Alternate History Thread III

Meanwhile, the Second Balkan War took place, in 1914. Long story cut short, soon after the Treaty of Edirne Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijevic and his supporters formed the Serbian ultranationalist "Black Hand" organization, which exercized great influence over the weak, ailing King Petar I. Spreading an expansionist, nationalist agenda at home, Dragutin Dimitrijevic's agents also worked hard in Serbian-populated Austrian, Albanian and Bulgarian territories, destabilizing the area and inciting rebellions, and also organizing terrorist acts, like the 1913 attempt on the life of Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand. Though that one was unsuccesful, the Serbs did manage to get away with several other acts and even organized a minor, but annoying rebellion in Herzegovina. However, one could only push his luck this far; when the Black Hand attempted to incite a rebellion in western Bulgarian lands, the Bulgarians caught some of their agents in the act and finally attained evidence of Serbian involvement in the recent destabilizing activities in Bulgaria. Ferdinand I secretly contacted the Austro-Hungarians and the Albanians, working to organize an anti-Serbian coalition. Bulgaria then presented an ultimatum to the Serbian government, demanding, among other things, that the Black Hand be disbanded and its leaders be brought to justice. Dragutin Dimitrijevic managed to overthrow the conciliatory Prime Minister Nikola Pasic who had intended to turn him over in order to avoid a war; now that the hated terrorist leader was in power, Bulgaria felt that nothing held it back and made its moves, invading Serbian Macedonia. However, this provoked a Montenegrin declaration of war on Bulgaria, King Nikola I being a fanatical Serbophile. This inspired Dragutic Dimitrijevic to contact Greece and Romania; though both weren't fond of Dimitrijevic, they were even less fond of Ferdinand I, and feared what might happen is Bulgaria were to defeat Serbia. Greece nonetheless remained neutral at first, quite wisely, while Romania declared war on Bulgaria and attacked across the Danube, distracting the Bulgarians. At this point, however, Albania and Austria-Hungary both jumped into the war on the Bulgarian side, while the Russian government wanted to hear nothing of Dragutin Dimitrijevic, having, after much heartsearching, decided to reconcile with Bulgaria instead of needlessly antagonizing Austria-Hungary by supporting Serbia; though Russia remained neutral in the war itself, calling for peace and reconciliation, it were the Russians that "persuaded" Romania to back out of the war as well. As Serbia crumbled, Belgrade itself having been besieged by Austro-Hungarians, Dragutin Dimitrijevic was betrayed and assassinated by one of his past retainers; Belgrade soon surrendered and Serbia collapsed, Montenegro still fought on but was soon overwhelmed as well. In the eventual peace conference in Sarajevo, it was decided that Serbia should be partitioned (that was going a bit too far for the Russian government, but only a bit so it didn't really interfere in this); however, the Hungarian parliament, fearing that with the annexation of parts of Serbia the South Slavs would get too numerous and their influence would increase accordingly, and so limited Austrian territorial gains to Novi Pazar and pre-1910 Montenegro (Albania got back the lands it lost to the Montenegrins by the Treaty of Edirne), though in the rump surviving Serbia (in the 1877 borders) an Austrian puppet regime was imposed, complete with the restoration of the Obrenovices under the last king's illegitimate offspring, Prince George. Lastly, Nish and all of Serbian Macedonia went to Bulgaria as well, which, as was long feared, increasingly became all too strong for Greece to potentially cope with it. The Greeks were scared enough to reconcile with the Ottomans, if temporarily, signing a defensive alliance with them.

In the greater colonial world, this was a time of further acquisition and conquest. While the Germans were preoccupied with their work in China, France and Spain finished off Morocco, Spain getting the Rif mountains and surrounding area, and the rest, obviously, becoming a French protectorate. Meanwhile, Italy worked hard to strenghthen its colonial empire, not only crushing native resistance and expanding inlands in Libya, but also getting a revanche against Abyssinia. The new Prime Minister, Antonio Salandra, was generally more imperialistic than his predecessor Giovanni Giolotti. Much to the annoyance of London and Paris, he played the usual Italian card, that of promising future assistance in spite of Italy's present diplomatic alignment in exchange for getting a free hand here or there; this time the Italians wanted a free hand in Abyssinia, in 1916, just as that country entered its civil war between the legal, but insane (or at least eccentric) and (allegedly) Muslim (but definitely and vociferously anti-Christian) Emperor Iyasu V and his devotedly-Christian aunt Zauditu. While Iyasu V was away in Harer, the Ethiopian Orthodox Church had him excommunicated and the conservative nobility declared him deposed and replaced by Empress Zauditu. Though the core Ethiopian population was definitely on Zauditu's side, the more barbaric Gallas and Wollos, and generally the Ethiopian Muslims were supportive of Iyasu V; from amongst them, he and his allies raised an army, but it was decisively defeated at Segale to the north from Addis Abeba, and Iyasu V was virtually defeated; however, at this point the Italians interferred in the civil war on his side, despite not having even contacted him before, and, cooperating with Ogaden's Muslims, quickly overran the eastern half of Abyssinia. After attacking from Eritrea and defeating the Ethiopian army at Mek'ele, the Italian commander, Pietro Badoglio, ran into Iyasu V, who was hiding near the Eritrean border ever since Segale. After some difficult negotiations, he agreed to accept an Italian protectorate in exchange for the Italian support for his recovery of the throne. As of early 1917, the Italians and their allies were in control of Ogaden and northernmost Abyssinia, but elsewhere, in the Ethiopian Plateau, the Ethiopians were recovering from the initial shock and preparing for a defensive war.

As Russia grew ever more assertive, imperialistic and expansionist since its conquest of Manchuria, it renewed the Great Game by intervenning in Persia, where the Qajars, whom the Russians had finally won over to their side, were forced by local nationalists to grant more power to the Persian parliament (Majles). In 1907, Mohammad Ali Shah ascended to power and immediately begun to work to eliminate the liberal Persian constitution and its supporters; his plans were sped up by the 1908 attempt on his life. After that he invited more Russian troops into the country, and in June begun his crackdown, first inviting and arresting most of the Constitutionalist leaders in his gardens, and then dismissing (and partially arresting) the Majles themselves. By this moment the Qajars were unpopular enough and the social tensions got far enough for a general rebellion - the Constitutionalist Revolution - to commence, with violent riots in the key southern cities of Persia resulting in the collapse of the Shah's authority there. Riots also occured in the north, but there, they were put down by Russian forces, except in the province of Gilan where it took several months of counter-insurgency operations to finally defeat Mirza Kuchak Khan's Constitutionalists. Although the north was more-or-less secure, in the southwest the Bakhtyari tribe leaders now moved to the forefront of the Constitutionalist movement and were only barely stopped in 1909 in the Battle at Qom. By this point, however, the British - who at first also supported the Shah against the nationalist Constitutionalists that worked against both the Russians and the British - begun to grow alarmed about the extent of Russian military presence. Striking a deal with the more moderate and/or Anglophilic of the southern Persian leaders, the British invaded southern Persia in 1911 under the pretext of assisting the Shah but with the secondary goal of preventing the Russians from reaching the Persian Gulf. Long story cut short (I hate using that expression, but have no better ones), the Russians occupied the north, the British occupied the south, and both sides demanded that the other withdraw, whilst hunting for the Constitutionalist rebels that retreated into the mountains and completely ignoring the Shah who now became a Russian puppet. Though withdrawal from Persia was delayed continuosly under the pretext of having to hunt down the surviving rebels, both sides now increasingly begun to skirmish with each other as the tensions grew.

And lastly, as China's civil war continued, the various nearby great powers raced to secure their spheres of influence. Though no de jure annexations were made - apart from the announcement of Russian protectorates over Sinkiang and Outer Mongolia, and, to counter that, the British military protectorate over Tibet - de facto as the Imperial authority was shaken or collapsed and the Republican one had hard time being established properly, and as, in anticipation of the conflict spiralling out of control, the Great Powers deployed more troops to China, authority passed to them in some of their influence zones. Germany, for instance, set up control over Shantung, all but annexing it directly after a failed rebellion there. Britain secured regions around Canton and Hong Kong, and also deployed troops to defend Shanghai, though unlike in the Guangdong province it set up no protectorates, formal or informal, over there, as to avoid antagonizing the American businessmen (who had an ever stronger control over their nation's policies). French troops frequented southern Yunnan, carefully avoiding actually clashing with the Republicans there, and set up an informal protectorate over the Guangxi Jang province. Even Japan which, though still liberal, had largely gotten over its initial bout of idealism and altruism and deployed forces to occupy the Fujian province, ostensibly to help defend China. However, the Republicans were led to understand that all these measures were merely temporary, and couldn't really have done anything about it if they weren't (except perhaps just surrender to the Qing). As for Yuan Shikei, he knew that these were no temporary measures, but also knew that he should do things one at the time. First internal pacification, then external aggression...

Things were clearly moving towards a bigger war. Already, tariff wars between Britain and Germany intensified, as did the naval arms races, Germany having recently renewed its naval buildup. Patrols frequently exchanged shots and even skirmished with each other on the Franco-German, Graeco-Bulgarian and Russo-Turkish borders. Every week some spy was caught or some conspiracy was revealed. While the German companies mostly expelled the French ones from Russia, the French grew ever more influential in the Ottoman Empire, displacing the Germans there. Irredentist riots struck Italy. And all over the greater colonial world, border clashes grew very frequent, as did accidents at sea, and ofcourse both sides worked to underhandedly sabotage the other's colonial empire by inciting natives to rebel (and as these did occasionally rebel, the paranoia that sat in on both sides seemed even more well-founded). Russian and British troops were only waiting for the other to make the first move in Persia, the tensions and mutual suspicion having built up for both armies by now. And China? China was the polygon of great powers, where, acting through whatever side happened to be more friendly, new weapons and tactics were tried out, and the valuable experiences were absorbed, at least, when there was actualy some fighting.

Already in 1916, some begun to claim that an undeclared global war was going on. In 1917, the declaration was sent and received, and a real war begun - spreading from a comparatively small theatre of war in East Asia to eventually put aflame if not the entire globe, then at least the entire Eastern Hemisphere, with battlefields from Lorraine to the Yangtze, from Arkhangelsk to Dar-as-Salaam.
 
