he would observe the Germans for the next day or so.

“All right, chop-chop!”

Kai was the slowest to get into the tank and he shut his hatch after throwing away his half-smoked cigarette as he was crawling inside. The sergeant repeated the essential instructions from the battalion commander down through the internal radios in their helmets while Kai started up the sleeping vehicle’s engines. The wind had died down about an hour ago, and the order to move out came directly from the battalion commander who had gathered all the tank commanders to discuss the plan for the day based on aerial reconnaissance of the lines up ahead.

Makoto had enjoyed the fresh air in the snow storm, but as soon as the sergeant ordered them inside the tank, he was struck by the seriousness. He was vaguely aware of the objective of taking a Russian city faraway, and he worried that there would be lots of white devils guarding it—and it was obvious that something like that was what Sergeant Shibui had been told. Yet as much as he worried, he was also very excited about going into battle with the foreign devils. The armored battalions
had to stay close together ahead of the mechanized infantry and the poor, jackbooted riflemen who would be sauntering behind them even farther back. The Russians were probably not that far off, and a good hit from one of those 76s would not be a welcome experience. The Russian 76mm “can opener” had given Maintenance and funeral details their fair share of work, and Makoto preferred those people to have as little work as possible.

Their section had been
lucky so far, but some of the company’s sections had not been as fortunate, and only three days ago the company had been able to get together for a cup of wine and a few moments of solemn reflection and prayer as they had held a memorial for their dead comrades whom they had left behind as they moved on.

The diesel engines were
rumbling when the sergeant gave the order to move out, and the strong smell that Makoto had learned to like filled the compartment as the engine was feeding off the diesel. He could not see much at all through the open slit, and he was really the one with the worst vantage point of the outside. He was sitting just below Mou, and he could feel his pulse as it adjusted after being thrown out of balance when the engines finally started up. After spending weeks either inside the tank or within just a few yards of it Makoto had become used to living inside the claustrophobic space. However, this was different than most days. Somewhere across the white blanket covering the landscape there were presumably a bunch of Russians waiting for them, and he knew it. They wouldn’t be running into an ambush; they would straight into Russians with their eyes open.

The Crown of Siberia was just ahead of them, and the major had been certain that there would be thousands of Russians out there who would be anxious to kill them
when he had addressed the whole battalion the other day. It was kill or be killed, and Makoto didn’t much enjoy the thought of dying like a real warrior and rot on the battlefield. He kept looking out from his own narrow field of vision, but for the most part he kept his eyes shifting between the open box of shells and the sergeant sitting above both Makoto and the gunner, Mou.

Makoto felt like he was just
a fellow traveler. Shibui, Mou, and Kai all had the major responsibilities while Makoto primarily had to load the gun during combat; even Akino was far more important than Makoto was. It was a bit of a relief to have the least important job, but it also made him feel a little redundant.

Ilya was anxiously looking at the swarm of tanks as they moved in the direction of the city which Ilya and the rest of the detachment were guarding. The emplacements were not particularly well-built, but they had not had much time
to pack the entrenchments. Most of the infantry battalion had left Irkutsk, but rather than relax in Novonikolayevsk after getting away from the front back around Christmas they had to fight them again.

The rice-eating monkeys were all over the place, and Ilya had only barely
had time to mail his letter to Mom to tell her that he would get to relax in Novonikolayevsk for a while longer. Now he had been freezing his ass off out in the snowy wasteland for days. In some perverse way, the sight of the tanks was a welcome thing. He had understood that the monkeys would eventually come, and the wait out here had been driving him insane. There was little to do for entertainment other than to just sit around and think, or to masturbate—and neither was all that pleasurable in the long-run. As far as he was concerned, Siberia could go to hell. Nevertheless, the chinks and the krauts would hardly stay away from the vital parts of the Motherland, and in some way Ilya did feel a sense of patriotic duty even towards Siberia, the Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the other parts of the country he didn’t really give a damn about.

And he
had himself to blame. When he had enlisted to defend his home he had done so unconditionally, not on terms that he was only to kill krauts. The chinks were just as much the enemies of Russia, and it was the high and mighty aristocrats who decided who would fight where.

He regularly looked over at one of the officers near one of the guns. Before the battalion
had withdrawn from similarly desolate defenses out further east, Ilya had been privy to see what one of these pleasant “ladies” could do. A solid hit—and the sides of those lumbering Jap tanks looked mighty inviting—would take out one of the damn things in an instant. If the trusty 76s could knock out their armor, then the monkey infantry probably would be easy pickings for the machineguns and rifles of Ilya’s battalion.

However, how many tanks were there? He could see maybe six of them past the trees, but only God could be sure of the exact number. What if a whole division was coming up the road? A whole corps?
The whole damn Mongol army?

Ilya wasn’t stupid; one infantry battalion with some hastily assembled artillery could not hold back a whole army.
They would have to be gods to do that.

“Just a little bit more,” Py
otr whispered as the chink tanks kept moving in a fairly neat little column.

In a hundred yards or so
all of their sides would be perfectly exposed to the guns. Ilya held his rifle firmly in his right hand, wondering if he would secure his first unarguable kill. Back outside Irkutsk last year he was fairly sure that he had killed a monkey, but he had not really been able to tell for sure. Things had been chaotic, and he had been too far away to tell if the monkey had been hit, and whether it had been Ilya that had hit him, and even then he could not be sure if it had actually died or just been a bit hurt.

