The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (3 page)

The castle had originally been constructed after the Norman Conquest in the 11th century, but the old wooden castles that had not only been military defenses of London but also a testament to the Norman domination over the Anglo-Saxons had long since disappeared. The large stone castle was the dominant landmark of the small town after being built to replace the old motte-and-bailey castle, and it had changed significantly over the years as it had become a permanent stone fortress. For much of its history Windsor Castle had been an armed safe house where kings could take refuge from murderous barons or pretenders in the Middle Ages. However, since the reign of Charles III serious refurbishment, renovation, demolition, and rebuilding had begun to make it the typically modest British counterpart of Versailles in lieu of London’s Whitehall which remained the most impressive palace anywhere in the British Isles. After the disrepair during the reigns of his immediate successors, Charles III’s work of making Windsor the modern extravagant family home had been revised and reinvigorated over a century after his death when William IV and Queen Sophia had made it their home in the late 1840s, and it remained the big “family cottage” beside the Palace of Whitehall.

Both William V and Henry IX had continued to use Windsor as their personal residence, and Whitehall had been increasingly left to be used by the government or as a series of individual apartments housing some of the families related to the king in the private apartments. The frequent use of the ancient Windsor Castle had necessitated the continued renovation and modernization of the castle since its large external transformation and expansion. Electricity, plumbing, and continuous work on making it more fit as a home made it a much more convenient home than the castle had been just a few generations ago. Many of the buildings were now as modern and convenient as any other upscale residence in the world.

In the days just after Christmas, guests had begun to return home again after the days of celebration and reunion. Family had come for the holidays from not just across the British Isles, but also from even farther away than the United Kingdom. Last year had been the first time in years no one had come from Germany to visit, but for the second year in a row Stephanie had turned up, bringing along her three youngest girls, Charlotta, Franziska, and Viktoria, but not her oldest girl, Sofia Vilhelmina.

Stephanie was only just over fifty, and she had been a queen mother since 1932 when her husband had suddenly died, leaving their oldest daughter to come to the Swedish throne under a regency until she was old enough to reign in her own right. The three Swedish princesses accompanying Dowager Queen Stephanie were geographically the most distant relatives who had made the trip, and they were all rather shy and naturally did not engage their adult relations in small talk through their visit to their mother’s childhood home. However, Stephanie obviously enjoyed seeing her brother and her cousins, and it seemed healthy for a modern country to have its princes socialize so effortlessly across borders. Britain had never fought a war against Prussia or Germany, and only once had it been allied with its enemies two centuries ago. Since the reign of William III Philip and more properly his and Queen Mary II’s son Charles III, the kings of England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom had been scions of the Franconian branch of House Hohenzollern. Over the years since William Philip was crowned king alongside Mary Stuart, several queens and princesses from the House of Prussia had married into the family over the centuries since then. Heinrich’s mother—the late Queen Sophie—had come from the same house, although the royal house in Sweden had grown out of the Prussian stem when her father had been elected Crown Prince of Sweden to succeed the childless Gustav V half a century ago, and his mother had not really ever been a Swedish princess in anything but name. Sophie had really been a Prussian princess even after her father had become Crown Prince of Sweden and then King of Sweden.

It was the obligation of princes and princesses to serve the nation even when its laws failed to provide the opportunity. Not since the days of Stuart absolutism had the King of England been able to order the ship of state, and the curtailed powers of the first Brandenburg king—William III Philip—had been completely lost during the timid reign of his Stuart wife Queen Mary II before their son Charles III had come to a throne that was little more than a dusty piece of ceremonial furniture. It was easy to sympathize with the young prince when he watched his pious, possibly deranged mother allow the corrupt House of Commons to strip the monarchy of its political power until she at long last died and left Prince Charlie in a politically impotent position which was further eroded during the inefficient reigns of the two Georges.

The castle had several separate buildings and yards, and it was quite crowded with staff for the occasion even though people had started to leave. The guests had brought along valets, nannies, and other personal servants which added to the castle’s temporary population boom. There were hundreds of people on the premises, countless servants and functionaries who performed the menial work of cleaning, cooking, and otherwise keeping life at the snow-covered castle endurable. The heating was so and so, and despite great investment of time and energy into sustainable ways of heating the rooms, some buildings of the castle were absolutely freezing this time of year. Even the small detachment of guardsmen added to the castle’s population.

Heinrich knew that his father had been reluctant to invest too much money from his own purse, and the hereditary feud with Parliament over paying for the renovation and improvement had continued even after his incapacitation—Bobby had inherited the pride of their ancestors. The Crown Estate had no shortage of funds, but there was supposedly a great question of principle at the heart of the matter, although Heinrich suspected that the real issue was indeed money. The long reign of William IV after the early death of Charles IV had left a deep, unsettled quarrel between the crown and Parliament over money which had only tentatively been resolved by the creation of the Crown Estate to administer the landholdings going back centuries. You had to envy the Russian and Chinese counterparts who did not need to worry about Parliament and the law. His limited understanding of the authority of the Emperor of Japan included his fascination by the oriental application of the Asiatic concept of divine right theory under which the sovereign was not merely the fount of honor but the absolute fount of law and power whose verbal pronouncements had the standing of proper legislation. Wouldn’t it have been simple if Westminster could be overruled with just a simple word from the king? How much idiocy Britain could have been spared!

