The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (27 page)

Lieutenant Mogilo
v and Boris were playing billiards while Count Sokolsky was sitting quiet in one of the chairs smoking a cigar. It was amusing to see Alexander holding a rather large pipe which he was exaggeratedly thoughtfully puffing on, but yesterday’s snowball fight between Alexander, Boris, Lieutenant Mogilov, and the guardsmen had perhaps only been a childish relapse of an otherwise mature and serious young man. However, he gave a much more immature impression than Boris who looked like he might actually be a little bit older than he was. Alexander was four years younger than Nadia, and over a year older than Evgenia—the family baby. He was wearing a uniform that was even simpler than the kind worn by Boris and Lieutenant Mogilov, the uniform of a student rather than a military officer. When she lived in Sofia she had seen the Slavophiles with their uniforms inspired by traditional peasant clothing that was a lot drabber than the folk dresses Nadia was made to wear—and a lot less colorful than real traditional peasant clothes. She had never really seen peasants very closely, but she knew that the Slavophiles were not necessarily inaccurate in their choice of drab clothes—the men who designed Slavophilic uniforms usually had a very martial streak in them and made them look more like dull military uniforms than something peasants would wear.

She wasn’t stupid; she knew that her grandfather wanted her cousins but also her and her siblings to be like ordinary people in some way
s. Even her maternally enforced isolation had not kept her from seeing the occasional postcard with the pictures of her grandfather, her grandmother, her uncle, and her aunt. While the two men were dressed like officers and might have been the king and crown prince of any civilized nation, the dresses the women wore had been obviously derived from what a peasant woman might imagine wearing for Easter if she could afford a really good dress. Especially the crown princess looked a lot like a wealthy peasant woman in those picturesque photographs rather than just a generic princess from any country.

There was a reason why Nadia’s first name and the name used for her publicly was Borislava rather than the name her mother used for her and the name she thought of as her name. If it had not been for her mother’s strong feelings, Nadia might have been educated more Slavicly by the sort of tutors that had been tutoring her older cousin Radoslava
. Uncle Boris the crown prince had three daughters of relatively similar ages to Nadia and her siblings. Radoslava was four years older than her, and she had been married to a Russian grand duke since before the war. Nadia had no idea what it was like to live with the enemy, but she assumed that even if Radoslava was kept as a prisoner she would still be treated respectfully like a prisoner of war.

Crown Prince Boris’s second daughter
Milena was two years younger than Nadia, and she was in frequent correspondence with a certain acquaintance she had made from her frequent visits to Austria. She had become friends with the heir to the emperor-king of Austria, but Nadia was not really in on what kind of friendship it was since she hadn’t seen Milena since they had come up to the mountain last summer, and she had never been all that familiar with her. The third daughter of Crown Prince Boris and Crown Princess Miroslava—born Viktoria of Luxemburg—was Lyudmila who was the same age as Evgenia. By comparison to the crown princess, Nadia’s mother’s Bulgarian name was almost identical to her given name—Princess Mariya rather than Maria; Maria of Mecklenburg-Schwerin.

The lounge was heated like the rest of the house, but it was warmer than the rooms the girls occupied. Indeed,
up in the girls’ rooms Evgenia kept wrapping herself up in blankets and could look like some sort of monk scholar when she was studying under a lamp with blankets over her head and body. Spring was slowly coming along, but the temperatures were still freezing—especially at night—even after Sofia was sure to be well into springtime already.

Ele
na helped Nadia with her hair, and to get dressed every morning. She wasn’t very choosy about clothes, and partly out of habit from her Slavophilic childhood and because of the temperature she wore rather bulky dresses that helped keep her warm rather than the kinds of dresses Elena used to wear when they lived in Sofia. The particular dress she was wearing today had less to do with any nationalist fervor than with the fact that it was practically comfortable and—in her opinion—pretty. Even if it was not the sort of fashionable dresses her mother or many women wore in Sofia, it was colorful and it helped keep her warm.

