A Conversation – Late 1940 in the Caucasus Mountains

In the distance the caucasus range hung suspended, as though the imagine of the mountains was just that, a painting suspended in the air and not the actual vastness of those mountains which distance at once revealed and concealed as though the great peaks were like a Circassian harem girl raised upon their flanks, manipulating her veils in delicate eroticism. The brilliance of the autumn sun revealed the men of the small farming town where the convoy had stopped that night were now heading out to their fields. They knew that soon enough many of them would be drafted into the war effort; many were gone, many more would go, it was all just a matter of time and something that they must accept.

At the party headquarters in the town a dignified-looking gentleman was dressing, carefully grooming his white beard and mustache after he had finished affixing his uniform. But it was no common uniform; it was the uniform of a Soviet Colonel and the man seemed to take an unbidden delight in the fact he was wearing it, not at all slow and stoic in the slavic style. Of course, he was not a slav, and the uniform was purely a gesture from an indulgent Krasnov. Everything about the dress uniform was perfect, down to the shine of the coat's buttons, gleaming in a fashion wholly unsuited for modern war. The old man had always been like that.

It had been a cheerful night. In the company of the farmers and the soldiers of his escort the old man had been strangely exhuberent, trading bawdy jokes and laughing as though in days of youth. In some ways that was perfectly appropriate, for this was like his youth, the evenings spent in the camraderie of the regiment in Potsdam, traveling again through Russia, tweaking the allies of his country a bit with his good-natured demands. Pulling on his gloves—carefully tailored for the physical disability which had irked him for so long and would be with him to his dying day—he stepped out to where the captain of his escort was waiting.

“Colonel!” The young Captain saluted and the Colonel returned it with great ostentatious ceremony, as he did with every little salute. “Your car is waiting, comrade Colonel. I have a cold brunch prepared for you in it as you requested, so that we can go straight to the staging area.”

“Excellent, excellent, Comrade Captain. Lead on.” The Colonel gestured slightly and followed after the Captain, his legs paining him with arthritis. There was nothing that could be done about that; yet it seemed like there was within him now a hidden energy, a second wind that carried on past the weak pains of his old age. The address of 'comrade' was something that it had taken a bit to get used to; but the Colonel was a precise man, loving of military discipline, and if the Soviets deigned to use that form of address for their officers, then he absolutely insisted on it being used for him when he was in the uniform of a Soviet officer.

As some of those thoughts mulled through his mind he reached the staff car, perhaps one of the best in Russia. It certainly had to have good shocks—the roads here were very bad. There were a few light armoured cars also in the escort, the modern version where thirty years ago the man would have escaped an escort of cuirassiers. “We shall get to review my regiment before they deployed to the front, then?”

“Most definitely, Comrade Colonel.”

An amused chuckle. “It is good that my rank was rehabilited by the Comrade Premier in time for this campaign. Other Tsarist officers have served the people to good account and I only wish to do the same.”

It was a joke—those dangerous words, admission of being a Tsarist—only because everyone of course knew that their guest was not a colonel, even if he traveled in the guise of one. Most of the peasants thought him some sort of correspondent or perhaps a special observation of the Great Krasnov's. But those things he was not. He was a guest in the Soviet Union only and his uniform was an indulgence hearking back to when his own army had fought against the regiment to which he was an honourary commander. Krasnov was not a man to ignore the gentle effect on the mind of such small kindnesses, and for all that Goering was the man in power in Germany, this man was, constitutionally, even more important.

President Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert von Hohenzollern of the Weimar Republic was going out to review the troops of his ally exactly as he had many times before, when he had been Emperor of Germany. Now that title seemed within his grasp; he did not chafe at Goering's power, and indeed in his old age Goering's success with the restoration of Danzig and Memel seemed to him to indicate the man had in him the power to be another Bismarck. If only he would complete the delicate cycle of the restoration; yet Goering did not want to great of a hammer hanging over him, knowing full well that he might be expendable the moment that the President had his goal: Restoration of the Empire. With the mere title of President, Wilhelm knew of his reliance on Goering. And it had taken so long to get even here...

Yet he could hope, and Wilhelm frequently did. The last years had been a delicate balance of negotiations with Goering, and the old Kaiser knew that as he aged, as his health declined that he must at least secure the throne for his son. Europe had been nearly torn apart by the last war and the chaos of the following years screamed out for the old order. The chaos before him screamed out for the salve of christendom on a benighted land. Two of them; though more and more Wilhelm had been convinced during his journey here that Krasnov was hardly some sort of slathering socialist.

