The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (52 page)

Chapter 7
6

“What’s wrong?” Radoslava asked, seeing on his face that he was unhappy, and she very much couldn’t stand him looking that way.

It worried her to see Sasha look so pale, and she sat up straight on the divan where she had been resting to make the nausea go away.
Olga had been born just at the start of the war, and now Radoslava was again pregnant, with all the little difficulties that entailed. For whatever reason, the Lord had made pregnancy a mix of some of the more unpleasant feelings she could imagine right next to that serene feeling of being party to the miracle of life. She didn’t come downstairs as much as she had used to, but she tried her best to spend time with Sasha, if only to watch him, especially when she seemed to be in pain.

“The Far East,” Alexander sighed as he dropped his peaked cap down on the low table and collapsed into the chair.

He looked like he might be sick. She smiled to herself, wondering if her nauseous condition was contagious... However, this was serious. The Far East. He had been speaking about it far too much, and she was far too interested to try to make him stop spill his guts out for her.

“What about it?” she asked, worried that something was wrong.

Alexander was an aide to the Tsar, and he had just returned from the palace just a short drive from the relatively modest house a couple of miles from the Tsar’s palace where he served as one of his private military assistants. Radoslava was proud of her precious soldier husband, even if he was not the kind of legendary soldier leading men into battle with a drawn sword. Staff officers were important too, and the Tsar needed reliable men around Him.

“Field Marshal
Bukharin has surrendered to the Mongols,” he quietly mumbled.

At first she looked confused, but when his serious look sunk in, her face paled, and she instinctively made the sign of the cross with her hand. Radoslava knew well about Bukharin, the man tasked with defending southeast Turkestan against the Mongol hordes.

“Oh God, no,” Radoslava gasped, as if she needed a moment to understand the gravity of Sasha’s words.

Sasha had kept her up to date with the worrying situation that was coming to Tsarskoye Selo from the General Staff in Petersburg. She was well-aware of the yellow monkeys descending on the armies in the East, but she couldn’t imagine how an honorable man—a field marshal!—could surrender to the Asian hordes.
A man was supposed to die rather than to surrender, and that had to be doubly true when it came to men fighting wretched little tailless rats.

“It’
s disgraceful,” Alexander spat, wondering if Bukharin knew that he would be court-martialed for surrendering the bulk of his Front to the enemy whenever he would return to Russia—he might be shot for what he had done.

Bloody traitor
.

“What will happen now?” she asked, distressed by all the bad news coming from the Far East.

When the Mongols had declared war in the late spring of 1934 she had been sure that the army would just whack the yellow monkeys on their heads and chase them back up into their trees so that they would learn their lesson—and maybe discover Christ if they had a few moments to spare for soul-searching. She had been a proud sponsor of the Church’s work to convert Eskimos and that sort of people of all sorts in Siberia, and she was sure that the spread of proper Christianity was the ultimate peacemaking tool. Yet these days she didn’t have much time to dream about a world without war.

At the time when
the Central Siberian Front in Asia had pushed the monkeys back in the summer of 1934 she had been filled with confidence that the numerous Mongols were no threat to the brave men of the Tsar’s army, and her confidence had been amply vindicated. Indeed, for much of last year, it had seemed like Sasha said nothing about the Far East at all, and only the fighting with the Germans had preoccupied his attention and his reports to her from what the Tsar was being told by his generals. She had been confident that all the fears about the Yellow Menace had been exaggerated, and the heathens had proved themselves to be lousy excuses for soldiers.

That lack of news from Asia
had only changed back in early March when Sasha had mentioned to her that the Mongols had launched a major offensive and crushed several defensive lines along the enormous border between the two empires. Since then he had spoken only about the Far East and the Baltic where the yellow monkeys and the ignominious Germans were attacking at different ends of their mighty, beautiful empire.

“The army is retreating from the Far East,” Alexander sighed as he reached for a cigarette from the box on the table.

“Retreating?” she gasped. “What about all the women and children?!”

There had to be millions of settlers living across those lands who would have no protection against the savage hordes. When the Golden Horde had harassed and humiliated Russia, the Russians had been too weak and disunited to hold them back and protect their families. Now they were united under His Majesty the Emperor, appointed by God as the Autocrat of All the Russias, the greatest empire in the world. The latter-day Genghis Khans could surely not be allowed to harm defenseless people now when Russia was strong!
Russia had proved her undying piety and greatness, and if anything it should be the Mongols fleeing and begging for forgiveness for being uppity little idiots trying to invade her.

