The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (30 page)

The nighttime cold was still not quite gone, and Stanislav shuddered under the blanket he had wrapped around himself as he listlessly looked down from the cliff
and over to where the enemy might be lurking. The foxholes and emplacements had been constructed by simply digging into the hard, rocky ground and then sandbags and rocks had been utilized to add protection in case the enemy would show up. It was a little unnerving to be on watch, even though Stanislav had never heard about anybody in the company being killed around here.

“You see any goat-fuckers?” Tsvetan asked, grinning widely when Stanislav glanced over at him
sitting up after a post-breakfast nap.

“I’ll tell you w
hen I do,” Stanislav sighed before he resumed looking down apathetically at the dead landscape below.

They had dug in at a defensive position
that offered a good view and decent defensive ground, but they didn’t really seem to do much defending at all. Stanislav hadn’t seen any Greeks since he was up just twenty miles northwest from here and fought them over some hills the generals wanted to have. Since the battalion had settled down out here just a few dozen miles from the city of Salonika he hadn’t seen as much as a shadow of a Greek, and he hoped that meant that they would be all right. He didn’t mind not seeing them; he hadn’t enjoyed the confusing, unnerving experience around New Year when things had turned really bad and he had had a spell of nightmarish flashes as he pictured a bullet or a shell hitting him. The whole division had been engaged, and people had said that there had been Greeks everywhere coming to overtake their positions—he hadn’t really noticed much of that over the confusion from the artillery shells and machinegun fire. Although it had been glorious excitement for much of the confusion, the long aftermath had left a bitter sting surrounding the whole battle.

In Stanislav’s battalion, almost a quarter
of the men had disappeared from the ranks since December; killed, wounded, or just gone before the rest had been sent down to this quiet standoff against the Greek garrison guarding Salonika. There was no telling what happened to men who disappeared, and they might just have died unnoticed. When he had walked past some horse-drawn carriages that had been hit by artillery it had become viscerally obvious how a man could pretty much vanish without a trace—one man had pretty much just left two boots with the feet still stuck inside them down under his seat on one of the carriages. God, it was horrible, and those flashes kept coming back a lot when he had nothing to do. The only comfort was that the Greeks had been repulsed, and Stanislav was sure that they had been beaten. Indeed, when his company had advanced after fighting back the Greeks, he had seen dozens of dead Greeks—or goat-fuckers as so many liked to call them. It was not pretty, and he had realized that there was little literal truth in the adage that it was good to see your enemy dead—he wanted them dead, just not where he had to get rid of the pieces.

The battalion was spread out over a wide area several miles wide
with guards posted to raise the alarm in case the enemy would try to pull something. Tsvetan and Stanislav and their fellow sentries had a somewhat troubling duty if you thought about it too much. After all, what could they do if a bunch of Greeks would come and attack them? They might warn Battalion and raise the alarm, and then the commander might radio whoever he’d radio and tell that the Greeks were coming, but what of the sentries? He shuddered at the thought. It was a disturbing feeling, and he prayed that the enemy would keep calm and stay in Salonika and enjoy themselves there rather than venture out to pester and possibly kill Stanislav. When he had been under fire in the past he had never been an expendable sentry like he was now. He had been a part of a larger effort to either hold back the enemy or assault enemy positions, and he had been entirely equal to anybody else in the face of the enemy—even the officers leading them. Well, the officers who were not too important to be out front—there was surely no shortage of junior officers in heaven though perhaps there were not that many generals there to lead them. It was God and luck that had kept him from getting injured or worse, and he had never been just a damned canary put out to die if the enemy attacked. Nobody could seriously expect that Tsvetan and Stanislav could hold an attack on their own or wait for the company to come to their aid. No, they would be dead meat for sure.

