The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (34 page)

It was awfully chilly, and it seemed like God was wavering and just couldn’t decide whether winter was through or not, and Vienna had been going back and forth between late winter and early spring with the sudden appearances of light snowfall after it had seemed like spring was finally ascendant. Leo disliked snow for reasons both private and public, such as the fact that it could imperil the dismal agricultural output within the western provinces. The western part of the Confederation had great problems in feeding its population, and grain was being imported through Germany, thus cluttering up the overburdened railroads.

He quickly walked along the street after getting off the streetcar at the stop closest to home, and the cold wind was biting something awful on his cheeks all the way to his building. His thick overcoat protected most of him from the elements, but his naked face was exposed to the cold and there was no way of completely shielding yourself from it. He had picked up the Viennese
Evening Post
from a small newsstand on the way from the ministry building so that he could see if there was some interesting piece of news he had missed—or just something in the arts section that would be enjoyable to read.

It had to be almost eight o’clock by now, and Leo had a sneaking suspicion that Renate and the children had already had dinner. It made sense that they could eat before he came home; the entire department was quite busy and he couldn’t be home in time like he used to be before the war, and there was no reason why his family would wait until evening to eat. Even if the boys that had been called up had a difficult duty to carry out, the officials in the Imperial-Royal Ministry of Transport didn’t exactly sit about and spend their days doing nothing. Leo’s department within the Ministry—the Integrated Railroad Board—had been tasked with maintaining and improving rail transport, but that meant that they had to deal with all the nasty fits people were throwing over the regulations. The Railroad Board had to impose harsh restrictions to keep essential military and civilian supplies going to their proper destinations, and nobody seemed to approve of the unfortunate consequences those measures had on traffic. It was a thankless job, and Leo disliked the way everybody blamed everything that was wrong with the railroads on him and his colleagues, even things not related to the Railroad Board’s war regulations. They weren’t gods! They couldn’t make trains run on time, and there was no magic wand that could keep locomotives from breaking down or otherwise reduce the time it took to bring goods to Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Mailand, Venice, or any other major city.

There was no doubt that the overstretched railroads contributed to the shortages, but Leo and his colleagues did what they could to enforce regulations to support the war effort and make rail traffic as efficient as possible. They were doing their best to make sure that local stationmasters and officials did what was deemed to be necessary by the Railroad Board to keep traffic flowing both in order to supply the armies in the field and to properly supply the cities and towns with agricultural products and the countryside with manufactured goods. Unfortunately, doing their best just wasn’t enough to people who liked to complain.

The most annoying aspect of railroad policy was that nobody gave Leo and his colleague even a modicum of credit when there were no glitches or delays. Success for them was met with absolutely no gratitude whatever, and failure was treated like a personal insult—as if they conspired to delay traffic for some sadistic pleasure. It was easy to lose all faith in mankind when even intelligent people failed to grasp the difficulties in operating a modern state’s rail network in the middle of a war that was stretching the carrying capacity in some regions far from what the system had been built to handle. Lombardy was a mess, as were Galicia and Transylvania—the parts that were not occupied by foreign troops. All of those three regions were right on the doorstep of the enemy, and the significant military needs coupled with civilian subsistence needs and relatively poor infrastructure to begin with worked together in unholy alliance against the attempts by the Railroad Board to solve the transport priorities and keep the troops supplied and the civilians from starving.

The greater government policy of local self-sufficiency through urban gardening, reduced usage of transported goods, and other measures were key too, but the Railroad Board was necessary for the war effort, and Leo wished that people would be more loyal and patriotic than they were. The government could only make its laws and regulations work as long as people pitched in and did their part. It wasn’t the Railroad Board’s fault that Lombards in particular had continued to resist the attempts to resettle people and factories temporarily in other parts of the country. Mailand—Lombardy’s biggest city—had been nearly emptied of its prewar industry, but the Milanese were resistant to follow the factories or leave their native land for Hungary, Bohemia, or some other part of the nation that was not under so much strain from the war and could do with the labor. In Leo’s opinion the government was far too reluctant to try to force the Lombards away from their homes.

As Leo approached his apartment building he was heartened by the sight of the national black and gold flag hanging outside one of the shops opposite the building on the other side of the wide street. He certainly approved of that sort of show of solidarity with him and the millions of others who did their part in the Imperial-Royal
Landwehr
or the civilian government. In some ways, he was really more important than the average soldier since most soldiers might kill a few Ities or Russkies while he and his colleagues had the whole national economy in their hands since railroads were key to all serious activity across the Confederation. Without a civilian government, the
Landwehr
would have no means of fighting the war at all.

The apartment building had three separate stairwells—one at each entrance—and Leo always entered through the middle one, the one closest to his apartment. He felt a bit tired when he had finally ascended the stairs to the top floor; Leo was much too old to run up and down stairs like a little boy racing around. He had less than ten years before he would reach the civil service retirement age, and despite his love of the responsibilities he had, he enjoyed the idea of being able to leave Vienna for a nice little cottage out in the countryside somewhere. Maybe a small village close to the German border where he could spend the rest of his life enjoying the fruits of his labor as a short prologue of heaven.

The stairwell was eerily dark with its lamps unlit, and he could hardly blame the landlord for following regulations. Coal was as much a commodity as steel, wheat, or meat and was duly in short supply for non-vital use, and lighting was precisely the kind of non-vital use the regulators had wished to curb. The limits were not imposed to punish people but to preserve them through this terrible war, and the news of victories in battle should harden the resolve of the most common man, woman, and child to fight on against the Russkies and their allies.

