The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (36 page)

The machinegun fire was tearing chunks of masonry away from the walls, and the soldiers had to keep away from the windows
to avoid both little chips of masonry and the bullets flying through the air, and the fear of ricochets was not exactly unfounded. The Frenchies were laying down a heavy, virtually constant hail of bullets, and the men were cowering behind the walls, hoping that they were thick enough to keep the enemy fire out while the men up on the roof and around the buildings would finish off the enemy or just alleviate the fire coming into the house where the company commander had established his headquarters. It wasn’t the best way to spend a sunny morning, but it wasn’t like they had much choice. The French assault had started before dawn, and by now they had been firing at each other for at least an hour. It felt like they had been at it all day though.

Anastas glanced over at the sergeant, expecting him to say something
at any moment. The machinegun on the roof was still firing, and a lieutenant was over at the other window facing the French. He was using his periscope to keep safe while surveying the outside, and Anastas worried about the possible reasons for why the lieutenant had sent for Anastas’s section to come to him. They had been waiting for God knows how long without anything to do once the shooting had started, and surely the lieutenant had some reason for calling for them to come over to him.

The enemy never stopped shooting, and Anastas felt so powerless to do anything to make them stop. The small village was held by most of the battalion, but he would have preferred to be in a safer spot than just at the edge from where the French were attacking.
He was vaguely aware of the landscape outside, but he wouldn’t try to have a look out the window to try to figure out where exactly the French were. It was bad enough when the occasional bullet zinged inside and struck the ceiling; he didn’t want his face to be anywhere near those unguarded openings.

“Bogdanov,” the lieutenant snapped over his shoulder at the NCO kneeling behind him with a radio. “Mortar fire on…”

He had to reach for the crumpled map before he could decide the place he wanted the support platoon to shell. Things had been chaotic before the battle since most of the battalion had not been in place, and just as they had been beginning to take up position in the small village in the dark, the frogs had launched their attack. What an absurd coincidence that both sides could have raced to the same village and arrived essentially at the exact same time. Fate! Thanks to the grace of God the first company had begun to fortify the village less than an hour before the French attacked, and the village was certainly superior ground to the field from where the enemy was attacking.

Anastas hated being here, and if he would be transferred out, he would never again ask God to save him from being sent outside to work with a bent back and hoe in hand. The smart-looking uniform wasn’t worth a minute more of this.
He just imagined something bad happening, and the noise of the ceiling and walls being chipped away by bullet after bullet was quickly becoming the worst sound in the whole world, far worse than the most annoying fly. Why wouldn’t it stop?! Minutes passed, and all Anastas could do was to eavesdrop on and observe the lieutenant to get some sense of the wider picture. His job was to be told what to do and do it, and he didn’t like it one bit. His father had never told him to face a bunch of foreigners with machineguns, but he didn’t have a choice now. He had to do what the sergeant ordered him—he was basically a damn slave to his superiors.

The firefight was obviously not a constant exchange—there was not enough ammunition in the world to fire aimlessly and needlessly at unseen enemy soldiers. Rather, the French and Bulgarians were taking potshots as soon as they saw—or thought they saw— something worth shooting. It was unnerving all the same, and the way the Frenchies stayed back and hit in the bushes rather than just attack made things all the more unbearable.

“Sergeant,” the lieutenant snapped at Anastas’s superior, “your section has to get out and support Vladimirov. You get out there, and you keep the frogs back.”

The sergeant grunted an
affirmation at the lieutenant. Anastas knew that Second Lieutenant Vladimirov was up on the roof with two sections and the platoon’s heavy machinegun, and he wondered if it was good or bad to go up on the roof. He shuddered, thinking that it was probably safer in here.

“Hurry b
oys, hurry,” the sergeant snapped at the nine men huddling low on the floor, assembled like little disciples at the beck and call of their master.

The NCO
took the lead to ascend the ladder up to the roof, and Anastas was the third man up into the direct sunlight. It was certainly a glorious spring day, and sans the shooting it would not be unenjoyable after so many bad days with rain. The simple house had a low parapet, and the soldiers were huddling behind sandbags while they were firing northwards towards their attackers. It seemed dangerous to be in the open air, and a single shell could cause havoc on the soldiers, but Anastas was much more focused on keeping as close to the roof as possible as he pushed himself forward to let his comrades get up on the crowded roof.

