alternatehistory.com

In the first months of 1912, two important elections echoed across the political landscapes of the world, and, even though the people of the time didn't really feel it, they influenced the outcome of the war in many ways.

In France, the many parties making up the Estates-General coalesced into two loose coalitions, divided on the single most important issue in the air of the Republic - the Great European War. The "Pro-War" coalition was composed of many centrist, Republican and Protectionist parties and headed by d'Esperey's Liberaux, while the Democratic Unitarians, the leading party from the blue side of the political spectrum, organized the "Anti-War" coalition. The leader of the Anti-War parties, Francois Chirac, already known across the nation for his pacifistic views and opposition to the conflict, presented a platform which included seeking an immediate armistice with the Baltic-Adriatic Coalition and negotiating a "honourable peace" with the BAC. d'Esperey, meanwhile, wished to continue the war, and he famously stated that "the only way France can accept peace is if we are the undisputed victor".

Unfortunately to the anti-war movement, the French public perceived the ongoing war as going well for France - the Rhineland was occupied, the German advance in the Netherlands got stalled and the Coalition was being starved with a naval blockade, so public opinion was firmly in favor of the war, and even though the margins were somewhat close, the Pro-War Coalition acquired a firm majority in the Estates-General. d'Esperey was sworn in for a second term. About 10 more seats were won by neither coalition, many of them held by either Revolutionary Unitarians or Purple Unitarians who were unwilling to join either movement.

The Vespucia Free State watched the events unfold in Europe with worry. Many of it's politicians were unwilling to draw their country into the war, fearing conflict with either New Sweden and the Spanish Caribbean or the dominion of New France. The VFS received dozens of thousands of refugees, fleeing war and conscription from across the Atlantic, and tensions only rose further when France began to dispute the ownership of the Los Angeles Canal - because it was a joint Franco-Vespucian venture, both countries had equal stakes in controlling it, and despite French demands, the Vespucians declined all requests to close the canal to Coalition nations. Still, President Klaas Luchtenberg wished to see Vespucia on the side of the Entente, and his party, the Federalists, endorsed the aging Matthijs Hoog Stoevenbeld, one of Luchtenberg's cronies, as the party's candidate. While they faced a challenge from the radical Republican-Unitarian Party, whose leader and candidate, as well as Unitarian activist Evert-Jan Aufderhaar campaigned for having Vespucia join the BAC and seizing the Los Angeles Canal, the main threat to Luchtenberg's wishes was the wide opposition to war in the electorate. A number of Protectionist and centrist parties coalesced to endorse a union ticket, which nominated Rogier Koertsen of the Christian People's Party.

Koertsen was young (about 45 years old) and charismatic, an opposite of Stoevenbeld's age and reliance on experience and webs of alliances, rather than public support, and he made a convincing case that having the VFS join the Great European War would not only be bloody, but also reward the Vespucians with little to no long-term gain. In the end, Koertsen comfortably won the first round and faced off against Stoevenbeld in the second round, and thanks to Aufderhaar endorsing him, rather than the Federalists, the Anti-Militarists seized the victory with over 60% of the vote. Democrat Koertsen declared the beginning of Vespucian neutrality, closed the nation's borders to most war refugees and declined all offers to join either the Entente Cordiale or the Baltic-Adriatic Coalition, and while he successfully kept his nation out of the war, his domestic policy, like promotion of Reformism as the state religion and retracting funding from many labor unions, irritated the Republican and Unitarian parts of the electorate.

Since by 1910, the VFS had become the world's fifth largest economy, after France, Visegrad, Lithuania and the Mughals, Koertsen's victory was a large blow to the Entente, which expected the Vespucians to join their side.

While this was taking place, all was quiet on the Western Front. The front lines that were reached during the Netherlands Offensive stayed, both sides dug in and licked their wounds while making grandiose plans for new offensives. In South Germania, public opinion was calling for the liberation of the Rhineland, and even King Otto III spoke up in favor - a rare event for him, considering the little amount of power that the monarch had in the government - calling for "pushing the reactionary French out of our Fatherland". In France, planning for the Western Front slowed due to election season, but when d'Esperey acquired his reelection mandate, he gave the green light to what will be known as the Pfalz Offensive. The plans called for transporting 350 000 troops, using pontoon bridges and river barges, over the Rhine to secure the city of Mainz, which would serve as the "beachhead" on the right bank of the river. With the German "water wall" broken and many French armies transported into the German heartland to "cut through them like a knife", victory would be certain. The French military did their best to prepare for the Pfalz Offensive - all troops involved were given basic river assault and urban warfare training, veterans from the Dutch front were pulled in as a backbone, millions of artillery shells, thousands of howitzers, mortars, armored cars and aeroplanes were prepared.

They had no desire to lose.

France actually scored a victory in the Mediterranean at this period of time. The island of Sardinia, Spain's last holdout in Italy after the old days of competing against Spain there, had long since served as an important naval base for the Spanish navy, and was a thorn in the Entente war effort. Ruled by the Spaniards for hundreds of years, Sardinia actually developed a peculiar unique culture, mixing Italian, Spanish and local Sardinian influences, and while the Italian Confederation laid a claim on the island, it was firmly established as a separate nationality. But now, with French naval superiority in the Mediterranean, this lonely island was pretty much destined to fall, and the Battle for Sardinia began in late March. Cagliari and Sassari, the two largest cities on the island, fell to amphibious invasions fairly quickly, but the battle stretched out due to remnants in the mountains, which resisted for about a month or two. The Battle of Sardinia was a success, it gave d'Esperey a considerable boost in polls, and a French military government was established - however, Sardinian resistance to the occupation continued for years after the Spanish garrisons had been rounded up.


