The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (44 page)

Nadia hadn’t really heard anyone tie her cousins’ mother to her native country that way before. She knew that Aunt Elena was a daughter of the younger brother of the King of Romania, and she knew that Romania had attacked Bulgaria. But she didn’t think of her as a Romanian; she was just Aunt Elena. Her marriage to Uncle Vladimir had been the first grand event Nadia could remember clearly since she had been ten at the time, and she liked Elena—she had always been very nice to her.

“Would you be a dear and have your sister come down?” Petar said, not wanting to discuss his
foreign
sister-in-law with Borislava anymore.

Naturally, Nadia left to go upstairs to her sister’s room, annoyed that her bratty little sister needed to be prompted to come and kiss her father. She should have been eager to come without being prompted. It was so typical of her, but Nadia was not quite comfortable to scold Evgenia for being a wicked child.

Evgenia was annoyed by the interruption in her writing, but she knew that she should love and honor her parents like God said—and she obviously wasn’t the product of a miraculous virgin birth so she had indeed
two
parents. But that didn’t make it fun. However, as an obedient child, Evgenia accompanied Nadia downstairs where her father was waiting for her.

“Good afternoon, father,” Evgenia mumbled, keeping her head down as her father gave her a quick embrace
and kiss.

“How’s little Evgenia?” he said as he let her go
, not sounding like he was much more enthusiastic than Evgenia herself.

“I’m tired,” she lied.

Actually, she had been spilling her brain out unto the pages of her current diary when her sister showed up and told her to come downstairs to be with their father. Father Nikola had agreed to come by after she had asked her mother for permission to invite him for a walk in the garden so he could counsel her—she felt a little bad for shutting down Mommy’s curiosity by invoking holy reasons when she just wanted to speak to him as her friend. Her heart was all aflutter with cheerfulness to finally get to hear his answers rather than to read them, and she had no interest in sitting around with her meanie father.

“If the nurses are asking too much you should ask Mrs. Georgievna for less hard work,” he said as he sat back down again.

He knew that his father had recalled Maria and the girls to the capital to work in the hospital where Miroslava and her daughters Milena and Lyudmila were spending their days, and he agreed that it did not look good to have her out in the country doing nothing in the middle of this bloody war. He looked forward to seeing a picture of Borislava and Evgenia in Red Cross uniforms like the photographs that had been published of the other princesses doing their sacred patriotic duty. On a routine visit he had met the woman in charge of the nurses about six months ago, and Mrs. Georgievna had struck him as a perfectly delightful and dutiful woman of aristocratic background who had devoted her life to helping the sick and injured. Maria should try to take after Mrs. Georgievna; she seemed an excellent example to follow for a princess—or indeed any woman.

“I know,” Evgenia mumbled.

She enjoyed work. Like Father Nikola had said, she was doing the work of the Lord by helping the sick, and her fascination was increasing as she spent the days watching the nurses at work and fetching things for them. She would have preferred to be allowed to just watch them, but she also wanted to do the Lord’s work, so pushing trolleys and carrying boxes and trays for the women was something she didn’t mind doing all that much. They didn’t ask her to dress wounds or do anything, and she mostly looked forward to the frequent visits from priests who passed along the hard cots to bless the wounded warriors. For some reason it was very fun to watch, even if it probably wasn’t very fun to the soldiers.

“How long will the war last?” Nadia asked, thinking that her father would be a lot more helpful than her mother.

“It will last until the enemy won’t fight anymore,” Petar curtly and truthfully replied.

One division had executed four agitating soldiers in February, and only the fortunate news about the progress by the Germans and the Chinese
for the past four and six weeks respectively had shown the men that the war was moving closer to some kind of victory. The German successes up by the Baltic in particular indicated that the Russians would have a difficult time to keep themselves together.

“How long will that take?” she pressed
with just enough innocuousness to not seem too obnoxious.

Nadia knew that there was well
over two hundred million Russians, and the Russian army was the army that had defeated the Turks when Bulgaria first became free after centuries of Turkish rule. Before the war, she had been inundated with the ideas that mighty Russia was the great protector of Slavic peoples in their struggle against heathen Turks, and it still did not seem right that Bulgaria’s chief enemy was Russia and that a Slavic and Orthodox nation was allied with Germans and Chinese against the Slavic nations and their Latin allies. Even if Nadia had not a single drop of Bulgarian blood in her—she was a full German going back generations with only sprinkles of Danish, Dutch, English, Catholic, and other non-Slavic admixtures—she nevertheless had to think of this as her country, and her father and Professor Vladimirov had helped to fill her head with a national mythos that was very compelling. This was the bridge between Russian and Greek Orthodoxy, and even under centuries of Ottoman rule, Bulgaria had a distinct character as a free nation with its separate culture from the nearby Orthodox Greeks, Yugoslavic peoples, and Vlachs who had been similarly dominated by the Mohammedans. Even today there were just eight million Bulgarians and this war seemed like a fight far more uneven than the ancient Bulgarians’ struggle to keep the Ottomans from conquering them. And back then the Turks had won and the Bulgar race had been reduced to servitude by foreign and heathen rulers.

“Hopefully
it won’t take too long,” Petar said, hoping to be reassuring.

Petar
wasn’t a fool; he had heard that the former prime minister—Count Popov—had begged his father to sue for peace on dishonorable terms of preferably minor territorial gains or even a status quo ante bellum peace. Petar agreed with his father that Bulgaria would never let Bulgarian territory remain in the hands of either the despicable Greeks or the Serbian ingrates. Anything short of a recognition that all of Macedonia was inseparable from the Bulgarian nation would make every dead soldier a waste. It would discredit the cause of the nation, and his father’s promise to reunite the Bulgarians living under the Serbian tyranny would be a public lie. How could the king and his dynasty continue on if Bulgaria had sacrificed so much for nothing? No, defeat was not an option, and it had only been proper for Count Popov to resign if he could see no honorable outcome to this titanic struggle.