Damn it, Reno, silver, one of you should change his avatar! Stop confusing me! :p
 
The Entente's policies prior to 1917 were a cause of much confusion and misunderstandment amongst the contemporaries, and frustration for the patriotic anti-German circles in all the three member countries. While in the last few pre-war years the military build-up was unceasing, and extra efforts were made to keep in the arms race (though many of the Entente's greatest technological achievements were to remain secret until a year or so into the war), many politicians complained that not enough was being done. Why were German troops allowed to go unpunished? Why was Serbia abandoned to its fate? Why was nothing done agianst the Russian forces in Persia? And, ofcourse, the greatest question of the day - why was virtually nothing done about China?! Why were Russo-German forces and lackeys allowed to roam free there, why wasn't diplomatic pressure put on the Germans, why was Sun Yat-sen abandoned to his fate, why was no intervention undertaken to, at least, bring the two parties to the peace table (as the war greatly hampered the Entente economical infiltration of Chinese inlands)? Notably, pretty much all the politicians that complained about this "weak line" in foreign politics were more or less irrelevant and away from important decisions, such as the decision, in late 1916, after a lenghty secret correspondence and negotiation, for a war to begin in 1917. Great military minds - most importantly the British Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill, the French Commander-in-Chief Ferdinand Foch and the Japanese Minister of the Navy Togo Heihachiro had prepared a plan for several attacks against Germany and Russia all over the Eastern Hemisphere. Plans were made for the capture of German colonies; Britain prepared for a North Sea Campaign, to crush the German naval might there and launch amphibious operations against Helgoland and Borkum; the French forces, overloaded with new weapons and elan vitale, were ordered in early 1917 to ready themselves for offensive operations to liberate Lorriane-Alsace, along the lines of Plan XVII; the Italians themselves remained uncommited, but also begun preparing their fleet for action in the Adriatic... just in case. British military advisors helped the Greeks and the Ottomans prepare their defensive positions and provided them with modern machine guns and so forth, while spies begun to work to destabilize Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Russia. The Indian Army moved into positions on the Northwestern Frontier and in Persia, reinforced by better British forces in the preparations for a big push, while a new provisional liberal government was assembled in Bander-e 'Abbas, after grudgingly accepting British hegemony and protection. Entente forces also begun to arrive in large numbers into their temporarily-occupied territories in southern China, in preparation for their second move. As for the first move, the Japanese fleet and the best of Japan's new amphibious assault force prepared to strike, just after, on the March 17th of 1917, the Gwangmu Emperor in Korea was found dead in his bed, and his son, the Yungheui Emperor, was forced by Japanese agents and their conspiring allies in Korea to request Japanese intervention to help restore order as a republican insurrection begun in parts of the country. Japan moved accordingly; despite not having many allies in Korea, and despite being opposed the country's modernized military, the Japanese attained the surprise effect necessary to quickly occupy the coastal urban regions, though resistance in the countryside continued. Before the Russians could protest, the Japanese already protested the Russo-German involvement in China and issued an ultimatum demanding that they cease their intervention. When the ultimatum was harshly rebuked, phase two of the Japanese plan was activated...

In the meantime, the diplomatic situation quickly unfolded into chaos. Japan declared war on Russia and Germany, Austria-Hungary declared war on Japan, the Chinese Republic joined the Entente and declared war on Austria-Hungary, France and Great Britain declared war on Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Qing Empire (Japan soon also declared war on the Qing Empire), and Italy pledged neutrality even as it continued war preparations. Also, the Entente declared war on Persia's Tehran government, while the Dreikaiserbund, after failing to sway Afghanistan over to its side (due to the more effective British "persuasion"), declared war on it as on a British puppet. Lastly, the British tried to sway Portugal over to its side in the war, hoping for Portuguese assistance in Africa, but Portugal was undergoing violent internicine strife after a failed military coup d'etat, and the Germanophilic factions in its diplomat corps, led by Sidonia Pais, had leaned on President Afonso Costa in favour of intervention on the German side, or at least neutrality; not daring disturb the fragile, breaking stability at home any further, Costa pledged neutrality. Thus ended the first flurry of war declarations; thus begun the war.

Almost immediately, the battle was joined; in the North Sea, in Lorraine-Alsace, in Germany's African colonies, in Persia, in Afghanistan, in Korea, Manchuria and, ofcourse, China, the forces of the Entente and the Dreikaiserbund clashed, in an epic war like none seen before, greater than even those of Napoleon. Although already by the 20th of March, all of those theatres already saw one or another degree of bloodshed, it is best to begin where it all, well, begun. The Japanese, commanded by General Terauchi Masatake and Admiral Yamamoto Gonnohyoe, quickly and ruthlessly crushed Korean resistance, forced back an initial Russian intervention force that briefly captured Kanggye, and, in a brilliant (if risky) naval attack, crushed the Russo-Germano-Qing Chinese fleets (not that any of them had a strong naval presence here) in a series of engagements in the Yellow Sea and the Bo Hai; the initial amphibious assault on Port Arthur itself was forced back with much loss, but the fortress itself was besieged; though this time it was commanded by Alexander Vasilyevich Samsonov, a much more competent - if unhealthy - commander than Stoessel. After the failure of the initial Russian breakout, however, the Japanese left a smaller force to carry on the siege and the main Japanese forces headed towards Mukden. Attacked both from the southwest and from the southeast (as the Japanese forces in Korea crossed the Yalu River), General Kuropatkin was forced to retreat under pressure, but retaining order; the Japanese captured Mukden and besieged Port Arthur, but their other main goal was left unachieved, the Russian forces in Manchuria were defeated, but neither broken nor routed. Still, by the beginning of the summer the Japanese secured good defensive positions in the slopes of southern Manchuria, tightened the ring of siege around Port Arthur, and, with the assistance of the British garrison at Weihaiwei and in combination with a repulsed diversionary attack on Tianjin, invaded the Shantung Peninsula. The Germans put up a fierce fight there, especially after parts of Falkenhayn's Korps were redeployed there and not only repulsed the Japanese attackers, but also forced the surrender of Weihaiwei, but this, too, was to a certain extent a diversionary attack; while the Qing Chinese and their allies desperately redeployed forces to face the Japanese, in the south, British, French, Japanese and Chinese Republican forces prepared for a big push. It begun in August; over a front over a thousand miles wide, hordes of Republican conscripts, reinforced at crucial points by the professional Republican Army and Entente expeditionary forces went into a berzerk charge (obviously, not over the entire width of the front, but instead at several important, yet comparatively weakly-guarded points), and, despite taking serious casualties, charged and charged, eventually breaking through in most of the cases, overcoming their enemies with sheer numbers. Reserves were quickly deployed to secure gains, while the professional and allied forces spearheaded the subsequent exploitation of the breakthroughs, advancing to prevent the enemy from recovering and secure as much ground as possible. Despite still encountering some heavy resistance at several points, the Entente troops captured Chengdu, Chongqing, Quxian, Yichang, Wuhan, Anqing, Hefei and Bengbu before September, although heavy resistance stopped their advance at Jingmen in the Hubei Province (where a large element of the Beiyang army dug in in the valley of the River Han) and in the Jiangsu Province (where the Germans held steadfastly, despite an Anglo-Japanese amphibious assault, making good use of the Mauser machine guns and heavy artillery recently shipped in across the Germano-Russo-Chinese railroad system). In the autumn, the Dreikaiserbund forces struggled to recover; with the deployment of more Russian and German troops, most notably Erich Ludendorff's "Zweiten China Korps" sent to reinforce von Falkenhayn, and the conscription introduced by Prime Minister Yuan Shikei; though the Russian counterattack in Manchuria was a disastrous failure due to bad logistics and underestimation of enemy preparedness, in Central China the Entente progress was halted; though Sichuan and Chongqing Provinces fell to the Republicans altogether, elsewhere little additional progress was achieved, and in the Hubei Province, the front's central sector, Qing forces counter-attacked with some efficiency, falling in thousands, but retaking Yichang and besieging Wuhan; a German-Qing counterattack in the Anhui province also made some initial gains, but bogged down after a strong Japanese expeditionary corps arrived there. The year ended with the situation still in balance, as the Entente forces advanced considerably, but failed to either push the Russians out of Manchuria or the Qing out of existance.

In the colonies and the world's oceans, the situation was more clearly in the Entente's favour, but frustratingly enough even where the combined Franco-British naval might should have guaranteed quick victories, the Germans managed to fight back. Though most of the German Pacific and African colonies were captured fairly quickly and easily - their garrisons no match for the Entente invasion forces, and morale not particularily high as a result - in German East Africa, all went wrong, as oberst-leutnant Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck rallied a force of German defenders and local African askaris, and humiliatingly routed the British Indian invasion force in May; when the British tried again, in greater force, they did succeed in occupying most of the German East African coast, but it tied down disproportionate forces, and all attempts to finish off Lettow-Vorbeck in the Tanganyikan inlands only resulted in heavy casualties due to terrible attrition and Lettow-Vorbeck's infamous guerrila tactics. The elements of the German fleet caught in the Atlantic, Pacific or Indian Oceans by the war's beginning took the British on several wild goose chases, occasionally - most infamously and humiliatingly, just outside of Madras - scoring local victories over the British pursuers, although the latter too managed on several occassions to eliminate the German raiders. Even then, by the end of the year, several German ships continued their outrageous commerce raiding - this was because the British, as of late 1917, could no longer reasonably afford to commit as many forces as necessary to control all the sea lanes.

