The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (42 page)

Manifest Destiny was not only a matter of national survival and power, it was also a good thing for economic development. It was a pity that the Latins—so burdened with a lax work ethic and Catholic dogmas—needed to be prodded into action. Of course, when it came to being violent or degenerate they needed no external motivation, but for development they needed someone to guide them. They needed Lady Columbia to set them on the right way—and not in the way that usually motivated the oversexed perverted Mexicans into action.

There was an intermission of a few minutes after the newsreel, but Helen did not seem very responsive when Emily tried to prod her about what they had seen. It was natural to want to talk, but she was being very quiet before she resolved to leave for the restroom for a bit. Poor Helen had her bladder now, so Emily couldn’t blame her. However, her absence made Emily’s mind wander, and she began to feel particularly annoyed that a man just a couple of seats over was smoking a rather odorous cigar. She hated cigars—her uncle smoked them quite frequently, and they made her quite nauseous. Cigarettes were fine, her dear late husband had smoked constantly, and as long as he did not light up until after he had finished eating she had been content.

She sighed nostalgically, missing his companionship. He had been a good man, and it wasn’t very easy to find them among the men like that man with the stinky cigar. So thoughtlessly puffing on such a smelly contraption. Cigarettes were quite odorless, so why would a man want to use something that was both annoying and left a stink behind? It didn’t make sense. She waited impatiently for her cousin, and she came back just shortly before the feature started.

When the Disney Company had made its cartoon feature fairytale back in ’33 it had been a fascinating thing, even though the fairytale itself had not been very interesting to her. Emily was much more intrigued by this production which
The
New Yorker
had described as a mature and intelligent film. Besides, Imperial Studios was headquartered right here in the city and had been described in
The New Yorker
in some detail. She had not read the novel, so she was not sure what to expect, and she had avoided the religious controversy since it might ruin the enjoyment.

Helen was a little apprehensive when the film started just moment after she returned from the restroom; she thought that the book was awfully dull and depressing. Cartoons by contrast were funny, like caricatures of the world. She did not instinctively accept the film’s denunciation from the Catholic groups, but not only Catholics had criticized what was undoubtedly a group of Hebrews choosing to make a film that could become offensive to everyone who believed in God.

The film was a bit long, and Emily did not know what to think when there was an intermission about an hour into it. It wasn’t exactly the kind of lighthearted entertainment she had expected. Perhaps it was her perverted mind, but she could not remember seeing a priest in such a bad light—unless only she interpreted him as being a debauched pervert. Maybe it was understandable why it had been referred to as yet another Hebrew deicide in a piece of hyperbolic criticism.

“Do you like it?” Emily asked Helen as they went out to the lobby to powder their noses.

“I don’t know,” her cousin mumbled, but it was with that kind of skepticism you could expect from someone too timid to say what she wanted to say.

Helen was such a quiet spirit, even more quiet than Emily, and that was when she was among friends and not with unfamiliar people. Emily was shy too, but only when she did not have the confidence of familiarity to help her speak. She had never been the kind of person to take the social lead.

The theater was a fairly big one despite being a cheap neighborhood theater. Like a proper theater it was crammed full of seats, and a small battalion of ushers were manning the aisles. Helen was walking a bit stiffly, perhaps still worried that her inflated girth would be noticed despite the helpful advice on colors. Emily had been hesitant about a corset since she had read somewhere that it was dangerous for pregnant women, but she was pleased that it had been enough to convince Helen to let her take her to the theater for the evening.

They returned to their seats after freshening up, and Helen bought a gauche bag of popcorn. Emily was rather skeptical, but she had noticed that an awful lot of people used the intermission to buy popcorn or drinks from the soda fountain. She had insisted that Helen must let her buy something to drink, or else she would get dehydrated from her munch. Actually, she bought herself an ice cream soda too, following her cousin’s immature example. It didn’t really seem right to eat and drink while watching a picture, but if that was what Helen was going to do, then Emily might as well sin together with her.

The picture was awfully sad in the end, and when the malformed, tragic protagonist lay down to die, Emily was feeling rather moved for some reason. She could agree that it was a wonderful little film, but unlike the short animated films and the Disney fairytale she had seen previously, it was rather a bleak film by contrast.

Helen wasn’t the least bit surprised by the ending since she remembered the novel well as the picture went along, despite the long time since she had read it. The wicked priest died in the end, but the Shakespearian ending in which everybody died was quite different from the usual cinematic fare, animated or not. It was a nice film, however, and it was surely less dull, but also more engaging than Victor Hugo’s novel. Whatever ill you could say about Hebrews choosing to make a film with the sort of anti-clerical and heavy themes as
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
, she found it quite appealing. She liked it. Perhaps Frederic would take her sometime and see it again?

