A bezant is, by definition, a roundel Or. You can't have a white bezant and more than you can have a white Chocolate Lab.
A white/silver/argent roundel is called a plate.
Look to the West Volume V: To Dream Again
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
A white/silver/argent roundel is called a plate.
An interesting look into TTL America, and at least with a happy ending. It's sweet and I'm rooting for the family.
Alex Richards
Donor
Well that was an emotional piece. Hammers home the idea that being sent home a cripple- and thus not having to go out again- is a good thing by this point.
Thande
Donor
Yep, that's from the same textbook. It uses him in what feels like almost every example question, I assume this is an ancient running gag as the textbook's in like the fifteenth edition or something like that.Yeah I specifically had this photo in mind:
The white Portuguese ones are referred to as bezants in every source I've looked at.
An interesting update that addresses several issues: 
This describes a case of social ascent in the late XIX century, climbing through hard work (and some luck) and marrying with a life partner with a slightly more educated background.
An example on the impact that (now treatable) diseases had in family lives and their loved ones.
A description of the discrimination felt by minorities, especially in times of war, and the phenomenon of cultural misidentification by an host society.
A touching example of parental love for their only son.
Thande
Donor
Well observed Archangel, those were just the themes I was going for. I've read quite a few books written in this period in OTL so it's useful to remind us of 'where we're up to' in terms of societal evolution, even though many things are different.An interesting update that addresses several issues:
This describes a case of social ascent in the late XIX century, climbing through hard work (and some luck) and marrying with a life partner with a slightly more educated background.
An example on the impact that (now treatable) diseases had in family lives and their loved ones.
A description of the discrimination felt by minorities, especially in times of war, and the phenomenon of cultural misidentification by an host society.
A touching example of parental love for their only son.
So let me think.
The Philadephia Pact (I think that was their name) - the ENA, Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Venezuela, Anglo-American puppets in Africa, India and Burma I presume, I kinda assume that Cuba, Jamaica and Superior are at least some kind of associates
+
The Pressburg Pact - Germany, Danubia, Poland
+
Feng China
+
The Ottoman Empire and their African vassals
+
Autiaraux
vs
The Hermandad - the UPSA, Brazil, Aymara (not really sure they are a sovereign state), Guyana, Pernambuco, New Granada, Peru, Mexico, Guatemala, Carolina, Congo, the Philippines, Batavia, Senor Olivenca's Company/thingamajig in India, one or two native states in East Indies, Siam, South Africa
+
Vitebsk Union - Russia, Lithuania, Finland, Courland, Scandinavia, Corea, Beiqing China, Kazakh Khanate and probably other Central Asian states, maybe Abyssinia and Hawaii
+
Belgium
That's all I think. I'm probably wrong about some countries being members of certain alliances, probably some of the lesser members never joined the war.
Of course, there's the French faction consisting of France, Italy, the Bernese Republic, Spain, Catalonia, Navarre, Portugal and Bavaria as wild cards, and I don't think that Persia and their vassals in Central Asia, the Middle East and East Africa have been mentioned so far.
EDIT: Added Hawaii.
EDIT 2: Post liked by Thande. I guess I'm onto something.
Last edited:
I've finally completely caught up with LTTW after all this time. Probably the best TL on the site, godspeed Thande
I just recently read through it all and I've been really enjoying it. I really like TLs that deal with original or divergent political ideologies so this has been a treat.
yeah, i've never seen another timeline that was this divergent in ideological development. It is fascinating looking at all the political science behind it.
You might enjoy that timeline where the southern US remains loyal to Britain but Canada rebels because a successful governor of OTL Canda was posted to TTL south. Eventually a Malthusian ideology develops. The timeline is called Dominion of Southern America IIRC.
Thanks for the suggestion! You remembered the name right, I found it through the wiki.
For your consideration, "What Madness is This" has Fifth Way Anarchism become the dominant revolutionary ideology and the "Co-Prosperity Sphere" timeline has Coprosperism/National Monarchism supplant Fascism.
Thande
Donor
(Part 246.2)
Prague, Kingdom of Bohemia, German Federal Empire
March 24th 1899
The victory at Stargard had been a week ago, yet Wilhelm, Freiherr von Eichendorf, felt as though the battle was still being fought within the confines of his skull. In these dark times it was good to use a sliver of his leave to celebrate a rare victory, and to silence the little voice that warned that merely repulsing the Ivans from crossing the Oder and pushing towards Dresden was perhaps not quite the same as a step on the road to the Fatherland’s inevitable victory.