And that, in turn, was because Winston Churchill's master plan had failed. Having, against the advice of his more experienced (and, his supporters reasonably claim, conservative and indecisive) opponents, opted to try and finish off the German naval threat with one strong blow, the charismatic young Secretary of War rallied just enough support for the North Sea Campaign to get the green light. The goal of the Campaign was a quick preemptive strike to destroy the German fleet in the North Sea, or at least to corner it in its ports; after that, amphibious operatinos were to be carried out against the islands of Helgoland and Borkum, the former a key German naval base in and of itself, the latter - a gateway to the important sea port of Emden. After that, the rest of the East Frisian Islands could be captured as well, and the German ports completely blocked; certainly that was a tempting objective, though the operation was quite risky. For one thing, unbeknowst to Churchill, von Tirpitz had been preparing for something like that (at least, for the naval parts); accordingly, as soon as the war begun, he sent out mine-layers and U-boats, which Germany had, in partial secrecy, built up in great numbers during the previous few years, as von Tirpitz realized that, the German navy still lagging behind the British one in numbers, needed some sort of an unfair advantage. When Admiral Jellicoe's fleet moved to secure Helgoland, it ran into a minefield (fortunately, only a few ships were lost) and was harrassed by U-boats; finally, Admiral Franz von Hipper challenged the British at Helgoland itself. His surface fleet took a heavy barrage, but replied in kind to the British, and the additional U-boats made things even worse. Despite receiving heavy casualties, Jellicoe also received some timely reinforcements, and made good use of primitive depth charges to defend against the underwater onslaught; eventually, von Hipper had to retreat with his badly-damaged fleet, but the British casualties, for all their ability to absorb them, were even worse; though the succesful amphibious assault of Helgoland partially redeemed Churchill, it was not enough, as Britain's victory was Pyrrhic, and the German fleet - as was shown by its later forrays against the British coastal towns - remained strong. It still was numerically-inferior to the British, having, as mentioned, taken many casualties, but the gap between the two decreased; to make things worse, the rebuilt Russian Baltic fleet soon forced Denmark to - without resorting to either formally joining the Dreikaiserbund or declaring war on the Entente - deny passage and trade to the Entente, and allow all that to the 'Bund; that and the Swedish declaration of neutrality made the Baltic completelysafe for the 'Bund, and so Russo-German naval assets could be moved from there to the more crucial North Sea. Though the later German attempt to recapture Helgoland had failed and a British naval base was set up there, Churchill soon had to resign in shame, though he remained a MP. The war in the North Sea remained undecided, but the British losses shifted the balance in German favour, and as the commerce raiders begun to grow ever more active in the British waters themselves, obviously enough hunting other commerce raiders near la Plata became something of a tertiary objective.

The French offensive into Lorraine-Alsace went little better; the Germans had well-prepared fortified positions, and despite initial French gains, they came with unacceptable casualties. A German counteroffensive soon expelled the French from what territory they did capture; Moltke the Younger urged the Kaiser to use the French attack as an opportunity to launch the Schlieffen Plan, invading Netherlands and Belgium to pocket the French army and capture Paris; however, in the last moment, the Kaiser rejected this plan as too risky; an attack through the Low Countries would have exposed the German flank way too much, and though total victory over France was tempting... the Kaiser knew better than to make the same mistake as Churchill did and mount such a risky, expensive operation (also, the Germans fell for a bit of British disinformation and thought that the British might renew the North Sea Campaign and try to capture the Kiel Canal and perhaps even strike into Flanders if the Germans invade there; though Churchill did entertain such plans, he was laughed out of his post for this and the previous failures; in other words, the Germans, for a variety of reasons, suspected that the French were deliberately trying to trick them into launching the Schlieffen Plan and thus walk into a deadly trap). Thus, German forces sat on the defensive or were dispatched to assist their Russian allies on other theatres; the core of the mobilizing German army was being retained for greater deeds, however. Meanwhile, back in Lorraine-Alsace, the French summer offensive achieved some initial success, even capturing Colmar and Metz, but failed to advance far beyond that; Ferdinand Foch, strangely unperturbed by this debacle, ordered the operations to cease and trenches to be dug in the gained ground; the Trench War begun, the Germans having dug in on their new positions previously, and now both land armies and air forces skirmished in Lorraine-Alsace.

Although good news came from the Middle Eastern Front, where the Russians lost battle after battle to the large British Indian forces, most notably losing Isfahan to the Indians and the Bakhtyaris and launching an utterly bungled invasion of Afghanistan which was met with well-positioned Maxims and artillery at Herat and Mazar-e Sharif, the year 1917 has generally not been a good one for the Entente; to recap, though the Central Powers suffered several defeats, none of them were decisive, much less fatal. Already, some of the former jingoists begun demanding that the clearly-unsuccesful war be aborted before the Entente suffers any serious defeats; however, as already said, Ferdinand Foch was unperturbed. That was, ofcourse, because he had a cunning backup plan. He had expected that the war might prove impossible to win quickly and on the main front, and thus made a far-reaching plan to open a second front and completely jeopardize the Dreikaiserbund's position. Having persuaded the French government to go with this plan, he waited for the rest of the 1917, while the various pieces of his plan fell into position. Quietly, with as little publicity as could be attained under the Third Republic, much of the French fleet was redeployed to the Mediterranean, the British still strong enough to guard the North Sea. Spies and diplomats worked tirelessly, and Italy, having mostly won its Abyssinian campaign, was virtually prepared to act, as were Romania, Greece and the Ottoman Empire. French troops were also gradually redeployed, and were ready to move out. Foch's grand plan called for a knockout blow to the Dreikaiserbund's weakest link, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the conquest of the Balkans; even if this succeeded only partially, its main goal would have been accomplished; Germany would have had to frantically redeploy forces to save its ally (and its own rear), and, before it could recover its balance, a new offensive would have begun in the Vosges. The plan was brilliant and thorough, and it was almost ruined by that dual plague of the Third Republic - the parliamentary system and the free press. The former hindered Foch's plans at first, but wasn't even all that bad; however, there were over 300 people in the French parliament, and inevitably, the top secret plans leaked out; also, the redeployments weren't all that easy to mask. Soon enough, the French press begun hailing Foch as a military genius and boasting of his cunning plan (fortunately, they only knew that it was to be a knockout blow in Austria-Hungary; not all that much information leaked out). Fortunately, the Germans, having by then realized the British disinformation for what it was, merely considered this press campaign an insult to their intelligence (in both meanings of the word) and only in the last few moments, after their spies reported that French soldiers were sighted in northern Italy, actually begun redeploying troops to help the Austrians. Although the leak was limited, Foch was still aghast, and even considered calling off the entire operation; but then again, the Rubicon was probably crossed by now, so after some internal conflict, he decided to go on, but considerably speed up the preparations. Thus, already in February 1918 (as opposed to April) the Mediterranean Campaign commenced, and the Croatian and Tyrolian Fronts were opened.
 
Foch's plan was saved not only by German fear of disinformation, but also - and probably to a greater extent - by the Habsburgs themselves, and also by the force of coincidence, probably at its strongest in that bloody year (see below). For it was precisely in the February of 1918, a few days before the Franco-Italian invasion commencend, that KuK (Kaiser und Konig) Franz Ferdinand I's long struggle with the Hungarian Diet reached a climax. Ever since the death of his uncle, the great KuK Franz Josef, in 1915, the Magyarophobic, tripartist new ruler had been in deadlock with the Diet and his own advisors, who cautioned him against making any rash moves. But that was precisely what he did make in 1917, after King George I of Serbia died - not heirless, perhaps, but as he himself was a bastard Franz Ferdinand "persuaded" his heirs to resign their claims. Serbia, occupied by Austro-Hungary peacekeepers since the Second Balkan War, was annexed directly, despite Hungarian protests; in December 5th 1917, the entire South Slavic portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (except Austrian Carniola/Slovenia and Hungarian Vojvodina) was reformed into the Kingdom of Slavenia, with capital in Sarajevo, and immediately was granted legal equality with Austria and Hungary, the Dual Monarchy having turned into Triple. However, the Hungarian Diet plainly refused to recognize it. After some verbal battles and the mobilization of the Landswehr in Austria and the Honveds in Hungary, in February 1918 the Hungarian Diet, citing the breach of the Ausgleich agreement and the very principle of Dualism, declared the overthrowal of Franz Ferdinand I from the Hungarian throne and the creation of a fully independent Kingdom of Hungary; Count Istvan Tisza, who was Prime Minister before resigning in protest of Franz Ferdinand's policies, was immediately granted the title of Regent and emergency powers; he used them to continue the mobilization and to sign an alliance with the Entente, almost in the same time as Italy. Honveds quickly assaulted all the trains with Austrian and German troops in the Hungarian railroads, killing or capturing everyone inside (though fortunately, not all that many Austrian and German troops were allowed into Hungary in the first place since 1917). Meanwhile, in Croatia, Austrian troops counter-invaded, with the help of rebelling, loyalist Croats. Into this mess, the Franco-Italians charged; in a quick naval action, the Austro-Hungaro-Slavenian fleet was eliminated at Lastovo, and Anglo-French troops hit the beaches along the entire lenght of Dalmatia's coast, while other Franco-Italian forces started an alpine assault on the Austrian positions in Tyrol, assisted by Italian rebels. Meanwhile, Albania, Greece, Romania and the Ottoman Empire also formally joined the Entente and declared war on Bulgaria, attacking it from all directions while a separate, yet distracting rebellion started in Bulgarian Macedonia.

Despite good defensive positions in the Dinaric Alps, Austro-Slavenian forces, preoccupied with fighting the Hungarians, failed to react fast enough; and though in the particularily-mountainous Velebit Planina the Anglo-French forces suffered decimating losses, including their commander Robert-Geroges Nivelle who was sniped by a Croat partisan early in the invasion, in general the campaign started surprising well. Further north, in Tyrol, the Italians have really outdone themselves (admittedly, that was not a terribly difficult task for them); though here, the Austrians were well-prepared and undistracted (except perhaps by the weather conditions that collected their toll from both sides), the Italian alpine troopers, especially the later-infamous Bersaglieri, have outmaneuvered the Austrians, attacking them from the high mountains and allowing a general breakthrough. By March, the Franco-Italian forces had taken not just Trient, but also, not letting the Austrians recover and linking up with forces from Dalmatia, Innsbruck and Laibach, occupying one half of Croatia, and nearly the entire Tyrolia and Carniola. A hastily-organized Austrian counterattack failed disastrously. Meanwhile, in the Balkans, Kemal Mustafa and Ioannis Metaxas, in a famous and utterly fake gesture of reconciliation of Turkey and Greece in the name of the holy goal of killing as many Bulgars as possible, met and shook hands at Plovdiv, the Bulgarians, surprised by the audacity of the attackers, falling back in disarray; meanwhile, one final Italian corps and the newly-formed, ill-disciplinned Albanian army, not facing much opposition, occupied Pristina and the rest of Kosovo, and linked up with Petar Zivkovic's Serbian insurgent army. Yet while the public at home and the lower ranks celebrated the February-April campaign as a great success, anxiety ruled supreme in the Entente governments and staffs, for the Entente's military was yet to confront the main German and Austro-Slavanian forces in the theatre, as they were busy in a different, though near, theatre.

