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On May 1st, 1912, after a three day preliminary artillery bombardment, the Pfalz Offensive begun, initiating one of the largest, most famous and bloodiest battles in the entire war.

Within the next two days, over 350 000 French soldiers, composing four armies, supported by over 1500 heavy guns and many more light howitzers and mortars, bolstered by hundreds of armored cars, cavalrymen and other support units, were transported over the Rhine at the city of Mainz to engage the Germans and establish the thing that their nation sought to reach since the beginning of the war - a foothold on the right bank of the Rhine. The French high command did all the calculations, necessary reconnaissance was made, everything was in order, but from the very first day, they made one, massive mistake - they overestimated the effect that the preliminary bombardment would have on German positions, and when the soldiers landed on the shores of Germania, they were greeted not with a destroyed landscape and scattered weak enemy units, but by strong enemy fortifications, which had been dug and prepared since Operation Faust, and machine gun fire spraying on their ranks. In the very first day, France suffered over 40 000 casualties, and many more came during the next few days, until the French soldiers managed to successfully dig in and protect themselves from the massacre.

What followed was three months of the worst that one could write about the Western Front in the Great European War - trench warfare, endless artillery bombardment, the complete levelling of the rest of the city while both sides fought in brutal street skirmishes and mass infantry charges trying to overwhelm one another. By August, over 1.2 million French and 900 thousand German soldiers were in the field, and not just the generals and officers of both sides, but the entire world watched the battle while holding their breaths. Even though the Germans fought with great morale, their flanks were wavering from superior French artillery and their manpower advantage, and had the leader of the French forces in Mainz, Field Marshal Ludovic Bachelet, been aware of the poor situation, especially in Wiesbaden, whose defenders, the 19th Infantry Division, even attempted a mutiny after their commanders ordered a second suicidal charge into the enemy trenches, then the result of the battle could have been different.

However, with neither side able to achieve a decisive victory over the other, the battle just whizzled out. The French obtained a perimeter with the width of about 11 miles on the right bank of the Rhine, but they were unable to achieve a breakthrough in the German defense and were thus forced to halt further attacks. By late August, over 850 000 casualties had been inflicted on both sides, around 350 000 of them being deaths. Public response to these events varied. The Battle of Mainz was perceived as a defeat in the Germanias, but it did not break the people's morale - quite the opposite, it strengthened it by creating a feeling of peril. Meanwhile, in France, the Anti-War Coalition heavily criticized the offensive, purposefully referring to it in public not by it's actual name, but as the "Rhine bloodbath". Still, the government managed to control the rise of opposition to the war for the time being. Both sides saw the end of the battle as a mere "armistice", and Director d'Esperey demanded the French Army to achieve all of the Pfalz Offensive's strategic objectives before the beginning of winter, especially Frankfurt, which was, as the politician hoped, at arm's reach.


In June, requested by the French during the heat of the Pfalz Offensive, the Lithuanians began their own offensive on the Eastern Front in order to divert the attention of the Coalition. The Grand Hetman himself, Jogaila Aukštaitis, was assigned as the leader of an attack that, as the Imperial high command hoped, would break into Pomerania and Brandenburg and force the Germans into a two-front war. All that was needed was to walk across the Visegradian forces in Northern Poland, composed of the 1st and 2nd Polish Armies... easier said than done. The initial attacks on fortified Polish trenches resulted in nothing but thousands of deaths, and sensing a moment of opportunity, Bronislaw Kwasniewski, the leader of the 1st Polish Army, defied the General Staff's orders and initiated the Gniezno Offensive, a humiliating defeat for the Lithuanians. During the rest of June and the first half of July, the Imperial forces were driven out of Pomerelia and most of Mazovia, Gdansk and Warszawa were retaken, and what's worst - for the first time in the war, the Visegradian Army stepped foot on Lithuanian soil, seizing most of Prussia and even landing in Sambia by going through the Vistula Spit. Karaliaučius, the capital and administrative center of the province of Prussia was still held by the Lithuanians, but it was now surrounded from both sides and only supplied by a small corridor along the Prieglius River.

Kwasniewski was court martialed in absentia for defying orders, but when his forces reached Warszawa, the punishment was secretly lifted and the general was now hailed as a hero. The successful Gniezno Offensive gave the people of Visegrad a very necessary boost in morale, which had been starting to waver ever since the Ottoman Empire's entrance into the war, while Kwasniewski himself became a national hero for the Polish people.

And speaking of the Ottomans - they weren't doing very well.

Knowing the fact that the people of the Balkans longed for freedom from the Sultanate, Visegrad decided to use it to it's advantage, and King Ferenc III von Luxemburg and Director of the Convention of the Three Nations Jaroslav Dostál together signed the so-called "Proclamation to the People of the Balkans". It declared Visegrad's promises to the peoples of the Ottoman Empire after the war and the dismantlement of the Turkish regime. A fourth nation was going to be added to the United Kingdom as an equal member of the union - Slavonia, composed of the territories of the South Slavs, including Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia, the latter to be freed from the Ottoman hands. Bulgaria, Greece and Albania were to be liberated as independent republics, and Romania was to be broken from Lithuanian domination. Was Visegrad really going to follow through with such a proposal, or was this just smoke in the eyes of the people - only time can tell, but for now, the document was successful in rallying the people of the Balkans to support the Coalition war effort.