She remembered wearing dresses similar to it when she was younger, and she had
for example worn a Thracian dress for the family picture from when Evgenia was just a few years old, and she had a whole wardrobe with dresses reflecting different traditions from across Bulgaria’s regional dress styles and patterns. Professor Vladimirov said it was good to be more like ordinary people than foreign aristocrats, but from her experience of Sofia, she looked more Bulgarian than most of the people she met when she had to dress for public appearances. Indeed, she had hardly seen anybody who wasn’t related to her ever wear the kind of peasant sandals which her father would wear when he went out on his treks. She occasionally wore sandals too, but compared to warm felt boots it was pretty laborious to properly put on wool leggings and socks and firmly tie the sandals around your legs. She knew from pictures that ordinary women wore peasant dresses, but she did not associate with their lot. Her friends—like Elena—were indistinguishable from German or English women when it came to clothes, and it was people like her grandfather, her father, and Professor Vladimirov, and her Bulgarian governesses who had impressed on her the idea that she ought to look like a
Bulgarian
rather than a foreign princess. It didn’t make all that much sense though, since Elena was a Bulgarian, and she didn’t wear dresses like Professor Vladimirov insisted Bulgarians should be wearing. And all the while he was wearing an ordinary three-piece suit! It did seem a bit unfair that he didn’t think he had to distinguish his wardrobe from a foreigner’s while she had to dress like a peasant woman.

The two
young men playing pool were not different from the officers she had seen in Sofia before the summer. Lieutenant Mogilov and Boris were very similar; their tall boots, the breeches, and uniform blouses looked just like the prewar uniforms she had been used to seeing her father and uncle dressed up in. She prayed for her father, but her isolation made it hard to know what was happening far away since he never came by even for the holidays. Even before they went up here to Rila she had not seen her father very much at all since the war started, and she missed him a lot. Her uncle and father were both generals, but she had no idea exactly where they were and what they were doing. She knew what generals did in theory, but not what her father and uncle actually doing. Were they leading soldiers into battle with raised swords? Hardly—war wasn’t fought like that. But what was it they were doing?

In the latest letter Doctor Phillips had written from England he had reassured her that the war would have to end well, but she wondered when that might be. How long could it take for a war to be settled? Once one side had the upper hand, then surely it was over. That was why Bulgaria had sought peace when it had been attacked by its former friend
s in the disgraceful betrayal against the army that had done most of the fighting against the Turks in the war for Macedonia. Her great-grandfather had realized that there was no point to go on fighting against the enemy nations, and Bulgaria had been saved from a longer war by conceding defeat even though it was the enemy that was in the wrong. This war was different somehow. Not only were the enemies more numerous; Bulgaria wasn’t alone this time. The Germans, Austrians, and Chinese also fought the allied enemy nations. But how far would it take to find out who was the stronger so the weaker side would surrender?

“How is your father?” Dimitri
Dimitrov asked the young friend of Princess Borislava.

“I have no reason to doubt that he is well, but I have not
heard from him in a month,” Elena replied.

Elena Davidova was a fair girl whose father Dimitri had met
only a few times in Sofia high society. David Neikov was the first duke of his family, and he had been rewarded for his services to the country during the Balkan Wars with the ducal title. Dimitri’s father had also been ennobled by King Frants, but he had not been as greatly recognized as Neikov by high society as a whole. The non-royal aristocratic system had three titled ranks;
khertsog
,
graf
, and
baron
—dukes, counts, and barons. The largest group of nobles were those who had been acknowledged as the pre-independence nobility and who tended to be barons, but a growing number of nobles were those who had earned their rank by service—or by patronage. Dimitri had been a courtier of sorts under King Frants like his father who was among the men who had elected him grand prince, but unlike people like Duke Neikov, he had not impressed the king through military endeavors and supposed courage in battle. King Frants had had an eye almost exclusively for military men as he had grown older, and even a general with no real credit to his career could still expect to be made a baron at retirement after the late Frants’s precedents. King Petar V had continued the tradition of titling generals upon retirement, and it was a source of sorts for a still poor country to build up a tradition of modern aristocracy. Not that it mattered all that much in practical life. Dimitri would be addressed differently than an ordinary man, but there was no enormous legal advantage to go with the title. His stipend from the crown was a pension entirely separate from his title, and he earned most of his income by providing some well-to-do commoners with access to important people as a way to get a bit of extra cash out of his acquaintances with royals and senior officials.

Elena didn’t lik
e the old count. Dimitri Dimitrov Sokolsky’s face looked creepy, and she imagined that he was some kind of a fairytale traitor; the kind who would appear smarmy and kind but at the same time be racked by envy and ambition. He was probably a pervert too. She knew that she had a suspicious mind, but it was natural to be wary of people around the royals who were looking for their favor. Nadia and her kind could easily be preyed on by people who hoped to take advantage of them for their own status and power. Elena didn’t have to worry about that; her father was deep in debt, and the only credit he had was as a patriot and a war hero who had risked his life in an ultimately lost battle and who was suffering from very bad rheumatism—hardly something that would be of interest to anybody else.

