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Knowing the meta is for cowards! Um, yeah, that's my excuse.
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Sep 30, 2022 18:33
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Kangxi posted:Oh, this is a great ship you got here. Converted battleship hull? My wife was always telling me this is a great idea if you need to repurpose your heavier ships and - oh, excuse me. I don't mean to intrude. This is the LÉ Columba, Irish naval ship, happy to meet you. 
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Oct 3, 2022 17:36
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 PART EIGHTY-THREE: Breakthroughs and Heartbreak (June 19th, 1941 - August 11th, 1941) A dream: I'm standing on the flying bridge of the RNS Hippolyta. All around, I see the other vessels of the New Ostia Home Fleet, reborn from the ashes of the old fleet scuttled after the Great War-- or, I suppose we should be calling it the First Great War, now that the Ayiti Federation has gone and started a second one. A destroyer off our starboard side is in flames; even from my lofty perch, I can feel the blast of heat on my face as its ammunition storage detonates. Far away, I can just about make out the fleet of Lai Ang-- just a constellation of of lights in the distance, but unmistakable. I relay this information to the gunners via the speaking tube. A few moments later, the ship's turrets slowly, ponderously turn towards the lights on the horizon. When they've finally shuddered to a halt, guns squarely aimed at the enemy, I give the order to fire. All at once, I realize that the ships from Lai Ang weren't ships at all-- it was the skyline of Byzantion; somehow, we were right in the Bosphorus, just off the coast of Thrace. Panicked, I turn back to the speaking tube and try to tell the gunners to hold their fire, but something strangles my voice in my throat. The guns all fire. Slowly, slowly, the shells arc towards the city, and-- Excerpts from the diary of Iouliana Erdemir, sixth Tribune of the Byzantine Commune Every morning, E., the very first thing I notice is your absence. I'd grown accustomed to your presence-- to your arms around me when I fall asleep, your sleeping face when I awaken. Even when sleep eluded me, when I was preoccupied by the dilemmas of statecraft, when I was too agitated by this or that to calm my mind and rest, or even when I was jolted awake by the nightmares that have troubled me for nearly as long as I can remember-- those Janus-faced dreams of dark premonitions of things to come all jumbled up with the keening ghosts of what once was into a formless dread, nothing was so calming as the knowledge that you were by my side. More than once, I was lulled back to sleep by the sound of your quiet, steady breathing-- or, failing that, it was at least a reminder that the world still spun, that whatever night-phantom stalked me had no place in the here and now, among the living. Waking up alone in bed, then, is my first reminder of the woes I-- we-- the Commune-- the Pact-- the world face. The Near West is in flames. Armies of millions are in the field, grinding one another to dust. Hundreds of thousands dead in just two months. The war, the war, the war.  Byzantion is... odd. The city seems suspended in time and space between two moments-- on this side, the wary peace it enjoyed until April 11th; on that side, whatever becomes of it in a long, hard war. Take the radio, for example. None of the radio stations seem quite sure what they're meant to be doing, since the cultural zeitgeist of wartime is still in flux, the sociopolitical concrete still setting. No one's had time to write this war's songs, yet. Some programs have opted for a sort of bellicose patriotism, digging out the old marching-songs and battle-hymns no one's bothered playing since the end of the last Great War, blowing off a thick layer of dust, and seeing if today's Byzantions still find meaning in songs about the Battle of Balboa or Byzantine landships driving through the Great Plains of Avalon. Others have also taken it upon themselves to bolster public morale by gentler means-- a concerted effort at escapism. Every song a jaunty love ballad or a standard half the Commune knows by heart; every radio-play is madcap farce, light as a soap bubble. A few, for the moment, seem stuck in a holding pattern, doggedly plodding through their ordinary programming; songs and stories about whatever on Earth we apparently cared about ten thousand years ago, on April 10th, 1941.  I keep on thinking about that speech V. Postuma gave at Rhenanicus's ovation. I don't know why; it was a premature victory-lap in the one theater of the war where things actually have gone our way, Alhamdulillah. Nor did it give us any new insight into V.P.'s ultimate goals-- not exactly news that the Imperium is a.) completely unhinged, b.) seeking not just conquest, but our eradication as a people through 'culling' and enslavement, and c.) has v. questionable ideas about the history of the Roman Empire. I've observed before-- in these very pages, sometimes-- that the Byzantine Republic wasn't fooling anyone when it insisted to all the world that they had made a clean break with the last 2500 years of Roman history; that the sins of empire were washed away by Alexios V's blood. That the peoples who were-- for better or for worse-- the Romans when Citizen Androutsos hoisted up the hiratine's blade were suddenly transfigured into some entirely new population of Byzantines when he let go of the rope and the emperor's head went tumbling into a basket at Noor Sallajer's feet. This, I felt, was an abdication of responsibility for the imperial conquests Sallajer's republic inherited. De Cultura Occidentalis reminded me of another unforeseen consequence of the Republic forsaking its claim on the history of the Romans-- it ceded that rhetorical ground to the Valerias of the world. V.P. is not merely distorting a history into a weapon pointed at our heart; she is instrumentalizing our history against us. Us, the Byzantine peoples. The Romans. It's not exactly a novel idea that the fascists want imperium over the past as much as they do the future; that Valeria Imperatrix was the ideological heir to the futurist tendencies of fascism more than the romanticism of the proto-Valerians is well known by now. Still, I'm struck by the fact that even the history of Rome itself is on the chopping-block. All the complexities of Rome-- Rome, with its revolutions and repression, idealism and cruelty, its polyglot syncretism and sneering persecutions, its poetry and barbarity, its art and its artillery-- and all the ambiguities left by history's biases and lacunae-- all of these will go straight into V.P.'s trashcan, replaced with a series of empty signifiers; modernist terror in Classical fancy-dress. Signposts on the road to the most ambitious genocide in human history.  V.P. mentioned Iouliana the Great specifically. Well, she called her 'Juliana', but you know-- it's ostensibly a reference to the woman my mother named me after. Or the woman who inspired the legend of the Empress-in-Marble that appeared in Roman folklore around the time of the Deluge, perhaps? Considering our family's situation, I see how a belief in some unspecified form of salvation awaiting in a brighter future appealed. I'll never know why she bequeathed this name onto me-- just that she did, and that it's one of the only things I still have from my childhood besides scars and bad memories.  (Later on, more direct parallels with the life of my historical namesake presented themselves.)  Iouliana the Great was a particularly complicated and ambiguous character in a complicated and ambiguous history. The 'New Byzantine', the archetypical warrior-empress who blazed a trail for the Valerias et al. Someone who did terrible things-- a conqueror and a killer-- 'no one reigns innocently' and all that-- but someone who was also achingly human. A woman, shy and retiring by nature, fearful by upbringing, who still picked up her sword and fought, again and again and again.   And then died a completely pointless death, because that's how things went in the Roman Empire.  History affords us but a few tantalizing glimpses of Iouliana, the living, breathing woman. There's no room for that woman in V.P.'s Juliana la Grande. No room for the Iouliana of folklore, either-- Iouliana, the name put to the distant liberatory hopes of peasants who lacked more precise language for their aspirations, but nonetheless could tell that the world was not as it should be. V.P. would scourge all this away, leaving nothing but inhuman perfection.  Morning briefing. First, the overall strategic situation. Klibanophoroi West's counteroffensive robbed the W.R.E of all momentum in Hungary-- but was run ragged in doing so, so Comrade Field Marshal Andrejić's taking the opportunity offered by the Austro-Gallic advance grinding to a halt to withdraw K.W. from combat for a time in order to resupply and recuperate, and reorganize. The Army of the Danube and the Hungarian forces along the Danube will be left to consolidate the counter-offensive's gains, then.   (Selfishly, I allow myself to feel a little relief at the prospect of a week or two of relative safety for you, E. I know you're serving in the 11th Cataphract Division, and I know the 11th has been in the thick of it for most of the Battle of Transylvania.)  Of much more cause for concern is Praetor Germanica's breakthrough in Croatia and Istria. The Army of the Alps-- recently re-assigned to Halevi, to free up Ha to take charge of K.W.-- is attempting to prevent Germanica from sweeping west into Italy.   Italy is perhaps the most well-fortified region in all the Commune; I'm told there's very little chance of Germanica advancing far enough down the peninsula to, say, disrupt our preparations for an invasion of lightly-defended Sardinia and Corsica.  It's clear by now that the biggest threat posed by Germanica is to the east; if the Army of the Alps's frontline was dislodged, our lines in Croatia are in utter disarray; Ghanaian reinforcements are already moving in to fill the gap in our pickets, but that still gives Germanica a window of time where her advance further into the Balkans is-- for all intents and purposes-- unopposed.  So-- with a heavy heart-- I authorized the deployment of three divisions still in training.  Inshallah, they'll be able to hold the line with minimal casualties until the Ghanaians and more seasoned Byzantine divisions relieve them. Inshallah, I haven't sent them to die as pointlessly as Iouliana the Great.  Things are scarcely better on the Belgorod front-- having made it across the Dniester River and then blown past any attempts to hold the Prut, W.R.E. forces have taken the city of Iași.  Stanotas's lines haven't broken yet (c.f. Croatia), but they've certainly been bent.  There was an assumption among the general staff that the Third Romans would be nothing more than cannon fodder to the Gauls, but in fact joint operations between Russian infantry and Gallic armor have been remarkably coordinated. It's already a world away from the early weeks of the war, when the Third Roman conscripts didn't even have enough steel helmets to go around.  R.R.P. armies are still holding out in Lithuania, but the situation grows more precarious by the day.  Lithuanian, British, and Ghanaian armies fighting in Kaunas and its surroundings are at risk of encirclement-- only a narrow corridor linking them to the Baltic Coast remains open. The best the British are hoping for, their attaché confided, is an opportunity for an orderly withdrawal of R.R.P. forces before the window of opportunity for evacuation slams shut.  Next on the agenda-- production, recruitment, and deployment. With two months of great war under our belts, we have more practical knowledge of what works and what doesn't. The standard Red Army infantry division has been slightly reduced in size to something like the more agile divisions deployed to great effect by the British. Seven companies of infantry, two of artillery, and their attendent headquarters and support units.  Cataphract divisions, on the other hand, will be increased in size. Medium landships like the LS/3 Evgenia, apparently, have proven themselves superior to the more specialized light and heavy landships most militaries are still fielding.  Moreover, the Red Army is the only major participant in the Imperial War to be fielding any medium landships in any significant quantity (Although two divisions of Kavallerielandschiff IIIs are among the 'volunteer' contingents sent our way by the N.G.F., and Ghana is currently producing a high-quality medium landship-- it's just yet to reach the frontlines in any numbers). Gaul's landships are more advanced than the Martels they fielded in the Lightning War, obviously-- but they're designed with the same priorities and doctrines in mind (i.e., speed above all else; they don't call it the 'lightning war' for nothing). The Evgenia (along with the German KLS III and the Ghanaian M1 Glagwa) is armored enough to survive shots from light landships, and fast enough to still run circles around lumbering land destroyers-- it is quickly becoming the backbone of our armored cavalry, with the LS/3 Reyhan and the LD/1 Aphrodite being gradually phased out.  We have seen some disruption to both production and logistics since the fall of Istria and the resulting severing of road and rail connections between Italy and the rest of the Commune. Our more or less uncontested control of the Mediterranean allows Pact members whose industrial heartlands are (for the moment) safe from imperial interference to pick up some of the slack; for the most part, the problem of shortfalls in the production of critical war materiel has yet to become acute-- in most respects.    Finally, a report from the Intelligence Secretariat (ably accompanied, as always, by representatives of British Military Intelligence, Section 6. It's becoming more and more clear that the British are, in fact, extremely good spies-- I didn't know they had it in them!). As usual, there's a big pile of signals intelligence they've had to through. Much of the military radio traffic they've intercepted and decrypted seems to relate to the ignominious end of Operation Sphaera. Rhenanicus has been given a new posting-- the significantly less glamorous but still important job of holding the western Alps and heading off any designs the Red Army might have on Genoa while Germanica makes her play to the east. (I suppose V.P. is far too pragmatic to just shoot an officer of his caliber for failing her once. Too bad, really.) From the alleged lack of glamor and glory of this posting, we can reasonably-- although not certainly-- infer that no major offensive operations are likely in this sector. Most likely he's just watching Germanica's flank.  Our talkative friends from the Praetorium have also confirmed that Vestfalica has been made praetor of what's left of Rhenanicus's Army Group Carpathia, and that her orders are to keep the pressure up along the Danube enough to tie up our own forces in the region, but for the most part focus on defense of prior gains, rather than attempting to win new ones. As an aside-- very struck by the tone of these intercepted Gallic military communiques. Expected more strum-und-drang from fascist officers discussing the aftermath of a military disaster on the scale of the destruction of the Sibiu pocket, and the disgrace of someone who's been at V.P.'s side since before she even was V.P., and less... banal office politics; Rhenanicus's fall from Valeria's favor and Vestfalica's rise are relayed with all the intensity of a mild-mannered civil servant reporting that their branch office is out of paperclips.  Tangents aside-- seems v. clear that the W.R.E. is in a holding pattern in Hungary and northwestern Italy; Croatia and Belgorod are currently the objects of their interest. Particularly Belgorod, it seems. Preliminary intelligence indicates that V.P. has left Paris and gone east, perhaps with the intention of taking charge of the W.R.E offensive. In most other unhinged dictatorships, the dictator taking it upon themselves to take personal command of a major war theater would be good news for their adversaries. But most other unhinged dictators aren't decorated field marshals who in recent memory mulched an entire Great Power in sixty days.  Although I suppose V.P. isn't the only dictator who's decided to lead from the front-- apparently, the sizable contingent of Marathi volunteers who have just arrived in Dublin are under the personal command of Rishma Sharqi herself(!). With her children already leading volunteer forces of their own, I can't help but think of Septimius Severus's ill-fated father-son getaway to Britannia with Geta and Caracalla. (Roman history's been on my mind lately.)  I expressed my concern that a figure as  Comrade General Stanotas has determined that holding Chernivtsi is impossible at this point; Theodora (back from Budapest now that the Hungarian theater is no longer war's main hot-spot) agrees with her assessment, and authorized withdrawal back across the Prut--and an effort to evacuate as much of the civilian population as possible. This has led to heavy congestion on the handful of crossings across the Prut we still control-- but we have to make some effort not to leave the citizens of the Commune to the Imperium's tender mercies.  The stories that have reached us from the Lithuanian, Hungarian and Byzantine cities that have already fallen into W.R.E. hands-- Siauluai, Mikolc, Debrecen, Zagreb, Ljubljana, and now Iași-- are scattershot glimpses of corveé labor, mass arrests, confiscations, and summary executions-- in short, an incomplete but unmistakable portrait of rear-echelon legionnaires and C.S.P. police units operating with unfettered power and violence. Documents captured in the wake of Rhenanicus's retreat hint at imperial designs still more grandiose and terrible-- and organized. Once again, thoughts turn to Occidentalis-- "even our wayward brothers and sisters squatting in the ruins of the old empire," proclaimed V.P., "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". "Remediation" is a term that occurs frequently in those captured papers. "Cull" isn't, but you don't need to be M.I.6 to put two and two together, especially given all the effort they put into making lists-- the lists of Party officials, communist leaders, labor union radicals, etc., you'd expect, and other lists according to more obscure-- but surely horrific-- criteria.  Unfortunately, V.P.-- in her capacity as acting praetor of a Polish-Russian-Gallic army group-- made short work of the Prut crossing's defenses, launching a successful pincer within hours of establishing her field headquarters at Płoskirów.  Chernivtsi has been encircled, and with it, nine divisions (seven Byzantine, two N.G.F.). Needless to say, the Belgorod Fort has made its top priority fixing this. Stanotas-- and whatever elements of Klibanophoroi East are near at hand-- are making every effort to dislodged the imperials before the noose can be further tightened. At the same time, the troops still in Chernivtsi and its suburbs are attempting to effect a breakout while they still have the food, fuel, and ammunition to try. I can but pray.   Lieutenant-General Konstantia Sarafian, commander of the XI Corps of the Red Army and ranking officer in the Chernivtsi pocket. A dream: I am holding a beautifully illuminated manuscript in a language I can't understand. I strain to understand the foreign letters, but the mere sight of them makes my head swim. It's only then I realize the parchment has caught fire; I turn it this way and that, trying to make sense of the words before they're burned away; a ring of flames eats away at the manuscript's edges. My fingers are burning. The pain is unbearable. But I can't let go of the parchment, not now, not like this. I can't. I can't. I-- We're finally pulling the Army of the Caucasus under Comrade General Cyrahzax away from the border with Asitelahan. Our frontier with the W.P.O. won't be totally unmanned-- a force of Geraman volunteers put at the disposal of Azerbaijan have taken their place-- but I suppose I'm still placing a bet that Zhang Zhulin won't think to himself, You know, what the Jimao War really needs is a few dozen new participants, and launch an invasion of Anatolia.   General Anteros Cyrahzax, Army of the Caucasus Admittedly, the prospect of the Ming Empire doing anything of the sort is-- gradually-- becoming more and more unlikely. It's too soon to say for sure, but there are some signs the stalemate the Allies and the W.P.O. have been caught in for over a year-- the W.P.O. ascendant on the Asian mainland after the fall of Silla, but the combined fleets of the Haida and the Japanese Republic making the Allies unassailable at sea-- is finally-- slowly-- very slowly-- breaking in favor of the Allies. The Allied invasion of southern China is continuing to grind its way forward. The Ming are making them fight for every inch of ground-- but they've also been unable to push them out. A year ago, the Ming armies would have been able to casually brush aside such incursions, knocking them back into the Pacific without even breaking a sweat.  Then again, a year is a long time for the Ming armies to bleed themselves white in the mountains of Hindustan and the deserts of Iran.   The Allies are optimistic enough to take another crack at Shanghai, anyway.  The Near Western pole of the W.P.O.-- the Somalian Republic-- has had no such dramatic military setbacks, and indeed they still decisively have the upper hand in the African theater, including naval supremacy along the East African coast-- but it's still a very costly effort in blood and treasure, and the people of the Republic are starting to wonder if it's worth it.    The answer for many of those people, apparently, is no, and disenchantment with both the patrician mercantile families and their alliance with the Ming Empire is growing by the day.   The Japanese Republic's ambassador in Byzantion-- Mizuno Tomoe-- requested a meeting. A private, off the books, "no bulls__t" (her words) meeting with me and select other R.R.P. representatives. The venue for this meeting? A private box at the Byzantion People's Amphitheater and Athenaeum (previously, the Grand Republic Theater, and before that, the Empress Theater, in honor of Julia Radziwiłł's patronage for its and its all-women theatrical productions). It all seems a bit much, honestly-- surely a discrete office somewhere would suffice? But the arrangement has a certain spy movie-ish charm to it. Miss Mizuno always has a flair for the dramatic-- and is adept at deploying it to charm her Byzantine hosts. Kyoto chose her well for representing its interests in the Commune. Drive to the theater was strange. By daylight, Byzantion still looks somewhat like itself, but at night it's nigh-unrecognizable-- the neon lights dimmed, windows shrouded with blackout curtains, art deco skyscrapers rendered into dark, jagged silhouettes. Here and there, pale lights bobbing down shadowed sidewalks-- the lanterns and flashlights carried by pedestrians picking their way through the city. The W.R.E. hasn't bombed Byzantion yet, but precautions are in place as the frontlines grind their way inexorably south. Once I stepped into the Atheneum, though, normalcy returned-- the interior was warmly lit, and the atmosphere was almost festive-- well-dressed civilians chatting companionably with soldiers in their dress uniforms on leave (many of them in British khaki, with the insignia of units recently evacuated from Lithuania-- presumably, resting and recuperating ahead of a fresh deployment to northern Italy). I was obliged to wait around for a few minutes while my security detail-- they've kept a particularly close watch on me ever since the Gang of Ten incident-- inspected the premises, presumably on the off chance the accredited ambassador of the Japanese Republic was going to push me out of a balcony to my death, or poison my drink, or something. Eventually, though, the coast was proclaimed clear, and I was ushered out of the lobby and up some stairs to Miss Mizuno's box. Miss Mizuno herself was there, of course. She was entertaining one other guest-- a British Army general with close-cropped hair and striking features-- Rina Pandey, lately of Lithuania. "The tribune?" asked the general; apparently she hadn't been told I was invited. "Uh, I mean, Comrade Tribune Erdemir! It's an honor!" She gave me a slightly flustered salute. Introductions were made. Pleasantries exchanged. Drinks were served-- tea for me, wine for Miss Mizuno and Comrade General Pandey. "Have you seen much Shakespeare, Tribune Erdemir?" asked Miss Mizuno, in polished, modern Latin. Outside the box, the audience was all a-murmur; the curtain had not yet risen on the night's production. "I read Julius Caesar when I was studying English in university," I said. "How very Byzantine!" Miss Mizuno said, amused, "Learning the language of your dearest ally by seeing what their literature has to say about your history. What about you, Rina?" "Tomoe," said General Pandey, who was evidently on a first-name basis with the ambassador, "We literally saw Antony and Cleopatra together! Remember? At the Takarazuka Revue? You kept pointing out which of the actresses you'd slept with?" "Yes, well, that was good fun, but I'm also pretty sure it wasn't true to the original text," said Miss Mizuno. Begins to dawn on me that I'm probably witnessing some manner of (ex?) lovers' quarrel. General Pandey rolled her eyes theatrically. "If you insist on being a pedant about this-- yes, Tomoe, I am familiar with the corpus of work of the single most well-known author in a thousand some-odd years of English-language literature." Miss Mizuno looked about ready to unleash another quip-- but then the curtain rose, and her attention was fixed on the stage. The play-- Shakespeare's Valeria III-- had begun. For a time, general and diplomat simply watched the drama with rapt attention, and I began to wonder why I was here at all. It seemed a fine enough production-- the actress playing Gabrielia Komnene was v. good; even if modern historians have come to doubt she had anything to do with the assassination of the young empress, the scheming killer made for a compelling villain in the context of the play as a work of fiction. But given that I was the head of state of a commune in a state of total war, there was surely-- surely something more worthwhile I could be doing with my time. By Act IV, I was getting ready to just unilaterally leave; it seemed a breach of diplomatic propriety, but so did the ambassador wasting my time with this. On the stage, the Hunter gave his soliloquy after Gabrielia had approached him about killing Valeria III. As he measured the weight of Gabrielia's silver against the weight on his conscience of murdering a child, Miss Mizuno finally deigned to make her thoughts known. She slumbed back into her seat with a heavy, world-weary sort of sigh. "This seems like a pretty stupid time for this play."  General Pandey blinked in confusion. "Why? I mean, yes, the protagonist is a Valeria, but give us a little bit of credit-- everyone knows that poor Valeria III hasn't got anything to do with... with that woman in Paris. Or do you mean that one of the comedies would have been more appropriate? Valeria III has a fairly grim subject matter, but--" Miss Mizuno shook her head. "I see you're still in the habit of responding to me without having bothered to listen first, Rina. No, what I mean is--" She glanced in my direction, as if inviting me back into the conversation after taking her (apparently obligatory) shot at her ex-girlfriend. "Well, it all seems a bit quaint, doesn't it? The flowery speeches, the clever wordplay, all of that. Even the assassin gets to make a long speech about how agonized he is by the moral dilemma of whether offing a thirteen year old is good or bad, actually-- even he gets to be imbued with a dash of nobility. It's stupid. We live in a world of wars with death tolls in the millions."  "And you people stuck on the European subcontinent probably have it even worse-- your war's already well on its way to catch up with ours in sheer casualties by volume, and you've already got ours beat for sheer brutality, since the fascists are a d___ned lunatic death cult. In a world like that, they should be putting on Titus Andronicus or something." "I'm afraid I'm not familiar with that one," I admitted. English is my fifth language-- my sixth if the Greco-Turkish patois spoken back home counts as a separate language (I'm told this is being hotly debated by linguists), so I haven't exactly plumbed the depths of late 16th to early 17th century British drama. "For good reason," General Pandey puts in, scornfully, "It's not exactly Hamlet or Macbeth or Gregor the Great. It's just hours of Romans and Goths murdering, dismembering, raping, mutilating, beheading, and occasionally cooking and eating one another." "Exactly!" said Miss Mizuno, "Finally, some Shakespeare suited for the 20th century."  "Things finally seem like they're breaking our way, but if that falls apart-- well, I don't know what we'll do. The W.P.O. and the Allies are two punch-drunk boxers that've already gone at it for ten rounds. In my personal-- and, I remind you, unofficial-- assessment, something has to give, or else the end of the Jimao War will end with a general collapse on both sides."  "You're being very frank with me," I said. "I want to make it clear where we're coming from. While the Jimao War is still at a stalemate," said Miss Mizuno, "Relations between the Allies and your Red Rose Pact are at an impasse. It's no secret that the Allies would very much prefer that the 'Western Roman Empire' lose the war. Despite the deep ideological and political differences between our blocs, we can at least be sure that you are dealing with us in good faith. Also, you did the German liberals a solid, and even though they aren't formally an Ally, they're with us in spirit. And also with us in terms of the dozens of divisions of volunteers they've sent us in addition to the dozens of divisions they've sent you. And the Haida, of course, remember your aid in the Second Great War. But even ignoring these factors, based on how the fascists are conducting themselves in Europe, I believe-- I really do-- that just as a matter of basic morality that we should do what we can to back your side. It's just that at the moment, what we can consists of-- pardon my French-- f___k all."  "It's in your interest that the Allies win too, of course," she continued, "Zhang Zhulin is banking on a W.R.E. victory." "Wait, what?" asked General Pandey, "Why? The W.P.O.'s stance towards the war seems to be staying studiously neutral." "In the short term," said Miss Mizuno. She then went on to say something so filthy I'm reluctant to copy it down, but was basically to the effect that given the current state of the Jimao War, Zhang recognizes that any involvement whatsoever in European affairs would be tantamount to him knowingly allowing a bear trap to slam shut on a certain anatomical feature.   