The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (28 page)

The men in the small
shack had heard the news on the radio and celebrated with a drink of schnapps. Even useless Austros could do something right once in a while. The news that the Austrians had dislodged the Ities from their defenses at Genoa was pleasant to hear after such a long period of stalemate on the Italian front with very slow progress across the board for the past few weeks. Günther had never seen Italy, but the Ities’ disgusting backstabbing was more than enough to hope that the Austrians would leave only ruins behind as they kept driving them down the peninsula or into France.

There hadn’t been much big news from Italy
since around New Year, and, quite frankly, Günther had been too busy to worry about the progress of their comrades on other fronts. They just had to rely on them doing their job the same as everybody else rather than worry about things they couldn’t do anything about. If thoughts alone would be enough to change the world, then surely the war would already be over and done with since nobody—except possibly the Fords and the Krupps of the world—could get much good out of endless war.

Günther went outside to get away from the cramped smell of the shack
, and the drizzling shower on top of his head gave him a feeling of release after spending so much of the day first at the command post and then holed up in the small peasant dwelling. The residents in the village had slowly been filtering back over the past month after they had abandoned their homes before Günther first came to the village. In East Prussia and South Prussia, Günther knew that the authorities had helped people settle temporarily farther west to get away from the fluid battlefield to keep them out of the way for both their own sake and for the sake of the army. With Ivan’s civilians it was obviously a very different story. The scruffy peasants came and went, and the military police units had to keep them out of the way. After all, who could tell if these people would spy on behalf of Ivan if they were permitted to come and go as they pleased? Yet a noble, empathetic man couldn’t bring himself to harm defenseless creatures, so they were largely left in place as long as they did not venture to the outposts lining the “red line” between the two sides about a mile outside the village.

Across the dirt road, he could see plenty of dirty peasants as they went in and out of the crowded shack
during the day, and a few children had been playing outside in the still winter-bitten mud—the rain was an auspicious sign that spring was right around the corner now. The peasants were left to work where they did not interfere with the defensive lines, and they went to work at daybreak and returned home at dusk.

He had noticed one
young woman in particular who lived in the crowded shack across from their humble hut. She did not remind her of Ilse other than in the most fundamental way in which most women might remind him of his wife, but he had been surprised to see a female Ivan that caught his attention in that way since most of them seemed dirty and somehow misshapen. He hadn’t touched Ilse since before Christmas, and he wasn’t sure when he would have the opportunity to do it the next time since leaves had been few and far between after Christmas. They had married just a few months before the outbreak of the war, and she still lived in the small apartment just a short walk from the barracks where he had been stationed in a suburb of Breslau where the division had been headquartered. Had he been a man of action he might have considered rectifying his lack of recent companionship with one of the Russians, yet he had not used his dozen army rubbers even once—and it wasn’t irrational fear of syphilis or whatever else they would shield him from that was holding him back; he just did not have the need or the will to bother.

Before the division moved into Russia
he had not really seen actual Russians in the flesh other than as dead, injured, or prisoners of war. His greatest impression of their race so far were the prisoners of war taken during Operation Clausewitz when the division had smashed through the flank of an enemy corps and helped secure thousands of men along with tons of munitions, guns, tanks, and other materiel left behind in the confused retreat. The most thorough conception he had of Ivan was just the kind of behind-the-lines familiarity with the broader goings-on, like the recurring—almost farcical—struggle for Lemberg between Ivan and the Austros. Those poor damn little fellows in Vienna just never seemed to catch a break. If there was a competition for least impressive armies in relation to the industry and population behind them, Austria was probably winning even against Italy. Didn’t Austria have like seventy or eighty million people or something? And still German soldiers had to help them out everywhere. Ivan was doing well though. As retarded as the Russians might be as a culture and race, they were under more pressure than any other power apart from Germany. They were not only fighting the majority of the German military, but also the Austrians, and the Bulgarians in Europe, and the godless Chinese in Asia. You had to respect such a low breed of people for putting up an impressive challenge.

