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

Copyright © 2014 by M.K. Sangert

The front cover images of the German war ensign, Bulgarian flag, Austrian flag, and Japanese army war flag have been released into the public domain on Wikipedia Commons by their creators and are used without their endorsement. The creators are “R-41,” “SKopp,” “Sir Iain,” and “Thommy.”

Note: This is a work of speculative fiction. Similarities of people, places, organizations, and so forth to real ones are purely coincidental and unintended.

The Great War of the Quartet

By M.K. Sangert

“How can you deny that the Russians have wronged you?” Daryn asked
rhetorically, looking over the silent crowd sitting around the stove that made the yurt quite cozy despite the cold outside.

The moveable hut was a bit crowded
with the old leaders of the small clan while two women kept refilling the small teacups with hot tea that kept going back and forth after they were emptied and refilled in an endless cycle. Daryn was dressed more like a Russian than one of his tribal counterparts, but it would be hard to mistake him for a white devil with his face. He simply wasn’t an ugly white, and apart from his youth and foreign clothing, he could have easily passed as one of the elders.

“Who owns this land?” he asked, pointing down at the ground
theatrically.

“No one,” one of the old men said.

“That is incorrect, and you know that, uncle,” Daryn pointed out with a smile. “The governor is god here, and by what right? Because a king in Europe owns this land and everything in it. You own nothing in your own home. You don’t even own your own horses…”

Meryem
was always anxious when Daryn was telling people the truth. She knew that it was hard for men to see that they were living like dogs, and she didn’t want them to take his truthfulness the wrong way and feel slighted. However, it was hard to think that these old men belonged to a proud nation that had once roamed free before the Russians had conquered the steppe all the way down into the mountains of Persia and western Japan—at some point in the past the whites would have feared them, not the other way around. Sometime in the past her own forefathers had left their native land for Shinkyou, but this was the part of the world where the Kazakh tribes had been living for centuries before the Russians came. The distinct Kazakh hordes had once been feared and respected, but now the Russians could do whatever they wanted to them without having to worry about vengeance. These men were just sitting back and let the whites do whatever they pleased in their own homeland.

“For how much longer do you think you can survive when the Russians are boxing you in without a way to make a living? The only way for a Kazakh to make a good living is to work in the Russian
mines and submit to the whites. Why can’t you see that God has given you the opportunity to free yourselves and take back your homeland? This war is a gift from the Almighty!”

Meryem
was haunted by her vivid imagination, imagining that the old men would beat him—or worse—for belittling them and implying that they were weak and cowardly for not fighting their Russian masters. Even if he tried to stroke their egos in the hope of harnessing their pride, she worried that they would not accept his arguments and feel insulted by his words.

“The Russians have tanks, machine guns, and warplanes,” one of the men pointed out, slowly shaking his head. “A brave man with a gun can’t fight airplanes.”

Meryem could understand that, no matter how much she loathed that kind of reasoning. It was a frightful thing to consider that the Russians were superior to them, but it wasn’t right to avoid justice and honor just because of the strength of the enemy. If they lived by that cowardly creed bad people would dominate them forever.

“Even your sister—
Meryem,” Daryn said, making her tense as he put his hand on her shoulder, “has chosen to resist the Russians any way we can to free ourselves and send the Russians back home. If God wishes us to die for that, then we can’t protest.”

“There are millions of Russians,” another of the elders said. “They even invaded that mighty country of yours.”

“Our comrades fought them and won,” Daryn replied with enthusiasm, pleased to remind these men of the consequences of the state of the war. “The Russians have retreated back to Verniy to lick their wounds and wait for more soldiers from Russia. Even at this moment mountain men help the Japanese troops liberate the southern mountains from the enemy. The Russians are leaving the mountains!”

Meryem had been very pleased when she and Daryn had heard the news that the Japanese and the supportive tribes were within a hundred miles of Samarkand and that the Russians were abandoning the mountains that had been the prewar border between Russia and Japan down in the southwest where a narrow sliver of Japan was squeezed in between Russia, Persia, and Afghanistan.

“Why do you expect us to fight?” one of the men asked, almost sounding like it was an actual question. “We might not fear death, but there’s no point fighting a war against all the power of Russia. What do you prove by fighting a war you cannot win?”

“The Japanese armies will come and
throw the Russians out of Verniy,” Daryn said, not losing his certainty for a minute. “There are a thousand million of them, and they have already beaten the Russians many times over and will do it again.”

“If they will beat the Russians,” said one of the elders, a thin man with a white beard and a smile on his thin lips, “then why should we bother fighting
at all? We didn’t ask them to fight, but if they want to fight the Russians and chase them out that will be fine. If they are as good and kind as you say, surely they will treat us well when the Russians are gone, regardless of whether we help or not.”

