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Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.


A Roman Byzantine Empire Republic Commune Paradox Mega-Campaign!


Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things, and drowns them in the depths of obscurity, no matter if they be quite unworthy of mention, or most noteworthy and important, and thus, as the tragedian says, "he brings from the darkness all things to the birth, and all things born envelops in the night." [Sophocles Ajax, 646]

But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and to some extent checks its irresistible flow, and, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over, it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion.

Anna Komnene, the Alexiad

update your LP, nora
-everyone, 2015-2019

Well! It's been a while, hasn't it? The old thread has fallen into the archives, like five years has passed, stories about fighting fascists became a lot more topical, and TibetLP has boldly advanced the gay Paradox LP cause, but it's finally, finally time to see how things are going for the Byzantines.

This LP's return would have absolutely never happened without the help of the team that helped put together the Hearts of Iron IV conversion (a link to which is forthcoming pending a few outstanding bugfixes etc):
Kangxi
Flesnolk
Mr.Morgenstern
sheep-dodger
Mirdini
Ofaloaf
pinback
Zanni
Additional art by Cami

So, on that note, let's play some Hearts of Iron IV! But, you know, in a gay baseball communism kind of way.



PART ONE: The Norman Invasion (1081)
PART TWO: The Doux and the Doukas (1081-1085)
PART THREE: Exeunt (1085-1087)
PART FOUR: Yo Ho Ho and a Battle of Rum (1087-1090)
PART FIVE: Citation for Bravery (1090-1094)
SENATE SESSION 1: Flagchat and Turkchat
PART SIX: Cloak and Dagger (1094-1098)
PART SEVEN: With Apologies to Mike Duncan (1098-1101)
PART EIGHT: The, Um, "Meletiad" (1101-1118)
PART NINE: Wolfe of the Steppes (1118-1136)
PART TEN: The Sun Rises in the East (1126-1130)
SENATE SESSION 2: Political Realignment and the Saimid War
PART ELEVEN: The Long Regency (1130-1131)
PART TWELVE: The New Byzantine (1131-1170)
PART THIRTEEN: The Komnenian Crisis (1170-1212)
SENATE SESSION 3: State of the World of 1212, Political Realignment
PART FOURTEEN: Janus (1212-1231)
PART FIFTEEN: The Fallen King (1231-1247)
SENATE SESSION 4: State of the World of 1247, Political Realignment
PART SIXTEEN: Trash Boot (1247-1251)
PART SEVENTEEN: Assassination Vacation (1251-1267)
PART EIGHTEEN: Rome is Where the Heart is (1267-1281)
PART NINETEEN: Trajan Horse (1281-1285)
State of the World, 1285
SENATE SESSION 5: Political Realignment of 1285
PART TWENTY: The Second War for Sicily (1285-1296)
PART TWENTY-ONE: The Bad Years (1296-1299)
PART TWENTY-TWO: The Clock Strikes Midnight (1299-1313)
PART TWENTY-THREE: The Old Byzantine in a Time of Strife (1313-1341)
PARTY TWENTY-FOUR: The Long and Glorious Reign of Valeria III (1341-1342)
PART TWENTY-FIVE: The Fall of the House of Komnenos (1342-1357)
SENATE SESSION 6: Welcome to the Punishment Zone™
PART TWENTY-SIX: The Senatorial Kiev Experience (1357-1358)
PART TWENTY-SEVEN: The Secret Diary of Dobrava Yaroslavovna, Aged 9 (1358-1362)
SENATE? SESSION 7: Rome is restored!
PART TWENTY-EIGHT: The Growing Pains of Dobrava Yaroslavovna (1362-1368)
PART TWENTY-NINE: Da Qin (1368-1370)
PART THIRTY: The Sun Sets in the West (1370-1390)
PART THIRTY-ONE: The True Confessions of Dobrava Yaroslavovna (1390-1406)
PART THIRTY-TWO: Let Europe Tremble (1406-1429)
PART THIRTY-THREE: The Yaroslaviad (1429-1436)
PART THIRTY-FOUR: An Englishman in Constantinople (1436-1444)
SENATE SESSION 8 (Part 1): The Nature of the Empire
SENATE SESSION 8 (Part 2): The Composition of the Senate
SENATE SESSION 8 (Part 3): Special Session on the Status of the Exarchate of Kartli, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Diplomatic Relations Limit


PRELUDE: State of the World, 1444
PART 35: The Savoy Truffle (1444-1453)
PART 36: Doukes? Nuke 'Em (1453-1458)
PART 37: gently caress ROME, gently caress DE MOWBRAY, gently caress YOU (1458-1491)
PART 38: Radziwiłł they or Radziwon't they? (1491-1508)
SENATE SESSION 9: Political Realignment of 1508
PART 39: Little Trouble in Big China (1508-1519)
PART 40: An Unorthodox Solution (1519-1541)
Interlude: Ecumenical Council of Smyrna The Edict of Athens Rumors of the Far West
PART 41: The Golden Age of the Radziwiłłs (1541-1610)
SENATE SESSION 10: We ran out of Seantors, please send more.
The Fall of the Senate
1: Was that a Cannon?
2: Constitution Class
3: Constitutionalism with Greek Characteristics
PART 42: Vita, Universus, et Omnia (1610-1666)
State of the World, 1666
PART 43: (Interlude) Reviving the Roman Name (1666-1672)
PART 44: A New Alexiad (1666-1687)
PART 45: Julia of the Julii (1687-1712)
PART 46: A Dear Old Friend (1712-1724)
SENATE SESSION 11: The Grand Ball
The Tsarina's Favorites
PART 47: Artemis (1724-1761)
PART 48: The Black Chamber (1761-1802)
PART 49: Komm, Süsser Tod (1802-1807)
The Course of Empire
PART 50: Noor Sallajer (1807-1815)
PART 51: Greek Fire, Iberian Water (1815-1827)
State of the World, 1827
Prelude to Victoria
1827
1828


PRELUDE: State of the World, 1836
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY SESSION 1: Let's throw the people we're about to send to horrible deaths fighting France a bone!
PART 52: The Sun and the Moon (1836-1837)
PART 53: Here Comes the Sun King (1837-1840)
PART 54: The Most Dangerous Game (1840-1842)
PART 55: Le roi est mort, vive la reine! (1842-1850)
PART 56: The Queen's Gambit Accepted (1850)
PART 57: Discovered Check (1850-1855)
PART 58: Checkmate (1855-1857)
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY SESSION 2
--Day 1: The Future of the Victorian League
--Day 2: Military Priorities
--Day 3: Reforms
State of the World, 1857
PART 59: Splendid Little Wars (1857-1862)
PART 60: Deal With It (1862-1865)
NATIONAL ASSEMBLY SESSION 3: All Rhodes Lead To...
PART 61: Day of the Colossus (1865-1868)
PART 62: In the Salon of Noor Sallajer (1868-1870)
PART 63: With a Smile of Christian Charity (1870-1875)
PART 64: Heart of Darkness (1875-1883)
PART 65: Liberation Theology (1883-1884)
THE FIRST INTERNATIONAL
--Day 1: Roll Call; Whither Constantinople?
--City of the World's Desire
--Day 2: Pope Lando VIII; A Suitable Title
--City of the World's Desire
--Day 3: Quit Africa!
--City of the World's Desire
--Day 4: The Fate of a Dictator
--City of the Worlds' Desire
--Day 5: Closing Statement
PART 66: Exteberria's War (1884-1889)
PART 67: Operation Fortinbras (1889-1896)
PART 68: Titanomachy (1896-1899)
PART 69: New Victorians (1899-1905)
State of the World, 1905
PART 70: A War With China, to Mixed Results (1905-1906)
PART 71: Pax Europaea (1906-1907)
PART 72: Over There, Over There! (1907-1911)
PART 73: Ardent for Some Desperate Glory (1911-1923)
PART 74: You are the Water (1923-1927)
PART 75: The Owl, the Dragon, and the Wolf (1927-1934)
State of the World, 1934
PAPAL CONCLAVE
HISTORIA


PRELUDE: State of the World, 1936
The Story Thus Far (January 1, 1936)
PART 76: Begin Again! (1/1/1936 - 7/24/1936)
PART 77: Equal Before God (7/24/1936 - 5/2/1937)
PART 78: Antifaschistische Aktion (5/2/1937 - 7/17/1938)
PART 79: From the Oder to the Mekong (7/17/1938 - 9/17/1938)
PART 80: A City of Gold, in Flames (9/17/1938 - 6/24/1939)
PART 81: The Third Great War (6/24/1939 - 4/10/1941)
State of the World, April 11th, 1941
PART 82: The Far Side of the Woods (4/11/1941 - 6/19/1941)
PART 83: Breakthroughs and Heartbreak (6/19/1941 - 8/11/1941)
PART 84: The Second Battle of Hungary (8/11/1941 - 11/17/1941)
PART 85: Normandy (11/17/1941 - 2/21/1942)
PART 86: Winter Came Spring (2/21/1942 - 5/17/1942)
:siren: The Red Rose Pact votes on an issue of some import. :siren:
PART 87: (Interlude) Six Soldiers of the Jimao War (June 1942)

BONUS UPDATES
Rum Interlude
Part 1: State of the World, 1081
Part 2: A Wolf at the Door (1081-1083)
Part 3: Backdrifts (1083-1103)
Part 4: The Boney King Of Nowhere (1936)
Complete nonsense
PART 75: Greco-Romans (April 1, 1934)

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Nov 8, 2023

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Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
(reserved)

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

PRELUDE: The State of the World in 1936

Excerpts from the diary of Iouliana Erdemir, sixth Tribune of the Byzantine Commune



December 30th, AD 1935

Landed at Makrohori Airfield without incident, but not before our flight offered us a splendid prospect of the city at night. Amidst the dark waters of the Bosphorus, Byzantion was a constellation of light. As the plane descended, we could make out landmarks old and new; there was the Hagia Sophia, there was the House of the Golden Horn, there was the Memorial to the Ten Thousand. There were still a few lights on at the Magnaura-- some Ekklesia members were burning the midnight oil, it seemed. Magnaura's neoclassical architecture belied the fact the building is just over a century old-- built in the early days of the old Republic, to evoke an ancient heritage predating even the empire they had toppled. Above it, Union Tower rose in all its streamlined, art deco glory, looking to the future and utterly unapologetic about it.



Erinna rested her head on my shoulder as she gazed out the window. She likened the city's railways and thoroughfares, delineated as they were in light and always in motion, to the veins and capillaries circulating the life-blood of some vast being spanning the breadth and width of the Commune. Will admit, I haven't got her flair for the poetic, but it was v. beautiful.

Still, can't help but have a sort of foreboding; forces at work in the world as vast and unknowable as ever; history stretches out into an utterly obscured future. (An obscured past, too, really.)

Beautiful things are fragile. Still can't help but worry we'll be remembered as the generation that destroyed all this.




Even Paris is beautiful from the air.

Next A.M.-- New Year's Eve. Cabinet briefing in less than an hour. Still feel slightly groggy, honestly. Our flight landed well after midnight, and even after we arrived at the House of the Golden Horn, E. and I pleasantly wiled away much of what remained of the night before sleep finally took me.


Erinna Papadopoulou, former captain, Byzantine national fencing team; silver medalist at the 1929 Olympic Games

Probably can't use that excuse to cancel my appointments, though. Don't want to go in unprepared, either; no matter what anyone says, there are still men and women in that room who hear my accent or look at my veil and think, what an ignorant peasant, supposedly exalted status of the rural worker not withstanding. So here I am, scribbling in this diary, trying to collect my thoughts re: the state of the world. (Quietly; E. still slumbers; don't want to wake her up when she, for once, looks utterly at peace.)

So-- the world.



Of course, any consideration of the world in toto has to begin with China and work outwards.



On paper, the Ming Empire which has dominated Eurasia since the Hongwu Emperor toppled the Yuan dynasty in 1368 continues on as it has for the last five centuries. In Beijing, the Kangping Empress sits on her throne in accordance with the Mandate of Heaven, and a chancellor presides over parliament's constitutional duties in accordance with the Mandate of the People.

On paper.


Everyone knows it's all just set-dressing after the Business Plot, though. The real power in China is in Shanghai, with Zhang Zhulin. A Pangalist, but not like the iconoclastic Pangalists of the past. It's so much easier for capitalist stakeholders to take absolute power and subsume the state if they don't make a fuss about it, beheading monarchs or toppling monuments; silver has always already ruled the world.



We owe much to the Japanese Republic-- the bourgeois revolution that toppled the old Roman Empire was inspired ideologically, methodologically, and politically by the revolution that toppled the Fujiwaras in 1744, and the republic the Byzantines was modeled on its Japanese predecessor, from the division of powers to the division of the flag into three fields to the division of monarchs' heads from their bodies. And the Commune is heir to the Republic, for good and for ill.


The Republic is still reeling from its defeat at the hands of the Ming in the '20s, which saw it ejected from the sphere of influence they'd built for themselves in the petroleum-rich lands of Da Qin and the Seljuk Sultanate. Now that Zhang Zhulin and his gang of cronies have seized the levers of power in China and the two rival powers don't even share the nominal tie of shared commitment to liberal democracy, the National Assembly's nerves have frayed even further.

Part of me wants to say they deserve it, that democracy and capitalism are incompatible, that the road of liberalism always leads to a Zhang Zhulin or a Johannes Goethe in the end. But right now, if you're looking for an East Asian counterweight to runaway Chinese capitalism, the Japanese Republic is the only game in town. We've coexisted with liberal democracies before; I don't much like our chances of coexisting with Zhang's China should he ever decide to fix his gaze westward.



As much as Zhang Zhulin insists it's business as usual for the Ming Empire, the people of Silla know not to believe it. The longstanding alliance between the Ming Empire and the Silla Kingdom, both liberal constitutional monarchies, did not long survive the de facto end of democracy in China. Like several of the world's remaining liberal powers, Silla realized that a monarchy, however freighted with history and tradition, was too glaring a point of failure to exist in a democracy. In the Ming Empire, physical control of the Empress's person abetted a compute seizure of power. In France, the king blinked when challenged by the fascists, and stood by while the constitutional apparatus he supposedly embodied was swept aside.


So Silla sacked its king, hoisted the tricolors and declared a Republic. Now they're the reluctant allies of Japan, shared commitment to a fading 18th century view of liberty trumping more recent conflicts.


Elsewhere in the Pacific saw even more sweeping changes, though. Just two years ago, the archipelagos southeast of the Chinese client state of Zhongnan were still a patchwork of small liberal kingdoms-- Majapahit, Brunei, Aceh, and Makassar. Enter the United Pacific Republic-- many peoples of many cultures and many faiths, bound together by a shared commitment to a democratic project and also to not being swallowed whole by some Chinese corporation.


Best of luck to 'em, really. Capitalist though they are, can't help but see a bit of Byzantium in such a polyglot state.



As has been the case since at least the early 19th century, India is divided between two powers struggling for dominance in the long shadow of Ming hegemony. The successor states to the two survivors of the Indian League of the Early Modern, each ebbing and flowing in turn but always, always being gradually ground down by their northern neighbor.


First decades of the 20th century weren't kind to Hindustan, but the new republican government has brought it a sort of stability just in time for the rest of the world to spin wildly off its axis. President Radhanath Trivedi's has found he's got a lot in common ideologically with the Japanese Republic, but, let's face it, even if he didn't he'd probably be stuck with them. Can't ally with the Ming. Can't ally with Marathas, either.

Speaking of which:


Marathas. God, where do I even begin?

So, say you're one of the dwindling number of old-school absolute monarchs of the world. You know something's got to change, but you don't want to give up power. You could promulgate a constitution, cede actual power to some sort of elected government, and hope your new citizen-subjects decide to effect change via the ballot-box (see: Great Britain, et al.) rather than the hiratine (see: Byzantine Republic, the)

Or, if you're Rishma Sharqi, maharani of Marathas, you could just declare yourself not a monarch at all, but the leader of a Müllerist 'dictatorship of the proletariat.'

The argument, to the extent that there is one and all and I can follow it, is that, well, if you've got absolute power invested in your person already, then surely it's better to put all that power towards revolution than dispersing it and hoping for the best. Marxism-Müllerism, unlike the Marxism-Qiuism-Exteberrianism you see here (or Nuevo Xi'an, or Great Britain, etc., etc.) calls for a strong hand at the rudder of the state. If you've already got your hand on the rudder, why let go?

Complete nonsense. At least more orthodox Müllerisms follow an internal logic, even if in practice they've set back the cause of socialism far more than they've advanced it. But Comrade Sharqi's 'revolution' is already a fait accompli, and for the moment they're the only even nominally communist power in Asia. Could easily see a future where we've got to make common cause with her; we've already swallowed our pride and thrown our support behind more Müllerist tendencies in Europe because at least they aren't the damned fascists.



Across the Pacific, on the western coast of Avalon, lies the other pillar of the liberal Allies: The Haida.


Our enemies in the First Great War and our allies in the Second Great War, the Haida Republic (like Silla, the Haida have recently dispensed with a vestigial monarch) is finally recovering from their country taking the brunt of the fighting in the latter. Still one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world (they're called haidagraphs for a reason), which probably helped get their industrial infrastructure back up and running. A center for newer art-forms-- especially radio and cinema. In a world of mass media, the power and influence this brings can't be overstated. Byzantium might've overtaken the Haida in terms of how many radios our factories produce or our shipbuilding capacity, but movie-houses from Trebizond to Milan are captivating audiences with Haida-made 'talkies'.

Much worse ways for a nation to project power, I suppose. Quite taken with the cinema myself, now that it's been show what genuine artistry it can bring to bear.


The Ayiti Federation, colossus of the Far West, victors of the First Great War, found themselves the vanquished in the Second. From the ashes, under Byzantine oversight, arose the Ayiti Commune.


Ayiti's at a crossroads, then. Tribune Mayneri Nitaino's done the best he can re: the physical reconstruction of and restoration of material prosperity to the new Commune, but that doesn't mean opponents don't accuse him of being a Byzantine puppet whose regime was put in place by a victorious foreign power. I'd like to say he's not a puppet, and the man himself was put into office by democratic elections, but the Commune was put in place by us after they lost the war. Still don't see a better option-- couldn't leave the government that tried to push the Haida into the sea for a shot at continental domination in place, but outright occupation would be not only infeasible but, in the end, morally corrosive.

V. complicated, in other words.



Not much to say about the Lenape Republic. Yet another Pangalist dictatorship, but being more or less encircled by Ayiti, the Iroquios Confederacy, Zheng He Bay, and Nova Scotia, their ability to project power is... limited, let's say. Still, their southern territories by the Gulf of Mexico are v. rich in oil, and that gives 'em some leverage. Oil's the actual life-blood driving the metaphorical life-blood of trains, planes, and automobiles E. described last night.



Great Britain's colonial possessions in North Avalon have finally been organized into the self-governing dominion of Nova Scotia. Consolation prize for years of occupation in the Great Wars? Like their mother country across the Atlantic, they've seen a peaceful transition from liberal democracy to communal democracy, are members of the Red Rose Pact in good standing, etc. Still, can't help but feel v. cynical about the British offering self-government to a settler-colony whilst the British Congo still languishes under colonial rule under the thinnest of leftist veneers.


On the other side of Avalon's Neck lies South Avalon, a continent which is-- by '30s standards, anyway-- surprisingly stable.


Tawantinsuyu-- The Inca Empire-- continues much as it has for centuries. Intervened in the Second Great War, but didn't over-commit-- it suffered severe naval losses (The Hippolyta was at Cape Bon, so I can attest to that first-hand), but none of the fighting took place in the metropole, so it emerged relatively unscathed.


It was enough for the Sapa Inca to decide he'd had his fill of Great Wars, though, and the empire's current posture is one of guarded neutrality.


The other major power of South Avalon is Anacaona. A dominion of the Ayiti Federation before suddenly being left adrift by the Federation's demise. Now the Anacaona Federation is a bastion of the old liberal government of Ayiti. More outward looking than the Inca-- thrown in their lot with the Haida and its allies. Patiently keeping an eye on its estranged mother country, checking which way the wind is blowing, waiting to see if the Ayiti Commune will stand or fall.



Tianhui Catalina is another ex-colony carrying on the legacy of a fallen mother country, although in this case León has fallen to fascism and reduced to little more than a French puppet, so loyalty to whatever came before that is a little more understandable.



The other old Leónese colony in South Avalon is building something new, though-- Nuevo Xi'an is a communal republic in the Byzantine mode. Currently enjoying some badly-needed and richly-deserved peace and quiet after we helped them put down a failed fascist coup. Proof the Red Rose Pact works-- it looks after its own, even in the face of a darkening world.


Finally we come to the Near West-- to Africa first, then.



The Communes of Kenya and Maputo are by no means leading continental powers, but their history is inextricably linked with ours. The Byzantine Republic's colonial adventures (viz. theft, murder, expropriation, etc.) in Africa directly resulted in its final, fatal loss of moral authority. Independence for Byzantine colonies and socialism in the Byzantine metropole were two fronts in the same war.



The first act of the Byzantine Commune was liberating its African colonies-- taking full responsibility for the crimes of the Republic and offering reparations. I know we aren't perfect. God, do I know we aren't perfect. For all our flaws, for all that our high-minded rhetoric and utopian idealism and pretty words about liberty and socialism are shot through with hypocrisy, for all that our system still lets people fall through the cracks, the Commune justified its existence when it delivered on its promises to our African comrades. Mean it.

Too bad about the British Congo, though. See above point re: hypocrisy.


Maputo and Kenya are, in many ways, the heart of the Red Rose Pact in an ideological/historical sort of way, but Ghana is the real center of the RRP in Africa, and really one of the core members of the RRP in general, alongside Great Britain and Byzantium.


(art by Cami)
Ghana had long left the 'splendid isolation' of its 19th c. behind at the turn of the 20th, building towards socialism, the second great nation of the world to join hands with the Commune after Great Britain. The Ghanians fought alongside us with bravery in both Great Wars, and as one of the load-bearing pillars of the Pact, look to do the same when war comes again.



The titan of Africa, however, remains the Somalian Republic, as has been the case since the middle ages (excepting a brief interregnum courtesy of Chang Yuchun and the Ming Frontier Army). The Somalia status quo of 'national emergency' and the benevolent (and extremely notional) reign of Maxamed Muzaffar's Lord Protectorate that had endured for over a century has finally broken, and the ancient liberties of the Somalian Republic have have been restored.


Unfortunately, what 'ancient liberties restored' actually just means that the old patrician families and merchant houses who ran Somalia in its merchant republic heyday are back in the driver's seat. Restoring an older power structure, rather than establishing something disruptive and new, means that it's probably technically inaccurate to call the government of Adey Walashma 'pangalist', but the difference is academic, and she and Zhang Zhulin get on like a house on fire.





The Mauritanian Republic and the al-Said Sultanate-- two liberal democracies, amiable with one another and most of their Mediterranean neighbors. Both of them have demonstrated a stability you basically won't see anywhere else in the Near West, but when the whole world is lurching unpredictably around you, that could be a liability. Not sure how well these two will find their footing in the coming storm. It's so, so easy for what looks like stability to turn out to just be plain old stagnation when the chips are on the table.



Could just be a country biding its time. The Republics of Azerbaijan and Iran used to be nothing but puppet states of the Byzantine Republic, stretched too thin to directly administer some of the late conquests of the Roman Empire. When the Republic followed the Empire into the dustbin of history, Iran and Azerbaijan were left behind as weird time capsules of a bygone era.

And then it turned out that they had oil. Suddenly, the rest of the world is extremely keen to be friends.


An exclusive club also containing the Seljuk Sultanate and Da Qin-- old, old names, shadows of their former selves but still carrying the weight of history on their backs.


The Seljuk Sultanate once brought the Roman Empire to the brink of ruin. After the Roman defeat at Manzikert, the empire was likely as close to oblivion as it ever was. But Alexios Komnenos stopped the bleeding, and then the Black Chamber got to work, doing everything they could to destabilize the Seljuks and their various successors (the Saimids, the Baytasids, the Bichri, etc.-- a revolving door of luckless Turkish and Arabic dynasties), and then Chang Yuchun plowed the entire Ming Frontier Army in and ran over anything that might've been left over. But when the Ming Frontier Army's Arabian holdings collapsed into a patchwork of liberated vassals, the nucleus of a Seljuk state survived. And endured.

So the Seljuks have seen better days, but they're still here, 129 years after the last emperor of Rome's head tumbled into a basket.


Did you know that Da Qin was originally a Chinese name for the Roman Empire? It literally means "Great China", but that's because Han dynasty thought of Rome as a sort of western counterpart to their own empire. The term was especially associated with the Roman East (in the narrow sense of Syria and its surrounding provinces, and not the broader sense of the half of Rome that didn't call it quits after 476), so, like a thousand years later, when Chang Yuchun's remaining conquests were being divvied up into successor kingdoms by his generals, Da Qin seemed like a logical name for the one centered around Antioch.

Da Qin proceeded to spend the rest of the 15th and 16th centuries kicking the Roman Empire's teeth in repeatedly. If the Roman Commonwealth hadn't found a second (third? fourth? fifth?) wind in the 17th, it's possible the Deluge could've continued until nothing was left save Da Qin, now seamlessly and undisputedly the proper Roman Empire. History's written by the victors, after all. Instead, its conquests stalled out, and it's just another strata of would-be conquerer wedged alongside the Seljuks.

Rome's coming up more and more the closer I get to Europe, isn't it? Understandable. Vexing, but understandable.





What used to be Roman Hispania spent centuries playing host to a three-way war between the Andalusians, Mauritanians, and a pile of forgettable Christian kingdoms like Castille or Portugal or wherever, before Chang Yuchun blew through town and left Lai Ang behind. They were the first fascist power of note in Europe proper, although after being stuck on the losing side of the Second Great War, they were eclipsed by France and subsumed into the so-called 'Western Roman Empire'. Admiral Gabriela Fatima Hu chafes at being little more than a French satellite, while still putting her country's resources towards the same mad dream of Rome the rest of the WRE is.

Faced her fleet in battle once, back in the war. Wasn't bad, although the most she could do against the Ostia Home Fleet was keep its surviving ships in good order as they withdrew.


France... oh, France. Hegemon of the early modern, punching bag of the 19th century, terrifying existential threat of the 20th.


It's easy not to take the "Gallic Empire" seriously. Their Classical pretensions, their fervent belief in the living saint Valeria as an undying transhistorical figure, the reckless abandon with which they rewrite history to suit their purposes. But then you remember how they quickly, efficiently, precisely dismantled the entire military apparatus of the North German Federation-- a proper Great Power, when conventional wisdom had it that defeating a Great Power in battle took five years of dying horribly in trenchworks-- guerre eclair. Lightning War.

Look beyond how formidable their military is on a practical level, though, and the picture gets even more alarming. After centuries of Near Western empires grappling with how to hold their myriad peoples together in the face of nationalism, Valeria proposes to cut the Gordian knot by simply obliterating every nation save one: the Roman Empire. Rome is Europe and Europe is Rome. They won't be satisfied until all our children speak one language, live one culture, swear allegiance to one empire. Even France will fade into Rome eventually, though Valeria Postuma keeps that card close to her chest-- her regime still depends on the support of old school French reactionaries and militarists who tolerate imperial 'eccentricities' in return for Valeria bringing them victory after a century of defeat and humiliation.

But if France is being lulled to sleep, the rest of us are just going to be crushed. It's the antithesis of everything we've built here-- no, it's the antithesis of every decent people in the world. Sooner or later, we're going to have face them in battle. The world is quite literally not big enough for both of us to exist.


Not that there's any lack of eager sacrifices at the altar of Empire. Of the so-called "Foedarati" of the WRE-- Holland, Bavaria, and Austria-- only Austria even aspires to any sort of independent sovereignty or historical identity.


But Klara Valeria Ma dances to Valeria Postuma's tune, in the end. When you get right down to it, power-- raw, exultant, atavistic power-- is all that really matters to these people.


