The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (37 page)

S
he knew that there was no point in writing to God, since everything she could tell God was already known to Him, but she still continued to write with pleasure. Regardless of her motivation for writing about her life, writing in her diary was a wonderful way of thinking about the day and the different impressions and distill them into funny phrases and ideas. Although she didn’t want to speak to people, she listened and she thought about what she picked up. And then she put it down in her diaries as she unloaded all her impressions. She wondered why Mommy was so sad about everything—Evgenia didn’t like when Mommy was unhappy. She didn’t ask her, obviously; that was Borislava’s job. She was the one who could talk; the one who liked to hear the sound of her own voice. She was the one who asked the driver about what she saw rather than to simply remain ignorantly speculative like Evgenia preferred to stay.

Evgenia had already written several pages after yes
terday about her fears, and the day had started bad for her when she had been separated from her sister and mother, but as the day had proceeded she had been allowed to focus so much on the plethora of fascinating sights when she had snuck away from her handler nurse to explore the hospital. Men with no arms. Men who had lost their eyes. Men who had had their jaws removed by the enemy’s weapons and had then been bandaged like funny inhuman mummies. She would have to write Father Nikola— maybe she would have the courage to ask if he could come and speak to her. He was not only an expert, but he was an expert who spoke to her, and seeing him was like seeing the Lord. She knew that he was not God—obviously—but she also knew that God used him as a way of coming closer to people who had done nothing to deserve His love and compassion. Father Nikola was a tool of God, and speaking to him was just an easier way of speaking to God than she could manage on her own. Others might do well on their own, but Evgenia needed a guide like the priest to properly verbalize her thoughts.

She wrote it all down
as her mind wandered from things that had happened today to things that had happened earlier and to things that hadn’t happened at all. Her impressions, her thoughts about God and Father Nikola, and about Father Nikola generally. She had missed the sound of his voice and the sight of his unkempt beard and hair, just like the way Christ must have looked. There was something very beautiful about him, but she obviously couldn’t tell him that she was jealous of his wife. She imagined how wonderful it must be to be married to Father Nikola. To talk about the world, life, God, and everything else, to raise his children, and just always have him there like a living saint and never feel alone. A good, simple Christian life.

Maybe there were other men like him who could make her feel the same way, but she hadn’t ever seen one.
Men like Milena’s fiancé were just pointless. Besides, wasn’t Prince Otto a heathen? If Aunt Miroslava was a good Christian she should not be happy that one of her daughters was engaged with a Catholic, right? Your husband should be a Christian. And what about their babies? Would they be Papist infidels? That wouldn’t be good at all. Someone should talk to Milena. It was a genuine mystery to Evgenia that there were people in the world who weren’t Christians. Didn’t they want to live forever together with God? Why would people want to be godless? And even if they wanted to live godlessly, they should understand that God wouldn’t be pleased with them. God could get really angry almost to the point where He was a little mean-spirited. How could people be so stupid? She didn’t understand it at all.

Father Nikola had ensured her that she would be fine, because God was sure to be absolutely pleased with her. She was so good, and God liked that. But she mustn’t be too proud about being God’s precious little thing, but it wasn’t easy to be humble about God’s endorsement. Humility was awfully challenging.

Anastas tried to move along slowly and keep his breath quiet. The company was supposed to get all the way to the shrubberies several hundred feet away before sunrise. The frogs were somewhere on the other side, and he had no interest of being the first one there, so he kept moving along rather than try to take the lead in case the enemy would be right there and ready for them. He kept an even pace with the other men around, not wishing to shirk from his duty, but he wasn’t trying to become a hero by taking on those damned frogs all on his own. They were keeping their heads down and the officer had said that they had to keep their eyes on the ground. Any sound and he would cut their balls off and stuff them up their own asses. That’s what he’d said, although he probably didn’t mean it… Still, they had to keep absolutely quiet or the French might be ready for them.

He wanted the frogs to just give up so they could stop all this nonsense. How many of them would have to die before they saw that there was no point in continuing? Anastas just wanted to get this all over and done with so they could go back home. The field was relatively flat, but the occasional furrow or twig could disrupt the silent flow as they kept moving forward. Keeping a few feet between each other, the men advanced in a very loose couple of lines, moving as quietly as possible while also wanting to get safely to the shrubberies. The French would be chased in their direction, and the field on the other side could be an excellent field to finish them off when they tried to retreat across it. At least that was the plan.

An owl’s hooting added just that little piece of spookiness to the atmosphere, and he smiled to himself when he was startled at first when he heard it before he recognized the nightly sound. Anastas didn’t mind being outside late at night, but this wasn’t an ordinary walk. Within hours they had to expect to fight the damn frogs, and he didn’t like it that much last time and doubted this would be very fun. Still, they had to kill them to stop them, and somebody had to do the job. If Anastas’s unit wouldn’t do it another unit would have to, and it would be pretty selfish and cowardly to try to hope to shift the burden away.

