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Now that winter has arrived, actions in all of the fronts slowed down, but that doesn't mean that people weren't dying. Far from it. Now, everyone's eyes were on the Mughal Empire.

The agriculture of the Indian subcontinent was the field of economy least affected by the Empire's industrialization - despite some attempts to introduce fertilizers, modern crop rotation and agricultural machines, the majority of the nation remained stuck in the old ways, limited to small plots of land worked by a single family. At the same time, however, the population of the Mughal Empire grew by a lot, even overtaking China as the most populous country in the world - and this combination of overpopulation and disproportionately weak agricultural output created an extremely fragile balance in India, and even the slightest alteration to that balance ran the risk of famine. This alteration, not one, but two of them, came during 1912. The first was India's participation in the Great European War - the offensives in Persia had to be supplied with food, ammunition and equipment, after all, and neither one comes from thin air. The nation was mobilized, war taxes were introduced, capable hands were taken from villages and sent to the front, and all of this created a large burden for the agricultural countryside. The second was weather - the summer monsoon of 1912 was notoriously weak in comparison to previous years, bringing less rainfall than usual, which resulted in lower crop yields.

All of this was fertile ground for the beginning of the Great Indian Famine. Outbreaks of starvation and hunger were recorded from as early as September of last year, but it only became catastrophic during the winter, the dry season. The Indus river valley and the Deccan were the most affected areas, but the rest of the country also suffered - except for Bengal, which was not only the most industrialized region in the Empire, including agriculture, but also received rain from the winter monsoon like usual, helping alleviate the damage. By May, when the worst of the catastrophe blew over, it was counter that over one and a half million people died from malnutrition and almost ten million more were affected. The famine took the government of the Empire off-guard, and they figuratively panicked, ordering the high command to cancel plans for a spring offensive in Persia and instead diverted the stockpiled supplies to helping the people - however, Mughal relief was only limited to major cities and barely even reached the Deccan, not to mention that many of the relief efforts were botched by corrupt governors or poor infrastructure. The famine was a severe blow to Indian morale and war enthusiasm, fears of a potential second famine were spreading, and opposition to the war started to rise.

And since it was the Mughals who brought India to war, this opposition was also directed at them.


Malnutrition and hunger was not limited to the Mughal Empire, far from it, although the other places didn't suffer nearly as much. One notable such place was Lithuania - much like in India, poor harvests combined with war drain and war exhaustion led to food shortages, though, to the relief of the Imperial government, it did not devolve into an outright famine. Bread riots rolled over the nation, and in many places, workers, having not received their wages for months, went on strikes. In all cases, public dissent was countered with police batons, arrests and broken bones - but oppression didn't change the fact that the people of Lithuania were suffering from the war. Combat casualties were already far above a million, most of the dead and injured being young men. The cold winter resulted in the death of a large portion of the empire's livestock, neutering food production. Wounded, bitter soldiers were returning home, only to find an equally depressed homeland. This was fertile ground for radicalism of all kinds - Unitarianism, Republicanism, nationalism...

Emperor Žygimantas IV started a scandal in the very beginning of the year. Hoping to boost the morale of the nation somewhat, he decided to organize an open Christmas party in the Imperial Palace, inviting the citizens of Vilnius to visit and "cheer up a little". The hungry lower classes did not take this lightly, perceiving this as an attempt to show off his wealth in the face of food shortages across the population, and thus, numerous organizations, labor unions and underground movements recommended to just boycott the "party". So, Žygimantas spent Christmas drinking alone in his room. Public support of the Emperor dropped to a new low - not that it was ever high, really.

However, the royalty's inability to relate to the plight from the people was far from news - but something else related to royalty was, and that was the palace coup in the Ottoman Empire. Rumors about Abdulmejid III being secretly overthrown turned out to be true, as a public announcement on February of 1913 revealed that the old Sultan has been removed from power, presumably also executed, and the red-wing elements of the army seized control of the state, installing one of the Sultan's brothers, now calling himself Mehmed V. Mehmed was already a familiar face to the people of the Ottoman Empire, and it did not inspire or give them joy - quite the opposite, actually. Before seizing control of the country, he controlled it's internal affairs and oversaw the secret police, and rumors spread about his brutality, sociopathic tendencies and "impiousness". Were those rumors deserved? Who cares! The collective beliefs of the populace matter more than little obstacles like "facts"! Mehmed V started with a low "approval rating" and only harmed it more by declaring martial law across the country, trying to root out dissent against the regime, which, in the end, only made his opponents more powerful.