One step in the WRE above the foederati-- barely-- you've got Poland.


The de Valois-Vexins ruled France for centuries-- and their Capet ancestors ruled it for longer-still. After the last king of France turned the keys of the country over to the fascists, though, he was swept away along with everything else they didn't have a use for. Now Stanislaus II, head of the Polish cadet branch of the Valois-Vexins, has spent every moment since trying to justify his continued existence to his French overlords. After suffering a humiliating defeat against the NGF, even after it had been decimated by the guerre eclair in the west, Valeria seems to be losing patience, and the king is getting desperate. And desperate people with power can do terrible things when backed into a corner.


The Gallic Empire isn't the only claimant to the Roman legacy, though. For something like one second, the crowns of Kiev and Rome were unified into the empire of "Kiev-Byzantium." The union fell apart more or less immediately, but-- frankly-- neither power ever, ever got over it. Roman historians laid the blame for the end of the Komnenos line and therefore everything else bad that happened over the next 200 years or so at the feet of the Yaroslavovich dynasty-- and some even blamed the fall of the empire on the dynasty's 18th century comeback tour. Kiev-- and, eventually, the Russian Empire-- never did stop styling itself "Third Rome".


Under Tsaritsa Yekaterina V Cespka Lipa, though, that belief has taken on a new fervency, and the empire-- already a reactionary, absolutist monarchy-- has crossed the line into outright fascism. Her vision of Rome couldn't be more different from Valeria Postuma's, but like I said-- empire is all about the exertion of power, in the end. And I'm sure both empresses realize how much power their combined strength can muster.


Not all of the old monarchs have turned to overt fascism, though. The Kingdom of Scandinavia is the same old monarchy it's been since Denmark united it. Tempting to think of the whole exercise as quaint, considering. Well. You know.


But the king seems content to sit back and watch as the rest of the Near West burns, as long it doesn't affect him. So gently caress him. The people of Scandinavia deserve better than cold indifference.


Sitting back and watching isn't a luxury Scandinavia's fellow monarchy, the Kingdom of Bohemia, can afford, boxed in by fascists on three sides. My understand is that the disgraced Stanislaus of Poland is looking for a softer target after his failures in Germany, and I imagine Bohemia-- not even three decades after it won its independence from the then-Kingdom of Hungary-- is a tempting morsel. But King Vladan I Zukal, architect of his kingdom's independence, probably isn't going to let it slip away without a fight.



The North German Federation (f.k.a. the Holy Roman Empire, because literally everyone in Europe has claimed to be the real successors to Rome at one point or other) is almost entirely composed of territories liberated from French dominion in the early 19th c., and boy is France never going to forget it. Valeria Imperatrix tore a huge swath of the Rhineland away from the NGF in the Lightning War, and Valeria Postuma is more or less visibly salivating at the prospect of further gains in the near future.


Germans understandably less than thrilled about this. Ever since their military was effortlessly routed by the Gauls in the space of sixty days, the liberal republican government has been tottering on the brink of-- well, on the brink of something, anyway. Nothing good. Pushing back the Polish invasion shortly after that has probably helped stabilize things a bit, but I can't say if it's enough. Given that I assume that the fall of the republic is more likely to be along the lines of "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" than "well, back to full communism", I have to hope it hangs in there. We already have enough of the continent arrayed against us.





We have got a few Continental allies, though. The Unions of Lithuania and Hungary might be small, their governments far too Müllerist for my tastes, their locations strategically precarious (to say the least), but in spite of all of that, they're still our comrades, and I wouldn't be worthy of leading the Red Rose Pact if I was going to leave them high and dry when Valeria's wolves are howling at the gates.


Our truest allies in Europe are across the Channel, of course.


Great Britain. Our first and oldest friend. Valeria's called 'em "the handmaiden of Byzantium" in her speeches, screeds and manifestoes, and the British proudly take it as a compliment.


(art by Cami)

We could not ask for better or more devoted comrades in the International. It's in the spirit of that friendship I admit to some concern re: various glaring contradictions undergirding the entire edifice of the British state.

Most obvious is the continued existence of the monarchy. I get why Victoria V von Habsburg is still around-- Great Britain was a liberal, democratic constitutional monarchy long before it was socialist, long before Marx or Qiu even put brush to paper. When Radical Labour came into power and built Great Britain into a thriving communal democracy, it was a bloodless victory won largely with ballots rather than bullets.

But we've seen why keeping monarchs around is dangerous (see: China, France, Poland, et al.), even if it seems like they'll stay in the little box drawn for 'em by constitutions. Maybe there's a reason you need a proper revolution.


Less abstract, and far more glaring, is the tenacity with which Great Britain clings to its African colonies. Don't have to explain why that's enraging.


When I was still a junior member of the Ekklesia, fresh out of the Red Navy, one of the first causes I really put my back into advancing was aid to the Irish Republic. The Irish have suffered tremendously over the past decades, as the country went through coup after coup, and political violence became a given as regimes rose and fell. When the ruling communist government found itself facing a fascist putsch, I did everything I could to get the Commune to send in reinforcements from our own military. Maybe we couldn't vanquish fascism in one fell swoop, but we could do that much, at least.

It's very strange to look at a map and think, I did that.

Suppose I've got to get used to it.



Sort of unavoidable, if you're the Tribune.



Iouliana Erdemir, sixth Tribune of the Byzantine Commune
Inaugurated January 18, 1930

The Athens Commune



I think one of the smartest things the founders of the Byzantine Commune did was clearly position the Commune as a progression from and heir to the Byzantine Republic, for better or for worse. The history of the Republic was our history. Noor Sallajer's revolution was part of our legacy; redressing the Republic's crimes was our responsibility.

Can't help but wonder if Sallajer had the wrong idea about the Republic being a clean break from Rome. I understand why she thought that-- when the Roman Empire has been lurching along for 1800 years, drastic measures are called for to prove to the world that it's well and truly dead. Certainly, some degree of iconoclasm is called for. Alexios IV richly deserved the Hiratine. Revolution was acutely necessary-- a republic, tricolors, all that. But just saying Well, this is some new thing called Byzantium actually and washing your hands of everything bad the Roman Empire ever did is disingenuous in the extreme. No, it's dangerous.

We aren't a colonial empire anymore-- our comrades saw to that in those heady days of the First International. But we're still governing territory originally bound together by imperial conquest, which, for all intents and purposes, makes us an empire as well.

And, if you look at a map of the Commune


and then work your way backwards,


and backwards


and backwards and


backwards and


backwards and backwards and backwards



I think it's fairly obvious which empire we are.

Can't say I know how to resolve this contradiction, to square away all our pretty words about liberty, equality, and so on against the bleak, inescapable fact that we administer the balance of the Roman Empire. But I do know the answer probably just isn't to pretend it wasn't us.

Hiratining the emperor was a good start, but it doesn't change the fact that we are and always already were the Romans. Pretending we aren't just meant we've yielded up our own history to the fascists, to do with as they please, warp into something in their own image, into a self-serving narrative of unceasing, unexamined glory.

All because we flinched away from our history, ugly as it is, rather than confronting it on our own terms.

P.M.— Cabinet meeting was wrapped up in fifteen minutes. May have possibly over-prepared.

Oh well, maybe some historian will read this a century later and think, ah, what a splendid primary source-- now we know what was going through the Byzantine tribune's head as 1935 drew to a close.

Tomorrow's going to be quiet, I imagine-- it's a holiday, after all. New Year's Day, 1936. A brief moment to turn our thoughts to whatever the future holds, before it's back to the everyday grind of the now.


MAP OF THE WORLD, JANUARY 1 1936


Baseball, 1934-1935:

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Dec 15, 2019

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

uguu posted:

Where can I find the Vicky 2 mod?

Right here!

First real post coming Soon(tm); we had a few last minute bugs in the HoI 4 mod we had to run around fixing but they're basically sorted out now.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Jedi Knight Luigi posted:

What exactly is the religious situation? Looks like everyone was Sunni at the end of EUIV and nothing was mentioned about it.

For Byzantium, specifically, is a religious melting pot. The three largest religious groups are the Catholics (still prevalent in densely-populated Italy, since even when the empire was still standing there wasn't much of a push to convert Italy), Orthodox Christianity (still dominant in Greece, the Balkans, and the more Greek bits of the Anatolian coast, and probably also having still having a patina of being the Byzantine religion even if it hasn't been the state religion since Alexios V got his head chopped off) and Sunni Islam (centered in Anatolia, especially the interior, which has had a large Turkish and Greco-Turkish population dating back to the Sultanate of Rum, but also other communities like a Hui Muslim minority in that bit of Istria we took from Austria a million years ago, or expat communities from Somalia or wherever in the larger cities). There's a long-established Jewish community throughout the Commune, mostly composed of Mizrahi who've been around since the middle ages, augmented by later migration from the wider Jewish world because the Byzantine Empire had a reputation for internal religious tolerance, especially after the Edict of Athens. There's still some Gallicans and Bogomilists kicking around from the Reformation, although far less than there were in their early-modern heyday, and of course numerous other minorities-- some of the Pechenegs are still Tengri, for example.

For the world at large: Sunni Islam is maybe a little more prevalent than it is in OTL, mostly as a consequence of a.) the reconquista stalling out, b.) the Ming Frontier Army, and c.) the Shiites having a really rough go of it in CK2. The MFA was largely secular in policy, but a lot of its leadership and soldiers were drawn from China's Hui minority, which meant that the ruling class left behind in a lot of the successor states like Lai Ang/Leon, or revolter states like Ao Di Li/Austria were Sunni, which led to an enduring Sunni presence in, like, south Germany or central Europe or wherever. Lai Ang, in turn, exported its Orthodox-Sunni-Andalusian-Spanish-Chinese melting pot to its colonies in Avalon, like Zheng He Bay, Tianhui Catalina, or Nuevo Xi'an. Shia Islam is most prevalent in Egypt, but the Somalis who've ruled it for centuries are mostly Sunni. Great Britain, Ireland, and the NGF are dominated by Catholicism, France is still nominally Gallican, and Orthodoxy remains prevalent in the rest of Europe, especially Russia and Scandinavia. But that's broad, broad, broad strokes-- the religious situation through all three games so far has been very messy, and sprawling multi-ethnic and multi-faith supernational states have been the name of the game for most of that time, so pretty much nowhere on Earth is religiously monolithic at this point.

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Feb 1, 2020

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

PART SEVENTY-SIX: Begin Again! (January 1, 1936 - July 24, 1936)

Excerpts from A Soldier's Life: The Memoirs of Field Marshal Theodora Papadopoulou. By the mid-1930s, described in the selected passages below, Theodora Papadopoulou had long been one of the most storied and well-known soldiers in the Byzantine Commune's history. After joining a socialist militia as a teenager at the onset of the 1883 Revolution, Papadopoulou survived the disastrous defeat dealt to the Communards by Republican forces in Constantinople (the so-called "Massacre of the Ten Thousand") and enjoyed a meteoric rise through the ranks of the Red Guard and, eventually, the regular army of the Byzantine Commune. A leading general in the First Great War, she was one of the only army officers to survive the debacle of Byzantium's defeat and the imposition of the Treaty of Jaragua with her reputation intact, and was one of the architects of the rebuilt New Red Army that fought in the Second Great War. She commanded Byzantine and allied forces in many of the most famous land engagements of the war, including the Battle of Avalon's Neck, perhaps the linchpin of the Byzantine push to relieve the beleaguered Haida forces along Avalon's Pacific coast.


Field Marshal Theodora Papadopoulou


At two in the morning, an aide woke me up with news that Poland had launched an invasion of Bohemia at the stroke of midnight.


A hasty meeting of the general staff was convened within hours. Some of my comrade-officers seemed surprised that the 'peace' that had lasted since the Polish invasion of the NGF ran out of gas in 1932 broke so suddenly, that once more life in the Near West was punctuated by the sharp cracking of gunfire, the thunder of artillery, the low drone of warplanes.


Idiots.

It was patently obvious that the king of Poland was on Valeria's shitlist.


It was obvious that he'd go for a softer target than the NGF the first chance he got. Bohemia was an old-style monarchy in a world rapidly losing the patience for such things. Vladan I was popular at home for his role in liberating the Bohemians from Hungary, but he was of a dying breed. Poland dressed up its casus belli in the language of the old world of kings and queens-- some bullshit about the Valois-Vexin dynasty having a claim to the Duchy of Bohemia following the messy dissolution of the Kingdom of Hungary-- but not even the Poles themselves took that serious. This was a fascist war-- not for dynastic glory, but for power, and the blunt exercise thereof.


Discussion quickly turned to the military preparedness of the Byzantine Commune. The verdict: piss poor.

The industry and might of our workers-- was hobbled by a soft, peacetime footing. Byzantine factories were tied up in the sort of palliative consumer manufacturing that helped Cavinato hang on after the 1GW, but was anachronistic by 1936. The 2GW didn't last long enough for anyone to learn their lesson.


Didn't last long enough for the officer corps of the New Red Army to pull its collective head out of its rear end, either. The Navy took all the credit for winning 2GW, just like the Army took all the blame for losing 1GW. So anyone with an ounce of ambition for a military career went right to the Navy, leaving behind a staff of officers not ready for the freight train heading their way. My daughter told me that, in private, Comrade-Tribune Erdemir described the officer corps as 'sclerotic'.

I'd use stronger language than that. "Completely poo poo," maybe. But I didn't have a chip on my shoulder about showing off a university education despite being born in Bumfuck, Anatolia, like the Tribune did.


But the Commune was still where the revolution burned brightest. Whatever organizational, logistical, or strategic problems the military has, I knew the people were willing to fight.


Willing to go down swinging, if it came down to it.


But I'd rather win than go down swinging.

So across the Commune, the first weeks of 1936 saw troops redeployed, borders manned, fortifications built, plans made. Across a frontline that spanned the subcontinent, RRP and WRE troops massed. Waiting. War was a matter of when, not if.




It's a rare gift to be able to the shape of things to come so certainly, and plan for that future.


A gift I could only hope the Byzantine Commune wouldn't squander.


Because the consequences of being caught with your pants down in times like this are swift and deadly.


In Bohemia, the defensive lines were being ground down by the fascists. Dug-in pickets became ad-hoc lines of retreat, which became salients, which became encirclements. Eastern Bohemia was already little more than a charnel-house; by February it seemed a near-certainty that the west, too, would fall.


And yet in Byzantium, valuable time and effort was being spent untangling the domestic political situation.


When I first met Iouliana Erdemir, I thought she was soft. Too young for the First Great War, at sea for the Second.


By all accounts, she served with distinction aboard the Hippolyta, the Navy was instrumental to the war's grand strategy, but let's face it, the war at sea was just a nautical turkey shoot. Commissioned naval officers are soft. Good at what they do, but soft, spending the war in wardrooms and bridges, staring out across the sea from the quarterdeck. Honorable service, but she wasn't in the poo poo with the common soldiers. For all that the officer corps got the blame for losing 1GW-- justifiably, even-- they were still ankle-deep in mud, down in trenches dug through hell on Earth with the rest of their men and women, enduring round-the-clock artillery bombardment, struggling to breathe through gas-masks.

Well. The officers worth a drat, anyway. Not the ones running the war from their villas in México, miles behind the lines.


Also, Erdemir was loving my daughter. Reason enough to hold her to a higher standard.


Left: Erinna Papadopoulou, daughter of the famous Field Marshal Papadopoulou; Right: Iouliana Erdemir, Tribune of the Byzantine Commune

As I got to know her, though, I realized there was more to her than I thought. Something that set her apart from the political functionaries who swarmed around the House of the Golden Horn, jockeying for cabinet positions or Ekklesia seats.


Or from the various mediocrities clogging the general staff Field Marshals Barthas, Hayrettin, and I had to sort through, for that matter.





Sometimes-- during our frequent meetings on the deteriorating situation in Bohemia, perhaps, or backstage at tedious civic functions, or when Erinna dragged Iouliana alone when she came to visit home-- sometimes, Iouliana would get that same faraway look I'd see from veterans of the First Great War. I had no idea what her life was like before what's in her Naval records, but I decided that clearly she'd been in the poo poo. In some way or another-- there are a lot of ways you can be in the poo poo, but they all leave a mark. Beneath the rural accent and the folksy wisdom, the sober grey suits and the quiet, knowing smiles, there was iron. There was fire.


In any case, we managed to cobble together a passable command structure for standing Byzantine forces. For the time being, anyway.



Bohemia was burning. The larger nations of Europe circled like hungry wolves, sizing one another up. As usual, though, everyone in the Near West kept a wary eye on the east. In the Ming Empire, Zhang Zhulin threw his weight around, consolidating his power, making sure everyone knew who the boss really was.


Part of this process was splitting up the spoils; some of the outlying territories of the empire were parceled out to his cronies. The Ming frontier with Byzantium in Astrakhan (or "The People's Republic of Asitelahan", because apparently Zhang Zhulin has a sense of humor) was given over to Liu Kesan. Word had it Liu was a crook-- but, then, every capitalist was. His mandate was to keep the territory in line and the oil flowing to China, and he did so with grim efficiency.



There wasn't much reason to think Liu posed an imminent threat to Byzantium-- by all accounts the Ming Empire and its satellites were more focused on the Allies than the Red Rose Pact-- but an army under General Antigone Tassi was still sent to man the line of fortifications across the Caucasus.

Just in case.


Less relevant to Byzantium's immediate interests but still worth keeping an eye on was Zhongnan, a Ming client state organized from their southeastern conquests-- Thailand, Annam, the Khmer Empire, and other old nations erased from the map centuries ago. The now-infamous Cao Liuxian was given free rein over Zhongnan, which in short order became his own private little playground and piggy bank. You'd be tempted to think he was cut from the same cloth as Liu, or even Zhang himself, but there was something different about him. Erratic. Dangerous; a spark on dry kindling.


And then the loving Sicilians got antsy again. Fascist landships were rolling through Bohemia, the French war machine was revving up, and everything was clearly on the knife's edge of becoming a complete global clusterfuck, but gently caress it, let's re-litigate some riots from 1930. Sure. Whatever.


You think it'd be clear that Byzantine troops and Byzantine guns and Byzantine forts were the only thing keeping the French from just crushing the whole Italian peninsula under an iron boot.


But I guess still having a bug up your rear end about that one time the empress of a dead empire seized the throne of an even deader kingdom in the year of our Lord fourteen-loving-sixty-two is way more important than not being run over by a column of landships.


All this against the backdrop of Bohemia's last stand. Un-loving-believable, even after all these years.



With Prague fallen and the Bohemian king missing in action (one of the many drawbacks to investing so much national legitimacy in a man with a crown), the fix was in.


Yet, amidst all of this, the Byzantine Commune was still handling the the Sicilian demonstrations with kid gloves. Behind closed doors, at command posts, in barracks, officers began to talk amongst themselves. Saying that the Commune was still shackled to the past, beholden to Republican sentimentality in a world far too dangerous. Saying the Commune was soft.


So it was that April 22nd, 1936, I was approached by Andreas Vasiliakis, a high-ranking officer in the Commune's military intelligence service. He painted a picture of a decadent civilian political establishment totally unprepared for the crisis looming just over the horizon. It was a time for men and women of action to step up to the plate. It was time for a strong hand on the tiller. The 1884 Revolution would've been strangled in the cradle of it weren't for Spyromilios doing what needed to be done in those critical early days, before he was betrayed by a bunch of idealistic professional revolutionaries at the First International and left to rot. We needed another Spyromilios, Vasiliakis argued. He knew better than to name-drop Müller himself, but we both knew that was what he was really talking about. The Exteberrian Commune was too soft to survive times like these. Tribune Erdemir was too soft.


I told him that what he was saying made a lot of sense, and that I'd think about it. I then very calmly rose from my chair, politely excused myself, and left the room.

I stepped out of the offices of the War Secretariat and onto the streets of Byzantion. All around me, people were going about their usual business. Cars drove to and fro. A small crowd was gathered on the steps of the Labor Secetariat across the street, listening to a woman strumming a tanbur. The sound of jackhammers and cement mixers drifted in from a few blocks away, where construction workers were breaking ground for a new apartment block.

None of them had any idea the Commune was at a fork in history's road, from which two very different futures stretched out into eternity.


I hailed a cab, and told the driver to take me straight to the House of the Golden Horn. I charged in, sprinted down its corridors, and barged into the Tribune's office, winded.

And I told Iouliana everything.

Within an hour, that ordinary Byzantion day had been swept away. Loyalist troops were in the streets. The trains ground to a halt. Across the whole Commune, comrades turned on their radios and heard the Tribune's voice. A handful of shots were exchanged when a few die-hard Müllerists made a futile last stand on the greenbelt that marked where the Theodosian walls used to stand; it was a doomed effort no matter what, but I still was struck by the fact they picked a symbolic location over a strategic one. Idiots.

Before the sun dipped below the waters of the Bosphorus, it was all over.


Was the Commune soft? Maybe, maybe.


But dictatorships are brittle, whether the person at the top calls themself a king or an empress, a kazike or a staatsrat.

A few days later, news of the final collapse of Bohemia reached us.




And the Byzantine Commune continued to prepare for the worst in its own way.




Have to admit, though, when the Sicilian situation finally boiled over, I found myself wondering if I'd made the wrong choice. A mob storming the Magnaura and holding the legislature hostage felt like the sort of poo poo that should be happening in the 1610s, not 1936.


And yet the Ekklesia actually heard the Sicilians out, instead of just sending in the Army to clear them out, as they richly deserved.


At first glance, it even looked like they caved.


But even if the Commune was soft, I knew Iouliana Erdemir wasn't. Her decision on the matter was the result of her ironclad convictions, each applied to the Sicilian crisis in turn. The protestors themselves were dealt with harshly, she explained, because they tried to subvert democracy through force. But she had no desire to ratify the killing of civilians by armed soldiers and so paid out reparations to the aggrieved families, arguing that the use of coercive force to bind a nation together was an evil that shouldn't be taken lightly, or for granted.

But it was a necessary evil, in times like these-- any state powerful enough to survive the dangers of the 20th century had to keep it in its back pocket. Nationalism was a poison pill, and if allowed to fester, would pull the whole Commune into its riptide. And so General Stanotas kept her command. And if this happened again, she told me, she would have given the same orders, and paid out the same reparations.


General Zenobia Stanotas

And so I was invited into the Tribune's inner circle, and put in charge of the reforms the Army so badly needed.




MAP OF THE WORLD, JULY 24 1936


BASEBALL STANDINGS, JULY 24 1936

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Feb 1, 2020

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
Perpetually being one expansion behind is practically ByzLP tradition at this point. :v:

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

PART SEVENTY-SEVEN: (July 24, 1936 - May 2, 1937)

Excerpts from the diary of Iouliana Erdemir, sixth Tribune of the Byzantine Commune


Threaded the Sicilian needle as well as could be expected. Believe that, emphatically. Not insensible to the consequences, though. Enough of the Commune's industrial capacity was tied up in maintaining the peacetime consumer economy as-is. In the grand scheme of things reparations were the best option-- an extended police action in S. Italy would have been far more costly, even setting aside any moral dimension (which one does at one's own peril, but I digress). But still, it's another red line on the Commune's ledger-books.


Making some progress ramping up production, at least.


The General Staff (or what's left of it after the Gang of Ten was flushed out by Theodora et al, anyway) has been in near-continuous conferences for weeks, now. Broader grand strategies are being devised, the pieces on the board taken stock of.


Allies doing the same, presumably. But it's not like we have all the time in the world to sort this out. Events are accelerating.


Tick, tock.


The Ming Empire's gaze, at least, is still fixed eastward. Unrest in Cao Liuxian's little fiefdom, a wary eye kept on Japan and the Allies, etc., etc.


Went to the cinema with E.-- a double feature. First up was The City in Dusk, starring Lan Na as a Shanghai police inspector. Her perfomance was... charismatic. Not enough for me to forgive her execrable taste in men, granted-- you don't wind up married to Zhang Zhulin by being a good a person. Went in expecting noir, found a rollicking adventure story instead-- the art deco spires of China's urban centers were shot like set-pieces from a historical epic. Pure spectacle, but a diverting one, at least. Whole thing was conspicuously apolitical, to an extent that's honestly extremely political in and of itself. Suppose it'd have to be, if it's playing in movie-houses from Beijing to Belgrade.


Empress Julia Radziwiłł the Great of the Roman Commonwealth and her confidante, lover, and political adversary Juno Koca

The second feature was Juno and Ioulia, which was of course v. political. If the big studios in China & Haida have used the advent of the talkies to devise brilliant new spectacles, Byzantine directors have instead leaned towards conveying a certain intensity of character unavailable to the silent films of yesteryear. So Juno and Ioulia, in spite of being set amidst the 1702 revolution-- that valiant, doomed attempt to bring down the Roman Empire a century ahead of schedule-- and following its central protagonists, Julia Radziwiłł and Juno Koca, felt intimate. Claustrophobic, at times. Some scenes filmed on location in Radziwiłł Palace, but portraying it as a maze of close spaces and deepening shadows.

The film is tightly focused on its eponymous doomed lovers (Gümülcineli, Hersekli, et al occasionally drift in and out of the story, but felt ephemeral), imagining the course of events as a series of conversations between the empress of Rome and the consul of Naples-- their chance meeting at a ball, a quiet moment together behind closed doors and away from prying eyes, a lively salon debate over Enlightenment philosophy, and then-- a tense, taut parley between the two women, now with armies at their back, before the Battle of Ferrara, where Juno met her fate and Julia was left standing alone.

Now it's fairly obvious that beyond the character study, even beyond the romance (which was electrifying, don't get me wrong), this is a work freighted with historical-political meaning. Yet not in the way I expected-- some facile connection between the Roman Empire of 1702 and its modern imitators, maybe. Instead, it dawned on me that Julia was meant to represent me (nb the pointed use of the Hellenized "Ioulia" in the title). It's an allegory couched in the 18th century split between the two strands of Byzantine liberalism but about 20th century divisions within the Byzantine left. The more orthodox Marxism of my tendency is likened to cold Julian rationalism; Juno's fiery rhetoric evoked the various anarcho-communist currents of thought in the old Athens Commune, sidelined by Exteberria's faction in the transition from revolution to government.

It's clear the director's allegiance lies with the latter position, of course. Still, the point was eloquently made, and both philosophy's advocates were portrayed as complex, sympathetic, and tragic characters.

Anyway. If I'm being accused of pushing materialist analysis within an Irenicist tendency traditionally more ambivalent to it, well, guilty as charged.

E. found this very amusing, naturally. Promised that at no point would she raise a revolutionary army against me due to irreconcilable political differences, with mock-solemnity.


Told that Ireland landed the '38 World Cup, beating out the likes of Anacaona and Ayiti (!).


First thought: More evidence we did the right thing in '29.


Second: Can't help but wonder if planning a major sport event two years in advance is hopelessly naive considering You Know Who in Paris.


Third: I have basically no idea what football is or how it's played. Never caught on in Byzantium, I suppose. Philomon cornered the market on professional sports back when there still were markets to corner. Well, the bit of the market that's not permanently ceded to chariot-racing, anyway, which Byzantines have been following with renewed vigor to console themselves after Paris, tragically, won the European Classic.


A few Sicilian brushfires are still smoldering. "Napoli ti ricorda" was on Baris's assassins lips. Juno and Ioulia fresh in my memory, had to remind myself that Koca chose Naples for her last stand because it's where the revolutionary armies expelled from Greece were able to regroup, not because of any particular tie to the old Kingdom of Sicily.


Still, things had calmed down enough to get back to our efforts reorganizing and reforming the officer corps-- urgent enough as-is, but especially pressing after the coup attempt. The overwhelming majority of common soldiers refused to back the Gang, so it's clear the rot is centered on their commissioned brethren.


General Staff's received a badly-needed influx of new blood, alhamdulillah.


