The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (4 page)

It annoyed him to no end that George would lecture him when he just mentioned the kind of talk that went around Tony’s professional neighborhood at RAF headquarters in Vauxhall. Besides, George wasn’t even anywhere near Bomber Command, so he was probably not even familiar with the serious study that was collecting evidence on strategic bombing and which promised to be the first survey of modern strategic bombing in action. George was an operational officer, so what the hell did he know about strategic bombing anyway?

“Why don’t you try your luck?” Tony said to the young prince sitting and quietly observing Tony’s defeat.

Tony was not an accomplished billiards player, but he played it well enough and with enough interest for it to be a decent pastime. However, when George won yet again, he felt like it was time to retire for now, and Bobby’s oldest boy was pretty easy to commandeer for things like taking over the billiard cue.

“Go on,” Tony said, holding out the cue to make sure that Harry would take over as opposition to his insufferable uncle.

The young Harry finally accepted the cue, and Tony walked out of the room and into the wide hallway that connected several of the rooms that were used by the remaining guests staying in this building. Tony was in no particular hurry to return to his home with regards to his duties, and Olga seemed to enjoy being away from their Whitehall apartment. The large palace in the heart of London was home to a couple of families just a short walk from his apartment, and Tony’s work with the Air Ministry in Vauxhall meant that he had use for one of the residences within the enormous London palace. Whitehall was the largest palace anywhere in Britain—possibly even in all of Europe—although most of it was used by the government for office space and only a tiny sliver was taken up by the royal apartments and state rooms, including the small apartment Tony and Olga used. Among Tony’s closest neighbors was the Cabinet Office, as well as some other administrative officers used by the senior government departments, the official residence of the prime minister was just across the courtyard from the front door.

Tony had a few more days before he
had
to be back in London, although he actually looked forward to it. There was little to do around Windsor, and he had thought about pretending to need to return to London and cut his stay short. The rooms Tony and Olga occupied with their small entourage included a small lounge they shared with both his brother and Anna as well as Pete and his valet. Olga had brought along Natalya and Lord Chelsea and of course Yevdokiya, and she obviously enjoyed spending time mostly with them as well as Anna and Hugh.

Since Anna and Hugh lived in Dublin, Olga didn’t see her cousin as much as she had when they lived in London and she could see her at least once a week. Before they had become sisters-in-law in Britain, Olga and Anna had been very distant relations and had hardly known each other in Russia—they had been raised about 500 miles from each other and had only met as young children a few times and then as young women around the time they met the English princes. As sisters-in-law, however, they got on well, and Olga had been very distraught when Anna moved away from London, even though she was not really that close to her.

Olga was a beautiful woman with dark, slightly curling hair, and Tony felt that any fair-minded man would consider her the most physically appealing princess anywhere in the United Kingdom, although she had begun to dress herself rather bizarrely for the past year or so. Along with Yevdokiya she had started to dress almost exclusively in rather colorful traditional peasant dresses as her principal means of identifying herself with her native country, and there was something rather ridiculous about her appearance—Tony though that folk costumes were always ridiculous. In their apartment she had hung up a picture of her two brothers in army uniforms, and she had forced Tony to scold her when Count Simeonovsky-Dimitriev conspired to have her become a public patron of the small Russian Orthodox congregation in London. Even if she for all intents and purposes maintained her Russian religion, she couldn’t publicly do so and certainly not in wartime. She could kiss as many icons as she wished in private, but if she thought that she could run off and kiss photographs of the Emperor of Russia in front of a crowd of Russian expatriates and diplomats she had to grow up.

“Roman says he’ll come and visit the moment the war ends,” Olga beamed, quite happy to mention the letter from her little brother to her brother-in-law.

The letter had been very late since he had written it back in late November and she only just got it a couple of days before Christmas, but she was very happy that Roman was happy for her son. She hadn’t mentioned that she had wanted to name him Roman but that the only name she had only been allowed to give him a single name, and her chosen Vasiliy had become anglicized into Basil. Roman had always been her favorite brother, and she hadn’t seen him since shortly after Constance was born when he had come to England over the summer back in 1933. Olga had been very blessed since the birth of Michael George Charles Stephen within the first year of her marriage through Constance, Fedosya, and then Basil Rupert Charles Hilary this past October. Four children in just over five years had been a bit much, but she was proud of her little babies, and for all the weariness, she couldn’t complain about God’s little gifts that had kept on coming, although she was in no rush for her fifth after the difficult Vasiliy.