Unlike
the wars his grandfather had waged against the neighboring Christian nations, Petar could see his father succeeding thanks to the support of great powers. Austria, Germany, and Japan were more foreign than even the Greeks and Romanians who at least shared some history and the faith in God Almighty as venerated in the Orthodox tradition, but they were on the right side against the Orthodox nations. Like his father, Petar resented the Russian emperor for his support of Serbia over a people who had always considered the Russians their cousins. His niece’s marriage to Grand Duke Alexander Pavlovich of the Russian Romanovs had been auspicious, but now it felt like rather than being an agent of national fraternity, little Radoslava had become the first prisoner of war.

Nadia wasn’t satisfied by her father’s evasive
answer. She wanted the war to be over, and her war exhaustion had become a lot more acute after she started going to the hospital. Even if she had always known that men were killed and injured in war, she was starting to have uneasy recollections of particular sights after hours. Like when she had to help Ana Nikolova clean up a big pool of blood after a bad surgery. It had been like an endless sea; no matter how much they scrubbed the liquid had just refused to be removed and they had to wash the rags several times over in water before all the blood had finally disappeared. The hospital was a depressing place, and she wanted to ask her father to let her stop going there. Evgenia could continue—she probably liked being there, the little sicko.

It was particularly bad to s
ee when the nurses redressed ugly wounds, and she had almost vomited when she saw a man who didn’t have a lower jaw; it had just been missing, and he had been wrapped in gauze with a hose for drinking soup down past his one line of teeth. He had been so ugly, and Nadia had felt so bad for being revolted by the sight of someone who didn’t even look human. Fortunately, his eyes had been covered by gauze, so the monster hadn’t seen how disgusting he looked to her.

She had learned from the nurses that the Greeks and the French had been attacking in Macedonia, that was why there had been so many men coming to the hospital
despite the long and arduous journey by train, and why some of them had been moved into tents outside the hospital to save room while the others were crowding the beds and even lying on blankets on the floor between beds. She had no idea how many men she had seen up close, but there had to be hundreds.

“Do you still study?” he asked his quiet daughter who was tugging on her apron.

Evgenia nodded without a word. Both girls were wearing Slavophile dresses, and he was so used to seeing them that way that he could hardly imagine either of them dressed in Western dresses anymore. When Borislava had been just a couple of years old she had been dressed like an ordinary infant, but as his father had pointed out, they would have to make amends for their looks. Borislava in particular had a very German face, but it was hardly her fault—nobody in the family looked Bulgar. As a convert to the Slavophilic cause, he could see why the family should not be so German, and his own wife was proof enough of the side effects of being guided by private sentiment rather than to harness the national revival that had reached new heights in the last three decades as Bulgaria was finding its place in the neighborhood. The post-Luther days of Europe when kings and lords could decide which religion their subjects should have or what language they should speak was ancient history. The German kings of Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania all had been forced to assimilate themselves to the religion and ways of their peoples rather than the other way around, and the strongest support of the monarchy in Sofia and the rural villages rested on the nationalist trinity of Orthodoxy, Bulgarian revivalism, and—increasingly—hostility towards Serbs, Vlachs, and Greeks. Apart from the Turks, no people had been as antagonistic to Bulgaria as Serbia, and even before the war the government had tried to harness religion, national identity, and hostility towards the Serbs. The middle class could take pride in their nation’s regional power, and uneducated peasants could understand the government as the only guarantor to keep the nation safe from foreign infidels who would bring tyranny and rape and pillage the countryside. Except for a small subset of the educated middle class, nobody would approve of the monarchy differentiating itself from the nation’s history to embrace a foreign culture that had very little in common with Bulgaria’s national history and was supposedly part of “modernity.” Even most members of the enlightened middle class could embrace the nation’s past in a revived sense of distinctiveness from other peoples, and during the war there had been a noticed uptick in publications that pointed to the many differences between Bulgarians and their Russian “cousins” while in the recent past the similarities had often been celebrated.

“You are getting big,” he said, thinking that Evgenia looked distinctly older since he last saw her.

Evgenia was still young enough to change at a rate a woman would not. She might be around the age when she would soon stop growing completely, but she wasn’t there just yet. The girl nodded without saying anything, and it was hard to say whether she was even listening to him. He had less and less time and patience with children the older he became, and Evgenia had always been the least interesting child. Boris would probably be the king in the distant future, and it was not difficult to see Borislava marry a prince. Had it been the Middle Ages he might have considered sending Evgenia off to a convent to just get rid of her. There was something unsettling about her, yet the lack of communication between him and her mother meant that he was not quite sure about her. Perhaps she was just an idiot. All families were liable to have one sooner or later.

“Daddy?” Nadia carefully prodded when Evgenia was just wasting his time.

“Yes?”

He turned his focus to her rather than her sister.

“Do you think I could go to a lecture or two?”

He was sure to be more understanding than anybody else. After all, he had studied philosophy, so he knew that it was important.

“What do you mean?” Petar asked, not sure what Borislava was talking about.

“I want to visit the university and hear a lecture,” she said, not letting herself sound to whiny or childish.

Nadia had to act like a woman, or else she would just sound like a baby. Her father was bound to be unhelpful if he thought she didn’t know what she was talking about.

“Oh, what for?”

“To learn. Like Daddy did.”