The men were coming closer to the shrubberies, but it was really hard to make them out very well. The branches were thick, and the dark turned them into a big mass of vegetation. He kept moving his head and eyes to scan the goal, ever so paranoid. The sensation of not knowing where the enemy was and the insecurity about his surrounding was horrible, but there was a different emotion inside him too. A kind of excitement. Here they were, marching quietly and on the lookout for frogs without being absolutely certain about the outcome of their little walk. That insecurity was quite unlike anything Anastas had ever experienced, but it was not entirely off putting. That excitement kept his fluids pumping, and he wondered if the others felt the same way.

“What’s that?” someone hissed down the line, and Anastas instinctively turned his head in the direction of the voice.

There wasn’t much time to ask who said it and what he had meant. Almost as soon as Anastas heard the horrific sound of rapid fire he dropped to the ground, just moments after some of the men a few yards away were smacked down by a swift, long burst of machinegun fire—it wasn’t easy to tell which men were on the ground from instinctive cover-seeking and who’d been hit. In the dark it was hard to see anything, but little flashes from the shrubberies made it clear that the vegetation wasn’t empty at all.

The men couldn’t just get down, they had to fight back too. As hard as it was to try to see the enemy, Anastas clenched his hands tightly on his rifle, and tried to make sense of the confusion. The moments from the first gunfire felt like an eternity before a flare went up into the pre-dawn dark, and the company was bathed in light from that small artificial sun when it came down towards the Earth again, lighting up the whole field. Rather than being immobile, he quickly realized that he was lying open with the small ridge with the shrubberies up above him two hundred yards away. Not wanting to die, he followed the example of several other men and brought his gun up like he had been trained to do, and he squeezed off the first shot pretty much as a wild guess that there might be a frog in the way of his bullet.

He fired again. Again. Again. The whole field was cracking with gunfire; the frogs were too far away for hand grenades, and he prayed to God that someone would bring a mortar to bear on the enemy and blow them all away. He hated the sons-of-bitches, but there was no use whining, and he was caught up in the excitement anyway. They had to be killed, and while he waited for them to die, he tried to fire randomly up towards where he guessed they might be lying up in the shrubberies.

When he fired the last shot in the internal magazine he reached down towards his pouches for a fresh stripper magazine. He had practiced reloading so many times that his hand could find a magazine on its own, but he was lying a bit awkwardly to get to the belt.

Damned frogs
…

He cursed as he had to change position slightly to get the pouch open in order to get the fresh clip out.
Fucking hell…
A single, well-aimed bullet came in for a clean hit, and before he had put the clip of bullets into the rifle he slumped down peacefully and quietly, the high-powered little bullet piercing through the steel helmet and slammed through his brain before he had time to realize that a frog had seen him.

The photos were very good to look at
, and the officers had passed them around while they talked about the auspicious signs from the handful of aerial pictures Combined Command had sent over after sorting through the endless cache of pictures the Air Corps had taken around Novonikolayevsk. Terushige was not the only one who was pleasantly surprised to see that it looked like the division would not face more than the rearguard. Corps had notified them of the Russian retreat from the eastern sectors, and the aerial photographs of the skeleton remains of the enemy defenses were very nice to see.

Despite the good news, t
he staff was in a bit of a tense mood after the exhausting past few days and weeks and the knowledge that the campaign had only just begun. Cups and canteens of dumpling soup were being passed around, and the simple, watery breakfast was not the finest one they could have asked for. The division had once more returned to be one of the spearheads that would take on the enemy, and this time the corps had been given the honor by the army commander to claim the big prize up ahead—the city of Novonikolayevsk. The Crown of Siberia.

Omsk, Novonikolayevsk
, and a few other large cities in Central Siberia were still under Russian control even as the cavalry and mechanized vanguards were thundering and rumbling across the desolate countryside to take the objectives they were assigned under the evolving plan. Each field army or mechanized army had become increasingly divided into its constituent parts, and Terushige’s corps was almost entirely independent of the rest of the mechanized army. They would be cooperating far more with a corps from a completely different army for the operation to capture Novonikolayevsk than they would with the corps of their own mechanized army.

Novonikolayevsk
was not an important prize because of its industry or population—southern Siberia was more of an agricultural country than an industrial belt anyway. The city was certainly the first or second city of Russian Asia, but it was far more important to take the city simply because of its significance as a symbol rather than to disable the industry the city possessed. Novonikolayevsk, Akmolinsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Orenburg, Yekaterinburg and Verniy were all vital if the General Staff would secure and pacify Russian Asia and secure the railroads and rid the enemy of all its military capacity in Asia. The plan from the General Staff in Hokukei was ambitious, but if they were as successful, then it was feasible that before summer would end most of Siberia would be practically secured simply because the Russians would not be able to keep their forces in Asia supplied without launching massive counteroffensives to retake the supply routes. It would be an impossible task to supply hundreds of thousands of troops in desolate regions of northern Asia without railroads. Absolutely impossible. Even moving a camel cavalry division around in northern Yakutia was a terrible challenge, and ten times that number of troops with all their needs to just survive let alone replenish ammunition would be infinitely more difficult.