Field Marshals were all reliable sorts-- we don't hand out marshal's batons like candy (cf. France). Still, I've a good feeling about Anrejić. She's up there with Theodora, probably. (Don't tell her I said that)


Field Marshal Zanye Anrejić

The influx of talented new corps commanders was a bigger turnaround, because we were desperately short of generals not stuck in a First Great War mindset.


"The Class of '36": Generals Nadine Hau-Fang, Gavriel Halevi, Valentina Ha, Zdravko Savic, and Stephanos Kastelis-Kurya




A reshuffle of the New Red Army chain of command swiftly followed. The Army of the Alps was given to Ha, and Hau-Fang was put in charge of the Danube frontier.


Savic was given command of the Army of Milan, a linchpin of any defense from French invasion.


Halevi's responsible for our ever-growing reserves-- new divisions coming up from training, new landships rolling off the production lines, etc. were under his watchful eye. For the moment, they're assisting the Army of the Danube.


Eudokia Akinyi, who'd already been around a while, but who's young and dynamic enough to fit in with the new crowd, is guarding our eastern flank in the Caucasus.


Finally, it'd be a waste not to use a general with Stanotas's experience and talent, but she still needed to be redeployed as far away from Italy as possible and pronto. So she was sent to the line of fortifications along the Dniester, responsible for our borders with Poland and Russia.







Dust settled, there's cause for reasonable optimism re: the New Red Army's field performance.


In any case: it was time to think bigger. We'd been trying to spin up military production piecemeal up 'til now, but now the military's working with the design bureaus and the industrial unions to devise a more coordinated, comprehensive strategy.




Reassured further by the continuous technological advancements we're seeing.


Carmela Mirra's given us something to cheer about after the bitter disappointment of the World Classic-- something more substantial than any bat-and-ball game. Advanced aeronautics and the valor of the Byzantine peoples mean more than RBI et al.



Still, there's a certain visceral catharsis one can only get when a national hero punches someone in the face repeatedly.

Note to self: ask E. for her brother's address; a letter of congratulations is called for, probably.

I'm definitely not still mad about the European Classic. Perish the thought.


Gang of Ten's failed coup played itself out in reverse in Marathas. The Gang sought to overturn a communal republican status quo and replace it with Müllerism. The coup in Marathas apparently sought to overturn a Müllerist status quo and replace it with-- well, that's not clear.

Also: The Gang of Ten's coup attempt actually happened. Less sure about this one.


Suppose that's one way to reform the officer corps.

Really hope we don't wind up on depending on Sharqi's good graces in some hypothetical Sino-Byzantine war.


Dealing with the Müllerists closer to home is trouble enough. The Army of the Danube and their Hungarian counterparts have been performing large-scale military exercises. Keep expecting some sort of minor but embarrassing international incident to happen as a result of several hundred thousand Byzantines, with Byzantine habits, attitude towards authority, etc. descending upon Zsigmond's Hungary. (Doubt a movie like Juno and Ioulia would fly in Hungary, for example, and only partially because of all the heaving bosoms in low-cut 17th century dresses.)

Nothing of the sort happened, fortunately.


Juhasz Zsigmond, chairman of the Central Committee of the Hungarian Communist Party.

In a better world, we wouldn't be propping up Müllerists like Zsigmond; we're culpable for whatever happens to the Hungarian people, too.


We don't live in that better world, though, so there's nothing to be done but accept them as the lesser of two evils. At least until the present crisis passes.

Later. "Until the present crisis passes." Listen to yourself, Iouliana. That's a classic Müllerist talking point, right back to Staatsrat Müller himself. Ugh.


Even in these darkening times, though, there's reasons for hope. Great Britain (allegedly our 'good' ally as opposed to 'bad' allies like those nasty Hungarians) has finally, finally, finally caught up with the Byzantine Commune circa 1884 and released their avaricious death-grip on their African colonies.




It's not perfect. There's still a lengthy 'transition period' where British boots will remain on the ground. There's an attempt to play this off as something magnanimously granted by the benevolent mother country, rather than won by the Congolese people for themselves. Doubt they're fooling anyone, though, even themselves. Interim President Ricard Touzayamoko is, rightly, the toast of the Red Rose Pact.


Spoke with Prime Minister Napier on the phone. Made it clear the Byzantine Commune would hold her government personally accountable should Great Britain backslide on its promises to liberated Congo.


Would like to think I'm not bluffing, but who knows what the world will look like a year from now, or two, or five? Still, for the moment, we can consider ourselves slightly less compromised than we were prior to this. That's something to be proud of.



Such victories are unevenly distributed, however. Important not to fall into the Julian (Ioulian?) trap of uncritically worshipping at the altar of capital-P Progress.


Some are born into places that see progress towards a better world. Some are born into places that stand still. Some are born into places where things get worse. It's just luck, distributed piecemeal.


Even within the Commune this holds true. Ostensible liberation from capitalism notwithstanding, can't say I felt particularly free growing up in forgotten old Tuzlukçu. Owning our land communally didn't help when the harvest was bad. Didn't stop my stepfather from inviting himself into our household and terrorizing the rest of us into submission, either. Good communal republicans sat in the House of the Golden Horn, true to the ideals of democracy and economic justice the Commune was founded upon. Spent my childhood with a tyrant's boot on my neck anyway.

Owe everything I have to the Byzantine Commune, of course. The Navy saved me-- I genuinely believe I wouldn't be alive today if they hadn't scooped me up from Tuzlukçu and deposited me in Athens, if some random military commissar had been a little less perceptive about my circumstances, if my obvious lie about my age weren't accepted with a wink and a nod. Still, important to remember it had left us behind up 'til then. There are undoubtably countless others in similar circumstances, subject to dictatorial authority and deprivation even amidst a general plenty. You can still fall through the cracks, even with the reforms of the last couple of decades.

If I ever, ever let myself forget that, let myself be seduced by the Commune's perfection, I've failed as a Tribune and would deserve it if the House of the Golden Horn slid off its perch and into the Bosphorus. The development modelled by historical materialism isn't just a boulder rolling downhill towards full communism; "There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits." Marx wrote that in the preface to the French edition of Capital, and one need only look at the subsequent trajectory of French history to prove his point.


8 Dhu al-Hijjah, 1355 H
Anyway. Sometimes the old and the new come together in ways that are, frankly, beautiful.

Decided it was probably now or never for the Hajj. Would've liked to carry it out after I left office, but considering the general state of things in the Near West, planning that far ahead seems ill-advised.


Fretted a little that all the worldly concerns resting on my shoulders might distract me from proper devotion, but that was foolish in hindsight. The moment I stepped past the miqat, all that just sloughed away.


Adey Walashma, premier of the Somalian Republic

Under any other circumstances, Adey Walashma is a hated class enemy who presides over a cruel ultra-capitalist cabal of patricians whom I am obliged to vigorously oppose in any way possible (we were staring daggers at one another when we chanced to meet each other at the airfield). For a few days, though, she was my sister, one amongst thousands and thousands of brothers and sisters together in a state of ihram, equal before God. (Is this what the perfect equality supposedly heralded by full communism would be like?)

When my fingers first brushed the surface of the Kaaba, I simultaneously felt incredibly small and inextricably connected with something, far grander than something so trivial as the fate of nations or the fortunes of war.



So of course the moment I was back at my desk in Byzantion I was handed a stack of ministerial appointments to sort through, a memo about how we don't have the Ekklesia votes to pass the next stage of our war production plan, and, for some reason, a briefing about a jewel heist in Edinburgh? (Someone stole the old Habsburg crown jewels, apparently? I didn't even know they'd ever left Germany, but I suppose it's just like Goethe to sell the regalia of the last Holy Roman Empress to her bereaved survivors in Great Britain). No rest for the wicked, then.




Got to work building popular support for that war production bill that died in the Magnaura.


Was woken up suddenly at some desolate hour of the morning and given some horrible news.


A catastrophe, which could easily bloom into a nightmarish fascist envelopment of Western Europe.



Theodora was grim even by Theodoran standards at the emergency conference convened just as the sun was rising.


But the first thought that popped into my mind, well before the full gravity of the situation sunk in, was Oh, so that's where the crown jewels went.


Kunigunde von Starschedel, leader of the fascist forces in the German Civil War

WORLD MAP:

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Apr 3, 2020

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
:siren: EKKLESIA SESSION 1 :siren:

The sudden outbreak of civil war in the North German Federation has thrown the Near West into chaos, as governments and militaries across the European subcontinent scramble responses to the rapidly changing strategic balance. The General Staff of the Byzantine Commune is divided on the issue of whether to send Byzantine volunteers to support the Meier's liberal government against the fascist rebels, but, in the end, it's not their call-- a decision of such import can only be decided by the civilian Ekklesia. Anything else is vulgar Müllerism.

Various members of the Byzantine General Staff are testifying in the Magnaura-- are you swayed by their arguments?


General Zenobia Stanotas

The outbreak of a Great War between the Red Rose Pact and the so-called "Western Roman Empire" is inevitable-- we don't know when, but the hour is assuredly fast-approaching. Arming, equipping, and training a military powerful enough to defend the Byzantine peoples is a Herculanean task, and although we've seen definite progress in the last twelve months, we are still lagging behind where we ought to be, as factories that could be used to manufacture guns or landships or airplanes are instead stamping out toasters, radios, and automobiles by the thousands. At this critical juncture, should we really be wasting vital war materiel on North German adventurism? Should Byzantines shed their blood for capitalist stooges? Behind Chancellor Meier's honeyed words and smiling face, the corporations which once supported Goethe still churn, assembly-lines slick with proletarian blood.

##Support the Hardened Veteran to let the civil war run its course.


General Eudokia Akinyi

We have a moral imperative to oppose fascism. But even if we didn't, sending a force of international volunteers to the NGF is actually the more pragmatic choice, here. A comparatively small expenditure of resources now could be enough to tip the scales against von Starschedel's forces-- far smaller than the forces we would need to bring to bear should Valeria have all of the manpower, industries, and resources of Germany to throw at us when the tinderbox finally lights.

##Support the Democratic Crusader to send Byzantine volunteers to help the NGF.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLTUEVUTdyQ


##Support the Hardened Veteran to let the civil war run its course.
"The capitalists who run phony elections for which boot steps on the necks of the people are fighting the capitalists who don't even bother with the pretense of an election."

Tulip
chairface


##Support the Democratic Crusader to send Byzantine volunteers to help the NGF.
"...the last thing we want is for our enemies to be all in one house."
Technowolf

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VOTE CLOSED
--

Iouliana Erdemir let out a breath she hadn't even realized she was holding. All her doubts had come to nothing-- the Ekklesia was with her. She'd always rankled at the mythological injustice done to poor Cassandra, so clear-sighted about the catastrophe looming over the horizon but rendered powerless by circumstances, by disbelieving countrymen, until it was far too late.

The descendants of Agamemnon and Aeneas, gathered as they are under Athena's owl, knew better.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
So you've probably noticed the announcement that's at the top of every forum, but if you haven't, you probably should. (Content warning for discussion of domestic abuse)

Hopefully Lowtax is just ejected from this community and things go on as normal, but in the event Lowtax stays on the forums, byzLP won't.

The threads are being archived, so we aren't going to burn down the library of Alexandria or whatever, but it's possible we'll need to find a new long-term home for this story and the people who've been invested in it for years. Since the market for gay and extremely verbose screenshot let's plays of mapgames isn't exactly booming these days, I'm not sure what that place would be, so if anyone's got any suggestions...

Anyway! I'll keep y'all posted. In the event the forums just shut down abruptly, I'll put any new information on my twitter-- following it might be a good idea in case Lowtax just nukes the whole forums the moment he wakes up or whatever. Um, I hope you like seeing retweets of Fire Emblem femslash, I guess? Which is kind of on-brand for ByzLP, I guess.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
Bread and Roses seems like it could be a good option! Another link I'll throw out in the interim is the Goon Paradox LP Discord, which already has a lot of overlap with this thread, and is probably a good place to find out what the deal is if/when SA finally, fatally implodes without having to also read dozens of twitter posts about how Edelgard did nothing wrong, or whatever.

EDIT: black eagles are the most byzLP house in FE:3H; gay, revolutionary, a complicated and compromised history with Empire

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Jun 24, 2020

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
Who knows what the future will hold, but I've put up a quick-and-dirty mirror of the whole LP on my own hosting. Even if SA doesn't explode, this was probably still worth making so you don't need Archives to go read the original thread.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
Archived versions of the thread with the discussions intact are now available at http://saarchiver.com/

I don't know how to link to individual threads there, but if you search for "Blood" in the searchbar they'll be there.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
I keep expecting everything to fall through at the last minute, but it seems like things may turn out okay after all? In which case I guess the thread will be able to stay right where it is.

Fingers crossed, I guess.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Technowolf posted:

Fingers, toes, arms, legs, eyes ...

*contorts entire body into the shape of a chi rho somehow*

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

PART SEVENTY-EIGHT: Antifaschistische Aktion (May 2, 1937 - July 17, 1938)



Dear Ingrid,
When we got the news the Byzantines were sending some volunteers to the NGF, the first thing I thought was-- well, the first thing I thought of is all the long discussions we used to have on the phone. Me at the base simultaneously bored out of my skull and worried things might blow up at any moment, you excitedly telling me everything you'd been learning at university.


The second thing I thought was that whatever was coming our way from Byzantium was something along the lines of the other volunteers who've already shown up to fight the good fight and been organized into international brigades by the NGF. Maybe a bit less like us here in the XXVI (a rattlebag of nationalities-- refugees from Bohemia or like us, German emigrés coming home to pitch in, idealistic liberals from the Allies, bitter liberals sick of the RRP, etc., etc.) and a bit more like the brigades organized around a single nationality or affiliation (the XXI and XXII are mostly Japanese and Sillan, the X and XVI are homegrown German Reds, whatever). Maybe with a bit of a wink and nod from the Byzantine government.


Which would be appreciated, obviously. But meanwhile the fash are sending in full divisions of regular infantry.


But apparently relief for the NGF passed the legislature with near-unanimous support, so the Byzzies were feeling confident enough to just send five entire landship divisions (which the Byzantines insist on calling cavalry for some goddamn reason but whatever). So that's nice! I mean, I have to ask where these guys were when Bohemia was under attack, and the Germans probably remember what you told me about that Byzantine Commune expeditionary force that was running around trying to prop up Müller, but whatever. They're tired. We're all tired. If the Byzantines decided to finally show up, good for them. Maybe the fash won't chase me out of two countries, now.


After all, several hundred LS/3 Reyhan and LD/1 Aphrodite landships kind of speak for themselves, right?

I hope you, Uncle Johan, and Aunt Edita are keeping safe. I know you're pretty far from the frontlines, but I worry anyway.

Your sister,
Viktorie

Dear Viktorie,

Did you know that Byzantine landships are named after the presidents of the old Byzantine Republic? The LD/1 is named after Aphrodite de Bassot, and LS/3 is named for Reyhan Hamzaoğlu, who was left to pick up the pieces from the Containment War and steered the Republic through its own civil war. It's a terribly appropriate name, given the circumstances-- the NGF sees itself as carrying the torch of Julian liberalism the Byzantines dropped in 1883, and endured a humiliating defeat at the hands of an imperial rival before finding itself mired in a civil war.


Reyhan Hamzaoğlu, Eleventh President of the Byzantine Republic

It's just a coincidence, obviously-- I think this naming scheme goes back to the first landships Byzantium deployed back in the Second Great War-- but it's a
nice coincidence.


Please don't worry about us out here in Frankfurt am Main. Things are normal enough Okay, things aren't even remotely normal, obviously. There's air raid drills every day, the streets feel like they're emptying out as more and more people join up as volunteers and go to the front, everyone is worried all the time. You'd think that between everything that happened back home and everything I've studied, I'd be used to the patina of unreality that settles over whatever zombified semblance of everyday life shuffles forward when you're living through a big historical event, or at least numbed to it, but it's still weird.

But even though it's weird, it's not
dangerous yet. You're the one risking your life out there, you're the one I'm always hoping is keeping safe. Aren't you deployed around Hannover? I've heard the fighting's bad over there. So-- to the extent it's possible in the middle of a war, please take care of yourself.

Love,
Ingrid




Dear Ingrid,

O.K., so, yeah, the XXVI is in Hannover-- which is also where the Byzantines showed up. Now that their boots (landship treads, whatever) are on the ground-- is it just me or are they really cool? General Ha even came around to meet us-- the international brigades, the poor German regulars who haven't had a moment's rest since the damned Lightning War, the mechanics and support workers who kept their landships fueled and running-- the regular folks. She makes a point of speaking German. It's a sort of German I can barely keep up with, even after having a whole year in the NGF to brush up on it-- her accent is very southern-- almost Austrian, really, peppered with Mandarin and Arabic loanwords, but it's a nice gesture-- even if half the time she's conferring with NGF officers they end up falling back on another language they have in common-- Latin, of all things (???). Anyway, I even got to pose for a haidagraph with her!


From left: General Valentina Ha, an unidentified Byzantine NCO, an unidentified German infantryman, Corporal Viktorie Kučerová of the XXVI Internationale Brigaden 'Republik', an unidentified German infantrywoman


Sometimes they seem like they've stepped right out of some pulpy Anita Andretti story. Which bothered me at first, honestly-- like they were taking all of this too lightly. They don't have skin in the game like we do-- whatever danger fascism poses to Byzantium, it's still abstract and in the future, when the Germans are fighting for their country now, when so many of us in the international brigades already have lost their countries. I bet exactly zero of the things you said about Frankfurt were going on in Byzantium


But when the fash were trying to make a push from Magdeburg and our lines were starting to buckle, the Ha and her landships were there more or less immediately, jumping right into the thick of things.


Maybe Byzantium doesn't have skin in the game like we do, but the Byzantine Antifascist Volunteers sure do!


So perhaps a certain amount of jauntiness can be excused. They're in the mud and the muck with the rest of us, after all, and doing a drat fine job at it.

Your sister,
Viktorie

Dear Viktorie,

Wow! I can't believe you got to meet General Ha! I've read so much about her in the papers-- she was one of the new generals who swept in with the 'new guard' a while back, and was in command of the entire Army of the Alps until she came to Germany.

She's from Istria, which is this peninsula just south of Austria the Roman Empire conquered in the mid-15th century or so-- one of the last new territories added to the empire before the Deluge rolled around, if I recall correctly (My historical atlas is still in Prague somewhere, probably).


She's just one piece of the sweeping reforms Tribune Erdemir's making to the Byzantine military's command structure-- the papers are full of articles about the latest shifts in the high command, a lot of them in direct response to what's happening in Germany; Tereza Arnand, who wrote the proverbial book of landship tactics, has just been appointed to the general staff, largely as a result of General Ha putting theory into practice so vividly.


From what we've heard, the frontline has stabilized, which is good news-- if it's true, anyway. The enemy's true numbers and strategic disposition aren't exactly public knowledge, and I can't help but think that "boosting morale" is as important as "being a truthful record of events" to the war journalists following the NGF armies.


Stay safe. I saw some newsreel footage of landships, and they were terrifying enough on the big screen-- I can't imagine what facing one down on the battlefield feels like.

Love,
Ingrid



Dear Ingrid,

Well, you heard right-- the fash's thrust towards Hanover has been parried, at least for the moment. Even the French regulars who showed up have called off major offensive operations. I'm sure they'll be back when they get their ducks in a row, but it's breathing room, so I'll take it.


So let their propaganda crow about some French boxer knocking out Scandinavia's guy proving the superior martial prowess of Rome or whatever.


We both know that's not the sort of strength that determines the fate of nations.


I'm no Red, and I'm not qualified to say if the version of history they paint is any more accurate than the fascist fever dreams that put jewel thieves at the head of armies. But I do think they've got a better sense of how the present works. Hard to argue with that, when we've seen the kind of power they can bring to bear. Bring to bear for our sake, even.


The landships themselves are impressive, terrifying weapons of war. But the real power is everything that had to happen to get them on the field-- the valor of their crews, the hard work that keeps their vehicles gassed up and in good working order, the teamsters and lorry-drivers and railwaymen that all collaborate to deliver supplies to a war zone, the workers in factories, foundries, and farms all those supplies came from in the first place.


And on and on, all manifesting a democratic mandate of the people.

O.K., maybe I'm a little bit of a Red. Byzantines are rubbing off on me, I guess. Or maybe I just have a pro-Byz bias from all those talks we've had.


Anyway. We're making a push for Magdeburg, now.


Fingers crossed!



Everyone's taking notes for the next war.

Your sister,
Viktorie

Dear Viktorie,


Obviously we know a lot less about what's
really happening on the frontlines, but we've still heard that the drive towards Magdeburg has gotten bogged down in an HRE counteroffensive. By all accounts, the NGF and Byzantine forces are doing a fine job of enduring the onslaught. But I suppose if they weren't, we civilians behind the lines would be the last to hear about it.


I also worry about the south, honestly. I feel like we get way less news about that-- it's less flashy than columns of landships from the great powers of the Near West duking it out. Possibly the situation's just been more static down there, so there just isn't that much news to begin with. But I worry.


Meanwhile, the situation around Magdenburg is anything but static, apparently. Reading between the lines of press reports, it really seems like 'holding the line' means a lot of rushing back and forth to try try to plug holes in the defensive pickets before the HRE can break through. But all this feels like guesswork, and I don't like that. When I studied historical wars, you have all the information you'd ever need right in front of you. And you know how it turns out, so you can pay attention to the specific strands of the story that mean something in the end.


Trying to follow a war as it happens from newspapers and newsreels and official communications is like trying to see the horizon through a thick layer of fog. I've read about NGF and allied forces trying to halt an HRE crossing over the Elbe. Is it just grist for the mill? A fascist feint? A thrust towards Hannover?


An attempted pincer in conjunction with the forces advancing from Magdeburg? Questions and questions and questions, with no answer in sight except for in a distant posterity. Assuming there even
is a posterity to speak of after all this, and assuming I'll be around to see it.


The Gallic forces in the theater are under the command of Victoire Lefort Hanseatica. She wasn't
born with the name "Hanseatica," obviously-- it's a agnomen bestowed upon her by Valeria, since that's yet another thing they've tried to bring back. A lot of old Roman cognomina were bestowed as honors referring to the sites of military victories (real or imagined-- Publius Cornelius Scipio received the agnomen Africanus for his success in North Africa during the Second Punic War, Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus-- aka Caligula-- got his for being the grandson of a guy who had won victories in Germany, Commodus eventually tacked on so many superlative honorifics to his name that he was able to rename all twelve months after himself). The practice mostly ended after the reign of Heraclius-- there were a few attempts to revive use of victory titles at various points during the Komnenos, First Yaroslavovich, Radziwill, and Second Yaroslavovich dynasties, but for the most part they'd been so diluted by over-use that those later emperors and empresses found better ways to express their imperial megalomania than just sticking a laundry list of traditional Roman enemies onto their names.


Praetor Laurentin Vannier Rhenanicus and Praetor Augustine Guilbert Germanica

But in the Gallic Empire, everything old is new again! Valeria's field marshals got the grandest titles--
Rhenanicus and Germanica-- for their part in the humiliation of North Germany and conquest of the Rhineland. But the generals under them got their share of honorifics, too.


Legate Victoire Lefort Hanseatica

Lefort's efforts in the Lightning War were concentrated along the North Sea, in the cities once dominated by
hanse-- merchant's guilds-- which included Hamburg. Hence- 'Hanseatica' So the Byzantines weren't the only one to pick a general with some local association, I guess.


Easy to find the seeds of the present in the past, but obviously I can't let that convince me I can extrapolate the future with any accuracy. The war hangs in the balance, everything is balanced on a knife's edge, and reading historical tea leaves isn't going to sort out the future.

Stay safe. Please.

Love,
Ingrid


Dear Ingrid,

O.K., now we're advancing in earnest. Word has it that the Byzantines pushed for a renewed offensive with the German High Command-- Ha argued that a purely defensive war would eventually grind us down through pure attrition. Can't say I disagree.


Byzantine landships are the tip of the spear, obviously-- the hope is that they can punch through the HRE lines and then let NGF regulars flood in through the gaps, pushing the HRE out of Magdeburg and right back to the Elbe.


The fash are still grinding forward to the north and south, making for Hamburg and Erfurt. If they're successful, the Magdeburg offensive might end up in a salient and then get their asses kicked. But we need to try something, right?



Ha's giving it her all, naturally. We aren't just pieces of a gameboard to her, you know? I've heard about some of those Byzantine officers from the 1GW, drinking wine in their villas while their soldiers die in a ditch on the Oaxacan killing fields. She's not like that. She's putting herself on the line, too.


So I trust her, which is more than I can say for a lot of generals. She's become quite the expert in fighting in terrain like this, fighting in winter. But she's adaptable, too-- it's July now and she's still forging onward. Fighting with us. Bleeding with us.




It's possible I'm a bit star-struck, honestly. But still-- if we'd had a general like her back in Bohemia, maybe all of this would've been different. Even without the sort of infrastructure at their back General Ha's got, even.





She knows a lot of eyes are on her. The Byzantine Commune at large is focusing more and more on the struggle against fascism in general and the German Civil War in particular.



Later. She sent three divisions down to relieve Erfurt, since the line was starting to buckle dangerously. The hope is that they can then swing north and link up with the forces advancing of Magdeburg, encircling all the fash armies caught in the middle. Fingers crossed! They've already managed to push HRE lines back towards Leipzig.


Could be they'll go and take Leipzig, too.



Things are beginning to tilt in our favor. I just know it.


Things have been (relatively) quiet up here-- the XXVI and the two armored divisions under Ha that stayed behind to hold down the fort in the north stayed behind when the rest of the Byzzies swept south towards Erfurt and Leipzig. Probably because the fash are concentrating all their attention down there, too. They're trying to advance along a wide front, and it smacks of desperation-- they're charging right into the teeth of Byzantine armor and NGF mechanized infantry.


Just received word that we're being sent with the other Byzantine divisions down to the Erfurt-Leipzig mess. Increasingly looking like what started out as a feint could be where the war's decided.

Will write again ASAP.

Your sister,
Viktorie

Dear Ingrid (again),

All right, so, it hasn't been long enough for me to have gotten your reply to my last letter, but a lot is happening, so I'm just going to send another one right after it.



First of all, I knew my hunch from before was correct when the HRE offensive towards Erfurt stalled out and their lines began to crumble in the aftermath.


More Byzantine landships and lorries are arriving on the frontlines every day. Not just replacing losses, either-- at this point, I'm convinced they've got more landships than they arrived with, now. (OOC: because I'd like just edited my armored division template before things popped off in the NGF :rip: which is also why their supply looks low in some of these screenshots despite the fact that they're still performing well. I think? I played this update in, like, April. God, gently caress 2020.)


And the factories churning them out are getting more and more quick at doing so. Shouldn't be surprising, really-- I remember that cement factory you told me about with something like twenty thousand workers, and you don't have a place like that unless you're good at organizing huge numbers of people for huge industrial efforts.


So the long-awaited push back up towards Magdeburg finally happened, and the two fronts merged into one wide, rolling battle.


Finally, after some tough-- and frankly terrifying-- artillery duels and clashes between Byzantine and Polish armor, we broke through. The way to Magdeburg seemed wide open.


The fash made some effort to plug the gap, of course. But you could tell the situation was deteriorating-- each HRE army sent to defend Magdeburg's west flank was more outmatched than the last.



All they could do was delay the inevitable, though. Almost feel sorry for the poor bastards on the other side-- having to try and fight off a column of landships with infantry when you haven't even gotten the chance to dig in properly is an awful way to go.


But, well, if they didn't want to die horribly maybe they shouldn't have picked up a gun to fight for a fascist jewel thief's coup and start a war that's left 600,000 people dead.


What happens when a defensive line begins to break down is obviously something the Byzantines are very interested in, given the appallingly long frontline the probably inevitable WRE-RRP showdown is looking to have.




Anyway, the Byzantine landship divisions then used their speed to wheel around and encircle an army under Lefort (I'm not going to give her the dignity of an honorific).




Leaving the NGF regulars to mop up Lefort, General Ha just kept on driving north towards Hannover.