Of course he was probably being lied to for his support in the war, but Wilhelm did not really care. He knew what was at stake, and for the moment he indulged himself with small-time amusements, teasing his handlers about the fact that Germany had the world's first welfare system and so on, playing the part of the regular progressive. Wilhelm was known, after all, to change his hats on a dime, and this traveling incognito and getting to see the action at the front appealed to him greatly. The years of negotiation had been exhausting; this, however hard on his body it was, seemed healthy, reinvigorating, somehow.

The car drove on for several hours during which Willhelm snacked in the back of it, desptie the bumpy and rough dirt road which would sooner than later turn to mud. He ate lightly, as elderly men do, and his attention was only really diverted when they passed some military unit on the road, or a plane flew overhead low enough for him to hear it. The captain was pensively silent, perhaps somewhat worried about how close to the front Wilhelm would demand to go.

At last they reached the staging area, easily visible miles ahead and a massive area where regiments were mustered in preparation for being sent out to the front, reinforcements for battered and depleted divisions that were involved in the heavy mountain fighting in the Caucasian passes. Here the road intersected with a railroad and there was an airstip nearby from which fighters were constantly taking off and landing; Wilhelm showed particular interest as one plane came in smoking and damaged and gave his handler a minor headache by insisting that he be given the opportunity to meet the 'brave aviator'.


The elderly German had been conducted what was simply a dusty field, waiting to be churned to mud by the first of the rains. A white horse had been prepared for him and despite his age and his disability he managed to mount it, the reigns held by a senior NCO, that he might receive his regiment properly. Here he waited, for the 9th Guards Regiment to march past him in a classic review. He knew they would be heading out to the front in just a few hours. To him it was a tangible connection with the men who were going to risk their lives in the most glorious crusade in history. The details of his bolshevik hosts fell away, and for a moment it was as though he was reviewing his cousin's troops and not those of a common man and revolutionary.

Sound came first. Wilhelm heard it, turning his head in a carefully precise and stiff movement, his actions perhaps giving himself away as being very much of Prussian origin and bearing. It was the regimental band, playing Slavanka. He could not help from brightening as he heard this pre-revolution tune, which he had heard at parades in St. Petersburg, decades ago, before the war that had destroyed everything, the war which had made this one possible, necessary even.

His ears were not so good, even so. Through the music he heard something faint, something distant; it was the crack of heavy artillery on the horizon, perhaps, or simply his imagination, the working of decaying ears and ancient senses. Perhaps, it was a haunting memory of the time he had heard such barrages on the western front. The band grew louder and it faded away, the grim reminder of the past replaced by the splendid imagery of the past, by the Now that was caught up in what was gone. The tune ceased with the regiment very close, and now as they passed his position in review, the band struck up the March of the Preobrazhenskiy Regiment.

At a crisply given order the heads of the men turned right to face him, their rifles shouldered with bayonets fixed, the flags of the regiment brilliant in crimson and gold. The intensity of being in the scene, of his foreknowledge that these men were heading right out to the front—his regiment, even if only in honour, his regiment, even if he was to frail to command them!--very nearly brought tears to his eyes. He saluted the regiment as the glorious old march of Peter the Great, so intensely Russian that it was yet played at Parades in Red Square, echoed in his ears and eclipsed the faded and dull reality of the world which he faced.

The music slowly faded. The regiment passed in review. The eyes of the men turned back forward and they kept marching, right to the trucks which would take them up to the front. Wilhelm watched them go for a very long time, until they had been obscured by distance and the dust kicked up by the movement of vehicles at the staging grounds. Then he dismounted with the help of the NCO who had patiently held his horse the whole while. Of course the troops had no idea who he was; it was simply another hoop they had to jump through. But they had never spoken to Wilhelm, and Wilhelm, knowing no Russian, had not spoken to them. Their perceptions were radically different: That was as it must be, and that brief and hieratic contact changed nothing about the one or the other.

His escort returned, saluting. “Comrade Colonel. My apologies, but I was unable to locate the aviator who succeeded in landing his damaged plane.”

A slight stiffening from Wilhelm, but he nodded in acquiesence after a moment.

“I am pleased, however,” the Captain continued after a pause, “to say that I can offer you an interview with someone you may find even more interesting.”

“Who is that, Comrade Captain?” Wilhelm asked instantly, the eyes on his now aged and weathered face focusing in on the young man intensely.

“A Drakian prisoner of war, Comrade Colonel. A Citizen.”

“An important one, is he?” The excitement welled up in his aged frame at that, the prospect of meeting the enemy, the Snakes, of seeing one of those at once fascinating and at once hideous individuals for himself.

“A She, Comrade Colonel. With an interesting name—Johanna von Shrakenburg.”