Terushige could not help but remind himself that
the 167th Division—a formation forced to the rear only yesterday—had been made up of humans. The 24th Corps had suffered obscene casualties, and one of its three divisions—the 167th—had been almost entirely obliterated as a fighting force in a series of engagements over just a couple of days. The remnant would of course be able to be refitted with fresh material, but a significant portion of the materials needed was the replacements for most of the actual soldiers that were in some way perpetually lost—fully or only militarily—from the significant Russian counterattack it had thwarted at the cost of about four thousand men in all—dead, wounded, and missing.

Since the offensive began in early March
it had seemed that the most dangerous weapon the Russians had were their warplanes. The enemy mechanized units could only do that much, and the Air Corps had been annoyingly ineffectual in providing the much-needed air superiority they had been tasked with giving the ground forces, trying to shirk their responsibilities by moving thousands of aircraft to interdiction duties over Shinkyou Province rather than to focus on supporting the offensive operations. Terushige had seen with his own eyes a fair number of burned-out tanks and trucks they had passed by that served as proof that the Air Corps’ failures did not come without cost. The lives of tankers was the price of Air Corps inefficiency, and as a part of the mechanized arm—and as a human—he sympathized with the men who joked about beating a few airmen black and blue. The audacity to move airplanes to interdiction over Shinkyou rather than fight the enemy here was repulsive. Even if it would be true that the enemy had been bombing Dushanbe, Altay, and Tekika that was unfortunate, but it was not reason to waste precious aerial resources to guard useless cities rather than armored columns in enemy territory.

There was
still a few hours left until the operation would begin that was intended to be the opening moves in the long operation intended to end with the capture of Novonikolayevsk, and Terushige did what he could to relax. The large tent was freezing, but he figured that if they did their job right they might soon be freed from freezing their balls off in this horrid part of the world. Either that, or spring would warm them up.

“
Yamashu’s regiment still hasn’t gotten back on the move,” Major Ryuu muttered as he sat down on the stool next to Terushige.

“Did you tell the general?” Terushige asked, immediately regretting asking such a stupid question.

“They might have to do without them,” the major answered absentmindedly while he tried to light a match for his cigarette, just barely nodding his head. “He still has enough tanks.”

The tent was just one of the residences doubling as workspaces temporarily used for the divisional headquarters before they would move on. The staff had been receiving a lot of intelligence reports—maps, photographs, and other intelligence paraphernalia—and Terushige and the other officers had to quickly further winnow the raw material down, and especially the logistics group had had a lot to do for the past 48 hours to work together with Corps to get spare parts and engines for field repairs of several broken down vehicles. As sturdy as the tanks were supposed to be, the divisional recovery group had had a lot of work to salvage tanks that had suffered mechanical failures, and the factory had sent much too few spare gearboxes and other vital parts. Yamashu’s regiment had suffered a one-in-a-million chance kind of mass breakdown of gearboxes, and there had not been time to ask other divisions for spare gearboxes to sort out the mess.

“How’s the weather?” Terushige asked, not having ventured out of the yurt for over an hour.

“Shitty,”
the major sighed as he managed to light his cigarette after he removed his gloves to be able to get the match to fire. “Snow is blowing like a... Well, it’s blowing, alright.”

Terushige had seen it when he last went out for a piss. He could easily imagine the attack being forced to be postponed if the weather didn’t change soon
simply because of how it might blind the troops. Moving tanks and guns around in the middle of what was some kind of snowstorm seemed to be a way to end up shooting at your own men. There was no way that the troops would be able to find their way to their objectives, and how could they tell the Russians apart? Already there was some difficulty to tell the difference between Japanese and Russian soldiers when they were wearing white winter smocks, and that without eyes full of snow.

“I’ll tell you, the gods invented snow for a reason,” Major Ryuu sneered. “It’s nature’s way of telling us where we shouldn’t go.”

“Maybe,” Terushige said with a thoughtful nod. “I don’t mind the snow; I think it’s very beautiful. It’s the damn wind that’s so awful. ”

“
Russian
kamikaze
,” Major Ryuu snickered. “It really is an unnatural wind.”

Sometimes
the gods just seemed to enjoy dicking around just for the fun of it, but Terushige was worried about the challenges the division had to solve. No matter how far the corps went there had been several ambushes and counterattacks, with the devastating one the other day being the worst so far with those horrific losses to the tanks in the 167th Mechanized Division. If this kept up, then the corps would be ground to nothing before they reached Europe and then have to let other men smash the enemy to pieces. That wouldn’t be right. Terushige had hoped that, after staying home from Arabia when he had been a cadet and hadn’t gone, this would be his great war. If the division would have to be sent to be refitted or even disbanded, he might not have the opportunity to marsh into Europe a conqueror. After all, how many chances would they have to actually fight? He couldn’t hope for a war against England or America within his career, so this was probably his war. It would be a shame to waste the opportunity.