Michael was happy to have the time to relax in the mild spring sun
without doing anything for a short while, and under the sun-drenched rest his eyes fell naturally on the parade of sorts across the simple dirt road that filled the early hours of the day. The tank was parked just thirty yards from the edge of the road, and as he dangled his legs absentmindedly down from the hull he watched the pathetic donkeys led by a handful of men with rifles like shepherds leading their livestock.

The Russians’ khaki tunics made it easy to tell them apart from the gray field uniforms of the infantrymen walking next to them
, prodding them onwards along the road. Word was that almost an entire battalion had been captured less than a mile to the north, and the lieutenant had said that the division they had pierced and shattered had disintegrated completely when the German armor had closed the trap around the Russians caught inside the Courland Pocket.
Poor little critters
.

For the first time in six months, the battalion commander had been genuinely cheerful when he
had come along with the colonel to hand out a few medals to some of the distinguished officers and other ranks. Michael only had one little medal which he wasn’t allowed to wear around the neck like the prestigious ones, but it was certainly a nice treat after so much time spent in genuine fear of his life. Right now he was immortal, but the moment they would be sent into their steel can and ordered into battle again he would return to be just as vulnerable to an enemy shell as he had been just days ago.

“Look miserable, don’t they?” Lothar beamed as he exhaled a small cloud of cigarette smoke.

Michael glanced over his shoulder to where his comrade was sitting and enjoying the afternoon sun. Lothar looked so sure of himself, and it was hard to disagree with him. The dirty prisoners looked like miserable little Ivans Filthy little things.

“They sure do,” Michael agreed.

The Russian uniforms only looked like military uniforms because all of them were wearing identical clothes and they had black leather boots and caps or helmets on their heads as well. The tunics themselves looked like they were some sort of peasant clothing rather than the uniforms of actual soldiers the way nobody could mistake their guards for being peasants. The guards’ uniforms were smart-looking and crisp—at least when they were somewhat clean. Of all the soldiers of Europe, there were probably none that looked as miserable as the Russians.

“Dirty little savages,” Lothar sneered.

He hated the damned lot of them. As long as they kept fighting the war would go on and on and on forever on in this pointless struggle. Only if they would stop this senseless fighting would they be able to go back and they and their fellow tankers would no longer have to risk being decommissioned by an anti-tank shell. The combination of tank shells and machineguns were devastating, and they had seen the remains of comrades and enemies who had died the same way; a shell knocking out the tank and the crew then being torn up by machinegun fire as they clamored to get out of what might otherwise become their tomb.

Even if the men walking down the road weren’t tankers, Lothar had no reason to like their infantry any more than their tankers. The infantrymen were part of the Asiatic horde as much as the tankers, and as far as he was concerned, the war would keep on as long as they kept coming. And did they! Russians fucked like
rabbits, and it might be nearly physically impossible to eradicate the pests faster than they made more of them. It was the biological version of Fordian mass-production, and this vermin parade was the end result of that human assembly line.

“It would be a lot quicker if we just put them in fron
t of a machinegun and let them have it, huh?” Lothar mused, thinking that the men guarding them and the resources wasted on those Asiatic creatures would be a lot better spent somewhere else.

“What, you want to shoot their whole army group?” the sergeant asked with a good-natured smile.

He had been with another crew before his tank had been destroyed, and he had earned himself the Iron Cross, First Class for his part in the engagement that cost his tank two crewmembers dead and a third man invalided. Only the sergeant had survived unhurt, and now this little group had been put together to fight as a unit.

“They deserve it,” Lothar said.

“If they won’t surrender we might have to kill them all,” the sergeant said, his face looking very mismatched to what he was saying.

It was as if
he just couldn’t stop smiling.

“You should be happy to see them,” the sergeant smirked. “Every last one of them is one less man standing against us.”

“It’s the same if they die,” Lothar said. “Death’s much more final.”

“Yes, well…”

The sergeant didn’t finish the thought, and for a moment he looked troubled. Michael wondered what he was thinking. The sergeant was a very affable guy, but he hardly knew anything about him since he didn’t air his opinions like a normal person. Lothar Kaschinski was a very outspoken guy, and there was scarcely a thing about him that Michael didn’t know. By contrast, the sergeant was a great unknown. Other than his name he was pretty much an empty canvas. A smiling canvas, but still almost completely empty.

Chapter 6
5

Easter was still a week away, and Nadia was absolutely delighted about the news buzzing about the capital about the Russian surrender of an army in Asia. The newspapers claimed that the Muscovites would be crushed by the Chinese assault in the Far East and the promising, ongoing German spring offensive from Europe. The good news were only punctured by another grueling day—a long day—at the military hospital. The fighting in Macedonia had been horrific, and Nadia was still shaken by the sights and smells of the results as the trains brought in soldiers from there. Men her own age and younger with bad injuries. It bothered her that they were so young, although she was no little girl anymore, so maybe it wasn’t all that odd that many of the heroic soldiers should match her age.