With the new year beginning in the Eastern and Southern Fronts, Visegrad began to change it's focus. Lithuania was no pushover, but it's allies on this front - the Ottomans and Wallachia-Moldavia - showed weakness, and the General Staff prepared a new strategy for the United Kingdom, setting the goals as, first, cutting Lithuania off from the Turks by seizing Romania, and second, routing the Ottoman military and, with help from the Mughal push in the Persian Front, forcing them to capitulate. Subsequent plans would follow, including creating a stable connection between the Coalition members in Europe and India, defeating Egypt by a Levantine push and opening a new front against Lithuania in Crimea and Circassia. In early March, the 3rd Hungarian Army pushed the Romanian defenders out of Craiova, and with the support of the 2nd Hungarian and 3rd Polish armies, which attacked through the Carpathian mountain passes, it reached the outskirts of Bucharest, the capital of the vassal duchy. Preliminary artillery bombardment in preparation for a siege begun. Further south, after a series of battles in the mountains and along the Danube, the Turks were pushed out of most of Serbia and coastal Albania.

Back in Visegrad itself, the Convention of Three Nations received an interesting proposal, from an organization calling itself the "Foundation for the Liberation of Lithuanian Slavs". During the year of conflict between Lithuania and Visegrad, both sides took many thousands of war prisoners, and among the POWs taken by Visegrad, many are Ruthenians and Russians, who, as the Foundation and it's leader Sergey Alexeyev believed, would be willing to fight to liberate their homeland. Essentially, the Slavic intellectuals wished to see the creation of a Russian and Ruthenian legion in the Visegradian army, which would fight for the independence of their nations under the banner of the United Kingdom. The Convention, surprisingly, said no. What Visegrad feared was the formation of a greater East Slavic state, encompassing most of Lithuania and Volga-Russia, which would be too powerful to be easily controlled, and yet often appeared in the end goals of the Foundation. Unsurprisingly, the Ruthenian and Russian exodus was disappointed with the decision.

Some of them, realizing that Visegrad has no interest in a greater East Slavic state, turned towards an another path to liberation - Volga Russia. Before and during the Great European War, fleeing conscription and the Saugumas, thousands of Russians and Ruthenians arrived to the Volga, where they were accepted with open arms. and the more active and ambitious refugees formed "liberation circles" in their cities, especially Vostovsk, where they campaigned for Volgak entry into the Great European War and the liberation of their homeland. And, in fact, if Volga Russia wanted to join the Coalition, the gates were open - after secret negotiations with the BAC, both Visegrad and South Germania confirmed that they wish to see Russia in the alliance. However, when asked about the chance of allowing Volga to form a "greater Russia" once Lithuania is defeated, the answers were either vague or nonexistent. An another problem with Volgak participation in the war was the question whether the Volgaks could even pose a threat to Lithuania - and this once again brings up the decentralization of their state. Founded as a democracy in the beginning of the 17th century, Volga Russia was less a unitary state of a federation and more a loose union of cities, villages and nomads, it was the "United Communities of the Volga" for a reason. This decentralization came as a necessity due to the vast distances across the nation, and because of the weakness of the federal government, the Volga did not even have a standing army, only a volunteer militia, the narodnaya opolcheniya. As such, Vladimir Ulyanov, the predsedatel' of the Vostovsk Council, the head of state of the nation, decided to tread a line of "prepared neutrality" - avoiding any conflict until the time is right to strike.


The slow Egyptian advance in the African Front was finally stopped past Sirte by combined Spanish and Visegradian defenses. Egyptian supply lines were overstretched and damaged by local Tripolitanian resistance - the locals fought a guerilla war against both sides to achieve long sought independence. Meanwhile, the Coalition was boosted by fresh reserves from Spanish North Africa and supplies brought across Portuguese Morocco and the narrow strait of Gibraltar. Finally, the Coalition advantage in technology and discipline showed, and the front came to a standstill after three failed Egyptian offensives. However, now that France captured Sardinia and obtained control over most of the Mediterranean, they could now support their allies in Africa, and they had plans for dealing with Coalition North Africa.

The Entente suffered defeats not only in Africa, but also in the Persian Front. Ottoman defenses were collapsing in face of superior Indian manpower and rocket artillery, and within the first half of 1912, the Mughals captured Kerman and Shiraz, both major cities in Ottoman Persia, and they were also drawing close to Tehran. Should the Indians reach the city and the Caspian coast beyond it, they could cut off the troops in Ottoman Khiva from the rest of the Empire, not to mention shorten the front by hundreds of miles. The Empire also began a naval invasion of Ceylon, a lone French colony in the Indian Ocean. And the impacts of the successful offensives this year could already be felt - the Ottomans found themselves squished in between two Coalition nations, both much more powerful than them, and losing on both fronts. Mass protests against Turkish rule had already begun in Persia, especially after Emperor Ali Khan Bahadur III issued the "Proclamation on the Fate of the Eastern Territories of the Ottoman Sultanate", declaring that his nation will "fight for a Persia independent from the Turks and aligned with the Gurkani". The Balkans were also getting uppity, and even though the Serbs, Bulgarians and Greeks were Orthodox, they definitely preferred the Catholic, but still Christian Visegrad than the Muslim Ottomans.

The Ottoman Empire was having second thoughts on joining this war in the first place...

Actually, everyone was having second thoughts.

But now they had no option but to continue fighting. Neither side wished to give up.

And the fighting was about to grow a lot more fierce...

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