Though Wilhelm was theoretically on leave, he was still frantically checking the Lectel messages at the signal post at the Prager Burg. Things up at the Moravian Gate, which he had left a few days ago, were not going well. At first, Wilhelm had felt relief that the Russians were not trying to push westwards deeper into Silesia, where his family and most of his ancestral family lands were. He knew that the Corps of Engineers had been busy building new defensive lines west of Breslau since the city’s fate had become clear, hoping to tempt the Tsar’s generals into a deceptively simple-looking march on Dresden. But instead the Russians had turned aside and tackled the more difficult-seeming prize, throwing everything they had into the gap between the Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains. All the misery of modern warfare had turned that once-pleasant landscape into something reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch’s depiction of Hell: bitter trench warfare, cingular guns and spike-wire, artillery barrages and shrieking rockets, bombs falling without warning from slow, silent steerables or even the new lightning-quick aerodromes.
It had not been a promising target for the aggressor, yet the Russians seemed to be slowly but determinedly pushing the Germans and their Danubian allies (precious few of them, these days—and rumours of secret negotiations were circulating...) back. If the Ivans could break through into the March Valley, they could reinforce from their base in Ostrau[3] where they were sat on an uncomfortable portion of Bohemia’s coal reserves. The whole of the kingdom could be opened up to them, especially if the Danubians really did pull out of the war.
Wilhelm would fight to his last breath to prevent that from happening.
Tomorrow. Tonight...tonight was his. It might be his last time, if the fortune of war did not smile upon him. Nobles no less than common soldiers could be found by a bullet, Alexandrian or otherwise.[4] It was not, perhaps, the most honourable action Wilhelm could choose to take. His pious brother Friedrich would probably argue that he should spend the night in prayer and contemplation. But then they had never seen eye to eye.
A cautious knock came at the door of Wilhelm’s room. Smiling, he barked “Enter!” in his best bluff officer voice. No, not quite—on the front line, he tried to tone down his Silesian accent lest he be looked down on by the High Saxons (and what did they have to boast about these days, when they were the ones voting in so-called High Radical traitors who tried to undermine the war effort?) Here in Bohemia, he didn’t have to be on his guard quite so much. Especially not here.
The door opened and closed again, moving silently on well-oiled hinges. The bolt, too, slid into place without a squeak. Discretion was the byword of this establishment.
Wilhelm’s smile broadened as his eyes assessed the new arrival with the same careful analysis they would give a battlefield map showing enemy positions. A casual description would say that the woman—girl, really—wore traditional Bohemian women’s clothing, increasingly fading from view these days as society urbanised. The basic items, aprons and blouses, were not too dissimilar to the Silesian peasants’ clothing Wilhelm knew from the farmers who worked his family’s land, though the details were different. However, a more subtle eye would take in the differences: those aprons were rather shorter than would be considered decent in your average Moravian peasant village, and there was a hint of silk beneath them. Similarly, beneath her red headscarf, the makeup used to enhance her already considerable beauty was beyond the financial reach of any peasant. She smiled back at him, a few blonde curls escaping from the headscarf as she did. Wilhelm was aware it was just an act. And so? Did a man demand his money back at the end of the opera when he learned that, actually, that wasn’t Thidrek, just a tenor playing him, and he hadn’t actually been taken away by Satan in the form of a black horse, because he was on stage at the end taking bows?[5] What rot! A man paid for an opera or theatre ticket to see an actor work his craft, to appreciate his skill at fooling him into thinking these events were really happening in front of him, that the emotional reactions were genuine. Was this really so different?
Well, that’s what Wilhelm told himself, anyway, though he suspected that his wife Ursula (who enjoyed the opera) would not quite see it that way. But Ursula was a long way away. Well, the other side of a mountain range, anyway.
“Wer bist du?” he asked, and resisted the urge to add ‘heute Nacht’ – that would destroy the magic. As far as the little roleplay was concerned, they had never met before.
“I am called Veronika, little Veronika from the mountains,” the Bohemian girl said in halting, accented German, an untutored peasant’s voice. There was uncertainty and perhaps even a hint of fear in her eyes, a girl snatched from her comfortable rustic life, fearful she might become the plaything of powerful men in a world she knew nothing of.
Yesterday she had been a domineering, spoiled young duchess who used old men and callously threw them away, and her German had been impeccably aristocratic Dresden, to the point that even Wilhelm had started to feel like a self-conscious rustic. This girl could have been a great actress, he realised, if her life had gone differently, and for a moment he felt ashamed; not for his adultery, but out of regret for how she played to an audience of one.