Had Dimitri been forty years younger the girl
’s appearance would have appealed to his basic instincts. He didn’t really know David Neikov—Duke Neikov wasn’t a major fixture in Dimitri’s circles. He was one of those old soldiers who had been called back, and if memory served Dimitri right, Neikov was commanding a division in Greece. Dimitri had a decent memory, especially when it came to important men—he knew probably a hundred men well enough to engage in idle small talk which was exactly what his common, wealthy clients were interested in.

Princess Borislava
was quite different from her brothers. Boris was tall and handsome and Alexander was cherubic, as much as he might try to hide it by smoking a pipe. Most important of all; if Crown Prince Boris would not have a son—which seemed rather unlikely these days since his wife had not had a child for so many years—the young man playing billiards with Lieutenant Mogilov would be king in the future. When things returned to normal, his friendship could be quite a commodity for Dimitri again, and after his fortune had taken a bad bruising from the war, he would need a source of revenue in the future.

“So the whole XX Armored Corps is going to be transferred?” the lieutenant general
in charge of the 114th Infantry Division asked, sounding rather skeptical about the news that his division would be moved up the line along with the rest of the corps.

“It will be attached to the
19th Armored Army,” the general answered with a curt nod.

The officers understood that the planned offensive was ambitious
, and the general’s presentation had been quite enthusiastic. The Russians had strengthened their extreme right by the Baltic Sea and down into White Russia, and it was a formidable challenge to deal with—seemingly attacking the enemy where he was the strongest. It was likely that they were planning an offensive against the flank, or at the very least might anticipate a German attack. The Austrians had barely contained the Russians around Lemberg in Galicia through December and early January at great cost, and the 7th Army had been badly bruised in its efforts to support the Austrians. With the resources stretched so thin, the enemy could well puncture the long lines, and no sane man trusted the Austros. They had serious quality problems, not so much with the hardware, but with the men. The hodgepodge of Hungarians, Croats, Israelites, Ukrainians, Gypsies, Italians, and all sorts of people whom many of the Prussian officers did not want to entrust with their security and the integrity of the long frontline from the Baltic Sea and all the way down to the Black Sea. The length of the frontline in the east was a thousand miles or so, and half of it fell within the command of Bulgarian and Austrian army groups with some German units attached to them.

There were more than enough officers who were skeptical of their own Danes, Franco-Burgundians, Prussian Catholics, Bavarians, and other sorts, but the Austrians had a far more diverse pool of men and far less reliable people than Prussian Catholics or Bavarians. The German Army was thoroughly imbued with Prussians—probably three-quarters of the men assembled were Prussian Protestants, and they were probably a decent representation of the senior ranks of the army as a whole. The fact that the Austrians were vital to keep pressure away from the northern end of the front made the concerns many of the men had with them particularly important. Not only did they relieve pressure, but a breakthrough in Galicia would require a major shift southwards and make it far more difficult to think about advancing into the industrial heartland of White Russia and Smolensk.

“The transfers to the West will be a hard blow, and it is vital that the center here will not fold if Ivan makes a push,” the field marshal said, taking over from his chief of staff who had summarized how the preparations for the upcoming operation would affect other parts of the front. “The center will be weak, but we will count on you to hold your ground if the enemy will try to push you…”

Although the field marshal was in command, it wa
s his chief of staff—the general who had been speaking for a good thirty minutes before the officers began to question details of his plan—who seemed most eager to explain the operation and how the senior officers of Army Group Center would have to support it.

General
Manstein was one of the poster boys of the drastic changes the war had forced on the Prussian Army. The creation of the
Reichswehr
was not in itself a drastic change—it was primarily an administrative shift that allowed the Prussian Army to gobble up the minor German armies into a single organization—but the demands of war and the increasing focus on armored warfare had left many old generals and colonel generals replaced by a wave of younger officers as battles, operations, and campaigns took their tolls on commanders who proved unsuitable for their commands. Several divisions and even corps were commanded by men who had been colonels or lesser men at the start of the war, and the general accompanying the field marshal was one such man who had risen to become one of Germany’s preeminent generals. He had been some sort of insignificant little twerp within the General Staff in Berlin just a few years ago who had risen to outrank many of the generals in the room after getting credit for much of the planning behind Operation Clausewitz. And now he was the chief of staff of Army Group North, one of the most important officers in the entire war effort.