When he came closer to the line where the men were lying on their stomachs,
he gently tugged on the pants of one man in the hope that he would make room to fit him in between him and another soldier. He didn’t look very friendly when he glanced over at Anastas, but he moved just a little to leave some room for Anastas. If the first man was unfriendly, then the next one beside him was downright rude. He didn’t even bother to look at Anastas when he tugged on his leg. To make sure that he understood that he was supposed to move, Anastas pushed his leg to prompt him to move it, but when he had pushed the leg and retracted his hand, the leg returned to cover the ground where it had been. Again he pushed the leg, but the man didn’t react even though it had to hurt a bit to have someone force his leg in the way Anastas was doing. Just as he was going to push it again, the man jerked backwards and flew sharply along the ground as if he bolted backwards by means of magic.

W
hen the bewildered Anastas looked over his shoulder to follow the bizarre flight of the man, two prone men were pulling him away by his ankles. His head was facing down against the roof while his limp body was dragged away by the prone men grabbing on him like a giant doll, it was all too clear why he didn’t respond. There were some dark stains on the dusty masonry where he had been lying, but before Anastas had time to get down on top of the wet spot left behind, another man crawled past to take the dead man’s place.

Anastas just hunkered down behind the men firing along the roof, waiting for another gap in the line. When he glanced around himself he noticed something very distressing, yet
the sergeant probably had good reasons for manhandling a human being when he pushed a limp man down from the roof at the back of the house like a heavy sack of garbage. The roof was crowded, and two men with Red Cross armbands were administering morphine and otherwise caring for a couple of men just by the edge of the roof while the dead men had been unceremoniously dumped down on the ground below. One man with a dirty bandage around his head was helping the man firing the heavy machinegun at the French by feeding it belts loaded with bullets from the steel boxes, and there were disturbing red stains and pieces of things near the machinegun, a horrific mess soiling the chest of the man firing the gun. How many gunners had they gone through? The man firing the machinegun looked like a demonic lunatic with a dark frothy mess of something that had streamed down along his uniform. The roof was so chaotic, and Anastas had no idea where he should go, so he just glanced around, so confused and distressed by his not knowing where to go.

When a gap in the firing line
at long last opened up, Anastas took the opportunity before another of the idle men could and dove forward between two soldiers.
Finally!
He got up close to the sandbags lining the low parapet and aimed down towards the thick vegetation about two hundred yards away. It was hard to see anything, but he knew that the frogs were bound to be out there. The frequent machinegun and rifle fire from both sides made him wonder how much more ammunition there could be and how they could make out enemy soldiers that far away in the bushes near the edge of the village. He wasn’t sure how the frogs had turned up; he knew what an airplane was, but he was still skeptical about the idea of people falling through the sky without breaking their legs or dying. Jumping with a big blanket over your head just sounded like something out of a children’s story.

He gently squeezed the trigger once
without aiming at any specific target. Twice. Again. Again. Again. Again. It wasn’t that he saw a frog, he just hoped he might hit one. He assumed that most of the men were just shooting wildly in the hope of hitting something. No, they weren’t firing as much as he was.
Doesn’t matter
. Anastas was too excited, too numbed by what he was doing to notice the soldier next to him being hit squarely in the face. He just kept firing until the last bullet was out, and he then slammed down another strip with bullets like he had learned how to do in just a couple of seconds, and pushed down another ten fresh cartridges into the rifle’s magazine to shoot down at nothing in particular in the hope that Saint George would just pick up the bullets in midair and transport them to a target.

When he reached the fourth cell in his first pouch—each pouc
h had four cells with two clips of ten rounds each—he heard a voice down by the wooden hatch leading down into the house. He did shoot through the clip before he bothered to listen, however.

“Hold your fire!”

It was one of the NCOs assisting the company commander coming up on the ladder.

“Men, hold your fire,” he yelled.

It took some time, but the sergeant and Second Lieutenant Vladimirov finally got in on the order and barked for everyone to stop shooting.