The French weren't the only ones who made secret plans to open new fronts; the Germans (or, more accurately, all the Three Emperors and the Bulgarian Tsar) also had plans for a Balkan campaign. This what the main Russo-German forces were being prepared for - a preemptive attack against Romania, Greece and the Ottoman Empire, to capture the Straits, to secure the Balkans, to eliminate the Entente influence there and to carry the war to the Middle East, where, with luck, the Ottoman Empire could be crushed altogether and forced into the Dreikaiserbund and decisive strikes could be delivered against the British colonial empire - already, the more "far-sighted" German commanders begun making plans for attacks on the Suez Canal, Kuwait and Isfahan, and then - into India and Egypt. After that, the British will have to beg for mercy - or die; and without the British, the Entente would be doomed, doomed, DOOMED (the Kaiser was very excited about this plan)! However, this grandiose plan was suddenly and bluntly crashed by the Hungarian rebellion and the Entente's own moves. Still, the forces prepared for this "blitz" campaign could be employed to thwart the meddling Entente and the mutinous Hungarians; and maybe the grand plan itself could yet be salvaged. In any case, August von Mackensen soon was redeployed by rail into Slovakia with a huge German korps, Aleksey Alekseyevich Brusilov rapidly overran most of Romanian Moldavia and struck into Hungarian rear in Transylvania, and Konrad von Hotzendorf, in command of the Landswehr and the core of Austrian forces, struck out towards Budapest, ruthlessly crushing all Hungarian resistance as he advanced. The sheer size and shock effect of the Dreikaiserbund attackers, not to mention the great leadership and Hotzendorf's anti-Magyar terror that soon intimidated the frightened Hungarian landowners, including many rebel leaders, into submission soon caused the ill-prepared Hungarian army to fall apart completely, several commanders defecting back with nearly intact divisions as soon as wind changed direction. The Romanians, in any case ruled by a German king (Ferdinand I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen), almost immediately switched sides as well, allowing passage of Dreikaiserbund forces in exchange for return of Moldavia (hints about getting parts of Transylvania were, naturally, ignored). After a three-month reign as regent, Istvan Tisza surrendered, but, much to the outcry across the world and scandal back in Vienna, was court-martialled by von Hotzendorf and shot by a firing squad. In the end, after pondering on the issue, Franz Ferdinand I - immediately restored as king of Hungary by the rest of the frightened rebel leadership - approved; after all, Tisza was only a Magyar, and a troublesome one at that. To appease his opponents, von Hotzendorf was, with this incident as pretext, discharged as head of General Staff, and appointed the military governor-general of Hungary; as such, he intensified the terror, broke all resistance, threw (during his entire tenure) hundreds of thousands of Magyars into concentration camps (based on the British model), and conscripted an equal number, throwing them all at French trenches at the threat of death should they try to defect, flee or even stop charging. In any case, this made it explicitly clear that Dualism was dead.

In March 1918, as more German and Austro-Slavenian forces were deployed to Croatia, Carniola, Styria and even Bavaria to halt the Entente advance, Mackensen, Brusilov and the Bulgarians carried out offensive operations farther south in the Balkans. After the Bulgarian government negotiated a truce and an alliance with the IMRO, and the Macedonians, bought by promises of autonomy, switched sides, the Greek supply routes suddenly collapsed, and Metaxas' army was soon destroyed at Pazardzhik; Mackensen, in a brilliant campaign of maneuver, secured the eastern Maritsa River valley, had Brusilov's Russians tie down Kemal Mustafa at Plovdiv, and captured the nearly-undefended Edirne; meanwhile, Admiral Kolchak and the Russian Black Sea Fleet destroyed much of the Ottoman one at the Bosporus, and landed soldiers to capture the key town of Sariyer. Though the initial Russian assault on Constantninople was repulsed, Mackensen's Sturmtruppe succesfully broke through the heavily-defended perimeter, caused random chaos beyond it and, followed up by the bulk of German troops, seized the seemingly-impregnable Ottoman capital, capturing most of the Turkish government, but for Djemal Pasha who was officially in charge of the Ottoman forces retreating in West Armenia, but de facto, as soon as the Russian onslaught begun and on the other front Edirne fell, sat in Ankara and organized a "shadow cabinet". This cabinet now came to power and requested Entente assistance; however, its takeover wasn't nearly as well-executed as could be hoped; Armenia and the Arab territories were up in flames, while Kemal Mustafa surrendered in early May with the Ottoman Empire's best (if surrounded and written off in any case) army at Plovdiv. The Russian forces in Armenia, commanded by Tsar Nicholas II in person, were able to quickly advance all the way into Trebzond and Sivas as resistance collapsed, before running out of steam; an attempt to invade Anatolia from the west was blocked by Anglo-Franco-Greek naval action in the Dardanelles, but eventually, under the cover of the well-positioned Russian Black Sea fleet, Mackensen crossed the Bosporus and, after a forced march, captured Izmit. Djemal Pasha's desperate mobilization of Turkey's feeble remaining resources managed to delay Mackensen's advance, but eventually, in June, Bursa was captured and Mackensen's victory march resumed.

Back in the Balkans, the war gradually died down. In the south, Petar Zivkovic was defeated, and the Albanians pushed out of Kosovo. The Greeks fought back fiercely at Thessaloniki after being pushed back to their pre-war borders, grinding the Russo-Bulgarian offensive to a halt. In the northwest - in Anglo-Franco-Italian-occupied regions - the war was also "dead"; Austro-Slavenians and Germans dug in heavily, and the Habsburg Croatian volunteers fought in the barricades of Zagreb, preventing that city's capture, while the Entente offensive in Steiermark died down, degenerating into a trench war just outside of Graz. The opposing side also launched several offensives, but the Franco-Italians took very good positions in the mountains and, apart from losing the eastern half of Carniola (but the Entente simply retreated from there, deeming the area indefensible), held on to them steadfastly. With the collapse of Hungary and the defeats elsewhere in the Balkans, offensive operations here were made impossible; but Ferdinand Foch wasn't distraught. Dreikaiserbund forces were properly distracted, and now, the finishing blow could be landed. On the 1st of June, after a particularily heavy buildup, the French army went into offensive along the entire lenght of the Lorraine-Alsace front; the aptly-named June Offensive had begun, and immediately was declared the turning point of modern warfare. Mustard gas shells hit the German trenches, and as if that was not enough, men were followed into this offensive by sluggish, armoured mechanical monstrosities, which were immediately dubbed tortues - "turtles". Though not terribly fast, troublesome to supply and often bogging down in the mud or in the mountains (in this case, the Vosges), the tortues had a notable psychological effect on Germans, still stunned by the initial poison gas attack (it must be noted that the German government DID supply its troops with gas masks, having itself developed chemical weapons but left them unused; still, the German troops were scarcely prepared for this attack), not to mention their actual usefulness of easily breaking into the otherwise near-impregnable enemy trenches. With this double tactical advantage, General Charles Lanrezac, in charge of this offensive (also dubbed by some the "Lanrezac Breakthrough"), quickly broke the German frontlines, and, before the enemy could recover, overran the remnants of German-held Lorraine-Alsace. Though Paul von Hindenburg, the German commander, succesfully retreated with his troops to Saarbrucken, preventing any offensives into Rhineland, in doing so he allowed Lanrezac to cross the Rhine into the Grand Duchy of Baden; before the Landswehr could be mobilized, the huge French army captured Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Pforzheim and Baden-Baden itself. Bogging down in the Schwarzvald in the south and center, the northern wing of French offensive even took Stuttgart before the Germans recovered. The unthinkable had happened; the French broke into Southern Germany. Soon enough, Kaiser Wilhelm II calmed down, however. They were not in position to do too much harm, aside from psychological one ofcourse (after all, southwestern Germany hadn't much in the way of industries, if compared to Silesia or Rhineland). This could be turned to Germany's advantage, even; Wilhelm II was easily swayed by von Tirpitz and Walther Rathenau, who had advised to use this invasion as a pretext for a general call for volunteers; if that proves insufficient, full mobilization, or even levee en masse if things get desperate, would be in order. But it did prove sufficient after all; and while the French struggled to break through the Landswehr's defenses, a new German army was being hastily prepared and deployed, while the reserves were sent to reinforce both the Landswehr and von Hindenburg who was to launch a cunning counterattack into Alsace; this process was sped up further when Lanrezac, instead of playing along, abandoned Stuttgart after dismantling its industries (that was the main concentration of such in southwest Germany) and nearby railways, and struck north to capture Heidelberg and Darmstadt, throwing aside the second-rate Landswehr troopers. This move forced Hindenburg to delay his attack and divert forces to prevent a flanking maneuver, while the newly-formed volunteer army, under Kronprinz Wilhelm, was quickly deployed to Frankfurt. The French broke into the city, but a fierce urban battle, not unlike the one at Nanjing in 1914, marked the end of this high tide of their military fortunes. Lanrezac had to pull back, while von Hindenburg was attacking at Metz. Though the heavy French artillery and hastily-mobilized reserves halted the German advance just outside of Lorraine's greatest city, this was obviously a temporary halt. Attacked by the Landswehr and the volunteers, Lanrezac staged a brilliant fighting retreat into northern Alsace, winning one final battle on German soil, that of Rastatt, where, despite losing a few cut-off divisions, the French yet again gave the Landswehr a bloody nose. Although ultimately repulsed, the French managed to exploit their initial breakthrough almost to the full. But already then, it was clear to many that the tide was turning; massive German forces were being prepared on the French border, and, though Hindenburg's case for the Schlieffen Plan had failed to change the Kaiser's mind on the issue, the Germans now prepared for an autumn offensive, both on the Dalmatian/Austrian front and on the Lorraine-Alsatian one.