But still, there was something
very auspicious about all the good news coming while Easter was approaching, and she was hopeful about the days ahead. Maybe it was a sign that just as Easter marked Christ’s great victory over death, it would be her grandfather’s time of great victory against the bully countries. That would sure be an auspicious timing.

“Did you read the book?” Elena asked, annoyed that Nadia was being so distant lately.

“Yes, I did,” she mumbled, not really feeling like talking about novels.

Elena had noticed that Nadia had become less open with her, and she worried that she didn’t enjoy her
friendship like she had when they had been up in the Rila Mountains. Not only that, the lack of spirited discussion left Elena feeling like the friendship wasn’t paying off the way it used to. She almost wanted to be back on the desolate mountain again where at least Nadia had paid attention to what they were talking about. With Nadia being this way, Elena felt like there was no point in discussing the book she had lent Nadia, and she decided to change to a topic that might elicit a much more interesting discussion.

“Do you kn
ow Anton Blagoev Nikolayev?” Elena asked eagerly, not having told Nadia yet about the other day.

“I’m not sure,” Nadia mumbled as she tried to think if the name was familiar.

“He’s the oldest son of Baron Nikolayev, the cigarette maker,” Elena added, assuming that Nadia would at least know of him.

After all, Baron Nikolayev was a very rich man with a couple of very big cigarette factories
here in the city and elsewhere. Nadia had to know about him. There weren’t that many barons, counts, and dukes to keep track of, and Baron Nikolayev was something of a celebrity as an industrialist and car enthusiast. He owned something like thirty different cars from England, Germany, and America.

“I’m sorry,
I don’t know him very well,” Nadia said apologetically, even though she had never heard of the man.

Maybe she should recognize the name, but Nadia was not good with names, and this or that manufacturer just didn’t sound very interesting. Who cared about industrialists?

“Anyway,” Elena said, undeterred by Nadia’s ignorance, “I spent the whole evening talking with the baron’s son, Anton Blagoev, and I think he likes me.”

Something clicked in Nadia’s head from Elena’s tone, and she immediately wanted to get to the bottom of what Elena was talking about. This actually sounded like something interesting to hear about!

“Is he handsome?” she asked, naturally keen to know about one of the more important points of anything.

“Yeah, sure,” Elena said, a little uneasy about being untruthful.

Anton Blagoev was not a handsome man, but he wasn’t really ugly, so she wasn’t lying. She was just being a bit generous about him. Still, looks wasn’t everything and Elena had to be realistic. Almost no men were all that interesting to look at, so it wasn’t like it mattered much if Anton Blagoev didn’t look super beautiful. What man did, right? Nobody. Nobody at all.

“Do you like him?”
Nadia asked.

They hadn’t talked about men or boys in a long time; Elena hadn’t liked it when Nadia just pointed out that she thought it would be great fun if Elena would try to flirt with one of the
married
guard officers at the lodge a few months ago. No matter how much Nadia had tried to get Elena to play games like that, Nadia had been left with no entertainment at all of that kind. Nadia wasn’t sure about her own future. She was too uncertain to talk about what might happen to her. If you looked at the record, it would be natural to think that Nadia would maybe marry some duke or prince in Austria or Germany. Before the war Russia had perhaps been natural too, like how Radoslava and other relatives had married Russians. There was no shortage of German princes with several dozens of sovereign princes, dukes, grand dukes, and kings like her mother’s older brother, the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. However, she didn’t want to talk about herself in the context of men. Not with Elena—maybe with Daddy if he would want to talk about it with her. Nevertheless, she was very curious about Elena and that was ground she could walk without the slightest unease.

“He’s re
ally nice,” Elena said, “and he likes reading.”

That was what they had mostly talked about: Novels. The small, informal party had been an opportunity for her to meet people from her own kind rather than the royals, and Anton Blagoev, Nikita Petrov, and Mikhail Mikhailov were just some of the eligible bachelors she had met over the last week. She liked Anton Blagoev the most, mostly because he was the one who had been most talkative with her. He was a bit older than her at twenty-six, but
at twenty-one she was no young girl, and it seemed like a perfectly normal difference, nothing weird about it. Besides, he was already involved with his father’s company, and he might be an even more successful businessman one day. What more could a girl ask for than an intelligent, successful, and nice husband?

“You have
to show me a picture,” Nadia said, rather curious about this guy Elena seemed to like.

Elena would be more than happy to share one with her friend, if she had had one to share. It wasn’t exactly easy to ask a man she only knew as an acquaintance if he could give her a picture of him. Anyway, she had no idea about what Anton Blagoev thought about her, yet she hoped to see him soon again so she could find out.