When Anthony joined the small circle of people, Olga felt a shudder run down her spine. He had been teasing her a bit the other day about her English which was not nearly as good as her German, but she wouldn’t speak Teutonic—the enemy language—out of principle unless she absolutely had to, and other than Anna, Yevdokiya, Natalya, and Anna’s companion Mariya Mikhailovna nobody in the room spoke Russian which forced her to use the language she knew best apart from Russian and German to make herself understood to Anna’s husband and Lord Chelsea.

“That sound nice,” Hugh said, not really all that keen on listening to his vapid sister-in-law.

Of all his relations, Olga was probably the one he liked the least, particularly since she seemed to think of Anna as her sister just because of their shared nationality and distant ancestry, and Anna didn’t make it better by indulging her belief. In addition to that, there was the fact that she so clearly enjoyed the sound of her own voice; her stupid, vapid, annoying voice.

Olga nodded, avoiding to make any further comment now when Anthony could hear her, and she was still too self-conscious from his teasing. Lord Chelsea had said that she spoke good English, and she had thought that maybe she did until Anthony made it clear that she didn’t. Even if it were true, she didn’t think it was very nice to say that she might learn English from the four-year-old Michael—her little Sasha. It wasn’t just not funny, it was mean, and he should know better to be mean to his wife. He should be happy that she learned this language as best she could. It wasn’t easy, and if he would try to learn hers, he might understand that he wouldn’t be able to speak without an accent either.

He settled down in t
he large green chair to read the paper, making himself comfortable after pouring a good healthy drink of whiskey for the evening. While he was not an old man who rejected technological progress, he much preferred to read the newspaper than to follow the news on the radio like so many others. It was hard to remember a time without radios since they had become so common, but he found the news much more readily digestible in written form like they had been when he was just a boy and electricity was not as ubiquitous as today. The front page of the paper was emblazoned with news from the Old World and the great stories that continued to feed the press with no end in sight. The war seemed to make every day an adventure as the correspondents followed the wire services of all the countries that had become embroiled in that bloody affair that had grown from a small war between the insignificant Balkan states to envelop all the great powers of Europe apart from merry old England.

After
nearly two years of bloodletting news continued to pour in without end of some new development that might change the course of things. As a slightly overdue Christmas present for the Kaiser, a big offensive in Italy had sent the wops fleeing in wild panic, abandoning some city in Piedmont to their Austro-German enemy after a year of tense back and forth between the two sides.
The
New York Times
reported absolute chaos as the Italian Army had been sent into an ignominious flight deep into the country, and the maps showed how Italy was close to being divided in two with the Germans coming closer to both Turin and Genoa.
The New York Times
had quoted an assertion by an Austrian official promising that it was only a matter of time before Italy would be forced to surrender.

The big item of the day was that the Austria
ns and Germans had entered the city of Alessandria which had been draped in white sheets and the pro-German crowd of New York had plenty to celebrate even as the Teutons and their allies were hard-pressed to hold back the Russians from pouring into Europe like legions of killer ants coming from the East. Like an endless baseball game, the war never seemed quite over, and since Christmas the war had apparently turned around again, this time in favor of Germany and her allies after the Russian advances during the fall when some correspondents had reported great jubilation on the French side. Perhaps with this fresh year the war would reach some kind of end?

“Do you have to read that now?”
a familiar voice asked with just enough annoyance to make him silently blaspheme as he glanced over at the shape standing across from him.

Helen looked genuinely annoyed standing by the divan
and glaring at him. She had been rather restless lately, and it made his life a little less appealing than the ordinary dreary state he lived in at home. Her present look of annoyance was plastered on top of a rather unappealingly sickly pallor on her face, and she had been looking quite sick recently.

“I believe I should know what has happened in the world,” Frederic said with a shrug, but he nevertheless put
The Times
away on the low table since he knew that she would not leave him to digest the news in peace.

He snatched his glass
from the table and took a healthy gulp. His rule to never drink in the daytime had a corollary that kept his nightly drinks somewhat larger than the norm, and he would seldom go to bed without having two healthy glasses before bedtime. Once in a while he had a bit more.