“If you must be cynical, old man
,” Daryn said, not breaking his good humor despite the selfish question, “I suspect that the men who have fought hard and risked their lives will be rewarded. When the governors and officials disappear, someone will have to replace them, just like the tribes who fought the Afghans were rewarded. The men who will be trusted to guide the country are the men who have served the country, not the ones who chose to sit by and let other men fight and die. Your tribe will do well if you pledge loyalty to the Japanese, and they will reward your valor.”

Meryem
had high hopes for these men, and she refused to let any show of doubt dampen her firm conviction that these men would decide to join in the holy struggle. She knew that Russia wasn’t popular among the tribes that had been pushed away from their old homes and had been left to scour the rocks for pastures and water while Cossacks took their land and livestock. Many of their people had been forced to take refuge in the towns and beg like dogs on their knees from the Russians who owned the land and could do what they wanted to the clans who had once roamed the steppe freely. The farms, mines, oilfields, and even the water belonged to the Russians. If they felt like it, they could even take cattle and horses from the Kazakhs. Since the start of the war the army had been confiscating animals across the land to pull guns and supplies, and the horsemen had been deprived of the most vital part of their identity and a necessary tool for the traditional way of life. How were they supposed to seasonally migrate without their horses?

“Please listen to my husband—your brother,”
Meryem said when Daryn stopped speaking. “We have to fight or we don’t deserve to call ourselves the children of our brave ancestors. I think... I really think you need to fight the devils.”

She regretted saying anything at all the moment she had opened her mouth, but when she began, she had to finish. Meryem
knew she wasn’t really in any place to lecture these elders who might understand these things better than her. She had been raised in the city of Tekika where there were no Russians, no pastures, and no yurts. There were hardly any people of their kind there at all. Tekika was very different from the Kazakh steppe, but the more time she spent back “home,” the more she became convinced of the righteous cause of Celestial Imperialism and the liberation of Asia from the white devils. She had always accepted righteous authority and as a child she had read short texts and abridged essays of all sorts of noteworthy scholars and thinkers, and she remembered reading a brief vision of a united and free Asia.

The elders all looked at Daryn, and
Meryem felt a little silly for trying to get in on his turf. She was not great at speaking. Even if they would have had great respect for her, her voice came out strained and shaky. She had never been able to speak with the strength and force of her mother, no matter how hard she tried, and she realized that the men must think poorly of her, and perhaps Daryn for having such an untamed companion.

She clenched her hands into fists down by her knees, annoyed with herself for possibly making a fool of her husband. Not once before had she tried to help him like that, but for some reason she just thought that maybe she could inspire these men to be brave. The long silence was horrible, and she tried to focus her mind on telling Daryn she was sorry in a vain attempt to make her thought jump over into his head so he would know that she felt bad for saying something silly.

“Please let us think about what you have said, son,” one man finally said. “These things are not decided lightly.”

“I understand that, old man,
” Daryn said, hopeful that the men would decide to join the cause, despite his disappointing experience from his previous attempts of enlisting men to actually fight the Russians.

The study was a very picturesque room in a picturesque house, and he was particularly drawn to the comfortable chair where he could sit and read for hours in the evening. They would be heading up to the “family cottage” in Berkshire tomorrow for Christmas, and he was not exactly looking forward to all that went along with those recurring visits for the holidays. Karoline had been very anxious about the holiday as well, but he felt a certain duty towards his family to go, and he knew that Karoline felt the same way. It wasn’t like he could come up with a good excuse, and he felt a certain obligation to attend one of the central family events of the year, and Karoline had—if reluctantly—been preparing for the journey for much of the day and deciding on what to bring for the presumed week-long stay.

The house was a bit cold in the winter despite the small fortune he had paid to the workmen who had been supposed to sort out the trouble with the heating, so he was overdressed for simple reading at this time of year. Nevertheless, he had no real problem with the cold and had it not been for Karoline and the children, he might as well have saved the money and not bothered at all to look into sorting out the mess of the poor performance of the furnace going back several years. One could get by with an extra sweater, a blanket, or some other way that did not involve expensive engineering.

The house was more than big enough for the family, and he very much enjoyed the location that was just far enough from London and just close enough to Portsmouth for a quick trip on an early morning train to work. He had spent much time in Portsmouth lately after he had returned from last year’s posting in Singapore, and he would be quite pleased if he never had to be posted abroad again. Although he had a strong sense of duty, Heinrich preferred not having to go so far from his books and the peace of his study where he was free to make brief excursions to any part of the globe through his personal library rather than waste away at a naval base far from home. He simply did not care much for foreign postings, and he suspected that the empire would be quite safe without him being there to guard it against whomever the Royal Navy might hope to be likely to fight
and
beat.