He only heard a distant voice call out before the cannons opened up, and the loud sound
s to his right made him flinch. Almost as soon as he had jumped from the sudden noise, the turret on one of the rice-combines popped up and fell off the tank, as if the machine had been decapitated. It was gratifying to see that one of them was disposed of so quickly, but with eerie speed the tanks stopped, and just as the second tank was clearly badly hit they were all pivoting in their direction.
Quick-witted little chimps
.

Makoto tried not to think. He was supposed to work on instinct, and he knew that there was nothing he could do to change anything. He just had to do his job.

“Go higher,” the sergeant snapped through the pipe.

“Yes sir,” Mou answered tersely just as Makoto pushed a new shell into t
he breech.

The sudden noise had taken him by surprise, but the automatic ritual of getting a new shell, reloading the gun, and then getting a new shell kept Makoto busy while Mou and the sergeant were effectively taking care of the fighting.

“You have to pull it up more,” the sergeant snapped. “You’re shooting too low!”

In the midst of the whiteness he could only just barely make out the Russians. Hitting them was awfully hard, and the big tanks felt exposed to their concealed enemies. They were just sitting ducks out here on the snow-covered road.

“Platoon chief: Advance on line,” Akino said, repeating the order from the company platoon commander. “Forward and free fire.”

Akino was firing his machinegun at the enemy with long bursts. There wasn’t enough ammunition to keep a steady fire, and the barrel would overheat if he did anyway. Despite the distance there was always the off chance that he might hit something, or just keep the devils’ heads down.

“Driver, get a move on,” Shibui said. “We’re advancing.”

“All right, here goes,” Kai quietly answered. “
Banzai
, I guess,” he mumbled out loud to no one in particular.

Makoto was ready to put in another shell and waited impatiently as the sergeant kept listening to the radio to keep track of the orders from the section commander after he had had Akino flip the switches to leave the sergeant in communication with the outside world rather than Akino who was left to focus on firing at the enemy with the front machinegun. Makoto hated this ignorance about what was outside. Only the terse orders from the sergeant and his testy behavior served as remotely instructional about what might be happening outside since Makoto’s headphones had stopped working, and loaders were just barely above insects when it came to priority for headphones. The noise of explosions and the sound of occasional hail coming down on their armored shell indicated that things were certainly happening outside.

Ilya quickly pushed down the fresh clip of bullets into his rifle. The monkeys were having some trouble with the snow, and he tried to pick off the men who were slowly moving through the several feet deep snow behind the tanks while keeping his head down to avoid the spraying bursts of machinegun fire. It had to be hell for the poor little monkeys as they clumsily climbed through the shallow frozen sea, and while the gunners went for the tanks, everybody else was left to shoot at the infantrymen.

The sound of an explosion several dozen feet to his right cut into his ear, but he tried his best to focus on the men coming thr
ough the snow behind the tanks. There were more tanks leaving the road to drive through the snow, and the machinegun fire was much too close for comfort, zinging through the air overhead. Sasha had collapsed, and judging from a brief examination, he was with God right now. Ilya felt much calmer now than he had felt last time, and he tried to focus only on the distant shapes rather than his comrades. Unlike the men in his battalion, some of the monkeys weren’t wearing white covers over their uniforms, and they were easy to spot even far away. He carefully aimed at one of them about two-hundred yards away and down below the slope of the ridge they were on top of. The little bastard was bobbing up and down, looking like he was fighting to not drown in the deep snow while he was making his way straight towards Ilya.

One of the rats close to him stopped abruptly, but Ilya had little time to bother with him.
Damn
. He missed. Hurriedly he pulled the bolt back to expel the empty cartridge and get another shot at the persistent little runt. He waited as he tried to keep the rifle steady and perfectly trained at the moving mole. He gently squeezed the trigger, and like that it stopped. Ilya smiled to himself as the rat was sunk down in the snow, and he pulled the bolt back while he surveyed the open field for another target, another little Mongol itching to go to hell.

The tanks were mo
ving much faster than the infantry, and one shell had clearly had an impact on the gunners to Ilya’s right. Squealing and shouting had followed an explosion, and the tanks closest to them had stopped just at the base of the slope. The sons-of-bitches had closed the distance from the road to the ridge much too quickly.

Makoto leaned back after pushing in another high explosive shell into the breech.

“More to the left,” the sergeant said, focusing his eyes through his periscope after again crouching down inside the tank rather than getting up out of the hatch.

“Yes sir,” Mou responded while he was looking into the sights and trying to settle
for one of the enemy can openers.

It was hard to say where they were, but this close and with this angle it felt like they had a much better shot at taking out
the artillery. The machinegun fire that was rattling all around was really not his concern. It was the big cannons—the tank killers—that kept his pulse from going down to a human pace. Once he had aimed the gun he fired, praying silently that he had struck a vein.

Makoto quickl
y pushed the next shell into the breech so that Mou could fire off another. They had to work fast, because—

“It’s right there on the left—five degrees, five degrees!”

Makoto froze as he looked up at the sergeant. He couldn’t see what the sergeant could see. The tone was chilling, and Makoto wanted Mou to hurry and placate him. What was taking so long?

“Damn
it, fire!”

He could just barely hear Mou’s voice when he snapped for another anti-personnel shell, and Makoto dutifully opened the breech and let the empty shell casing fall down with a heavy clang on the floor with the other casings littering the inside of the tank. Again he slammed the breech shut, with a squeal that the gun was loaded again. The way Mou
had yelled still made Makoto feel jittery, but there was no time to stop and ask what was going on. As soon as the gun fired, Makoto pushed in the next fresh shell and slammed the breech shut and called out to Mou that it was loaded before he took out another shell, hunkering with it ready to load the gun again. Just how many shells did those devils need?