In the meantime, on the sea, the British were once more reclaiming supremacy. After reequiping destroyers with hydrophones and powerful new depth charges, the British felt much safer from the submarines; also, after most German commerce raiders around the British Isles were eliminated, it became possible to redeploy more and more naval elements to hunt for the Germans elsewhere in the World Ocean. However, the Germans here in the North Sea were suspiciously quiet, and so the British suspected that they were up to no good. Indeed, they were up to building a new Continental Blockade; having previously enforced it in Denmark, the Germans now begun working to spread it into Norway. That wasn't terribly succesful at first, but when the British themselves begun intercepting Norwegian shipments to Germany as part of their own blockade, they ran into an unfortunate skirmish with some Danish border guards; populations in both Scandinavian countries were outraged, both by this and by the subsequent British occupation of Iceland and Greenland. Under some Russo-German pressure, both countries not only formally declared an embargo on British goods and stopped trading with Britain, but also resumed trading with the Germany. The Home Fleet itself was sent to make them reconsider, but it was confronted by all the naval might Denmark and Norway could assemble; that would have been a walkover had this might not been reinforced by the German Hochseeflotte and the Russian Baltic Sea Fleet. Thus the Home Fleet was tied down in a huge naval battle at Cape Lindesnes, near the infamous Vik Bay, better known now as Skaggerak. Though early on, with help of reinforcements, the British crossed the German "T" and delivered heavy casualties before the Germans regroupped, the Russian fleet, with the help of German instructors, fought surprisingly well; also, more German reinforcements were pulled up, and Britain's own "T" was capped at one point, though von Hipper failed to take full advantage of it. Despite taking heavy losses, the Dreikaiserbund forces eventually managed to outmaneuver the British again; this, and unexpected introduction of U-boats in mid-battle, granted the Dreikaiserbund a sufficient firepower advantage to reverse the battle's tide. Finally, with both fleets thoroughly mauled over, the Home Fleet broke off engagement, and its enemies didn't pursue. This was a significant defeat; to make things worse, as dissent grew in Great Britain, in Ireland an open rebellion already broke out, the past (1914) compromise being deemed insufficient. Much of the island was up in arms, with a meager British garrison besieged by rioting mobs in Dublin and the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers in Ulster were all the actual presence the British retained. Though later in the year, a major British forces was deployed, and order - terrorism aside - was upheld in several key coastal areas, the Irish rebels merely went into the underground or retreated into the countryside, and there fought an endless guerrila campaign.

While all this went on, the frontline scarcely changed in Dalmatia, but for a partially-succesful German offensive that routed the Franco-Italians in the bulge sticking out towards Graz, and ended up taking Laibach, nearly severing the Entente troops in Dalmatia from those in Tyrolia and Carniola; Italian reserves, however, managed to stop the enemy offensive long before it could even properly threaten Triest, now a key supply center. Further south, however, the Dreikaiserbund forces were on the move; Bulgarians, Russians and Austro-Slavanians finally broke into Albania as its army fell apart and, with the help of the popular leader and Germanophile Ahmad Bey Zogu, overthrew Emanuele I altogether; Wilhelm zu Wied, from the Hohenzollern senior branch (as opposed to the junior branch ruling in Germany), was declared King Wilhelm I of Albania, Ahmad Bey Zogu was appointed Prime Minister, Albania broke all ties with Italy and allied with the Dreikaiserbund. Meanwhile, the Greeks, using the Ottoman collapse, launched an opportunistic landgrab campaign at Smyrna; but it only served to drive a wedge between the Ottoman government and the Entente, and alienate said Entente from the Turkish nationalist circles; thus, it mostly helped Mackensen, who had triumphantly entered Ankara and soon had Kemal Mustafa form a puppet military government, which immediately realigned Turkey with the Dreikaiserbund as well; as Djemal Pasha was assassinated during which attempted escape into British custody, that government held the most authority, and soon, the remnants of the Turkish army, including some other freed PoWs, advanced, with German assistance, against the Greeks; after the recapture of Smyrna, the Germanophile Greek king Constantine I sacked Venizelos and, with German assistance, suspended the parliament; Greece, too, left the Entente and allied with the Dreikaiserbund, though many of its troops mutinied and had to be put back in line by the Germans and the loyalists. Crete, however, was immediately occupied by the mutineers and came under British protection.

Yet meanwhile, as the Germans were asserting their control over the southern Balkans and Anatolia, Britain and France asserted the control over the Middle East south of that. Immediately after Constantinople's fall, the British occupied the Palestine and southern Iraq, while the French, at Druze petition, occupied Lebanon. Struggling with Arab rebels and assorted bandits, the Entente trops advanced further inland, eventually occupying Hejjaz, Transjordan, Syria, northern Iraq and Kurdistan as well, halting the Russian advance into the area. Meanwhile, other victories were achieved; though a new Russian offensive, made with the past experiences taken into consideration, captured Herat and Birjand, the British won the Second Battle of Mazar-e Sharif and secured both Yazd and Kerman, while the Constitutionalist insurgency resumed in Gilan; and later into the year, Anglo-Persian troops secured Hamadan.

Sadly, even as German commerce raiding declined under methodical British blows, Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck still managed to limit the British control to the coastal areas; the major expedition undertaken against the German rail center of Dodoma, now von Lettow-Vorbeck's headquarter, had failed disastrously despite the good basic strategic plan for a two-pronged offensive; the second prong advanced along the Wami River and was massacred in the Nguru Mountains by the Askaris and German sharpshooters, while the northern one actually reached and entered Dodoma, and was starved to death there before surrendering. Very late in the year, however, South African forces arrived to occupy the territories south of the Rufiji, where the resistance was practically nonexistant; the Entente was slowly, but surely advancing into the German East Africa.

Lastly, in the Far East, the Entente pressed on. In Manchuria, the Japanese won a string of victories; they seized Changchun and Jilin in the northeast, and Jinzhou and Fuxin in the west, establishing a pretty good defensive perimeter; meanwhile, after a lenghty siege and heavy bombardment from the land and the sea, Port Arthur surrendered. And in the meantime, in early 1918 Prime Minister Yuan Shikai died of old age; this coincided with a major Entente counterattack, and the Beiyang army, confused and demoralized, was pushed along almost the entire front; as a result of all this, almost 1/6th of this army defected to the Republicans, and already, General Chiang Kai-Shek declared the beginning of the final "Leap to Beijing"; however, both the Beiyang Army and the Qing regime proved far more stable than they seemed at first. Under Yuan Shikai, many much needed German-style administrative reforms were put into place, and the Qing regained some genuine sympathy in the north from all walks of life. Also, more Russian and German forces were deployed here in ever greater numbers, and so the second Japanese attack on Tianjin was repulsed, although Qinhuangdao was captured. The twelve years old Emperor was in no position to exercise actual power, but the German advisors, Qing courtiers, Beijing reformists and loyal Beiyang officers alike soon reached a consensus on who should be the new Prime Minister/dictator; it was, ofcourse, Xu Shichang, an old associate of Yuan Shikai, a civilian with great ties with the Beiyang army and a pragmatic conservative, the one man who was acceptable for all the interested parties. Xu Shichang immediately ordered more levies, and the regroupped Beiyang army, reinforced by conscripts and allies, stopped the Republican advance in the Qin Ling mountains, and on the Huang He-Zhengzhou-Suixian-Xuzhou-Zhenzhou-Yangtze line. The attacking Republicans were met with machine guns, heavy artillery, minefields and later on, as the Germans felt their hands to be untied, with poison gas. The casualties were horrendous; the advance was stemmed. And in the meantime, Russo-German forces retook Qinhuangdao and counterattacked in Manchuria. Using infiltration tactics and modern weapons, the Dreikaiserbund forces broke the Japanese defenses at Dalinghe, capturing the crucial city and defense post of Jinzhou and exposing the Japanese southern flank in Manchuria. Anshan was captured, while a new Russian assault in the north took heavy casualties - and the cities of Fuxin and Tieling. The Japanese had to fall back from the now-untenable positions in the Jilin province, but eventually retook Tieling and fought back all attacks on Mukden; in the north, the new Japanese defensive perimeter was on the Tumen-Yanji-Liaoyuan line. In November, the Japanese, having learned a few things about fighting in difficult weather conditions since the last war, launched a sudden, three-pronged assault on Anshan after securing the Liao He with river boats and thus severing Anshan's supply routes; a pretty large Russo-German army was annihilated, and Kuropatkin was captured. This disaster would serve to greatly undermine Russian morale.

Returning to the fields of Lorraine-Alsace and the mountains of Tyrol and Croatia, we would witness the Autumn Counteroffensive. After several months of slow, drawn-out trench warfare, the hour of the decisive (or so it was hoped in the Generalstab) confrontation had come. On one side, stood the Entente troops - dug-in and in fairly good positions, whether due to the mountains, the urban grounds or the rivers (as was the case in Alsace, ofcourse). They were numerous, well-led and prepared for all occassions; they had gas masks, grenades, minefields, some basic knowledge of the German infiltration tactics and confidence in the impregnability of their defenses. The Germans and the Austro-Slavenians on the other side, however, were preparing for this for several months now. Huge amounts of manpower - due to efficient German censorship and counterintelligence, greater amounts than the French were expecting - were assembled on both fronts; the German Generalstab was filled with steely determination to sacrifice entire army corps, but break the back of enemy resistance. Powerful heavy artillery was hauled in by rail, and pounded at the enemy positions day and night. Zeppelins and other aircraft carried out reconaissance, directing artillery fire at the enemy positions and itself dropping bombs on key enemy positions. Kommandos and die Alpen Korps scouted the outer layers of enemy defenses, and prepared to spearhead the advances. After spending a few minutes blankly staring at the map and weighing all the consequences, Kaiser Wilhelm II declared to his staff that the Rubicon is crossed; soon after, one of the bloodiest military operations in the history of mankind commenced; several millions charged at the enemy positions, and an epic meatgrinder begun.
 