“Von Shrakenburg, you say? That is a lower sort of name of best—barely worthy of ennoblement. Perhaps an ancestor dispensed law for half a village in Hesse a quarter millennia ago. Certainly not a proper representative of the German nation, I am thankful to say. No German father would let his daughter be so near the front, at any rate. Please, show her to me at once. She was in their medical corps?”

“A pilot we captured, actually, Comrade Colonel,” the Captain said, hurrying on to lead Wilhelm away from the scene of anyone who would overhear his musings, even if his actual identity was an open secret at best. Secrets in Soviet Russia were kept regardless of whether or not they were secrets.

“Atrocious, simply atrocious.” Wilhelm murmured more to himself than not. “I have never understood how white men could become so uncivilised as the Draka have. It cannot be the degenerating effects of living among other races, as the Americans have not been brought down to such depths by their negros and latins. Perhaps it is the southern climate; yet neither Chile nor Argentina, nor the Australian provinces, have wrought such evil in Mankind.”

“The Great Leader, Comrade Krasnov, teaches us that the Draka represent a form of reaction against the modern middle-class society by traditional feudal slavocracy with the goal of halting the rise of the bourgeoisie,” the Captain answered almost by rote. 'Which means that they must be annihilated before socialist revolution can begin properly' did not need to be added, at least with the German President anyway.

“There are certainly such men in the Junkers,” the old Kaiser continued amiably. “They would get themselves quite upset when I would attend parties at Ballin's—the poor, poor man!--schloss, and go on and on about he was Jewish, he was not of the right blood or class... They forgot that such men were those that made Germany powerful! He was a Jew, certainly, but without him we would not have had such a splendid fleet, not had the chance to challenge Britain for mastery of the seas. And he loved his nation so much—he was not the type to move to Patagonia or West Australia! Nothing could shake his faith and loyalty to the German nation and the German people. An Empire needs two such Jews running joint-stock companies for every aristocrat in the army if it is to be successful!”

“Of course, Comrade Colonel,” the Captain said tolerantly as he led Wilhelm into one of the buildings, a prison building. There was an interview room into which he was brought, and allowed to sit first. Guards with submachineguns were prominently placed.

“Surely a woman cannot be this much of a threat!?” Exclaimed the old Kaiser, gesturing to the guards.

“She is quite dangerous, I assure you, Comrade Colonel, even in unarmed combat.”

“Disgusting,” Wilhelm replied. “It is base insult to mankind that such a place could exist, where white women have been dehumanized, stripped of their virtue, and turned into the adjunctants of brutality.”

“You may tell her that yourself if you wish to, Comrade Colonel.” And with that the Captain—who was in fact an MGB Major—left the room, knowing that this meeting had in fact been in planning for more than a week.

The woman was led in a few minutes later. Wilhelm had his uniform cap in his lap, sitting stiffling erect and with his hands folded over the cap; the Draka did not stand for physical weaknesses and so it made him especially conscious of his bad arm. He observed her, a lean, muscled blonde woman in drab Russian peasant's dress with some sort of painted red slogan in cryllic on the tunic. It did not suit her, but then, the germanness of her blood did excite a sort of horror and curiousity at once in the old Kaiser.

Showing long familarity with the room, Johanna simply sat down, nursing a hand that was still bandaged, and the guards who had escorted her in stepped back somewhat. Wilhelm waited for a moment and then began to speak, in German, testing her for her knowledge of what would have surely been in mother tongue in better circumstances.

“Where is your ennobling Von from, my lady? Where did your family possess land?”

“An ancestor was an officer in a Hanoverian regiment,” she answered, surprised at such an inane—yet to her important—question that it threw her off and she answered truthfully, immediately regreting it. The old man with his incredibly perfect High German was surely a skilled interrogated and she immediately forced her mouth clamped shut.

“I had you marked for a Hessian, My Lady. Apologies.” Wilhelm replied after a moment of thought on the matter, and about his next question:

“Are you a Christian?”

“Of course not,” Johanna replied a bit snappishly. “Only fools and malcontents among Citizens still profess faith in Europe's precious Christ—we have better things and better beliefs to spend our time on honing than honouring a religion of Slaves.”

“Women and slaves,” Wilhelm replied with a slightly annoying smirk that he was still capable of. “I have had the time to read Nietzsche myself in the intervening decades. I have also read the Drakian translation—that woman who did it got it all absolutely wrong. Turned his work into a lot of tripe and nonsense.”

“Elvira Naldorssen was the preeminent thinker of our race,” Johanna shot back, feeling a bit flustered. That ancient Colonel had a certain flair for making people unbalanced and upset...