Of course, it was only unsettling when he allowed thoughts like that to enter his mind. He tried his best to focus on how ple
ased Boris would be when he came home to help out again. Although it had been a while since the last mail had come through, Stanislav had been happy to hear that his big brother missed him. It became particularly meaningful since he mentioned the specific agony of not having Stanislav to help out in the store rather than to be just a generic sort of “oh, you mean the world to me, dear brother” kind of platitude parade. He would have liked it if his sister-in-law would write him too, but she just sent her generic “best of luck” at the end of Boris’s letters. Stoyanka was a good woman, and he felt a bit guilty for the times he had jacked off with her on his mind—it was a very sinful thing, but it was in the past, and he was sure that God had forgiven him for it. He had turned nineteen last month, and he had marked the occasion with a few sips of pomace liquor the sergeant had bartered for some cigarettes from a peasant in the village where the regiment had its headquarters about three miles from the defensive perimeter. Although they were supposedly Greeks—pending victory when this land would be Bulgaria—they were happy to trade homemade liquor and scraps of meat for cigarettes from the soldiers. If there was one thing his brother could send him, it was tobacco and rolling paper, and over a month ago he had received a small box stuffed with a good ersatz blend.

Tsvetan Bogdanov had a rather swarthy face from a couple of days without shaving
that made him look almost like a Turk. By contrast, Stanislav made sure to quickly have a go every morning with his straight razor like his brother had taught him. Even if he didn’t
need
to shave every morning, it was a good habit that he religiously maintained even in the field. A man should be presentable, and where he came from—working as a junior clerk in the family store—it was essential to be well-groomed and good to serve the customers. A man’s appearance would spill over on the business, and a poorly groomed man would surely lose the customers’ confidence in him.

Private Tsvetan Bo
gdanov Radomirov had finished his military service before the war and had been called up as a reservist rather than as a green conscript like so many of his comrades. If it had not been for the war, Stanislav would probably have been in uniform now as a man undergoing that rite of manhood men went through at that age. Of course, usually that did not entail being under threat of death from a bunch of Greeks. Tsvetan had served through his conscription years without any violence other than in exercises, but it was all really a matter of luck that determined whether or not you had to go through with this kind of thing. If you were the wrong age at the wrong time, you were liable to end up in uniform fighting rather than just marching and training for a war that might never come. That was what Tsvetan had thought was to be his lot before he received the summons that required his presence before a draft board. And here he was, a veteran fighter who’d even received a nice little medal trinket for bravery as opposed to his short military career in the peacetime army as a mark of manhood.

Stanislav’s
second older brother had been in the service before the war started, and he was in a regiment somewhere up north fighting the Russians in Moldova. The army had to fight all neighboring countries except the Turks, and Stanislav had no idea if it made much difference fighting Romanians and Russians, Serbs, or Greeks. He figured they were all sort of similar to each other where it counted. Greek and Russian bullets were probably about the same. Yet somehow, the goat-fuckers were just worse human beings. They were scum, and Stanislav was proud that he had almost certainly hit at least one, although he couldn’t be absolutely certain. He hated them—the whole murderous lot of them. They were an easy bunch to hate, the backstabbing, goat-fucking sons-of-bitches-in-heat.

It was dark and freezing
, and just trying to get a few precious hours of sleep was a struggle. The high winter in Mongolia had not quite been enough to prepare him for a week of sleeping inside the all too small steel tractor. From the outside it looked so big, yet it was downright impossible to really get a good night’s sleep among the boxes of shells and the cramped insides of the vehicle designed to be as small as possible while packing as much ammunition and fuel as it could inside its steel plates. Kai was sleeping in his seat and the sergeant was lying next to Makoto on the floor, close enough to be a couple pressed against each other with Akino sitting in the seat next to Kai up in the front at Makoto’s boots. He had to bend his legs to fit on the floor, and it was awkward to be so close to the sergeant that he could almost feel the heat of his body through their uniforms. The worst part was that just moving slightly made him fear that he would disturb his comrade’s sleep and wake him up too.

Makoto
could hardly wait to be able to get out of the tank for at least one full day and stretch out his limbs and exercise his joints freely—guard duty outside didn’t count. The company was still far from the ultimate goal—wherever that was—and it seemed that there was no end to the Russians. The company had lost five tanks to enemy guns, and from what Makoto had heard from the others, several well-known faces were gone just these past two days when they had been ambushed by Russian anti-tank guns. If his tank had killed Russians, they had probably been killed by Akino and the sergeant who had fired the machineguns at the enemy. Mou might have killed some with the explosive shells, but it was hard to know since the platoon had mostly just charged Russian lines with the machineguns firing bursts of bullets against the enemy. Well, Mou had certainly killed
someone
. After all, he had hit at least two enemy field guns according to the sergeant, although so many tanks had been shooting at them that it was hard to know who exactly had thrown the enemy off into hell.