Leo’s floor of the apartment building was a small menagerie of modern Vienna. The eleven families included three Hungarian families, two Semitic, and one Croatian. The Croat bank clerk had the rather linguistically unappealing “
M. Wlaschitsch
” written on the small sign on his door, and one of the doors next to Leo’s was labeled “
S. Szabados
.” The hallway would have been empty, except for Mr. S. Szabados standing by the door to his apartment smoking a cigarette. Leo instinctively tipped his hat slightly when their eyes met.

“Good evening, Mr. Kaltenbrunner,” the tall man said, moving his cigarette from his right hand to his left before stepping up to extend it to Leo.

“Good evening,” Leo said just before their hands connected.

“Working hard, eh?” Szabados said with a smirk.

Sigmar had only just returned home, and this was his first at-home cigarette for the evening. Kaltenbrunner was a colleague of sorts working for the Railroad Board while Sigmar worked for the Post Office which was similarly a Confederate institution, although Sigmar was obviously a far humbler man than his next-door neighbor. He was just a postal clerk, not some bigwig railroad chief like Mr. Kaltenbrunner.

Leo didn’t think much of Szabados either way; he was often out in the hallway smoking, presumably because Mrs. Szabados was a rather willful woman and the tall postal clerk too timid to use his size to his advantage. The walls were thin enough for her voice to occasionally reach his ears and although he did not speak the language there was no translation necessary to grasp that she was a rather domineering woman, but he did not know Mr. Szabados adequately to lecture him about domestic life. His affairs were his to deal with, and Leo had more than enough on his plate without concerning himself with his neighbors’ home life.

“Don’t we all?” Leo replied, sure that the Post Service was also swamped in war-related difficulties.

Sigmar Szabados spoke without any accent whatsoever. Most Hungarians his age had a slight accent, a small linguistic proof that they didn’t quite belong. If it had not been for the surname the only indication of the family’s nationality was when the family harpy was yelling through the wall in Gibberish rather than German. Leo was a tolerant man who had no trouble working alongside Protestants, Czechs, Israelites, or Croats but he still felt a little apprehensive about Hungarians. He rationalized his dislike for the race by their chauvinism and separatism, as well as the sheer number of them. Judging the results of the last census there was 13 million people across the Confederation who claimed to speak Hungarian as their native language, and it was the only language spoken by more than ten million people apart from German. And judging from the 1932 census compared to the 1920 census, Hungarians were reproducing at a rate far higher than the German-speaking people.

The two neighbors exchanged their rudimentary pleasantries before Leo went on to the door marked “
L
.
Kaltenbrunner
,” leaving Szabados to continue smoking alone out in the hallway. The door hinges creaked a little when Leo opened the front door, reminding him that they probably had to be looked at, but he was too tired to bother with that now. He had barely removed his shoes before a familiar face turned up in the hall.

“Home so soon?” Renate said when she came to meet him while he was putting his hat on the shelf just inside the apartment.

She had a rather sarcastic way, and he didn’t always enjoy that streak in her, although it had doubtlessly been a wonderful thing about the then precocious, intelligent young woman who could speak like someone who enjoyed the ironic style of the late Nietzsche or the still breathing Siegfried Breschinski who had been a quite esoteric writer back when Leo was a university student but was nowadays something of a household name for the readers of more serious journals on politics and culture. Like Leo, Renate was no longer the person she had been when they first met, and after having five children she had settled on a rather rotund figure that did not quite match her fairly beautiful younger self. Had she worn a dirndl she might have superficially encapsulated the sort of warm rural Austrian woman rather than looking like a relic from the time of the Good Old Emperor Franz of their childhood with the austere dresses she usually wore around the apartment.

“There is a war on,” he said, not sure if she was being sarcastic or not, but as usual he assumed that she wasn’t.

“There is,” she agreed without giving any indication that she sympathized with him as she walked over to him to push his hat farther up the shelf so the brim wasn’t sticking out. “Are you hungry?” she asked when her head was turned to face the hat she was pushing up the shelf.

“Yes, I am.”

She didn’t immediately respond, and she turned to walk to the kitchen adjacent to the hall.

“We had a bit of a feast today,” she said over her shoulder as he followed her to the room that was almost exclusively her domain, her ownership of it only ever seriously disputed by their oldest daughter Erika.

Leo had never afforded much relief for his wife, so Renate had to take care of domestics on her own while he took care of bringing in the money. Despite her relatively humble background, she might fool someone into thinking her as the sort of woman who at least had one maid to help her around her home, but Renate had only ever been assisted by her older sister around her pregnancies and had otherwise been assisted only by her offspring as they had grown older.

The small, modern apartment had a fairly large living room right next to the small kitchen, three separate bedrooms, and the home even had a water closet and a bathtub with a hot water tap right inside the apartment. Had it not been for the war he would have expected at least his two oldest children to be out of the home, but only Eugen was away, and he had been conscripted into the army and still had his bed next to his brother’s. Josef was still underage, and Erika and Frieda would obviously not be drafted, although Erika did serve in the Women’s Support Corps and Frieda had taken a job as a typist for a government agency.

The war certainly kept his oldest girls busy, although he did feel it a bit unnatural that Erika should dress up in a uniform that looked too martial for his taste; the skirt just seemed too short—although at least her skirt was part of a uniform rather than picked out by her like Frieda’s skirts that ended far above her ankles. He had been rather uncomfortable with the myriad of girls that were showing up in the Ministry to fill the increased need for typists and secretaries, and he worried that they distracted the men from their work with their hair, ankles, and arms. Perhaps things would return to their normal order once the war ended and the civil service could return to a slimmer organization without all that extra staff. If there was one good example Renate had set for their daughters it was skirt lengths, but both Erika and Frieda wore clothes that just seemed wrong. Klara didn’t matter; she was still a child, but the older girls were not really girls anymore at all, and he thought that Renate was being rather disinterested in what they were doing.