The more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Clearly, the current thinking in Shanghai-- or, well, in Guangzhou, where Zhang Zhulin's set up shop now that he's been chased out of Shanghai for the third time-- is that they anticipate that the W.P.O.-- should it prevail in the Jimao War-- anticipates a confrontation with the victor of the Imperial War, and they like their chances better against a pariah state isolated to the European subcontinent which has all but declared itself hostis humani generis than against, oh, the entire international proletariat. The thing about the fascists draping themselves in the mantle of "the West" is that it sets them against nearly all the world. Although it's all academic for the moment; Miss Mizuno is also correct that the W.P.O. doesn't really have any means to pursue its interests in the Imperial War given the current state of things.  A dream: I am bound to a wooden stake, coarse rope chafing my wrists as I try to wriggle free-- in vain. Soldiers pile firewood and kindling at my feet. A procession of knights bearing reliquaries and holy symbols is marching towards me; they move with ritualized solemnity. At the procession's head is a woman carrying a torch. And then I see you, E.-- you dart out, epeé raised, putting yourself in between them and me. My heart soars at the sight of you, and I permit myself some small hope that I will not die today. You were so, so beautiful. But it turns out the knights have real swords; they unceremoniously cut you down, stepping over your body. After that-- the smell of smoke as the flames rise higher, and-- Woke up to the news that all attempts to either relieve or break out from the Chernivtsi pocket have been exhausted. A Polish army under Czceibor Umiastowski-- a veteran of the W.R.E.'s attempt to prop up the H.R.E. in the German Civil War-- successfully protected the fascist flank from Stanotas's counter-offensive. Gaul's own Constantin Bruix Lupus, in command of a mixed force of Russians, Poles, and C.S.P., overran what was left of Lt. General Konstantia Sarafian's pickets.   After that, V.P. plunged the miséricorde into Chernivtsi's remaining defenders.   Survivors of the Byzantine XI Corps are escorted from Chernivtsi by Third Roman Army and Gallic CSP troops, under the watchful eye of a Scipio landship of the XIX Légion Autocurrus Armatus. These prisoners, like the tens of thousands other Byzantines and Germans captured in the fall of the Chernivtsi pocket, would find themselves in the custody of the CSP. Red Army still holds some of the fortresses along the eastern Dniester, but given the magnitude of the disaster unfolding to their northwest, I don't know how long that defense can be sustained.  Air raid on Byzantion today. Minimal damage; 'only' a dozen or so dead. The Légion Impériale de l'Air saying hello, in other words. The air war is going badly for us; we've kept air superiority in Hungary, but lost it in northern Italy and Croatia, and never managed to gain it in the first place in Belgorod. The B.A.F. is redeploying its planes accordingly, but at the end of the day, they're stretched too thin. We just don't have enough fighters.  Still some bright spots, though. Klibanophoroi West is back in fighting shape, and making short work of an imperial salient on the north bank of the Sava.   A small victory, but a victory nonetheless. Could be a stepping stone for a more concerted Croatian counteroffensive, too. (Casualties were light, but there were casualties. I hope you're safe, E.)   On Germanica's other flank, meanwhile, Halevi and the Army of the Alps has prevented imperial forces from pushing further west into Italy. For now.  In Lithuania, Sharqi has apparently decided to lead from the front in her efforts to hold the all-important Baltic coast. Doubly good news; not only does it further delay fascist efforts to trap R.R.P. forces in the Lithuanian interior, but there's also a chance Sharqi might get shot and die.  But Theodora has made it clear to me that the Battle of Belgorod is lost.  The Red Army is fighting like hell, making the W.R.E. pay dearly for every inch of ground they take. But the battle is lost.  All we can do now is attempt an orderly retreat to fallback positions, trying to keep as much as the Army of Belgorod and Klibanophoroi East alive as we can, regroup, and establish a shorter line defense in Moldavia to defend Bucharest-- and the oilfields of Ploiești.  We're supplementing our domestic oil production with imports, but not enough to make up for it if the heart of that domestic oil production's torn out.  And without fuel, Ha's latest counter-offensive would sputter to a halt.    Keeping pressure up on Germanica's east is more important than ever; in the west, Trieste has finally fallen.  And Klibanophoroi West is hardly the only gas-guzzling operation underway; Comrade General Cavdarli's Army of the Islands has finally set off for Sardinia, and even a comparatively modest naval invasion like this (It's not exactly the Third Battle of Shanghai or the Fuzhou Offensive) requires significant naval support-- and, therefore, burns a significant amount of fuel.   Still-- if the Irish landing in Holland can actually gain a foothold and create a beachead for reinforcements from Great Britain, Ghana, and Germany, brushing aside whatever rear-echelon garrison's been left to mind the shop on Sardinia and Corsica should be a simple matter.  The news from the Belgorod front continues to be v. discouraging. The future of armored warfare might belong to the medium landship-- but there are few such landships on the Belgorod Front. V.P. is still a master of the blisteringly fast light landship maneuvers that (often literally) ran circles around the North Germans, and the light LS/3 Reyhans that still form the backbone of Klibanophoroi East are similarly confounded. V.P. managed to cut off the escape route of a sizable Byzantine force-- a mix of divisions from the Army of Belgorod, the Belgorod Reserve Army, and Klibanophoroi East-- before they could withdraw safely. They're currently pinned against the Dniester, trapped somewhere near Șoldănești polis. The one small mercy is that there aren't tens of thousands of civilians trapped in there with them as was the case in Chernivtsi-- the sparsely populated poleis along this stretch of the Dniester have long since been evacuated.  A grim milestone-- R.R.P. casualties have now surpassed one million. Tried to reassure myself that most of those casualties aren't necessarily K.I.A. Still couldn't help but think of Mizuno saying our war's well on its way to surpass even the appalling toll of the Imperial War thus far. The latter began in 1939; and the former not three months ago.   Even if the tides of war favor the Allies now, they have a long road ahead of them.  And how much longer is our road?   And where does it lead?  Another thing I keep finding myself thinking of: the Deluge lasted seventy years.  We're regaining air superiority on the Croatian Front-- partly from re-aligning our existing planes to support Klibanophoroi West...  ...and partly through the generosity of our allies in this desperate hour for the Commune.  And-- make no mistake-- the hour is desperate.  Conditions in the Șoldănești pocket are rapidly deteriorating. Supplies are short, defensive operations are costly (and, when nominally successful, Pyrrhic), and lines of communication not already severed by the encirclement are breaking down.  Disaster.   This war, this war, this monstrous war.  A dream: I wake up, and I'm back in Tuzlukçu. Or maybe I never left it? My head is full of vague memories of Byzantion, directing some vast and complicated enterprise-- maps and radios and conference-tables. The images slip through my fingers before I can fix them in my mind; naught but cobwebs burned away by the rising sun. It's absurd, anyway. I've never been more than twenty miles from this village, not in all my life-- the capital city, with its skyscrapers and its artists and its crowds of millions-- only exists in newsreels put out by the Cavinato tribunate as it assures us that despite defeat in the Great War, life goes on, the world still spins. Life goes on the way it had before in Tuzlukçu, too. Before the war-- before the Commune, even. The revolutionaries dreamed of a new world, but, you know-- Rome wasn't built in a day. Time and attention had be allotted, and inevitably it was drawn in by the irresistible gravitational force of the cities, birthplace of the revolution and home to the industrial workers whose blood, sweat and tears won a better future. But what of we, the peasants? The revolution was only 32 years ago-- everyone above a certain age remembered the days of the Republic. To them, the revolution was a coat of red paint hastily slapped onto a way of life that stretches back, past the Commune and the Republic and the Commonwealth, into deepest antiquity. What about our blood? Our sweat? Our tears? I creep out of the bedroom I share with my brothers and sisters, quietly, quietly-- I don't want to wake them up while they still slumber peacefully. But, more importantly, I don't want to wake my stepfather up, either. If it's my lucky day, I can slip past him and leave the house, which in turn means a few precious hours free of him. He's always been a brute, but lately he's gotten even more intolerable. I'm sixteen years old, and apparently in his eyes that's old enough to start looking for a husband. Or rather, for him to start looking for a husband for me. That's my future, I guess-- passed from one brute to another. And then I'll have children, who will then grow up to live basically the same sort of life I had. When I was younger-- much younger, a time I can barely remember-- my mother told me that I had a fire in my heart, and that-- no matter what-- I had to keep it burning. As long as I kept the fire burning, there would be hope. Distracted, I'm not watching my step, and bring my full weight down on one of the creaky floorboards. A moment later, the door to my parents' bedroom flies open, and my stepfather steps in front of me, cutting off my escape route. "Iouliana!" he thunders, "What is that loving racket you're making out there?" If I can't find a way out of here, I'll die. Maybe a slow death, spread out over decades, or maybe a sudden or calamitous one. But I can't live here, I can't live like this. I can't, I can't. The fire in my heart gutters and sparks, and-- Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Feb 5, 2023 |
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Oct 28, 2022 20:48
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Need to calm down. Can't guide the Commune out of this nightmare if I'm a bundle of frayed nerves and sleepless nights. War's bigger than one battle, no matter how disastrous that "one battle" is. Have to keep that whole picture in my head, even when the enormity of it all makes that feel impossible. The battle of Sardinia is all but won; the only thing standing between the Army of the Islands and the Strait of Bonifacio is a small garrison of Bavarian foederati who really, really don't want to be there.  For whatever reason, V.P. has decreed that her foederati be bled dry to fuel the war machine.  The Gauls have scraped together some of their Mediterranean fleet and sent it out there in an attempt to disrupt the Sardinian landings.  Quixotic efforts, and easily brushed aside by our fleets once detected. The continued necessity of large-scale naval operations is an additional stress on our fuel reserves-- hopefully, the imperial navy will learn its lesson sooner rather than later.   Sinking the battleship Lusitania was among the many accomplishments of Comrade Admiral Ercole Andretti.  The Hungarians, meanwhile, are seeking to build on the victories won in the Battle of Transylvania-- they've launched a counter-offensive from Cluj, intent on pushing the remnants of Rhenanicus's little lightning war further back.   R.R.P. troops continue to flood into Holland now that Ireland has opened the way. They've managed to advance as far as the Hague. Amsterdam's proving a tougher nut to crack, but still-- it's a remarkable amount of success for an amphibious invasion that started with just eight Irish divisions under Hresvelg, an untested young commander who looks fresh out of officer's school. (Presumably this is not literally the case-- the civil wars gutted the Irish general staff, but not that much.)   Still more cause for hope: Ha's continuing to make good progress in Croatia. Nothing on the scale of the destruction of the Sibiu pocket yet, but Klibanophoroi West is still steadily pushing Germanica's forces back. More importantly, she's robbed Germanica of all momentum. A month ago, Germanica's army looked poised to shatter our lines and sweep into Greece. Now, just hanging onto her prior gains in Croatia is requires her full attention.   Miraculously, the network of forts, defensive lines, and strongpoints stretching across all of northern Italy has enabled Halevi's Army of the Alps to not only hold the seemingly precarious salient abutting Trieste and Ljubljana, but do so without breaking a sweat.  Given all of this, Ha has proposed a bold second phase to her offensive: simultaneous attacks on Ljubljana from Ha in the east and Halevi in the west. Ljubljana is well defended, but if a well-executed pincer could dislodge it-- well, suddenly the whole state of things looks v. different. Just like that, the W.R.E. forces on the Adriatic coast would be totally cut off. From there, liberating Dalmatia and Istria would be much more doable, and the overland connection between Italy and the rest of the Commune will be restored.  The next defensive line K. West hit was under the command of Jules de la Révelliére-- a C.S.P. prefect, rather than a legate. Apparently, the unified command structure that puts C.S.P. units under the command of regular army legates works the other way around, because V.P., or Germanica, or some one put Prefect de la Révelliére in charge of whatever bits of Legate Corvus's VI field army ("Victrix". Awfully presumptuous when you haven't actually won the war yet.) managed to escape the collapse of Operation Sphaera in general and the reduction of the Sibiu pocket in particular.   Jules de la Révelliére, prefect of the Adriatic section of the Comité de salut public, acting legate of Comitatensis VI Victrix Ha's assessment of her new adversary: "Next time, they should send a real legate." Within a day of making contact with VI Victrix, Ha's landships were rolling into Kranjska polis. (Were you with them then, E.?)  Apparently, they took her advice, since the counter-attack on Ha's right flank was led by noted actual legate, Victoire Lefort Hanseatica. Infantry divisions from the Army of the Danube and its reserves were sent up the trail blazed by K. West to keep that corridor open-- and, if possible, widen it. Meanwhile, Ha regrouped her forces, marshaling her strength for the final push to Ljubljana.    Halevi, meanwhile, began his attack from the west.  It was slow going. Everything would depend on whether Ha's salient can be held and expanded long enough to buy her the time to free Ljubljana from its Gallic jailers. Bit by bit, though, she began to gain ground. Bit by bit, the imperial armies garrisoning the city were forced back.    If the corridor can be held.   The exhausted remnants of the Army of Belgorod and Klibanophoroi East have finally made it to their fallback line. Construction of another fortified fallback position is already underway, since a one-dimensional picket will not suffice to defend Ploiești-- and the millions of civilians in Bucharest. For the moment, though, the front is shockingly quiet. Stanotas is hoping to use this relative lull in hostilities to regroup and reorganize an army shattered by the fall of Belgorod into something resembling fighting shape.  By the end of July, though, it was clear the pincer was starting to get bogged down. Halevi lacked the landships he needed to punch through Legate Vormatia's lines in the west-- and, with Germanica still splitting the Commune in two, and the Mediterranean made a battlefield by the invasion of Corsica and Sardinia, it would be very difficult to transfer landships from elsewhere to northern Italy. Klibanophoroi West, meanwhile, had taken heavy losses trying to punch through Legate Vormatia's dug-in defenders. (Were you among those losses?)   Worse still, the corridor Ha depended on for supplies and reinforcements was under attack from all sides-- even if the attack on Ljubljana regained its lost momentum, the salient could still collapse behind them, leaving them encircled.  Conference call today to discuss the Croatian front. In attendance-- Comrade Field Marshals Andrejić and Papadopoulou (in Byzantion), Comrade General Hau-Fang (in Budapest), and and Ha herself (being shelled in the suburbs of Ljubljana). Hau-Fang reported that the window of opportunity for a withdrawal was closing soon. Theodora concurred with that assessment-- as did Andrejić, who, as commander of the Second Army Group, ordered Ha to withdraw.  From Ha: A heavy, defeated, world-weary sigh. "You're right," she said, "We need to get out of here before it's too late." "Well," said Theodora, "I'm glad you agree, given that it was an order, not a suggestion." "Yes, ma'am," said Ha, cowed. She's silent for a moment or two. Swear I could just about hear distant gunfire over the phoneline-- although I suppose it could have just been bad reception-- static, distortion, something like that. Then: "Permission to speak freely, Comrade Field Marshal Andrejić?" Andrejić bid her continue. "We were so close. We were so d___n close." Her voice was raw; even over the phone, she sounded as if on the verge of tears, "I can see the d___ned towers of Ljubljana Castle from here. And past that-- Trieste, Istria." Where my family is, she meant, without saying it aloud. Her parents are in Istria. So is her fiancé (or husband by now, possibly?). None of them have been heard from since Germanica's drive to the coast put them behind enemy lines. "But I know that if we try to advance another inch towards the city, Germanica's dug-in anti-landship artillery and superior air power will tear our cataphracts to shreds." Cataphracts that include you, E.-- and God knows how many other spouses and lovers, parents and children-- a web of families, born and found, stretching across the length and breadth of the Commune.  "And then that's the ballgame. So-- I'm ordering Klibanophoroi West to withdraw without hesitation or regret. It's a clear matter of military necessity. But I'm absolutely heartbroken."  The withdrawal of Ha's forces was executed with the same skill and decisiveness she applies in her offensives; the landships and their supporting dragoons and infantry escaped the salient without significant casualties. From there, they were able to regroup and consolidate the more modest gains of the offensive's first phase.  The entire month of July felt like one long nightmare; a chain of disasters and defeats which consumed hundreds of thousands of lives and saw the loss of the entire Belgorod region. Perhaps now, in August, we've finally awakened from it? Army of Belgorod's holding their new frontline for the moment. The invasion of Corsica and Sardinia was an unqualified success; the Army of the Islands is already preparing for a further series of landings in the Balearic Islands. The Irish, British, and Ghanaians continue their remarkable feats in Holland. The Army of Milan has been augmented by a large contingent of British troops under General Pandey; W.R.E. forces on that front dare not leave their fortifications in Genoa.   In another sense, though, the whole war's just one long nightmare; every day it continues is a fresh disaster.  WORLD MAP, 8/11/41 
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Oct 28, 2022 20:48
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Whatever happens, this is not going to be a story about fascism winning in the end. It's to the LP's benefit, I think, that I'm actually kind of evenly matched with the AI, since it makes the war more narratively interesting to me without having to play sub-optimally on purpose. To that end, I'm trying to let the war play out as naturally as possible, but if things go really badly... well, I'll think of something.  Or just reload the save instead of writing a post that breaks the character limit about it.That said... this was kind of a rough update in terms of, well, *gestures vaguely*, but by the end, the situation's stabilized a lot, so I'm mildly optimistic about our prospects the next time I play. And hopefully I can turn the air war around by moving some of our fighters out of Hungary and to the Belgorod Front or northern Italy, since the fighting's much less intense in Hungary now. Suggestions or tips are always appreciated, though.
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Oct 28, 2022 23:41
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Ayitian troops are here and there— a few garrisoning Gibraltar, a few up in Lithuania, but it seems like the bulk of their land forces (along with the other big Avalonian RRP members like Nova Scotia and Nuevo Xi’an) aren’t in Europe yet. They’ve already sent a ton of air wings, though, which is a big help.
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Oct 29, 2022 20:43
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 PART EIGHTY-FOUR: The Second Battle of Hungary (August 11th, 1941 - November 17th, 1941) Sing, O muse, of the Third Troop, C Squadron, 1st Thracian Regiment of Lancers, of the 11th Cataphracts Division of Klibanophoroi West… First, the 1st Section, led by Sergeant Çelik Tikolo, gallant and cunning. They brought two LS/3 Evgenia landships– reliable 2481 Meliae, commanded by Sergeart Tikolo, and indefatigable 3207 Phrasikleia, presided over by sure-footed Sergeant Helena Sotiriou. Then the 2nd Section; Staff Sergeant Verica Čerkez, battle-hardened, veteran of wars in far-off Avalon and emerald Ireland; implacable 1200 Hippocrene and sturdy 2025 Aster were her command. The former carried Čerkez and four others into battle; the latter was directed by Sergeant Meriones Papadopoulos: unrelated to, and not to be compared with, Field Marshal Theodora Papadopoulou or her line. From there came the Olympian, Second Lieutenant Erinna Papadopoulou, daughter of adamant Theodora, commanding her troop from enduring 1024 Gorgon. Eager Corporal Isaakios Ardizoglou drove the landship; Trooper Sabina Aderca, withdrawn and melancholic, served as co-driver and bow-gunner. Corporal Warsame Abdullahi, sharp-eyed and patient, manned the main gun; easy-going Trooper Zuan Cesare Capello loaded it. Onward they went to the battlefields of the Imperial War...  From left to right-- Trooper Sabina Aderca (smoking by the turret), Trooper Zuan Capello (relaxing by the treads), Corporal Isaakios Ardizoglou, Corporal Warsame Abdullahi, Lieutenant Erinna Papadopoulou Excerpts from the diary of Lieutenant Erinna Papadopoulou: Fighting in a landship is more like fencing that I thought it would be. Which is to say, not very much like fencing at all, but not entirely unlike it. Before this war, had I been asked to imagine what a battle between landships looked like, I would have pictured something like the way old ironclads fought in the mid-19th century-- the two ponderous foes hammering away at one another with their main guns, the outcome unclear until volley after volley of shells had finally worn away their armor, at which point one or the other would erupt into flames-- or something like that. But while a landship might seem slow and plodding compared to-- shall we say-- a race car zipping down a track unimpeded, to a foot soldier it moves with unimaginable swiftness. A duel between landships is a battle of manuever and positioning as much as it is anything else. Whether on the battlefield or the fencing-piste, agile footwork is the difference between victory and defeat. Such clashes are, perhaps, more akin to the foil than the épée I favored. A blow that's off-target is utterly inconsequential; an attack that strikes true is catastrophic. Case in point: The retreat following Klibanophoroi West's failure to retake Ljubljana. The 11th Cataphracts Division in general and the 1st Thracian Lancers in particular are said to have taken "light" casualties (Within my own troop, Sergeants Čerkez and Tikolo report no casualties from their sections). In terms of numbers in a ledger-book, this is true, I suppose; less so from within the confines of the landship 1024 Gorgon. We were ambushed before the Gorgon was "buttoned-up"-- which is to say, before all of the hatches were secured. In one burst of machine-gun fire, our driver, Corporal Artemisia Avlonitou, was killed instantly. Corporal Tsveta Draganova, our gunner, was badly wounded. With the landship now buttoned-up and then-Trooper Isaakios Ardizoglou taking Avlonitou's place (the driver's seat still slick with blood; Artemisia's body crumpled on the floor of the compartment), we sped back towards our lines, hoping to carry Tsveta to safety and medical assistance. No such luck. We reached a safer position, but not before Tsveta had bled out. One lucky attack. Half of the people I spent so much of my time in close confines with, half of the people I know in this little metal box-- gone, just like that. "Light" casualties.  And so our little community gains two new members. Our new gunner is a fellow named Warsame Abdullahi. He was already with Klibanophoroi West-- indeed, he was already the gunner of an LS/3 Evgenia landship. But several divisions of cataphracts-- the 5th, 6th, 9th, and 10th-- were consolidated due to shortages of equipment and vehicles. The excess personel were in turn assigned to replace losses from the other divisions of Klibanophoroi West.  Isaakios was promoted to corporal and bumped up from driver to co-driver, in recognition of his quick-thinking in saving Gorgon-- and the other souls aboard it-- in that fateful ambush. Taking his place as co-driver, then, was one Trooper Sabina Aderca. She's a survivor of the disasters on the Belgorod front; her prior unit was disbanded after sustaining catastrophic losses in Klibanophoroi East's attempt to relieve Chernivtsi after its investment by the WRE. The survivors are now scattered across new postings up and down the frontlines; Sabina has landed in the bow-gunner's seat of 1024 Gorgon. She's disinclined to speak of her time in Belgorod, Muntenia, and Bessarabia, which is understandable. According to her paperwork, before her conscription into the Red Army she was a citizen of Iași, which was one of the first Byzantine cities seized by imperial forces as they pushed across the Prut. She's disinclined to speak of this, either-- also understandable.  There has been a reshuffling of the Commune's various field armies along more-or-less geographic lines. Field Marshal Andrejić's been given more or less sole charge of the forces attempting to regroup in the east-- the Army of Belgorod, Klibanophoroi East, the Army of the Caucasus, et al. She also remains in charge of Cavdari's Army of the Islands as it island-hops across the Mediterranean. All of these are now under the aegis of the Second Army Group.    The major forces in Italy, Croatia, and Hungary-- the Armies of the Danube, the Alps, and Milan, and of course Klibanophoroi West-- have all been consolidated into the First Army Group. Which means that I'm now part of a chain of command with my mom at the top. (Does she think about me as she draws lines on a map, sketching out offensives and defensive lines and retreats? I almost hope she doesn't. As far as command decisions go, I'm not any different from any other of the thousands and thousands of junior officers in the Red Army.)    (Julie, as Tribune of the Grand Secretariat of the Byzantine Commune, is at least notionally my commander-in-chief; I know she thinks of me, even as she's steering the great ship of state and directing the grand strategy of the RRP-- every letter I get from her is a litany of longing. I'm touched, but I also hope... I don't know. That my presence out here never compromises her judgment? That, should anything happen to me, she stays resolute? I remember her referring to her desire to keep me safe in Byzantion as a "selfishness" of hers; is my presence on the frontlines a selfishness of mine? Would I have done more for the Commune's cause by staying at her side? What if I'm killed, and she blames herself? What if I'm captured by the enemy, and they try to use me as leverage over her? What if? If, if, if.)   Such unhelpful ruminations are more and more common as Klibanophoroi West is... well, idleness isn't quite the right word for it; you can never really feel idle when the enemy has air superiority, when death can rain from the sky at the shortest of notice. In limbo, let's say; the thrust towards Ljubljana has been parried by Germanica, and we've clearly broken it off and withdrawn to lick our wounds.   Even the 11th Cataphracts, with their light casualties, have been left in a state of disarray by the failure of Ha's Croatian offensive. Many other formations in Klibanophoroi West were considerably less fortunate. In any future offense, the cataphract divisions will pretty obviously be the tip of the spear. For the moment, the LS/3 Evgenia medium landship outclasses anything the enemy is fielding-- agile enough to outmaneuver the WRE's heavy landship (veritable land dreadnoughts, really), sturdy enough to withstand shots from the fast light landships Valeria's so enamored of (unless they're either extremely lucky or manage to get behind you, in which case you might be a few seconds away from a fiery death.) I doubt this technological edge will last forever-- the Battle of Transylvania was a proof of concept for the medium landship that's hard to ignore; the WRE must be developing an answer to the Evgenia. But at the moment, only a handful of divisions equipped with Evgenias are in anything resembling 'fighting-shape'.  It's academic, anyway, since fuel's a bit scarce at the moment. Even the most advanced landship can't do much without gas in the tank. What's left of the Marine Impériale has once again taken another tilt at the Mediterranean. They're currently being blasted to smithereens by a large RRP fleet, as is by now customary, but that means maintaining-- and fuelling-- large-scale naval operations.  Keeping the Mediterranean shipping lanes open is non-negotiable, of course-- exports from our allies, the Allies, and neutral nations are a vital lifeline for all sorts of key war goods by this point-- including, ironically, oil.     