Charging through fog, clouds of dust raised by bombardment and the poison gas - harmless as long as their gas masks were on - the Sturmtruppen, the Kommandos, the Alpeners, the Kaiserjagers and the Magyar conscripts occasionally ran into mines, came under artillery barrages and were cut down by machien gun fire, or killed by the automatic rifles of the men entrenched; but still, inevitably, some of them reached the trenches, and there, in vicious melees, a few of them survived and triumphed, or at least distracted the enemy long enough for the main mass of German and Austro-Slavenian troops to jump into the fray. Particularily vicious fighting took place in the city - Strassbourg and Innsbruck were ruined, as troops and sympathizing civilian paramilitaries alike fought under heavy artillery barrage; in the end, Dreikaiserbund forces took over those cities street-by-street, but had little time to rest. Croatians and Tyrolians under Entente occupation used the opportunity to rise up, sniping enemy officers and attacking the occupiers in the rear; thus in Dalmatia, the occupation ended as it had begun, the defenders hemmed in between rebels behind their lines and enemies ahead, although a large portion of the Anglo-French forces from there was evacuated and redeployed to Veneto, or to southern Anatolia and Syria. The Bersaglieri sharpshooters and Tyrolian jaegers wrecked havoc on their respective enemies, while further to the south the Austro-Slavenians too had captured Trieste after some jagged fighting. Back in the Alsace, despite taking heavy losses, the Germans had advanced into the Vosges, almost reaching the pre-war border; there, too, the difficulties of mountain warfare became apparent. A particularily vicious battle was foguht between German volunteers and retreating French forces at the slopes of Mount Hohneck, it would be later popularized by the most famous of those volunteers, Adolf Hitler, who lost an arm and nearly died during the fighting there, but later recovered and went on to become a prolific war story and political and military essay writer. In the northwest, Paul von Hindenburg stumbled on the Mosel, but surrounded Metz, and after some brutal street fighting where he lost a good fourth of his remaining forces, von Hindenburg "die Stahlmauer" virtualy finished the reconquest of German Lorraine and crossed the pre-war French borders. After the fall of Metz, Lanrezac commenced a general fighting retreat beyond the Mosel; meanwhile, almost all the remaining German reserves were commited to the battle. Overcoming the Vosges, the Germans poured into French Lorraine, taking St.-Die and harrying the retreating French forces. Calmly, Lanrezac ordered his troops to quickly retreat towards Toul and Epinal, leaving a few troops to delay the German advance and a few more to defend Nancy; in this manner, the greater part of what French forces survived the early slaughter succesfully retreated beyond the Mosel and prepared good positions beyond it; as for Lanrezac, he shot himself melodramatically, declaring that he had failed France. After news came in from Tyrol, Ferdinand Foch considered following his subordinate's example, but eventually was persuaded by the French government to simply stand down. The masterplan had failed, crushed by the superior German and Austro-Slavanian manpower and resources (and willingness and capability to use them; the Third Republic, as this war had shown, wasn't terribly competent in matters of military organization); also, the Italians, after a good early performance, were beginning to break down. They still held ground in southern Tyrol, but they were pushed out from the north, and Austro-Slavanians were marching on the Italian soil; Udine was already occupied, Treviso was threatened. As the French front died down, the Germans and the Austro-Slavanians concentrated on the Italians, and eventually retook Trient, and advanced, despite courageous resistance and heavy casualties (to which the Germans had grown accustomed by now), to take Treviso, Vicenza and - after a particularily furious battle - Padua. As the year came to an end, the Italian army was barely regroupping to the west, with the help of more French and British reinforcements, but for all the purposes it was broken, as was Italy itself - riots and peace demonstrations grew widespread, the economy was collapsing, conscription was widely resisted, and Prime Minister Antonio Salandra was shot by an anarchist in December while trying to rally the Italian population to resist the invaders. His successor, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, did manage to persuade the parliament to mobilize all of the country's resources and launch a levee en masse, but this policy, already in December, resulted in ever more violent riots and an armed uprising in Sicily. As Italy's war effort, military, spirit and economy all collapsed, the country was suddenly cast down from the mountain-tops of triumph and the Bavarian Alps to the dark pits of defeat and revolution. France was better off at the moment, but many feared that soon, the same shall happen there. Britain was better still, but in Ireland and India alike, dangerous armed insurrections were beginning. Japan was also quite well-off for the moment, almost completely undamaged by the war itself, but the Chinese Republic's continued levee en masse and mobilization were placing heavy tolls on the economy, while none of the great military victories were decisive.

But a sudden relief came in 1919, as the January Revolution took place in Russia. Dissent was rising there since the coronation of Nicholas II and the Khodynka incident in 1896; it got even worse after 1905, when the Russo-Japanese War was only barely won and riots were suppressed violently; in the interwar period, Nicholas II's increasing Germanophilia and uncompromising militaristic autocracy cost him the support of both the Westernizers and the Slavophiles, and gradually, the gap between the Tsar and his people - already quite wide by default - grew to unacceptable levels. Anglo-French agents worekd incessantly to further undermine the Tsarist authority and variously assisted the various "battle organizations", especially those of the Socialist Revolutionaries - the SRs, also called eSeRs in Russia. Unresolved social tensions went on, more-or-less quietly after 1906, but, as usual, these were intensified by the war. Lastly, during the war itself, the developing, but still fragile Russian economy was overstrained and despite German subsidies beginning to crash; meanwhile, though the Russian performance during the war wasn't completely failed, there were several serious military defeats, especially in Persia and Manchuria, and casualties were heavy. The Tsar - who had left the control over Russia to the even less popular Tsarina, while himself "crusading" in Armenia - wasn't at all aware of the detiriorating domestic situation, which was recently exacerbated by bad harvests and what was one of the worst winters of the 20th century, and so ordered more and more conscription and requisition in the Russian countryside. That was the last straw. Already in December 1918, several eSeR-led and independent peasant rebellions erupted all over the Russian chernozem. On January 4th 1919, workers and students started rioting in the streets; joined and organized by the eSeR terrorists, they fought back against the Imperial gendarmerie, and when the garrison soldiers were sent against them, many of these second-rate troops simply mutinied and joined the rioters. The Winter Palace was soon place under siege, defended by the loyal Guard regiments; meanwhile, rebellions and mutinies spread elsewhere as well. The fortress of Kronstadt was seized by mutineeing soldiers; nationalist rebellions took place in Finland, Georgia and Poland, the latter spreading into Austro-Slavenian and German territory as well. Peasants were seizing control of the countryside everywhere; in Moscow, the rebels were only barely crushed in blood, but in the Ukraine, for instance, most of the army and later the Russian Black Sea Fleet as well had mutinied, and officers, including Kolchak, were slaughtered; several key industrial centers and ports all over the country were captured by workers; anarchists, under Nestor Makhno and the aging Knyaz Peter Alekseyevich Kropotkin himself, begun rebelling in Ukraine and southern Russia; the Russian troops on the front, kept in line by Brusilov in Bulgaria, Velikiy Knyaz Nikolai Nikolaevich in Poland, the Tsar's presence and constant victories in Armenia and the menacing German presence in Manchuria, rebelled freely in Siberian garrisons and on the Perso-Afghan front (often surrendering to the Entente, or negotiating paroles with the British and the rebels), while in Central Asia, inspired by the pan-Turanist ideals and British agents, Turkmens and Uzbeks begun massacring Russian colonists. Loyal forces did struggle on in parts of Russia, most notably Moscow with its surroundings, Belarus and the Far East, but they were poorly-coordinated and often surrounded. Tsar Nicholas II only got the news of the rebellion a few days after it happened; he was outraged, but thought that the people will soon come to their senses. When two days later news came to him of the fall of the Winter Palace and the gruesome massacre of his entire family, including his son and sole heir Aleksey, he flew into a rage and ordered an end to the Armenian campaign; conceding Kurdistan to the French, he hurried with his army to restore order, through the still-loyal Armenia into the rebelling Georgia. There he bogged down in clumsy counter-insurgency operations for several months, and had to request help from Cousin Willy. Kaiser Wilhelm II obliged, himself outraged by the death of the Tsarina, his first cousin, and by that downright annoying Polish rebellion which forced him to divert forces from the Lorraine-Alsace Front. A large German expedition korps was soon pieced together under the command of Aleksandr von Linsingen; after linking up with Nikolai Nikolaevich's forces at Warsaw and crushing the Polish insurgents, he started an offensive towards St. Petersburg (by then renamed into Petrograd and declared the capital of the Russian Republic by the Provisional Revolution Government of Viktor Chernov), along the way joined by some more loyalist forces (including the paramilitaries organized by Pyotr Arkadyevich Stolypin, governor of Pskov) and a volunteer corps of Baltic Germans; this force had succesfully secured Petrodvorets and the Tsarskoye Selo, just outside of St. Petersburg.

What followed was the decisive battle, though back then it certainly didn't seem such. If the defenders of Petrograd won, they would not yet win the war, far from it, but they will win time to properly organize and moblize more resources, and, with the help of the Entente, tie down the German forces for good. And if the Germans/loyalists won, they wouldn't really nip the rebellion in the bud, but they would destroy its central leadership, prevent it from becoming a coherent force and properly mobilizing Russian resources (especially as Moscow, too, remained in loyalist hands, if just barely), and then would just have to root out the resistance, a lenghty, ungrateful task, but far less risky then the opening of a third front that MIGHT just overstretch Germany's resources enough and snatch the seemingly-assured victory out of the Kaiser's hands.