Whenever he saw Russians in the flesh around here, they looked miserable, like they had no sense of humor or appreciation of anything—perhaps they were indeed a bit like animals in that way. Not exactly the sort of people you would want to spend time with if you had a choice. While he had not become all that acquainted with Russians, he had had plenty of time to get familiar with
the South Prussians around the time of Operation Clausewitz when he had spent months in South Prussia. They were somewhere halfway between Russians and Germans, and they spoke an incomprehensible language to each other that sounded rather like Russian, although in terms of religion they were Catholic rather than Slavic. Günther normally used the term “Catholic Prussians” rather than “Poles,” since the latter term had such a bad and foreign ring to it. He had seen Catholic Prussians in Breslau, but there you mostly only recognized them on their names, although that was not a sure thing. After all, the controversial writer Siegfried Breschinski had a very
Catholic
sounding name, yet as far as Günther knew he was just as ordinarily German as Goethe or Günther himself.

After letting the rain soak him for a minute, he returned inside, refreshed and just a little wet from his momentary excursion.

“You’d think the wops would just give up,” Kolb said, turning his head back to face Stöckert after glancing over at their comrade returning inside again. “What do they get out of being punched around?”

“Maybe they’re just deviants of some kind?” Stöckert suggested with a smirk. “Perhaps there is something about how they were raised as children?”

“Is that what your Freud would say?” Kolb asked, never missing a beat when it came to ridiculing academes.

“I’m not that actually kind of person,” Stöckert calmly replied with a casual shrug of his shoulders. “It was just an inconsequential joke.”

Despite Stöckert acting so cool, Günther suspected that he was actually quite angry with Kolb about the frequent potshots at intellectuals in the broadest sense. Günther didn’t really care either way about intellectuals, but he tended to feel sympathy for Stöckert since he was a purely practical student rather than some kind of radical intellectual on a crusade. He was just going in for a law doctorate and hoped to be out of the ivory tower again and out in the ordinary world. So what was the point of pretending like every single brain-dead idea to come out of universities was somehow this law student’s responsibility?

“We should be happy for the Austrians,” Günther said, hoping to relieve the tension between Stöckert and Kolb.

“The Austros aren’t too shabby,” Rossbach agreed, probably just as keen as Günther to move along. “One of my neighbors is an Austrian Itie. But they are a bit tricky those Austrian Ities. They don’t call themselves Ities.”

“Lombards, eh?” Stöckert smirked, more focused on rolling a cigarette than on Rossbach.

“That’s it, Lombards,” Rossbach beamed.

“I guess Lombards are to Ities what the Frisians are to us,” Stöckert said, thinking that the analogy was probably not too bad.

“In what way?”

“To other people they’re the same, but we all know the difference,” Stöckert grinned.

“Like Bavarians,” Günther smirked.

“Unfortunately, I guess that’s true,” Stöckert giggled, not too intellectual to beat down on their supposed cousins down south.

“I thought university men were all
Grossdeutschlanders
,” Kolb said, sounding like he was actually a little surprised to hear Stöckert deride Bavarians as foreigners.

“Oh, if you only knew,” Stöckert beamed before he swiped the cigarette paper to his tongue and finished his cigarette. “There are all sorts.”