A page torn from a cheap paperback copy of Polybius's Histories posted:For the Consul appointed by the Romans to the command of their naval force, Gnaeus Cornelius Scipio, had a few days previously given orders to the captains to sail in the direction of the Straits whenever the fleet was ready, while he himself, putting to sea with seventeen ships, preceded them to Messene, being anxious to provide for all the urgent needs of the fleet. While there a proposal happened to be made to him with regard to the city of Lipara, and embracing the prospect with undue eagerness he sailed with the above-mentioned ships and anchored off the town. The Carthaginian general Hannibal, hearing at Panormus what had happened, sent off Boödes, a member of the Senate, giving him twenty ships. Boödes sailed up to Lipara at night and shut up Gnaeus in the harbour. When day dawned the Roman crews hastily took refuge on land, and Gnaeus, falling into a state of terror and being unable to do anything, finally surrendered to the enemy.  Well, chalk up another loss for WRE's navy. Perhaps they really are the heirs to Rome, in that their navy repeatedly engages a superior foe and gets destroyed; A baton of maritime incompetence picked up by Scipio Asina and passed down through millennia of fleets now at the bottom of the Mediterranean and into the hands of Admiral Adéle de Lacour.    The platoon was somewhat dismayed when orders came in to redeploy to the Croatian frontline; it looked for all the world like we were taking another crack at Germanica's dug-in troops and armor-- a bit south of the last offensive, but still plunging into the same morass of enemy strongpoints and static defenses we'd been forced back from just one week ago-- where we lost Sveta and Artemisia. "That's some real First Great War poo poo," grumbled Zuan, as 1024 Gorgon led its sisters down the highway out of Banja Luka. "Isn't that the sort of thing your ma put a stop to, LT?" The Red Army is notorious for the lack of social distinction between officers and enlisted members; one of the few vestiges left of the old Red Guard's attempt at battlefield democracy, mostly fallen by the wayside on the battlefields of México, after the army learned the lesson that, yes, you really do need a chain of command. This is even more true in a landship-- decorum and protocol fall by the wayside when you're all living in a metal box together. The Gallic nickname for Byzantine landship troopers, apparently, is les Grognards-- the Grumblers. I might carry a commission bestowed upon me by the Grand Secretariat of the Commune, I might be responsible for coordinating with Comrade Staff Sergeant Čerkeza and Comrade Sergeant Tikolo, but I'm also just another fragile human body getting rattled around inside an Evgenia. More fragile than most, even, given how much time a landship commander spends just sticking her entire head out of the top hatch, wildly looking this way or that for friend or foe. (I was incredulous when I learned that, no, there really isn't a better way to do that.)  At the same time-- I still am an officer, and there is a chain of command; sometimes, I'm not entirely sure what I'm supposed to say in situations like this. We sat in awkward silence-- or, well, we were awkwardly silent, while Gorgon was noisy as ever-- the growl of the engines, the constant vibration of a landship moving at speed (the fuel shortage having apparently been ameliorated), and the rush of wind through the open hatches. And then I saw Sabina and Warsame exchange a rather bewildered glance, and it dawns on me that I haven't had the "Yes, that Erinna Papadopoulou" conversation with either of them yet. Suddenly, it's a completely different sort of awkward moment. It had to happen eventually, I suppose. The fact Papadopolou is one of the most common names in the Grecophone poleis of the Commune affords me some amount of anonymity, but it never lasts forever. Just who "that Erinna Papadopolou" is varies-- the daughter of the field marshal, the girlfriend of the Tribune, the sister of the famous boxer, or-- very occasionally-- the Olympic silver medalist. "What, didn't you guys know?" said Zuan, who'd also grasped the significance of our new comrades' silent exchange, "You're sharing the Gorgon with a bonna-fide celebrity!" "Oh," said Warsame, right on cue, "You're that Erinna Papadopoulou?" "The one and same!" said Zuan, now clearly enjoying himslef, "As seen on the front page of news periodicals throughout the socialist world."  "Come on, Capello," said Isaakios, who'd been keeping his eyes on the road, "Be nice." Isaakios is always polite in that country-boy sort of thing. He's from somewhere in rural Anatolia-- not far from where Julie grew up. (Every time he speaks, his accent makes me think of her.) Things are better out there, now. The communal farms actually live up to the name-- they've finally become genuinely cooperative, democratic instituions, as woven into the fabric of the Byzantine Commune as those of the urban proletariat. Well, better late than never.  Isaakios is a good kid. Hardworking, honest to a fault. He was just finishing his second year at studying scientific agriculture at Eskişehir University when the war broke out and wrecked everything.  Warsame swung around in the gunner's seat at gave me an appraising look. "I thought I recognized you!" he said, "I saw you at the '29 Olympics!" "Oh," I said, "Were you in London for it?" "Sure was!" he said, brightly, "I was on vacation with my folks, and we got to see a few of the events-- including the fencing. I kept asking my Mom why they didn't let you guys have swords that didn't flop around. But even if I was too young to really follow what was going on, I was so excited when you beat-- uh-- what's her name, from Bavaria? Cheering you on was one of the first times I really felt Byzantine."  "I hope it wasn't too disappointing when Louise Colville trounced me in the next round and won the gold for Britain," I said. "Well! You know what they say-- silver rules the world."  Sabina took a long drag from her cigarette, moodily silent as ever, thoughts still clearly on the Belgorod front.   Can't say I blame her. Valeria has made a charnel-house of the east; the fallback line is holding for now, but they haven't pushed the WRE a single inch back towards Third Rome. Iași's still playing host to a bunch of fascist occupiers busy doing God knows what.  I need to remember that things haven't stagnated like that everywhere, though. The Irish invasion of Holland is continuing to succeed contrary to all expectations. The Hague fell to a combined British-German offensive, and collectively, the Irish, British, and Ghanaians are resisting every attempt to dislodge them.   Nuevo Xi'an's even opened up a second beachhead southwest of Rotterdam.  Presumably, lessons have been learned from the failure of the Allies' first two attempts at an amphibious invasion of the Chinese coast-- and the spectacular results of their third crack at it.     (It's not good news for the Allies everywhere, though-- a Somalian offensive has shattered Allied lines in North Africa; the investment of Tripoli has already been completed.)  An Ayitian expeditionary force has begun the invasion of the Balearic Islands-- the last of Gaul's island redoubts.  And, somehow, Kaunas still holds, months after its encirclement.  Most relevant to us-- LS/4 Cosettas are now rolling off the production lines, forged with Ghanaian steel. Even if it's months before any of those Cosettas find their way to us, the fact the Commune is maintaining its edge in landship technology is heartening.   There's clearly some sort of deception operation afoot; they pulled us back from the Croatian front, but they're taking great pains to convince the enemy Klibanophoroi West is still there with everything from fake radio traffic to just leaving a bunch of inflatable landships everywhere. Apparently, they look pretty convincing from the air. The Adriatic is host to all sorts of conspicuous naval transport, and Maputo's even been launching a few probing attacks.  The real target is elsewhere. Somewhere on the Danube front, most likely.  The WRE's attention is squarely focused on Northern Italy-- the salient east of occupied Trieste has been getting absolutely hammered.  They also seem to be anticipating the next RRP offensive will be somewhere in Italy-- assuming that's not a ruse of their own? Presumably, the Intelligence Secretariat is figuring that out.  All I can do is make sure my troop is as prepared as possible for what comes next, whatever it is.  Today [September 30, 1941], we finally found out "what comes next". Comrade Captain Berenice Achilleou called in of C Squadron's troop leaders and their sergeants to brief us the part we will play in Operation Hannibal (a code name which seems to loosely-- and misleadingly-- gesture towards a focus on the Alphine region). The aim of this operation? Nothing less than the liberation of all of occupied Hungary. Klibanophoroi West is, of course, the tip of the spear-- the opening phase of the operation will a strong armored attack right towards the WRE center, with our primary objective being achieving breakthrough, followed by a rapid advance towards Debrecen-- the second largest city in the Hungarian Union. (At least, it was that before the war... but that's a grim thought to linger on.) Simultaneously, other RRP forces on our flanks will begin their own offensives-- a mostly Hungarian army under General Szemere in the west, towards Miskolc, while to our east a Ghanaian army under General Ahmed (augmented by Ayitian, British and German reinforcements) will push into northern Transylvania. Once a breakthrough is achieved, the Army of the Danube will move to consolidate it, while Klibanophoroi West and the flanking armies will converge on Debrecen.  D-day is October 9th.     The architects of Operation Hannibal: Field Marshal Theodora Papadopoulou of the Byzantine 1st Army Group, Field Marshal Zobor Krisztofer of the Hungarian Army Group East, and General-in-Chief Ioannes Oluwaremilekun of the Ghanaian European Command.    The principle commanders of Operation Hannibal's field armies: General Valentina Ha of Klibanophoroi West, General Nadine Hau-Fang of the Army of the Danube, General Sibri Ahmed of the Ghanaian European Command - Fifteenth Army, General Szemere Marika of the People's Defense Force - Danube Defense Area.    Secondary commanders of Operation Hannibal: British General Rina Pandey, North German General Miriam Kerr, and Ayitian General Seán Galligan. Day 1: First line of defense was Austrian infantry supported by Gallic landships. They're the zippy little ones Gallic doctrine is still built around-- landship-to-landship, a Scipio's getting blown away by an Evgenia. The trick is, Gallic tankers also know this, and since they aren't loving idiots, they don't just rush out and start blasting away at us. And by this point, they're pretty trained in how to use their superior speed against our landships-- come in from multiple angles, circle around us, and try to get a shot in at relatively thin rear armor. So here's what fighting them is like: sticking my head out of the commander's hatch, trying to keep my eye on both the five landships of my troop and whatever the enemy's sending at us without getting my head blown off by small-arms fire, trying to do complicated geometry in my head even as good old Gorgon 1024's engines are doing their best to rattle my bones right out of my body, while also periodically ducking back down to relay commands to my crew-- turn this way, aim the main gun at the enemies at six o'clock-- no, make that seven, load the high explosive shells and be ready to fire on my mark. And if you screw any of that up even a little bit, there's a very real possibility of being roasted to death or atomized by a munitions explosion or sliced to ribbons by shrapnel. Fortunately, today, at least, nobody screwed it up too badly. 3207 Phrasikleia got its engines knocked out by a lucky shot from an Austrian anti-armor gun that got the drop on the troop, but Sotiriou and her crew all escaped unscathed. We're down a landship for the moment-- Phrasikleia isn't being written off as a total loss-- the maintenance company's optimistic about getting it running again, but not in time to send it back into the fray of Operation Hannibal, which is moving at such a breakneck operational tempo.  Day 3: WRE lines beginning to crack.  There's a weird discordance between my knowledge of the grand strategy playing out (as elucidated by Achilleou and her maps) and the actual experience of being on the ground. It's just a lot of mud, blood, explosions, and death, seen through view-slits and hatches. Go forward. Secure this crossroads. Forward again. Try to tune out the constant cacophony inside the compartment-- and the smell, that exotic cocktail of diesel and the odor of five human bodies stuffed into a confined space for hours and hours. Watch out for the anti-armor emplacement that just blew away one of the landships from Second Troop-- and don't look back at the wreck, it's someone else's problem now. Zuan loads a round, Isaakios turns the landship a few degrees left, Sabina lays down suppressive fire with the bow-gun, Warsame squints into the rangefinder and makes minute adjustments to the angle and inclination of the turret, I give the order-- and then the deafening report of the main gun firing, percussive blast of an explosion, bodies in Austrian uniforms left strewn about like broken dolls.  And then forward again.  Day 4: We're getting closer and closer to the city center of Debrecen. Phrasikleia's replacement-- 78 Hoplon-- has reached us, so we're back up to full strength. Hoplon's clearly an early production Evgenia-- the rear plate's been redesigned since then, and the ammunition storage is in a different place, but Sotiriou and her crew seem to have adapted without missing a step. Opposition seems to be thinning out, but there's still Gallic armor between us and our goal.   The Battle of Debrecen: Hungarian infantry of the 1. Gyalogdanár come to the aid of the stranded survivors of a company of dragoons attached to the 2nd (Light) Cavalry Division. Day 5: Debrecen won. That's for Tsveta and Artemisia, you fascist sons of bitches.   Our job wasn't to just go charging down Piac Street and into the city center-- the 1st Thracian Lancers were tasked with securing the roads in and out of the city. The third troop-- accompanied by a platoon of motor dragoons-- was tasked with securing the humble town of Vámospércs, a dozen or so miles west of Debrecen proper. A village by Byzantine standards, but it sits on an important highway leading from Debrecen all the way to Cluj (and thence even further behind RRP lines). We breached Vámospércs's outer perimeter without incident. Some crewed antilandship guns were set up overlooking the approach, but the dragoons managed to clear them out so the landships could proceed into the town. We then passed the remnants of a machine-gun nest that had already been cratered by indirect artillery fire.  The town itself was a scene of disquieting silence. The low buildings set against the wide expanse of the Northern Great Plain created the impression of a wide-open landscape, but the Vámospércs's actual streets were narrow, houses and shops all bunched up together, obliging us to advance in single-file. Landship doctrine has it that the commander takes point on the offense-- like some romantically doomed Roman empress, then, ready to take the brunt of any attack for the men and women under her charge. That's not how war works anymore-- if it ever did outside the pages of history books. We were attacked from the rear-- a Scipio zipped out from the alleyway between a shuttered café and the burned-out shell of what used to be the local Party office. It was far too narrow a space for an Evgenia, but the Scipio was just barely able to scrape its way through. And fire its gun directly into the old-model backplate of 78 Hoplon. The ammo stowage immediately went up in flames; a heartbeat later, so did the rest of the landship. Sotiriou and her people would've died instantly-- a cold comfort. To survive the loss of one landship, only to die so unceremoniously two days later... Revenge was swift, though-- wedged into the alleyway, the little Scipio was a sitting duck as the turrets of Meliae and Aster swiveled towards it in near-unison. The Gallic landship was immediately torn to shreds by 75mm guns. Did the crew know they were making a suicide run? A Scipio for an Evgenia is an exchange of materiel that favors the Gauls. I opened the hatch and glance around frantically. I see a glint of metal out of the corner of my eye, angles too sharp and straight to be a civilian car or truck. "Ardizoglou, back up. Nice and slow," I said, after ducking back into the compartment. The engine shuddered to a halt, and then went into reverse; the landship lurched backwards. Then, over the radio-- "Meliae, Aster, hang back a moment-- cover our rear." "You heard the LT," answered Staff Sergeant Čerkez, "We don't want any more surprises kicking us in the rear end." Even over the crackling of the radio, she sounded strangely calm, all business. I tried to will a little bit of the same steel into my voice. I tried not to imagine Sotiriou and the four other troopers roasting in the wreck of Hoplon. "Capello, load up an AP shell," I said-- trying to project calm but also shouting to be heard over the engines. "On it, boss!" "Abdullahi, two o'clock. We're going to get right in their face-- be ready to fire." The turret swung left. I counted to three under my breath. Then: "Ardizoglou, forward-- floor it." 1024 Gorgon lurched forward; the intersection our quarry was lying wait in hove back into view. That glint of metal. The ricochet of small-arms fire. There's something electric in the air in moments like this. The Gorgon stops feeling like five disparate individuals at the controls of of a machine; instead, she becomes a living monster, thinking, breathing, and moving as one. "Fire!" Gorgon fired down the side-street. A Scipio trying to back up gets its turret blown off instead. "Got 'em," said Warsame, grinning. I patted him on the shoulder, and then got back on the radio. "Let's get moving again," I said, "But take it slow." Thus we picked our way through the village, block by agonizing block. Our landships fanned out, picking off Scipios one-by-one. The dragoons dismounted from their trucks and swept the alleys too narrow for vehicles to negotiate. After that, the houses and shops. At one point, a shot from a Scripio just barely missed me, passing maybe a foot or two over my head. In the midst of battle, through nerves and adrenalin, the fact I came within a hair's breadth of dying barely even registered. In the moment, all that mattered was that I was still breathing, still playing my part in the Gorgon's heart. Finally, though, we reached Vámospércs's central square, where the main street crossed the highway to Debrecen, and the guns fell silent. A Gallic officer emerged from a commandeered police station barricaded with sandbags, accompanied by a lieutenant carrying a white flag. I climbed out of 1024 Gorgon, service-pistol unholstered and pointed at the Gauls. The landship's machine-guns pointed at them, too. Without taking my eyes off the little fascist negotiating party, I motioned for the nearest section of dragoons to dismount and fall in behind me. As I approached, the officer-- a colonel with a careworn face, greying at the temples-- put his hands up and said... something. He seemed to be attempting to speak Greek, but not in a way that made any sense until the slow-dawning realization that he was trying to address me in extremely garbled ancient Greek. "Don't you speak Latin or something?" I asked-- first, in my best Koine Greek, because I couldn't help but show off a little bit; then, when he showed no sign of comprehension, in Latin. "Oh!" he said, "Yes, I forgot. 'Greek, Latin, and Arabic,' yes?" He's speaking the stilted classical Latin the Gauls always seem to, but at least he's not nigh-incomprehensible anymore. "You are the commanding officer here?" "That's right." He squinted at the insignia on my shoulder-tabs. "Very well, Second Lieutenant," he said, looking vaguely affronted at being faced with a junior officer, rather than-- I don't know-- Valentina Ha herself driving up in her jeep to parley with him. "I am Tribunus laticlavius Louis-Alexandre Lemarque, commander of the 1st cohort of the 10th Autocurrus armatus Legion. I wish to negotiate the surrender of my command." The young lieutenant-- who looked about half Lemarque's age-- with the white flag grimaced. He remained silent, but he looked me dead in the eyes with such venom I had to fight the instinct to take a half-step backwards. "If you surrender unconditionally, you and your soldiers will be treated in accordance with the provisions of the Agaidika Convention concerning the treatment of prisoners of war," I said. Then, because I couldn't help but twist the knife a little, I added, "Even though I know drat well you people don't extend the same consideration to our soldiers." "Ah, well, touché," said Lemarque, with a shrug. Then: "I graciously accept your terms, Lieutenant. I surrender myself to your tender mercies." Seeing him try to play the part of a gentleman-officer paying his respects to a worthy opponent who has bested him in honorable combat was vaguely nauseating, but at least it meant he probably wouldn't make any trouble. The lieutenant, on the other hand, looked about ready to blow a gasket. "Sir--" he began, apparently unable to stop himself. "You forget yourself, Pilus Prior," said Lemarque, shaking his head like a teacher who's just been disappointed by his prize student. "Remember your place." "M-my place," said the lieutenant-- Pilus Prior-- whatever he was, "--is in the legions of an empire eternal and indivisible. You cannot mean to surrender to surrender to this-- this woman!" He was clearly seething with rage, but I had to admit his Latin was rather better than his commander's. I suppose that's one advantage with having still been a schoolboy when Valeria Imperatrix seized power-- they start you on Latin earlier. Too bad about the fascist indoctrination, though. "Centurion," repeated Lemarque, more forcefully this time. "I recognize her," said the lieutenant, ignoring the admonishment, "She's not just any Red oval office-- that's Erinna Papadopoulou! The Tribune's whore!" I couldn't help but laugh; apparently, I'd just discovered the worst version of the "Yes, that Erinna Papadopolou" conversation yet. Having said his piece, though, the lieutenant lapsed into a bitter silence; from there, the surrender of the remnants of the 1st cohort proceeded without incident.  Anyway. That's what Operation Hannibal looked like on the ground. On the grand strategic level-- in the boxes and arrows drawn on Achilleou's map-- it looks like this: The center of the Austro-Gallic line shattered at Debrecen. The flanks began to crumble, at all across Hungary, RRP forces surged forward.    Up and down the lines, the fash were in retreat, trying to withdraw across the Tisza before they got enveloped.   Less than a week after the recapture of Debrecen, Miskolc, too, is liberated.  A week after that, the WRE has been pushed out of almost all of the prewar territory of the Hungarian Union, only holding a narrow band of fortifications on the far side of the Tisza.   Legate Hanseatica was dispatched to try to salvage the situation, but the best she can do is staunch the bleeding-- the damage is done.   But even accomplishing that much meant reallocating men, resources and materiel from the war's other fronts. While we were fighting in Debrecen, the last of the Balearic Islands were seized.  The RRP forces invading Holland received an influx of Ghanaian reinforcements, and pushed their way across the Meuse River and into Rotterdam.  Even more ambitiously, the Ghanaians, British, and Irish have attempted a second amphibious invasion across the Channel, this time aimed at northern France proper. Even if this effort goes the way of, say, the Allies' first two swings at Shanghai, it would force a major realignment of Gallic forces from other theaters.  Most shocking of all, the RRP armies encircled in Kaunas not only achieved a breakout, but advanced all the way to Vilnius.   Valentina Ha-- and Klibanophoroi West-- is once again the toast of the whole Pact. I genuinely think she's the best field commander in the whole drat Imperial War at this point.   But our elation at the liberation of northern Hungary and the various dominos elsewhere it toppled is somewhat undercut as we see what the Gauls left behind in their occupied territory. First: A vacated prisoner of war camp we passed through on our way from Vámospércs to Debrecen. The prisoners were long gone-- they'd been marched further behind the WRE's lines long before we showed up. Or, well, most of them were-- the rest were lined up in front of mass graves and shot. About a hundred or so were left to rot in a ditch, unburied-- the last-minute executions we saw in Sibiu on a larger scale, maybe. I wondered how Lemarque and his unit were doing.  "Is this what Belgorod was like, Sabina?" Zuan asked, quietly. "I don't know," answered Sabina, "Probably worse. When were retreating from Iași, I made the mistake of looking back. All I saw was a pillar of smoke." "poo poo," said Zuan, shaking his head. Sabina dropped her cigarette stub, grinding it into the asphalt with the tip of her boot, and said nothing more.  Debrecen, on the other hand, was more harrowing for what we didn't see: a huge swath of the civilian population. Some of them were evacuated ahead of the fighting, but then... When the fash arrived, they did what they usually do-- have the CSP round up political prisoners-- Party officials, union leaders, a broadly-defined "intelligentsia", anyone who looks askance at the occupation authorities, etc., etc. After that, though, the Gauls imposed a system of corveé labor, and a portion of the able-bodied population was shipped off to the metropole to toil away doing God knows what. The mood in the city is... bizarre. Half celebratory, half-somber. The only thing I can think to compare it to is the anniversary of the Revolution always is in Byzantion; red banners and singing the Internationale in the shadow of the Monument to the Ten Thousand. General Ha seemed to always be in a hurry, rushing hither and yon in the liberated city, assessing conditions, shoring up the city's defenses in the event of a counter-offensive, and checking in with the soldiers under her command. She was doing the latter when she crossed paths with us. "Comrade General Ha!" I said, with a salute, "It's an honor, ma'am!" "At ease, Comrade Lieutenant," she said, returning the gesture with a disarming smile. "Oh, I know you!" she added, a moment later, "You're Theodora's girl, aren't you?" ("Yes, that Erinna Papadopoulou" strikes again) I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just shrugged, helplessly, as if to say, well, you caught me. The general looked a bit chagrined. "Sorry, I think I came off a bit dismissive? You're a lot more than just 'Theodora's girl'." ("Yeah," muttered Zuan, "She's also the Tribune's girlfriend!" Sabina elbowed him in the ribcage and silently mouthed shut the gently caress up.) "You're a soldier of the Red Army," said Ha, "And you've been fighting like hell out here. Soldiers like you-- all of you--" She gestured to the rest of the crew, inviting them into the conversation. "You're what makes Klibanophoroi West work." "Thank you, Comrade General Ha!" I said, a little stiffly-- I was still feeling a bit overawed. "Anyway!" continued Ha, breezily, "Everything copacetic for you guys? Are you getting the supplies you need? How about fuel? Eating all right? What about--" And then: the sharp crack of a sniper rifle. Ha dropped to the ground; at first I thought she was just ducking for cover-- then I saw the blood soaking her coat, and her teeth gritted with pain. The fash had noticed how indispensable to the RRP war effort she'd become, then. "poo poo," she hissed, "poo poo, poo poo, poo poo..." "Get her in the landship before they take another shot!" I ordered, hoping my voice didn't betray the anxiety-- no, the terror-- I was feeling. Sabina and Warsame gingerly helped her into the Gorgon, and just in time, too-- another shot rang out just as they were closing the hatch, ricocheting off the armor. "Ardizoglou, get us the gently caress out of here!" The engine growled, and the landship 1024 Gorgon churned to life. More gunshots-- from another direction, this time, and with the distinctive ping of a Byzantine rifle. "Aderca, get her-- I-- I don't know, apply pressure! Or something!" At this point, I knew my voice betrayed a note of fear. We sped off in the direction of the nearest forward medical unit, still not believing that this had somehow fallen on our shoulders.  A clipping from the Red Army Times, the official newspaper of the Byzantine Armed Forces posted:JUHASZ AWARDS HA HIGHEST DECORATION OF THE HUNGARIAN UNION  A clipping from the Red Army Times, the official newspaper of the Byzantine Armed Forces posted:"Comrade General Ha," said Comrade Juhasz, "Although you are a citizen of the Byzantine Commune-- and although the fascist aggressors occupy your very homeland-- you have tirelessly fought on behalf of the Hungarian people in our country's darkest hour. Now, you have bled for them as well, with all the valor and determination of any daughter of Hungary." Comrade Juhasz was visibly emotional as he spoke with Comrade General Ha-- a display that would have been unthinkable before the outbreak of the Imperial War, and a demonstration of the toll taken on him by the crisis which has engulfed the Union. "For your leadership in our collective struggle, and gallantry in the face of danger, a nation owes you its gratitude." After pinning the gold star of the Hero of the Hungarian Union to Comrade Ha's shirt, he added, "When the time comes to liberate the occupied territories of the Byzantine Commune, know that the Hungarian people will be with you every step of the way-- in Belgorod, in Croatia, in Istria-- and wherever else the fascist menace dares rear its head." "Yes, that Erinna Papadopoulou." WORLD MAP, 11/17/41 
Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Feb 5, 2023 |
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Nov 26, 2022 07:01
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NewMars posted:And now we have Hungary... but the real surprise is what's going on there in the baltics. They must have the luck of a god, to get a br8k like that. Ironically, General Vrischika has been left behind to mind the shop in Marathas proper. Yeah, I was disappointed, too.
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Nov 26, 2022 07:31
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I'm not really sure what comes after HoI4, honestly-- it depends a lot on what the state of things at endgame is.
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Dec 6, 2022 19:54
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That loving rules, holy poo poo.