Contrary to public opinion both then and now, the battle wasn't quite as uneven as it was often seen. Although the superior quality of German and professional Russian forces over the revolutionaries is unarguable, the revolutionaries were much more numerous. They had, naturally, an inferior supply situation - but they weren't exhausted by a forced-march through hostile territory. Rallied by Chernov and Kerensky, brilliant orators both, and at the same time pinned against the wall with nothing to lose, the Russian rebels had far superior morale and determination to stand to the last. Plus they were in an excellent strategic position - Petrograd was a perfectly-fortified city, and all of its main streets were thoroughly barricaded. Indeed, the initial - mostly probing - assault soon bogged down and was repulsed. But von Linsingen was prepared for this, and, ignoring Nikolai Nikolaevich's vain protests, ordered the infamous war atrocity - the Gassing of St. Petersburg. That way, the opposing barricades were cleaned quickly and efficiently, and those who survived fell back in panic. German Sturmtruppe, equipped with gas masks, charged in and, with the help of one of the rebel commanders (Yevno Azef) who had defected to the loyalist side and had all of his men surrender immediately upon contact, easily occupied St. Petersburg south of the Neva, executing all of the captured rebel leaders on spot. By then the gas has dissipated enough, and the rest of the attackers moved in as well. Heavy fighting ensued in the city's northern parts, but after the initial gassing and the loss of the southern half of the city, the rebels were nearly broken; the islands were quickly captured, German forces requisitioned riverine transport and, after some fighting on the Primorskij Prospekt and near the St. Sampson Cathedral, during which Kerensky was accidentally gunned down, the city was in loyalist hands. The waves of outrage all over the world were irrelevant; the Russian Revolution was decapitated. Poland and Georgia were already subdued, the surroundings of St. Petersburg were soon pacified as well. In revolutionary-held territories, internicine strife between the various factions both within the SR party and between the eSeRs and other parties, most notably the anarchists and the RSDWP, begun in the least opportunate moment, while the members of the Black Hundreds and other monarchist organizations started counter-revolutionary counter-uprisings. Tsar Nicholas II and his forces, meanwhile, linked up with the loyalist Cossacks and soon retook Krasnodar and Astrakhan'. The Germans captured Tver, another revolutionary center, after some heavy urban fighting and though Finland, the Ukraine, Central Asia and many parts of Siberia and Central European Russia were still rebelling, the Revolution was effectively aborted. But not before the Entente made one last attempt to revive it, in the Northern Campaign of the spring of 1919, during which Narvik, Tromso and Hammerfest were captured, and Boris Savinkov's "Free Russian Legion", backed by the best of the British Expeditionary Corps, disembarked in revolutionary Arkhangelsk. This force had occupied Arkhangelsk, Severodvinsk and Kotlas, and secured the Arkhangelsk-Vologda railroad; striking from the north on an armoured train, Savinkov actually captured Vologda, and almost took Yaroslavl', from where he could have threatened Moscow itself. However, by then some semblance of order was restored, and loyalist troops managed to stop Savinkov and, after a failed attempt to capture him, destroyed the armoured train with some very thorough artillery bombardment. The British, however, held on to Arkhangelsk and its surroundings, and, as more forces were deployed, occupied Murman and Petrozavodsk. Having thus taken up some very good defensive positions, the British saved Finland, winning time for it to become more organized. For the rest of the year, loyalist Russian forces and the German "Russland Korps" conducted counterinsurgency operations, gradually reconquering the Ukraine and restoring order in Siberia and the Urals.
 
Elsewhere, ofcourse, life and the war went on. Predictably enough, the year started with two revolutions - not just the Russian one, but also the one in Italy, though it was even more disorganized and chaotic. The government came under attack from two directions - the various socialists, syndicalists and anarchists called for revolution, while Pope Benedict XV, gleeful over the secular government's troubles, simultaneously leaned on it to make peace with the Germans and, urged on by his more aggressive cardinals, increased the agitation for the restoration of the temporal power of the Popes. In truth, it wasn't as much the peaceful and unambitious Pope that threatened the state, but rather the long-suppressed clericalism and conservatism. So when, in February, after the complete collapse of the Italian front at Mantua, a series of rebellions begun all over Italy, amongst them were the conservative/clericalist rebellions in the south and in the former Papal States. The threat from the Left, however, was probably even more severe; Italy's Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) saw the opportunity to turn the imperialistic war into a revolutionary one, but it was prevented from acting immediately by internal disagreements. As of early March, the Germans had overran Venezia - but for the city itself, seized by the mutineeing Italian fleet - and advancing through Lombardy. Italian government forces barely held out in Latium and Piedmont; anarchists were in control of Sicily, a splinter socialist faction was in charge of Venice, the former Kingdom of Naples was a mess, the battleground of anarchists, socialists, syndicalists, clericalists, warlords and government troops, and now, united around the far-left maximalist leader Benito Mussolini, PSI moved to seize Milan and Florence, soon taking over Central Italy. Acting quickly, Mussolini mobilized his forces at Florence, linked up with some defected ex-military units, and captured Perugia and L'Aquila, eventually moving to outflank and attack Rome. The garrison, surprised, was overwhelmed by Mussolini, especially as workers and soldiers alike rebelled in Rome itself; the king fled to Sardinia just in time, but much of his government, including Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, was soon executed; in an anti-clericalist frenzy, Mussolini, as if realizing that his time was short (as the Germans had already broke up the Milan commune and too begun to march southwards), seriously changed history by ordering the destruction of Vatican and massacre of the Pope and all of the Curia that could be caught. In this manner the Catholic church was handled a serious blow, and was prevented from taking advantage of Italy's post-war power vacuum. But more on that much later. In any case, though briefly Mussolini controlled the central third of Italy, eventually he and his supporters had to go into the underground or flee, as the counter-revolution begun and was assisted by the Germans. Italy was, for all purposes, broken now and the French had to desperately redeploy forces to occupy Piedmont properly.

Meanwhile, to the north, the Germans, though delayed by the Russian events, continued offensive operations against the French, seeking to exploit their past success. Early on, a German drive to Besancon was met head on by a major French counterattack, now with new and improved tortues, just outside of Montbeliard. The Germans stopped there, and launched a new, much larger offensive to the north; crossing the Mosel, they captured Toul and Thionville, and advanced to the Meuse; meanwhile, more to the south, despite heavy French resistance, the Germans captured Epinal and advanced all the way to Chaumont. Victory seemed near, but soon, the Germans begun to stumble; behind their lines, surprisingly efficient and well-organized guerrila units sprung up, while Belfort and Chaumont were recaptured in French armoured offensives. The French were now doing a levee en masse of their own, and, having lured the Germans into their own territory, now inflcited more and more serious losses on them. However, what they achieved in the southern sectors of the front was uncomparable with the solid line of fortifications the Germans encountered further north, in central Meuse, especially around the town of Verdun, which was a veritable fortress in and of itself. The Germans managed to retake Lorraine-Alsace, and occupied most of French Lorraine, but all attempts to advance outside of that were blocked. After pondering the situation, von Hindenburg - and the Generalstab - had decided to not try and attack towards Paris; Verdun blocked that direction all too well, while the Schlieffen Plan was indeed too risky. Instead it was decided to hold the line on the Meuse, and instead advance southwards, while the German and Austro-Slavanian forces in Italy would advance to the west. With luck, the Rhone Basin would be secured, the Anglo-French forces now in Italy encircled and annihilated, and France intimidated into surrendering. Marching orders were given; Philippe Petain, the new French commander-in-chief, was partially disappointed that the Germans didn't try and attack Verdun, but nevertheless rejoiced as they walked into his trap. In a general offensive, Novara and Turin were taken by the Germans after some heavy fighting, and the pro-Entente provisional Italian government dismissed; meanwhile, the Germans advanced into Franche-Comte and Burgundy, advancing in great numbers, taking casualties but taking Besancon and Dijon. It was a cakewalk, von Hindenburg complained; the French had probably just put all of their forces near Paris, thinking that the Germans would foolishly charge there, as if their goal was to lose as many men as possible! After Chalon-sur-Saone surrendered without a fight, however, von Hindenburg begun to realize that this was too easy. Maybe its a trap, he thought minutes before reports came of a sudden massed French armoured attack against Dijon and the beginning of more of those nasty guerrila uprisings that quickly severed the German supply routes, while back in Italy Genoa was recaptured by the British in an amphibious operation and Asti was seized by a pro-Entente Italian "warlord". Combining the tortues and the German infantry infiltration tactics, the French easily captured Dijon and blitzed towards Besancon; the Germans had left some fairly strong garrisons there, but the French came in great numbers and advanced far more quickly than anyone was used to in this day and age. Von Hindenburg desperately ordered a forced march back north, and was harrassed heavily as he went; fortunately, Petain wrote him off too quickly, having sent too few forces too early against the main German force; as the French launched a counterattack against the Landswehr and the other reserves in Lorraine, making great gains, von Hindenburg succesfully fought back against the attackers at the village of Fenay and then recaptured Dijon. As the French retook Nancy and Mulhouse, however, von Hindenburg had to abandon his initial plan of a cunning offensive towards Paris through central France. Most of his forces set out as quickly as possible to retake their old positions, but a few divisions were to be sacrificed in berzerk, risky, but very distractive raids against Paris, Orleans and Rheims. This diversion worked flawlessly; the French had panicked before learning the true size of the advancing "armies", and while they dealt with the (highly-destructive as well as distractive) raids, von Hindenburg's main force, itself split up into three groups, fought its way back into Lorraine, using the lack of a solid frontline - this fatal flaw in Petain's plan determined the war's end, amongst other things. Soon after, a French force was annihilated by a rear attack at Colmar, while heavy fighting ensued at Epinal and Nancy. Surprised and having outran their supply routes, the French nonetheless fought back ferociously, and in the end, by August, the Germans, though mildly-triumphant, had to fully pull back to Mosel. This highly-confusing, indecisive, mutually-destructive campaign of maneuver only resulted in heavy losses on both sides and some heavy, but far from irrepairable damage in parts of the French countryside; that and in the eventual German occupation of Piedmont, as the Entente move against the southern German flank had ultimately failed. The very indecisiveness of this campaign was one of things that sped up the war's conclusion. Other factors included the Russian semi-collapse, the great strain put on the economies of all belligerents, and general war-exhaustion amongst the masses and in the governments. The left wing in France, Germany, Britain and Japan alike called for peace, but that was usual; now, however, more moderate and even right-wing parties begun putting forth peace plans, out of simple pragmaticism.