Johannes couldn’t deny that the men who had either gone to Anatolia as military observers during the Turkish War or had simply taken part in the development of the armored arm brought something new and vital to the field
, and all military planners had to take armor into account whether they liked it or not. When Johannes had been a junior officer tanks and airplanes had been eccentricities with little military utility. After the Turkish War and the great success of both the Bulgarians and the Turks with simple tankettes built in Germany and France, German, French, and British theorists had rushed to examine the potential of armored vehicles. The Germans and the British had developed similar doctrinal thinking based on them, but with Britain keeping out of the war, it was Germany that had proved to the world the importance of armored warfare over older, less reactive decisive battle doctrine which the Russians followed. Johannes saw no shame in admitting that he had been wrong in his belief that the tankers would turn out to have been mistaken in their beliefs about the armored arm’s utility. Although he remained a proud product of the infantry, he understood that his corps needed its tanks and air support just as much as it needed its artillery.

Johannes
was a firm believer in pride, and he would not easily confess that he was glad that the General Staff had swooned and gushed at the tales from Lutz and his disciples of fast armored warfare. It was good fortune that the French had been too timid and the Russians too stupid to embrace the kind of thinking that the armored theorists had brought along in which the armored arm was a central component rather than just there to support the infantry—the roles had almost been reversed with the infantry trying to catch up to act as the support arm to finish up the armored breakthrough and destroy the enemy. As things stood, Germany could still keep a sort of equilibrium in the strength of the tank arm against Russia and France, but the news that Johannes would lose a fifth of his corps to Italy to help keep the French busy would have negative consequences on the balance of power between Germany and Russia—and he was not the only one being robbed of troops
ahead
of the offensive operation the self-satisfied general had devised.

T
he four European fronts—the West, Italy, the Balkans, and Russia—were manned primarily by Germans. The Austrians had their organizational issues and were under heavy pressure in Galicia from the Russians, and Bulgaria was a tin-pot little country with little industry—German envoys had had to go down there with planes, tanks, guns, and even helmets and boots to help them equip their primitive armies for a sustained war effort. No sane man could believe that Germany could hold on to this situation or overturn it on its own without a miracle. That was why Johannes was curious about the plan detailed by General Manstein, which indicated that High Command would not wait for the Chinese to force the Russians to send troops to Asia to counter their offensive. It was only the decision to strengthen Italy and the Gneisenau Line by transferring a hundred thousand men—albeit not of the highest quality—there before the operation would begin.

The Russians had been striking hard agains
t the Austrians, particularly around Lemberg, but they had also pushed them where the Austrian and Bulgarian lines met to the west of Moldova in the north of Romania which had been almost completely occupied by troops from all three European allied nations. Army Group South and the Austrians had taken the worst Russian blows for the past eight months with several minor and major strokes and offensives more or less uncoordinated but serious enough to cause a huge drain on manpower and resources to plug in the emerging gaps.

Russian casualties were perhaps greater, but no country in Europe could mobilize more men than R
ussia. The only nation anywhere in the world that could realistically put more troops in the field was Germany’s distant ally in the Far East, but that was a long way away. What happened in Asia would have little direct consequence in Europe for some time, and Johannes hardly even bothered to listen whenever someone raised the topic, either out of hope or out of concern about the supposed military power of the yellow rats.

The long frontlines of
the Russian front made it naturally difficult to concentrate large forces without weakening the defenses elsewhere, and the Russians had been surprisingly capable when it came to shielding troop movements from view and quickly moving significant forces between different sectors. That was how they had been so successful against the Austrians despite the distances and the sheer number of troops involved. The German air forces were being flown all over the place like a flying circus moving from place to place to provide air cover, close air support, or to make strategic or tactical strikes against the enemy, but they weren’t enough to decide campaigns on their own and they were stretched far too thin. An advancing army couldn’t be stopped dead in its tracks by air power without significant ground forces to deal with the threat. Air forces were undoubtedly a support arm rather than an independent military force like English theorists had suggested for the past decade, and on the aerial score Johannes felt that his original disdain had been vindicated by the failure of the French to shatter the Gneisenau Line through aerial bombardment.

The overall strategic
situation was troublesome, and the knowledge that both Johannes’s sons were in uniform and how the whole nation was being mobilized made even a staunch Prussian nationalist fear for the collective health of the nation. Prussians—and perhaps Germans more generally—might be hardy folk, but even the most dedicated people had some limit to them. Johannes was worried about the enemy’s resilience which seemed implacable and the nagging fear that there was still a lot of fighting left didn’t make for pleasant dreams.

He had no idea how many had died
so far, but just after he had assumed command of his corps he knew that his command alone had lost more than three thousand total casualties in a period of less than eight months of bitter engagements. How high could the total casualties be for the whole war effort if you counted the army corps that had seen much worse action? Millions?