Still, Wilhelm had never been overburdened with a conscience, and he just smiled broadly, beneath his now sadly greying moustache. “Do not worry, little Veronika,” he said. “I will keep you safe.”
Later, he awakened from a comfortable doze, his disappointing ersatz cigarette still gently smoking on the ashtray next to the bed. He could still smell Veronika on his pillow, but he missed the warmth of her body. Confused, he sat up in the bed. Veronika had pulled back a corner of the thick Verdunkelung curtains to look out over the city, her other hand distractedly attempting to restore her headscarft to her ruffled hair. Many houses and businesses had adopted the thick black curtains to make the city less visible to night raids by Russian steerables, and they served a double function in an establishment like this one. “What are you looking at?” he asked.
She turned back to him, and to his admiration she kept the act going, looking startled and worried. “Lights are flashing from the castle,” she said in her thickly accented German. “I do not kno—”
Wilhelm suddenly lurched into action, almost leaping from the bed and roughly pushing her aside from the window. He stared keenly at the castle, a dark bulk in the dreary spring rain. She was right. Coloured lanterns were being rapidly covered and uncovered, an Optel-type older style of communication which had the advantage of broadcasting across the city to any observer, not merely those awaiting a Lectel message.
The first part of the message was in the clear for any subject who knew the general alert code system: it warned that a Russian raid might be incoming and that everyone should prepare according to the drills they had been instructed in. The second part was coded, but Wilhelm knew the code. His jaw dropped as he saw the pattern of colours he had never hoped to see. Breakthrough. The Russians’ breakthrough, the next few lights clarified, as though anyone would be optimistic enough to think it would be the other way around. The defence of the Moravian Gate had failed. The Tsar’s panzers, or armarts rather, were leading his armies deep into the heart of the Kingdom of Bohemia.
At the front line, in the officer’s mess, Wilhelm routinely swore like a sailor. Right now, none of those curses seemed to carry enough meeting. “Mein Gott,” he whispered, and suddenly sounded a lot like his brother Friedrich. “I need to get to the front line—I can help with logistics and planning—set up a second defensive line—”
“We have catered to several officers with that specialty,” Veronika whispered in his ear as she put her arms around him. Her pseudo peasant accent was gone. Her breath was hot on his cheek, her hand clutched to his chest as though drawing strength from him. “They have been unaccountably detained.”
Wilhelm turned, startled. “Wha—”
And then his treacherous brain filled in a detail that had blurred into the background. He had noted that Veronika had been trying to newly entrap her hair beneath her red headscarf. Therefore, it had seemed natural that she had been handling a hatpin in one hand.
Or at least, something that looked superficially like a hatpin, but was in fact rather longer, thicker and sharper than would be required for that purpose.
His realisation came one heartbeat before the weapon was driven up under his breastbone and into his heart.
Wilhelm grabbed hold of Veronika, his left hand going reflexively for her throat, even as the stab of pain lanced up through him. “Why?” he choked out, tasting blood. He gripped tighter, putting the last of his strength into it.
But Veronika managed to prise his weakening fingers aside, though not before he put bruises on her throat. “Why?” she croaked, and he wondered if he had destroyed her actress’ voice forever. Somehow, that actually saddened him. “Why?” She leaned closer and whispered to him as his vision darkened. “Slovanská Vzájemnost.”
Wilhelm didn’t strictly speak the Bohemian language, but it was similar to some of the dialects he knew from Silesia. Even if he hadn’t, he had seen that slogan painted illicitly across this kingdom before, going back to his younger days when the Bundeskaiser had tried to force everyone to speak standardised German in his Kulturkrieg, and the Russians had been suspected of fanning public anger against this.
It meant something like ‘Slavs Together’.
Perhaps it was Wilhelm’s imagination, but he thought he heard the first bomb drop before he went.
[3] Ostrau is German for what is now in OTL called Ostrava; similarly, the March river is the Morava river.
[4] An ‘Alexandrian bullet’ is a bullet specifically aimed with intent to kill an individual on a battlefield, referencing John Alexander’s action at the Battle of Paris in 1809.
[5] This references an opera based on the Old Norse saga known in German as ‘Thidrekssaga’, about the legendary adventures of Theoderic the Great (who was identified in legends with a figure known as Dietrich of Bern). In OTL, the Thidrekssaga is less well known in Germany than the Nibelungenlied (which also features an appearance by Thidrek), but in TTL the positions are reversed as far as their impact in culture such as operatic works; the Nibelungenlied was obscure in OTL until its rediscovery in the 1750s.