The
isolation inside the tank was almost absolute, and it was like living inside a steel box on tracks. Mou was on guard outside for now, and guard duty outside would have been wonderful if it hadn’t been for the lost precious sleep. Makoto could just indistinctly pick up some conversation from the outside presumably Mou talking to someone, but not enough to follow the contents, but the length of the talking made him feel confident that there was nothing bad going on. The damn tank hadn’t been welded properly, and the thin, invisible gaps between the plates made it easier for outside noise to get into the machine than it had been in the training vehicles that had been perfectly assembled.

The landscape wasn’t as dark as nights back home were.
The snow together with the stars and the moon offered decent lighting compared to ordinary snowless nights, but the open expanses made it hellishly cold, and the wind was really biting his cheeks badly. Mou Takenosuke would rather pick warm but black nights over these bright, freezing ones. Admittedly, it was not nearly as cold here as it had been in Mongolia over the worst of the winter and then in Altay before they moved out into enemy country.

“I hope you’re right,” Takenosuke
said as he watched across the dark frontier.

The infantryman was wearing
a heavy coat and had strips of cloth tied around his head underneath his steel helmet. Most of the soldiers were sleeping beneath the most rudimentary shelters of winter blankets, snow, and winter coats with the occasional kerosene stove for artificial extra warmth. Some of the soldiers had apparently found some of the Russian leftover blankets quite helpful to fill out their inventories, and the soldiers had done their best to build shelters for the night all around where they had stopped for a few hours of precious sleep.

“I’m sure that we’ll be there in no time,” the corporal said as Takenosuke leaned his he
ad forward toward the lighter.

The corporal had found a big box of tobacco in one of the bunkers the day before yesterday, and he had kept generously providing cigarettes to both the tankers and infantrymen within reach.
He was a good man, and Takenosuke wouldn’t say no to yet another cigarette.

“I just hope we can get home soon. I’m sure something will freeze off if I don’t get out of here,” he
sneered after he had inhaled a puff of smoke from the corporal’s Russian stuff.

“Oh, you’re in a hurry? Someone waiting
for you?” the corporal asked.

Takenosuke nodded with a
mischievous grin.

“You lot have too much spare time,” the corporal chuckled
, taking a drag on his own cigarette. “If you’d done a hard day’s work you wouldn’t have time to think about that,” he said with a smile. “This is practically a vacation for me; the moment I get home my wife will direct me to our field to get to work!”

The two laughed about the corporal’s claim. Like most men in the division—like most men in the country—they were rural men, ostensibly “peasants” although the class system had been legally abolished so the definitions were rather vague and not very easy the way they had been classified back in the old days when being a peasant had formal legal ramifications.

“Konan can’t be that different,” Takenosuke said after a few moments of silence once their laughing had died down.

He didn’t know much about Konan. It was not that far from Annam
on most maps, probably not more than a good day or so by train, but he didn’t know much about that place. There were far too many provinces to know much about them at all, and what they did know tended to be rather simplified summaries of the provinces and their people.

“Picking cotton is good for you,” the corporal said with a playful smile before he took a long drag on his cigarette. “It builds your character.”

“What, you become a man if you pick cotton?” Takenosuke asked.

“You
’d better not,” the corporal replied quickly, not missing a beat. “Then there wouldn’t be any women in Chubu County. My wife has probably picked enough cotton to clothe a whole township, and she’s a woman alright!”

The two men didn’t have much else to do than to waste time talking about anything that made time move just a little faster.
It was pretty unlikely that Russians would show up out of nowhere, but there were several men standing around the shelters, tanks, trucks, and halftracks parked all across the field in case the enemy would try something.

“I’m fucking freezing,” Takenosuke whined.

“I think everyone is,” the corporal pointed out. “Unless you’re a Russian or a Mongolian you aren’t supposed to live in a place like this.”