And now it was time again for bloody Christmas with the whole damn family. Supposedly, his great-grandfather and great-grandmother had inaugurated the family tradition back in the 1850s, and pretty much ever since it had been continued the same way under his grandmother’s helm, through his mother, and now it continued on under the care of his older brother Bobby. He remembered his old grandmother very well since he had been a young man when the aged woman had passed away. She had been quite the woman, and Heinrich was still very fond of the person who cemented his rather un-British name not least in his own consciousness to the degree that he thought of himself as Heinrich rather than being just another Henry. It was difficult to imagine how much had changed during the lifetime of someone his grandmother’s age—the world she had been born into in 1829 had been quite different from the world of 1918 that she had left behind. Not just the world, but Britain itself had changed just as well as her native country of Prussia and later Germany. Heinrich had been very fond of family history, and his grandmother and his wife had surely been instrumental in establishing in him a great love for Prussia and Germany.

To Heinrich Karoline seemed very similar to his dear old grandmother, and it was not surprising that his grandmother had been keen on seeing her in the family and had urged him on. Sadly the old woman had died just weeks before the wedding, but despite her death falling so close in time to Heinrich’s and Karoline’s wedding, he had been quite mature enough to keep the two very different events quite far apart from one another in his memory.

Heinrich smiled when he looked over at the picture on the desk of his old grandmother together with his grandfather, the warm feeling of nostalgia coming over him. The picture was from the 1880s, and the old woman had looked quite good for a woman her age back then. He had never really known his grandfather since he had been just five when the old man had died, and it had only been after that that his grandmother had become a ubiquitous part of his childhood when he had lived in London within a short walk upstairs from her apartment. His mother was a distant relative of his grandmother’s, but the two were never close, and presumably that had been part of the reason why they had lived so far away from each other until things changed when old Grandma moved back to London for her widowhood. His mother had always been fondest of Bobby, and George and Heinrich had both had their grandmother as a sort of a surrogate mother aside from everyone else around the London home while their parents and Bobby had lived in the “cottage.”

A knock on the door prompted Heinrich to let his focus slide just a little from the book he was reading. He had been reading old books lately, and Karoline’s older brother had given him a whole case of old German classics that he had not read in years. Old Max shared Heinrich’s great love for literature, and it was quite a nice collection of some of the finest German literature he had given him.

From the sound of the knocking on the door, he knew that it was neither Collins nor Heinrich’s son who had come to see him. That special knocking with four or five knocks with that same almost rhythmic pace to it was the telltale sign that Karoline had come to invade—the woman had a knack for giving herself away. Sure enough, just a moment after the last knock the door was slowly opened and that familiar face peeked inside the room, and as soon as she saw him she frowned slightly and entered the room, closing the door behind her.

“I thought you’d be here,” she mumbled with that faint trace of disapproval in her voice.

They had been married for so long now, and Karoline did not seem to have changed much to him. She had never been terribly beautiful in any way, but she had a sort of charming plain face and demeanor, even if she surely looked a bit gaunt to most people. Her character was very different from her father or her brother, however, and from the look of her and as long as she kept her mouth shut, nobody could figure out that she was German while her older brother looked like a caricature of a martial German come to life.

“You have much to do, I’m sure,” he said, thinking that she had been quite busy making sure that everything was being properly packed by the servants she had enlisted to help with the packing.

For someone raised so luxuriously, she had something of a middle-class attitude towards work, and she would never let people carry out her wishes without her poking her nose in to make sure that things were done properly. She wasn’t the sort to just order people around haphazardly, and there was no doubt that she would seem difficult to people who preferred their mistresses to delegate work and give leeway to achieve whatever she wished them to do.

“Yes, but I hoped you would have an opinion about Philipp’s clothes,” she muttered.

Karoline was the only one who referred to James as
Philipp, but she still persisted in the hope that it would rub off. Pretty much everyone called James Alfred Philipp Maximilian either James or Max. However, Karoline much preferred the name she wanted him to have; the name she thought was his
real
name rather than the name chosen by Heinrich’s father from the standard group of names. He certainly seemed to look like a James, and Heinrich thought that this was one matter where Karoline was wrong. She was far too obstinate to admit that, however.

“He’ll be fine whatever he wears,” Heinrich said, shrugging his shoulders.

He knew that Karoline was worked up about having to see his family, and whenever she got worked up, she lost most of her patience along the way. She preferred her solitude with her occasional lady companions rather than leaving the house to go places, and she had surely been born to be a housewife and was clearly quite discontented about the responsibilities she had as his wife. She certainly had the inclinations of a middle-class housewife.

“Can’t you please come?” she asked in her semi-pleading tone of voice.

