The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) (46 page)

Chapter
70

The open parade grounds had filled with people assembled between the wooden barracks and the brick buildings that had sprung up during the boom of the growth of the suburb into a virtual city around the Constantinople Kremlin outside of the city proper. Every week since back when the Turks had first relegated the Constantinople Regiment to its primary base on the western side of the Bosporus the regiment had held a weekly review with parades and military marches. Compared to Pavel’s experience from before, the soldiers were surprisingly cooperative and did not seem to mind the work necessary to keep belts, boots, and uniforms clean and perfectly presentable to perform the ritual military drill in public. Most ordinary soldiers resented ceremony for ceremony’s sake, but the recurring review on the parade grounds was not at all unpopular as a martial “up yours” to the Mohammedan Turks just across the strait from them in Asia.

Perhaps the men had understood and accepted Pavel’s motivation for starting the weekly ritual and enjoyed sticking it to the Turks, or they just enjoyed looking smart in front of the local ladies. Or maybe they did not mind having to spend time with military drill rather than other, perhaps more tedious work. Regardless of their motivation for being so cooperative and putting on a good show, Pavel was very pleased to watch from the sidelines along with other officers, officials, and thousands of Constantinopolitans who came to see the marching and listen to the music of the band. Surely it was good for both the garrison and the local Christians to keep on as normal and ignore the Turks, and the weekly parade was surprisingly popular with the otherwise rather dubious Greeks in the city. The outbreak of the war had made Pavel and his military administration as popular as it had ever been with the overwhelming Greek majority of Constantinople and in particular the people living in Little Constantinople, the part of the large metropolitan city that was directly under Pavel’s auspices. As the senior representative of the Russian government and the governor of the Military Administration he oversaw the garrison as well as the civilian administration of Little Constantinople itself. The small town had grown up around the Constantinople Kremlin, but to Pavel’s great consternation, the Greeks that dominated Little Constantinople had been very uncooperative in the past, particularly with Pavel’s refusal to amend his father and predecessor’s decision to maintain Slavonic as the liturgical language of the churches under direct Russian control rather than the Greek the locals demanded. The advent of war had made the Greeks more sympathetic to the Military Administration, and Pavel had agreed to the requests from the Civilian Advisory Organization and the city government of Constantinople proper to include a small detachment of the Greek Police in the review of the garrison to turn what would otherwise have been a Russian event into something far broader. Little Constantinople was only home to a small fraction of all the Greeks in Constantinople, which had become even more Greek after the end of the war than it had been at any time since the Mohammedan conquest of the city half a millennium prior. There were probably even more “miscellaneous” people—Armenians, Jews, and so on—than Mohammedans, which was in part the result of certain evictions and neighborhood cleanups during the war when the Russian occupying troops heard about Mohammedan atrocities in Anatolia and had decided to let the local Mohammedans make up for it. While Pavel did not condone looting, rape, or murder, he was inclined to believe in transfers as a humane and decent way to keep separate peoples apart—he believed his ancestor Paul I had been right to expel the Chuvash to Siberia as punishment for their impious rebellion, and several other forced relocations of hostile peoples, Christian or heathen, since.

Indeed, had Pavel been given all the authority he would have liked to have, every Mohammedan in the Province of Constantinople would have been expelled back into Asia rather than to permit many tens of thousands of them to live in Constantinople and the rural lands that were part of the autonomous province. He didn’t trust Turks, but the Russian government had insisted that the London Treaty stipulated that Turks would be allowed to remain within the city and the rest of the Province of Constantinople, and the loyal soldier that he was he could not defy decisions made by the Tsar’s government and unilaterally expel the Mohammedans.

The constituent forces of the Constantinople Regiment had been slimmed down by recalls for most of the garrison to return to Russia to fight in the war, and Pavel had no field artillery and—apart from his mounted Cossack squadron—no cavalry under his command, and only a single armored platoon with antique machines that might as well have been made of cardboard… He had a company of naval infantry, a “battalion” of guardsmen, one company of Cossack infantrymen, and two tiny battalions of line infantry. The theoretical combat strength was somewhere around seven hundred, about a tenth of the prewar manpower of the regiment.