A successful drive, obviously, which left yet another HRE force encircled. I'm sure you've read about it in the papers by now. People are calling it the war's turning point. I'll believe it when I see it, but I am feeling a lot more optimistic. Watching the fash get a taste of their own guerre eclair is satisfying. Marching into liberated Hannover was even more satisfying. It's put some wind in our sails.

Maybe one day we'll march back into Prague like that.

I hope you're still safe in Frankfurt. I mean, I guess there's not any reason to think you're not-- the fighting's moved pretty far away by now. But I'm your big sister, so I kind of have to worry about you. But let me be a little less of a downer-- Christmas is just around the corner! I hope you, Aunt Edita, and Uncle Johan have as happy a Christmas as can be managed, considering the circumstances. Next year we'll all be together for it. Know it.

Your sister,
Viktoire

Dear Viktoire,

Oh, did we
ever hear about Hannover out here. I think I saw you in one of the newsreels, even! Or someone who looked like you from a distance, in a uniform, standing in a column of other people wearing the same uniform. O.K., it probably wasn't you, but it was somewhere you've been, at least!

Your second letter actually got here before the first, somehow. Can't imagine how that happened-- but we got the second one on Christmas Eve, and I can't think of a better present than knowing you're doing all right out there.


Although I guess the fighting went on like it was any other day. Some of the papers have called the string of victories we won on the 25th and 26th a Christmas miracle, which frankly seems a bit gauche. Anyway, the woman actually winning those victories is a Muslim, and most of the Christians in her forces would probably celebrate Christmas on January 7th. Well, unless they're Gallicans, anyway. And of course the Bogomilists who are still Christiany enough to celebrate Christmas at all do it on any which day. Calendars are weird.



That diversity's part of the reason I like Byzantine so much, why out of all of thousand and thousands of years of human history, they're the ones I ended up studying. All these people, all this history, all these cultures and traditions are all alive in something that's constantly changing, constantly reinventing itself, but still hanging together.


It's the exact opposite of the sort of world the fascists want-- all of Europe (All of the Near West? The whole world?) speaking one language, part of one nation, one empire, one Rome.


Field Marshal Miriam Kerr of the NGF 4th Army Group, Field Marshal Gertrud Fleischer of the NGF 1st Army Group

Rumors are flying that Field Marshal Kerr's mulling over an offensive towards Berlin, which would've seemed completely unrealistic just a few months ago.


There's a definite sense of the tide turning, anyway. But I don't need to tell you that the only way to be sure something's a real turning-point is in retrospect.



It's not like matters are settled in the north yet, either (which I guess I also don't need to tell you since you're literally there, duh). Seems a bit premature to worry about Berlin when we've still got Byzantine landships and NGF regulars still trying to link up for an attack on Hamburg.


Later: Knew it was premature to start drawing up a road map to Berlin. The NGF forces advancing on Hamburg from the north got pushed back, and managed to lose Kiel in the process.



In the south, though, Valentina Ha's still the tip of the spear, trying to get across the Elbe. Probably safe to say
she's not getting pushed back anytime soon.


Just heard Magdeburg was finally liberated. At the beginning of this awful war, everyone seemed to think the campaign for Magdeburg would be the fulcrum the whole conflict turned on. Now it's practically an afterthought. Still good news though, especially after the setbacks in Kiel.


The Gauls seem to think they see the writing on the wall, too. Hanseatica is still fighting on, but Valeria herself is already looking elsewhere for allies now that Kunigunde's Holy Roman Empire is looking like a bad investment.


They've been friends, enemies, sister nations, joint defenders of Orthodox Christianity, a grand unified empire, bitter rivals, and wary neighbors, but through all that time Byzantium and Kiev-- Russia-- the Third Rome-- have been bound to one another. Might not have the industrial might a fascist Germany would've brought to bear, but that historical tie, that unbroken continuity with Kiev-Byzantium, and thence with the Roman Empire under the Komnenoi, St. Valeria, and all the rest-- is probably more important. Maybe it is, even. Valeria's got a way of warping reality around her, and history's the medium she does it in.


It's obvious to anyone who's even sort of following the news that the apparatus of the Third Roman state is rapidly faltering. But if anyone can bring it back from the brink, it's the WRE, ready to forge it into a potent weapon pointed at the Byzantine Commune's heart.

And then absorb it into their own vision of Rome, presumably. Valeria might respect Third Rome's history, but in the end her propagandists are probably more than up to the task of incorporating it into the story of a single Roman Empire, eternal and unbreaking.

God, gently caress the fascists.

Love,
Ingrid




Dear Ingrid,

God, can you believe fascist Hamburg is still hanging in there, somehow? Can't imagine it can hold on for that much longer, though.


The Byzzies have officially led the charge across the Elbe and I don't think the fash are going to have much luck getting them back onto their bank.


And that's how the holdouts in Hamburg and the reoccupied territory around Kiel went from being the frontlines to a pocket. Serves 'em right, really.


I'm honestly amazed at how fast the frontlines are moving, now. 1GW this ain't, apparently.





I've come to admire the Byzantines, too, although maybe for reasons a bit less poetic than yours. They just... they just seem like they know what they're doing, you know? I feel like people lead good lives over there. And they've certainly been a big help to us. (Can't help but wonder where all these landships and volunteers and talented generals were when Poland was devouring Bohemia, though.)


Later: Whoops, there goes Kiel!


Lefort's been sacked, I guess. This new guy Matieu Philippon ("Corvus", which is even dumber than being named after some battle you won, honestly.)


Legate Matieu Philippon Corvus


Also, I'm pretty sure there was a villain in an Anita Andretti who looked just like that guy? Except without the eyepatch. Makes him a decent enough foil for Valentina, I guess, since she's also right out of a pulpy novel or a movie serial.


But as you've pointed out, again and again and again, things the world doesn't actually work like that; there's no narrative logic to the course of events. Not only do the good guys not always win, but there might not even be the consolation of some sort of moving, tragic ending. Plenty of people I know have had their stories end when they're hit by shrapnel, or shot dead by a sniper, or caught by friendly fire, or just in the sort of mundane accident that'll happen when you're moving so many many people around under such hard conditions. You pick up a gun to protect your country from the fash, or for revenge because you couldn't protect your country so you'll protect that one, or any other number of grand ends, and then you just get hit by a truck carrying gas cans to some landships or whatever.


I've gotten the impression that whenever history seems to wrap itself up too neatly, that's almost always a deliberately imposed narrative. Sometimes it's historians just trying to make sense of an unknowable past. Sometimes it's an ex post facto attempt at self-justification, which is sort of the fash's go-to move.


Sometimes the actors on the world's stage are trying, very self-consciously, to not just do things but to make capital-H History. The British finally ditched their monarchy, and all the Byzantines and other Reds in the international brigades are excited by this historical moment-- here, even as Kunigunde von Starschedel is trying to dig up the Holy Roman Empire's bones, Great Britain is shedding the last vestiges of their historical connection to the HRE, the Habsburgs, Gregor the Great, etc., etc.



But also: a much better way to bury that legacy would to be here fighting her directly, like the Byzantines are, like those of us who got out of Bohemia are. And, yeah, there are a few Brits amongst the international brigades-- pretty much every RRP nation has a net export of starry-eyed idealists-- but it's not the kind of effort they've put into a symbolic blow against empire.




So the story of the German Civil War certainly seems like it's turning out in our favor. After Kiel fell, encircling Hamburg was easily accomplished, and with that done, it was only a matter of time before Byzantine landships were rolling into that city, too.


With the last pockets of resistance in the north swept away, there was nothing stopping the Byzantines from spearheading a fresh offensive to the east. Towards Berlin. Towards the knock-out punch.


And with the fash's strength spent trying hold onto Magdeburg, Kiel, etc., there wasn't much left to get in our way.


Whatever defense the HRE could scramble to defend the German capital was smashed to bits in short order.


But as much as the civil war here feels like the only thing that matters, it's not like the whole world is holding its breath to see how it turns out. Everything everywhere else keeps on moving. It's fair to say that what we're doing here will leave some mark on history, but something somewhere could be happening that's going to be what future generations, with the benefit of hindsight, will think of when they think of the year 1938.


World's a big place, you know?



And every single bit of it's got infinite details once you look at it up close.


So while the fighting still rages in Germany as the HRE continues to fall apart, the fash are still consolidating their hold and getting their stories straight back home.




People in the RRP are reading scores from the World Cup right next to casualty numbers from the frontlines, and probably having stronger feelings about the former.


Or they talk about the 'knock-out blow' against the HRE and the knock-out blow against some French boxer in the same breath.




As NGF infantry and landships complete their encirclement of Leipzing...


...as the Meier government and the Bundestag pack up their things in Essen and prepare to take their proper place in Berlin...


...as General Valentina Ha becomes an international celebrity through her feats of cunning, innovative strategies, and derring-do...



...elsewhere, the very pillars of the world might be shaking.




And we'll have no idea about it until we read tomorrow's paper.


Food for thought, I guess.


Your sister,
Viktorie

WORLD MAP, 7/17/38:

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Tulip posted:

Hell yes.

How are the combat logs to be read? I've never played HoI4 and they seem very important and part of the narrative but I kind of don't actually understand what they say.

I played this update in April, so I might flub some details, but let's use this one as an example:


The attacker is always on the left, and the defender is always on the right. The icon indicating the result always appears on the player's side. So the top battle on that list was Valentina Ha's divisions making an attack on Sachsen, whereas the one two days ago was her leading a successful defense of it. A green arrow with a sword means a successful attack, a green arrow with a shield means a successful defense, and a broken arrow with a broken sword or shield represents a failed attack or defense, respectively. The manpower etc. numbers are causalities, I believe? Which were probably less lopsided overall than they look here since I believe this is only showing Byzantine losses, not NGF ones, even though most of these battles involved both NGF and Byzantine forces.

EDIT:


lmao

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Night10194 posted:

On an unrelated note, who does the art for the characters in the LP? The Byzantine uniform looks perfect for one of the countries in an RPG I'm running and I want to know who to credit if I use some of these fine officers for character portraits or something.

Feel free to use 'em for your campaign! I mean, assuming it's just an RPG you're running and not secretly a public-facing actual play with a zillion dollar patreon, or whatever. I spent ages drawing the things, so any additional use that can be gotten out of 'em sounds cool. You can credit me with a link to my twitter.

also a new post is coming after i get over my irrational anxiety that i forgot how to play hoi4 in the time between playing the last post and now

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

PART SEVENTY-NINE: From the Oder to the Mekong (July 17, 1938 - September 17, 1938)


Mizuno Tomoe (水野 朋恵) was a distinguished member of the Japanese Republic's diplomatic corps, most most notably serving as ambassador to Great Britain from 1930-1936. In 1938, she was given the even more prestigious-- and critical, given the volatile state of the Near West in the 1930s-- posting of ambassador to the Byzantine Commune.


In 2013, a distant relative of Mizuno's discovered a box in the attic of the family's home in the suburbs of Edo. Labelled simply 'Miscellany', the box was found to contain a series of leatherbound notebooks-- the diaries Ambassador Mizuno kept during her time in Byzantion. This serendipitous discovery has offered historians new insight into aspects of the period ranging from high level diplomacy between the Allies and the Red Rose Pact to the night-life in '30s Byzantion. Edinburgh University Press, together with Kyoto University and the Athens Institute of History, is pleased to annouce the publication of an edited collection of her diaries, translated for the first time into English.



Sent off my report to Kyoto vis-à-vis the state of things in the Near West and what Byzantion. Thorough, accurate, and just dreadfully dull. Dry cables to President Masaoka don't capture the heart of the matter:



Diplomacy with the Red Rose Pact is a most diverting game, even if the stakes are deadly serious. This is especially true in Byzantium-- the Byzantines are a much more fun bunch than all those stuffed-shirts back in Edinburgh.

Oh, there's still all the hallmarks of diplomacy on the European subcontinent which have been annoying generations of ambassadors from the governments of Asia-- the obsessive self-regard for their own past, the obsession with historical continuity, the continued use of Latin as 'the language of diplomacy' in spite of the fact no one's spoken it natively for at least a thousand years, and all the other signs of the tendency of European leaders to act as if their every action is being watched-- and judged for consistency!-- by a chorus of ghosts from previous era. As fashionable as it is for the modern Byzantine to gaze ahead into some glorious future, they're still always, always looking over their shoulder, as if some historical legacy is stalking in their wake. Absolutely bonkers.

But once you get used to this, it's easy to work around. Or turn to your advantage, even-- the Byzantine attitude towards the Japanese Republic will always be colored by the fact the Byzantines see it as a predecessor to and model for their own republic, even though that republic fell half a century ago. They have a complicated relationship with Sallajer's republic, in turn proudly claiming its legacy and denouncing its myriad crimes, real and perceived. This means two things:

1.) If the Byzantines were trying to build something in Ryuzoji Nagahito's image, the concrete never set right.
2.) They will constantly project these feelings onto the modern Japanese Republic. They're so eager to see themselves in mirrors you'd think we were in the Palace of Versailles. (Which is reputedly full of mirrors. That's the joke.) I'm beginning to see why the ancients Greeks, who the Byzantines emulate so self-consciously, had a myth where some guy spends so much time looking at his own reflection he dies.


Job one right now is sounding out the Byzantines about the situation in Indochina, without making it blatantly obvious that's what I'm doing. Our interest in the rebels succeeding is fairly self-evident-- it's a potential check on the Ming Empire's influence in southeast Asia. Things would be cleaner if our guy had grabbed the reins of revolution in the name of liberal democracy or whatever, but he didn't and Trung Cam Lynh's communists did.


One would be tempted to think that this would be an easy sell to Tribune Erdemir-- Kyoto certainly seems to think so, given the instructions they've given me. Trung's life and career is practically tailored to Byzantine sensibilities-- a worker who rose to lead revolutions and command armies, who saw injustice and oppression and rose in the name of... the immortal science of Marxism-Qiuism, or something. Combine that with boyish good looks, windswept hair, a cool leather jacket, and just generally looking as if she'd fit in at certain select Byzantion night-clubs and dance-halls, if you understand my meaning.





Trung Cam Lynh, acting head of the Provisional Government of the Union of Indochina

And her nemesis, Cao Liuxian and his Zhongnan Peninsula Company, basically came out of central casting for the role of 'despicable capitalist villain' in some hackneyed early '20s propaganda film, before the Haida invented talkies and the Byzantines discovered subtlety. Seriously, look at the guy. Even Zhang Zhulin's probably like, 'This is a bit much, Liuxian.'





Cao Liuxian, the absolute fucker.

And Byzantium's putting so much effort into aiding a bunch of liberals in Germany, so surely inducing them to send resources to their fellow Reds would be simple?


Except no, because that means that the Byzantines are still fully focused on their efforts in the German Civil War. General Ha's landships are in the midst of a drive for Dresden, and it's all anyone wants to talk about.


The Byzantine calculus is simple-- a Great War in the Near West is inevitable, the (sigh) "Western Roman Empire" poses an existential threat to Byzantium, and North Germany being brought into the fascist orbit would make their strategic position unacceptably weak.


And honestly, are they wrong? Gaul's their Ming. No, even more than that-- if the Ming Empire achieved all its designs on Asia, Japan would be in for a rough few decades-- centuries-- whatever. If Gaul achieves its plans for the Near West, they will make every effort to wipe any semblance of Byzantine culture or history off the face of the Earth.


Got word that Cao's security forces and the rebels are already fighting up and down the Mekong, but these initial reports are sketchy at best and maddeningly vague at worst, so I still don't have a clear picture of the situation on the ground or who-- if anyone-- has the upper hand.


The next dispatch I received, on the other hand, was very clearly to Trung's advantage. The Commune might still be tied down in Germany, but the other major RRP members and the other significant Communist powers have no such obligations. Confirms my hunch the Byzantines weren't just blowing smoke up my rear end re: involvement in the German Civil War precluding intervention in Indochina. So if that's settled, maybe they can pitch in. For now, though, fourteen divisions sent in to fight the Ming's Zhongnan proxies is fantastic news.


And more might follow, if things wrap up with the NGF. I've found myself following the attempted encirclement of General Erich Ceska-Lipa nearly as assiduously as the Byzantines, even if my motives are a bit different.


The NGF and pals currently hold the Elbe crossings to the north and south of the city, but they haven't been able to close the corridor still connecting it to the rest of the Holy Roman Empire (a name which never fails to make me feel silly when I write it, but that's what they call themselves). No one seems to have seriously committed their forces yet, though-- Generals Ceska-Lipa, Ha, and the NGF's General Reibling all seem to be limiting themselves to probing attacks for the moment.


Cao's succeeded in pushing the rebels out of everything they held west of the Mekong, and a lot further than that in places-- most notably, the Mekong Delta region, which Zhongnan authorities have almost entirely reasserted control over.


For the moment. Those volunteers are still en route, after all.


News from Germany is more immediately encouraging; NGF and Byzantine forces succeeded in cutting off Dresden. An army under Hanke attempted a breakthrough, but Reibling was be able to hold down the fort (in a very literal sense) until Ha can bring her landships in.


The NGF's next objective is Frankfurt-- no, not that Frankfurt, the one that's an der Oder. Reibling's infantry is attacking along a broad front, trying to press their advantage.


The intention, apparently, was for Ha and her landships to sweep in on the southern flank, but the Byzantines aren't the only one who can pretend large numbers of landships are 'volunteers'-- a Polish armored division (probably one of the only ones in the HRE still operational) under Czcibor Umiastowski launched a frontal attack on Ha's position. There's no way it'll succeed per se-- and I have to imagine Umiastowski realizes that, although this is Europe, so maybe he believes that some manner of intangible transhistorical force will propel him to victory.

Probably, though, he's just trying to pin down the enemy landships so they can't join the NGF center's thrust towards Frankfurt an der Oder.


Delaying tactics have the potential to bear fruit, since as much as beating up the HRE has put a spring in the Byzantine military establishment's step not seen since the salad days of the 2GW, they would really like those forces back on that ridiculous two thousand some odd kilometer frontier of theirs. (Honestly, one look at these borders should disabuse anyone of the notion that there's any grand design behind the narratives history weaves. Things move, and then they stop, that's all.)


Anyway. It turned out Umiastowski's offensive didn't matter at all, in the end-- Ha simply wheeled around her forces to join the final push to crush the pocket at Dresden.



If I were asked to lead the defense of a strategically important city, I would simply not let the enemy encircle me.


The first of the RRP (and Ayitian, Marathas, etc.) volunteers have at long last arrived in Indochina. They're still getting organized, but they should help take the pressure off the rebels once they've got their act together.



I was quite surprised to find that the general in charge of the British volunteers was an acquaintance of mine, from my time in Edinburgh; General Rina Pandey and I often... frequented the same establishments, let's say. (She's queer as a three pound note, is what I'm getting at.) A certain degree of idealism is a common vice in the Red Rose Pact, but she's an idealist's idealist. The cause of much friction between One might be tempted to assume this was the reason she rose through the ranks so rapidly-- she was just a brigadier the last time I saw her, but I have it on good authority she's actually a very good soldier. Just the sort of very good soldier I am totally unsurprised to find out is leading a force of volunteers aiding anticapitalist revolutionaries on the other drat side of the planet.

I'm impressed, considering commitment clearly wasn't her strong point when we Good for her!



General Rina Pandey, of the British Red Army

The other half of the RRP contingent is headed up by a general named Kwasi Omenaa, who I've never heard of in my life, but seems competent and honorable enough.



General Kwasi Omenaa, of the Ghanaian Army

More intriguing are the representatives of the non-RRP communist militaries. The Ayitians-- keen to show that they can play nice after 2GW, maybe-- have sent a force under General Katrin Möhring-- a German, if you can believe it. Wonder what she makes of heading out to Indochina in the midst of everything going on in the Old Country. Probably something like, "Wow, I'm glad I left Germany." Well, that's what I'd be thinking, anyway.



General Katrin Möring, of the Ayitian Army

And then there's Marathas.


General Aruna Vrishchika, of the Marathan Anti-Capitalist Defense Force

Like nearly everything else to do with Rishma Sharqi's royal production of a theatrical adaptation of a communist revolution, I've heard numerous conflicting things about Vrishchika and the volunteers she leads. Certainly, with ten divisions at her command, she's bringing considerable power to bear on behalf of the Indochinese rebels, but to what end? A desire to prove herself to the more orthodox Marxists? A realpolitik attempt to contain China, perhaps? There isn't much in common between Marathas and the Japanese Republic, but they do feel every bit as threatened by Ming ascendency as we do.

Maybe it's an attempt to seize control of a narrative-- while the Byzantines were busy saving capitalist running dog lackeys etc., etc., Marathas is taking the initiative. The history of the Indochinese Civil War is a work in progress, after all-- I could easily see someone like this Aruna Vrishchika lady eager to rewrite it with herself as the hero.

In any case: she didn't have much to do with the first major joint operation between Trung's rebels and the international (or, given the ideological makeup of their sponsors, maybe International would be more accurate. Hah, I slay me.) volunteers.

Two divisions of Trung's folks and one of Rina's General Pandey's Brits were making a push in Liao to get Zhongnan Peninsula Company security forces back onto the river's west shore.


For the moment, though, the Company still seemed to have the upper hand-- but it's not as if the fighting had really started in earnest.


Things are fully capable of becoming much, much worse. What a rotten decade the '30s are turning out to be.


Oh well, nothing to be done but try to salvage the situation as best we can. Better to shed blood in a river than drown in it.




Latest from the front is that while Cao Liuxian('s employees) tussles over the Mekong with Rina international brigades from Great Britain, Ghana and Marathas, the rebels proper (with some Ghanaian logistical support) are making a play for the west, using the natural choke-points offered by the Tenasserim Range to take Momian.


Meanwhile, on the other side of the Eurasian supercontinent, a different civil war continues being fought over a different river. A number of costly attacks on Frankfurt an der Oder (a toponym whose specificity I enjoy a little more every time I write it) finally dislodged the last of Umiastowski's landships, but not before the HRE infantry safely across the river and took up positions an der other side of der Oder.


Against this backdrop, the Byznatine Commune continues to prepare for the much larger conflagration everyone knows is coming. The German Civil War (1.4 million casualties and counting!) is just a dress rehearsal.


Wonder if the same could be said of the Indochinese Revolution? Hard to say. Well, for one thing, if it were, that would imply that the RRP is going to come to the Allies' aid, which would be nice of them.


More importantly though, there's a sort of fatalism about the coming war that's set in among the Byzantines-- among the Near West as a whole, really. The assessment of my government (which in this case I agree with) is that armed conflict between the Japanese Republic and the Ming Empire is likely, and should be planned for accordingly. But I can still imagine chains of events where it doesn't happen, where this latest round of saber-rattling never gets beyond the level of proxy wars and border skirmishes. A few of 'em aren't even utterly farcical.


The Near Westerners know there's going to be a war. A fate impossible to escape; all that can be done is try to jockey for position. And wait.





And, again, that feeling isn't based on nothing. Valeria's sure there's going to be a war, too, and she's the one who'll be starting it. When someone tried to derail this express train to the apocalypse by shooting her in the head, they just found a new one.


The rebels got Momian, by the way. It's a staging ground for Ayitian, Marathan, Ghanaian, and British forces now.


Byzantion's taken notice of these successes. Officially, the government is pursuing the destruction of the HRE as single-mindedly as ever, but I have it on good authority that the Byzantines have sent an attaché to Trung's revolutionaries



One morning, when I opened the door to my office at the embassy, I found my own chair occupied by none other than Yoshida Kazuo (I really wish he'd stop doing that). Our subsequent meeting taught me two things:

1. All signs point to an increasing Byzantine involvement in Indochina-- provided Gaul doesn't attack in the interim. In that case, all bets are off-- you don't need to be a spymaster to know that much. Or a diplomat, for that matter. Being a person who's read a newspaper in the past five years or so would suffice.

2. I need to have my office's locks changed.


As much as I hate having to interact with 'the Wolf' (who calls himself that?), though, as usual his information was right. Within the week, the Commune began a lend-lease program, funneling such arms and materiel as could be spared to Trung et al.


Turns out that would be it for now, though. Things in Germany hit a speed-bump when the NGF-Byzantine attempt to secure a crossing over the Oder ended in miserable, miserable failure.


The Oder, it seemed, was where the Holy Roman Empire decided, in true fascist manner, to make their last stand.


Valeria looked to have already written off her German cats-paws, and turned her attention elsewhere. On September 7th, 1938, she gave a lengthy speech to mark the beginning of the integration of León into the central government of the Imperium in which she did not mention the German Civil War even once.


Of course, that same day carried news more immediately relevant to the Allies.



You know, the last time the Great Powers of Avalon tried to push the Aztecs around, a whole Great War broke out over it. The Haida trying to extract concessions from the Aztecs someone set into motion a chain reaction that ended with a few hundred thousand Byzantine soldiers dying in the mud at Oaxaca for no discernible reason.



Now a war breaks out, and it isn't even above the fold in the Byzantine papers.


I've read a bit of Marx, since that seemed like the sensible thing to do if I'm going to represent Japanese interests in the RRP. Anyway, one of his essays directly dealt with Byzantine history-- it was written in the wake of the Byzantine Civil War, which was a (frankly nearly incomprehensible) conflict between the Byzantine Republic and a bunch of Roman revivalists after something like half the country swore itself to the reclusive emperor of a Roman rump state which had preposterously endured on the isle of Rhodes (see what I mean about being incomprehensible?).

Anyway, Marx wrote this: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

But even that's giving history way too much credit, if you ask me. It's farce the first time around as well.


Thousands of people get themselves killed to hold a river for a megalomanical jewel thief trying to revive the Holy Roman Empire, which was a revival of the first Holy Roman Empire, which was in turn a revival of the Carolingian empire, which came about when the Pope crowned Charlemagne "Emperor of Rome" because he didn't like the empress of that other Roman Empire based in Constantinople, which was the surviving half of a prior Roman Empire that split itself into two Roman Empires, which spent the earlier part of its history pretending it was still the Roman Republic, which saw itself as the inheritors of and antithesis to a line of mostly-fictitious kings who claimed descent from a guy mostly known for being suckled by a wolf and committing fratricide, who was himself the distant inheritor of another guy who ran away when a bunch of Greeks hiding in a wooden horse burned down his city.


At no point was this entire chain of events not absurd.


Trying to find patterns in history is like trying to read the future from tea-leaves-- diverting on occasion, but not particularly useful or insightful.


General Ha finally got that Oder crossing she wanted, by the way.



So much for the empire's glorious last stand, then.


And so much for the empire, too. Even the absolute die-hards had lost hope.


What was left of the "Holy Roman Empire" capitulated unconditionally on September 17th, 1938. And the wheel turns once more.


WORLD MAP, JULY 23rd, 1938 (I played two updates worth of gameplay or so, so I don't have a map for the actual end-date of this post. :rip:)

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 03:56 on Jun 28, 2021

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Samovar posted:

This, uh... Vrishchika-person. You know, she looks a lot like someone...

Look, don’t worry a8out it.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Josef bugman posted:

I mean judging by how fast it is going we might be able to. The idiot in charge seems to have all the military intelligence of a GW1 era general.


Yes. For someone so obsessed with it, you'd think that Valeria would learn at least something from history.

Alongside that I had three questions. 1) How late can you play HoI up to? Like can we see what this game is like if we run it up to 1980? 2) Does anyone else have a little bit of foreboding about what is going on with the Haida? and 3) What would "annex tarraconensis" actually do?

1.) HoI IV has an end screen at the end of 1948, but you can continue playing past it indefinitely. Things will very quickly stop making sense if you go much further than that— I imagine the lack of a hard end-date is just to avoid a situation where a player is cut off in the middle of a lengthy war. That means I don’t know exactly how far this segment of the LP will go, but it’s probably not “until 1980” :v:

Which I suppose means I’ll have to think of some way to model the 250 or so years between HoI and Stellaris, I guess.