While it would sound like a plea to someone unfamiliar with her, Heinrich saw it more as an impatient command, and he tended to surrender to those sooner rather than later since there was little use in trying to defy his wife. With a heavy sigh he got out of the chair, giving her a curt nod when she faintly produced a shadow of a smile to show that she was pleased by his cooperation.

Philipp had his own little room separate from the nursery where his younger sisters lived. He had turned thirteen this year, and he was sure growing fast. The house was small enough for the family to live intimately, and Karoline enjoyed the privacy and solitude the quaint dwelling offered with the nice big hedges walling in the yard from the other houses on the street. Heinrich had his duties with the navy and the crown, but she was left to her own devices most of the time, although the girls were getting in the way of her gardening lately since Karoline would not entrust other women with looking after her offspring as the girls were becoming older and more intelligent. However, as much as the girls were nice and good, Philipp had taken a disobedient turn the older he became, and she felt powerless without Heinrich stepping in to tame the boy with his authority.

Heinrich didn’t like having to act as Karoline’s arm, but she had been asking him to intervene in the boy’s antics more and more in the last year or two with only a brief respite when he had been away to Singapore. He didn’t like young children, and he was looking forward to the boy going to the naval college like he had before him. There he was bound to become a healthy young man, just like Heinrich before him. Then he would not cause his mother so much grief anymore.

“
See, there’s nothing wrong with it
,” Philipp confidently said, giving a salute towards his parents when they came in the door.

The blue tunic had a red lining around the plastron on the chest and two symmetrical lines of shiny brass buttons. Karoline’s brother had pointed out that it was the old uniform of their father’s regiment, the Uhlan Regiment Grand Duke Maximilian of Luxemburg. The uniform was obviously from a more civilized time before beauty and elegance was removed from uniforms and replaced by drab modern colors of green, gray, khaki, and brown. The clear blue hue, the red facings, and the embroidered epaulettes that identified both the regiment and the rank of the uniform were not the sort that she assumed her father’s regiment was actually wearing in combat these days. Karoline had always had a soft spot for uniforms, but there was a time and place for them, and Christmas with her in-laws was not the right time or place to walk around in that uniform.

While Heinrich thought that James looked striking as a Prussian lancer, he doubted that it would be appropriate for the boy to strut about in such an incendiary getup over the holiday. Not for the reaction of his second cousins’ wives, but the family’s firm neutrality between the bloody quarrel on the continent. Even if many Britons would not mind James or anyone else wearing a Prussian uniform either as a statement of support of Germany or just as a courtesy of a nation Britain had a long relationship with, there were many others who believed that the war was the fault of Prussian “aggression” and “imperial” pretensions. The family could not be seen as interfering with the policy of the government, and it was bad enough as it were that certain papers enjoyed mentioning that both Karoline and her sister-in-law Paulie were honorary petticoat colonels in the Prussian Army. Among other regiments, there was a Fusilier Regiment Princess Karoline of Great Britain and Ireland and a Foot Guard Regiment Princess Paulina of Great Britain and Ireland alongside the older regiment named in honor of Heinrich’s great-grandfather, the Dragoon Guard Regiment King William of Great Britain and Ireland in which Bobby was the honorary colonel as part of a tradition going back to their grandfather that that particular regiment should have the Prince of Wales as its honorary colonel—in addition to his rank as honorary field marshal.

It was perfectly innocuous to accept and extend military honors and a natural courtesy and expression of fraternity, but the anti-German press led by filthy rags like the
Daily Mail
and
The Times
—two sides of the same ugly anti-British media coin—put everything in a bad light. It was Heinrich’s suspicion that the degenerate newspaper barons were not really as much in favor of the France-centered Entente as they were simply using the war as a club against their own country, and it had left Bobby quite sensitive to anything that had the faintest smell of partisanship from the monarchy. Unlike the soulless newspapermen, Heinrich’s cousin-in-law the Russian-born Countess of Antrim and the Duchess of Clarence at least had noble motives to their nationalism, but the journalists simply wished to destabilize Britain in favor of communist nihilism. But he still had no choice but to dutifully suppress all signs of sympathy with the Germans, for personal reasons of familial tranquility and the integrity of the monarchy. There would be photographs for publication taken over the holiday, and the nephew of the Prince of Wales could not be seen in a uniform more political than perhaps a Boy Scout uniform.

“
It’s a good uniform
,” Heinrich agreed, thinking that James looked passably like a boy cadet. “
But you’ll leave that in the wardrobe
,” Heinrich said as he walked over to the open closet where James’s coats hung in a neat row.

While he went through the clothes hangers, he assumed that his son was rather unsatisfied by his rejection of the uniform he had grown very fond of since it was delivered with the well-wishes from Prince Max. The boy could sulk an awful lot, and Heinrich had expected him to object. However, James didn’t say a word before Heinrich found what he was looking for.