Constantinople had seen a renaissance since the decrepit Turks were driven out, and many Greeks had fled from Anatolia to the safety of the Russian administration rather than take their chances with the rump republic that had emerged in Anatolia after the Ottoman Empire collapsed completely and was carved up by the victorious Allied Powers. Along with the thin line along the Asian side of the Bosporus and the city limits of the city of Constantinople, all of Turkey west of it had been demilitarized by the London Treaty which allowed only for a single Russian regiment to be stationed in the autonomous Province of Constantinople that made up the small remains of the old Ottoman holdings in Europe. The empire had once reached all the way to the gates of Vienna and now Russia had had it reduced to a small husk of the once great Mohammedan menace. A pitiful end to the Ottomans, and only Russian magnanimity—as well as certain European nations’ diplomatic agendas—had allowed there to be any semblance of a post-Ottoman, Mohammedan state left in Anatolia rather than to annex the whole thing into Russia.

Within that Greek province of Turkey, Little Constantinople was governed by the Military Administration—of which Pavel was the head with the Greek councilors being advisors rather than co-rulers. Little Constantinople was in practice Russian territory, but the war had made the future of the Province quite unpredictable with the Turkish remilitarization of the eastern shores of the Bosporus, and it made not only Pavel wonder whether there might be a new Ottoman War in the near future. The Turks had not sent troops into the city, but the threatening Mohammedan crescent flag was flying from several small forts along the Asian side of the Bosporus.

Pavel was used to holding his hand up to his head, and as the soldiers marched below the stands that seated the senior officers, officials, guests, and ladies, he kept his hand up in a constant salute to the men filing past. The Constantinople Regiment had been shaped by its first commander—Grand Duke Georgiy—who had been very interested in ancient Orthodox Rome, and had attempted to tie the regiment in with its predecessors as the defenders of Constantinople against the enemies of Orthodoxy. Pavel had not been his father’s immediate successor as regimental commander, and his father’s short governance before his death had been followed by the much longer administration of Grand Duke Oleg Konstantinovich starting in 1924 before Pavel had replaced him back in 1931.

It was a dreary job to deal with the sort of people who moaned about everything, but Pavel did not wish to betray his duty to his cousin who had appointed him as Oleg’s replacement. If Nicholas Alexandrovich believed that Pavel Georgievich should represent Petersburg in Constantinople, Pavel had an obligation to comply with his wish. His cousin was after all emperor under the law as the oldest son of Alexander I—the second son of Paul II—and the heir of Emperor Nicholas II who had died in 1887 without male issue to succeed him. Pavel’s father—Grand Duke Georgiy—had been the youngest of Paul II’s sons, and the longest-lived since Nicholas II had died far short of fifty and Alexander I had barely passed sixty.

After the infant Pavel and his father Grand Duke Alexander Nikolayevich and the Tsar’s younger brother, Pavel was the heir to the throne of his cousin. The Emperor had produced a small brood of daughters, and his only son was Grand Duke Alexander Nikolayevich who along with his infant son were heirs to the Tsar before the sovereign’s childless brother Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich. Pavel had no reason to wish for ever becoming Tsar since God appointed the office, but he was eager to serve Nicholas Alexandrovich in any way he could to make it easier for him to deal with the difficult politicians and all the tedious matters of state. Judging from the workload, it seemed like being somewhere close to the Tsar but not too close would be the most comfortable station in the world, but Pavel had been raised as a soldier, and he wished to serve his sovereign as one when the country was in such a great war against its enemies in both the west and the east.