2.) no comment

3.) It continues the Gallic annexation of León by integrating an area which roughly corresponds to the old Roman province of Hispania Tarraconensis.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
Aurora could potentially be a good narrative fit, but also I absolutely cannot make heads or tails of it enough to actually, like, play it. This did remind me that I'm like a zillion pages behind on reading CominternLP, though.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Kangxi posted:

Just to clarify, the version of the mod Nora is using runs on Man the Guns, but not Revolutions or the Battle for the Bosporus.

The latter of which is particularly ironic, given the thread’s name. :v:

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

PART EIGHTY: A City of Gold, in Flames (September 17, 1938 - June 24, 1939)

More excerpts from the collected diaries of Mizuno Tomoe, the Japanese Republic's ambassador to the Byzantine Commune on the eve of the Third Great War.

For months now, my every inquiry to the Powers That Be in Byzantion about intervention in the Zhongnan Civil War was met with the same answer-- "The situation in Germany requires our undivided attention." Promises upon promises upon that as soon as the Kaiserin's gone, of course the Byzantines will intervene on behalf on their revolutionary sisters and brothers in Indochina, etc., etc.

Well, so much for that excuse. It's as dead as the Holy Roman Empire (i.e., extremely).


Now, it's possible the Byzantines won't be needed at all. News from the front is a mixed bag. It seems like Shanghai and Mogadishu both decided they had more important things to do than bail out Cao Liuxian, so the small contingents of WPO regulars who'd been milling about in Zhongnan are all quietly-- and rather sheepishly-- withdrawing. On the other hand, the idea that Zhang and Walashma have something 'more important' to do is frankly, terrifying, and almost certainly bad news for Kyoto and its allies.

More immediately relevant, Trung's rebels and the various underachievers of the RRP who tumbled into the war like clowns out of one of those tiny cars are still mostly bottled up west of the Dawna Hills. Some Marathan alpine troops and a few of Trung's rebels are making a play at crossing the Chao Phraya, but from what I've heard (from... sigh... Rina, who is unfortunately my inside source for the situation on the ground in Zhongnan), it's less an offensive than a horrible, spindly little salient that's just an encirclement waiting to happen.


Shouldn't let myself get too frustrated with the Byzantines, I suppose. They've got problems of their own. With Gaul eating Lai Ang bit-by-bit, I can see why they'd prioritize, say, reinforcing Gibraltar. Rina counsels patience, anyway, but she's hardly an unbiased source.




Gallic rhetoric-- always bellicose-- is increasingly targeted at Great Britain, the so-called "Handmaiden of Byzantium." Not really sure why that's become the focal point of their aggression all of a sudden; desire to shore up their northern flank after the NGF slipped from their grasp? I should cable Kyoto and see if our intelligence service knows what that's all about.


Hardly matters in the end, I suppose. No matter where the spark hits the kindling, the war will set all Europe aflame.


In Zhongnan Indochina Zhongnan, the frontlines continue to fluctuate wildly. Cao's loyalists and company troops are in the process of crushing the last few rebel holdouts on the Malay Peninsula, but the rebels have taken beachheads on the western bank of the Mekong, likely with the intention of driving south towards Saigon.


Cao's taking heavier casualties than Trung, but-- at least on paper-- is still fielding a slightly larger army, and still hanging on in all of its important strongpoints.


Haida & Allies pretty much rolling through the Aztec Republic effortlessly.


A more agreeable government has been put in place in México. Kind of anticlimactic, really. I'm sure Haida Gwaii is very happy to have dealt with their little separatist problem. Well, fewer distractions for the Allies is good news, anyway.



In Zhongnan Indochina, a combined Rebel-Ghanaian-Marathan-Ayitian-British (hi, Rina) army has got past the Dawna bottleneck and reinforced the salient-- at least somewhat. Ghanaians are right across the Chao Phraya from Taijing. Zhongnan Peninsula Company's making them fight for ever inch, though. Taijing is the jewel in the company's crown; Cao Liuxian's shining art deco utopia, glittering with the wealth stripped out of the rest of the country. Wonder if all the executives in their golden spires can hear the shelling just over the horizon from their fancy offices.

Later. Only half-remember writing the above paragraph. "Glittering with the wealth stripped out of the rest of the country"-- really, Tomoe? Can only conclude that I've been talking to too many Byzantines. Or at least that I should stop trying to write in my diary right after I get home from a Byzantine party.


Speaking of the Byzantines, guess who finally decided to show up.


Well, better late than never.



General Eudokia Akinyi, commander of the Red Pacific Volunteers

I was expecting them to send Valentina Ha (she of the German Civil War), but she's back in command of the Byzantine Army of the Alps.


Instead, they've sent Eudokia Akinyi. Technically not part of the 'Class of '36'-- she was already a part of the General Staff before Ha, Hau-fang, Halevi, et al were kicked upstairs, but she's young and ambitious enough to fit in with that whole crowd.

Some fellow named Anteros Cyrahzax is minding the shop along the Caucasus in Akinyi's absence.


Rina assures me that she's been specifically trained for the sort of warfare the Byzantines expect in Indochina Zhongnan. Sounded more as if she were trying to convince herself of that, though; I think she was hoping she'd get to meet Valentina Ha.



Byzantine volunteers arrived in Hanoi Henei Hanoi (well, that's what the rebels call it) on 1 November 1938, and promptly set off on a tear westwards to help their colleagues crush a Zhongnan pocket.


Turns out the colleagues didn't need the Byzantines to pile on, so Akinyi just kept on moving southwesterly, to reinforce a joint Marathan-rebel thrust looking to link up with the Taijing salient...


...and relieve a rebel division caught in a pocket of its own.


And so our little family gets a little bigger. Note to self: make congratulatory phonecall to my Haida counterpart in Byzantion re: his foreign ministry's good works. He'll be cross if I don't.



He's been testy lately; The Haida embassy is within earshot of the constant construction in Byzantion's industrial districts (and across the Commune in general, but you probably can't hear that from the Haida embassy and its environs.)




Concerning news from Zhongnan-- the attempt to relieve the Hele pocket has not only been turned aside by Company forces fighting with renewed vigor and/or paychecks, but the thrust is perilously close to being encircled itself.

Byzantines scrambling. Gen. Pandey Rina apparently going half-mad as her own divisions are nowhere near where they'd need to be to help.


First contact between the Byzantines and ZPC security forces. Akinyi's split her forces-- her two divisions of regular infantry will advance head-on, while her squishier Red Guard types will be sent around to flank 'em.



Told (by Guess Who) she's a bit annoyed at being stuck with Red Guard at all, and, considering that they're mostly known for dying by the hundreds of thousands in 1GW, can't really blame her. Clear sign this is a much, much lower priority for Byzantion than the German intervention, which got columns of brand new landships led by a soon-to-be celebrity.

So she took matters into her own hands and re-organized the collection of random communes and union locals that composed half her army into something a bit more military. (ooc: and then i took a screenshot of the wrong template lol)


The reorganized divisions were rechristened the 10th ("Qiu Zhao") and 11th ("Gaius Gracchus") Treaty Armies. The 'Treaty Army' was originally the little rump military left over after the Treaty of Jaragua dissolved most of the Commune's forces, scuttled the Red Navy, etc. That handful of divisions managed to keep the Commune together until the situation could be salvaged, so apparently the 'Treaty Army' designation has become something of a badge of honor for Byzantine regulars.

If I were leading an army and wanted to instill it with a sense of esprit de corps, I probably wouldn't choose a name that evokes one of the most humiliating defeats in the Commune's short history. Byzantines: kind of weirdos, honestly.


Thus reorganized, renamed, and rebranded, the Red Pacific Volunteers brushed aside the Zhongnan Peninsula Company forces moving to encircle the rebels...


...but their advance was cut off by reinforcements-- a mix of Company troops and Ming volunteers looking for an adventure-- under Valentin Baranov, a Russian general whose services Cao has retrieved.


Suppose that if your old boss was the Tsarina, you're one of the few people in the world who would consider working for Cao Liuxian a step up.

I mean, have you seen the hats Yekaterina makes her generals wear? Suspect she dug out some Roman mosaics c. the reign of Justinian and told her General staff, 'I want something halfway between that and a shako from a hundred years ago.' Frightful.


General Field Marshal of Third Rome Yeremey Kalyagin, noted fashion victim

And so, free of the distraction of half a dozen jangling pendilia bumping into his face at all times, Baranov halted the Byzantine advance.


With help from the RRP (and RRP wannabes like Ayiti and Marathas), it was possible-- although by no means certain-- that the Provisional Government of Indochina had more troops in the field than Cao, but Cao still held the balance of Zhongnan's infrastructure and industry.


Byzantion is trying to be a little more certain about those numbers. Although, honestly, I'm not sure if even Cao Liuxian knows how many divisions Cao Liuxian's got.



Akinyi easily fended off a frankly rather half-assed attempt to dislodge her forces from their position, but her offensive has still ground to a halt.


With most of the foreign volunteers getting bogged down in the northwest, situation in the east is deteriorating for the rebels. They've lost several vital Mekong river crossings, and are slowly but surely getting pushed towards the South China Sea.


Situation in the west more encouraging. Taijing still hasn't fallen, but forces under Rina Generals Pandey, Omenaa, Vrishchika and Trung herself are massing on the west bank of the Chao Phraya. Akinyi's finally punched through Baranov's corporate army and is tantalizingly close to linking up with 'em.


Baranov rushed in to try to plug the gap...


...to no avail.





Before the encircled corporate troops could be completely obliterated, though, a fresh army of loyalists hoved into view, so Akinyi had to divert her forces to deal with them instead of sealing the deal.


Zhongnan's getting desperate, I think. They know that if they don't push the rebels and pals back across the river, Taijing's pretty much doomed.


They've halted Akinyi's advance for the moment. Her army's pretty well battered now. A reprieve for all the fancy-pants in Taijing, then.



Pangalists capable of exhibiting some backbone when something threatens their profits. The Pangalists of the Lenape Republic, at least, have the benefit of being the lesser of two evils.


Another missive from General Pandey Rina arrived. The war's still in its bitter stalemate, apparently.


Not all bad news, though, she assures me. The RRP brass are apparently impressed with Ayiti's performance in Indochina, and seeking closer relations with their government.

In response, gently but firmly reminded her that as a diplomat for the Allies, the expansion of the RRP does not necessarily count as 'good news'. Still extremely disappointed in the leaders of the old Ayiti Federation for betraying the Haida and bringing down the fury of the RRP down on their heads. If they hadn't, maybe the Ayiti Federation would a.) still exist and b.) have joined its fellow liberal democracies in the Allies, making our position in Avalon utterly unassailable.

Suppose that's just how it goes, sometimes.


Rina then went on to excitedly write about some new trick the Byzantine artillery's picked up for pages and pages, each less comprehensible than the last.


What does she think I'm going to do with this? Honestly.


I guess whatever she was going on about worked, though; I just got a dispatch that Akinyi finally, finally got her offensive inching forward again.


But the same dispatch said that even as the Byzantine volunteers ground their way south, a Zhongnan Peninsula Company army managed to force its way back onto the west bank of the Chao Phraya. Give and take. Push and pull. See what Rina meant about the 'bitter stalemate'.


The mood in Taijing is reportedly quite bad, as the area under Zhongnan Civil Security forces slowly but surely contracts. Cao Liuxian is frantically sending cable after cable to Shanghai, begging Zhang Zhulin for reinforcements, assistance, anything.


Cao's a personal friend of Zhang's, apparently. The two of them go way back, long before the Business Plot swept the Pangalists to power, which is how his company got put in charge of managing the empire's southeastern possessions in the first place.


It's easy just to write off Cao as being wildly incompetent given that within a few years of coming to power it all blew up in his face, but Zhang held him in high esteem-- he'd exceeded all expectations for productivity and exports. Half the cars in Eurasia have tires made out of Zhongnan Peninsula Company rubber. Profits were way up and expenditures were way down from where they were during the period of direct rule from Beijing. Hundreds of miles of new railroad tracks were laid down. The numbers coming out of Zhongan looked good-- and he wasn't even cooking the book on those.


They just weren't the only numbers that mattered. There were other numbers Cao didn't bother to record, and Zhang never asked for. The huge and ever-widening disparity in wealth, standard of living, and access to essential commodities between the Chinese executive class in their shining cities and the peoples of the fallen kingdoms of Khmer, Champa, Manlejia, Thailand, and Annam. The rise in infant mortality. The decline in life expectancy.


The number of people who've had enough of all of this.


The massive, coordinated state action it took to subjugate those people in the first place.


The number of other nations in the world positively salivating at the prospect of poking a Ming proxy in the eye.


The number of loyalist troops left garrisoning Taijing.


Maybe if he had taken a longer look at those numbers, he could've stopped all of this. Enacted some of the palliative reforms that keep the wheels of market economies greased. Spent some money now to save money later. Generally acknowledging the fact that a good government is ultimately beholden to the Mandate of the People, and not just some boardroom full of well-heeled executive types.


But he didn't, so now communists have overrun the last pickets defending his capital city-cum-corporate headquarters he's being hastily evacuated all the way down the Malay peninsula to Xingzhou.


And Trung Cam Lynh is sitting in his chair.



The war wasn't over, of course. Rebels advancing on all fronts, and the ZPC forces are increasingly demoralized, but they still hold most of the south.


There's a definite sense the tide has turned, though. Trung's rebels have advanced well past Taijing, now, and Marathan and Byzantine volunteers are scurrying in their wake to fill out the new frontline.




It's possible the Marathans under General Vrishchika are trying to compensate for something. The Red Rose Pact has officially let the Ayiti Commune into their little club, and Queen Comrade Rishma Sharqi is still stuck on the outside, looking in.



In my professional opinion as a diplomat, there are three reasons for this.

The first is that the RRP are clearly consolidating their interests in Avalon. They've long had a stake in the region-- Nuevo Xi'an is a long-time member, and North Avalon played host to both great wars-- the crucible in which, for better or worse, the alliance was forged.




The second is that-- their little jaunt in Indochina aside-- the RRP isn't terribly interested in picking a fight with the Ming Empire while the Western Roman Empire France it's just loving France is still breathing down their elegant and fashionably-attired necks. It's just not in their interest to antagonize China too much, but agitating China is more or less Marathas's raison d'être (Pardon my Latin).


The third is that Rishma Sharqi and the people Rishma Sharqi likes enough to be brought into the regime instead of shot at a show trial? Kind of nuts.


With the end in sight, Akinyi's pushing herself hard. According to my inside source in the RRP expeditionary force Rina General Pandey Rina, she looks like she's pretty badly in need of a nap. Or possibly a stiff drink.


Not like Akinyi really needs to be at the top of her game, anyway; one gets the distinct impression that the war had entered its 'mopping up' phase.


With troops from Marathas, Byzantium, and the Union of Indochina proper sweeping eastwards from Taijing Bangkok now I suppose, Rina's British volunteers are taking point on the invasion of the Malay peninsula, steadily grinding down everything between herself and Cao's final redoubt.


I think I've figured out what the rest of the WPO thought was sufficiently important for Zhang Zhulin to write off Cao Liuxian as a bad investment and wash his hands of his old friend's plight.


The answer is "launching large-scale military operations against the Al-Said Sultanate."


Fatima Iqbal's government might not be a formal member of the Allies, but they're still ideological (small-a) allies.


The Japanese Republic and the rest of the Allies are all sending volunteers to aid Iqbal, of course, but, frankly, I'm kind of relieved they aren't part of the alliance. Confidentially, we aren't ready to get pulled into a war against the whole drat World Prosperity Organization.


Then again, we're hardly the only ones lurching towards a conflagration like we've not seen since the Hongwu Emperor sent Chang Yuchun to the Near West to see what's up with the western terminus of the Silk Road.


The Ming Empire and the rest of the WPO (including, hilariously, the rapidly-shrinking remnants of Zhongan) has joined in the fun. Which is just overkill, if you ask me. The Somalian Republic is more than capable of crushing the al-Said Sultanate into a fine powder under its own steam.


The RRP's just about wrapped up their little Indochinese adventure and/or audition for new member states.



Probably a relief to them, given how the Near West is rapidly losing whatever semblance of stability it still had.


The glorious victories of the people's revolution in Indochina isn't even front-page news in the Byzantine papers of record anymore.


It's all military build-up this, research and development that.


Everyone has the sense that something terrible is just over the horizon.


Suppose just what that terrible thing is is a matter of perspective, though. For example, the terrible thing Cao Liuxian probably sees just over the horizon is an impending trial for war crimes now that the rebels have got their mitts on him.


Rest in pieces, I guess.



So-- for the moment (perhaps a brief moment), the world once more holds its breath as it teeters on the brink of an abyss.



Well, not the al-Said Sultanate; they've already been pushed overboard.


The rest of us, though?


All we can do is wonder how much longer these calm waters can last...


...and when the storm will finally sweep in from the sea.


WORLD MAP FOR JUNE 24th, 1939

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Jun 29, 2021

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

QuoProQuid posted:

same mood:



(that's a us soldier wearing the crown of the holy roman empire after seizing nuremberg)

this guy rules

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Josef bugman posted:

Let's stay in the realm of the possible for now, shall we!

I did want to ask though, what does the Byzantine research and other set up look like now? Are we finally going to be rid of the "you are still building toasters" icon?

We did the focus to get rid of Byzantine Abundance at some point or other, although I'm not sure which post that happened in off the top of my head.

We should be getting a better look at the production situation in the next post. Probably. Maybe.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

PART EIGHTY-ONE: The Third Great War (June 24, 1939 - April 10, 1941)

Erinna Papadopoulou, like her lover Iouliana Erdemir, kept extensive diaries during the 1930s and '40s-- one of the most tumultuous periods in world history. Papadopoulou, then mostly known as the daughter of the famous Field Marshal Theodora Papadopoulou and a silver medalist in fencing at the Games of the IX Olympiad), took a very different approach to recording her thoughts than Erdemir (affectionately referred to as "Julie" in Papadopoulou's diary) did; whereas the tribune did her best to write a meticulous and accurate record of events, Papadopoulou's diary entries were much more freewheeling-- a patchwork of impressionistic prose, collages, clippings from periodicals, photographs, and even the occasional sketch. In subsequent decades, her work was recognized as artistic accomplisment, but until recently its historical value has been underestimated.

Editor's notes are in italics.

Meryem [Terzioğlu, wife of Evgenia Exteberria] asked Julie and I to sit for a portrait. She'd painted Julie and I separately before, but she wanted the both of us together. "A couple like you two," she'd said on the phone, "ought to be known by posterity."

"I'm not gonna say no to a Terzioğlu of myself and my girlfriend, but we aren't that special," I demurred.

"Do you know how many women like us have been elided from history?" asked Meryem, with the air of a professor inviting a favored-but-wayward student into a Socratic dialogue.

"No," I admitted.

"Exactly," said Meryem, "History books make it seem like between Sappho and Julia Radziwill, women in the Near West just stopped loving women for something like twenty-three hundred years before suddenly winking back into existence in the drat Baroque era. And even admitting that much is new. Wasn't so long ago-- in the great scheme of things-- that history books called Julia and Juno 'close friends and confidantes' and literary tradition still had it that Sappho's story ended with Phaon."

I envy her utter certainty that there would be a posterity to either forget or remember us, given the, well, you know:



A clipping from Constantinople Courier, July 8 1939 edition:

quote:

JAPAN DENOUNCES PLANNED MING NAVAL EXERCISES
Masaoka calls for emergency summit; Will diplomacy avert war?


KYOTO - Natsuko Masaoka, President of the Japanese Republic, has again demanded that the Ming Empire cancel planned military exercises that she says would see Ming warships "intrude upon the Republic's territorial waters" by passing through the Bonin Islands, an archipelago south of the Japanese home islands[...]

Masaoka has, however, stressed that it is not too late to seek a peaceful solution to the dispute. "Diplomacy can still work," she said in a radio address, "We urge the imperial government to agree to bilateral talks mediated by a neutral third party before it further pursues this restless course of action."

That aside, I did think it would be nice to have a painting of Julie and I, so off we went to the comfortable little townhouse Meryem and Ev shared in Phanárion.


Of course, the moment Julie and Ev were in a room together, they more or less immediately started talking shop. Well, I think it was talking shop; their conversation consisted of a bewildering series of statistics, acronyms, and numbers, which could have either been some extremely technical discussion of the Intelligence Secretariat's latest research into cryptography or an argument the woebegone state of the Byzantion Crimson's batting. Or possibly both. Meryem and I could barely understand a word of it, but the tribunes seemed to be enjoying themselves.



In any case, it was an pleasant night with some old friends, which is not the sort of thing Julie has time for often these days. Also, Meryem's sketched out the portrait and it is very cute.

The trip back to the House of the Golden Horn was miserable, though. The government's been expanding the rail network ever since Julie signed some big infrastructure bill the Ekklesia passed, which is good in the long run, but for the moment means a bunch of the local lines are shut down, which means more people driving cars, which means traffic jams from here to the Sea of Marmara.

"Hoist by my own petard," Julie murmured to herself, amused with herself, as our driver slowly inched the car down the Mese.


July 19th, 1939.

Old Lai Ang's rapidly disappearing from the map. Julie bundled off to an emergency session of the Ekklesia.



Turned on the radio for more news. But Lai Ang vanished from the airwaves, too, banished by news of shots exchanged at the Bonin Islands.


Third Great War started.


Well, the Ming have branded it "the Jimao War", after the current year of the sexagenary cycle; Zhang's regime is very brand-conscious, as always.

But it's the Third Great War.

The forces of the World Prosperity Organization and the Allies come sallying forth, by land and by sea.






The al-Said Sultanate's been invited into the Allies, and so their fight against the invading Somalians and Ming was folded into the larger war. (Does that mean the Third Great War retroactively started several months ago? Or did it not count until Great Powers started going at it?)


Julie's going to be some time at the Magnaura, then.



Called Meryem to let her know we won't be making the next sitting for our portrait.


A very bad week.


There's an eerie sense of calm across the Byzantine Commune. Everyone going through the motions, waiting for the Big One to hit us, too. The zeitgeist is decidedly somber-- funereal, even.




The General Staff has ordered military exercises across the frontier. Gallic invasion is a matter of if, not when; all we can do is prepare as best we can, as long as we can.


'Peace' endures for the moment, but training, equipping, mobilizing an army to fight the sort of war that's looming over us is already an endeavor massive enough to upend everything.




The fascists want us dead. Every one of us. In spirit or in body.


They will see everything on the European subcontinent-- all our peoples, all our history, thousands and thousands of years of stories and culture-- reduced to blank perfection, unchanging and eternal.

Mimeographed selections from Tacitus's Agricola, 30

quote:

The extremity of Britain is now disclosed; and whatever is unknown becomes an object of magnitude. But there is no nation beyond us; nothing but waves and rocks, and the still more hostile Romans, whose arrogance we can not escape by obsequiousness and submission. 4 These plunderers of the world, after exhausting the land by their devastations, are rifling the ocean: stimulated by avarice, if their enemy be rich; by ambition, if poor: unsatiated by the East and by the West: the only people who behold wealth and indigence with equal avidity. To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.

A desert, called peace.


Small bit of good news:

Clippings from the Athens Journal of Foreign Policy, week of September 29, 1939:

quote:

[...]Following the ousted President Azim Derya's tacit if grudging acceptance of the bloodless dissolution of the old Azerbaijani Republic, the socialist government led by provisional president Atabala Urxanoğlu looks to be firmly in control of Tabriz[...]


quote:

[...]with WPO troops at the gates of Iran, Azerbaijan's 'sister-republic' established alongside it by Noor Sallajer as she reorganized the fallen Roman Empire's easternmost provinces, Urxanoğlu has responded positively to the overtures of the Red Rose Pact. The fledling Azerbaijani Commune wants to avoid being drawn into the crossfire of the intra-capitalist struggle between the WPO and the so-called 'Allies', but still seeks the protection of a supranational bloc.




The Allies are having some difficulty in the land war, it seems. A combined Silla-Japanese-Hindustani army has been attempting to hold the line on the Korean peninsula, but against the full weight of the Ming mainland, it's a Sisyphean endeavor.


Volunteers from the North German Federation and Marathas(!!! Mutual loathing of Zhang Zhulin makes for strange bedfellows, it seems) are moving up to join the main Allied armies on the frontline, but it feels like that boulder's not rolling back uphill.


Can't help but worry we're seeing the future of the Italian peninsula played out in advance on the opposite hemisphere.


Most of Sillan Siberia is still under Allied control-- a Ming army under Field Marshal Wang Chengdong and General Ha Rongzhao is beginning to push them back from the frontier, but the balance of the territory is still controlled by a combined Japanese-Sillan army group under the overall command of Field Marshal Matsudaira Tsukasa.



Field Marshal Wang Chengdong and General Ha Rongzhao, WPO Army Group Korea.


Field Marshal Matsudaira Tsukasa, Allied Joint Forces Pacific Command

There's enough war news in the air that I'm so on edge that when Julie started talking about her displeasure at 'Vienna's successes against the Commune' I half thought the war had finally broken out.




She was just talking about the European Classic, though.

I will never, ever understand baseball. I can't conceive of a less elegant sport. Everyone is operating at such a remove from one another-- a batter and a pitcher might face off, but never truly take the measure of one another as they would if they dared meet blade-to-blade on the fencing-piste.


That's just not how war works anymore, though. Maybe in a few centuries, blasting one another to smithereens with howitzers or battleships will be an Olympic sport instead, with wars fought in some still more horrifying way.



Julie was showing me schematics for some of the technology the Commune hopes to employ to avoid our own little repeat of the Lightning War.

"Landships and landship accessories," I murmured.

Julie threw a pillow at me, but she laughed.



Anniversary celebrations for the 1884 Revolution, like everything else going on in Byzantion, are strange and subdued. It's never quite a joyous occasion, not in this city, the site of the Massacre of the Ten Thousand, the one place the Republicans really tried to stick the boot in. Mom was there and barely ever talks about it (except to say "It was chickenshit compared with the First Great War,"), but I've heard enough to know it's not exactly an occasion for dancing in the streets.

Still, even given that, there was clearly something heavy in the air as Julie gave her speech.

Mom leaned over to me as we listened. "This feels like a god-damned funeral," she said.


A whirlwind tour of the war:

Fighting's reached the suburbs of Seoul. Allied lines in Korea seem like they just fell apart after Pyongyang was lost-- although it's hard to say, since one imagines both sides' press accounts of the battle for the peninsula are heavily censored.


Things are going better for the Allies in India, though. Not only was Ming general Cai Wenli's invasion thwrarted, but Hindustani troops have marched right into Shigatse prefecture.



General Cai Wenli, of WPO Army Group Hindustan

Iran, too, has seen the Allies hold some Ming territory, although it still seems like things on that front are at a stalemate overall.



Field Marshal Cabdule Jilicow and General Otgonbayan Garamjav of WPO Army Group Persia


Generals Utsonomiya Reisa and Imagawa Seinosuke, Allied Expeditionary Force - Iran

The beleaguered al-Said Sultanate has arguably benefitted from becoming just another front in the Jimao War. When facing the Somalian Republic alone, the sultanate faced near-certain annihilation. Now, however, their once-crumbling pickets have been bolstered by a sizable Haida-led Allied expeditionary force and even a smattering of volunteers from the Red Rose Pact. (Not Byzantium, though-- We're hard-pressed enough to guard our own frontiers, Julie told the Ekklesia. We can't spare the troops to intervene in an intra-capitalist squabble, not with the wolves at the door and looking for a moment's weakness to fall upon us.)



General Berehanu Gedeyon, WPO Army Group Tripoli


General of the Army Meriko Aperahama and General Tetua-umeritini, Allied Joint Forces North Africa Command

War's already spilling over the bounds of the rival WPO-Allied blocs. Great Zimbabwe is not only not a member of the Allies, but it doesn't even have any political or ideological tie to them (save the existence of capitalism, I suppose)-- it's an absolutist monarchy. It wound up fighting with the Allies anyway.



