Read Online The Great War of the Quartet (The Imperial Timeline Book 1) by M.K. Sangert - Free Book Online

the West, although the Germans had launched their own small attacks in the West as well. For much of 1935, the Germans and the Russians had fought a very mobile war until the Russians had been forced to abandon their occupation of large chunks of South Prussia in the easternmost part of Germany and flee, and now the frontline in Eastern Europe had moved almost entirely out of Germany and into Russia, although big parts of the long frontier between Austria and Russia was on the Austrian side of the prewar border.
    In only a couple of weeks, the war would have its second birthday, and there was no immediate end in sight. The cabinet right here in Whitehall had made it its policy to pursue an “immediate and just” settlement through mediation, although it was clear even to someone as politically and diplomatically ignorant as Tony that both sides agreed with that formula but had diametrically opposite definitions of what a just end to the war would mean. The original quarrel between the little Balkan countries had been superseded by a conflict between great powers, and by the logic of great power politics France in particular needed the war to achieve a great victory since that country had been sliding from being Europe’s preeminent power into being its most irrelevant one. Tony’s family mostly was naturally aligned with Germany, and surely Britain would not gain anything from Russian continental domination, although many Britons were still afraid of unchecked Teutonic power on the continent, and some cabinet members were apparently interested in undermining the possible future German domination of the continent, although for the past twenty or thirty years the only viable alternative was Russian domination, and Russia was no prize when it came to Britain’s global interests.
    “ The weapons we fight with aren’t normal weapons ,” Olga read from the book where she had scribbled and underlined parts, substituting words here and there as she pleased to suit her. “ They have the power to destroy fortresses ,” she explained, looking over at Fedosya who seemed much too bored, “ because they’re the weapons of God .”
    Patricia was holding Fedosya while Alice was holding her little Vasiliy. Sasha and Constance were sitting on either side of her while she read from the bible Prince Yazov had acquired for her. It wasn’t written in church language, but she had wanted something that would help Sasha, Constance, Fedosya, and Vasiliy get a good understanding of their mother tongue—that pun never failed to make her smile—and she thought that nothing could be better than to use a bible translated into ordinary Russian so she could kill two birds with one stone; teach them religion and Russian at the same time.
    She used her own memory as well as the help of Prince Yazov who had consulted a priest to get her a list of especially good portions of the Bible to read in addition to Emperor Paul II’s authorized Holy Lives of the Saints , a giant tome filled with hagiographies. She liked to read funny things too, and she had been given a good deal of children’s books by her brother Roman and her nice uncle Alexander Konstantinovich before the war when she had had the opportunity to ask them to buy as many funny picture books as they could and bring with them to England.
    From his seat at the table by the window, Tony glanced over at his energetic young wife reading with that squeaky baby voice. He pitied the poor Michael who might be old enough to feel condescended by her demeanor, and he hoped that she would not leave the children with a boorish attitude towards learning from her immature style of tutoring. He didn’t really understand Russian at all, but he had some actual sympathy for her general aim which seemed perfectly reasonable if only a bit crudely articulated. Her sense of nationalism was as immature and naïve as that of the basest men in the street, and he had begun to increasingly suspect that she had