A lot of machinegun fire was still sounding from the brush, but as the fire coming from the village was dying down, the noises were becoming much more distant.
Was the war over? How come? Anastas looked at the chirpy NCO, surprised by the contrast to his appearance just minutes earlier downstairs when he had been assisting the lieutenant.

“It’s Major Zlatev’s boys,” he said with a smile
, gesturing with his right arm to the probable enemy left flank. “If you keep shooting you might hit them too. Third Company is coming up to advance from this direction,” he said excitedly, waving his hand towards the village as groups of men were coming out of houses and dugouts carrying rifles, machineguns, and other equipment. “We’ve got them now, for sure,” the NCO grinned, happy to see so many men looking back at him.

Maria had never felt so humiliated
, and she wanted to tell this horrid spinster to shut the hell up and leave her alone. The woman was spelling out exactly what she was doing, and why she was doing it, droning on like a God-knows-what. Did she think Maria was stupid? The only possible hindrance to understanding what she was being taught was that she had no desire to learn this any more than she wished to learn the science of war-making or plumbing. For whatever utility either had, she did not wish to pursue them. There was no end to the things she had no desire to learn, and nursing was definitely on that list.

“You mustn’t mak
e it too tight, Your Highness,” the nurse said as she tied the fresh dressings up. “It’s there to protect, and it shouldn’t press it…”

At least she had covered the man’s surreally hideous injury again, but Maria’s retinae had stored the grisly sight safely inside her head of the swollen, discolored arm. Humanity could be a very trivial and disgusting thing to look at, and this form was clearly one of the more disgusting sights imaginable. As much as she had tried to isolate herself from things she did not wish to see, in this matter she had no choice, and she kept silent while the nurse continued this endless, disgusting tutorial of explaining different things.

“Maybe Your Highness would be willing to try and help me with that one?” the nurse said as she was leading Maria over to where another apathetic patient was waiting to be cleaned and redressed.

The King Frants Military
Hospital had been founded by Maria’s grandfather-in-law to deal with military invalids, but it was under her father-in-law it had been expanded into a huge institution. The original purpose of handling war invalids had been supplanted for more acute and short-term healthcare by the addition of entirely new buildings and the result had turned what had once been a home for invalids and turned it into this foul, smelly place littered in human debris and excrement. It was a crowded place awash in the worst and dirtiest aspects of humanity, and she could not believe that her sister-in-law had been remotely truthful when she had insisted that it was a good place to be. There was nothing good about it at all. Already Maria had seen things not actually meant for the eyes. What was contained underneath the skin was intended to remain there, not be poked around with and exposed to the outside. The hospital was a horrific place and not even an hour into it she had decided just how much she did not wish to be here at all. She was no more interested in performing this sort of job than she was doing any other necessary, gross chore. And it wasn’t just selfish concern; what about Nadia and Helene? Were they also supposed to see disfiguring injuries like the ones she had seen?

When the day was finally at an end she met her two girls
out by the car that was waiting for them. Like their mother and the other nurses they were wearing white uniforms with aprons and headscarves, and if it had not been for the red crosses on their right arms they might have been mistaken for nuns dressed in white. Helene seemed strangely upbeat, and Maria assumed that she had perhaps been left to do something inconsequential and clean or maybe even just make tea. She knew how much Helene liked sweet tea. Only Nadia looked happy to get into the car after hours wasted at the hospital. They didn’t discuss their experience; Maria felt so terrible for not protecting her girls from this horrid place, and she did not want to expose herself to their bad feelings. Well, at least not Nadia’s—Helene obviously had had a pleasant day.

Helene had always been a strange child
, so even if she had had to do some nursing chores she might not have thought too badly of it. Both her girls had their quirks, but it might be good that Helene was so interested in serious things rather than just books. While Nadia had spent much of her time at the lodge reading novels and conversing with that girl Maria’s father-in-law had chosen as her companion, Helene was much more interested in the Bible, hagiographies, and things of that nature. Maria had never been very diligent when it came to religion, and certainly not Bulgarian Christianity with its medieval clergy and archaic language, but she didn’t think it could hurt that Helene was so interested. Maria was not godless, but she had a much more austere, much more German Protestant kind of religion than the Slavic kind which Helene and her other children had grown up with.