Even Avalon has become a theater of the war; the outcome of the struggle of the Lenape Republic against a joint invasion by the Haida and Zheng He Bay isn't in doubt, but they aren't going to give up Mannahatta without a bloody and costly fight first.


This has led to something that must be a historical rarity: wars being fought on nearly every continent besides Europe.

The clock is ticking, of course.


Still, the sheer appalling scale of the a Great War as fought on the cusp of the 1940s has at least partially vindicated Julie's policies of rearmament and military build-up in the eyes of the electorate.



So she's expected to cruise back into the reelection with a fairly substantial Ekklesia majority at her back.



So there's that, at least.


A clipping from Constantinople Courier, January 1 1940 edition:

quote:

ALLIES TAKE HAINAN
KYOTO - A spokesperson for Allied Field Marshal Hisako Nobusawa confirmed that a Japanese army, with 'limited logistical support' from a division of Marathan volunteers, has successfully seized the island of Hainan. The island's principal port, Haikou, was reportedly left largely intact during the fighting and subsequent Ming evacuation, although the Courier could not independently confirm this.




Admiral Hisako Nobusawa

quote:

The announcement comes following a spate of bad news for Allies from elsewhere in the Asian theater, with northern Silla occupied with few prospects for relief, the situation in the south rapidly deteriorating, and WPO troops advancing all across the thousands of miles-wide Siberian front.




quote:

When asked if Hainan would function as a staging point for further amphibious Allied actions, the Navy spokesperson declined to comment, citing operational security.



The Red Army continues to grow, and grow better armed.






"Good thing the communists won in Indochina," quipped Julie.


Allies have indeed decided to use Hainan as a springboard for crossing the Qiongzhou Strait. Prematurely, surely? If the Allies can't even hold down Silla, a heavily fortified member of their Alliance, I'm not sure how they expect any beachead to hold without being instantly pushed into the sea.


At least Japan can probably absorb the losses, though. The Lenape Republic has successfully knocked Zheng He Bay out of the war, but with most of their territory-- including their all-important, oil-rich colonies on the Gulf of Mexico-- under Haida occupation, it's a Pyrrhic victory at best.


[Here, Papadopoulou has cut out haidagraph of a tombstone and pasted it onto the page]


[A second, slightly smaller tombstone]


Seoul fell, and within a few weeks, the entire Allied front in Silla disintegrated.



Silla's set up a government in exile in Kangwon, and they still have troops in the field in the rapidly-shrinking part of Siberia still controlled by the allies, but the Korean metropole's lost.



The Sillan rump state's just a shadow of its former stuff.


Jesus, the casualty reports.


And it's going to be like that here, too.


Sooner rather than later. Everyone knows it.

I haven't been sleeping well, lately.

"Join the club," said Julie; who hasn't slept well in the whole time I've known her.


Julie's off to some diplomatic summit in Hungary. "Time to hold my nose and make nice with the Müllerists," she said, on our way to the aerodrome, where she'd get on a westbound plane and then I'd be driven back to the House of the Golden Horn alone.


In her absence, I find myself bored, and quite lonely. The feeling of limbo that's hung over Byzantion since the Third Great War set the Pacific aflame is pronounced, so close to the center of the Byzantine Commune's political apparatus, so far from the woman at its heart.

I can't decide if the fact that whenever I turn on the radio to listen to a news broadcast, I can hear her voice-- mouthing platitudes about "the fraternal bonds of Global socialism", perhaps, gritting her teeth and declaring her adamant support of a man I know for a fact she detests (The feeling is likely mutual; however, Juhasz Zsigmond needs Iouliana Erdemir much more than Iouliana Erdemir needs Juhasz Zsigmond.)-- is a comfort or a painful reminder.


Is this what the war's going to be like, when it comes here? Pacing around the House of the Golden Horn in solitude, while Julie's nothing more but a voice on the wind or a name on a page, a constellation of grainy photographs and staticky speeches?


And the world burns all the while.


Just reread those last few entries. Rather grim, really. Spirits considerably lifted once Julie's plane touched down at Makrohori, and still more once she was safely deposited at home. She's asleep now-- fitful as usual-- but her mere presence soothes.

The next day she toured a Red Navy fleet that put in at Byzantion. Still comes down to war preparation in the end, but I'd be fibbing if I said we didn't make a pleasant day of it. Standing on the deck of great ships, sunlight and crisp sea air blowing in off the Bosphorus on our faces, all the beauties and wonders of Byzantion making a lovely vista of the horizon. She knew the admiral from the Second Great War, apparently.

Julie introduced her to me; her name is Hypatia Kiyohara. ("You know, like, Sei Shonagon's real name," sayeth Admiral Kiyohara, as if that meant anything to me.) She swore like... well, like a sailor (I suppose that's not just a cliché after all). Julie fit right in; for the afternoon, gone was the forty-year-old politician bearing half the world's weight on her shoulder-- she was again the gallant young naval officer, with all the world opening up before her.

She still didn't swear, though.


Anyway, some new kind of aircraft carrier (that looks like all the other aircraft carriers to me, but I'm told is quite advanced) was made the fleet's flagship. A short speech, a smattering of applause from the gathered sailors and press corps, and a rather dreadful rendition of the Internationale playing from a tinny speaker.


Later: Looked up Sei Shonagon and apparently she's some sort of horny Heian era author and diarist. Well, whatever, I guess.


Some organization reforms to the Red Air Force Julie was pushing for made it through the Ekklesia and onto her desk.

New Air Force chief seems to know a thing or two about aerial warfare.



The Intelligence Secretariat's been building up a pretty hefty technological lead over their Gallic counterparts (The so-called "Frumentarii"), because there's no organ of state that the fascists won't come up with a silly name for). Plenty of new toys for Ev and her people to play with, especially in the fields of cryptography.


Apparently we've actually decrypted enough of the French military ciphers (The Muri Aureliani; see above point re: silly names) that the Intelligence Secretariat has a fairly good picture of the overall state of imperial military readiness.

The Intelligence Secretariat has dubbed this steady stream of signals intelligence "The Visigoth Intercepts", because Byzantines can give things cheeky names, too.


The Allies are confident enough in their naval control of the Pacific that they've actually launched a raid on Shanghai itself. Given the overwhelming Ming advantage in the land war, the chance that the Japanese can hold it for any appreciable length of time are basically nil, but it's still a big propaganda win send the Zhang clique running inland and take a bunch of haidagraphs of republican troops marching down the Bund and waving the tricolor.


On the other hand, Allied casualties already far outpace WPO ones, so I have to question the wisdom of wasting further troops in an action that will have very little long-term impact.


Sure enough, in a little over two weeks, Ming forces had regained control not just of Shanghai proper but the entire Yangtze Delta.

Was it worth it?

I can't imagine having to make decisions like that.

And yet...


Pretty soon, that's the scale of decision Julie's going to be making.

And what will I be doing?


Julie came home ashen-faced, expression grim, bags under her eyes.

"What's wrong?" I asked, "Did something happen?"

"The Visigoth Intercepts," she answered, whisper-quiet. "France is expected to be at a state of total military readiness for large-scale operations against the Red Rose Pact in less than two months. We have less than two months."


And so our brief reprieve from the bloodletting of the Third Great War enters its last days.


Troops massing all along the frontiers. RRP navies and troop transports leaving their ports. Full wartime conscription measures have already been put in place. It's really happening.



My number came up.


I... I want this, I think.

Told this to Julie.

"Erinna," she said, "It's going to be a bloodbath out there in seventy days."

"I know," I said, eyes downcast, letting my gaze linger on the intricate geometry of one of the House of the Golden Horn's Persian carpets instead of having to see what expression she had.

"We need people working behind the lines, too," she said, an uncharacteristic quaver in her voice, "In the War Secretariat's offices, or in signals intelligence, or--"

"You know that wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be just."

"Please," she said, "Please, permit me this one weakness." I finally dared meet her eyes. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, but more than that, she looked afraid.

I gathered her up in my arms; her shoulders were trembling. "You know how that would look. I can't make you compromise yourself like that," I murmured, "And... and I want do everthing I can to protect this beautiful Commune."

She sniffled. "O-of course... of course."

But that still wasn't quite it. The feeling swelling in my heart was something different than mere patriotism, something entirely more powerful. "I want to do everything I can to protect you. If... if the Commune is overrun, if the government falls, if the fascists take Byzantion-- if they get their hands on you, then--"

A brittle laugh. "Bullet in the back of the head if I'm lucky. Show-trial if I'm not."

"If-- if putting my body between the fascists and Byzantion makes that even one thousandth of one percent less likely, I'll do it. I have to. I couldn't live with myself if I did anything less."

"Erinna... oh, Erinna." She clung to me tightly; Odysseus lashed to his mast.

"I know," I said softly.

***

I set off to report for induction amidst reports of WRE troops massing along the Russian border; mobile reserves that had been kept back from the frontlines were now rushing east to meet them if they attacked. When they attacked.


But there's a flurry of activity all across the frontiers. All around the Red Rose Pact, really-- Ghanaian troop transports are already arriving in the Mediterranean.




And the Ayitians and Nova Scotians are beginning the long Atlantic crossing.


Had less time to write lately. For obvious reasons; training and such. They've put me on the officer's track, so I suppose in time I'll be a second lieutenant with a platoon to my name. Have to wonder if it's actually based on my experience or skillset, or just my last name?

Of late, Great Britain seems to be particularly singled out for Valeria's wrath. Lots of talk of "our sovereign interests in Britannia." Typical Valerian triple-speak, really-- the old school French reactionaries and nationalists who back her regime think of the territories the old Kingdom of France held on the island-- Cornwall, for example-- before the 'century of humiliation' that began in 1836. But Britannia was also one of the provinces in Postumus's little Gallic Empire in the Crisis of the Third Century. And, of course, it was part of the Roman empire proper, whole and indivisible and eternal, the fact that Roman rule over Britannia was less than four hundred years of the 1,800 some-odd years in between the rise of Augustus and Alexios V getting his head cut off.


Military planners are expecting the first major WRE thrust to come along the Danube, though-- and that is where I'm headed, among all the newly-raised divisions reinforcing General Nadine Hau-Fang's Army of the Danube.


Julie saw me off.

And so did a gaggle of reporters.


Clearly intruding on a private moment, but, well-- I thought of what Meryem was saying last year about whether history would remember women like us. There are worse things than an achingly human moment becoming an icon.


And all the while, the clock ticks down.



And the world's pillars shake.


And crumble.


Thus on April 10, AD 1941 began the Near Western twin of the Jimao War, the other side of the Third Great War's coin.




The Imperial War.


The first shots were fired as the Gallic and British Navies battled for control of the Channel.


But within hours, the WRE was assaulting RRP positions up and down the Danube. Right where I'm headed as I write this, sitting on a train slowly making its way northwest of Byzantion.


Found a note in my pocket; Julie must have slipped it in there when she said good-bye.

[A note in Tribune Iouliana Erdemir's handwriting]

quote:

I would rather see her lovely step
and the motion of light on her face
than chariots of Lydians or ranks
of footsoldiers in arms.


Sappho, Fragment 16

WORLD MAP, APRIL 10, 1941

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Jul 10, 2021

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
I’m putting together a state of the world post soon— are there any screens/countries/whatever that you want to see in particular?

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
Aotearoa is a Haida dominion, which is why it’s a different color.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.


STATE OF THE WORLD: APRIL 11th, 1941

Transcript of a conversation between French communist resistance leader Jocelyne Rodier, several of her key lieutenants, and an agent from the Special Operations Executive (SOE) known only by their codename, Domesday. This transcript is derived from a recording surreptitiously made by a member of the Gallic comité de salut public (CSP, also known as the Consilium Salutis Publicae) who had infiltrated the Resistance; the recording, however, never made it to their superiors in Paris-- it was intercepted and forwarded to the Byzantine Intelligence Secretariat.


Jocelyne Rodier

RODIER: War's on.

DOMESDAY: Yes.


RODIER: Visigoth was right on the money, then.

DOMESDAY: To the hour.


RODIER: gently caress me. I can't loving believe the Frumentarii haven't changed their codes yet. loving amateur-hour bullshit.

DOMESDAY: Too much emphasis on cracking down on domestic dissent, if you ask me.

RODIER: Well, look around you-- I'm still alive, so clearly they're doing a poo poo job there, too.

DOMESDAY: [laughter] And thank God for that. In any case, just as predicted, the first shots of the Imperial War--

RODIER: 'The Imperial War'?

DOMESDAY: That's what the papers in the RRP are calling it.

RODIER: Whatever. So, the first shots--

DOMESDAY: Fired in the English Channel. Gallic submarines under Admiral de Beauharnais attacked Republic Navy ships patrolling the Channel under Admiral Elphinstone at the stroke of midnight, Paris time. Right off the coast from Portsmouth; I'm told people ashore can hear the battleships' guns firing.


RODIER: Too early to say how it's going to shake out, then.

DOMESDAY: Yes. But I'm curious if you have any thoughts?

RODIER: Thoughts, yes, cold hard facts, no. The Navy's cleaned house-- lost a lot of people there. Vicious, efficient. Cold-blooded. We don't have many eyes on the Admirality anymore.

DOMESDAY: I was under the impression that the Gallic Navy was less sympathetic to the fascists than the other branches of the imperial military.

RODIER: They're sympathetic enough to kill for the fascists. Which makes them fascists.

DOMESDAY: That wasn't what I--

RODIER: I know. What you meant is that the Navy thinks of itself as less fascist.

DOMESDAY: Right. No Latin cognomina, no legionary helmets, maintaining the traditions of the old royal French Navy.

RODIER: That's just an aesthetic sensibility coupled with self-delusion. They tell themselves they're holding their noses at the fascists' trough, but they're still content to dig in.

RODIER: All of which is to say-- of the navy, I only have only suppositions.

DOMESDAY: And your supposition?


RODIER: They can't hope to contest the Byzantine navy for control of the Mediterranean. Your Royal Navy--

DOMESDAY: It's the Republican Navy now.

RODIER: --fine, your Republican Navy looks like a much softer target. The Roy--Republican Navy probably still outstrips the imperial navy in a pitched battle, but it's no Byzantine Red Navy...


RODIER: So de Beauharnais is trying to tear a great big bloody chunk out of it while the Byzantines are securing the Med and trying not to lose Gibraltar.


DOMESDAY: Anything else you can tell me about Gibraltar?

RODIER: Besides some Ayitian general jumping the gun on the offense?

DOMESDAY: ...Besides that, yes.

RODIER: Legate Rossignol's in charge of the Gibraltar offensive. He has a few legions-- the 17th, likely-- but the backbone of his forces are the Leónese army formations absorbed into the Gallic Legions.

DOMESDAY: How are these ex-Leónese forces performing?

RODIER: Who knows? Ask me again when the war's been going on for more than six hours.


RODIER: Also I hope you're ready to deal with commerce-raiding. Even the Commune is still a net importer of some crucial war goods like rubber and tungsten, and Great Britain sure as hell isn't the Byzantine Commune.


DOMESDAY: We've prepared contingencies, of course.

RODIER: Of course.

DOMESDAY: In the short term, however, the situation is especially chaotic, since so much transatlantic traffic goes on WRE and RRP-flagged ships. Even passenger transportation--

RODIER: ...since before all of this, who had most of the big gently caress-off ocean liners? France, Ayiti, Britain, and North Germany. And North Germany's port facilities all got mauled in the civil war, so effectively all your options for getting the hell out of Europe are flying the flags of one belligerent or another.

DOMESDAY: Exactly. And a lot of people are keen to get the hell out of Europe. Citizens of neutral countries, mostly-- or, well, neutral in this war, since most of them are probably from the Allies or WPO. Can't really blame 'em for deciding they'd rather take their chances in the middle of the Jimao War than whatever the deuce is about to happen here.


DOMESDAY: Especially since the fighting's died down in Avalon. After the WPO was pushed back out of Zheng He Bay, the Lenape armies went into full retreat. Now the whole Lenape Republic's being occupied by the Haida, Iroquois, and Zheng He, and the guns have fallen silent.


RODIER: What's the state of things in the rest of the Jimao War?

DOMESDAY: Business as usual, for the moment. In the coming months, I expect the sudden disruption to exports from the RRP and WRE to make itself felt. Right now, though, it's the same bitter stalemate it's been stuck in for months. The Republican Japanese Navy and Haida Navy's control over the Pacific is unassailable, so the Ming can't do anything to threaten the Japanese home islands-- but also every attempt to invade mainland China ends in disaster, since the Ming army is more than capable of throwing anything the Allies try landing back into the sea. Haida task forces, Japanese armies, even volunteers from North Germany-- they all might as well just be throwing themselves onto Ming machine-gun emplacements and coastal fortifications.



DOMESDAY: The situation is more fluid on the war's other fronts, to be fair. The Somalians are still grinding their way through the al Said sultanate, the Allies are trying to hold the line but are slowly but surely being pushed back-- but if they do manage to parry the Somalian thrust, they'd be well-placed for a counteroffensive.0


DOMESDAY: Things are even more chaotic in southern Africa, since Great Zimbabwe-- which had absolutely no political or ideological ties to either side in the Jimao War-- got pulled into the fighting none-the-less. We don't have much intelligence on the state of General Mareye's invasion-- Great Zimbabwe nominally isn't a proper member of the Allies, just a 'co-belligerent', so our usual sources in the Allied diplomatic services can't help us much here.


DOMESDAY: We have a better sense of where things stand in Asia, though. The Iranian army-- and other Allied forces in the theater-- have taken the brunt of a major WPO offensive out of Transoxiana. The WPO has managed to get past the Zagros Mountains, so the Allies are left to fend for their lives on the Iranian plateau proper.


DOMESDAY: The Allies are having better luck in Hindustan, though; not only have Ming attempts to break through the Hindustani lines come to naught, but the Ming client state in Tibet's fallen to the Hindustanis.


RODIER: So. In short...

DOMESDAY: Oh, right. In short, the actual shooting war's confined to these fairly contained theaters.

RODIER: Meanwhile we're about to torch all Europe. So everyone who's not stuck living here wants out.

DOMESDAY: That's about the shape of it.

RODIER: But there's no neutral passenger shipping to speak of.

DOMESDAY: Right.

RODIER: So people took British or Ayitian ships. Which means when the shooting started in the Channel, those ships were caught right in the middle of the Navy's little exercise in commerce-raiding. Which means...

DOMESDAY: Submarine attacks, yes. Just got word this morning that the MV Hibernian got torpedoed this morning.

RODIER: gently caress.

DOMESDAY: There were 1500 people on that ship. We're still waiting for an official death toll, but we're fairly certain the number of survivors is in the dozens. Poor blighters barely had time to swing out the lifeboats.

RODIER: gently caress. I wish I could say I was surprised, but I know how cheap life is to the fascists.


The sinking of the North Atlantic Line ocean liner MV Hibernian by the Marine Impériale submarine Zenon le Méchant

DOMESDAY: The crew was mostly British and Ayitian, but a lot of the passengers were citizens of Allied nations-- people trying to get home to Haida, Zheng He Bay, Tianhui Catalina, Anacaona, wherever. I'm a little surprised they'd risk provoking the Allies like that.

RODIER: What the gently caress are the Allies going to do about it? Go to war? You just listed all the reasons that's not on the table.

DOMESDAY: I still don't see what the point was, though.

RODIER: Like a lot of what the fascists do, it's two different things at once. The first-- and I'm sure this is what the sailor who fired the torpedo thought-- is that every liner sunk diminishes the shipping capacity of the Red Rose Pact. They know all those big British liners wound up being converted into troopships in the first two Great Wars, and the Third isn't going to be an exception-- all those Ayitian and Nova Scotian reinforcements and war goods have to make it across the Atlantic somehow.


RODIER: The military's real loving worried about the overseas RRP powers-- safely located across the ocean from the WRE, where the imperium's ships and planes and landships can't get 'em. They'll do anything they can to choke off that constant flow of manpower and equipment.



DOMESDAY: What's the other thing?

RODIER: A message, written in blood. They're teaching the rest of the world the same lesson they've spent the last decade beating into the French-- your life is in the empress's hands, and you are never, ever safe.

RODIER: Anyway, the Battle of the Channel is just a sideshow. We know this war isn't really being fought so that Shitface Fuckhead, comte de Wherever the gently caress, can reclaim the French Kingdom's glorious royal patrimony by conquering loving Cornwall.

RODIER: The point is erasing the Byzantine Commune from existence. So the real hammer blow's fallen along the Danube.


RODIER: Great Britain was in the rhetorical crosshairs, but let's get real. She sent some submarines at your navy. She's sent three goddamn legates to dislodge Hau-Fang from the Danube.

DOMESDAY: That would be Legates Mogontica, Vormatia, and Fortissima.

RODIER: Jesus Christ, don't call them by their loving agnomens. Legates Lemaire, Blondeau, and Binot, please.


DOMESDAY: We had assumed that the first major WRE offensive would be an invasion of the Italian peninsula, since most of the good Alpine passes are already on their side of the border, and because Italia would be quite the feather in Valeria Postuma's cap. But it looks like it's Hungary on the chopping-block at the moment.


RODIER: Postuma doesn't give a rat's rear end about Hungary. They're just in the way. Also, I hope you guys are keeping an eye on your Eastern flank. WRE troops are massing along the Poland-Russia border.


RODIER: Let's get down to brass tacks. Is the RRP ready for what's happening?


DOMESDAY: As requested, we have a dossier prepared detailing the Red Rose Pact's current military posture. In broad strokes, mind.

(SOUND OF PAPERS SHUFFLING)



RODIER: Ayiti Commune's a pretty big get for the RRP, huh? Look at these manpower and production numbers...

DOMESDAY: Relying on Nitaino's government was a risky bet-- the whole thing could've easily imploded since socialist government was basically imposed at bayonet-point after the Second Great War. But as you can see, it's a risky bet that paid off in full.


DOMESDAY: And they're far from the only friend we have in Avalon. There's the dominion of Nova Scotia--

RODIER: Can they still be a 'dominion' since you guys ditched the queen?

DOMESDAY: Well, they haven't stopped calling themselves one yet, anyway.


DOMESDAY: Nuevo Xi'an's nothing to sneeze at, either.

RODIER: Good at killing fascists, too, from what I hear.

DOMESDAY: The Right made an attempt to seize the reins of state back in the '20s. Let's just say they won't be doing that again.


DOMESDAY: There's also the Maya Republic-- a recent addition to the Red Rose Pact, but still one of the oldest communal republics in the world--


DOMESDAY: --and the Habsburg Commune.

RODIER: ...the "Habsburg Commune."

DOMESDAY: What?

RODIER: That's the stupidest name for a country I've ever heard.

DOMESDAY: To be fair, "Habsburg" is being used as a toponym in which their communal republic is situated, so it isn't named after the dynasty per se...

RODIER: They should really think of something better.


DOMESDAY: Moving right along. We also have a fairly sizable presence in Africa-- slightly closer to the frontlines, but still at a safe remove from the actual fighting. For example, in British Congo...

RODIER: Speaking of countries that could use new names, holy gently caress.

DOMESDAY: It's simply a by-product of the orderly transition from overseas dependency to self-government--


RODIER: Save it. Say what you want about the Byzantines, but they know how to decolonize the right way.



DOMESDAY: Ghana, of course, was one of the founding members of the Red Rose Pact. In terms of manpower, industrial output, and military contribution to the Pact, it is surpassed only by Ayiti and, of course, the Byzantines themselves. The Ghanaian Army Air Corps-- by certain metrics slightly larger than either the Ayitian or Byzantine Air Forces-- could be particularly critical. Assuming we can still stage those assets in in Europe-- if we lose control of Gibraltar, that might be a bit dicey.


RODIER: Does the RRP have any assets in Asia?

DOMESDAY: Strictly speaking, no. The two communist governments in Asia-- Marathas and Indochina-- aren't members of the Pact. They are-- understandably-- more concerned with the Ming than anything going on in Europe. Marathan volunteer units are well-represented among the Allies, for example.

RODIER: God, can you imagine how drat awkward it'd be for the Hindustani soldiers serving right alongside the Marathis?

DOMESDAY: Well, despite the long enmity between the two great powers of the Indian subcontinent, a mutual desire not to be swallowed up by the Ming Empire has ever been common ground between them.


DOMESDAY: As for the Commune of Indochina... well, even if it weren't for the Jimao War happening on their doorstep, I can't really blame them for not wanting to plunge into a Near Western entanglement more or less immediately after independence, however much RRP forces under Generals Pandey, Akinyi, et al contributed to that independence. Relations between Indochina and her sister communes are warm nonetheless-- they are the leading exporter of tungsten to the Byzantine Commune, for example, as well as a major supplier of rubber.

RODIER: The two major war goods the Byzantines can't supply domestically. Right.

DOMESDAY: In this light, one could argue that Indochina can better contribute to the cause by maintaining its ability to sail under a neutral flag rather than whatever meagre contribution of divisions it could make by directly involving itself.


RODIER: Any chances of pulling the Marathans in?

DOMESDAY: The Byzantines have been reluctant to pursue closer relations with Marathas, especially in light of Sharqi's recent purges-- footage of the regime's show trials made it out of Marathas, resulting in an outcry in the Byzantine press and a significant chilling effect on the already tenuous relations between the Commune and the Marathan state. I'm told that the Foreign Secretariat's current thinking is that with Ayiti in the Red Rose Pact, it won't be necessary for Byzantion to sully its hands to avail itself of Marathas's not inconsiderable manpower and industrial capacity.

RODIER: Is this really the time for scruples like that, though? If Gallic legions go marching down the Italian peninsula, I don't think anyone is going to think, well, at least we kept the RRP ideologically pure.

DOMESDAY: I'm inclined to agree. In any case, the Byzantines haven't entirely discounted the possibility of approaching Marathas-- they're keeping that in their back-pocket, at least.

RODIER: Hm.


DOMESDAY: Additionally, there is one formal member of the Pact in Asia-- the Azerbaijani Commune, which is making an invaluable contribution towards keeping the RRP's landships, ships, and motor vehicles fueled and operational.


DOMESDAY: Europe itself will be the war's main battlefield, of course.

RODIER: ...Who could've possibly guessed. (SOUND OF PAPER SHUFFLING) Okay, let's see...


RODIER: The Irish Republic and you Brits are insulated from the land war, even if de Beauharnais's submarines are trying to chew off your leg in the Channel.

DOMESDAY: For the most part. Great Britain is within range of imperial bombers, though, so there's still a certain degree of risk to our civilian population centers.


RODIER: You guys are still better off than, say, the Lithuanians, though.


DOMESDAY: We've dispatched a sizable expeditionary force under General Ainsley to shore up Lithuania's defenses. WRE forces are massing along the Russian border, but they haven't pressed the attack yet.

RODIER: Any defense of Lithuania seems like it'll be a delaying action at best. But, gently caress, that's better than nothing. Fighting an enemy like the fash means you loving take what you can get.



Lieutenant-General Beatrice Ainsley, Continental Expeditionary Force - Lithuania

RODIER: Hungary's taking the brunt of things, of course.


DOMESDAY: The RRP has committed a fairly large portion of its ground strength to the Danube Front. In addition to the Hungarian armies under General Király Zsusanna and Hau-Fang's Byzantine Army of the Danube, there is already a sizable Ghanaian contingent present. Further reinforcements from Great Britain, Ayiti, Nova Scotia, and Nuevo Xi'an are currently en route.


General Király Zsusanna, commander of the Hungarian People's Defense Force's Danube Defense Area

DOMESDAY: To their credit, the Byzantine Commune has really put their back into defending Hungary. So far, the only fighting in Byzantine territory proper is in Croatia, which is mostly an extension of the larger battle for control of Hungary.



DOMESDAY: The Byzantine War Secretariat believes that an enemy offensive into Italy is imminent, however. The Armies of Milan and the Alps are well dug-in, but the fighting is expected to be bitter and hard.


RODIER: So, near-term, we're looking at a defensive war of attrition.

DOMESDAY: Assuming the frontlines hold, yes.