“What does it matter to you?” she said as she carefully sat herself down.

Vainly, she always tried to keep from looking bloated by hunching down and concealing the unnaturally big belly on her otherwise narrow and skinny frame. She had put on weight over the years, but she still had a very small body. They had married back in ’30, shortly after Frederic had moved to the city to work for Henderson & Blythe, and they lived in a decent enough townhouse in Yorkville, just a block from a dismal couple of tenements that polluted the otherwise rather nice little neighborhood settled by plenty of professionals like Frederic.

It was rather peculiar that someone like George Blythe would produce a daughter without the wh
ale-like girth of him or any resemblance with the similarly grotesque Mrs. Blythe. George Blythe looked like a caricature right out of the socialist press of the corpulent, cigar-smoking capitalist—and his running an accountancy firm was even better for the caricature appearance. Indeed, if he would just have been given a whip and some workers to lash he could easily have made it into the Marxist propaganda that supported Red Dick’s administration and his communist allies in Congress and the state legislature. Helen on the other hand was—at least when she was not pregnant—a small, delicate thing who looked thoroughly pathetic compared to the energetic young woman she had been just a few short years ago. She seemed to have aged twenty years in the five-odd years they had been married, and since her first pregnancy she had become something of a recluse who did not seem very interested in leaving the house at all. It was difficult to understand how she worked, but Frederic would not even try to map her alien psyche. He had far too many things to worry about, like proving himself to her father, rather than to worry about charting her feminine mind.

“You would think that the German Boulevard is an entirely different country,” he said as he pulled out his cigarette case to retrieve a cigarette. “There are more German flags there than there are people.”

Helen nodded apathetically, continuing her increasingly annoying disinterest for anything outside the house. She had hardly taken a breath of outside air in months, but with Frederic’s busy life he did not have time to bother. As much as she was acting unusual compared to her ordinary self, she did not seem very unhappy. Perhaps it was just some kind of phase that women went through as they were transitioning to another era in life. She had been very young when they married, and she had perhaps not quite matured into a woman yet even after getting a son to look after.

“I suppose the German
s will be pretty upset if they don’t win the war,” he said, almost imagining what the spirit of some of the neighborhood would be like if that happened.

Yorkville
was home to thousands of Germans, Austrians, Czechs, and others who had flocked to New York or were sons of immigrants, and they were overall quite partisan about the conflagration in Europe, unlike Frederic who could follow the events with the dispassionate interest some men reserved for baseball—he prided himself of being a rather dispassionate man all-round. A battle won or lost here or there contributed to the overall series, but no matter the ending, Frederic would not be really affected regardless of the outcome.

The Times
was the foremost of the dailies in the city when it came to drawing the process with occasional maps of where the frontlines were, and the paper was even receiving telegrams from correspondents that had ventured into the depths of Asia where the fall had offered a bit of excitement as the Japanese and Russians had clashed here and there along the long border between the two countries. The mountains of Central Asia had just recently served as a fascinating photo story in
Life
where a photographer had chronicled the fierce fighting between the squinting little Chinese and the Russians. It had been a rather exotic collection of primitive little yellow men riding on camels through the mountains and bearded Cossack mountaineers fighting over the mountains to the northeast of Persia.

The Balkans, Russia
, Italy, the Far East, Africa, and even the high seas had fed the newspapers with reports of how the great armies and navies of every great power except the United States and England were moving around across the globe in the largest war that history had ever known so far. And that wonderfully massive war had joined with radio, newspapers, and newsreels to make for an extraordinary cavalcade of martial news that were ever-present in the background even in a country as far removed from actual battle as the United States. A trip to the local theater was an excellent opportunity to see moving pictures of war and the men massacring each other all across Europe.

Unlike much of Yorkville, Manhattan, New York, and the rest of the country, Frederic had not taken a side
in this global baseball tournament. The Francophiles, wops, Greeks, and an assortment of the best and worst of New York had rallied to the cause of France, Russia, Italy, and the rest of the “Great Entente” and insisted that the debt to General Lafayette and General François was due to be repaid by committing the industrial weight of the United States to support the cause of the free French Republic against the despotic
Kaisers
of Europe.