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Dec 21, 2022 19:41
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 PART EIGHTY-FIVE: Normandy (November 17th, 1941 - February 21st, 1942) In 1950, Major Esther Burns, an officer of the British Army Intelligence Corps during the Third Great War, completed writing a memoir of her wartime experiences. As it contained numerous references to still-classified intelligence operations (in particular, the source of the so-called 'Most Secret Sources'-- i.e., the Visigoth intercepts-- as even in peacetime, MI6 and the Byzantine Intelligence Secretariat wished to avoid details of Byzantine-British decryption methods leaking to the capitalist powers), the government requested that Major Burns make numerous redactions before publication. She refused, instead electing to drop the project entirely. The manuscript was duly filed away somewhere in the vast War Office archives in Edinburgh Castle and forgotten for the next several decades. By the time researchers rediscovered it in the 1970s, the operational details it contained had long since been declassified, and, with the now-retired Major's permission, Two Wars was finally published, unabridged and unredacted. I grew up in the shadow of the First Great War-- old enough to understand what was happening, but perhaps not quite old enough to truly grasp its import. The war was certainly felt on our side of the Atlantic-- it was clear that some sort of disaster was slowly unfolding, even if it was far away. The headlines were full of Pyrrhic victories, then a slow grind of defeats and casualty lists. Schoolmates' parents were occasionally sent overseas; sometimes, they never came back. Rationing was never instituted, but everyday goods nonetheless seemed scarcer and more expensive by the day. Then came the final blow: the Byzantine armies finally broken at Totonacapan, leaving nearly 400,000 dead in their wake. After that, the governments of Byzantine, Great Britain, and Ghana had little choice but to accept the Treaty of Jaragua, disarm what was left of their shattered armies, scuttle their great fleets, and pay a massive indemnity to the victors.  In all three of the vanquished powers, their fledgling socialist experiments teetered on the edge of obliteration. The Byzantine Commune, the oldest and most established of the socialist governments, seemed ready to fracture-- or, worse still, collapse into reactionary revanchism. In Ghana, a once-unified socialist bloc collapsed into mutual recriminations, infighting, and factionalism. In Great Britain, the old capitalist-liberal status quo-- waning in power, but not yet dismantled-- sensed that perhaps their time in the political wilderness was coming to an end. Pessimism was in the air; a utopian dream was dying, and the distant disasters abroad seemed ready to be matched by calamities closer to home. And then, miraculously, the storm clouds which loomed so distantly suddenly dissipated. Political theorists have written much on how this happened-- the reforms of the Cavinato tribunate, the failure of Ghanaian rightists to take advantage of the socialists' internecine warfare, and, of course, the most violent phase of Great Britain's so-called 'peaceful revolution'-- the general strikes, the unions fighting phalanxes of fascists and their police accomplices in the streets, the emergence of the Radical Labour Party. From my perspective, though, things seemed to unfold like this: the 1911 defeat represented a sort of nadir in our fortunes, followed by years in which life seemed to improve by every metric. Having stepped back from the brink, a better world was emerging before our eyes. The horrors of the Great War were just a brief aberration from the steady upward curve of human progress. Even the outbreak of the Second Great War wasn't enough to dispel the illusion; that war took on the aura of a sort of grand adventure-- Internationale ships ruled the sea, Internationale landships and Haida highways allowed our armies to run circles around the Ayitian invaders. It was a war fought with and won by technology, industry, daring, and sheer cleverness-- a far cry from the muddy trenches of Oaxaca and México.  My grandfather destroyed his body mining coal on behalf of the heartless bourgeoisie for a pittance in wages. My parents fought with their blood, sweat, and tears for humane working conditions and fair compensation. I was the first person in my family to attend a University. What kind of world would my son grow up, I wondered? A better, kinder one, I thought, still more just and good than one I was privileged enough to come of age in. The Third Great War put paid to such naive optimism.  By the autumn of '41, though, the end of the war seemed tantalisingly within reach. Hungary was liberated, the Imperium's would-be occupiers smashed by General Valentina Ha's daring landship offensive.  Amsterdam had finally fallen to the Red Rose Pact, and the so-called 'Batavian Foederati' fled into ignominious exile. The invasion of Holland had seemed a mad gamble-- but, in the end, it succeeded beyond all expectations.   A positive omen, surely, for the even more audacious invasion of France itself, which had now secured a beachhead stretching from Dunkerque to Rouen, which was working its way towards the heart of the fascist beast itself. Towards Paris.  Even Lithuania seemed at a turning point.  General Ada Davies was making a spirited attempt to break through WRE lines and finally relieve the beleaguered Kaunas pocket.  And within the pocket, the already-legendary, against-all-odds defence conducted by a melting pot of Lithuanian regulars and partisans, RRP reinforcements from Ayiti, Britain, and Ghana, and volunteers from Marathas and the North German Federation continued; with the recent capture of Third Roman-held Vilnius-- and the supplies therein-- it was clear they could still hold out for some time.  The war was unquestionably brutal. The liberation of Hungary brought to like the sort of conquerers the Gauls were. In the short run, terror. In the long run, genocide. Elsewhere, the Légion Impériale de l'Air had embarked on a campaign of strategic bombing; the urban centers of Northern Italy were in flames. Wherever the RRP's air defences faltered, imperial bombers were never far behind.  No matter what, there was still a long, hard war ahead of us. But there was a palpable sense in the air that we had, at least, reached the beginning of an end. Like the First Great War, the Third Great War would be nothing more than a temporary diversion from humanity's climb to the lofty summits of utopia.  And like the Second Great War, this would be a war won through technology...   ...industry...  ...daring...  ...and sheer cleverness. And there were few organisations in the Red Rose Pact's entire military effort as assured of their own cleverness than the London Section of the RRP Joint Military Intelligence. Parliament might sit at Holyrood; the War Office might occupy cramped warrens of offices built into Edinburgh Castle, but London, with the self-confidence (or, some would say, self-regard) of a city that was once the capital of an ancient kingdom, remains Great Britain's centre of gravity in many spheres: cultural, economic, demographic... and clandestine. For in Westminster City stood an inconspicuous office building which anchored a sprawling web of outbuildings, foetid basements, country estates expropriated from the formerly-landed gentry, radar arrays, safe houses and boltholes tucked into anonymous tower flats or terrace houses, radio antennae, laboratories, workshops, facilities well-hidden, facilities hidden in plain sight, and other such places stretching across southern England.  Collectively, these were the nerve centre of military intelligence for Great Britain, and, by late 1941, for the entire Red Rose Pact.  Foreground, from left to right: Captain Jeanne de Lisle, Republican Navy; Major Esther Burns, British Army; Captain Cosima Laurenti, Red Army. Background: Sarah Mallory, a graduate student reading mathematics at the University of St Andrews recruited by military intelligence's cryptography programme. Several things recommended London over the Pact's other great cities for this purpose. The Byzantine Commune itself, of course, is directly threatened by the WRE's armies.  Even the urban centres far from the fighting-- Nicea, Athens, Rome, Byzantion, and all those other ancient names-- were at the mercy of the long frontier between the Commune and the Imperium, serpentine, shifting, and permeable. The Intelligence Secretariat were gifted spy-hunters, but even they couldn't hope to catch every enemy agent operating within the Commune's boundaries when placement of said agents was as simple as walking across the border, or staying behind in liberated territory as the regular army withdraws.  Hungary had all the same disadvantages, and the additional foible of intelligence efforts being undermined by internal rivalry between Army Intelligence and the State Political Police.  The attempt on Ha's life in Debrecen demonstrated the former of these problems; the latter, perhaps, gave the blot the room it needed to exist in the first place.  Ghana, the Ayitian Federation, and the other RRP members in Avalon and Africa were an ocean away from the war. This was an enormous strategic advantage in most ways-- population centres and factories entirely out of the Imperium's reach was a critical asset-- but it also made them unsuitable for coordinating operations on the European subcontinent.   Great Britain offered the best of both worlds. It was close enough to the fighting to monitor and intercept radio transmissions, conduct reconnaissance flights, co-ordinate with our own agents operating behind enemy lines, and so on, but it was still defended by the sea. Among other things, this made it exceedingly difficult for the WRE to place hostile agents on our shore, whether by air or by sea.  By this point, the English Channel had become a dangerous place for Gallic ships, and an enemy agent parachuting onto Great Britain tended to be rather conspicuous. Combined with the fact their codes were broken months ago and the other shortcomings of the Imperium's intelligence apparatus-- the Deuxième Bureau de l'État-major général, which answered to the military high command, and the Frumentarii, controlled by the CSP, were so riven by mutual suspicion and animosity that it made the state of affairs between Hungary's Army Intelligence and Political Police look positively civilised, for example-- even spies that managed to make it to Britain tended to be caught in short order. This put us in a unique position: while we could never be entirely certain, it was very likely that there was not a single WRE operative in all of Great Britain who had not been caught, executed, or turned. In retrospect, this supposition was correct-- the only intelligence coming out of the entire island of Great Britain was coming from double agents working for us.  With an edge like that, even the Byzantines eventually packed their computers and radio equipment into crates and evacuated them-- and their Intelligence Secretariat operators-- from Byzantion. Thus Red Rose Pact Joint Military Intelligence was born.    Operation Hannibal's very public success was undergirded by a more subtle but no less important deception operation conducted by RRPJMI. Operation Highway employed a bewildering variety of means to convince Gallic intelligence that the coming counteroffensive would be a pincer attack on Istria from the Army of the Alps in northern Italy and Klibanophoroi West in Croatia, rather than the march to the Tisza that was actually imminent. The methods ranged from the straightforward-- having our double agents pass on false intelligence, for example-- to the grandiose-- the Byzantines using inflatable decoys and simulated radio traffic to convince the Gauls Klibanophoroi West was massing on the outskirts of Belgrade is probably the most famous part of Highway. My role was primarily in composing the false documents and radio transmissions which would find their way into imperial hands, but there was a fairly free flow of ideas across the entire London section as everyone passed around suggestions, tricks, and schemes of all shapes and sizes. My favourite little flourish was a plan to turn General Rina Pandey's reputation for sloppy operational secrecy to our advantage. Pandey was instructed to "let slip" to an Allied diplomat she was on intimate terms with that she was expecting to depart for Milan in the near future. The diplomat duly passed on this tidbit to her superiors in Kyoto. The Department of Foreign Affairs shared this information with the rest of the government. The fascist mole who'd infiltrated the Japanese Republic's Department of War, of course, discretely tipped off the Gallic ambassador, who, realising this meant a British offensive in northern Italy was imminent, sent it on to Paris. Within a week of Pandey's feigned indiscretion, we had intercepted and decoded messages from Gallic military intelligence congratulating 'their man in Kyoto' for obtaining this vital corroboration of the coming pincer attack towards Istria. We all had a laugh over that one. Pandey, of course, was in Transylvania, preparing her armoured divisions to support the eastern flank of Hannibal.  As the WRE forces which had massed in southern Austria to meet an attack that never came embarked on a frankly rather sloppy counter-offensive towards Byzantine and Hungarian forces dug in on the west bank of the Danube, the mood at Joint Military Intelligence was not merely celebratory; it was very nearly jaunty. Visigoth intercepts made it clear that the CSP frumentarii and the regular military intelligence agencies blamed one another for the debacle. The CSP wrote snippy reports criticising military intelligence officers for 'credulously believing the pillow-talk of Red harlots and their Asiatic mistresses'. The Deuxième Bureau lambasted 'Frumentarii snipers who can't shoot straight' for wasting the golden opportunity that had fallen into their lap in Debrecen. The Praetorium proper was furious with both agencies for being so thoroughly and disastrously outfoxed.  Working in intelligence offers a strange and rather discordant perspective of a war. While we sat in our offices, batting around wild ideas and building up an arsenal of lies, it was seductively easy to lose sight of the horrors and privations of the ground war. It was easy to have fun.  My colleagues all had their own ways to remain grounded in the realities of a long, hard war. I, perhaps, found it easier to remember what was really happening than others at Joint Military Intelligence.  Among the RRP forces fighting on the Channel coast, in the 8th Infantry Division, serving in the London Regiment of Fusiliers was one Private John Qiu Burns. My son, my Jack.  Jack Burns, London Fusiliers Jack was a prodigious writer of letters; to this day, I don't know how he found the time in the middle of a war. Still, every few days, a new missive would arrive, wryly written and sharply observed in spite of his tender years; at the outbreak of war, he'd only just turned eighteen. One such letter arrived early in December. It was heavily redacted as ever, but it was easy for a woman in my position to fill in the blanks. A letter from Jack Burns dated 1 December, 1941 posted:Dear Mum,  A letter from Jack Burns dated 1 December, 1941 posted:Getting here was something of a trial, though. Nothing like the initial landings at Dunkirk, granted-- some of the Ghanaians in Amiens were there, and I can't say I envy 'em-- it sounds harrowing.   A letter from Jack Burns dated 1 December, 1941 posted:Maybe that won't matter. Maybe the end of all of this really is in sight. We're close enough to Paris that we're seeing road signs for 'LUTETIA PARISIORUM' here and there. Granted, those signs all say things like, 'LUTETIA PARISIORUM - 160 km', but that's still a lot closer to kicking Postuma in the teeth than we were even a month ago. Everyone's honestly starting to feel a bit giddy.  Jack's instincts served him well. Just a day after I read his letter, Valeria Postuma gave another one of her signature frothing harangues, and this, now known as the De Britannia Magna Speech by all accounts, was a fascist barn-burner. Valeria Postuma posted:Brothers and sisters, sons and daughters of Rome-- a great atrocity has taken place: the Red hordes have profaned the sacred soil of La patrie with their presence. They have pointed a sword at the very heart of Europe, and there is but one redress: Crush them, utterly.  Valeria Postuma posted:The beasts infesting our shores come in many breeds. That outside interlopers from Africa far-off Avalon have no place here is self-evident. They shall be dealt with as swiftly and harshly as any barbarian tribe that intrudes upon imperial frontiers not as supplicants, but under arms and battle-standards. In the words of Romulus, "So perish whoever shall overleap my battlements."  Valeria Postuma posted:Yet the most vile of these intruders is the Briton-- handmaiden to Byzantium, slaves bowing and scraping for the crumbs off the Gracchans' table. They were offered Roman civilisation, and resisted it at every turn. An African or an Avalonian can at least plead ignorance of their betters' ways-- the Briton has no such excuse. Again and again, they rose up in futile rebellion. Again and again, they were crushed, until the old Western Empire collapsed. The rest of the fallen empire preserved, at least, some feeble embers of Roman civilisation-- they spoke Latin tongues, they lived by Latin laws, in their breasts they nurtured the memory of their former greatness. Not so for the Briton, who soon yielded to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. Whatever flickering embers of the ways of civilised men that had somehow survived centuries of Germanisation were finally snuffed out for good when the Picts poured over the ruins of the Roman wall once separating imperium from terra nullius. The result was this Habsburg delusion, this mongrel thing called 'Great Britain': A pustule on face of Western civilisation in dire need of lancing.  Valeria Postuma posted:Great Britain, lacking any true historical identity, uplifts the memory of rebels and barbarians-- the deformed patriotism of those with no patria. Boudica of the Iceni is considered a national heroine. Well, let us remind these traitors how that story ended: at Watling Street, with Gaius Suetonius Paulinus standing over the broken bodies of Boudica and her daughters.  The Red Rose Pact's current grand strategy relied on the on the assumption that the WRE would continue to be pulled in a dozen different directions-- that, in attempting to put out fires from Lithuania to Nice and everywhere in between, the imperium would stretch itself too thin. Ambitious plans like Operation Distaff-- the attempt to open up a new front in southern France-- were predicated on this logic. The Irish, British and Ghanaian vanguard dispatched to secure a beachhead and await reinforcements from the Byzantine Army of the Islands and the North German Antifascist Volunteer Corps was allocated forces according to what the Gauls might bring to bear locally on the lightly-defended Mediterranean coast, with their main army being bled dry in Normandy, Pas-de-Calais, the Danube, the Alps, and everywhere else the RRP was pressing the advantage.    In short, we sought to inflict the proverbial death-by-a-thousand cuts to prepare for a coup de grâce dealt by a refreshed and resupplied Klibanophoroi West early next year.   But that calculus was incorrect; we could not simply run out the clock until General Ha returned in triumph at the head of fresh divisions of medium landships.  Valeria Postuma indicated a clear desire to inflict a telling blow on her foe-- but the question remained: Where would the hammer fall? RRPJMI began making feverish inquiries, but there was very little signals intelligence to go through. Communication within the French metropole was mostly done via more secure landlines, not radio signals. We wondered if this was an incidental advantage of fighting closer to home, or a deliberate policy borne of the Gauls realising we had broken their codes? Postuma's reference to 'Africans and Avalonians' seemed to gesture towards a counteroffensive on the Channel coast, but we, of all people, knew better than to take such things at face value. The success of RRP forces on the Mediterranean was certainly much less spectacular than the drive for Paris in the North, but it represented an equally potent threat-- with the Byzantine Red Navy in more or less uncontested control of the sea, a Mediterranean port in enemy hands was potentially catastrophic.  But Operation Distaff's gains were still fragile. A more concerted effort by the imperials could spoil the whole enterprise.  Another possibility was an offensive in the low countries. Of all of the amphibious invasions undertaken by the RRP, the forces in Holland was by far the most well-defended and dug-in. An offensive under General Pandey was underway, and the fighting had spilled over the Dutch Foederati's notional borders and into Gaul itself. Dislodging these armies would be a difficult task-- but also one that would both remove a dangerous thorn in the imperium's side and mean that any future offensive into Pas-de-Calais or Normandy wouldn't have to worry about being flanked by Pandey.  On the other hand, it was possible that we'd been overthinking the whole question, and that Valeria Postuma really had arrogantly telegraphed her intentions towards the forces on her northern coast, and a major counteroffensive was imminent. Yet even if this could be confirmed, there are still questions to be answered: When the attack came, would it come from the northwest and drive towards Calais? Or would the divisions now in Normandy but gradually inching their way towards Paris be the target of a thrust from the south? The onus was on us to answer such questions.  The fact I was part of a decision-making process that would directly affect the 8th Infantry Division-- and therefore, Jack-- was not lost on me. I knew I was not the only mother in such a position. I found myself thinking of the Red Army's Marshal Theodora Papadopoulou; I'd read in the papers that she had a daughter serving in a division of cataphracts in Klibanophoroi West, which had recently been transferred to her First Army Group in anticipation of Operation Hannibal. Did she think of that while she was looking at tokens on a map in her headquarters? I supposed it wasn't quite the same as my dilemma-- I was only one voice among many in a decision-making process by consensus, while Papadopoulou bore ultimate responsibility for the fate of the First Army Group-- for the fate of that daughter commanding an Evgenia.  Far away, the imperials' Croatian counteroffensive had rapidly run out of steam. The Army of the Danube and their Hungarian counterparts had even begun to make some modest gains. Hau-Fang was cautious-- she knew that Klibanophoroi West (and its commander) was still nowhere near fighting shape, so any sort of sustained offensive operation was inadvisable. It was nonetheless clear that local imperial forces had been reallocated to another theatre, and she was not about to let the opportunity slip away.  When forward elements of the 9th (Dalmatian) Dragoons discovered a command post of Comitatensis XII Fulminata that had been torn to shreds by an artillery strike and abandoned, they found another sort of opportunity entirely. In the survivors' haste to evacuate their position-- presumably fearing a second artillery barrage blasting them to smithereens-- they left behind their dead. Among these dead was a staff officer still carrying classified papers.  The Byzantine Intelligence Secretariat quickly took charge of these papers, and before long, copies were winging their way to Byzantion, Niandi, Jaragua-- and London. Cursory examination of these papers revealed the man was carrying orders detaching him from the 108th Legion to take up a posting at the Praetorium in Paris. We immediately realised that whatever he was carrying could be just the break we were looking for. We promptly asked for-- and received-- a full inventory of the body's effects. A report from Intelligence Secretariat, Croatia Section posted:The following official papers and correspondence were recovered from the body of Prefect de Boissieu: The letter from Hanseatica to Germanica was obviously of most import. A letter from Victoire Lefort Hanseatica posted:Field Headquarters, Comitatensis XII Fulminata   Visigoth intercepts, still mum on Gallic intentions in the north, made it clear that the Mediterranean coast was dug in for a defensive war. Double-agents under our control were instructed by their imperial handlers to report if any RRP forces were massing along Britain's coast. The target of this "Operation Oppidum" was clearly either Normandy, as stated in the letter, Pas-de-Calais, or-- less probably-- Holland. Immediately we set to work corroborating the other details. Casualty lists in Le Temps and The Journal officiel de l'Empire were pored over, and a Prefect de Boissieu was found. Several of the things the letter alluded to were well-known to us-- the collegial rivalry between Rhenanicus and Germanica, the shortage of imported goods like tobacco and coffee, Parisians being rattled by the thunder of distant artillery barrages. There were still some reasons to reserve our judgment, however. The fact we were unable to forensically examine the body and the originals of its effects constituted a dangerous gap in our knowledge. The convenient timing of our discovery also provoked suspicion. Captain Jeanne de Lisle, a colleague from Naval Intelligence, remarked that information regarding a counteroffensive happening to drop into our hands just when we needed it was "A little too good to be true, if you ask me." Captain Cosima Laurenti, of the Intelligence Secretariat, countered that wars are full of far stranger coincidences and sudden strokes of fortune. For my part, I felt we had too little information. We were pressed for time, however-- if we hesitated, it would be too late to act on what could be a critical piece of intelligence. Forced to decide in the affirmative or negative, I, as a creator of false documents, judged the papers carried by de Boissieu genuine. My colleagues deferred to this judgment. We passed our findings up to our superiors, who in turn informed the General Staff that an attack from the south and into Normandy was imminent.  We were wrong. The documents were artful forgeries placed into our hands by the Deuxième Bureau, carefully composed to reinforce our existing preconceptions about the Gallic war effort and its officers. On 9th December, Postuma's promise that magnificent engines of war shall fall upon them with terrible, beautiful speed was fulfilled, with the blow aimed directly at Calais. By the day's end, the RRP lines were beginning to buckle dangerously.  A day after that, they were broken entirely. Dunkerque was reclaimed by a force of Gauls and foederati, and our surviving units in Calais were cut off from the rest of the RRP forces to the south.  Calais itself, now totally isolated, fell not long after. The northwestern flank of the invasion force had been shattered-- only a few ragged survivors of the Ghanaian Army held out north of the Somme. The only ports still held by the RRP were in Normandy.  With Pas-de-Calais clear of any opposition, the Imperium turned its attention to the remnants of the invasion force to the south with a pincer attack on Rouen by Legate Marie-Jeanne Binot Fortissima's Comitatensis II Augusta. Soon, the Irish, Marathan and Ghanaian troops holding the city were forced out. All along the channel coast, RRP forces were in retreat.   On 17th December, the RRP's last bridgehead across the Somme was summarily dispatched by Legate Élise Hardouineau Holsatica and Comitatensis III Gallica. Fortissima continued to relentlessly hammer the now-surrounded RRP troops in Normandy. The RRP strategic goal shifted from retaining a foothold on the French coast to simply holding a port long enough to effect some sort of evacuation. General Millicent Boussombo took what troops she still had and decided to make a stand at Amiens in a delaying action against the encroaching legions. Among these desperate defenders? The British 8th Infantry Division.  A letter from Jack Burns dated 20th December, 1941 posted:Dear Mum,  A letter from Jack Burns dated 20th December, 1941 posted:But the battle of Kaunas has been a slow, grinding war of attrition-- it's been going on nearly as long as the whole war has. Things here in Normandy seem to be happening at a breakneck pace. So maybe our lot's got more in common with the the soldiers trying to break the encirclement and relieve Kaunas, who are apparently pinned against the Nemunas River and under heavy attack.  A letter from Jack Burns dated 20th December, 1941 posted:The war's a lot bigger than this little mess we're caught up in. The fact we've got the enemy concentrating her forces up here means the other fronts are undermanned. Holding out doesn't just let us make good our escape-- it's making a difference as far off as Dalmatia, where the Byzantines are picking apart what was left of the Croatia counteroffensive.      A letter from Jack Burns dated 20th December, 1941 posted:Sometimes, it seems like the whole world has shrunk down to Amiens, the beaches at Dieppe where the evacuation is being staged, and the narrow corridor still connecting the two. It's so, so much more than that, though.  A letter from Jack Burns dated 20th December, 1941 posted:They're expecting the fash to take another tilt at us in a few hours, so I better cut this short-- I'm not sure how long we'll still be able to get mail out for, so I should probably just send this on.  The next days were agonising. Every time the teletype printer started up, I just about jumped out of my seat, wondering if this next dispatch would bring final word of disaster in Normandy. But like Jack wrote, the war was far larger than the circumscribed world of Amiens; the dispatches always seemed to bring tidings from elsewhere. Sometimes the news was grim-- the Marathi-Ghanaian force attempting to relieve Kaunas had been driven all the way back to Baltic coast, and was in danger of being surrounded.  Sometimes it was merely ambiguous. The Second Army Group in Belgorod was on the offensive for the first time since the disasters at Chernivtsi, but the outcome was uncertain.  In a desperate attempt to draw enemy troops away from Normandy, an army from Nuevo Xi'an and Ayiti conducted a daring raid on La Rochelle and its environs. But this was not an amphibious invasion that could be sustained for long-- they were getting shredded by the Gauls.    The Kenyans were attempting a similar operation in southern Iberia, but it was a similarly dicey proposition.  Then, on New Years Eve, an update on the battle for Amiens: the town had fallen. Survivors-- including many from the 8th Infantry Division, Jack among them-- had fallen back towards the coast, where General Davies was doing her best to salvage a rapidly deteriorating situation.  With their backs pinned to the sea, and nowhere left to withdraw to, the embattled expeditionary forces prepared to defend the rapidly shrinking portion of Dieppe they still held.  The Red Rose Pact at Dieppe -- 2nd January, 1942 Under such dire circumstances, managing to evacuate the surviving forces to the safety of Great Britain would take nothing short of a miracle.   In war, relying on miracles is always, always a losing proposition.  The last vestiges of the Red Rose Pact's once-formidable invasion were destroyed by 11:00 AM, 6th January 1942.  The telegram that arrived later that day informed me, in War Office boilerplate, that Private John Qiu Burns had died in that last stand.  His was but one name among many. The failed invasion of France had resulted in nearly 100,000 casualties for the British. Half were killed outright; of the remainder taken prisoner, scarcely four in ten would survive the war. Ghana suffered similar losses, and although their much larger military could better absorb the losses than the British Army, it was still just as many human lives snuffed out, with just as much grief and pain left in its wake. Even the comparatively small army of the Irish Republic suffered an appalling ten thousand dead and wounded.  Blame, in war, is a diffuse thing. Ultimately, responsibility for all of the millions left dead in the Imperial War rests with Postuma and her Praetorium for starting it in the first place. Any individual death is the product of a complex of web interlocking decisions at all levels of command, from generals giving orders leading to a certain soldier being in a certain place at a certain time all the way down to some random private or legionnaire pointing a rifle and pulling the trigger. Yet, we of Joint Military Intelligence, so self-satisfied with our cleverness, so confident in our ability to run circles around our incompetent and outmatched fascist adversaries, whose analysts we mislead, whose intelligence agencies we plied with elaborate deceptions and false information from double-agents, whose codes we cracked so casually, lost sight of the fact that we, too, could be deceived by a sufficiently appealing lie. We therefore had an outsized role in this debacle.  True, our recommendation that de Boissieu's documents were genuine was merely advisory. It was a conclusion that was passed from our section all the way up to the highest authorities in RRP's intelligence services, and thence to the general staff. Possibly, the problems of an invasion of France this early in a war were sufficiently insurmountable that no amount of preparations in Pas-de-Calais would have sufficed to forestall the wrath prophesied in Postuma's De Britannia Magna. We were but one cog in a complex set of circumstances leading to the greatest military disaster in British military history. Still, a bleak truth felt inescapable: I killed my son. 