“A new F
ront is being established along the Ural River in the Orenburg District,” he said, not proud to bring such bad news. “God have mercy,” he sighed.

“It’s not right,” she insisted, feeling her tears coming.

She had never thought that the East would ever threaten Russia again. It was the West; the scheming Germans and Austrians whom she had thought could possibly be dangerous, but even then Russia was bound to be safeguarded by God, and she knew that deep down in their hearts, her German relatives were good people. When Sasha had first said that the Tsar was being blackmailed by the Germans she thought that it must have been a mistake. She remembered meeting the Kaiser when she and Sasha had visited German relatives—he was a very kind old gramps. How could he let himself be fooled into making war on Holy Russia? Unlike the monkeys, the Germans were Christians. Against righteousness, heathens wouldn’t stand a chance. The pagan armies would crumble like the walls of Jericho; so why would a Russian surrender to them? Was the field marshal a pagan? No one could possibly be as cowardly as to give up without a fight!

“As long as we have faith, we will win,” Alexander asserted
, using platitudes to a painful degree when talking to Radoslava.

He didn’t want her
to cry; she should focus on being happy about the baby rather than worry about the business of war. She had no power in her pale little hands. There was no decision on her part that could be made that would impact the war in any way. What was the point to tell her the bleak outlook and the defeatism that had seeped into so many soldiers’ minds? Bukharin’s last telegram had been offensive to any patriot forced to read his apologia, but Alexander could see some treacherous merit to the notion that he genuinely believed that his decision was just. Yet he hated the son-of-a-dog-fucking-whore for it. How could a field marshal take it on himself to speak in the name of Russia?
How dare he?!

“It’s all because of that horrid Austrian pipsqueak,” she sobbed, knowing full well who had started this endless bloodshed.

She crossed herself as she turned her thoughts to God for some solace.
Poor Russia, God have mercy…

Radoslava’s
grandfather was not an evil man. He had been fooled by the Austrians and the Germans, that “emperor-king” of Austria who wanted to conquer the Balkans, and he was using her grandfather as his pawn. And now millions were dead because of him! So many good, noble men because of the evil designs of that disgusting twerp.

“Yes,
I suppose the damn Austrians are to blame,” Alexander said quietly, not wishing to bring up that it was her grandfather who had attacked Serbia rather than either Germany or Austria.

Europe was on fire, and Russia was under siege from west, south
west, and east because of her grandfather’s dreams of a new Bulgarian empire. He was sure that whatever historians and hangmen could do to King Petar would be nothing compared to what eternity had in store for his wretched, greedy soul. When Romania, Montenegro, and Greece had fulfilled their treaty obligations in defense of Serbia against Bulgaria’s invasion of Serbian Macedonia, it had looked like Bulgaria would yet again see its ambitions turn to dust. And when Austria—Russia’s great nemesis—had decided to declare war on the Balkan states and side with Bulgaria the Tsar had surely been unable to dishonor himself and ignore his promise to defend Serbian sovereignty against Austria, and that had pulled Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal to uphold their own treaty obligations—as well as perhaps the hope of securing some fruits of an allied victory.

All because of the ambition of King Petar to become the lord of the Balkans.
But his little granddaughter didn’t need to have her image of him as a kind but misguided man upset. It was bad enough that his own conceptions about his own great leader and autocrat the Tsar had been squashed when he saw him in the heat of a profound national crisis. Alexander knew from experience that the Tsar was a wonderful man, but as autocrat he lacked the temperance, patience, and intelligence of their great ancestors like Paul II or Peter I. He was not a bad man by any standard, just imperfect. In person King Petar was an amiable man, despite his grandiose ambitions for his puny little country that had set the great empires across Eurasia at war. Perhaps this was just a foul generation of kings and emperors.

Well, perhaps there was a logic to the war. If the damned Germans wanted to fight Russia time would be on Russia’s side. If only they would have waited a few more years Russia would have been that much stronger.
Damn shame
.
Bloody damn shame.
And all these bad news coming now right in time for Easter… Was that supposed to be some kind of divine joke?

To be continued in
Great Spring Ambitions