On th
e other side the Germans, Bohemians, Hungarians, Austrians, and Poles had joined to demand neutrality or even war against tsarist oppression in Russia or to defend the dignity of the poor, defenseless virgin Bulgaria. Frederic leaned towards neutrality, since that was the natural sentiment of an upstanding liberal after the debacle in Mexico that still affected the Republican Party. The party had suffered for three decades from its decade-long adventure in Mexico, and rather than liberate all of Mexico from almost a century of inept home rule, it had ended in what even a Republican partisan had to admit was a great setback. Like the Zulus who had bloodied old England’s nose in Africa, the usually so lazy and mendacious Mexicans had been surprisingly tenacious fighters, and Congress had stopped far short of annexing Mexico and had only gotten away with northern Mexico—the provisional government in the south had remained embroiled in anarchy long after the last doughboy marched north of the new border between the two countries.

The Mexican Debacle had become fertile territory for Democrats to wave the bloody shirt after decades of Republican shirt-waving over the Civil War, and in particular the Labor Democrats had used the “imperialism” cudgel to drum up support from the rabble who had embraced the “peace, employment, and social security” rhetoric of the Democratic Reds. Even many Republicans had abandoned the dreams of uniting the Americas. In New York City the damned Democrats had recouped lost ground by accusing the Republicans of being mad imperialists who had sacrificed several thousands of American soldiers in a war that had only earned the country a bunch of underdeveloped territories with millions of spics who were bound to move northwards with their apathy and Syphilis. Compared to the short, victorious war against Spain, the Mexican Debacle had been a very bloody affair and costlier than all previous wars put together save for the horrific Civil War.

These days, Mexico was apparently at peace, although Frederic had no idea whether the talk among hawkish politicians about toppling the de facto independent republics of Yucatan and Veracruz would be a very wise policy to follow. Although the Red one in the White House was a complete idiot when it came to foreign affairs, even good internationalist Republicans and Conservative Democrats had to be quite reluctant to back a policy that could upset the frail peace in Mexico and spill over into Zacatecas, San Luis, or the other American territories with long, dangerous borders with Mexico. Besides, the separatist caudillo regime in Veracruz was already quite favorable to the United States while Federal Mexico was filled with peasant wetbacks who were proving yet again that the only way to govern Mexicans was through brute force and authority like the military rulers in Veracruz who should have been a fine example of the kind of government under which the Latin race could prosper to at least some degree. Whether Mexicans could theoretically live responsibly or not, that was at least not the case today, and reuniting Mexico under a strong central government seemed quite foolhardy compared to the disunited status quo in which Federal Mexico was a weak and feeble republic while Veracruz’s Sovereign Republic of the Gulf was a functioning state with good informal relations with the United States. Only the special laws that differentiated between nationals and citizens kept the spics in the southern territories from storming northwards, and he was too young to ever have believed that it was wise to pursue Manifest Destiny.

Frederic found both
American sides in the European war quite amusing and he could not help but eagerly hear New York gentlemen decry the Kaiser, or read an appeal from one of the pro-German papers for the United States to offer moral support for the German cause against a conspiracy of tsarist imperialism for Slavic domination of Europe and the “rape of brave Bulgaria” that had set off the war. Some of the pro-Germans made the explicit comparison between the Slavic Russians and negroes and in that analogy the Germans were the Americans who just wanted to be left alone but who were forced to defend their way of life against what was essentially an alien humanoid race with weak intellectual faculties and an instinct for savagery.

Most men like Frederic
who had no connection to either side seemed to believe that France deserved some sympathy since it was the only republic in the war, in addition to its great material support in both the Revolution and the Civil War. Well, Portugal was also a republic, but since she was on the same side as France it only made it that much more appealing to cast that side as fighting for liberty against Prussian militarist autocracy, and as soon as the Chinese went into the war, it was natural for Francophiles to add that race as further proof of the barbarism of the German side—and thus allowed both sides to draw on the other side’s racial features as proof of their depravity. The other nations apart from France and Portugal were without exception monarchies ruled to varying degrees by kings and emperors, and this matter of national constitutions was the official reason most educated men gave for supporting France and her allies alongside worries about the power of Germany. Frederic was skeptical of whether it was America’s business to free Europe, especially since the millions of German and Austrian soldiers would presumably not just lie down without a fight. No, it was probably for the better to stay in the bleachers and watch the slaughter with fascination from afar.