The Ottomans weren't doing well on the battlefield, either. Squished from both sides by superior enemy forces, they were losing on both fronts, each unsuccessful battle, lost city and defeat dealing blow after blow to the nation's morale. Visegradian forces pushed the Turks out of Serbia and Albania, despite the mountains in the way, and were now encroaching on Bulgaria, especially on Sofia. On August 21st, a Visegradian bomber squadron for the first time reached Konstantinyye, the City of the World's Desire, and commenced a large raid on the undefended capital - while it had no strategic justification, it was a major blow to Turkish pride. On the Persian Front, the Mughal supply lines were growing overstretched, but despite that, they managed to take Isfahan, one of the largest and oldest cities in Ottoman Persia. Indian offensives into Ottoman Khiva were also successful, but the advance along the Gulf was halted by tougher enemy resistance, including three reserve Janissary divisions and the Zagros mountains serving as a natural barrier.

To the north, combined Turkish, Lithuanian and Romanian defenses in Bucharest proved ineffective against the 2nd Hungarian Army, and in early July, the Visegradian Army entered the abandoned city. The Duke of Wallachia-Moldavia, Mykolas (Mihai) III, pleaded the Council of Lords for more Lithuanian reinforcements, but he received none - and in fact, 60 000 of the over 200 000 Lithuanians in Romania were transported out of the country to help stop the Gniezno Offensive. With such a poor situation, the fall of Wallachia-Moldavia and cutting off the Ottoman Empire from Lithuania seemed inevitable, but, in a surprising turn of events, the Romanian forces managed to hold the line at Dobrogea and the Carpathians, at least for now using the swamps and mountains to their advantage and keeping up the connection between the two empires.


In July 19th, an interesting event took place in Milan, this being the Third World Congress for the Promotion of Unitarianism, a congress of Unitarian, mostly Revolutionary Unitarian, parties and movements worldwide, but mainly from Europe. The first two World Congresses, which took place in 1899 and 1905 respectively, were heated enough, but now that one of the largest wars in human history was raging all around, it could only grow more intense. The greatest dispute came on the divisions between the Unitarian movements in the east and in the west. The representatives from the Party for Unity and Unitarianism from the Ottoman Empire, led by Akarsu Kubilay, a charismatic and energetic party leader, decreed that Lithuania, the Ottoman Empire and the Mughal Empire, all authoritarian, absolute monarchies, were "ripe for revolution", and as soon as both sides bleed out enough, the old order can be torn down to build Weber's envisioned society. This came into opposition with the views of Revolutionary Unitarian movements from Western countries, like France, Germania and the VFS, and the leader of the French Revolutionary Unitarian party, Florentin Maret, spoke out against it. Many Unitarians from Western countries believed in the Historicist view on Unitarianism, developed by Maret himself - it stated that all societies in the world develop towards higher inclusiveness, one jump at a time, from primitive autocracy to feudalism, from feudalism to early democracies, from early democracies to modern, liberal democracies - and in this view, a Unitarian utopia, a nation where all people are completely equal and all form one "body", is the most inclusive, and thus the ultimate form of government. However, as Maret argued, the jump towards higher inclusiveness can only be done at one stage at a time, thus only a Western democracy, not an autocratic regime, could possibly become the start of a Unitarian world revolution.

Obviously, this logic didn't impress neither Kubilay, nor the rest of Turkish Unitarians, not even the other representatives from the East, like Vincas Kudirka's Lithuanian Unitarian Party or the numerous Indian blue-wing movements, and the worldwide Unitarian movement suffered a major ideological split. The Party for Unity and Unitarianism began arming and distributing propaganda, among other things, Unitarian violence and influence across all of Europe, but especially in the Ottoman Empire, was rising. With nationalist rebellions taking place in Persia, a two-front war and a plethora of internal problems, the Ottomans hardly even noticed that a new movement was rapidly growing in popularity...


From other minor fronts, news were coming too. The Swedish streak of victories in the Northern Front came to an end, as, unlike in the Eastern Front, the Lithuanians achieved many major successes there. The summer of 1912 was quite hot, and the permafrost in most places melted enough to allow trench warfare to take place - and despite their failures, that's where the Lithuanians were more experienced than the Swedes in. Veterans from the Eastern Front were brought in to bolster a major offensive, which broke the lightly manned Swedish lines and drove them out of the Karelian Isthmus in one fell swoop. The Lithuanians were now approaching the town of Helsingfors, a major coastal fortress on the Gulf of Finland. The Pyrenean and African fronts stayed quiet this summer - knowing what happened last time they tried to support an allied offensive in the West, the Spanish forces decided to sit this one out despite having the advantage, while in Africa, the Egyptians failed to muster enough men to make a difference in the stalemate. Something finally happened in the Burmese Front, as after spending an entire winter in jungle and mountain skirmishes, the forces of Ayutthaya, bolstered by French reserves and fleet, managed to push the Burmese out of their territory and even advanced into their territory, capturing the trading port of Mawlamyine and drawing close to the Yangon River.

On slighly unrelated terms, the Dutch holding of New Zealand went through some heart beating in late July, as the garrisoned fleet entered a scuffle with the Chinese navy, which had been making missions around the island for almost a year. It was no mystery that the Shun Dynasty, which had been slowly modernizing during the last two decades, was looking forward to taking this island off their eastern coast, and while such clashes had become common, this one was far larger in scale than all of the last one. Time will tell if this tension will come to bear fruit.

The war could only grow bloodier and wider from here.

And there was no stopping it.

Even if people tried.

On August 21st, while the French and Germans were still licking their wounds after the Battle of Mainz, Pope Julius IV called representatives from both nations to Rome to discuss potential peace terms. The Italian Confederation may have been neutral, but they were surely worried about the enormous war right outside their border.

Neither side showed up to the negotiations.

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