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Jan 10, 2023 04:08
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In retrospect, it was the height of arrogance to assume the war could be ended with a decisive strike towards Paris. The example set by the Allies should have been instructive-- of their vaunted amphibious invasions, their advance into Fujian had been stalled for months...  ...and Allied forces in the Yangtze Delta had been pushed back as far as Suzhou.  In Africa, on the other hand, the wind was at the WPO's back. The Somalian Army was making its final drive for Tunis, which would finally knock the al-Said Sultanate out of the Jimao War.   And, with that accomplished, they would finally be able to fully commit their forces to crushing Great Zimbabwe once and for all.   The end of the Jimao War looked further away than ever.  Who were we to assume that the Imperial War would be any different?  Still the Allies forged ahead-- onto the next grand plan, the next set-piece offensive, the next lofty objective.  What else could they do?  What else could we do but roll the dice once more, even after a bad break?  I tried to concentrate on my work. The future would arrive whether or not I did anything about it. They Byzantines were preparing to launch another grand offensive; five new divisions of cataphracts were nearing readiness for deployment, and General Ha had nearly recovered from her wounds.  This latest effort-- putatively designated Operation Sanxian-- would be the first battlefield test of the new LS/4 Cosetta landship, which was a refinement of the highly successful LS/3 Evgenia, as well as the Ghanaian M1 Glagwa, which the Ghanaians were supplying to the Byzantines via lend-lease.  Much was made of the international solidarity embodied by this arrangement. The Cosetta, of course, was kept out of public view, as the Red Army was disinclined to give the enemy a good look at it until there's a column of them bearing down on the WRE, so the Glagwa was put front-and-centre in propaganda. The British military seemed caught in a holding-pattern after the appalling losses. At the time, this barely registered with me-- I was benumbed, going about my business with the mechanical efficiency of an automaton. My colleagues, however, assumed that the War Office was simply being tight-lipped about its plans, even with its own intelligence service. In retrospect, we know that in the immediate aftermath of the failures in France, they were immobilised by indecision. British troops already committed to various operations continued to play their part, but it wasn't clear what future operations could be launched-- or even if any could be launched after suffering the loss of so many of its personnel and equipment.  The war's centre-of-gravity seemed to have shifted decisively to the Mediterranean, but now that the Channel coast was cleared of enemies, the landing zones in southern France and eastern Iberia were at risk of having the full weight of the legions brought down on them. Even if they held out, there was the possibility of another Fujian-- an invading force too strong to be expelled, but still insufficient to advance.  Eventually, the British general staff began to shake themselves out of their stupor, and a modest Mediterranean offensive was planned-- five divisions under General 'Tiger' Bishop Cuervo attempted a landing southeast of Istria, what the intent of linking up with the Byzantine-held salient to the north and encircling the French and Austrian armies at Trieste.  The grand strategic plans of Great Britain were more in doubt. Perhaps there was some doubt we even had a role to play at this scale, beyond the continuing contribution of the Republican Navy towards blockading the Imperium and dispatching its commerce-raiders whenever they dared rear their heads. The Army was in a battered, broken state-- many divisions were critically under-strength. Between the equipment destroyed or abandoned in Pas-de-Calais or Normandy and losses suffered by the British armoured cavalry watching Operation Hannibal's eastern flank, there was not one single operational division of landships in our entire army.  On February 4th, with the Channel coast-- and its airbases-- back in fascist hands, the Légion Impériale de l'Air launched a 'punitive' raid on London. Incendiary bombs rained down; the Londoners were left to shelter wherever they could while nearly two thousand separate fires tore through the city. Several hundred civilians were dead; an order of magnitude more were left without shelter. A haidagraph of Baynard's Castle-- once one of the centres of Norman power in the aftermath of William's conquest-- collapsing in flames has become one of the quintessential images of wartime Great Britain. This provoked a massive row within the Air Ministry. Some demanded the of the RAF squadron wings serving on the European mainland be diverted back to defend the home island, since a brazen daytime raid demonstrated that the fighters stationed there were insufficient. Others pointed to the much greater damage wrought over areas where the Byzantine Commune (and, to a lesser extent, Hungary, although the RRP was better able to maintain air superiority there than other fronts) had lost air superiority. Everyone had seen the newsreel footage of the Venetians resorting to using the wreck of the RNS Sivas as a makeshift AA platform. Everyone had seen haidagraphs of what was left of Milan-- a field of flattened ruins which, in places, looked something like the surface of the moon. Many of the monuments of old Roman Mediolanum were felled-- this was when the ancient Basilica of St. Ambrose exited the stage of history, for example-- which Byzantine propaganda was quick to observe, as if under the impression that the Imperium cared for such hypocrisies. Tens of thousands of civilians died in these raids.  The latter position won out; the RRP had recently regained control of the skies of the Alps and Northern Italy, but it was fragile-- and, in the meantime, the Imperium had begun a new campaign of bombing on the Belgorod Front, aimed at both the oil wells of Ploesti and the civilian population of Bucharest.  The cold logic of war was that the bombing of London, while shocking and demoralising, had very little effect on the course of the war. The events unfolding in the skies of Byzantium did; they needed to be the strategic priority.  Diplomatic tensions between Great Britain and its Nova Scotian dominion, which had been simmering throughout the war, finally risked boiling over. Since the outbreak of the Imperial War, Nova Scotia had vastly expanded the size of its army-- by February 1942, a greater portion of their population per capita was serving in the Nova Scotian Army, the Republican Nova Scotian Navy, or the Republican Nova Scotian Air Force. The RNSAF had been making valuable contributions to the air war since the beginning of the war-- RNSAF pilots had served valiantly all over the subcontinent, and RNSAF ground crews had done their fair share to keep everyone else's planes in the air, too.  The army, on the other hand, seemed afflicted with an uncanny lethargy. This massive host gathered by the most extensive conscription laws in the Red Rose Pact had spent the entire war milling around North Avalon, doing nothing in particular, even as the other Far Western members of the Pact-- Ayiti, Nuevo Xi'an, and even the Habsburg Commune-- sent the greater part of their armies across the Atlantic.  Nova Scotia's reluctance to get directly involved was, in part, because of the dominion's experiences in the First and Second Great Wars-- it was occupied by the Ayitian Federation on both occasions-- the only member of the Socialist International to suffer such a fate. Bitterness over this led the government to, understandably, feel reluctant to leave their own shores undefended. It also meant that Great Britain, mindful of this, tactfully avoided applying too much pressure on their dominion. This wasn't the whole story, though-- with the sea firmly under RRP control, there was no plausible way Nova Scotia could be threatened by the WRE, and the risk of the Jimao War spilling over the borders of the Iroquois Federation or Zheng He Bay, if it ever existed in the first place, had receded after the Lenape Republic capitulated to the Allies.  The primary culprit, then, was factionalism within the Nova Scotian government-- and, especially, within the army. Whilst the old liberal order had decayed away into a husk easily overturned by communism, as had happened in its mother country across the sea, the leftist movement that prevailed was anything but united. There was no Marxist-Exteberrianist consensus in Nova Scotia-- the Müllerist wing of the Communist Party of Nova Scotian remained far stronger than its counterparts in Britain or Byzantium. These divided loyalties extended all the way up the army's chain of command and into the general staff. General Lucius Milne, for example, was stridently Exteberrianist in outlook in spite of his thoroughly military demeanour. The soft-spoken General Caroline Raglan, on the other hand, exemplified the Müllerist cohort of officers who argued that the nation's difficulties in the prior Great Wars were borne of political and military weakness caused by the government's revisionist tendencies. A few general officers, like the long-suffering Field Marshal Lenore Ramsay, tried to portray themselves as neutral 'honest-brokers', but, in general, Nova Scotia's oversized army was in the hands of two mutually suspicious ideological cliques caught in a stand-off-- each feared that if its own loyalists were sent abroad, the rival faction would pounce. Neither side seemed ready to blink. In the wake of the slaughter of British forces in northern France, diplomatic pressure to rouse Nova Scotia from its paralysis became public outrage. Yet the impasse continued.    Generals Lucius Milne and Caroline Raglan, and Field Marshal Lenore Ramsay, of the Nova Scotian Army Elsewhere, the war ground on. The Byzantines were buoyed by the news that General Ha had finally recovered from her injuries, and preparations for Operation Sanxian entered their final phase. This meant we, too, had work to do-- obtaining any intelligence we could about the disposition of imperial forces in Austria, and coming up with a deception plan that accounted for the impossible-to-hide spectacle of Klibanophoroi West massing on the western bank of the Danube.  Ultimately, it was determined that the best course was a comparatively modest operation to convince the enemy that the coming offensive would advance southeast with the objective of liberating Zagreb, rather than the far more ambitious objective of barreling straight towards Vienna. I think it helped, having work to do. The day-to-day business of forging documents and putting words in the mouths of notional Gallic spies was at least a temporary distraction from the simple fact of my son's permanent absence from my life, from any sort of future.   A reunion of three of the principle commanders of Operational Hannibal-- General Rina Pandey, of the British Army; General Valentina Ha, of the Byzantine Red Army, and General Sibiri Ahmed, of the Ghanaian Army. They are posing in front of the landship G3701 Koya Temne, the first Ghanaian-built M1 Glagwa to be delivered to Klibanophoroi West. It was named in honour of the city it was manufactured in. The grinding stagnation that threatened to overtake both sides of the Third Great War was demolished, piece-by-piece. The spectacular success of the Allies' liberation of the Republic of Silla did much to revive their flagging spirits after the fall of Tunis and the capitulation of the al-Said Sultanate-- less than a month after the initial wave of landings, their forces had arrived at the very gates of occupied Seoul.    In our own struggle, the RRP's various Mediterranean footholds were-- for the moment-- withstanding all imperial attempts to expel them.    And very shortly the Imperium would have much, much worse problems.  Great Britain had been dealt a staggering blow-- but the nature of the RRP, and the political project it repesented-- is such that when one is knocked down, someone will be there to pick them up.  We still had a part to play in all of this.  WORLD MAP, 2/21/42 
Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Jan 10, 2023 |
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 PART EIGHTY-SIX: Winter Came Spring (February 21st, 1942 - May 17th, 1942) 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 14: BUDAPEST By February, months into the lengthy convalescence following the Frumentarii attempt on her life in Debrecen, Valentina Ha was feeling decidedly restless. Even early on, when still confined to a hospital-bed behind the lines, she tried to remain as active as possible, finding things with which to busy-- or perhaps distract-- herself with. The most enduring images of this time (for Ha, as always, had an instinct for image-making) are the improvised ceremony in which Juhasz Zsigmond pinned the medal of a Hero of the Hungarian Union to Ha's hospital-gown and Valentina Afire, which was painted at around the same time. In a way, these seemingly opposed images gesture at the internal contradictions of the Red Rose Pact, in which Exteberrianist communal republics and Müllerist dictatorships[1] profess their undying loyalty to and solidarity with one another. In this light, Ha accepting a medal from a grateful Juhasz casts her a stoic heroine of International Socialism-- or, less charitably, as a prop conferring legitimacy on a repressive and authoritarian government. Valentina Afire on the other hand, evoked a very Byzantine sense of avant-garde transgression, defiant in the face of fascist denouncement of 'degenerate art'. Yet it is perhaps more fruitful to continue these two images as in a dialogue with one another. The artist of Valentina Afire came not from the bohemians of Byzantion or Athens, but was in fact a native of Debrecen, Hungary. The portrait is a reaction to fascist purity, yes, but it's also a reaction to the staid socialist realism promoted by Juhasz's state and the general tendency towards conservatism in matters of gender and sexuality. In the official mythology of the Hungarian Commune, queerness was seen as-- at best-- an 'eccentricity' to be overlooked in their Byzantine allies, and at worst, an un-Hungarian obscenity. Yet even the haidagraph of Ha and Juhasz, when reexamined, echoes Valentina Afire in many ways. The decision to decorate Ha in an ad-hoc ceremony devoid of Müllerist pomp resulted in an oddly intimate portrait. One's eye cannot help but be drawn towards details like the intravenous drip in her left arm, or the wedding band on her right hand as she raises it to her heart-- we know from Ha's diaries and correspondence that her missing husband was often in her thoughts throughout this period of enforced inactivity. Ha is clearly not some idealised hero hewn from marble; she is deeply human and vulnerable even as she's being recognised for leading an army to a spectacular victory. Juhasz himself is humanised; the dictator looks tired and stooped, yet clearly expressing a sincere sense of relief and gratitude following the liberation of his nation. For a haidagraph that was heavily circulated in Hungarian state media, it is in many ways extremely atypical. On February 21st, with both Ha herself and the divisions under her command sufficiently recovered for a new offensive, she returned to Budapest to oversee the final preparations for Operation Sanxian-- the invasion of Austria. According to her war diary, The war diary of Valentina Ha posted:Budapest still feels something like a city under siege. Obviously, we've got a fairly secure beachhead on the west bank of the Danube-- Sanxian would be impossible without being able to use this as a staging-point for the drive towards Vienna-- but our zone of control doesn't extend as far north as Budapest, so the fash still occupy Buda. They haven't got the gas for any serious attempt at pushing their way back across the Danube and into Pest, but they still bombard the eastern districts with artillery every so often; just to let us know they're still there, maybe?  The war diary of Valentina Ha posted:At least the Gallic Air Force isn't bombing us on top of all of that; they still enjoy air superiority in the Alps, but in this theatre, the RRP's finally keeping the skies reasonably clear.  The war diary of Valentina Ha posted:Still: Budapest is a city severed from itself. Old and stately bridges lie in pieces at the bottom of the Danube. Rail and streetcar lines are all abruptly cut off where the river wends through the city. Gallic and Austrian flags flutter from the ramparts of Buda Castle[2] and the Gellért Hill Citadella. The traffic on the streets of Pest is mostly martial in character; lorries, jeeps, staff cars.  The war diary of Valentina Ha posted:At least some of that traffic is the Germans clearing out; they've decided to commit fully to the Jimao War, so the 24 German divisions who'd been serving throughout the RRP's forces are all headed home. A few small detachments are remaining behind-- mostly those who are ideologically committed to our war, for one reason or another-- exiles from fascist rule serving in the NGF International Brigades and avowed communists, mostly. Guess the German Army figured it'd be better to just let that sort go than drag them kicking and screaming to Iran or Fuzhou or wherever, where they'd be corrosive to morale. These die-hards amount to a regiment or two at most-- in other words, actual international volunteers, rather than 'volunteers' in the way that the five divisions of armoured cavalry I led in the German Civil War were 'volunteers'.[3]  The war diary of Valentina Ha posted:In short: liberals make for fair-weather allies; they'll see an attempt to stave off an enemy seeking to annihilate us, on one hand, and a pointless intra-capitalist squabble on the other, and prioritise the pointless intra-capitalist squabble every time.  Ha's bitterness is typical of the Byzantine reaction to the NGF drawing down its involvement in the Imperial War to fight with the Allies, denouncing liberal 'fickleness'. Yet there was a certain cold logic to the Meier administration's decision to deepen its involvement in the Jimao War as a full member of the Allies.  In the German analysis, the risk of a fascist victory in the Imperial War had receded. The Jimao War, on the other hand, continued to be locked in stalemate.  The Red Rose Pact, they felt, was capable of breaking Postuma's empire with or without their assistance-- it was simply a question of how long it took. In the Imperial War, however, the North German Federation's not inconsiderable industrial and military might had the potential to decisively shift the balance of power in the Allies' favour.  And after the war-- for, as endless as the war seemed in 1942, it would surely end eventually-- an alliance with ideologically-aligned peer nations was seen as far more essential in peacetime than being alternately indulged, tolerated, scorned, or pitied by the communists.  Many other nations were making similar calculations. In the first free elections held in liberated Indochina, the communists suffered a smashing defeat, and the newly elected liberal government was clearly gravitating towards the Allies.   Such calculations were cold comfort to the RRP troops on the frontlines left hard-pressed by the abrupt German withdrawal. Even if-- if-- the Germans had read the wind correctly, and the eventual fall of the imperium was assured (an issue by no means settled at this point in the war) whether or not the Germans participated, their absence still meant a longer, harder, deadlier war for everyone left behind.    But perhaps a shorter, faster, and less deadly war for the Allies, whose positions in Africa were rapidly disintegrating after the fall of Tunis.  In any case, Ha didn't have long to dwell on such things-- D-day for the launch of Operation Sanxian was set for 25 February, and soon Ha's full attention was devoted to the feverish effort to ensure all was in readiness for the next phase of the war.  Sanxian was perhaps the crux of this new phase, but hardly its only component. As Klibanophoroi West made its attempt to smash the imperial lines between the Danube and the Sava, a combined army of Ghanaians and Hungarians would push north into the Carpathians, where landships were of limited use, and attempt to take the slim line of mountain fortifications that which constituted the last significant enemy foothold on Hungarian soil. This effort was codenamed Brimstone.  The next stage was Operation Rook. If Klibanophoroi West achieved breakthrough, Hau-Fang's Army of the Danube was to follow them through the gap in the Austro-Gallic lines, secure a crossing over the Sava, and then veer westsouth towards Zagreb. This would coincide with a northwestern push by Halevi's Army of the Alps, supported by Azerbaijani mountaineers and a surprisingly large contingent of infantry from the Habsburg Commune, to break out of the Trieste salient and link up with Hau-Fang. Together, Sanxian, Brimstone, and Rook constituted what has become known as the Danube-Sava Offensive.  Finally, if the imperium was knocked sufficiently off-balance on the Danube-Sava front, the tertiary stage of the offensive-- Operation Duelist-- would attempt to force the Gauls and their various foederati out of the alpine passes leading into Italy, with an eye towards eventually forming a junction with the sizeable multi-national RRP army occupying Provence.  On the morning of 24 February, Brimstone was activated. Up and down the ridge of the Carpathians, the Hungarian army began shelling fascist fortifications. With less than 24 hours left before the launch of Sanxian, Ha delivered an address to the five newly-raised landship divisions which had recently joined the ranks of Klibanophoroi West-- the 2nd, 14th, 15th, 16th, and 18th Cataphracts, who were equipped with state-of-the-art LS/4 Cosettas, but were also far less battle-tested[4] than the senior regiments of Cataphracts which had been with Ha since the Battle of Transylvania. Over the prior weeks, she had given similar addresses to many of the more experienced formations of Klibanophoroi West, but she had saved these men and women about to experience a baptism-by-fire on the Danube-Sava front.  Valentina Ha's speech, 24 February 1942 posted:We are on the precipice of a new stage of our struggle against fascism. Initially, we were an integral section of the bulwark seeking to stem a nigh-unceasing tide of imperial invaders. Next, we turned back that tide, liberating those Valeria would put in chains. Now the enemy is forced to defend the frontiers of their disintegrating empire; For the first time, Klibanophoroi West will be venturing into the very lair of the fascist beast. One day later, the Danube-Sava offensive was launched.  The Austrian frontier was heavily reinforced by Gallic legions; Austria was a critical member of the Western Roman Empire, not expendable foederati, not an ally of convenience to be tolerated with simmering distaste. The Austrians, Postuma felt, were kindred spirits. On the surface, this seems absurd. In her various wartime screeds, she was frequent in her denunciation of both Germans and (in her words) the 'asiatic'. While she was more circumspect on the subject of religion-- her Iberian annexations brought a large Muslim minority into the Imperium Galliarum-- she increasingly deployed Christian imagery in her rhetoric, invoking the memory of the so-called 'Living Saint' Valeria II Komnenos and her violent attempt to unify Christendom under Roman leadership, likening her soldiers to the crusaders[5], and using the language of Christian eschatology to describe the war. Austria, even in this period of fascist rule, was a German-speaking nation with a significant population of Hui Muslims. On top of that, Austrian fascism paid only the most superficial lip-service to the 'Romanisation' core to all of the other strands of European fascism-- a few ceremonies, a few uniforms and symbols, dictator Klara Ma half-heartedly adopting the middle name 'Valeria'. On a personal level, Ma and Postuma despised one another. For the most part, a cynical sense of realpolitik bound Gaul and its non-foederati allies. This, for example, is how the mutual exclusivity of Postuma and Tsaritsa Yekaterina V Cespka Lipa's and Postuma's visions of Roman-ness was papered over.  It is tempting to regard the Gallo-Austrian alliance through this lens. But let us remember the ideas which animated Gallic fascism: beneath the veneer of backwards-looking romanticism, there was much overlap with the futurist tendencies of Ma and her clique. Postuma and her inner circle, too, worshipped at the altar of the swift and the violent, of the technological instruments of killing, of the strength and vigour of a nation fully mobilised triumphing over the weak and soft-hearted, and, most of all, of war. War, they argued, was hygiene for the world, the medium through which the human soul is purified into a state of beauty and perfection. A war on the apocalyptic scale of the Imperial War had the transcendent potential to remake the world, and it was this transcendence that bound the fates and fortunes of Austria and Gaul. Ha, addressing Klibanophoroi West, did not refer to a fascist 'war-machine' or describe it in terms of speed and momentum by accident; it was a very pointed reference to the ideological character of enemy her troops were preparing to fight.  Yet the fact that Gaul was fully committed to the defence of Austria politically and strategically did not necessarily mean they were braced for the blow that was about to land tactically. The Deuxième Bureau de l'État-major général, fresh off the success of the de Boissieu deception, was nebulously aware that a fresh offensive somewhere in the Danube theatre was being prepared, but Red Rose Pact Joint Military Intelligence had successfully concealed the date through a combination of the selective use of transmissions in codes known to have been cracked by the WRE and double agents under British control disseminating false intelligence that several of the key corps commanders under Ha were presently on leave in London. The Deuxième Bureau's best guess was that Klibanophoroi West would resume its advance with the spring thaw, although it openly admitted to some uncertainty on the point. The Praetorium assumed that an offensive into either occupied Croatia or Austria would occur in the near future, but wasn't yet imminent. As such, their immediate priority was the remaining RRP footholds on the French and Iberian coasts. The British-Ghanaian invasion of the Channel coast had been crushed decisively, but the fact they had gotten as close to Paris as they had left Postuma and her praetors rattled. 'The immediate danger of a raid on the capital has passed,' Rhenanicus noted, in an increasingly rare incidence of concordance between himself and Germanica, 'Yet the vermin are still nipping at our heels. Our priority must be sweeping away these nuisances before the Red invaders reach critical mass.'   Similarly, the Ghanaian, Irish, and British forces occupying Holland had been reinforced by dozens of fresh Ayitian divisions, and although for the moment their advance had been stopped at the Meuse, they were proving extremely difficult for the WRE to dislodge entirely.  Most ominously, the RRP forces which had landed in Provence had consolidated their hold enough on the region to attempt a fairly modest offensive; halting this would require a commitment of manpower also needed to snuff out the brushfires eating away at the periphery of the imperium.   Coordinating the defence of Austria therefore became the responsibility of Austria's own generals. This was a token of the esteem Postuma had for the Austrian Army, but it was also the result of the Praetorium's attention being elsewhere.    Austrian Generalobersten Siegfried Hafner (II. Armeeoberkommando) and Ernst Neudinger (III. Armeeoberkommando) By 26 February, Brimstone, Rook, and Duelist had also been initiated. There was now heavy fighting up and down the sprawling frontline; only the Belgorod Front remained quiet.  A day later, forward elements of Klibanophoroi West advancing into Pannonia made contact with a section of Generaloberst Siegfried Hafner's defended by only three battered divisions. Hafner and Ha both scrambled to concentrate their forces in this region[6].  Initially, having only light landships and dragoons at her disposal in the area, Ha's initial attempt to push into Transdanubia was repulsed by Hafner.  Within hours, though, five divisions of cataphracts had joined the battle, with a division of LD/3 Aphrodites arriving shortly thereafter. While the venerable LD/1 Aphrodite design was clearly ageing, and the heavy landship in general had fallen out of favour in Byzantine doctrine, cracking fortified enemy positions played to its strengths. 'Guess we keep all those Aphrodites around for a reason,' Ha remarked to her staff.  This, in turn, renewed Byzantine interest in the further development of heavy landships. Even if the medium landship was and would remain the backbone of Byzantium's armoured cavalry, heavier vehicles clearly still had a role to play.  The Austro-Gallic line broke soon thereafter. Byzantine, Ghanaian, and Hungarian forces surged into Transdanubia. The Hungarians were especially buoyed by this victory; most of the region had been part of Hungary within living memory, having been conquered by Austria in the dying days of the old Hungarian kingdom. The civilian population was still in large part ethnically Hungarian; many even welcomed the advancing RRP armies as liberators. This, obviously, would not be the case as they advanced further into Austria proper, but it put a spring in the Hungarians' step.   