Teetering on the Brink - The Web of Alliances in the stands of the 1910 Centennial Parade
As the United Provinces celebrate their centennial, the seats lining the parade reflect the major alliances of the globe: at center stage, sitting alongside the Supreme Director and the General Secretary, the British Royal Family are joined by the Prime Minister and representatives from its far-flung collection of colonies and Dominions, an the Japanese, Incan and Chilean delegations close out the main stand at the parade.
To their left, the French and American delegations sit at the middle of their own group of hangers on, with the Russian Grand Duke and the Brazilian Empress sitting alongside President Leclerc while Presidents Santamaria of Colombia and Ibañez of Perú flanked President Macarthur. The Mexican, Texan and Californian delegations huddle together at the back of the stand, the Cubans separating them from the Americans.
To the right of the center stand, the German delegation is headed by the Kaiser himself, surrounded by his Chancellor and a swarm of German princelings vying for his favor. The ailing Austro-Hungarian Emperor is not in attendance, but his son and heir strikes a dashing figure seated with his wife alongside the King of Italy and the Grand Duke of Bavaria.
It is the culmination of months of work for the Masters of Ceremony in charge of planning the parade, with a whole floor of the Foreign Ministry cleared out specifically for the task of arranging the seating. The arms race between the various great powers in attendance is accelerating at an alarming pace even as the heads of state - many of them closely related by blood if not by ideology - fraternize oblivious to the danger.
The world is a powder keg, and the world’s empires great and small are too busy sharpening their bayonets to notice the sparks landing dangerously close to the fuse. The grand show of force by the United Provinces pales in comparison with the grand armies and fleets maintained by the British, the French, the Germans or the Russians, and they’ve all trapped one another in a never-ending and ever-accelerating race to outgun the other.
Industrial output continues to boom, with record amounts of steel going into record numbers of ships, rails and guns across the globe. But as countries like the UP grow wealthy feeding the insatiable appetite for the arms race, empires come closer and closer to direct confrontation. Only one question remains: where will the war start?