As he kept looking outside at the snow-covered lawn, he heard the singular clicking sound of billiard balls. Tony and George had spent much of the time playing billiards when Tony wasn’t boring the living lights out of people with his fascination with airplanes and his great interest in the one he had spent a small fortune to buy for himself. George was just as intrigued by planes, and the division of Bobby, George, and Heinrich’s military service into the army, the newly created Royal Air Force, and the navy was actually more accidental than it might look to ordinary people. George had started out in the army, but he had been quite eager to get involved with aircraft, and he had since transferred to the relatively young Royal Air Force. Bobby had been educated as an army officer, and he had spent much of his early adult life in India with the big army stationed there. At one point, Bobby had actually ventured into Afghanistan on a penal expedition after a couple of British subjects had been robbed by Afghan bandits, so he was the only one of the three brothers who had been remotely close to actual military conflict, even though his was the shortest career of the three. He had been informal regent on behalf of their father for the past four years now, and the way things looked he would probably be king before too long.

Heinrich felt obliged to stay at Windsor for at least one more day since Stephanie had been so obsessive about the children, and Karoline had said that their oldest daughter had been very friendly with one of the Swedish princesses. He wasn’t sure why Stephanie took such an interest in the young princesses, but he imagined that she might have been somehow psychologically damaged when she was widowed—she had been quite fond of her husband the late king. It didn’t harm him the slightest that she was interfering with the nannies and governesses, and he figured that the girls would perhaps even like the attention from the strange lady. Karoline seemed unusually interested in socializing with her, which was odd since she almost never liked to spend time with princes or princesses. Perhaps Karoline got along so well with Stephanie because they both seemed unable to leave the staff to deal with the children in peace. They just wouldn’t let nannies and governesses do their jobs.

Harry was looking on while Tony and George were playing. Bobby’s oldest son had turned twenty-one this past year, and he had been married to Rose for just over a year—a rather early marriage that had only been rescued from scandal by the war. It was not a good sign of the maturity of the prince and princess that the first child had been born six months after the wedding ceremony, although the press had been quite cooperative when it came to the young princess’ dignity, and the public announcement of the birth of Princess Mary had been timed more appropriately. It was hardly in Britain’s interest that Harry had been a bit too keen on Rose when he spent a summer in the Netherlands with Prince Paul and had played more than just tennis with the prince’s little sister which had made for possibly the quickest marriage negotiations in world history between the Prince of Wales and the Dutch king.

The billiard room had been part of the apartments where Heinrich’s father had grown up and had first been designed for the use of his father back when he had been the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne. There was room for several guests and the quarters were separate from the building that had the King’s Bedroom and the other facilities of the royal couple that made up the royal private residence within the castle complex. The building housing the Crown Prince’s Apartments was the smallest of the residential buildings of the castle compound, but it was still far larger than Heinrich’s own house in Brighton, and as a guesthouse it had room for dozens of important guests and their servants.

“There’ll be plenty of wise men drawing their own conclusions,” George scoffed dismissively at the young Earl of Antrim.

Tony was certainly right to suggest that there would be lessons to be made from the air war, but George knew how these things worked. One set of officers would insist that the one key lesson was one thing and another set would propose a completely different factor as overlooked, and yet a third would deny both other points and bring another vision to the fore. There had been a popular idea for the past ten years of air power as the future of warfare, but already army men in particular were gleefully making the point that France had failed to overwhelm the Germans, and it had been months since the French tried to level Aachen and ignobly failed—and in the process giving the Germans more than enough broken bits of airplanes and a couple hundred captured airmen as war trophies.

“I suppose so,” Tony mumbled, a little annoyed that his cousin was so sure of himself.

Tony wasn’t nearly as interested in the military application of airplanes as he was interested in their technical aspects and in particular the experiments with new forms of propulsion, despite his being a staff officer of Bomber Command as his day job. Ever since he had first sat inside a plane he had been keen not just to learn to fly, but to follow the rapid development that had gone on since the very first basic planes had begun to appear when he was a young boy. During his adulthood, flying had been radically transformed, both on the civilian and the military side, and theorists had begun to claim that the future would be radically different with aircraft replacing virtually all other forms of transport. Perhaps even automobiles and trams.

“Either way,” George said as he leaned down over the table, systematically clearing out the table ball by ball, “you shouldn’t bother listening to all that bunk.”

Tony frowned when George wasn’t looking, angry that he treated him like a child. The age difference between them was essentially negligible at their age, and Tony didn’t like it when George acted like he was some sort of commonsensical oracle whose pronouncements were axiomatically true. Tony respected the thoughts of many of his colleagues who were thinking hard about valuable information about airplanes coming from all the warring powers. That was the advantage Britain had of having good or at least indifferent relations to all nations; British officers were present in Berlin, Petersburg, Vienna, Paris, and even in Japan to follow the war as closely as they could depending on the local circumstances. Several officers had been observing the air war between France and Germany, trying to establish whether French aerial losses over Germany somehow balanced out the damage on the ground in the race to out-produce the other side.

So far, there had been little to suggest that the air war France was waging was worth the terrible press and the seemingly negligible impact on German morale and industry. Even the most Francophile Tories couldn’t quite explain away France’s Napoleonic ruthlessness and the vile vandalism they had visited particularly on Aachen over the summer. Luxemburg and Strassburg had also been severely terrorized by French bombers which had at the very least cooled Tory support of France and Russia and eroded the moderate support for the Entente. The majority opinion among Tony’s fellow members of the lower echelons of Bomber Command on the question of the strategic efficiency of bombers was that the French had failed to properly support their bombers in the face of German interceptors. Few men he had come across believed that strategic bombing was necessarily unviable as a strategy for defeating an enemy, and the major criticism to arise from the Germans’ generous exhibitions of downed aircraft was that the French simply used too few escorts—although the Germans had developed very sophisticated methods for monitoring aircraft traffic with radio waves. The overall attitude in Bomber Command remained one of optimism about air power as a decisive weapon that would be capable of forcing a nation into submission, and as far as Tony knew there had been no change to Bomber Command’s strategic planning in the wake of the apparent French failures to defeat Germany through strategic bombing against industrial and military targets.