Having kicked in the proverbial door, the WRE pickets began to crumble all across the Danube-Sava front.    Shortly thereafter, Halevi and the Army of the Alps, reinforced by several corps of infantry from the Habsburg Commune and Maputo, finally broke out of the salient they'd been confined within since the fall of Croatia in mid-1941. Trieste was liberated at the beginning of March.  Ha, still hundreds of miles away on the Danube-Sava front, took a moment to note this in her diary. The war diary of Valentina Ha posted:Halevi has taken Trieste, and the road to Istria lies open. From the initial reports, Trieste is host to the same scenes of terror and devastation we've found in every city occupied by the WRE for any length of time. I don't see any reason to think it won't be the same in Istria, unless the Austrians harbour unexpectedly tender feelings about their brothers and sisters across the Byzantine border.  The war diary of Valentina Ha posted:Things here are clearly turning in our favour; Klibanophoroi West has shattered Hafner's line of defence, and Nadine [Hau-Fang] got a breakthrough of her own to the south and is now approaching the outskirts of Zagreb.   The war diary of Valentina Ha posted:There's even some cause for cautious-- cautious-- optimism about Savic's advance into the French Piémont.   The war diary of Valentina Ha posted:But the uncertainty gnaws at me; even while we've got the fash on the run, even while I try to project the sort of dashing-- occasionally jaunty, even-- image both the newsreels and my own troops expect of me.   The liberation of Istria would have to wait, it turned out. Halevi instead elected to turn west, towards Byzantine Slovenia, reaching the polis of Ljubljana by the fifth of March.  Having broken out of the Trieste salient, he chose to prioritise junctioning with the Army of the Danube as rapidly as possible, bypassing the WRE armies stationed to his south.  Klibanophoroi West and its supporting elements continued their rapid advance into the Austrian interior, drawing inexorably closer to Vienna itself. Klara Ma and her government quietly slipped out of the city.  Ma's intent was to establish a temporary headquarters in Salzburg, from whence she could organise the defence of her petty Austrian empire. By this point it was unclear how much longer she'd have anything to conduct that defence with; while some Gallic armoured divisions had finally reached the front, they were understrength and run ragged by months of hard fighting; many of them had come all the way from Normandy. For the most part, though, Neudinger and Hafner's frontlines were looking increasingly threadbare.   Hafner, his forces now in a fragile salient, only narrowly avoided being encircled by rushing in two badly depleted infantry divisions to make a suicidal last stand against nearly the entire weight of Ha's medium landships.   This desperate stratagem gave Hafner the time he needed to evacuate the salient before it collapsed, but did little to rob Klibanophoroi West of the momentum it was rapidly gaining as it approached Vienna.   By 17 March, the outer districts of the capital were within the range of Byzantine artillery; just over three weeks since Operation Sanxian's launch, the Battle of Vienna had begun.   Defence of the city limits was assigned to the Austrian II. Korpskommando, under the command of Generalleutnant Ulrich Marenhorst-Ha. This name obviously crossed Ha's desk at some point-- Red Rose Pact Joint Military Intelligence kept her well-apprised of the enemy's order of battle.  As she made no particular note of it in her diary or correspondence, however, she apparently didn't consider the name Ha particularly noteworthy. This is reasonable-- 'Ha' (traditionally considered by the Hui to be a Sinicisation of 'Hasan'), like 'Ma' ('Muhammad'), 'Hu' ('Hussein'), 'Zheng' ('Shams'), et al. is not only a common surname throughout the Sinophone world, but particularly common among the Hui people. Because of the sheer enormity of the Hui diaspora-- the 're-ordering of the world' Ha mused about in the letters to her husband she wrote from the Army of the Alps HQ in Venice nearly a year prior-- these names spread throughout the Near West, and, through early modern Lai Ang's overseas colonies, to Avalon. As a result, the most common surnames among the Hui are likely also the most common surnames in the entire world. An Austrian general named Ha, then, wouldn't necessarily have attracted Ha's attention. However, Ha had definitely attracted Marenhorst-Ha's attention; her international fame meant that her reputation preceded her, even among the general staffs of the WRE, and the Austrian general immediately recognised the relationship between himself and Ha: she was his cousin.  Generalleutnant Ulrich Marenhorst-Ha, commander of II. Korpskommando and the Vienna Defence Area Until the Austrian fascists seized Vienna in 1919, travel between Byzantine Istra and the Sultanate of Austria was so common as to be routine. This was especially true in Byzantine's Republican era, throughout which the Republic enjoyed close relations with Sultana Xu Xiulan and the liberal-minded constitutional monarchy she presided over, eventually leading to Austria joining other stalwart Byzantine allies like Great Britain, the Habsburg monarchy, and Lithuania-Hungary as founding members of the Victorian League of 1836.  By the mid-to-late 19th century, Austria was considered to be firmly in the Byzantine Republic's sphere of influence. This is the Austria Valentina Ha's father, Klaus Ha, spent his childhood in. The Ha family had a long history stretching between Austria and Istria, and a tradition of military service to both Austria and Byzantium (and, before that, to the Roman Commonwealth). Such was the seamlessness when he moved across the Byzantine border to Istria as a young man to attend a Byzantine university, he remarked in a letter home to the Austrian Has that, 'It hardly feels like moving into another country at all; the only difference is that the prices are in drachmas instead of kronen.'  This began to change after the 1884 Revolution. Klaus Ha, already leaning left in his political outlook in the ideological ferment of the last years of the Republic, joined a socialist student militia after news of the Massacre of the Ten Thousand in Constantinople had spread to the rest of Byzantium. It was in these heady days he met his future wife and Valentina's mother, Aisima Zheng, and continued the Ha family's military tradition under yet another flag-- the red banner of the Commune. This was discussed in more detail in Chapter 1, of course, so let us now turn our attention to the other half of the story: the branch of the Ha family which remained in Austria through this period. Walther Ha, eldest brother of Klaus, attended a prestigious military academy, receiving his commission in the Royal Austrian Army in 1880. At around the same time, he married the daughter of Field Marshal Friedrich von Marenhorst, who thereafter became young Walther's patron as he was initiated into the ranks of the military aristocracy. His son Ulrich was born in 1883. After the declaration of the Commune, while the border still remained more or less open, the mood in Vienna was increasingly anti-communist. Initially, this meant a realignment of Austrian policy to orient itself towards the kingdom of France out of a sense that the remaining constitutional monarchies should 'circle the wagons'.  [/img]https://i.imgur.com/VrI3HTl.png[/img]By the time Ulrich was following his father and grandfather's footsteps into the Royal Army, the political situation had grown more polarised and tense. Great Britain's constitutional monarchy 'sleepwalking to communist tyranny' was seen as a cautionary tale about the fate of nations over-concerned with democratic niceties. The first wave of this reactionary sentiment took the form of revanchist nationalism; pressure from these elements led the sultana to sign off on declaring war on Hungary to seize Transdanubia. This brief but glorious little adventure further encouraged Austrian militarism in general and the glorification of 'modern' instruments of war in particular, which-- along with the other technological leaps and bounds of the late 19th and early 20th centuries-- came to influence the particularly futurist brand of fascism that developed in Austria. Ulrich Marenhorst-Ha quickly became an acolyte of this far right ideology of the machine, of speed, and of warfare. When the Sultana was murdered and constitutional government overthrown, Marenhorst-Ha was among the first officers of the now-former Royal Army to declare his loyalty to the new regime.  By 1942, Valentina Ha was a figure Marenhorst-Ha found simultaneously admirable and utterly repellent. '[She][7] is not only a Red,' he wrote to Hafner in the aftermath of Operation Hannibal, 'But the worst sort of Red-- not only extraordinarily degenerate, but also utterly contrary to all that we hold dear. A homosexual[8], an effeminate sentimentalist, a romantic, and a traitor to [her] own people, whose blood [she] spills without compunction on behalf of the Byzantine butchers of Istria. And yet there are none who wage war as beautifully as this Red traitor. None! Earth trembling as artillery thunders! The roar of a landship's engines punctuated with the deep percussion of the main cannon and the rat-tat-tat of the machine-gun! Man and machine moving as one to conduct this orchestra! [She] has recognised the potential of guerre eclair as astutely as the most zealous and fanatical of us, and perfected it. Exquisite! Awe-inspiring! And all in service of the Reds. What a waste...' In Vienna, he would have the chance to test his mettle against his cousin and bête noire.  CHAPTER 15: VIENNA By 18 March 1942, Ha had established new headquarters in Mödling, an industrial town around ten miles south of Vienna, and the assault on Vienna began.  There was other good news for the Byzantines that day. In northwestern Italy, Savic's Army of Milan finally cracked the ring of Gallic fortresses protecting the Alpine passes into France, achieving a breakthrough west of Milan.   At around the same time, the Army of the Alps completed its re-occupation of Istria. Understandably preoccupied with her own battles, Ha only briefly refers to this in her diary. 'Istria free,' she wrote, 'No news.'  Despite the Ma government's furious injunctions to the people of Vienna to fight with 'absolute fanaticism' and wage 'total war' whilst they remained safely ensconced in Salzburg, it was immediately clear to Hafner, Neudinger, and Marenhorst-Ha that Vienna could not hold out for long against a massive attack spearheaded by the 16th Cataphracts and their brand-new Cosettas and Glagwas. They faced two problems-- a lack of time to mass their forces and dig in against a rapidly-advancing, heavily mechanised Klibanophoroi West, and terrain extremely favourable for landship-fighting-- Vienna's wide boulevards tied together by the Ringstraße and the well-developed and modern system of motorways surrounding in had become a liability in these circumstances. Making a dramatic, doomed last stand in Vienna likely appealed to Marenhorst-Ha on an ideological and perhaps aesthetic level, but, under orders from Hafner, he instead moved the bulk of II. Korpskommando further west. He would, eventually, make his stand, but he would do it on ground of his choosing. 28. Infanterie-Division, on the other hand, was left behind as a rearguard to buy time for the rest of the corps to regroup. They were the ones who were made a dramatic, doomed last stand on the streets of Vienna.  An LS/4 Cosetta landship escorted by dragoons, both from the 16th Cataphracts Division, moves past an overrun Austrian defensive position. It wasn't long before Ha was moving her headquarters, so recently established at Mödling, into the suburbs of Vienna.  While the 16th was spearheading the advance into Vienna, the 11th Cataphracts were ordered to take Semmering Pass, ensuring that the route through the Austrian Alps into Styria secured. For the most part, they saw little combat-- Semmering Pass was only lightly defended-- but two platoons-- one of landships, and one of dragoons-- were peeled off to investigate reports reports that prisoners of war were being held in a nearby fortress. The result was an odd little battle at Otakar Castle, which had very little importance to the course of the war, but turned out to be extremely important to Valentina Ha.  Fortunately for historians, the landship troop chosen for the mission was the Third Troop of C Squadron, 1st Thracian Regiment of Lancers, under the command of recently-promoted First Lieutenant Erinna Papadopoulou, and her diary provides a detailed-- if occasionally meandering-- eyewitness account of the incident.[9] Excerpts from the diary of Lieutenant Erinna Papadopoulou posted:We set out for Otakar early the next morning, picking our way down a narrow cliffside road. It was large enough to accommodate our landships and trucks without any danger of tumbling into the abyss, or something like that, but it left us little room to maneuver if we ran into any serious resistance. The castle has a commanding presence atop a hill-- I caught sight of it in the distance well before we arrived. It looked... well, pretty much like the hundreds of other castles and forts the Ming Frontier Army put up wherever they went. It looked better maintained than the distinctly run-down ones we saw every so often back in Transylvania, though. Papadopoulou left the lieutenant in command of the dragoons to organise a defence of the castle grounds, and then ordered the lieutenant to lead herself and the crew of 1024 Gorgon to the prisoners. Excerpts from the diary of Lieutenant Erinna Papadopoulou posted:[...]The POWs were already gathered in the courtyard ahead of our arrival; the lieutenant said that in the absence of RRP forces, the Austrians were going to attempt a breakout of their own through the CSP blocking units. This dapper-- if slightly rumpled by months of captivity-- Byzantine was none other than Ioannis Kegen Qara-Khungirat. After the soldiers from the 11th fought off a rather half-hearted CSP attack, which had clearly been expecting to find a dozen or so Austrian prison guards and not six landships and five lorries of dragoons[11], Qara-Khungirat was bundled into a jeep, which promptly sped off in the direction of Ha's headquarters in Vienna. They radioed ahead to Ha, of course, but she couldn't quite believe that her missing husband really was safe until she saw him with her own two eyes. When they caught sight of one another-- Ha in her command tent, Qara-Khungirat in the backseat of a Byzantine Army jeep-- they rushed out to meet one another and more or less collided, laughing and embracing.  The war diary of Valentina Ha posted:For the first time since this horrible war started, I felt happy. Not just relieved at disaster averted, or satisfied at a job well done, or putting on a brave face for the haidagraphers and the troops, but actually, genuinely happy. In the ruins of some Viennese suburb, artillery still audible in the distance, sporadic gunfire as the last Austrian holdouts were overrun, I was happy. He kissed me, again and again and again, and each time it was like our first kiss all over again; my heart sang. Reading what I've written, I fear I sound like a giddy schoolgirl, but I can't think of a better way to put it. Against the backdrop of a war that's surely one of the great calamities of all human history, there was still this singular moment of pure joy.  In the end, Ha and Qara-Khungirat had little time to wile away together; as Ha herself noted in her diary, there was a war on, and she had a job to do. Klibanophoroi West, bolstered by Hungarian and Ghanaian reinforcements flooding into the theatre, had lost none of its momentum in taking Vienna, and was already barreling towards Graz.  And the Danube-Sava front was but one theatre above many. In Iberia, the British Army proved they were still in this war even after the disasters at Normandy, and led an RRP breakout from the British landing zone, intending to link up with the Ghananain-Ayitian armies to their east...   ...and the long-dormant Byzantine bastion at Gibraltar, from which General Dajad Malkhassian was attempting a breakout of his own.   In Provence, however, the Byzantines faced a setback when Cavdarli's attempt to push north was deftly parried by Legate Aubertus Brosseau Berolinicus and Comitatensis V Alaudae.   More immediately relevant to Ha was the state of things to her south in Croatia. Savic's Army of the Alps and Hau-Fang's Army of the Danube linked up on 23 March. While they still controlled only a razor-thin corridor along the Adriatic coast, it still restored rail and road links between Italy and the rest of the Commune. For the first time since Germanica smashed through RRP lines on her great southward offensive of June 1941, the Byzantine Commune was no longer cleft in twain. Ha, having resumed her habit of writing regularly to Qara-Khungirat now that he was safely behind the front lines, quipped, 'Looks like ours wasn't the only fateful reunion this week.'  Further north, Hau-Fang was also seeing success, inexorably working her way towards the liberation of Zagreb, one of the most important population and industrial centre in all of Byznantine Croatia, second only to the port of Ragusa. While Ha burned through everything the Austrians threw at her along the Danube, Hau-Fang was grinding them to dust on the banks of the Sava.  Graz fell not long thereafter, and only a major commitment of Gallic armour and infantry drawn from Thérèse Blondeau Vormatia's Comitatensis VII Gemina was able to reinforce the resulting salient before it could be cut off and encircled. This, of course, left Vormatia with fewer available forces to prop up the crumbling Austrian positions in occupied Croatia.   But Vormatia failed to hold the salient in any case. Over twenty thousand Austrian and Gallic soldiers were killed or captured in the resulting encirclement. Slowly but surely, the walls were closing in around the Austrians.   Neither the Austrian general staff nor the fascist political apparatus in Salzburg intended to go quietly, however. Marenhorst-Ha had chosen the ground II. Korpskommando would make its stand on: Klagenfurt. Or, rather, the entire region around Klagenfurt, where the Pannonian Plain began to give way to the Eastern Alps, in which Marenhorst-Ha began[12] the construction of an enormous system of defences, including trenches, minefields, anti-landship obstacles, bunkers, artillery emplacements, and other fortifications. 'We will defend the Fatherland from terrain utterly hostile to the traitor Ha's methods of war-making. Where Nature[sic] is insufficient, we shall remake her into something more suited to our purposes.' 
Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Feb 8, 2023 |
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Feb 8, 2023 22:21
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The objective of the Austro-Gallic forces bearing the brunt of Klibanophoroi West's rapid advance, then, had changed. There was no hope of halting her advance; instead, they would engage in a delaying action, buying as much time as possible for Marenhorst-Ha to prepare his redoubt. In Salzburg, Klara Valeria Ma again insisted that the Austrian armies hold the line until death, not yielding one inch of Austrian soil if they yet lived. By this point, however, Ma exercised very little actual control over her generals-- the natural result of over a decade spent shaping a state to exult in war and exalt the military was that in wartime was that the state would wither away as a redundancy in the face of an ironclad military hierarchy. The ultimate expression of Ma's futurism, was Ma being cut out of the loop; Gaul would henceforth coordinate its actions directly with the Austrian general staff, rather than using Valeria as an intermediary. Elsewhere, one of the war's great turning points was playing out. A combined RRP force under General Rina Pandey was beginning its final assault on the Gallic fortress-city of Genoa after months of hard fighting to reduce its once-formidable garrison and defences.   It was a long and costly campaign...  ...but, although dearly bought, the Red Rose Pact had won one of the great prizes of the war-- the city of Genoa, utterly critical to any Gallic attempt to hold the Western Alps-- and the passes leading into the French metropole.   This wasn't the only threat faced by metropolitan France. At the same time Pandey and Savic's armies were engaged in the closing phase of the siege of Genoa, the Ayitians began landing troops in Brittany. It was a risky gambit-- the disasters at Normandy and Pas-de-Calais amply demonstrated how landings along the Atlantic coast of France could end badly for the Red Rose Pact. The cold calculus of war, however, was that a nation with Ayiti's size and industrial capacity could better absorb the cost of failure, so, with a roll of the dice by the Ayitian high command, the invasion of Brittany had begun.  RRP plans in Lithuania had been badly set back by the sudden departure of the North Germans who'd been serving alongside them, but by the end of March, they had found their footing and were on the move again, making a serious push to relieve the Kaunas pocket at long last.   It was a dynamism that stood in stark contrast to the current state of the Jimao War, which was once again congealing into a static stalemate. There was some hope that the North German Federation could tip the balance, with their large and modern landship corps serving as a sort of Allied Klibanophoroi West. It would be some time before German boots would be on the ground, though-- with the Suez Canal closed to Allied shipping, the North German Federation would have to sail the long way around Africa, rounding the Cape of Good Hope and dodging any Somalian ships patrolling the east African coast.  So for the moment, at least, the deadlock endured. The frontlines in the Himalayas, for example, were so stationary that a Marathi expedition to climb Sagarmatha still went ahead as scheduled.   CHAPTER 16: KLAGENFURT The fall of Vienna and Genoa in such rapid succession was cause for consternation in the Praetorium, but Postuma and her praetors still believed the situation could be salvaged. 'The Reds nearly reached Lutetia Parisorum,' Vodenosid told the military officers, 'And then they drowned in their own blood, and rued the day they set foot on the holy soil of the patria. Compared to a crisis like that, losing a city of Italian merchants and Bulgarian mercenaries is a mere inconvenience.' Rhenanicus, slightly-more practical-minded (and on the hook for allowing the Alpine breakthrough to happen at all), pointed out that although Genoa had fallen, there was still a large span the RRP would have to cross to link up with their comrades in Provence-- a span filled with dug-in Gallic troops, fortified positions, and other impediments to a rapid advance. 'We can still contain them,' he told Postuma, 'Or, failing that, bleed them white in the process.'  This strategy would never really materialise, however; by 4 April Cavarli and Savic's forces linked up and began pressing north. This, finally, would send Rhenanicus into permanent eclipse in the fascist inner circle; with the situation now more precarious than ever, the formerly 'collegial' rivalry between himself and Germanica became increasingly bitter, and before long the knives were out.  Back in Austria, Ha plotted her next move. Although she didn't know the full extent of the preparations being made in Klagenfurt and its environs, she could read a map, and was aware that west of Graz, the terrain became increasingly mountainous, and therefore less conducive to the sort of highly mobile landship warfare that had carried her this far.  The recapture of the Adriatic coast opened up new strategic options, however. Field Marshal Theodora Papadopoulou drew up plans for the three major field armies in the theatre-- the Army of the Alps from the south, the Army of the Danube from the east, and Klibanophoroi West to the north-- to act in concert to pinch off the WRE salient that was taking shape between them.   Klibanophoroi West quickly cut off a relatively small Austro-Gallic force unlucky enough to be caught on terrain still suitable for landship shock tactics.  The city of Klagenfurt itself, too, was vulnerable to Ha's cataphract divisions.  That was the end of the easy part, however. The Red Rose Pact was rapidly running out of open terrain, and had now been channeled into a narrow salient of their own. The moment Marenhorst-Ha had been patiently waiting for was now at hand. Klagenfurt had fallen, but the Battle of Klagenfurt commenced on 11 April 1942-- one year to the day after the Imperial War began. 'Exactly a year of this,' wrote Ha, in a letter to Qara-Khungirat, 'Can't decide if that's a good omen or a terrible one.'   By April of 1942, with a year of experience under their belt, the armies of the Red Rose Pact began to change the way they were uniformed, equipped, and trained. The Byzantine M42 uniform, while broadly similar to the M36 pattern uniforms it replaced, made several improvements. Two of the three pleats in coat's skirts were eliminated, which both simplified production and allowed for more pocket space. The tunic and trousers worn under the coat was now a darker shade of tan; the high contrast of the prior colours made Byzantine infantry easier to spot and target. The biggest change, however, was the replacement of the M36 uniform's leather carrying straps with new load-carrying equipment based on the highly successful British 1937 Pattern Web Equipment. Finally, the puttees were now replaced with gaiters. In the years leading up the outbreak of the Imperial War, Ghana had been anticipating a war against the expansionist Somalian Republic in arid environs, so the first Ghanaian troops deployed to Europe were partially equipped with stockpiled desert gear. By 1942, however, a standardised temperate uniform was adopted.  The Gallic Legions belatedly began to simplify their complex infantry uniforms in an effort to save materials and increase production efficiency. The the boots cut slightly lower, and the pleats and scalloping on the pockets were eliminated as were piping and trim on the shoulder-straps. A new helmet was introduced around the same time patterned on the more streamlined helmets already being produced for export to Austria and Third Rome. Additionally, the Roman-style focale scarf worn with the old uniforms was generally unpopular among the soldiers, so it was replaced with a conventional collar. Gallic landship troopers, however, still wore the ornate uniforms inspired by the old chasseurs; by this point, the stockpliles of uniforms had far outstripped the number of operable landships Gaul had. Finally, by the spring of 1942, conscripts of the so-called Levée en Masse militia were an increasingly common sight. Equipped with a mix of military surplus-- the soldier above is wearing a Lightning War-vintage uniform and an Austrian-pattern export helmet, and armed with a British-made Sten gun captured after Normandy-- the Levée en Masse were serving a variety of rear-echelon duties such as manning spotlights, ack-ack guns, and other air defence infrastructure. They were still kept well away from the frontlines, however-- their purpose was to free up regular soldiers for combat, not engage in it themselves. The advance from Klagenfurt was decided unlike most over advances in the Danube-Sava theatre-- it was slow and methodical, with infantry from Byzantium and the Habsburg Commune, along with specialised alpine troops from both Byzantium and Azerbaijan cautiously working their way further into the Austrian defensive lines, all the while enduring withering artillery barrages. The first task facing this force has securing the bridge across the river Glan in Klagenfurt.  In the Western Alps, Geneal Eudokia Akinyi of the Second Army of Milan presided over an offensive moving at a similarly deliberate pace.   Across all fronts, caution was the order of the day for the RRP. With the fighting around Klagenfurt moving up into the Karawanken mountains, most of Klibanophoroi West's landship divisions were taken off the line and withdrawn to Zagreb, where they would be able to rest, recuperate, and re-equip themselves after advancing halfway across Austria in the space of three months.  But although caution was the order of the day for the Red Rose Pact, for Ha, it was decidedly not. As was standard procedure for her by this point, she established her new command post perilously close to the front. Although her headquarters were placed outside of artillery range-- she'd learned her lesson, evidently, from when her staff car was blown up in the German Civil War-- artillery was hardly the only hazard in the Klagenfurt area. As the RRP pushed further west into Austria, though, the air superiority they'd enjoyed in the opening phases of the Danube-Sava offensive had slipped away. The Byzantine Air Force scrambled what planes it had available to the Alpine theatre, but for the moment, the fascists still commanded the skies over the Alps.  