The quiet Helene still wrote frequent letters
to one of her tutors, Father Nikola. Maria wasn’t sure about the content of her letters since she would not spy on correspondence with a priest, but the girl had been very taken by the scruffy-looking priest with long hair and a wild beard who had been sent for by her father-in-law to educate her children. Unlike Maria, her children had the cross-making as second-nature, a gesture she had known from Catholics but had never seen as vigorously used as she had in her husband’s country. Maria had been raised in the faith of her family where much of the Eastern ritualism would seem alien and absurd with its reverence for icons and ritualistic professions of faith. Her children hadn’t been raised in the Lutheran tradition of viewing religion as a matter of faith rather than a system of rituals, and it showed when they attended services with all the exaggerated symbolism and ritual that polluted Slavic Christianity. It seemed so pointless and superstitious, yet her in-laws shared in that Eastern mysticism, and all her children had been educated in the rituals and the religious canon by priests like the one Helene was so fond of.

Maria had not thought twice when the negotiations between her father’s representatives and the Bulgarian crown had drawn up the terms of her marriage to Peter, under which she and her parents had agreed to the demand that all children would be raised in the Bulgarian National Faith while she would be free to practice her own religion as long as it did not interfere with state functions and public affairs. It wasn’t exactly strange to make contracts like that—her family had experience of Russian Christian and Catholic spouses who required similar negotiations and terms. Her sister-in-law and wife of her brother Fritz—the reigning Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin—was a Russian princess, and obviously their children could not be Russian Christians. Feodora had seemed like a religious woman when Maria had met her, but not excessively so. The last time Maria had seen her brother and his wife was when their oldest daughter Charlotte had married and the first ceremony had been held in Schwerin. Oh, how she missed home! It wasn’t right being trapped here for this long without spending even a week in Schwerin or in any other place, and she hoped to see her family ever so soon.

The driver took them the short way between the palace and the hospital, and Nadia imagined that the city was different from what she remembered of it. Compared to London, Berlin, Venice, or any other big city she had seen, there were not that many cars in the city, but the lack of an underground train system meant that you could always see the streetcars going through the middle of the large streets. She couldn’t quite visualize how tunnels could be dug under buildings without caving in, but somehow it had apparently become a hallmark of a modern city, and even in Russia they were digging tunnels for those underground trains. Sofia was not that. In Sofia, electric streetcars traveled in the middle of the big streets between the lanes, and on tracks in the pavement of smaller streets. The wide boulevard just a short distance from the hospital felt superfluous. There were no automobiles going on the other side of the street, just the electric streetcars in the middle. Well, usually. Today there weren’t any streetcars around. There were some horse carriages the driver had to pass, but in the opposite lane there was not a single motor car. There had to be at least some thousands of automobiles in the city, yet not a single one apart from theirs seemed to be out and about at this time of day when there should at least be some people going places. Weren’t there at any given time? It seemed rather odd that nobody was going anywhere.

At
a street corner they passed, there was a big crowd of mostly women and children standing in line at some kind of Red Cross feeding station where a couple of women were pouring soup into pots and canteens. Nadia didn’t know much about the people out in the city, but it seemed somewhat odd that the Red Cross would run some sort of street corner food place like an outdoor restaurant. Wasn’t the Red Cross all about health and hospitals?

“
What’s that
?” she asked, wondering if Mom might have some idea.

“
I don’t know
,” her mother replied, shrugging her shoulders after shooting a quick glance over at the crowd.

Nadia frowned, annoyed that nobody knew. However, she quickly decided to consult the uniformed man behind the wheel
before it was too late. He might know.

“Excuse me, is that an eatery of some sort?” she asked.

The man glanced over at his shoulder to see where Nadia was pointing.

“That
is a soup kitchen, Your Highness,” he said as he returned his attention to the street.

As much as he should be polite to the princesses, driving into a streetlight would probably not do him or the royals any good.

“What’s that?” Nadia asked.

