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Alright, this update is taking a while to finish due to real life so I'll make this one an add-as-I-write one. Here's what I've got done so far.

Part Fifty-Eight: Peace at Last

Homage to Catalonia: After many back and forth battles in the Mediterranean and France only achieving much success around Catalonia and the Balearic Islands, France finally got the upper hand in the Mediterranean in 1870. In late 1869, France launched a new naval fleet out of Nantes and sailed it toward the English Channel. With several British ships recalled to the Channel to prevent the French gaining superiority in the seas, France caught the naval bases at Malta and the Ionian Islands off guard and landed small forces in various British islands around the eastern Mediterranean. Malta and Corfu were captured by March of 1870, and Kefalonia fell to the French army in September.

On the Spanish mainland, France continued gaining momentum against the Coalition forces in both Catalonia and the Basque Country. Barcelona succumbed to the French siege and balloon bombings after six months as thousands of men lay dead in the streets of the city. The Spanish had resorted to urban fighting to hold off the French as long as they could, and as a result many of the city's buildings were reduced to rubble. After the capture of Barcelona, the French army began advancing northwest. The war ended before any more significant gains were made, however, and Barcelona stood a ravaged husk as French troops filed back to the city during the occupation of the city in the winter of 1870.

In the Basque Country, the Spanish troops and the Irish Foreign Legion were in dire straits. French artillery had been bombarding the Spanish defensive networks and now made extending or repairing the defenses almost impossible. Along with the direct combat, French generals had also enlisted Basques and Carlists in their cause as saboteurs. These saboteurs were disrupting the Spanish rail and telegraph networks and misinformation and dwindling supplies in some areas, causing discontent and several lowered morale among the Spanish infantrymen. The stalemate at the Guernica River that had held off the French for years at last shattered in May of 1870 and French soldiers surged through the widening cracks in the Spanish line like water breaking through a failing dam. By the time the General Armistice was agreed to in November of 1870, the French had seized both Bilbao and Vitoria. Bilbao was one of the cities with a French presence between the General Armistice and the Berlin Conference in March of 1871 finally restored peace to Western Europe.


In Flanders Fields: France also made many gains in the final year of the Second Napoleonic War in Belgium. The French kept the front in the eastern half of Belgium at the approximate line following the Sambre River and moved tens of thousands of men to the western section of the front. The increase in French troops punched a hole in the Coalition lines near Lille and Kortnijk across the Belgian border fell into French hands by April. The French advance widened to include Tournai and Ypres in the next two months as Belgian leaders began considering engaging in separate negotiations with the French.

As the French continued marching through Belgium, the French general Antoine Chanzy turned the army's advance not toward Brussels, but rather toward the coast of Belgium. President Louis-Napoleon had reasoned that Great Britain had become the main opponent to France in the war and advised his military staff to focus on injuring Great Britain as much as they could. Additionally, the British had made a landing of thirty thousand more soldiers, two thirds of whom were Irish, at Dunkerque at the beginning of 1870. French forces had been able to contain this new British force in the city until now, but it was growing ever more difficult as the Royal Navy was sending supplies through several Belgian ports and the French ships in that part of the English Channel were unable to stop enough supply shipments.

General Chanzy kept the pressure against the Coalition lines as the British and Belgians were pushed further back toward the Channel. The French army in the central push was divided into three sections. The Ypres Corps was tasked with taking Nieuwpoort, the Rosselare Corps was tasked with harassing Brugge and taking the city if possible, and the Krontijk Corps was tasked with advancing toward Ghent. The Ypres Corps took Nieuwpoort while the Rosselare Corps reached as far as Oostkamp just south of Brugge by July. The trap was set and the Ypres Corps turned west to accompany the other French armies surrounding Dunkerque.


The Evacuation of Dunkerque and the General Armistice: As the hot summer months bore down on Europe in 1870, the French armies in Belgium were content to sit and hold their positions while the main force of the French northern front was turned toward Dunkerque. The British had unloaded an extra hundred thousand men in the French port city the previous winter, bringing the total number of Coalition soldiers in the Dunkerque area to a staggering 150,000 men. By the beginning of August, the French had almost a complete wall of people and field guns arranged in a tweny mile wide semicircle from Gravelines to Koksijde.

The first site of fighting in the Battle for Dunkeqrue came in Koksijde, where the British armies attempted to push back the French and recapture Nieuwpoort and another supply port. The British force, while concentrated in this circle, was also necessarily spread out all around the circle and the Ypres Corps easily repelled the British attack. Once London realized the situation in Dunkerque as the French started to close in on the city, the Royal Navy attempted landings and naval bombardments at Calais and Boulogne and create a wider field of play in the battle. These landings succeeded for a few days, but within two weeks the British were rebuffed and the small landing parties had to be sailed back across the Channel.

The final assault on Dunkerque took place between August 13th and October 21st of 1870. In mid-August, the French forces began to close in on the city, taking large losses from the British artillery and the Royal Navy. Naval attacks on Gravelines heavily damaged the army there, but the French continued inching forward. The British attempted to break out of the city and gain a wider front as French artillery began lobbing shells into the city, but no attempts in August or early September were successful. Heavy fighting continued until early October, when the French had taken Capelle-la-Grande and it was clear to the British that continuing to hold Dunkerque was an untenable position. The Royal Navy set up procedures for evacuating the troops in the city, but as there were so many it took over two weeks under fire to get the last of the soldiers out. Over 40,000 men died in total during the two months of the French assault on Dunkerque, and the losses by the British were so great that in November Parliament agreed to sign the General Armistice and participate in the Berlin Conference early the next year.