Ha was forced to learn this lesson, too, the hard way, when her headquarters were bombed by the Légion Impériale de l'Air. Ha and her staff, of course, sought cover immediately; Ha was reckless, not suicidal. She nonetheless got clipped by shrapnel before she managed to get to safety. The resulting injury was nowhere near as severe as the the wounds she sustained in the Debrecen assassination attempt, which were severe enough to have killed her if she hadn't received prompt, high-quality medical care. As discussed in Chapter 13, even after she had recovered and returned to active duty, she still suffered chronic pain, and would for the rest of her life. The lacerations of the leg she suffered on this occasion were comparatively trivial, but that's only relative to a severe and traumatic injury with lifelong consequences. Taken on their own merits, the shrapnel wounds were severe enough to oblige her to withdraw to Zagreb for treatment.  'Please, you have to be more careful,' wrote Qara-Khungirat in his next letter, 'I didn't survive by the skin of my teeth in a fascist prison just to lose you. We've made it this far, against all odds-- let's make it the rest of the way, too. Besides, I don't want to see what happens when they run out of room for Wound Stripes on that little patch.' 'It turns out that after two they just pinning on little stars for subsequent decorations, if you were wondering. But I'll do my best not to collect any more.' Ha answered, 'Besides, I think my surgeon would get mad if I ruined all her nice work by getting myself shot to pieces.'  In any case, Ha had a limited role to play in the remainder of the Battle of Klagenfurt, which by this point was by and large an infantry battle-- one of the largest of the entire war, involving troops from Byzantium, Ghana, Hungary, the Habsburg Commune, Ayiti, Azerbaijan and Marathas on one side, and Austria, Gaul, and Poland on the other. Marenhorst-Ha had built his citadel on terrain chosen to deliberately counter his cousin's mobile landship warfare, so the Red Rose Pact simply sidestepped the problem by fighting the offensive by other means. While Ha was still coordinating Klibanophoroi West's dragoons as they formed the northern prong of a pincer aimed at the Klagenfurt salient, the main offensive drive was now coming from Hau-Fang in the south.  The rugged terrain and dug-in enemy troops resulted in scenes more reminiscent of the First Great War than the Third-- and casualty numbers more reminiscent of of the Belgorod front than anything that had happened in the Danube theatre.  It was a hard, thankless, and bloody way to win a battle.  But the battle was won nonetheless.   Elements of the Austrian 27. Infanterie-Division surrender to soldiers of the Habsburg Commune's 3rd (Richcoast) Infantry Division. The encirclement of Marenhorst-Ha's III. Korpskommando was completed by 11 May.  Worse still for the Marenhorst-Ha, the encircled troops were trapped in the lowlands. While still heavily fortified, the remnants of his corps-- along with the Gallic 1ère Légion de Cavalerie[13], 22ème Légion d'Infanterie, Strasbourg Légion d'Infanterie, three divisions of Polish landships-- had been cut off from their alpine redoubts. Accordingly, Klibanophoroi West sprang into action once again, and Ha, despite still recovering from her wounds, drew up plans for the 11th and 17th Cataphracts-- deemed the most fighting-fit of the medium landship divisions after months of heavy fighting-- to join the Byzantine and Hungarian troops assaulting the pocket from the east. Meanwhile, the 1st Independent Heavy Cavalry and its ageing but formidable LD/1 Aphrodites, would support the Ghanaian attacking from the north.  Before communications with the Drau-Sava pocket were totally cut off, Berolinicus, whose Comitatensis V Alaudae at least notionally included the Gallic forces in the pocket, along with Polish General Czcibor Umiastowski, ordered the surrounded troops to-- rather quixotically-- effect a breakout back towards the Alps. Marenhorst-Ha, trapped in the pocket along with everyone else, took personal command of the situation, by this point even exercising unofficial authority over the Gallic and Polish formations in the area. He repeatedly exhorted the 'soldiers of our great Empire-Nation' to 'fight to the last bullet, the last man, the last drop of blood, before you allow the Red beasts to advance one inch further onto our sacred soil.'  It was a futile, suicidal order, but one the fascist soldiers-- especially his fellow Austrians-- followed with grim determination. Unlike the other great encirclements of the Third Great War, before and since, few prisoners were taken-- spurred on by years of propaganda exalting the glory of warfare even in death and by lurid tales of 'the Reds' torturing, killing or otherwise humiliating POWs-- the men and women in Marenhorst-Ha's charge proved unusually unwilling to be taken alive if even one more of the enemy could be killed by continuing to fight to the end.  By 14 May, the Austrian forces had been in large part destroyed, as were the greater part of the Gauls. The only operational divisions were the Polish landships and the Gallic cavalry, who, for a time, used their speed to engage in hit-and-run attacks while avoiding being killed or captured, although these, too, took heavy casualties.  By this point, Marenhorst-Ha and his staff-- perhaps the only Austrian soldiers not yet killed or captured in the entire pocket-- facing the point of joining the tens of thousands of soldiers they'd ordered to their deaths into Valhalla, took a step back from the ledge and, under a white flag, asked the Byzantines for terms.  Eventually, Marenhorst-Ha was taken to see the senior RRP commander in the area-- Valentine Ha. Thus it was Ha had a second reunion with a family member in the spring of 1942. 'Finally come to your senses, eh?' asked Ha, in the South German dialect the two generals shared, 'The terms we're offering are this: unconditional surrender. Take 'em or leave 'em.' Marenhorst-Ha, however, was utterly flabbergasted to find himself sitting across the table from his estranged relation, and immediately concluded that the Byzantines were intentionally attempting to humiliate him. 'You,' he said, in startled fury, 'Of course they'd send you, just to twist the knife already lodged between my ribs.' Ha, for her part, was taken aback and seemingly somewhat confused by the outburst. She blinked at him, silent for a moment. She then turned to Christiadis, her chief of staff, addressing him in Greek. '...do I know this guy or something?' All Christiadis could do was shrug helplessly; he was as lost as she was in this situation. Marenhorst-Ha assumed that this lack of recognition was yet another calculated slight. 'We met in 1918,' he said, 'The family reunion in Vienna? I know you remember,' he added, addressing Ha by her birth name, despite the fact she had discarded it some months earlier. The other officers present exchanged somewhat befuddled looks, since they-- rather obviously-- had never heard that name before in their lives, and so seemed nothing but an odd non-sequitur. Ha wrote later that she was furious, but in the moment, she maintained the same cool, dismissive, almost casual demeanour she routinely adopted when treating with enemy generals. 'Oh,' she said, switching back to her native German, peppered with Mandarin and Arabic loanwords. 'You're that Ulrich? The one who ran off to join the blackshirts and embarrassed everyone else by spending the whole dinner talking about how the First Great War foretold the future of humanity and why that was good, actually. My parents told me to steer clear of you in the future, and, well... good call, in retrospect. Anyway![14] Do you surrender or not?' she continued.  A moment later, she added, 'You forgot my name, by the way.'  While Ma's government still sat in Salzburg, the loss at Klagenfurt had made the collapse of Austria in the near future all-but-certain. It also effectively meant the end of the Austrian Army as an independent fighting-force; while they could still scrape together some two dozen divisions in various states of depletion and disarray, they were scattered across a broad frontline. Henceforth, the Gaul's main ally in the Danube-Carpathia theatre would be the Polish Royal Army.  The news was similarly grim for the WRE across nearly every front of the war; their sole success was decisively defeating the attempt by the RRP to form a broad front in southern Iberia. The invasion of Brittany, however, continued apace.  When combined with the fall of Genoa in the Western Alps and the near-collapse of Austrian in the Eastern Alps, even the most strident Gallic propaganda could no longer pretend a quick and decisive conquest through guerre eclair was in the cards. The speeches, posters, newsreels, articles, and other output of Vodenosid's propaganda machine began to change in tone, calling for 'total mobilisation of the imperial nation' and 'a struggle for national survival against the Red Hordes'. The CSP, Army, Air Force, and increasingly prominent levée en masse militias were urged to 'hold the line' until deliverance of some sort would arrive. Sometimes, the form this deliverance would take was couched specifically in religious or apocalyptic terminology; sometimes, it was left tantalisingly unstated. More and more, though, the force that would save the empire if only the line could be held long enough to deploy it was given a name: l’arme absolue: the final weapon. Immediately, RRP intelligence attempted to determine if this 'final weapon' was merely wishful thinking and bluster, an example of the rather fanciful Gallic 'wonder-weapons' by then known well-known to the RRP (e.g., landships the size of actual ships, rocket-powered gliders, artillery cannons built into mountainsides, etc.), or a reference to something specific which was genuinely threatening to the Pact.  It was the latter of these, it turned out. The mood in the Praetorium was stormy; they had long been realists enough to know that a speedy guerre eclair was unlikely within months of the war beginning, but now doubts began to set in as to whether the war could be won conventionally at all. Rhenanicus, by this point half-way out the door of the inner circle, suggested sending out peace-feelers to the Pact while the WRE was still in a position of relative strength and therefore, perhaps, able to extract more favourable terms. Postuma, in agreement with Germanica and Vodenosid, dismissed this as hopelessly naïve. Instead, she said, the war must be won unconventionally. This triumvirate knew something that had yet been concealed from the increasingly disfavoured Rhenanicus: a top secret Gallic project was very close to building a practical nuclear fission reactor, a feat no other nation was even close to achieving, and the first step to the development and production of atomic weapons.  No-one else in the world so much as suspected it, but the Third Great War had become a race against time.  [1]It is debatable whether, by this stage of the war, Lithuania could still be considered a Müllerist dictatorship in the classic sense. While Kasparas Sereikis was still notionally at the head of of a Müllerist state apparatus, in practical terms he exerted no authority. Sereikis and his ministers had withdrawn to the coast before the encirclement of Kaunas was complete, but this cut him off from the bulk of the Lithuanian army and civilian population. The army formed an ad-hoc unified command structure with the other RRP forces in the Kaunas-Vilnius pocket, and the bottom-up organisation of the civilians in the encircled zone into autonomous communes is well-known as an example of 'stateless communism'. It was apparent by even early 1942 that whatever Lithuanian state emerged from the Third Great War would be fundamentally unlike the one that existed ante-bellum. This left Juhasz's Hungary as main standard-bearer of orthodox Müllerism in the Pact; while there were robust Müllerist tendencies in many other RRP members (most notoriously in Nova Scotia), none of those states were Müllerist in form. Fortunately, Marathas was not a full RRP member, and so I am spared the necessity of determining whether Sharqiism is 'really' Müllerism or not, a contentious issue that continues to cause Müllerist party conferences to descend into chaos to this day. [2]After the monarchy was abolished in 1928, the old Royal Castle was officially named The Castle of the Liberated Hungarian Worker Bequeathed to the People of Budapest by Our Revolutionary Victory. As far as I can tell, no one actually called it that. [3]Most of these formations would be absorbed by the Red Army's foreign legions, which were full of the same sort of people as the international brigades-- they simply wound up in the Commune instead of North Germany. [4]Regiments from divisions of Klibanophoroi West that had been depleted or consolidated out of existence in the aftermath of the Belgorod encirclements and failed Croatian offensive in the summer of 1941 were were incorporated into these new divisions, however, giving them a nucleus of relatively experienced combat veterans. Many of the dragoons were survivors of dragoon or infantry formations disbanded after Belgorod. Some of the post-Croatia offensive consolidation was more due to lack of equipment then lack of manpower; the merging of the 9th and 10th Cataphracts, in particular, left numerous experienced landship crews without any landships; these crews eventually found their way into the into companies of the 2nd, 14th, 15th, 16th, and 18th Cataphracts still fielding LS/3 Evgenias. [5]Pointing out all of the historical inconsistencies and incoherencies in the Gallic regime's invocations of history is tantamount to ploughing the sea, but I am nonetheless obliged to point out that the most lasting outcome of the medieval crusades was mercantile Italian city-states enriching themselves by leveraging conquests in the Levant to contest Somalian trade supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean, that the crusades were ostensibly the endeavours of a Catholic Church Valeria II sought to overthrow, and that the Roman forces under her command massacred the Knights Hospitaller challenging her claim to the patriarchate of Jerusalem. [6]Roughly corresponding to the ancient Roman province of Pannonia Valeria. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, in spite of their penchant for classical references, neither the Byzantines nor the Gauls made note of this strange historical coincidence. Yes, I was disappointed, too. [7]Marenhorst-Ha frequently misgendered Ha in his writings. I have taken the liberty of making amendments where necessary, but it should still be stated for the record that, yes, he was that much of an (if you will excuse my Latin) rear end in a top hat. [8]Ha, of course, was heterosexual, to the disappointment and occasional embarrassment of many women throughout the militaries of the Red Rose Pact (see Mizuno's Diaries for an representative anecdote along these lines about an unnamed RRP general-- almost certainly then-Lieutenant General Rina Pandey-- who met Ha at an RRP military conference after the Zhongnan War). Marenhorst-Ha, like every self-styled fascist 'philosopher', was not about to let such details get in the way of a rhetorical flourish. Incidentally, labelling Ha a 'homosexual' implies that unlike Ha herself, Marenhorst-Ha did acknowledge Ioannis Kegen Qara-Khungirat's transition. This was without a doubt not intentional on his part, and rather a case of not even trying to parse the nature of his cousin's marriage, but it's still a helpful reminder of the utter incoherence of fascist rhetoric regarding gender. [9]I have taken these excerpts, which hew closely to the original Greek in both substance and spirit, from the late Eve Kessler's excellent 1963 English translation of Erinna's diaries. [10]This was István de Valois-Vexin, the self-styled King Stephen III of Hungary. Kessler speculates that Papadopoulou would have known this, but decided to be rude on purpose. [11]It is sometimes asserted that the Austrians assisted the Byzantines, on the basis that if the CSP won, they, too, were as good as dead. The evidence we have available is ambiguous; Papadopoulou, for example, describes the Austrians as 'cooperative' without specifying whether they participated in the skirmish or not. It is my belief that the Austrians, while willing to shoot at the CSP, had no opportunity to, since the Byzantines already so thoroughly outgunned the relatively small CSP contingent that the battle lasted a few minutes at most. Admittedly, though, there is no scholarly consensus. [12]Or, more accurately, ordered some fifty-thousand slave labourers to begin on his behalf. [13]As we have dealt extensively with Byzantine 'cavalry'-- i.e., armoured formations, particularly of light landships-- it should be clarified that the 1ère Légion de Cavalerie was a division of horse cavalry. Horse cavalry were surprisingly useful in the broader Battle of Klagenfurt-- they offered certain advantages in rugged terrain over motorised cavalry. Most of the combatants in the Third Great War, whether they were WRE, RRP, Allied, or WPO, fielded cavalry in some capacity-- a far cry from the apocryphal but much-touted in propaganda tales of North German hussars and cuirassiers charging Gallic landships in the Lightning War. By the time the 1ère was encircled, however, these advantages were negated. [14]The phrase Ha used in the original German was 'Sei's drum!', which-- for reasons that are rather unclear to me-- became a catchphrase heavily associated with Ha in wartime English-language media. WORLD MAP, 5/17/42 
Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Feb 8, 2023 |
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Feb 8, 2023 22:21
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At this point I’m like 80% sure this won’t continue into Stellaris, even though I like that game a whole lot, since it feels like it will take all of the narrative themes we’ve been building up since 1081 AD and jettison them into orbit. That said, I’m also a bit reluctant to privilege our WW2 equivalent as being, like, the climax and ending point of history, so I want to have something after it. It’s possible that this will just be an elaborate epilogue post or posts, but if anyone has ideas for a game to use as a coda (instead of needing to be a bridge to Stellaris), I’m very interested, since writing this story in collaboration with and ascribing historical narrative meaning to game mechanics is what makes it an LP and not just my alternate history novel. I have vague ambitions of getting this story to 2081, just so it covers an even thousand years of history, but I’m not sure if ‘easily moddable games which model some aspect of history covering the years 1945 to 2081’ is a particularly full market segment.
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Feb 10, 2023 19:22
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 EMERGENCY VOTE With Operation Sanxian winding down, the fighting on the front lines of the Imperial War is in a lull as both sides draw up their next grand strategies and plan out future operations. This is just as well, as at this very moment, a diplomatic bomb has just been lobbed into the Red Rose Pact.   Hurriedly, a tense conference of top RRP leaders and diplomats was convened in Niandi, Ghana, to formulate their response to this most unexpected offer from the Red Maharani herself.  Aoife O'Connor, Tribune of the Irish Republic The Irish Republic learned the hard way that it's never a good idea to look a gift horse in the mouth when you're facing an existential war against fascism-- we know a thing or two about that from the civil wars. Although I'm as Marxist-Exteberrianist as it comes, defeating fascism took a big-tent approach to left-solidarity-- while Byzantine intervention finally tipped the scales against the Iron Heart Movement, the fact we survived long enough for that to happen is because we held our noses and recognized that in times of crisis, the Müllerist PNE were our comrades, too. It's true that right now we have the momentum and the strategic initiative-- winning the war without Marathan help is a likely outcome, although by no means an assured one-- the fortunes of war are fickle, and there are some indications from the Pact's intelligence services that l'arme absolue of Gallic propaganda refers to some sort of genuine and well-resourced weapons R&D effort. The intervention of Marathas would make victory that much more certain-- and, even if victory were already certain, Sharqi throwing her whole weight behind us will mean a victory that comes quicker and with lighter losses. Every day this war continues, more people die-- soldiers on the front, but civilians, too-- every European Pact member can attest to the effects of Gaul's campaign of terror bombing, and Hungarians and Byzantines in particular have borne the brunt of it. I'm sure we've all seen the haidagraphs of Milan, Ferrara, Venice, Budapest, Debrecen, and dozens of other great cities. The fascists continue to brutalize the citizens of the vast and populous territories they still occupy in Lithuania and Belgorod-- as well as the citizens of now-liberated areas who were deported to the WRE to serve as slave labour-- or worse. I don't trust Sharqi, but if she wants to help stop this, we should let her.   Mayneri Nitaino, Tribune of the Commune of Ayiti The Red Rose Pact is predicated on the power of the belief that the world can be better than it is. Ayiti, in the aftermath of the Second Great War, is testament to that-- we were treated not as vanquished enemies to be punished, but a federation of peoples as worthy of a future as anyone else in the International. Everything Ayiti is today is because Byzantium and her allies stayed true to their ideals. These ideals, then, are not liabilities-- they are our greatest strength. But-- very well-- let us concede that in times of war, pragmatism must win out. Marathi aid does not come with no strings attached-- it ties our fates to a government that's infamous for its capriciousness and unpredictability. Their help in the war might alleviate suffering now, but we must not lose sight of the longer-term consequences: it legitimizes and empowers Sharqi as she continues to inflict bloody purges upon the people and workers of Marathas. It gives Sharqi a seat at the table when the time comes to map out the post-war world. It would destabilize our relations with the Allies-- while Sharqi has, for the moment, supported them in the Jimao War against the World Prosperity Organization, she still dreams of seeing all India under her banner, and the Republic of Hindustan stands in her way. Or, even if she continues to prioritize her opposition to the Ming Empire, that could still further entangle us in the Jimao War, and I don't need to tell you the disastrous economic and human cost of getting ourselves embroiled in that intra-capitalist feud.  Is she likely to do any of those things? I don't know. And I don't think any of you know, either. Let's not stake the world's future on the restraint and diplomacy of Rishma Sharqi. THE VOTE:##Support the Scrappy Firebrand to accept Marathas's offer to join the Red Rose Pact as a full member and intervene against the WRE. ##Support the Charismatic Idealist to reject Marathas's offer and deny them entry into the Red Rose Pact. Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 23:07 on Feb 14, 2023 |
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Feb 14, 2023 22:53
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Pacho posted:
holy poo poo Incredible.
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Feb 15, 2023 00:02
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The really fun thing here is that I genuinely don’t know what the consequences of accepting or rejecting Marathas might be; when we were making the mod, a lot of the Marathas-related stuff was siloed off from me so that Sharqi would be a wildcard to me, the player. Like obviously I can look at the focus tree itself, but I have absolutely no idea how how things are weighted by the AI, how any event chains attached to it work, etc, etc. So there’s no dramatic irony here; anything could happen.
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Feb 15, 2023 16:26
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The vote is going to close at 11:59 pm EST on February 17th. Hopefully that’s enough time to get all the debate and discussion done!
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Feb 15, 2023 19:29
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Shogeton posted:I like to imagine that a contested vote like this means that people are going to be screaming at each other throughout the ekllesias. Everyone at the RRP diplomatic conference is having a miserable time. Everyone is shouting over one another, everyone is accusing everyone else of revisionism. The delegates have all smoked their body’s weight in cigarettes. Vriska is there.
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Feb 16, 2023 11:24
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In the event of a tie, I will cast a tie-breaking vote on the basis that I’m the one who had to play out whatever we decide.
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Feb 16, 2023 23:37
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Reminder that voting closes at midnight EST.
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Feb 18, 2023 05:22
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war is good because it creates more opportunities for yuri moments The Scrappy Firebrand Natty Ninefingers jalapeno_dude Akratic Method Crazycryodude ThatBasqueGuy stumblebum Pacho habeasdorkus karmicknight Grizzwold kirsus AriadneThread Hellioning Communist Zombie Night10194 e-dt TheMaskedReader paragon1 420 Gank Mid AJ_Impy edipil megane ZiegeDame Jeoh Skavenlord Kangxi thatbastardken TheMaskedReader Rubix Squid TheFlyingLlama idhrendur RabidWeasel GunnerJ silentsnack punched my v-card at camp Livewire42 mcclay Slightly Lions Total: 38 "How long has she been in power, now, ten, twelve years? How many Foreign Service people have we spoken to. Hungarian, Byzantine, whoever. We don't have a clue what's going on in her head, and now look at what she is asking us to do-" The Charismatic Idealist QuoProQuid SirPhoebos Redeye Flight Technowolf chrome line Yuiiut Thordain Coward tatankatonk NewMars Sanzh Angry Salami VideoWitch Polgas Josef bugman Soup du Jour Freudian Anzrel Mr.Morgenstern Lynneth LJN92 Dr_Gee Shogeton Bloody Pom wiegieman Tulip Morrow Luhood NeverHelm MatchaZed Total: 30 Somewhere in Lithuania, a phone rings in Rishma Sharqi's command post. She picks up the phone. She smiles, sphinx-like. Somewhere in Paris, a teletext printer begins tapping out syllables, fast as machine-gun fire. A Deuxième Bureau officer tears off the page and skims it. He goes white as a sheet. Somewhere in Byzantion, a Japanese diplomat has started drinking at ten in the morning. She isn't sure whether she should be celebrating or despairing-- or, somehow, both-- all she knows is that the drama playing out in the capitals and battlefields of Europe is, potentially, a critical turning point in her own nation's concerns. Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 08:33 on Feb 19, 2023 |
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Feb 18, 2023 19:19
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Pacho posted:turn the audio on: (right click on the video -> unmute on Firefox at least) Incredible. 
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Mar 1, 2023 08:01
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A thing that happened purely mechanically just because of how the civil war was set up, but might be relevant to this conversation, is that the half or so of the generals who went over to the HRE are gone after the civil war, which meant that the NGF had a shortage of generals (especially when they had like a million tiny little volunteer forces running around, but even after joining the Allies and consolidating those it’s still a military that needs a bunch of generals), which in turn means that now there’s a bunch of Skill 1 randomly generated generals clogging up their command structure (which then creates more work for me since I have to go back and draw/properly name if they actually show up in the thread, but that’s neither here nor there). This only affects the highest echelons of command (four-star generals and field marshals) because that’s what HoI IV models, but it might still be useful information for speculating about the current state of the German military, its officer corps, and its politics.
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Mar 5, 2023 07:51
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A brief update: April was exceptionally busy for me, so not much work was done on the next post and its art. I’m back at it now, though— expect a short interlude update in the next week or so, and a proper update not long after that.
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May 10, 2023 21:50
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I am dealing with some computer problems at the moment so it might be a little longer than I said until we get an update, sorry.
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May 20, 2023 06:11
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Pacho posted:
 habeasdorkus posted:Man, if you think Maoists are annoying in our timeline, think about the Sharqists circa 2023 in this timeline. Sincere believers in the world’s most insincere ideology. Christ, since SA or something like it eventually exists in ByzLP, that SA’s version of LF must be somehow even worse than real LF.