RODIER: Pretty slow-going. But I guess that's more time for Byzantine industry to churn out guns and landships. Too bad getting more soldiers isn't that easy.






DOMESDAY: In summary-- the Red Rose Pact is spread out across the globe, which can result in difficulty coordinating forces from far-flung commands-- to say nothing of physically moving military assets from outside the Near West to where the fighting's actually happening. On the other hand, the alliance is clearly dedicated whole-heartedly to the entire Pact's collective security; even the Müllerists in Hungary and Lithuania clearly have the other member-state's unwavering support in the face of fascist aggression.

RODIER: Sure loving hope that rosy little prediction is true. But the war's been going on for six hours, so who the gently caress knows.


Prime Minister Mary Napier of Great Britain, Tribune Iouliana Erdemir of the Byzantine Commune, General-Secretary of the Hungarian Union Juhasz Zsigmond, Prime Minister Akwesi Konadu of Ghana, and Tribune Mayneri Nitaino of the Ayiti Commune, at a Red Rose Pact summit in Budapest, February 1941, in which the RRP reaffirmed their continuing commitment to the defense of Hungarian territory from fascist aggression.

RODIER: I'll go over all of this in more detail later, but it looks like you've held up your end of the bargain.

DOMESDAY: So you'll tell us--

RODIER: Yes. Marguerite! (Rodier is referring to Marguerite Thomas, a member of her Resistance cell responsible for gathering and collating intelligence)

(SOUND OF DOOR OPENING AND SHUTTING)

MARGUERITE: Ma'am?

RODIER: Give the man his dossier.

(SOUND OF HEAVY OBJECT HITTING TABLE)

DOMESDAY: ...this is fairly substantial.

MARGUERITE: It's everything we've got on the fash.

DOMESDAY: Going through all of this will take time. Give me the high level version, if you please.

MARGUERITE: You'll go through the whole thing later, though? We worked hard to collate all of this.

DOMESDAY: Of course.

RODIER: Go ahead, Marguerite.

MARGUERITE: Okay. Um. Right, the Western Roman Empire. Also known as the Imperium Romanum Occidentale. Even though that's an ahistorical term only used to refer to the western provinces of the old Roman Empire in retrospect as a means of historical periodization--

RODIER: Marguerite.

MARGUERITE: Right, right. The Western Roman Empire!



MARGUERITE: The most recent addition to the Western Roman Empire is Third Rome, the fact it's well to the east of the actual Roman Empire notwithstanding. Even during the brief existence of Kiev-Byzantium, the tsar's domains clearly formed the northeastern extremity of the empire, and-- well. Anyway. Both Valeria and Tsaritsa Yekaterina secretly thinks the other one are a bunch of uncouth barbarians play-acting as the real heirs to Rome, but they both agree that the Byzantine Commune ought to be crushed. Valeria Imperatrix might have turned her nose up at 'the Kievan Pretenders', but Valeria Postuma is pragmatic enough to paper over that dispute for the sake of hundreds of thousands of Russian conscripts pouring into the Moldavian Plateau.


MARGUERITE: There's a sizable Russian army under General-feldmarshal Konstantin Mukhomorov linking up with Gallic armies on Byzantium's eastern flank, but it looks like they're not fully mobilized just yet.


General-feldmarshal of the Army of Third Rome, Konstantin Mukhomorov.

MARGUERITE: Similarly at odds with the WRE's ostensible raison d'être is Iceland, although at least Iceland's goals are mutually incompatible with Valeria's-- they just want to bottle up a little bit of the old magic of the medieval merchant republic which once ruled the whole North Atlantic. As you can probably guess, Iceland doesn't exactly bring much to the table in terms of production, manpower, or materiel. But it is strategically located between Great Britain and Ireland and Nova Scotia, which could be useful for attempts to disrupt RRP shipping in that region.


MARGUERITE: Slightly more integrated into the WRE proper is Poland. Poor, poor Poland. You almost have to feel sorry for them. One minute you're in an alliance because the king of France is your distant cousin, the next minute you're glued to a bunch of fascists plotting world domination.

RODIER: They were happy enough to take Valeria's guns and landships to kick Bohemia in the teeth.


MARGUERITE: Austria occupies a sort of in-between state, not quite an ally of convenience like Russia or Poland, but also not a puppet state in the manner of the Foederati. As best as we can tell, Austria wants a strong WRE hegemony over the Near West, without themselves being subsumed into Gaul in the way that León was.

DOMESDAY: I imagine the annexation of León was a shot across Klara Ma's bow.

MARGUERITE: If she's bothered by that, she sure hasn't shown it-- Austria is the staging point for the entire Danube campaign, and Austrian legions are well-represented among the WRE forces spearheading the offensive.


MARGUERITE: The Austrian commander of that theater is Praetur Otto Karl zu Ffannhofen und Wissenau, with Legates Siegfried Hafner and Ernst Neudinger serving as corps commanders.


Praetur Otto Karl zu Ffannhofen und Wissenau, Legatus Siegfried Hafner, and Legatus Ernst Neudinger.

DOMESDAY: What about Portugal?

MARGUERITE: The so-called nation of Portugal--

RODIER: Too small a country to matter. Move on.


MARGUERITE: ...well, that brings us to the Foederati, then. In Valeria's eyes, worthy barbarians being uplifted by the empire in return for military auxiliaries.

RODIER: In other words, client states not quite ready to be swallowed up like León was, but still kept on a tight leash.

MARGUERITE: The South German Foederati are a composite of various southern German states outside of Austria's Hui-German cultural sphere but also left out when the Holy Roman Empire united around northern Germany under the Habsburgs. The balance of their territory belonged to the former Kingdom of Bavaria, but it also includes smaller German states conquered by the Kingdom of France, but left as difficult-to-govern exclaves after the wars of the first half of the 19th century.

MARGUERITE: Batavia, on the other hand, was once Holland, the last surviving outpost of the old Yaroslavovich dynasty. The king hasn't been seen since the fascists seized control of the government, though.

RODIER: A loose end. The Imperium hates those.



MARGUERITE: Which brings us to the Imperium Galliarum proper.

RODIER: The only member of the WRE that really matters.


RODIER: Honestly. If you really want to know about Valeria Postuma's allies, don't look at her foederati, vassals, or other international hangers-on. Look at her cronies.

(SOUND OF PAPERS SHUFFLING)


From left to right: Praetors Laurentin Vannier Rhenanicus and Augustine Guilbert Germanica, Valeria Postuma, Grand Admiral Hélène de Marcognet, Censor Alexius Vodenosid, and Praefecta of the CSP Antoinette Thiébault

DOMESDAY: Who am I looking at here?

RODIER: Postuma's inner circle.

DOMESDAY: I suppose that's Rhenanicus and Germanica with the marshal's batons.

RODIER: What did I say about agnomens? They're Vannier and Guilbert.

DOMESDAY: Right, right. Two of the three praetors who brought North Germany to its knees in the Lightning War.

RODIER: The third one is there, too-- before she molted and became Valeria Postuma, she was Praetor Anne de Vence.

MARGUERITE: That's her doing the Augustus of Prima Porta pose just behind them.

DOMESDAY: Is that what she's doing? I'd assumed she was just gesticulating wildly. Who's that to the right, by-the-by? I don't recognize her.

RODIER: Grand Admiral Hélène de Marcognet. Postuma's pointwoman in the Navy, to keep all the aristos and nationalist fossils in line. She also loving hates the British-- I imagine she's part of the reason so much of Postuma's rhetoric in the lead-up to the war targeted you guys and not the Byzantines.

DOMESDAY: And the fellow in the toga and business suit?

RODIER: Imperial Censor Alexius Vodenosid.

MARGUERITE: The Vodenosids were a Roman family of Cretan origin which eventually achieved Senatorial rank-- even after the Senate was abolished, the Vodenosids regularly occupied various high offices during the Radziwill and Second Yaroslavovich dynasties. Alexius is the distant descendant of a general loyal to the last emperor, who fled to France after Sallajer's revolution cut that emperor's head off.

RODIER: He's one of Valeria Imperatrix's people, so he's one of the links in the chain connecting her to Postuma's administration. In addition to controlling 'public morality', he's the regime's main propagandist.

DOMESDAY: ...what happened to the woman at the far right? She...

RODIER: Former head of the CSP. Current corpse.

MARGUERITE: (Laughs) Hopefully she'll have some company before too long.

DOMESDAY: I suppose congratulations are in order to your organization, then.

MARGUERITE: I should return to my other duties, ma'am. I--

(GUNSHOT)

(SCREAM)

(LOUD THUD - FEEDBACK FROM MICROPHONE)

DOMESDAY: I-- what-- Jesus Christ, Rodier, Jesus bloody Christ, you just-- you just shot her and--

RODIER: Look. She had a tape recorder hidden on her.

RODIER: We need to get moving. We aren't safe here. We--

(CLICK)

(RECORDING ENDS)

State of the World, 11 April 1941

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 04:00 on Aug 5, 2022

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
Rome is where the heart is.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
Green is what the country natively produces and uses, blue is what they import, and I thiiink yellow is what they export, but I don't have the save in front of me right now.

Also apparently Lithuania has had elections since the beginning of HoI4, which I guess is a bug in the mod, since they're meant to be Müllerists. Oh well! Let's just call them sham elections and move on, I guess. :v:

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
Yeah. As of that SotW, they have some volunteers fighting with the Allies, but they aren’t actually a member of any faction, so they aren’t a belligerent in either half of the Third Great War.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Jeoh posted:

I'd love to see an infrastructure map of the world to kind of get an idea how messed up things'll be





This is the infrastructure map as-of April 11th, 1941, so there's been some build-up since the initial situation in 1936.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

PART EIGHTY-TWO: The Far Side of the Woods (April 11, 1941 - June 19th, 1941)


Excerpts from Cambridge University professor of modern history Esperanza bint Ifrain al-Tammar-Wu's A Reordering of the World: The Life and Times of Valentina Ha (Cambridge University Press, 2015)

CHAPTER 10: VENICE

It was 11 April, 1941. Across the Near West, great engines of war began to lumber forth. In the English Channel, imperial submarines fell upon the Home Fleet of Great Britain. In the Mediterranean, Byzantine submarine squadrons and Gallic destroyers attached to the fleet of Admiral Gabriela Fatima Hu-- former dictator of León, and still in command of both the remnants of its vaunted navy and vessels of Gaul's own navy.


Meanwhile, the former Leónese army-- supported by Gallic landships-- began their siege of the Rock of Gibraltar.


Klibanophoroi East-- a mobile rapid response force under General Flaminia Montemarano, named for a sort of armoured cavalry[1] employed first by the Sasanian Empire and then by their Roman adversaries-- meant to be held in reserve, was rushed to the Belgorod frontier in response to Gallic, Polish, and Russian armies massing along the border.


Within hours, a joint Gallic-Russian offensive under Panteley Meshcheryakov was attacking Montemaramo's positions.


On the shores of the Baltic, the British Army stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the Lithuanians as Legate Parmentier Saxonica's legions began their invasion of this small Commune.


And, of course, the Battle of Hungary had begun, with the full strength of the WRE war machine engaged with grim purpose to shatter the Byzantine Red Army and Hungarian People's Defence Force armies trying to hold them back.


But along the Alps-- long at the centre of the Byzantine Commune's pre-war plans-- the guns were yet silent. General Valentina Ha, hero of the German Civil War, dashing star of newsreels and magazine articles, and the most seasoned landship commander the Red Rose Pact had at its disposal, was left to sit in her office at the Army of the Alp's Venice headquarters, thinking of the Ming Frontier Army's invasion more than five hundred years ago.


'The period between Chang Yuchun arriving in the Near West in 1370 and the Hungarian League shattering the empire he built in 1436 is less a series of wars of conquest and resistance,' she wrote to her husband[2], 'and more a re-ordering of the world. The Ming Frontier army rolled in like the tide and receded just as quickly, but the landscape left in its wake was irrevocably altered.'


She continued:

"Letter from Valentina Ha to Ioannis Kegen Qara-Khungirat, 11 April 1941 posted:

History never stops, of course-- the present is the sum of everything-- everything-- that came before. But it's fair to say that some historical events are so monumental as to be in a class all of their own. Will the present conflict be as equally complete a re-ordering of the world? It seems all but inevitable. Whatever the outcome-- victory or catastrophe, liberty or empire-- whether the future belongs to the Rose or the Wolf or to no one at all-- an Old World is in its death throes, and something else will take its place. Valeria is determined to bring about the eradication of the Byzantine peoples; we, correctly, see that self-preservation requires the destruction of her Imperium, stem-and-root. To the loser, annihilation-- to the winner, a new world, the Near West remade in their image.

For Ha, then, the war played out in dispatches and intelligence briefings, on maps and in aerial haidagraphs. Sometimes the news was encouraging-- RRP lines in both Hungary and Belgorod were holding for the moment, and Imperial casualties were far outpacing those of the defenders.


On other occasions, Ha found herself more concerned, such as when she got word that a large Gallic fleet had slipped into the Mediterranean while the British Republican Navy was focused on the battle for the English Channel, and the Byzantine fleets were dispersed across the Commune's ports, ready to suppress commerce raiders or submarines when Red Navy patrols spotted them.


'The attack on the Channel fleets, Postuma's rhetoric against Great Britain-- was it all a feint?' Ha wrote in her war diary.


'The Grand Admiral of León, of all people, would know that however formidable the combined Classis Imperialis is, it's hardly a match for the Red Navy. Our ships, however, have been caught out of position-- Grand Admiral Hu could do some major damage before an adequate response could be scrambled.'


'Questions upon questions-- is this a hit-and-run? An attempt to divide and conquer? Some sort of nautical attempt at guerre eclair?'


'Pointless questions for me to ask,' she continued, 'I have my responsibilities, and the Admiralty has theirs.'


Ha's state of mind during this early phase of the war is often characterised as mounting frustration, or even a simple desire for the glories of battle-- the Hero of the German Civil War, resentful at being stuck at her desk even as this 're-ordering of the world' was unfolding all around her. The RRP's media-- radio broadcasts, newsreels, and newspapers alike-- was rapidly filling with stories of heroic exploits, whether of exceptional individuals, such as fighter aces or landship troopers--


--or whole formations, cities, regions, nations. The classic example of this is the defense of the Lithuanian Commune. In pre-war planning, its fall was seen as inevitable; its position, surrounded on all sides, indefensible.


Yet British soldiers flooded in as reinforcements, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with their Lithuanian comrades, daring the Gallic, Third Roman, and Polish forces surrounding them to try to advance one step forward.


General Rina Pandey-- previously a major figure in the RRP's intervention in Indochina's Trung revolution-- proclaimed, 'Let no one say that the Red Rose Pact has forgotten the world's small nations,' and the quote quickly became famous throughout Byzantium.[3] Byzantine Field Marshal Theodora Papadopoulou-- less sentimentally than Pandey-- in a meeting with the commander of the Army of the Danube, General Nadine Hau-Fang, observed 'Every landship that's up there is one that isn't down here.'


From her diary and personal correspondence, however, it is clear that Ha's feelings are more complicated than anything so simple as envy of those closer to the fight. 'I know that what I'm doing is important,' she wrote, in another letter to Qara-Khungirat, 'I know that.' These read like the word of a woman trying to convince herself of something. Although she didn't elaborate on the current military situation (She took operational secrecy seriously, unlike some of her more blasé comrades[4]), she was well aware that the defence of the Alpine passes was of the utmost importance. A break in the lines in her sector would be disastrous-- WRE forces could conceivably march straight to the Adriatic and cut the Byzantine Commune in two, flank the Byzantine Army of Milan and begin an advance down the Italian peninsula, or both.


Yet, as is often the case-- in history and in life-- the intellectual knowledge of a thing that is true does not necessarily mean emotional acceptance of it. Ha was a woman who felt things deeply and acutely; like Pandey (and unlike Papadopoulou) she had a sentimental streak. Sentimentality is not always paired with unseriousness-- she accepted the cold logic of wartime exigency, followed her orders, and stayed at her post without hesitation or complaint. Clearly, though, as casualties mounted, the commander of the Army of the Alps was intensely unhappy.


Valentina Ha's War Diary - 16 April, 1941 posted:

The North German Federation has sent a substantial force of volunteers to aid us. Nominally, they have sent four divisions to the Byzantine Commune, but they have sent similarly-sized detachments to every individual member of the Red Rose Pact, adding up to entire field army's worth of NGF troops and armour. Such a provocative gesture! Meier's government is counting on the fact that the Imperium will prioritise avoiding the opening of another front in northern Germany over punishing the Federation for its insolence. Brave of them-- but I suppose they don't have any choice. If the RRP is destroyed, they will be left alone on the continent with the victorious Imperium, and they quite reasonably don't like their chances in that situation-- even before the derangements of Valeria spread, the French militarists and rightwing nationalists had long dreamed of erasing Northern Germany from the map.


Valentina Ha's War Diary - 16 April, 1941 posted:

The Marathas Anti-Capitalist Defence Force, on the other hand, saw no need for that sort of sleight-of-hand.


Valentina Ha's War Diary - 16 April, 1941 posted:

Some of the North German generals are familiar faces from the Civil War. König, Hell, Reibling, Kerr, and Wanner all have a corps or two to their name. Some names I don't recognise-- Behrmann, Wilbs, Kirschner, and Duttmann. Presumably they've been brought up to replace the generals who went over to the fash, who are mostly dead, in prison, or in exile in Third Rome. It'd be nice to catch up with old friends and meet some new ones-- König worked especially closely with me in the critical phases of the German war.

Nothing for it, though. I'm told the Germans are mostly headed up to the Belgorod front (i.e., at the complete opposite end of the Commune from me.)


North German Federation generals Anton Behrmann, Frederika Wilbs, Werner Kirschner, and Josefina Duttmann

Valentina Ha's War Diary - 16 April, 1941 posted:

The Marathan force, on the other hand, seems to be mostly under the command of members of Rishma Sharqi's immediate family. Not too broken up about not getting to meet them.


Narasimha and Anandi Sharqi, the son and daughter of Marathan dictator Rishma Sharqi.

Valentina Ha's War Diary - 16 April, 1941 posted:

Lines still holding-- in Hungary, and Belgorod, and now Croatia. Fash thrust aimed straight towards Istria; hope Mom and Dad are keeping safe. Yannis, too.

Just heard Montemarano's counterattack failed. Suppose she thought the Third Romans were a softer target than the Gauls, but they were well dug-in.


Valentina Ha's War Diary - 16 April, 1941 posted:

We're winning the attrition war. Imperium doesn't have enough manpower to keep this up forever, and the Pact has a clear advantage in the production of war materiel (and, therefore, in the replacement of losses.). But, God, what a miserable way to win a war. By the time they've bled themselves dry, we'd be most of the way dead ourselves.


Valentina Ha's War Diary - 16 April, 1941 posted:

And if that's if the Imperials don't get a breakthrough. If they defeat our pickets before their little war machine runs out of gas, then God help us all.


This tone is typical of Ha in these first weeks of the Imperial War-- less frustration, more melancholy. In her words, even unalloyedly good news for the Red Rose Pact-- Grand Admiral Hu's fleet finally being cornered by the Ostia Home Fleet and the Republican Navy's Mediterranean Squadron-- is shot through with a sort of pessimism.


While noting the 'recent victories in the Western Mediterranean'...


...Ha was mostly concerned about the effect such massive naval actions would have on the Commune's dwindling supply of fuel.


Discontentment of a different sort was mounting in the WRE's Praetorium. The initial Gallic strategy-- to secure bridgeheads across the Danube to flank the RRP forces protecting Budapest-- seemed to have stalled out for the moment. Valeria Postuma declared that determining best approach to address this setback was the main topic of her daily war conference on 18 April.


Praetor Laurentin Vannier Rhenanicus proposed a bold change in strategy. 'If the centre of gravity of the Red's defense of Hungary is in the West-- let us go east,' he said, 'An offensive through the Carpathian mountains will break through a weaker segment of their frontline, leaving their entire enterprise off-balance.'

Préteur Laurentin Vannier Rhenanicus, Magister Militum of Army Group Carpathia

A long discussion followed. Rhenanicus's fellow praetor (and alumna of the Lightning War) Augustine Guilbert Germanica was skeptical of the idea, suggesting that a better strategy would be a reinforcement of Army Group Adriatric's invasion of Byzantine Croatia, bypassing the Hungarian capital entirely. Préfet du prétoire[5] Claudia Guilleminot, on the other hand was more optimistic about Rhenanicus's prospects for a breakthrough, and recommended that Valeria Postuma sign off on the plans.

Valeria seemed to dither for a while, not used to seeing her two favorite praetors at odds with one another-- in the Lightning War, Valeria Imperatrix's three praetors-- Vannier, Guilbert, and de Vence (which is to say-- Postuma herself) all acted with remarkable coordination, generally taking important military decisions only after reaching consensus. Once she made up her mind in favor of Rhenanicus's proposed offensive, however, she allocated substantial resources to it. 'If this risky stratagem is to succeed,' said Postuma, 'We must put our backs into it.' Accordingly, plans for Operation Sphaera[6] were drawn up, and forces allocated. True to her word, Postuma diverted significant materiel and personnel to the newly formed Army Group Carpathia-- if Sphaera were to fail, it would not be for lack of resources. Rhenanicus, as the so-called 'magister militum' of the fledgling army group, was given charge of six field armies-- four Gallic Comitatenses[7]-- VI Victrix, VII Gemina, IX Hispana, and XII Fulminata-- and two Austrian field armies, Armeeoberkommandos II and III.


Rhenanicus's subordinates: Légats d'Auguste propréteur Mathieu Philippon Corvus (Comitatensis VI Victrix), Thérèse Blondeau Vormatia (Comitatensis VII Gemina), Alexandrine Chapuis Invicta (Comitatensis IX Hispana), and Victoire Lefort Hanseatica (Comitatensis XII Fulminata); Austrian Generalobersten Siegfried Hafner (II. Armeeoberkommando) and Ernst Neudinger (III. Armeeoberkommando)

Sphaera was launched on the midnight of April 27th. The Byzantine, Hungarian, and Ghanaian troops manning that sector were caught completely by surprise. Reinforcements from the Danube Reserve Army (then under the command of Byzantine general Gavriel Halevi) were scrambled as soon as the alarm was sounded-- it was hoped that armoured cavalry and motorised infantry could be rushed into the fray before the WRE's own armour could achieve a breakthrough.


It was too little, too late. The forces available to meet the armoured spearhead of Hanseatica's Comitatensis XII Fulminata fought valiantly, but they were hopelessly outmatched.


At 9:00 pm CET, XII Fulminata broke through the line of Hungarian fortifications along the northern frontier, and RRP forces in the area were forced to withdraw towards the banks of the Someș.


An immediate counter-attack was launched to try to push Sphaera back before the WRE could dig in, but it was decidedly disorganised and, at times, outright chaotic. Armour, motorised infantry, and infantry from Halevi's reserves were rushed to the frontlines as quickly as possible, all moving at wildly different speeds. The resulting congestion was worsened by traffic moving the other way-- the remnants of the units forced back by Hanseatica's initial attack, attempting to retreat in good order, found themselves caught in a flood of civilian refugees fleeing the oncoming Gauls. This was the first major conquest of RRP territory achieved by the Imperium in the war so far; the full extent of their brutality in occupied areas was yet unknown beyond old stories from the Lightning War and vague rumors. Hungarian civilians, however, weren't inclined to stick around and find out just how true those rumors were.


The war had come to the Transylvanian plateau.


Even well to the west of the breakthrough proper, the RRP's positions suffered from constant attacks and withering artillery barrages at all hours of the day; the lines began to buckle dangerously.



By 6 May, those, too, broke, and an armoured column under the command of Legate Vortmatia rolled into the Hungarian city of Miskolc, advancing all the way to the Tisza river.


All Ha could do was it in her office in Venice, and read the casualty reports as they rolled in.

'I suppose we're still winning the so-called attrition war,' Ha wrote in her war diary, miserably, 'But that hardly seems to matter when our armies are in retreat up and down the lines. Even a pyrrhic victory can open the way for more sustainable gains.'


On 8 May, Rhenanicus launched the next phase of Sphaera-- a pincer movement skirting the Apuseni mountains, with the intent of encircling and capturing Cluj-- the historical capital of the province of Transylvania.



By 12 May, the situation had further deteriorated-- WRE troops had succeeded in crossing the Tisza, gradually tightening the noose around Budapest.



In Paris, Rhenanicus was duly fêted. Valeria granted him an ovation[8] on 15 May-- 'A celebration of victories already won,' she said, 'A promise of triumphs to come.' Astride a white stallion, draped in the purple-trimmed toga of a senator, Rhenanicus rode under the great arch erected over the route of the triumphal procession held at the conclusion of the Lightning War ten years ago, where Valeria Imperatrix's three victorious praetors-- Anne de Vence, Augustine Guilbert, and Laurentin Vannier-- came down the Champs-Élysées in chariots drawn by four horses, followed by their armies in parade-dress, landships, and military lorries carrying trophies seized from the North German Federation. On that august occasion, Imperatrix crowned them each with laurel wreaths, and bestowed upon them the agnomens history would remember them by[9]-- Europica, Germanica, and Rhenanicus. On this occasion, Rhenanicus received a far humbler crown of myrtle, but it was still the first such honor granted in the Imperial War.

Valeria Postuma, in the shadow of the triumphal arch, also gave one of the famous set-piece orations of her reign-- the De Cultura Occidentalis ('On Western Culture') speech-- recited first in French, then in Latin, and broadcast throughout the WRE, including to troops up and down the thousands of miles of frontline that streched across the breadth of Europe.

It was delivered with the clipped, military bearing Postuma always seemed to have, but the words theselves were presumably the work of censeur et préfet des mœurs[10] of Public Morality Alexius Vodenosid; it at once further developed the themes Valeria Imperatrix used in her 1931 speech proclaiming the Imperium Galliarum and justified the state of prolonged total war any defeat of the Red Rose Pact would require, when no such privations were necessary to vanquish North Germany.

De Cultura Occidentalis posted:

[...]The Red Gracchans, their intellects contorted and narrowed by their slavish adherence to Marxist dogma and 'historical materialism', have become so literal-minded that even the true meaning of the phrase Western Roman Empire eludes them. They think we are modeling ourselves after the portion of Rome that rotted away in AD 480[11]. They ask how we can be a 'western' empire when we have embraced the Third Rome whose territories once comprised the northernmost and easternmost extremity of the medieval empire.

'Western' is not simply a geographical descriptor, and it certainly is no ode to the degenerate and thoroughly Germanized fifth century remnant. We are not a Roman Empire that is to the west of some point of reference. We are the Roman Empire, which is Western.

The whole of European history has been the eternal struggle between the virtues of the West and the degeneracy of the East. It is a pattern we see again and again in history. Ten years ago, on the day of our great Imperial revival, I [i.e., Imperatrix] observed, the Romans 'sought to bring western virtue and martial vigor to Greece and Anatolia. And, indeed, these regions became some of the most important provinces of Rome. But it was a poisoned chalice, for the decadent oriental luxuries of Greece began to infect the ruling classes of Rome.'

The result was an empire constantly at war with itself. When the old Roman empire looked west, it found strength; when the empire looked east, it found decay and weakness. For every sturdy conquerer like Traianus Optimus, there was an effete philhellene like Hadrian[12] waiting in the wings. The former brought the empire to its greatest extent; the latter set the terminal boundaries from which it would spend the next thousand years retreating.