Prague, Kingdom of Bohemia, German Federal Empire
March 24th 1899
The victory at Stargard had been a week ago, yet Wilhelm, Freiherr von Eichendorf, felt as though the battle was still being fought within the confines of his skull. In these dark times it was good to use a sliver of his leave to celebrate a rare victory, and to silence the little voice that warned that merely repulsing the Ivans from crossing the Oder and pushing towards Dresden was perhaps not quite the same as a step on the road to the Fatherland’s inevitable victory.
Though Wilhelm was theoretically on leave, he was still frantically checking the Lectel messages at the signal post at the Prager Burg. Things up at the Moravian Gate, which he had left a few days ago, were not going well. At first, Wilhelm had felt relief that the Russians were not trying to push westwards deeper into Silesia, where his family and most of his ancestral family lands were. He knew that the Corps of Engineers had been busy building new defensive lines west of Breslau since the city’s fate had become clear, hoping to tempt the Tsar’s generals into a deceptively simple-looking march on Dresden. But instead the Russians had turned aside and tackled the more difficult-seeming prize, throwing everything they had into the gap between the Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains. All the misery of modern warfare had turned that once-pleasant landscape into something reminiscent of Hieronymous Bosch’s depiction of Hell: bitter trench warfare, cingular guns and spike-wire, artillery barrages and shrieking rockets, bombs falling without warning from slow, silent steerables or even the new lightning-quick aerodromes.
It had not been a promising target for the aggressor, yet the Russians seemed to be slowly but determinedly pushing the Germans and their Danubian allies (precious few of them, these days—and rumours of secret negotiations were circulating...) back. If the Ivans could break through into the March Valley, they could reinforce from their base in Ostrau[3] where they were sat on an uncomfortable portion of Bohemia’s coal reserves. The whole of the kingdom could be opened up to them, especially if the Danubians really did pull out of the war.
Wilhelm would fight to his last breath to prevent that from happening.
Tomorrow. Tonight...tonight was his. It might be his last time, if the fortune of war did not smile upon him. Nobles no less than common soldiers could be found by a bullet, Alexandrian or otherwise.[4] It was not, perhaps, the most honourable action Wilhelm could choose to take. His pious brother Friedrich would probably argue that he should spend the night in prayer and contemplation. But then they had never seen eye to eye.
A cautious knock came at the door of Wilhelm’s room. Smiling, he barked “Enter!” in his best bluff officer voice. No, not quite—on the front line, he tried to tone down his Silesian accent lest he be looked down on by the High Saxons (and what did they have to boast about these days, when they were the ones voting in so-called High Radical traitors who tried to undermine the war effort?) Here in Bohemia, he didn’t have to be on his guard quite so much. Especially not here.
The door opened and closed again, moving silently on well-oiled hinges. The bolt, too, slid into place without a squeak. Discretion was the byword of this establishment.
Wilhelm’s smile broadened as his eyes assessed the new arrival with the same careful analysis they would give a battlefield map showing enemy positions. A casual description would say that the woman—girl, really—wore traditional Bohemian women’s clothing, increasingly fading from view these days as society urbanised. The basic items, aprons and blouses, were not too dissimilar to the Silesian peasants’ clothing Wilhelm knew from the farmers who worked his family’s land, though the details were different. However, a more subtle eye would take in the differences: those aprons were rather shorter than would be considered decent in your average Moravian peasant village, and there was a hint of silk beneath them. Similarly, beneath her red headscarf, the makeup used to enhance her already considerable beauty was beyond the financial reach of any peasant. She smiled back at him, a few blonde curls escaping from the headscarf as she did. Wilhelm was aware it was just an act. And so? Did a man demand his money back at the end of the opera when he learned that, actually, that wasn’t Thidrek, just a tenor playing him, and he hadn’t actually been taken away by Satan in the form of a black horse, because he was on stage at the end taking bows?[5] What rot! A man paid for an opera or theatre ticket to see an actor work his craft, to appreciate his skill at fooling him into thinking these events were really happening in front of him, that the emotional reactions were genuine. Was this really so different?
Well, that’s what Wilhelm told himself, anyway, though he suspected that his wife Ursula (who enjoyed the opera) would not quite see it that way. But Ursula was a long way away. Well, the other side of a mountain range, anyway.