Peter was well-aware that most university students probably viewed the Treaty of Schönbrunn as a complete success and something to be celebrated in its entirety. Although the treaty had unified Germany under Prussia, there had been great debate over Bavaria’s future which had had quite dramatic consequences. Some revisionist Prussians—like Peter—thought that Berlin had been far too kind on Bavaria whose neutrality in the short war against Austria had not made it a formal enemy of the Prussian Bloc, but still a traitor to the cause of establishing a united Germany that was just too cowardly to stand with Austria when time came to walk the walk. Some revisionists would have preferred to leave Bavaria independent or even give it to Austria in exchange for Bohemia, or just abolish the Kingdom of Bavaria and annex it into Prussia directly as had been done to Hanover earlier. Peter had always thought that the goal should have been to abolish all the German states, Bavaria as well as Saxony, Hesse-Kassel, the Palatinate, Karlsbad, and all the other German “sovereign” states and just make Germany synonymous to the Kingdom of Prussia—turn them all into ordinary provinces directly and rebrand the Landtag in Berlin the Reichstag. As a law student, Peter was quite familiar with some of the difficulties in law emanating from the decentralized state created at Schönbrunn which had guaranteed that law students had to study not just Prussian and German law, but also Bavarian, Krakowian, and other distinct systems of state law that differed significantly from the Prussian legal standard.

Peter did not object to the articles in the Treaty of Schönbrunn of 1858 and the 1860 Constitution that laid the foundations of a constitutional parliamentary state based on the rule of law rather than the rule of kings, but the tendency towards decentralization seemed to defeat the object of the modern nation state to be one of a single set of laws and streamlined administration. The Prussian conquests from France had even in recent years been granted statehood within Germany as Luxemburg, Lothringen, Elsass, and Burgundy rather than remain Prussian provinces answering to the Landtag in Berlin. Although he thought himself a firm liberal, Peter was a Prussian first, and he would rather see a Germany governed by Prussian conservatives than
foreigners
like Catholics, Frisians, or Schleswigians. When it came to social affairs he was a firm opponent of the Conservative Consensus within Prussian politics which under the undemocratic electoral system was dominated by wealthy landowners and industrialists who elected the most of the electors.

Back home in the Prussian Province of Hanover, probably the majority of university students wanted to reestablish the Kingdom of Hanover as a separate kingdom, and toasting the health of the “King of Hanover” was popular among them. Peter had no such desires, and he was content with his Hanover being “just” a Prussian province and constituent part of the Kingdom of Prussia rather than a formal equal to Prussia. The only reasonable argument in favor of Hanoverian statehood was the undemocratic electoral system of the Constitution of Prussia which the Province of Hanover followed, but that could be amended, and surely would be, given enough time. The Grand Duchy of Bremen-Verden was presumably what these Hanoverian patriots wanted to join with the Prussian province since Bremen-Verden was the small offering that Prussia had given the last King of Hanover in exchange for annexing the kingdom into Prussia, and the grand duke was the natural pretender to be the king of a resurrected Hanover. Bremen-Verden was almost as illiberal a state as Prussia, and its slightly more democratic politics was not thanks to an absence of a stratified suffrage system, but simply a function of the fact that it had a more egalitarian population distribution that slightly weakened the more conservative forces that would otherwise completely dominate the politics. There weren’t enough exceedingly wealthy and politically overrepresented landowners to dominate the politics in that state like the landowners and industrialists who were at the core of the Conservative Consensus in Prussia.

No, there was no good reason why a Kingdom of Hanover would be superior to remaining within Prussia. The Conservative Consensus couldn’t last forever, and they had to cave in someday to the demands of the
educated
bourgeoisie that was bound to rule in a democratic society. They had to give in. Someday. Sure they would, just given enough time. No matter how much they had tailored the system to keep their people in power, enough voters of all the economic strata had weakened the conservative and “liberal” parties, and if they wouldn’t change their tune they would slide into irrelevancy if they didn’t amicably agree to reform the system. Peter had no doubt that it was disgust with the Conservative Consensus that were fueling the Social Democrats and Left Socialists rather than the proper liberals. As much as it was offensive to his basic political and philosophical beliefs, the only prewar political group he could support was the Catholic Coalition Party, and he was confident that there had to be millions like him who would embrace the Prussian Liberals if they would just begin to actively work for reforming the stratified voting system—they had to be far closer to the educated populace than the mean, rural Conservatives and their “liberal” urban allies.