“It’s for people who don’t have any food.
They get a meal from the Red Cross.”

Nadia knew that her grandfather was a very kind man, and she assumed that his ministers were honorable men too
since they were appointed by him. Obviously they would help poor people, and it pleased her to get further confirmation of her grandfather’s generosity. Indeed, back when she was a Scout before her year of exile, solidarity had been one of the basic tenets of being an honorable person, and her grandmother was the chief patron of the National Organization of Bulgarian Girl Scouts, so the Scouting Law was hardly some kind of revolutionary, anarchistic string of words. As far as Nadia could tell, the ideology of the Scouts was probably about the most honorable and succinct rules for being a good person, and looking out for your fellow human beings in Christian solidarity was at its heart.

The car passed thro
ugh the gates to the palace as soon as the uniformed guards saw the car, and it continued up to the large doors where the three princesses could exit the car just by the doors that led up to their private quarters. The palace had been built by Nadia’s great-grandfather as the royal residence in the city as opposed to the Royal Palace which was the working palace over at King Frants’s Square. The Tarnovo Palace had been named after the city so strongly associated with royal history, and it was the home of the families of the three sons of King Petar—Uncle Boris, Dad, and Uncle Vladimir. Prince Mikhail—the only son of Nadia’s granduncle Prince Yakov—lived over in the city of Plovdiv.

Nadia’s grandfather—King Petar—had moved back t
o the Royal Palace while she had been away from the city, and that had left the large Tarnovo Palace the domain of the two sisters-in-law of her mother, Princess Miroslava and Princess Elena. For natural reasons, Elena had become estranged from most of the family, despite still living in the palace right among them. Nadia was too old to actually go ahead and ask her about her feelings, and instead she stuck her head in the sand and joined in avoiding her. Even if she had been a Bulgarian princess for about as long as Nadia, Elena’s uncle was an enemy of Bulgaria. The fiendish and treacherous king of Romania had conspired with the Serbs and the Greeks to divide Bulgaria between them, and it was impossible to feel comfortable about Aunt Elena as one of them.

Like Nadia’s father and Uncle Boris,
Aunt Elena’s husband—Uncle Vladimir—was in the army, perhaps fighting against the soldiers of Elena’s uncle up north. Uncle Vladimir’s two children had grown a great deal since Nadia left Sofia, but they were still small. The boy—Vladimir—was seven and their daughter Mila was turning four this year and rounded out Nadia’s first cousins of the House of Hanover-Bulgarsky. The whole dynasty in Bulgaria was composed of just five families; the family of Nadia’s grandfather, the families of his three sons, and the family of Prince Mikhail along with his widowed mother living in Plovdiv.

Once Evgenia
had changed out of her nurse’s uniform and into an ordinary dress, she sat down at the desk next to her bed, quite eager to get to her writing. She got out her diary from the drawer where she kept it and she started to methodically jot down her thoughts as they came to her, the sentences and words readable only to her because of their vagueness and her use of euphemisms she made up as she went. Since she wasn’t writing for anybody else, she didn’t think she had to keep her thoughts straight and presented as cleanly as she would have if she had been writing a letter. It wasn’t like there was anybody who would have to understand any of what she was writing.

The day had been so fascinating, and she could hardly co
ntain her sense of serenity about the moment when she had seen a dead body covered by a sheet. Obviously, she had had to sneak a peek and look to see what it looked like under there. Unlike an old or sick person, the man had been young, maybe around Borislava’s age. She had prayed for him, and she was sure Father Nikola would be quite content by her mature reaction to the will of God that had gone hand in hand with her childish curiosity. Because God’s will was what death really was—nobody would die unless God allowed it to happen.

She was still worried about being around strangers, bu
t her curiosity had quickly led her to try to find enjoyment in the sights, sounds, and smells in the hospital. As her pen was moving quickly across the page, jotting down cursive Cyrillic letters, she let her mind wander. Maybe she was really writing to God, since she never read what she had written. Instead she kept filling volume after volume and put them away in a couple of big boxes under her bed where no one was allowed to get to them. She had filled a dozen books during her long, almost monastic retreat up on the mountain, but she had never looked in the books to see what she had produced.