The Burgundy Campaign alone was not enough, however. Or, rather, it wouldn't have been enough had it been alone. It wasn't, ofcourse. At this very time, other, often undeservedly less famous campaigns took place. For instance, in a series of skirmishes off the Danish coast, the British once more inflicted some serious casualties on the Hochseeflotte, very nearly crippling it and thus crossing out the Kaiser's plans for a possible naval offensive in the North Sea to bring Britain to its knees. A British landing in Morea, initially-succesful, was repulsed with heavy casualties at Navplion and later pushed out altogether - this cancelled the Entente plans to reconquer the Balkans. The French occupied Kurdistan, but were pushed out by Mackensen's Germano-Turkish forces, which then launched a crazy armoured train invasion of Iraq, surprising the British and capturing lightly-guarded Baghdad, securing the Berlin-Baghdad railway once more and seriously undermining Entente positions in the Middle East. Italian rule in Libya and East Africa collapsed to native revolts. Von Lettow-Vorbeck was von Lettow-Vorbeck. The British struggled to occupy Persia and Afghanistan, increasingly hindred by their former allies - and newfound enemies, like the pro-German Persian nationalist Reza Khan who had, with the help of German specialists, rallied the nationalist Persian resistance, including several defectors from the Constitutionalist movement, and built a small, but highly efficient guerrila force and wrecked havoc on the British; also, Amanollah Khan rallied Afghan resistance and, by severing the British supply routes, bled the British forces in Afghanistan and southern Russian Central Asia white with attrition and hit-and-run attacks. Several rebellions in India were only barely put down, and the more violent of the nationalists in the INC gained more and more credit from all this, causing the INC's eventual dissolution (de jure; however, it was soon re-formed in the underground by those of the nationalists that escaped arrest) after an abortive "Great Indian Revolution". In Manchuria, the Japanese tried, and failed, to advance forward, taking heavy casualties; an abortive amphibious operation at Vladivostock also took place, as did, however, the succesful occupation of Sakhalin/Karafuto. In China, Germano-Qing forces advanced in the west with renewed vigour, taking Chengdu and eventually advancing to Yangtze; as peasant uprisings begun in Republican territory, Sun Yat-sen had no choice but to sue for peace. The Americans chimed in, Woodrow Wilson suggested that negotiations take place in Washington, and promised to intermediate, but Kaiser Wilhelm II declared that the peace conference to determine the new world order will take place in Potsdam or not take place at all. As the Germans had recently vanquished Italy and were about to finish off the revolutionaries in Russia, that was a most potent threat, especially as France's resources and manpower were, though this wasn't immediately obvious, stretched almost to the breaking point, Britain's naval supremacy and economical prosperity were beginning to shake and Japan was facing a new economical crisis. So in the end, all the interested parties came to Postdam, while an armistice was declared on the fronts and the guns fell down on this somber August day, the 10th of August in the year 1919, the anniversary of such momentous events as the destruction of Ninneveh, the Battle of Lechfeld and the storming of the Tuileries Palace. They all were overshadowed by this watershed mark in human history.

Yet it would take much of the remaining August to finally hammer out the treaty that ended the war, despite the impatient Kaiser's best efforts to streamline it all, by immediately shouting down all attempts to create a "League of Nations" or negotiate some new military conventions: "This isn't the Hague!" The interested sides mutually and predictably demanded apologies from each other, which were duly received, and war reparations, which the Kaiser, in the name of streamlining, declared to be cancelled out by each other, in part also because the Germans have themselves inflict awful amounts of collateral damage everywhere they went. When the question of colonies rose, despite protests among some of the British delegates - and the representative of the Dominions even more so - it was decided to restore the status quo where possible, and later send some unbiased and duly-bribed Swiss to help resolve boundary disputes in a fair and equitable manner. However, this proved impossible in the case of the Italian colonies, due to Italy's complete collapse; it was decided that Italy, both through its treacherous behaviour and clearly mal-intended self-desturction, had lost Europe's trust and so Austria-Slavonia got itself a little colonial empire by taking over Libya (more in name right now). After some fierce debate, Italian East Africa was partitioned between Britain and Germany; the former got Eritrea and Abyssinia (nobody warned the rebellion Abyssinians, but who cares), the latter - Italian Somaliland and Ogaden. The British really, really didn't want the Germans anywhere near the Red Sea.

In Europe, it was decided to restore the pre-war borders between Germany and France, with mutual limitations on amount of troops that could be stationed in border regions (German Lorraine-Alsace and the parts of French Lorraine east of the Mosel were thus semi-dimilitarized). Italy was a subject of much debate; the Dreikaiserbund representatives wanted that perfidious country disbanded and returned to pre-1848 status. Eventually, it was decided to return Venezia, within the borders of 1860, to Austria-Slavania; the rest of Italy was to be put under joint British (Two Sicilies), French (Sardinia-Piedmont), German (the Papal States) and Austro-Slavanian (Lombardy, Parma, Modena and Tuscany) occupation at first (for restoration of order and "demussolinization"), then re-create the states mentioned in brackets under mutually acceptable leadership, BUT join them all into an Italian Federation, which, however, shall not be allowed to build a navy and no national army neither (though local armies, as long as they were no bigger than five divisions per state, were to be allowed). Austria-Slavania was generally recognized, as was its annexation of Serbia. Bulgaria annexed Thrace. The new, pro-German governments of Albania, Greece and Romania were likewise granted official recognition. The Dodecanese Federation was annexed by Great Britain, as was Crete, though both retained great autonomy and later formed a British-guarded Aegean Federation, led by, ofcourse, none other than Eleutherios Venizelos; other Aegean islands were returned to Greece, however. In exchange for cancellation of Russia's war debts to Germany AND in order to appease the French public, Finland and Poland were granted independence (both within the official, Russian borders of the Grand Duchy of Finland and Congress Kingdom of Poland respectively) and German monarchs, though bound by constitutions. Poland was naturally a German puppet state, but Finland was less so due to the strong parliament and British influence, not to mention the lack of any German military presence there, at least at this moment.

The Ottoman Empire was partitioned. As already mentioned, Thrace went to Bulgaria. Constantinople became a free city under joint Russo-Germano-Turkish protection (read: German protection); a Russo-German naval base was established at the Dardanelles, but the actual Russo-German military presence there was limited, and in any case checked by the British control of Crete. Russia annexed West Armenia. The rest of Anatolia, including northern (OTL Turkish) Kurdistan, became a new "Turkish Republic" under Kemal Mustafa; it was a German puppet state. Complete German control over the Berlin-Baghdad railroad was guaranteed; British control over Kuwait, Hejjaz, Palestine and Transjordan was recognized, as was the French control over Lebanon and Syria, including Hatay; in exchange, the Germans too got circa 1/3rd of the Arabic Ottoman holdings; specifically, Irak. Persia was officially neutralized; remaining Russian forces (a nominal garrison in Tabriz) were pulled out, so were the British troops and the German advisors, and Reza Khan was allowed to form in peace the new government of the Republic of Iran, the independence of which was guaranteed by Germany, Britain and Russia, and which, in return, guaranteed their interests in Iran; by now Reza Khan already had a pretty efficient army and, with the help of some clandestine German advisors, managed to quite easily restore order in most of Iran before the end of the year. Afghanistan was likewise vacated and declared independent, but left vaguely in the British sphere of influence in exchange for British noninterference in Russian Central Asia, now annexed directly.

Controversially enough, the concept of sovereignity was reconfirmed and officially extended to the colonies of the signatory nations; also, several regions previously dubbed "interest zones" were officially annexed, against some Japanese complaints that switched from loud to whispered after this was extended to Korea and Fujian, and when it was allowed to purchase Karafuto from Russia. Virtually this was the de jure confirmation of the de facto situation as far as China was concerned; Russia annexed Manchuria and Liaodong (the Japanese naturally enough pulled back), Outer and Inner Mongolia (the latter in compensation for losses elsewhere) and Sinkiang, Germany annexed Shangdong (including Weihaiwei, which the British agreed to abandon militarily and politically in exchange for the safety of their concessions there), Japan - Fujian, Britan - Tibet and Guangdong, France - Yunnan and Guangxi Zhuang. Both Chinas had no choice but to accept this humbly and quietly; the RoC did get compensation in form of the semi-autonomous, semi-European city of Shanghai that nonetheless was granted to it, as long as it didn't meddle with the local European concessions and their interests. China, by the way, was divided between the Qing Empire north of the Yangtze and the Republic of China south of it. European commercial interests in unannexed China were generally confirmed as well. Also, Siam was reduced to a rump state; its Malay/Kra territories and northern Siam (Chiang Mai and the like) were annexed by Britain, France took eastern Siam (basically, the Siamese part of the Mekong Basin). Thus Potsdam was sometimes called the "20th century Westphalia", and its protocol - the Bible of European imperialism, whether derogatorily or proudly; indeed this was probably the zenith of European colonialism.

The Eurasian War was over, with over six millions dead and around eighteen millions wounded, several French, German, Italian, Croatian, Russian, Turkish, Manchurian and Chinese urban and industrial centers devastated by warfare, the confidence of the masses in their present rulers badly shaken, the world thoroughly destabilized, the social strife exacerbated by abortive revolutions and economy, burdened first by the war and now by the necessity of repaying the war debts, thrown into recession. The war was over, and so were the Bloody Teens/1910s; the Volatile, Tumultous, Loud, Interesting Twenties had begun.
 
.................

das, I think I've said this before, but you have no life :D
 
das, I think I've said this before, but you have no life
Click to expand...

And as NK already told you, ofcourse I don't, I died! :p

The French seem rather competent, and for this I am glad. However, I also very much like the Second Reich.
Click to expand...

Its very competent as well, most of the times. As I had mentioned, the Chinese Civil War had served as a valuable polygon for both sides, so many of the mistakes that were made in OTL were avoided due to the Chinese (and Falkenhayn) making them first. Plus the "tortues" made for a good technological edge.

Thanks, glad you like it. Having already plotted out many of the things to happen in the twenties, I might actually finish this before September. What I've got for the world in 1930 thus far would make for a very nice setting, IMHO...
 
Amazing timeline, das. Ok, here's the semi-final (I'll need to do an E.C. revision after I finish the stats) map. Not sure about Agra, to me it looked like it was placed correctly.

(The stupid uploader won't even do a PNG... :mad: )



I'm keeping religious center levels low, for now, as they're quite valuable. The current ones include Gallway, Rome, Constantinople, Mecca, and Lhasa. I need one for whatever is the most popular center (pilgrimages, etc) of Hinduism at the moment. I'll be sticking to established "capitals" of world religions, until events convince me to add more.

Starting work on the stats.
 
Hinduism might be Varanasi; that would be on the Ganges' north bank, about halfway between where it joins that other river and the eco center.

And if the cultural capital is supposed to be Agra, it really should be that city just south of it. The place you currently have it at is Delhi.

EDIT: And if Roman and Irish Catholicism get each their own religious center, what about Shiia Islam?
 
silver 2039 said:
@Thalyi I'd like the Golden Horde.
Click to expand...

I'm glad I didn't pick Galicia then. The prospect of a fight to the death from turn one doesn't excite me so much.
 
Very Nice Alt. History, das!! Imperial Germany surviving World War 1 will make things interesting.

I can't wait to see the installments you have for the 20's.
 
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