This internal conflict became most acute in the final seven-hundred years of old Rome before it was finally cast down by the she-devil Sallajer. This was an era that was at once host to some of the greatest rulers and conquerers the West has ever known-- Alexius I Comnenus, who restored the empire's honor after the humiliation of Manzikert; Juliana the Great, who destroyed the Bulgarian Empire when it dared defy Roman authority; Valeria the Apostle, who led her army in triumph to Rome itself ; Basilike Yaroslavovna, who vanquished the Ming hordes besieging Europe; and of course, our beloved Living Saint, Valeria II Comnena Imperatrix, the Iron Sword of God, unifier of all Christendom, scourge of heretics, remaker of the world, eternal victrix of the empire. Even in the last stage of the old empire's terminal decine-- the so-called "Roman Commonwealth" there were occasional flashes of brilliance; the aptly-named Traianus III is still among the greatest generals to ever walk the Earth. But by this point, the empire had already rotted from the outside-in-- saving a polity so compromised by Greek debauchery, sexual deviants, street radicals, asiatic barbarism, proto-socialists, oriental despotism, 'Sinicized' institutions, unassimilated minorities, self-defeating palace intrigues, and incipient mob rule was a Sisyphean task.

But now, the empire has the privilege to begin again. The new empire we are building will be an empire reborn in fire, steel, and blood; the imperfections and contradictions of the old empire will be burned away. Just as the Living Saint united all the West under one Church and one God, we shall unite it as one imperial Roman nation, eternal and indivisible, moving as one to advance the cause of Western civilization. We can do all of this-- together; even our wayward brothers and sisters squatting in the ruins of the old empire have their part to play once the wicked commissars who have led them astray and other undesirable elements beyond remediation or rehabilitation have been culled.

The world will begin again. We will begin again.

This fascist statement of purpose was noted by Ha, still in Venice, and is mentioned several times in her writing. In a letter to her husband post-marked the day after De Cultura Occidentalis was promulgated, she made two off-handed references to it. "As usual," she wrote, "Postuma speaks the Latin of someone who's spent too much time reading Caesar's Commentaries and not enough time reading anything written in, oh, the last thousand years or so. Her insistence on classical pronunciation makes matters even worse; the Gauls always sound like they're trying to speak with their mouths full of peanut butter." The second comes near the end of the letter. 'Postuma seemed to attribute the fall of the Roman Empire to Germans, "sinicization", heresy, heathenry, effete philhellenes, Greek debauchery, the miscellaneously "asiatic", street radicals, minority ethnicities, Germans again, wicked commissars, sexual deviants, and, finally, the Germans. I think between the two of us, we have most of those covered.'

In her war diary dated shortly afterwards, she shared more somber thoughts:

Valentina Ha's War Diary - 16 May, 1941 posted:

The future only exists because of all the past piled up behind it. I think about all of the historical circumstances that had to line up exactly for people like women like me to exist. The mass migration that was the real legacy of the Ming Frontier Army, the Hui nobles of southern Germany throwing their lot in with the Hungarian League and the foundation of the sultanate Ao Di Li, Ao Di Li's expansion into Istria, the Roman Empire's later conquest of that same region, the fall of the empire, the rise of the republic, the fall of the republic, the rise of the Commune, and its evolution into the sort of society where I was not only free to be myself, but had the vocabulary and concepts to articulate it and the tools to achieve it. Sometimes, looking back at the grand sweep of history, I feel a sort of vertigo, like I'm perched atop some sort of narrow spire, and beneath me is the vast majority of other times and places that eventually led to the particular one I was lucky enough to be born in. In most of the rest, I suppose I would have wound up living as a man out of sheer inertia. Or, more likely, not living at all.

I already knew that Postuma's world is one that would push me right off my little perch, because I'm not an idiot-- I didn't need to listen to some overwrought Latin harangue to know that. It was still odd to hear her state her intentions so bluntly; I can't help but wonder if Fatima Hu's having some buyer's remorse about signing away Lai Ang to a leader whose stated goal is to assimilate it into a homogenous blob of an empire.

More than that, though... the empire Postuma wants to rule isn't just a collection of land and people; the unity she wants to impose somehow goes even further than the elimination of distinctions of culture or language. She longs for an empire stretching across time itself-- history collapsed into a single imperial present, unchanging, permanent enough to dispense with the need for having a future at all. Could she actually do this? Well, no, obviously; people are people-- fragile and fallible and beautiful and human; they'll never be the militant, virtuous automatons the Imperium wants them to contort themselves into. Even if her armies defeat us, even if the Commune is crushed, even if we're all lined up against the wall and shot-- in the end, it won't work. In the end, she'll fail.

But, God-- she'll make a charnel-house of the world in the attempt.

On the same day, a tense conference of RRP leadership was convened in Budapest. General Hau-Fang, of the Army of the Danube, noted, 'The problem we're facing is one of coordination. Halevi has his landships and infantry, and I have mine, and we have been left to separately try to shore up a crumbling frontline and launch localized counterattacks.' Papadopoulou, less diplomatically, said, 'We sent our reserves to the front all higgledy-piggledy.'


The most obvious task to be accomplished was to regain air superiority over Hungary. The dwindling fuel reserves caused by the necessity of large-scale fleet actions in the Mediterranean notwithstanding, additional wings of the Byzantine Air Force were transferred to airbases within operational distance of Hungary. Yet this would have to be paired with some sort of change in how the ground forces were deployed, lest the front collapse before the BAF can even start flying missions in the region.


The Belgorod front, on the other hand, remained stable. Montemarano's Klibanophoroi East and Stanotas's Army of Belgorod were successfully acting in concert to hold the line. The Klibanophoroi's mobility allowed it to serve as a rapid response force complementing the Army of Belgorod's more dug-in defensive positions.

This successful arrangement would become the basis for a reorganisation of Byzantine forces in the Danube theater. The so-called 'Reserve Army of the Danube' (which had ceased to be 'reserves' in any real sense of the word) would be dissolved. Its infantry would be integrated into the Army of the Danube. Meanwhile, the motorised and mechanised elements of both armies would be combined into a separate command. The name of this new formation would of course be Klibanophoroi West.


And when it came time to name a commander for this mobile field army, the choice was equally obvious.

With Halevi taking responsibility for the Army of the Alps, Valentina Ha departed Venice. In the German Civil War, Ha had proven herself not only an accomplished landship general, but a woman of sharp political instincts and an almost subconscious mastery of image-making. Now, it was time for her to step onto the next grand stage the drama of her life would play out on: Transylvania.


Klibanophoroi West order of battle c. June 1941, when the transfer of infantry and mobile troops between it and the Army of the Danube was nearly complete. The reorganisation was carried out in phases to prevent large-scale disruptions to the frontlines.

CHAPTER 11: TRANSYLVANIA

In antiquity, the region later known as Transylvania was the core territory of the Kingdom of Dacia. The final Dacian king, Decebalus, attempted to preserve Dacian independence in a series of wars against the Roman Empire. The Romans, as was their wont, crushed these aspirations. Trajan and his legions presided over the kingdom's ultimate destruction,
and incorporated it into the empire as the province of Dacia Traiana. The Romans promptly set about extracting wealth and resources from their new conquest; the new province's gold mines (and the Dacian laborers doing the mining) was a major engine of the Roman economy until the Crisis of the Third Century. By the time the emperor Aurelian I was attempting to stabilize the seemingly-crumbling empire, Dacia seemed like an indefensible salient jutting out from the Danube frontier-- and in any case the gold mines had been exhausted. He withdrew the legions and administrators from Dacia; the Daco-Roman population left behind was, perhaps, the ancestors of the population of Romanian speakers spread out across what eventually became Hungarian Transylvania and Byzantine Muntenia.[13]

Over the following centuries, a variety of powers dominated the Transylvanian plateau-- the Goths, the Huns, the Avar khaganate, the First Bulgarian Empire. Sometime around the 10th century, Transylvania was conquered by the Hungarians. When Stephen I inaugurated the Kingdom of Hungary, Transylvania was incorporated into it.


The Kingdom of Hungary and its neighbors, c. 1081

Hungarian rule of Transylvania continued without interruption until the arrival of Chang Yuchun's army in 1370. By the early 1400s, with sprawling holdings throughout the Near West, Chang turned his attention to the Danube and its environs. In an attempt to forestall the Ming Frontier Army's seemingly inexorable advance, Queen Lucja of Hungary and Dowager Empress Alberade, regent of the Roman Empire on behalf of the young empress Basilike Yaroslavovna, formed the First Hungarian League.

Too little, too late.



Decades later, the War of the Second Hungarian League met with significantly more success. Battles were fought all over the Near West as the Hungarians and Romans were joined by Ming vassals from Persia to Portugal hoping to overthrow the heavy-handed rule of the clique of generals who inherited Chang's fraying empire. Transylvania, in particular, was one of the most heavily contested in central Europe.


Indeed, a Ming army commanded by General Guo Xiaoping remained in the field into the 1440s, existing in a liminal state between the Frontier Army's legitimate successor states-- Lai Ang, Suo Ma Li, Da Qin, and Yilang-- and the ethnically Hui nobles who sided with the Hungarian League, typified by Ao Di Li.


This loose end was cleared up by 1450, however, and the Kingdom of Hungary's dominion over Transylvania would remain unchallenged until the kingdom itself was overthrown by communist revolutionaries in 1928. In Transylvania, Juhasz Zsigmond's Müllerist cadres seamlessly stepped into the role once occupied by royal administrators.


This history was at the forefront of Ha's mind on the lengthy journey from Venice to Cluj, where she planned to establish Klibanophoroi West's headquarters. In between working her way through reports from various theaters of conflict-- this was around the time Grand Admiral Hu's fleet limped its way out of the Mediterranean, and subsequently lost five submarines, cruisers, and seventeen destroyers when intercepted by the Republican Navy-- Ha read Ardizoglou's Transylvania: A Concise History.


'I don't expect to gain any immediately useful insight from Ardizoglou's history,' Ha wrote in her diary, 'I don't need to be bloody Lucius Domitius Aurelianus to know salients are points of vulnerability and a shorter frontline is more defensible. It's just important to know something about the place I'm going to be fighting in, some sense of these peoples and their history... enough to remember that there's more to this region than topographical maps, grid squares, and troop deployments.'


Meanwhile, the naval situation continued to improve. A joint British-Irish task force, supported by Byzantine submarines, successfully cornered the flagship of the Marine Impériale, the aircraft carrier Valeria and its escorts, and destroyed them.


Notably, the killing blow on the Valeria was dealt by the Irish destroyer LÉ Columba.


For the foreseeable future, the Gallic navy would be restricted to submarine-based commerce-raiding. This considerably improved the Byzantine Commune's petroleum supply issues-- Klibanophoroi West and its supporting Air Force wings wouldn't be left wanting for fuel.


News from the Jimao War also pointed towards a better supply situation for the RRP-- an Allied amphibious attack on South China, unlike some half-dozen prior attempted landings and raid, seemed to have gained a beachhead on the Chinese mainland. This opened up the tantalizing possibility that the months-long stalemate the Jimao War had devolved into would finally be broken. An Allied victory would be good news for the Red Rose Pact, since exports of strategic resources from Allied nations could resume. The RRP would undoubtably be the beneficiary of these exports-- the major Allied powers generally considered them the lesser of two evils compared to their fascist foes. 'Enmeshed in our own struggle, we can do little but watch the madness unfolding in western Eurasia,' said General Park Tae-yeong, at a summit of political and military leaders of the Allies' so-called 'Big Five' (Japan, Haida, Hindustan, the United Pacific Republic, and Anacaona) in Haida Gwaii, 'It is clear, however, that the Wolf of Valeria is a mad dog that must be put down. The communists, at least, still follow the Agaidika Convention.'[14]



Japanese General Park Tae-yeong

Klibanophori West arrived in Cluj on 30 May. 'Cluj County must be so, so beautiful in peacetime,' Ha wrote, in another letter to her husband, 'Even after a month of war, something of this place's majesties shines through-- the stately greened peaks of the Carpathians, the rugged gorges, the Someșul Mic winding and wending its way through the urban fabric of Cluj, the architecture-- the baroque castles and palaces of the expropriated nobility, the gothic cathedrals, medieval streets lined with early modern façades... and, here and there, the pagoda of a mosque or gongbei built in the Chinese fashion which wouldn't look out of place back home in Istria. Yet these delights fade a little more with each passing day, trampled by jackboots, crushed under landship treads, pockmarked by artillery craters.'

Ha's first order of business was meeting with the other generals in charge of the region. She already knew Hau-Fang well, of course-- they were both members of the 'Class of '36'-- the cadre of younger generals promoted during the pre-war reorganisation and reforms of the Red Army, and already had served together for years before that. The two old friends took some time to catch up. Discussion of business-- Ha complimented Hau-Fang's defense of Budapest, still holding fast, still keeping the WRE on the left bank of the Danube-- eventually gave way to more personal matters. 'She took it upon herself to congratulate me again on finally marrying Yannis,' Ha recorded in her diary, 'and commiserate with me about our honeymoon being ruined by the outbreak of a war so apocalyptic future generations will likely study it as eschatology rather than military science. Well, I shot back, I'm sure that when all this is over, whatever's left of Yannis and I will have a lovely time in whatever's left of the Near West.' Gallows-humour aside, the meeting seemed to do much to lift Ha's spirits.


The Hungarian general in charge of the Carpathians Defence Area, Bobérly Endre, was a stranger to her, but apparently she made a positive impression on him-- Bobérly later remarked that the new Byzantine general 'cut an impressive figure.'

Colonel-General Bobérly Endre, of the Hungarian People's Defence Force Carpathians Defence Area

After that, Ha wasted little time before launching her counteroffensive, aimed squarely at the narrowest point of the Sibiu salient (so called because its southernmost outpost was in Sibiu County)


When General Cornélie Lemaire Mogontica tried widen the salient by linking up with Gallic forces to the northeast of Cluj, advance units from Valentina Ha's motorised dragoons were already waiting for them, and her landships weren't far behind.


Meanwhile, Ghanaian European Command sent the Fifteenth Army, commanded by General Sibri Ahmed, to take up positions in the in the Eastern Carpathians.


As the Sibiu salient faced increasing pressure from Klibanophori West, any prospect of widening the salient eastwards-- or even withdrawing further east was forestalled.



General Sibri Ahmed, Fifteenth Army of the Ghanaian European Command.

Ahmed's forces were soon joined a portion of Ha's mechanised cavalry, positioning themselves, preparing for a pincer attack on the salient.


With the noose clearly tightening, the Byzantine 3rd Cavalry Division spearheaded an attack on Invicta's Comitatensis IX Hispana's right flank just as it was being hammered by the Army of the Danube's artillery.


Despite having two légions of armour in the area, Invicta's attempt to block this new offensive failed; the Legate was attempting to leverage her force's mobility for a defence-in-depth-- but, in the bottleneck IX Hispana was caught in, she rapidly ran out of depth, and was forced to order these divisions to withdraw southwards, towards Sibiu-- and the nigh-impassible Southern Carpathians-- after taking nearly 3,000 casualties in the space of five hours.


Byzantine armour and dragoons surged through the gap, and within a day of Invicta's withdrawal, the Sibiu salient was now the Sibiu pocket.


The encircled forces included the elements of IX Hispana that were able to withdraw and and an Austrian corps of Neudinger's III. Armeeoberkommando. The majority of imperial forces in the pocket, though, were from Matieu Philippon Corvus's Comitatensis VI Victrix-- and indeed, Corvus himself was present, as he had the distinct misfortune of having established his headquarters in the town of Sibiu.


But, then, whenever Corvus encountered Valentina Ha, misfortune seemed to follow. He was one of the luckless legates in command of the Gallic 'volunteers' attempting to prop up the crumbling Holy Roman Empire. Ha successfully encircled him there, too.



Corvus would fare little better in this rematch. Under attack from all sides, the pocket was quickly reduced, leaving Corvus pinned against the Southern Carpathians.




The LS/3 Kasdaglis landships 451 Hippolyta and 752 Clonie of Klibanophoroi West enter Sibiu County

Corvus sent the Austrian 1st and 7th infantry divisions to guard his eastern flank, and scraped together whatever was left of VI Victrix to defend Sibiu proper.


'Deckchairs on the Titanomachy,' wrote Ha.



On the morning of 15 June, a WRE delegation approached Ha's staff under a flag of truce. A few hours later, Corvus surrendered his command-- and himself-- to the Byzantines and Hungarians.

The haidagraph of the signing ceremony-- such as it was-- more or less immediately became one of the iconic images of the Imperial War. With the hood of the Byzantine ToMP 100 halftrack 819 Phaethon serving as makeshift desk, Corvus is seen hunching over the single-page capitulation, holding a writing-brush awkwardly-- in France, signatures even the most formal documents were generally signed by pen rather than brush. Ha leans casually against the halftrack, a pair of trooper's goggles lifted over the brim of her kepi. The insignia of Klibanophoroi West-- a black chess knight superimposed on a red gear-- is clearly visible. So is the wound stripe she was awarded in 1937 after her command car was blown up by a Polish landship during the battle of Magdeburg. So is the grin she'd been deploying strategically to charm the press and the newsreels since the early days of the German Civil War. To Ha's right stands Major General Traian Stoica, commander of the 218th Infantry Division of the Hungarian People's Defence Force and a native of Sibiu. Behind the officers, victors and vanquished like, looms a building featuring the distinctive 'eyebrow dormers' that give Sibiu its nickname-- 'The City With Eyes', just so there's no doubt where, exactly, this tableau is situated. A notice posted by the Gallic occupation authorities flutters in the breeze, forgotten and unheeded. The implication is clear: this is not just a battle won-- it is the liberation of an occupied people.


Legate Matieu Philippon Corvus signs terms of surrender to General Valentina Ha. Major General Traian Stoica, commander of the the 218th Infantry Division, acts as official witness.

Just how off-the-cuff this moment really was became-- and remains-- a subject of much speculation. Later, when asked about the haidagraph by a reporter from the Byzantion Courier, she shrugged, saying-- rather enigmatically-- 'Nothing in the Agaidika Convention says we've got to be polite to fascists.' Regardless of whether the symbolism was serendipitous or calculated, it's clearly another example of the sort of image-making Ha often did. Her landship maneuvers-- intricately planned and meticulously executed-- shaped the course of the Battle of Hungary. The images left in her wake shaped how that battle would be remembered.

:siren: Nota bene-- this post exceeded the character limit, so I've had to split it into two posts. Please refrain from sniping the post after this one so I can put the end of the post in there! :siren:

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Sep 29, 2022

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
As the RRP forces picked through the rubble of Sibiu's abandoned pickets and pored over the documents left behind by the WRE armies, it became clear that the Gauls' lack of regard for the Agaidika Convention moved past mere rudeness. Surviving political prisoners and Hungarian POWs liberated by the Red Army reported that some among their number were taken out and executed by C.S.P.[15] officers once it became clear Corvus's forces were encircled with no hope of relief. There was also evidence that the occupation authorities seemed to be cataloguing and categorizing both those in imperial custody and the larger civilian population of Sibiu County, although according to what schema-- and for what purpose-- remained unclear; this was an occupation that scarcely lasted a month, so this effort had barely got started by the time Ha's landships rolled into town. The full scope of the WRE's occupation policy, therefore, remained unknown to the RRP.

In the Praetorium, various heads rolled. Operation Sphaera, despite a promising start, turned out to be a costly failure. The Sibiu pocket alone accounted for some 10,034 dead and nearly 70,000 captured imperial soldiers; casualties for the operation as a whole were even higher.


Such were the recriminations, the capitulation of Portugal nearly went unnoticed.



In the end, though, Postuma was never one to fall victim to sunk cost fallacy. She had known Rhenanicus's plan was a gamble, and even with the substantial resources allocated to its executions, it had failed. There was no sense in sending good materiel after bad; it was time to pull the plug. Rhenanicus was removed from command of Army Group Carpathia. Legate Isolda Dieudonne Vestfalica was promoted to praetor and made magistrix militum of WRE forces in the Danube theater.


Newly-promoted Praetor Isolda Dieudonne Vestfalica

Besides, Postuma had bigger fish to fry at this point. Developments elsewhere were far more promising. Klibanophoroi East and the Army of Belgorod under General Zenobia Stanotas had finally faltered in their adamant defence of their side of the Dniester; a joint offensive by Gaul, Polonia, and Third Rome had broken through and advanced as far as the city of Iasi.



Even more consequentially, Germanica had correctly identified the junction between the Army of the Danube and the Army of the Alps as a weak point in the Byzantine lines. She was able to break through, brush the Bynzantine defenders aside (an encircle an unlucky division of Marathi volunteers), and pour into Croatia. They raced towards the Adriatic, rapidly crossed the perilously thin strip of land connecting Italy to the rest of the Commune, and continued on right into Istria.


The Byzantine Commune had been cut in two.


The entry for 19 June, 1941 in Ha's war diary consists of a single sentence: 'Istria is fallen.'


Gallic attacks continued in Hungary, of course, even if at a slower operational tempo than at the height of Sphaera.

Still, when she had a moment, Ha still sat down to begin writing her weekly letter to her husband.

She got as far as writing 'Dear Yannis,' before she remembered that he was now behind imperial lines in occupied Istria.

She set her brush down on her ink stone. What was the point?


--

[1]Known as the Grivpanvar in Persian and the Clibanarii in Latin; the Greek name Klibanophoroi translates as 'oven-bearers', referring to their heavy armour's tendency to rapidly heat up in the sun. Many a Byzantine landship trooper would observe how well-suited to the 20th century machines they operated the name was.

[2]Ha had married Ioannis Kegen Qara-Khungirat just over a week before the Visigoth intercepts which warned the Byzantine government war with the Imperium was imminent were received and decoded; the newlyweds' life together was quickly overtaken by the Commune's frantic efforts to prepare for an invasion. 'Not the honeymoon we were imagining,' Qara-Khungirat ruefully noted in his diary.

[3]Or, in certain nationalist quarters, infamous. A political cartoon in La Fenice, a pro-Sicilian independence periodical, portrayed Byzantine General Zenobia Stanotas digging a shallow grave for 'The Sicilian Nation' and saying, with a shrug, 'Well, not those small nations.'

[4]Mizuno, Tomoe. The Diaries of Mizuno Tomoe. Edited by Zhang Akiko and translated by Kate Hayashi. Edinburgh University Press, 2013.

[5]"Praetorian Prefect;" in the WRE command structure roughly analogous to a chief of staff. As is often the case, Gallic military jargon is a somewhat anachronistic jumble of titles and offices from various eras of Roman history.

[6]Latin for "sphere." Shortly before the operation was actually launched, the Visigoth intercepts decoded a reference to the name Operation Sphaera, but no other details regarding its date or purpose. The Byzantine officer corps, of course, were generally fluent in Latin, and the analysts working in the Intelligence Secretariat were no exception. As a result, much effort was expended on trying to determine if the somewhat enigmatic moniker had some hidden meaning hinting or insinuating the nature of the forthcoming Operation Sphaera. This, obviously, was not the case-- documents examined after the war made it clear that, to prevent just this sort of attempt to divine their plans, Gallic code names-- Sphaera included-- were selected by opening a Latin dictionary to a random page and choosing the first word they found that was one or two syllables and reasonably euphonious. The intelligence officers who had wasted days poring over Euclid and the like for clues were suitably chagrinned.

[7]The Comitatenses of late antiquity were Roman field armies-- however, they were more or less equivalent to (and often started their existence as) a single legion, rather than an agglomeration of up to two dozen division-sized légions. This discrepancy is made all the more aggravating by the fact that many Gallic "comitatenses" were given the names and numbers of historical ancient Roman legions-- some of which, in late antiquity, were re-organised as comitatenses, and eventually evolved into the theme system of the Eastern Roman Empire. These themes, in turn, evolved into the modernised legions of the Radziwiłł and Second Yaroslavovich dynasties of the Roman Commonwealth. After the 1803 Revolution, surviving elements of these legions merged into the new Republican military. When the 1884 Revolution broke out, several units of the Army of the Republic mutinied rather than commit further atrocities in the vein of the Massacre of the Ten Thousand. These units became the nucleus of the regular Red Army. So, really, if any formation in the Third Great War could be referred to as a comitatensis, it would be a handful of regiments scattered throughout the forces of the Byzantine Commune. However, for the sake of clarity and consistency, I will-- under protest-- continue to use the Gallic terminology generally used in Third Great War scholarship.

[8]Also known as a petit triomphe. 'Triumphs,' Germanica is said to have dryly observed to her staff officers, 'are for people who finish wars.' This quip is now believed to be apocryphal, however.

[9]Despite not insubstantial efforts to the contrary.

[10]Or: Censor et Praefectura Morum (Censor and Prefect of the Morals). It should be noted that in antiquity, these "praefecti" were appointed to manage public morality in place of a censor, as the regular appointment of Roman censors ceased during the reign of Augustus. The office was briefly revived by the Roman Commonwealth-- always a government keen to hearken back to antiquity-- but their responsibilities were strictly limited to the administration of the census and the maintenance of voter rolls derived from them. As you may have surmised by now, one must deal with this sort of thing fairly often as a student of Imperial Gallic history.

[11]Apparently, Vodenosid is a big fan of Julius Nepos.

[12]Ironically, the emperor Hadrian (born AD 76, reigned AD 117-138) was also (and remains) a despised figure in Byzantine historiography as far back as the Roman Commonwealth era, remembered mostly for his brutal conduct crushing the Bar Kokhba revolt in Judea and subsequent genocidal repression of the Jewish people. In Great Britain, meanwhile, the wall he built along the northern frontier of Britannia is generally assessed as an act of aggressive imperial power-projection, rather than one of defensive retrenchment.

[13]Another theory is that the modern Romanian population is descended from citizens of the Roman provinces south of the Danube who migrated to the Carpathians at a much later phase in the collapse of the classical Roman empire. As a historian of the Near West in the 20th century specializing in the Third Great War, rather than the demography of Late Antiquity, resolving this question is beyond my expertise, and, therefore, beyond the scope of this book.

[14]Brokered between the Great Powers of the day by the Shoshone and signed in 1879, the Agaidika Convention codified many of the laws and customs of war, including the treatment of sick and wounded combatants, civilians, and prisoners of war. Not to be confused with the Prague Convention of 1912, banning biological and gas weapons, the latter of which had previously been used with wild abandon by the Byzantine Commune in the First Great War.

[15]Although it has-- mercifully-- fallen out of favor even amongst capitalist historians, for years following the war a tendency existed to lay all of the Imperium's war crimes at the feet of the Comité de Salut Public, rather than the regular army. It is, of course, a distinction without a difference; C.S.P. divisions serving as frontline combat units were fully suborned by and integrated into the army's command structure. Even the C.S.P. forces operating separately from army formations and far away from combat-- the secret police, for instance-- ultimately answered to the Praetorium.

---

WORLD MAP, 6/19/41

Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Oct 3, 2022

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Josef bugman posted:

How on earth did that happen?

WE seem to be doing very well otherwise, but how in the first heck did they manage to slip through?

Basically just the game mechanics version of how it was described in-fiction— they got a breakthrough right where the frontline manned by the Army of the Alps met the frontline manned by the Army of the Danube, and when the frontlines were automatically redrawn around this, the Danube line’s western terminus stayed where it already was instead of being extended down to the Adriatic coast. I fixed this manually as soon as I noticed it, but by that point the AI had already exploited that gap.

Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.

Tulip posted:

Really a game mechanics perspective: how bad is this? IRL the territorial discontinuity would be a pretty minor problem - the mediterranean is the highway of rome, not an obstacle, and we have uncontested control of the adriatic (and uh pretty much every other sea) so other than being a pain in the rear end for italian stevedores its more of an encirclement opportunity than anything else, but I don't know that HOI thinks about water shipping as much or in the same was as I do.

The thing I’m most worried about is my ability to plug the gap that opened up in Croatia; even after I extended the front to the coast in order to cover that area some of those provinces are still undefended. With the Sibiu pocket closed, I think I have enough divisions to stem the bleeding, but they need to get there first. There’s a risk of the WRE just sweeping into the Balkans and Greece while reinforcements are in transit, probably.

I’d be interested in hearing what someone who’s better at HoI4 than me thinks, though.

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Empress Theonora
Feb 19, 2001

She was a sword glinting in the depths of night, a lance of light piercing the darkness. There would be no mistakes this time.
If the AI’s so dumb, why am I still struggling with it? :colbert:

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