The weekly military review outside the Constantinople Kremlin included a small ceremony in which priests blessed the soldiers, and the garrison’s military band played the imperial hymn along with marches and other music appropriate for the occasion. When the Greek Police marched by, the band played a Greek march to placate their supposed brothers before God. Unlike their military counterparts, the Greeks were armed with swords rather than rifles, although if Pavel had had access to more arms he would have liked to reorganize the Greek Police into a militia capable of supporting his regiment. Despite the many differences and controversies between the Military Administration and the civil Greek authorities, there was no doubt that the Greeks would prefer the Military Administration to a return to Turkish rule. The bloody struggle between the Turks and the Greeks and the dechristianization of Turkish Anatolia had left Greeks, Armenians, and the other peoples of former Ottoman territory resentful towards the Mohammedans, and both the Greeks in the Province of Constantinople and the Armenians and some dissident Mohammedan race to the east were under the protection of Russia. The Ottoman War had left rump Turkey religiously quite pure with Russia taking up most of the Christian former subjects in the Great Yerevan Governorate and the Trebizond Governorate in eastern Anatolia and many of the Greeks fleeing Anatolia for the Province of Constantinople.

The review was an exercise in military pageantry, and after it was finally over, Pavel returned to his residence after some ordinarily brief and mostly pointless conversations with the sort of people who turned out to see the spectacle. This was the first review for some time Tatyana had seen after she had been recuperating from the agonizing months after her difficult delivery. Olga and Pyotr had taken their toll on her, and she still did not look very healthy. When he had married her four years after Maya’s death she had been a beautiful young woman, but her face had become rounder, and despite her expansion, she looked sicklier than she had when she was thin and delicate—the very opposite of the ordinary effect of gaining a bit of flab.

Maya had had six children, yet she had been beautiful until she become sick and then, despite the hope that staying in Sochi would be good for her, she had died at the young age of thirty-six. Such a wonderful angel she had been, and how wasteful to see her in pain from her disease. No woman could ever supersede her, and Pavel felt ashamed to have tried. His young wife was not a bad woman, but she was no Maya. Tatyana was five years older than Pavel’s oldest son Vanya, yet it had become less easy to tell that she was that much younger than Pavel any longer.

After she sat down in her favorite sofa in the lounge, she continued to wave her fan at her face, sweating from the hot, humid day. For all her flaws, Tatyana was a loyal and good wife, and perhaps her presence made him much less likely to stray from the bonds of matrimony into sin. Frankly, he didn’t think much about those sort of things anymore, and with everything on his mind, he could hardly bring himself to be happy about his newest son and daughter, let alone look for women more beautiful than Tatyana. It seemed that he had increasingly gained the mindset of a eunuch, despite still being man enough to knock up Tatyana so recently. With Maya things had been very different, however, and he could not quite understand just how energetic he had been back then.

“Would you tell Anna Vladimirovna to bring the little girls here for me?” Tatyana said when the maid returned to the lounge.

The maid had brought cold seltzer water for her while Pavel sat down for a cigarette in the chair opposite Tatyana after he had switched on the radio on a low, almost inaudible background volume. He always had the shortwave set to the frequency to catch the broadcasts of Russian Telegraphy, the state agency created to broadcast all across the empire. The technology permitted Pavel’s radio receiver to pick it up quite well, just like how radio receivers all across the vast landmass of Russia and far beyond was within reach by the quite fantastical magic of radio. The small lounge and frugal circumstances kept the household rather intimate, and if he wanted privacy he would have to go over to his offices opposite his small apartment rather than to spend his time in his wife’s presence.

Shortly after the maid left, Anna Vladimirovna turned up with Vera and Maya. Vera had turned ten early in the year and Maya would be seven in October, and Vera was a fairly close reminder to when he had married the girl’s mother since it was almost exactly a year between the marriage and Vera’s birth—despite his virility he had not lost his head and risked scandal. The young governess Anna Vladimirovna was tasked with the girls’ education and she was their chief warden and assistant to Tatyana. She was a charming young woman from a good background, and she was not dissimilar from how Tatyana had looked ten years ago, although she was much paler and did not have that faint oriental air of the Caucasian Tatyana but rather was a model of Slavic feminine nobility, if a bit round.