Mehmed V's government would receive a major challenge in the spring of 1913 - but not from where you'd expect. Rumors about a possible separate peace between the Ottoman Empire and the Coalition being negotiated under the orders of the new Sultan were present ever since the palace coup, and such negotiations taking place would have been a logical idea - after all, the Ottomans were being defeated in the battlefield and disintegrating from within. The truth was that Mehmed V was not considering a truce, gambling on a successful Lithuanian summer offensive to break into Poland and divert Visegradian attention from the South, but the rest of the Entente overreacted to the rumors - overreacted in probably the most self-destructive manner. While France merely sent a bunch of angry letters, the Lithuanian government cut off all trade and supplies through the Baltic Sea to press the Turks into remaining in the war, which proved to be not only ineffective, but also detrimental to their war effort, as the weaker and dissent-ridden Turkish industry was incapable of supplying all ranges of modern weaponry to it's army without allied assistance and loans. Just in time for Operation Bathory.

In April, the Visegradian army, bolstered by additional reserves, began a sudden push into Greece and the rest of Bulgaria, aiming to take over the remainder of the Balkans by the end of the year. Their opponents, three Ottoman armies, were war weary, infested with Unitarian, Republican and nationalist dissent and lacked almost anything beyond basic infantry equipment. As a notable example, the Turkish soldiers were not yet supplied with gas masks, even though the high command expected 500 thousand of them to be bought from Lithuania this spring, which just so happened to never arrive - and what do you know, the Visegradians employed gas shells for the first time in this offensive. In Greece, the Ottomans had to fight not only Coalition soldiers, but also local resistance, risen up in the mountains and hills of the nation, they disrupted the Turkish army's weak supply lines and picked off weaker units in support of Visegrad's invasion. The situation was no better in Bulgaria - the 3rd Hungarian Army reached Thrace and the outskirts of Konstantinyye by early May of 1913. The first artillery shells fell on the City of the World's Desire. The Southern Front was now reduced to a stretch of 200 kilometers, easily defensible thanks to the Bosphorus, and with so many forces now freed, the Visegradian General Staff could now look north, sensing weakness in the Lithuanian lines...

Despite the Great Indian Famine, Mughal forces continued to advance in Persia, although their gains were very limited. In many regions, Turkish soldiers and authorities were fleeing in fear of the arising Iranian rebellion against their rule, and the Indian forces arrived to an undefended Tehran in late April, only to see it already liberated by Persian militias, some raising blue flags - the color of Unitarianism - and some flying the old banners of the Safavids. With Tehran and most of Tabaristan under the control of the rebellion, Ottoman Khiva was now completely cut off from the rest of the Empire, too. Not good, not good at all...

Finally, the first months of 1913 saw the entrance of a new participant into the war - Shun China. The Shun Dynasty had been ruling China since the fall of the Ming, and their period marked a decline in China's importance on the world stage thanks to relative isolation and failure to catch up to the West and the Middle East. While the Mughal Empire embraced Western technology and scientific advancements, China was a relative laggard, but the last decade of the 19th century marked a change in the Middle Kingdom, led by the Yongwu Emperor. Under the guiding words of "change from above", he reopened China to foreign trade and led the nation to a slow beginning of industrialization thanks to a number of imperial decrees easing foreign investment and adapting Western novelties in local businesses. His son, the Shangwu Emperor, ascended to the throne a few years before the beginning of war in Europe, and he decided to exploit the chaos among "Western Barbarians" to retake the island of Taiwan, more commonly known across the world as New Zealand. Whether this move of pragmatism would succeed or would the weakened Dutch still be able to push back the invasion from the mainland was a question for the future to tell.

Over two years have passed in the Great European War, and while peace is still far behind the horizon, some participants were already deeply regretting ever joining. And soon, some countries will regret it even harder.

Many, many heads will soon roll.