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Aug 15, 2023 16:41
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 PART EIGHTY-SEVEN: (Interlude) Six Soldiers (June, 1942)  THE ALLIES 1. Kawaguchi Chihiro: The Student-Soldier Far across the ocean, in the distant Near West, the communists and the fascists were locked in an apocalyptic death struggle; two mortal foes both in a position to totally mobilize their populations and their economic, scientific, and industrial bases towards the single goal of destroying one another. Where armies fought, where ships sailed, where planes flew, destruction followed swiftly in their wake. The newsreels coming out of Europe underlined this: columns of Byzantine landships rolling into shattered city centers, Gallic air legions leaving desolate moonscapes where the great industrial centers of northern Italy once stood, artillery barrages sculpting the very earth into something hellish. Even far behind the lines, death never seemed far-- the fascists weren't about to push the Red fleets out of the English Channel or the Mediterranean, but their submarines still prowled the waters. Bombs fell on London, on Byzantium, on Rome and Paris and Madrid and Dublin. The sheer scale of it made Kawaguchi Chihiro's head swim; it was always impossible for her to concentrate on whatever trifling Haida adventure film or sentimental love story came after the news.  Certainly her own nation's war left its mark on the world-- she'd seen the haidagraphs from Silla, she'd seen Shanghai worn down by siege after siege, a beautiful glass bottle slowly turning into a featureless lump as the tides came and went. She'd seen casualty numbers far too large to comfortably hold in her head. But even those grim spectacles were across the East China Sea or Sea of Japan, or among the forbidding peaks of the Himalayas-- or in Iran or Africa, which were basically in the Near West, anyway. the core territories of the Japanese and Haida Republics were not just secure-- they were unassailable, impregnable, sacrosanct. No WPO bombers overhead, no WPO commerce raiders harrying the sea lanes connecting Japan to the Haida; even the routes to the frontlines in Silla, Fujian, and the Yangtze Delta were secure until you got close enough to the coast for Ming planes to be in striking distance.  Sometimes, when Chihiro looked out the window of the train she took to school and back and saw the Edo cityscape pass by, too fast to read the slogans on the patriotic banners and posters that had cropped up, she cleared her mind and let herself pretend there wasn't a war on at all. By 1942, the threat of enemy planes or ships had receded so much that blackout rules weren't even being enforced anymore, and the city's familiar tangle of neon advertisements and lit windows was returning.  But still: There was a war on, and it was impossible to miss it-- it was just that here on the home islands, that war was felt in terms of absence. First, the absence of certain goods as trade links with the Ming were suddenly severed, than the absence of basically everything imported from the Near West once the conflagration spread there, too. Then, as the number of casualties mounted, a far more disquieting absence was felt: The absence of their fellow citizens; half-silent streets, half-empty trains. Early in the war, everyone seemed to know someone who was serving abroad. By now, everyone seemed to know someone who wasn't coming home.  So the industrial heart of Japan continued to beat; landships and planes and artillery pieces and munitions and bombs and every other weapon you'd ever need to wage a modern war rolled off the assembly-lines without interruption. The trouble was the lack of soldiers left to bear those arms, and it was this that caused the Republic to adopt more and more desperate measures. The minimum age of conscription-- 20 at the beginning of the war-- was quickly dropped to 18. The maximum age was raised to 38, then 40. Exemptions and deferments and loopholes -- for workers in non-essential industries, for college students, for high school students who'd turned 18-- were eliminated.  Chihiro's boyfriend Keisuke was a year older than her and a year ahead in school; the possibility that they would be separated by the war sooner rather than later cast a shadow over everything. Still, they thought they had more time-- until he graduated, at least, they could pretend this was just another high school love story, they could enjoy a pleasant dream of peace. No such luck: the Department of War widened conscription's net a little more, secondary school students who'd turned 18 were no longer exempt, and Keisuke's number came up more or less immediately. So were many of his classmates, plucked right out of third year and sent God knows where. She sleptwalked through the rest of the term. Every day she rode a quiet train through a quiet city to a quiet classroom in a quiet school, and then got back on that quiet train through the quiet city to return to a quiet home-- Chihiro's older sister had been serving in the Navy practically since the Bonin Isles incident-- she'd volunteered out of a sense of patriotic duty. Her mother worked long hours at a factory making-- of all things-- military-issue binoculars; she came home late at night, nearly collapsing from exhaustion. Her father-- always a taciturn man of few words-- now seemed totally lost at sea, sad and defeated. She'd read once about an aircraft whose pilot died suddenly in the cockpit; the plane flew in circles for hours before it finally ran out of fuel, the engines stalled, and it plummeted to the ground. Everything felt like that, now: A holding pattern, but an unsustainable one. Something-- something had to give. It turned out that something was the conscription laws, yet again: 17 year olds were now liable to serve. One day, Chihiro was sitting in a classroom, doodling in the margins of her notes as a history teacher droned through Fujiwara empire's campaign to chase the Genchou Mongols out of Kyushu. The next, she was on a train to a military base, Edo receding into the distance, to report for duty to the 49th Infantry Division. By June, Chihiro and the other nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine men and women serving with the 49th were at the port of Nagasaki, awaiting orders to deploy. She was well-equipped with the fruits of Japan's war industries. She had a steel helmet emblazoned with the cherry blossom insignia of the Army, she had a gas mask, she had a temperate uniform, a winter uniform, a tropical uniform, a service uniform, a dress uniform, a mess dress uniform, along with several spares and several sets of boots and gaiters. She had her very own Arisaka Type 100 submachine gun, a frankly preposterous amount of ammunition, a fold-out pocket multitool, an entrenching tool, a bayonet, another knife that wasn't a bayonet but looked basically the same as the one that was, a canteen, a sleeping bag, a pile of handbooks and technical manuals, and a few grenades thrown in as a little garnish. She had bags and cases and boxes to carry all of these things in, and complicated load-carrying webbing to distribute the weight of all of these things across her body, so that carrying them was merely unwieldy instead of outright impossible. She even had her very own set of binoculars. (She wondered, idly, if they'd come from her mother's factory, if her mother's hands had screwed the bakelite casing protecting its lenses together.) The other nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine men and women in the division also had all of these things, along with whatever other specialized equipment they might conceivably need-- radios, jeeps, antilandship rifles, artillery pieces, explosives and tunneling equipment and field hospitals.  What she didn't have was very much training at all. She thought there would have been more of that. She learned to salute, she learned to march, she learned to fire her weapon in the general direction of a target-- and then off she went, with nine thousand, nine hundred, and ninety-nine graduates of the same rigorous training regimen.  Still, she allowed herself a cautious sort of optimism. She'd heard from Keisuke-- after his unit was activated with not much more training than Chihiro's, they were deployed to one of the Republic's far-flung outposts some Pacific island or other-- the name was blacked out with a censor's bar, but it was clearly far from any of the fighting. In such serene surroundings, Keisuke's military education continued. Perhaps, thought Chihiro, that was the typical procedure. The 49th wasn't just going to get dumped right into hell, dropped off in Silla or Fujian or Iran and with not so much as a by-your-leave. They'd get rotated into garrison duty to free up a more experienced unit, and stay there until their training was complete and they shipped out to the frontlines. Rinse, repeat. That, she thought, made sense. Maybe it worked like that. Maybe hell was still a little further in the future.  No such luck. Even as Chihiro stared out across Nagasaki Bay, thinking of beaches and palm trees and Keisuke, General Lau Akemi was preparing a very different set of orders to hand down to the second army.  2. Nalghen Ts'ihna: Time Enough to Catch Your Breath The Haida Republic-- the name has always bothered Nalghen Ts'ihna, a proud Dakelh, truth be told-- a hundred peoples boiled down into one monolith just because the Haida happened to have the best boats in the seventeenth drat century, or whatever. You'd think that they would have changed that when they were tidying up the constitution to shed their vestigial king and become a proper republic, but of course they didn't. But of such circumstances were nations built, he supposed. The Hongwu Emperor picks exactly the right moment to kick the Yuan in the teeth, and six hundred years later the maps still show Great Ming in giant letters stretching across the width and breadth of Asia. That's just how it was. Not everywhere could be the Byzantine Commune, after all. And the Byzantines were just Romans by another name, anyway.  In any case-- the Haida Republic (for better or for worse) was in much the same situation as their Japanese allies across the sea: a critical shortage of manpower, an industrial base far from the fighting churning out more than enough war goods to keep up with recruitment, reinforcement, and replacement.  Nalghen knew better than to take the far from the fighting part for granted, though. Back in the 1920s, when Japan was just getting kicked around by the Somalians in their most far-flung colonial possessions, the Second Great War happened in his back yard. Sometimes even literally in his back yard-- his family's farm was on the western bank of the Lhtakoh River, and Ayitian forces occupied the eastern bank for a few months. Occasionally, a mis-aimed Ayitian shell would blow a crater in the middle of an orchard or knock over an outbuilding. At one point in the middle of a blizzard, a Byzantine observation plane crashed right into a cornfield; its pilot bailed out but she got stuck in a tree, parachute cords all tangled up in branches. Nalghen's mom had to go find the ladder and trudge through the snow with it to cut the poor woman free before she froze to death. They let her stay in the farmhouse, sitting by the stove, drinking hot chocolate, leafing through magazines in languages she almost certainly couldn't read, but she seemed like she needed something to do with her hands, still trembling even after she'd warmed up. A day later, some Byzantines in a truck showed up to pick her up; one of them thanked Nalghen's parents in broken Haida read from a phrasebook which probably would have been nigh-incomprehensible even if any of them actually spoke Haida as their first language, which they did not. Then the guy handed Nalghen a candy bar, for some reason. He didn't have the heart to admit he'd never had much of a sweet tooth.  Nalghen's seen a lot more war since then-- he'd been in the army since the very beginning of the war. Since a bit before it, even-- he was at the tail end of his mandatory year of national service right when the Ming sailed into the Bonins and everything went to hell. The month or so he'd had left to go before returning to civilian life was prolonged indefinitely. And he'd seen some of the hardest fighting the whole time-- he was in the Allied reaguard trying to hold off the Ming invasion of Silla, he was in the Siberian taiga, he was in the Second Battle of Shanghai, and then the Third Battle of Shanghai. By this point, the Yangtze Delta campaign could scarcely be divided up into discrete battles-- the push and pull between the Allies and the Ming was constant; he gave it better than even odds that he'd die in uniform instead of ever going home. Worse still, he'd gotten used to the idea, and it barely even bothered him anymore. He'd gotten used to a lot of things-- bullets zipping by, the thunderous peal of artillery, blood, death. It might appear to an outside observer as bravery, fearlessness, or bravado, but really it was just a profound, soul-deep indifference. This was just his life now. It is what it is.  Soldiers like Nalghen were the other side of the coin in the Allies' manpower shortage. There were the green recruits-- the young or the old, pulled from their schoolbooks or civilian jobs and dropped into combat-- and there were the survivors, run ragged by constant fighting, without rest or respite. A few of the former would eventually harden into the latter. Most of them just died, though. Finally, though, in the last days of the spring of 1942, the 49th division was pulled off the line; everyone piled onto a troop transport-- a former ocean-liner repainted spartan military grey, with most of its elegant interior fittings stripped out-- and sailed for Haida Gwaii. After so much time spent amidst the disintegrating Allied pickets in Korea or posted up in some Shanghai suburb getting the hell shelled out of it, the sheer normalcy of the city felt deeply, deeply weird. Blue skies, birdsong, the sound of wind whipping through pine trees-- the low drone of traffic, the murmur of voices, the sound of footsteps out of rhythm with one another, the laughter of children. In spite of everything, somewhere, somehow, a sort of life continued.  He tried not to get used to it. He knew this was but a brief interval. At best, it was just enough time to catch his breath. Soon, the division would set out again-- for the Iranian Republic, this time, where the rest of General Kim's Fifth Army was already engaged.  The quiet joys of a city at peace were for the living; he already numbered himself among the dead, mourned it, made peace with it. No sense picking at that scab. It'd just make things worse. Wouldn't it?  3. Sanjukta Mohapatra: War on the Roof of the World Hindustan, in many ways, was better off than the other Allies. Sure, much of the fighting was right along their northern border, but that northern border wove through mountains so remote and forbidding that, to your person-on-the-street back in Bhubaneswar or Dhaka or Kolkata, the war might as well be on the moon. Probably more important to the proverbial person-on-the-street was that Hindustan wasn't suffering the severe shortage of manpower the other major Allied powers were. There was a limited program of conscription-- but that was more than enough to keep armies in the field and replenish losses.  At first, this was cold comfort to Sanjukta Mohapatra-- however "limited" conscription might be, she still got drafted. It was a little more complicated than that, though. Sure, she'd much prefer to be back home in Orissa, getting on with her life-- she'd had a good job as a typist at a big company in Cuttack and finally dumped her cheating shitbag of a boyfriend and made a new start of things-- but the fact that the Hindustani government wasn't absolutely desperate for more soldiers still made her life better in any number of ways. Ways that balanced out the fact Hindustani factories, while not insignificant, didn't produce anything like the glut of excess materiel like the Japanese or the Haida.  So she had a bolt-action rifle-- like the rest of her platoon, she'd been issued an old Haida M09 of essentially the same design they'd used in the First Great War-- and, for all she knew, had been sitting forgotten in some supply depot since the Treaty of Jaragua was signed. But the drat thing worked, and anyway having a slightly less fancy rifle than the C-4 submachineguns current Haida soldiers were toting around was an acceptable trade-off for things like still having leave alotted, the peace of mind that comes from one's nation not resorting to the use of child soldiers, or actually being rotated between the frontlines and rear areas on some sort of regular schedule.  There were two problems: one, war is inherently miserable, terrible, and dangerous, but that went without saying. The other is where that war was being fought: In the loving Himalayan Mountains. Sanjukta literally can't think of a worse place to fight a war. She can just imagine some war minister drawing up a grand plan for a pincer attack on Ming-held Gangtok-- one arrow pointing out of Punakha and one branching off the railhead at Kishanganjo, throwing in a supporting attack from Nepal just for good measure-- and been satisfied with the elegant simplicity of the maneuver, in serene ignorance of the fact that that the axes of attack went right through Kangchenjunga loving Himal. What next? A western thrust from Karakoram? A counter-offensive up the slopes of Sagarmāthā?  This then, was the tempo of Sanjukta's life: A week freezing her rear end off and getting shot at in the most adverse conditions imaginable on the frontlines, a week freezing her rear end off but getting shot at less often in slightly less adverse conditions guarding some mountain pass or serpentine road, and then a week where her unit is sent back to the rear echelon, notionally garrisoning some village but mostly just getting belligerently drunk, listening to the same three records over and over again, and telling one another scarcely credible stories of their personal exploits-- military, athletic, romantic, sexual, or otherwise. Then, back to the frontlines-- goodbye frying pan; hello fire. She knew that-- purely by the numbers-- there were much worse places to be. Soldiers out here were more likely to become casualties from frostbite or hypothermia than enemy action-- unpleasant, but considerably more recoverable than, say, getting mulched by an artillery barrage, getting your head blown off by a sniper, run down by a landship, reduced to fine red mist by Ming close air support, or any of the various other hazards of modern warfare. Still, that doesn't mean she has to like it. It's cold, it's miserable, she felt constantly short of breath, and after a while the stark beauty of the world's loftiest peaks stops really registering. She hates it. She wants to go home. She wants to see her mom and dad. She wants to go back to a time when the worst problems she faced were the annoyances of everyday life: the train's too crowded, the comma key on her typewriter keeps getting stuck, her ex-boyfriend refuses to come by and get all of his poo poo out of her apartment. The problem with battlefields so far away from home that they might as well be on the moon, it turned out, is that when you're a soldier, you might as well be on the moon, too. The lights of Cuttack felt as far away as the stars above-- no, further, even: in these cold, clear skies, the stars are brighter and sharper than they were anywhere else Sanjukta had been in her whole life. Home, by contrast, was just a fading memory-- a half-remembered dream-- something that happened to someone else, someone other than whoever this war was carving Sanjukta into.   THE WORLD PROSPERITY ORGANIZATION 1. Lam Hin-chi: We're Here Because They're Here Even with Fujian occupied, even with the Yangtze Delta a battleground, even with all its ports blockaded, there was no greater industrial power in the world than the Ming Empire. More than Japan or the Haida, with their sacrosanct factories and unassailible sea lanes. More than the French, with their total war, with their absolute dedication to that bleak futurist vision of magnificent engines of war reaping harvests of death. More, even, than Byzantium or Ayiti or Ghana, with their clock-work perfect central planning and grand visions of a worker's utopia. Great Ming, as ever, was the center of the world, the beating heart of commerce, around which all else orbited, unable to escape the irresistable force of its gravity.  The problem was this: as great as the empire's capacity for production was, the challenge of the Jimao War was greater still.  If the frontlines of the Imperial War spanned a subcontinent, those of the Jimao War girdled the world. From Siberia to Silla to Shanghai to Fujian, then west to Tibet, Nepal, and Hindustan, then northwest to the rugged frontiers separating Iran from Transoxiana, and then down the length of Africa, from Tripoli to the Cape of Good Hope. The patricians of Somalia claimed responsibility for Africa-- the Ming were left to man the rest of it with what was probably the single largest military force in history. No wonder the home front's war machine was beginning to shudder and strain under pressure like that. The opening of the Jimao War was as well-marketed as any corporate product launch. Here's the new '38 SPHI luxury coupe, here's the new '39 Great War. The transition from one to the other was nearly that abrupt, too. While the newspapers vaguely mentioned upcoming naval exercises off the coast of Japan or communists in Zhongnan getting uppity, the entire Kowloon Electric Appliances Company, from executives in their gilded boardrooms to factory line-workers like Lam Hin-chi was utterly absorbed in the herculean effort to design, manufacture, and market a new model of wireless radio set. The timetable of this was punishing-- the board wanted the radios on store shelves by the time the New Year holidays rolled around in February, which meant unforgiving deadlines for advertising copy-writers and packaging designers and the like, and weeks of mandatory overtime for Hin-chi and his co-workers. Any complications further ratcheted up the pressure-- it turned out that that business with the Zhongnan communists meant the Zhongnan Peninsula Company wasn't meeting its rubber production quotas, so for days the lines sat idle, partially-assembled radios piling up until an alternative exporter-- a worker's co-operative in Congo, of all places-- was found. For months, Hin-chi lived, breathed, and dreamed of radios. Whenever he closed his eyes-- on the bus, trying to sleep in his cramped little apartment, taking his fifteen minute lunch break-- he could see vacuum tubes and wires and aerials passing by. Just as that effort was finally winding down, the campaign to promote the war was spinning up. All those radios that had just rolled off the production line were now sqwuaking about weak-willed liberals being undermined by socialist infiltrators, about saving the world from a stagnant future without innovation or competition, a future of fascist obscurantism or the enforced mediocrity of the Reds. More than that, though, there was an appeal right to the people of the empire's pocket-books: at higher levels, corporations all wrestled one another for lucractive military contracts. At lower levels, myths were spun-- invest in the war now, and it will be paid back a thousandfold with unimaginable prosperity-- with all of the Ming's rivals swept out of the Pacific, the spoils of a great world-empire would be theirs. It was hard not to believe this when everyone and everything seemed to be underlining it. Production quotas were joined by new quotas: quotas for employees willing to accept wages in war bonds, quotas for non-essential employees to patriotically enlist in the army. Management drew up a list of workers they thought should volunteer, Hin-chi's name was on that list, so 'volunteer' he did.  By 1942, it was clear that none of those promises would materialize anytime soon. The war was an exhausting grind of attrition and minute adjustments of battle-lines. The situation (in Asia, at least-- apparently the Somalians were enjoying great success in Africa) was at a stalemate-- but it was a stalemate that disadvantaged the Ming-- half their gains in Silla lost, great swathes of metropolitan China occupied by the enemy, unable to advance but also unable to be dislodged.  By the time Zhang Zhulin had been ignominously chased all the way to Guangzhou, the realization among those patriots ordered to volunteer, the sentiment that the Chinese people had been sold a bill of goods had pretty well sunk in.  More than half of the division was still using old bolt-action rifles-- however many Si-Ji-Shou-41 SMGs were being cranked out by whatever arms company had low-bidded that particular government contract, it wasn't enough for an army fighting across the whole of the Eurasian landmass. Their artillery batteries had almost enough guns for a full complement, but only because they'd padded out the numbers by digging up surplus from the 1905 war with the Byzantines. The gun that the anti-landship support company had, on the other hand, was state-of-the-art: the problem was that there was just the one gun, singular.  Yet-- somehow-- their conviction never wavered. Whatever larger ideological factors had led to this-- whatever grand strategy of empire-building and economic supremacy was playing out-- the simple fact of the matter was that for the first time since Emperor Shun of Yuan was driven into the north, the mainland of China was occupied by foreign troops. Wars fought in the empire's outlying territories, its far-flug outposts, its clients and tributaries-- well, those were practically routine. This was something different. Hin-chi didn't give a poo poo about Pangalism, or unfettered free enterprise, or Zhang Zhulin. He was pretty convinced that the fact this stupid war happened at all was the result of Zhang's short-sighted vanity. What he did give a poo poo about was the thought of Japanese soldiers marching down the streets of Fuzhou, of Haida flags flying over the Bund, of troop transports full of North Germans slowly steaming towards the coast. He gave a poo poo about loyal subjects of the empress-- citizens of a great empire-- becoming prisoners in their own homes, living under occupation, subject to the caprices of Allied military rule.  He suspected that a lot of his comrades-- a lot of the other millions of men and women under arms in the largest military force in human history-- felt much the same. This was, above all else, a war for China. So the question that had faced so many other soldiers stuck in interminable wars started under dubious pretenses-- What are we even doing here?-- had a simple answer: We're here because they're here.  2. Liu Zihua: Smile for the Cameras There was one sort of soldier who did give a poo poo about Zhang Zhulin: the sort who was getting their paychecks from the man himself, the private security forces of Shanghai-Pudong Heavy Industries.  The overwhelming-- overwhelming-- majority of Ming ground forces in the Jimao War were Imperial Army regulars-- but they were by no means alone. Dozens-- hundreds, even-- of private military contractors, corporate security details, mercenary companies, and other such shining examples of wartime free enterprise fought alongside them, under a bewildering variety of standards and banners more akin to the feudal levies of the War of the Hungarian League than 20th century warfare.  By sheer numbers, the largest of these corporate militaries was the Wàibǎo Services Group, a Beijing-based security firm whose chief executive had gotten in on the ground floor of the Business Plot, and was rewarded with the contract to provide military policing services to the entire Ming Imperial Army. Lucrative as this was, though, these corporate gendarmeries most served in thoroughly unglamorous rear echelon duties-- directing traffic, guarding stockades, dragging straggling regulars back to their units, and the like. The most visible, front-and-center, and therefore famous of the private military forces, on the other hand, was the SPHI Private Security Forces, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Shanghai-Pudong Heavy Industries and therefore answerable only to Zhang Zhulin himself. From humble beginnings as factory guards and strikebreakers, the SPSF expanded, and expanded again, and again, until by the summer of 1942, they fielded no less than four division-sized elements. Still a drop in the bucket compared to the regular army, of course, but still not insubstantial. Even beyond their numbers, though, they wielded an outsized influence-- they were the stars of propaganda films, they were on magazine covers, they were on posters hawking war bonds, carefully edited depictions of their exploits led all the newsreels. Despite making up the tiniest fraction of the soldiers of the empire, they were the face of the Jimao War. They didn't have any problems getting all the modern artillery and small arms they needed. But more than that, their equipment was carefully devised to tell a story: with their automatic weapons and flak vests, with their goggles and kneepads and distinctive helmets, with their distinctive urban camouflage and streamlined corporate insignia, they offered a vision of The Soldier of the Future(tm). If the Haida or Japanese were piling the best equipment the 1940s had to offer onto their soldiers, the SPSF would gaze still further ahead, into a shining, prosperous future.  This, naturally, meant that basically everyone else in the military loving hated these guys. They got the best equipment, all the glory, all the credit, when-- when you got right down to it-- they weren't actually any more effective than regular soldiers. Early on in the war, Liu Zihua didn't really care, though. The way it was explained to her in basic training (for SPSF basic training included nearly as much media training as it did actual soldiering) was that their goal was to sell the war to the press and to civilians, not the military, who were already sufficiently invested in the war effort. She excelled at this-- she was photogenic, smiling for the cameras, affecting a heroic self-confidence without crossing the line into an unappealing arrogance. She tested well with all the focus groups, and before long she was marching in the front row of every parade, she was filmed performing carefully rehearsed military manuevers to show the world what The Soldier of the Future(tm) looked like-- for a while, she was even the poster girl of a war bonds drive. Life was good. The war was-- dare she say-- fun. There was a bit of combat, sure-- chasing the Allies out of Shanghai after their raids a couple of times-- but she'd liked swooping in and playing the part of the avenging heroine, freeing the good citizens of the world's greatest city from their cowardly and despicable enemies. Then came the Third Battle of Shanghai-- the Allied attempt to occupy the city that finally actually took. Images were everything to the SPSF, and the images coming out of Shanghai-- SPSF officers surrendering without firing a shot even as the imperial regulars waged a desperate rearguard action to force the Allies to bleed for every city block, every building, every room; bemused Haida soldiers wandering through the lobby of Shanghai-Pudong Heavy Industries' corporate headquarters; Zhang Zhulin's limousine repainted as a Japanese staff car-- was enough to destroy whatever prestige they'd got. It wasn't quite Fall of Taijing, Trung Cam Lynh-Sitting-In-Cao-Liuxan's-Chair bad, but it was still a public relations nightmare. The Shanghai-Pudong Heavy Industries Private Security Force had one job, the thinking went, and now they've gone and absolutely hosed it. The SPSF divisons were attached to field armies of the regular army to take part in combined operations. Shanghai Section 1-- Zihua's unit-- was attached to the Third Army of Army Group Yangtze Delta, under General Cai Wenli, and found itself repeatedly sent against the Allied lines along with everyone else. Henceforth, the SPSF's main duty would be actually soldiering. The dream was dead. Still, all that media-training was hard for Zihua to forget. Even if the regular army resented her, even if the public that once adored her considered her a laughing-stock, even if her presence on the battlefield was met with sighs and groans, she couldn't help but play the part she'd been trained to play. Smile for the camera, Zihua. You never know who might be watching.  3. Sakariye Waare: The Wind is at Our Backs What do the Japanese Republic, the Haida, Silla, the Ming Empire, Asitelahan, the United Pacific Republic, Karatgurk, and Hindustan have in common? Stalemate. Offensives with tens of thousands of casualties barely moving frontlines an inch. Months spent sitting outside cities occupied by the enemy, getting shelled the whole time. Civil society starting to crack under almost exactly three years of sustained wartime pressure. All in all, the sort of war that, in twenty or thirty years' time or so, will lead to a lot of financially unsucessful but critically acclaimed movies or novels about the futility and waste of war. Things were different in the African theater. For the Somalian Republic, things were-- all-in-all-- going quite well. And for the enemies of the Somalian Republic, things were really not going very well at all.  The initial timetables for Somalia's northern offensive were, perhaps, a bit over-ambitious-- the Pacific-based Allies were more committed to the defense of al-Said than predicted, but although progress was slow, it was steady, until Tripoli was taken and the entire Allied effort in the region disintegrated. The delays got some bad press, and caused a bit of grumbling on the homefront, but the inescaple laws of logistics and supply lines meant that al-Said was doomed the moment the Suez Canal was blocked to Allied shipping. Somalia's domestic industry was more than sufficient to keep an army supplied and fighting-fit for longer than anticipated, after all.  And with al-Said out of the picture, the Republic could turn its full attention to the defeat of Great Zimbabwe.  When Sakariye Waare was conscript into the army, he'd regarded the promises that he was in for a grand adventure with the appropriate level of suspicion. If it was really such a grand adventure, he thought, the patricians wouldn't need to, you know, conscript. The optics of conscription were-- frankly-- terrible for the patricians. The whole rhetorical justification for their return to power is that-- unlike the Lord Protector (or those acting in his name)-- they would respect 'the ancient rights of the citizen', or whatever. Turns out that-- like everything else every government in human history has said-- was just so much window-dressing.  But it was, in fact, an adventure. A grueling, terrifying, sometimes gruesome and often unpleasant adventure, but an adventure nonetheless. Until the war, he'd spent his entire life in the Greater Mogadishu area-- he grew up there, he went to school there, he got a job as a clerk for one of the great merchant houses there-- and then, suddenly, he was traveling the length and breadth of Africa, constantly seeing and doing things he'd never even conceived of. Even the trip to the front back in '39 had a dash of excitement-- when the Allies threw in their lot with al-Said, the Somalian military had to race to shore up its frontlines before the Haida or Japanese could arrive in force. So he found himself in a plane, being airlifted up the Nile River and into the Libyan desert, and discovered a whole new way to see the world.  The ground war was less picturesque, but it was still a nearly un-broken string of victories that took him and the 55th division all the way to the gates of Tripoli. It was an aggressive, up-tempo campaign-- his was an army with constant forward momentum. When he made contact with the enemy, he felt an almost-giddy sort of thrill, too high on adrenalin to even really be scared. God help him, but he seemed well-suited for war. It was a disquieting thought-- he knew, intellectually, that war was one of the world's great evils, that soldiering was a solemn obligation and not a game. In the quiet moments-- in the lulls between battles, in the stillness between continent-spanning redeployments, in sleepless nights-- it all weighed on him: the lives he took, the comrades he lost, how much time he spent on the absolute knife's edge of death. But all these reservations sloughed away once the bullets started flying. The thunder of artillery, the low growl of landships, the drone of planes overhead... somehow, in the midst of this, he felt alive.  Sakariye couldn't even begin to guess when the war might be over. Certainly, there seemed to be a light at the end of tunnel absent in other theaters of the Jimao War-- once the rotten edifice of imperial Zimbabwe was finally knocked over, the Somalian Republic would basically have the whole continent of Africa stitched up. Well, besides Ghana, but at the moment the Ghanaians had much bigger things to worry about than Somalian expansion. His comrades-- his friends-- his brothers and sisters-in-arms-- longed for the end of the war. They wanted, more than anything else, to just go home. To them, the war was a nightmare they wanted nothing more than to awaken from. Sakariye wasn't so sure. The war, slowly but surely, was turning him into someone different than the man he was when he first put on a uniform and left Mogadishu behind. Could he really just... go back? Sit at his desk and fill out ledgers like he hadn't fought his way from the halls of Great Zimbabwe to the shores of Tripoli? Pretend like he hadn't seen the Great Pyramids from the sky, pretend that he'd never braved the searing expanse of Great Sand Sea? Could he pretend he hadn't seen so many die? Could he pretend he hadn't killed? If his suspicion was true, if he really was suited for war... what would become of him in the peace? He did his best not to think about any of that. For now, the war raged on, and the wind was at his back. 
Empress Theonora fucked around with this message at 07:41 on Nov 8, 2023 |
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Nov 8, 2023 03:41
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I went back and forth on whether to render it as “Orissa” or “Odisha” here, honestly, but I wound up going with the former for consistency’s sake, since that’s how it was in EU4, since, yeah, that’s what Paradox games call it. Back in the days of the Indian League, Marathas and Orissa/Odisha were the two big players, with Orissa being the ones to eventually form the Hindustan tag, while Marathas had to settle for being Marathas, But Big.
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Nov 8, 2023 15:41
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To be fair, there was a pretty long hiatus between V2 and HoI4.
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Nov 9, 2023 19:30
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