Most of the men Takenosuke had come across in t
he division were either from the South like the Annam men, or from the Middle like the Konan men. And while he only really knew the provinces outside of Annam through mostly black and white photographs and motion pictures, he thought that the provinces in the Middle were not at all as desolate and freezing as this enormous wasteland. The closest people to this sort of climate in the division was one of the other armored regiments which came from Ryounei Province up in southern Manchuria. Manchuria was also way up north, so those guys had probably been through a lot of bad winters before. Nevertheless, it was hard to understand how human beings of any kind could live in this horrible wasteland or places like it. The people in Altay looked normal, yet they seemed to live like Eskimos in the winter.

The division
had punched through the deep defenses surprisingly fast, but the damned Russians yesterday... Takenosuke had just kept firing at them, hoping that the sons-of-bitches would just stop firing their damned guns. After the engagement, they had been forced to leave the wreckage behind for other people to deal with while they kept moving on like all those dead guys were just nothing. The orders from the top were to keep moving and let others look after their comrades, and Takenosuke felt like the regiment should at least have some kind of memorial ceremony for their lost boys. But who cared about decency? The mechanized divisions were supposed to be quick and move ruthlessly onwards. Yet after combat wound down and they continued past the burning tanks, the realization that a number of their comrades had been killed started to work its way into his head, and the excitement was replaced by a sense of melancholy.

Takenosuke’s sole duty was to be th
e tank’s sword, and to have Onda Makoto keep the gun loaded as he tried to pick off whatever Russians were in front of them. He was a bit annoyed that he had not yet come around to write a letter and tell mom and dad that he had probably knocked out at least a dozen Russians. A dozen devils! He was sure they would be happy to hear that. Happy that their little Takenosuke was making them proud and doing his duty: Killing
white ghosts
.

“Do you think that city will be l
ike home?” the corporal asked.

From what he had heard, their division would have the honor of smashing into the defenses of the city of Barnaul.
It was supposed to be one of the largest cities in the region, and from what Battalion had told them, it was bound to be entrenched with layers of machineguns, landmines, and Russians; more devils. Hell had to be pretty damn crowded these days with both good and bad men dying in droves.

The
static defenses so far had been strong, and the division had been fortunate compared to some of the divisions that had advanced through the enemy lines and then turned to roll up and seal the enemy lines into pockets that the regular divisions could then hammer into oblivion. However, the Russians inside those would-be pockets had not remained idly waiting to be destroyed. The word from some of the men in one of the support units was that the 217th Division had been taken out of operation after it had lost most of its battle tanks during a Russian counterattack just miles from where their regiment had been advancing. Even their own division had suffered plenty of casualties despite the small number of armor, artillery, and infantry they had faced.

Thankfully, Takenosuke had so far seen no Russian aircraft apart from the remains of a temporary airfield they had passed by two days ago. The engineer boys from Corps had been at work pulling the destroyed aircraft left behind off the rugged airstrip and when the battalion drove onwards, the airfield was still being repaired in the hopes that it could provide increased air support during the push on Barnaul and
Novonikolayevsk. They had all been taught the outlines of military strategy, so even the least literate soldiers were supposed to understand the roles of each kind of military unit.

“So you have a girl waiting for you?” the corporal sighed after a somewhat too long silence, eager to fill it with some noise.

“Yes, a fine girl,” Takenosuke replied.

“Children?”

“Not yet.”

Takenosuke was not embarrassed to say that he had no children yet. He hadn’t been married long enough for it to be too weird or reflect poorly on Shouko—or himself.

“I have one,” the corporal said thoughtfully. “Just a girl a little taller than my boot,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “It would have been a relief to have a son before you go, right? If something happens.”

Takenosuke knew what he meant. He didn’t think too much about that. He was still a child at heart, and he felt pretty immortal even after the messy past two days. Marriage was still more recreational than procreational to him, although at some point that would probably change. It wasn’t like he was trying to not have a child; it was simply the case that the depositions had come to nothing inside Shouko yet.

“I suppose so,” he said, thinking that the corporal had turned awfully melodramatic. “There’ll be time to take care of that later.”

“Right, right,” the corporal answered with a slightly nervous chuckle, as if he realized that he was sounding a bit too sentimental. “We should hope for the best.”