“She could not even translate out of German correctly, a language that you have managed to master—on account of heredity no doubt. Though perhaps she had an agenda..” The old Colonel brought his right hand up to the table, rapping it through his glove.

“Tell me, M'lady, why did they send you to fight? War is not for women; it is not in your constitutions to withstand the rigeurs of the trench and the trial of the bayonet.”

“We have as much right to the glory of our race's conquests as men do!” She found herself drawn in, surprised by her own willingness to duel with the man.

“I do not doubt your mental faculties,” Wilhelm replied. “I doubt that the character of the female spirit—with perhaps rare exception--and the constitution of the female body are such that you are capable of handling the extremity of war. It is a terrible thing, you know, but also a very glorious one—the extremities which despoil the steady lives of peace and fecundity that women desire.”

“Peace and fecundity!?” Johanna exploded, coming halfway out of her chair before the shifting of the machine-pistols of the guards became obvious and she forced herself back down. “I am every bit as brave and capable as my male counterparts. Despite knowing full well the atrocities these slavic apes visit on any captured woman.”

“You forget yourself, woman.” The old Kaiser replied sharply himself, the abuprt change in voice yet digging another dagger of annoyance into Johanna's heart. “Christian soldiers do not commit such crimes as you imply in such a very base way. And it is base hypocrisy to complain, at any rate. Your people cannot expect to somehow be accorded the principles and rights of chivalrous warfare when you deny all the morality of western civilisation and christendom.”

“Your Soviet Union is neither Christian nor Chivalrous,” Johanna muttered softly.

“I am not a Soviet, though I have the honour of being named the commander of a Soviet Regiment, which shall soon be acquitting itself excellently in the tradition of all great Orthodox campaigns against the Turk.”

“We are Turks!?” The rest fell away at that immediate—and calculated—insult.

“You are not Christian. You refuse the teachings of chivalry and of Christian generousity in exchange for the badly jumbled translations of a nihilistic philosopher. Your people have shattered the common bonds of society which all other nations recognise and in doing so have commited depraved evils against races you were entrusted to civilise. I would, indeed, call you a Turk, were it not that Turkish soldiers acquitted themselves with such honour and bravery under my generals in the late war.”

Johanna hated the feeling of being lectured to by some sort of bizarre and eccentric social fossil, and now she was simply confused to boot. “Your Generals? Von der Goltz, Von Sanders, and Lettow-Vorbeck were your generals?”

“If you were really a woman quality, you would be able to recognise the German Emperor, even as old as I am now. But then you are not. You have been debased such that a butcher's wife has more natural feminity and grace than you do. I do not regret speaking to you this way. You have come to deserve it.”

“Compare me to a butcher's wife!? You're not the damned German Emperor!” Though in truth Johanna was very, very uncertain about that: “You're just another common Soviet Colonel who can't find his ass with both hands and is to incompetent to be promoted before you're eighty! The Draka were born to rule. We do not need guns among our serfs, our power is within. You only maintain your 'Empire' at the point of bayonet.”

“Your composure is not that of one born to rule,” the old Kaiser said, strangely soft of voice once more. “And I know the duties of that place very well. You are no rulers, no custodians; merely plunderers, born to destroy. Your serfs may adore you, but that is only thanks to your denying them a higher cause and purpose. Even the blackest and most savage negro will fight for his liberty if he is told the truth of his equality with all other men before God. And I will not go to the grave having failed to give him that chance.”

Johanna mustered to answer him, but Wilhelm held up a hand and stayed her words. “Please. There is nothing more we can say to each other. The war is no longer your's to fight, though it is mine. And with that considered... Are you a commissioned officer?”

The von Shrakenburg girl choked down her retort to those neigh-unanswerable words and nodded simply. “I am.”

“I would give you parole on your word of honour, were you a prisoner in Germany, for I could not think a woman suffering imprisonment for the duration of a doubtful conflict, however unfeminine she is. I cannot offer it here, but I will request them to show a proper and civilised respect for you life. Good day.” With that the Kaiser nodded to the guards, who tiring of the conversation in words they could not understand, rather roughly removed the yet-flustered and confused Johanna.

Wilhelm settled back as she left, not really noticing how they treated her, tired with the effects of old age upon a man. He needed to rest, and then go visit with some generals. The next day he would visit the artillery that was actively engaged in supporting operations on the front, but Krasnov would not let him get any closer. Oh well, he had not kept his body in the shape demanded of an old Spartan King who should still fight in battle. But it would serve him for what his nature as a man and emissary of civilisation demanded, and that indeed was clear enough.