“Wer bist du?” he asked, and resisted the urge to add ‘heute Nacht’ – that would destroy the magic. As far as the little roleplay was concerned, they had never met before.
“I am called Veronika, little Veronika from the mountains,” the Bohemian girl said in halting, accented German, an untutored peasant’s voice. There was uncertainty and perhaps even a hint of fear in her eyes, a girl snatched from her comfortable rustic life, fearful she might become the plaything of powerful men in a world she knew nothing of.
Yesterday she had been a domineering, spoiled young duchess who used old men and callously threw them away, and her German had been impeccably aristocratic Dresden, to the point that even Wilhelm had started to feel like a self-conscious rustic. This girl could have been a great actress, he realised, if her life had gone differently, and for a moment he felt ashamed; not for his adultery, but out of regret for how she played to an audience of one.
Still, Wilhelm had never been overburdened with a conscience, and he just smiled broadly, beneath his now sadly greying moustache. “Do not worry, little Veronika,” he said. “I will keep you safe.”
Later, he awakened from a comfortable doze, his disappointing ersatz cigarette still gently smoking on the ashtray next to the bed. He could still smell Veronika on his pillow, but he missed the warmth of her body. Confused, he sat up in the bed. Veronika had pulled back a corner of the thick Verdunkelung curtains to look out over the city, her other hand distractedly attempting to restore her headscarft to her ruffled hair. Many houses and businesses had adopted the thick black curtains to make the city less visible to night raids by Russian steerables, and they served a double function in an establishment like this one. “What are you looking at?” he asked.
She turned back to him, and to his admiration she kept the act going, looking startled and worried. “Lights are flashing from the castle,” she said in her thickly accented German. “I do not kno—”
Wilhelm suddenly lurched into action, almost leaping from the bed and roughly pushing her aside from the window. He stared keenly at the castle, a dark bulk in the dreary spring rain. She was right. Coloured lanterns were being rapidly covered and uncovered, an Optel-type older style of communication which had the advantage of broadcasting across the city to any observer, not merely those awaiting a Lectel message.
The first part of the message was in the clear for any subject who knew the general alert code system: it warned that a Russian raid might be incoming and that everyone should prepare according to the drills they had been instructed in. The second part was coded, but Wilhelm knew the code. His jaw dropped as he saw the pattern of colours he had never hoped to see. Breakthrough. The Russians’ breakthrough, the next few lights clarified, as though anyone would be optimistic enough to think it would be the other way around. The defence of the Moravian Gate had failed. The Tsar’s panzers, or armarts rather, were leading his armies deep into the heart of the Kingdom of Bohemia.
At the front line, in the officer’s mess, Wilhelm routinely swore like a sailor. Right now, none of those curses seemed to carry enough meeting. “Mein Gott,” he whispered, and suddenly sounded a lot like his brother Friedrich. “I need to get to the front line—I can help with logistics and planning—set up a second defensive line—”
“We have catered to several officers with that specialty,” Veronika whispered in his ear as she put her arms around him. Her pseudo peasant accent was gone. Her breath was hot on his cheek, her hand clutched to his chest as though drawing strength from him. “They have been unaccountably detained.”
Wilhelm turned, startled. “Wha—”
And then his treacherous brain filled in a detail that had blurred into the background. He had noted that Veronika had been trying to newly entrap her hair beneath her red headscarf. Therefore, it had seemed natural that she had been handling a hatpin in one hand.
Or at least, something that looked superficially like a hatpin, but was in fact rather longer, thicker and sharper than would be required for that purpose.
His realisation came one heartbeat before the weapon was driven up under his breastbone and into his heart.
Wilhelm grabbed hold of Veronika, his left hand going reflexively for her throat, even as the stab of pain lanced up through him. “Why?” he choked out, tasting blood. He gripped tighter, putting the last of his strength into it.
But Veronika managed to prise his weakening fingers aside, though not before he put bruises on her throat. “Why?” she croaked, and he wondered if he had destroyed her actress’ voice forever. Somehow, that actually saddened him. “Why?” She leaned closer and whispered to him as his vision darkened. “Slovanská Vzájemnost.”
Wilhelm didn’t strictly speak the Bohemian language, but it was similar to some of the dialects he knew from Silesia. Even if he hadn’t, he had seen that slogan painted illicitly across this kingdom before, going back to his younger days when the Bundeskaiser had tried to force everyone to speak standardised German in his Kulturkrieg, and the Russians had been suspected of fanning public anger against this.
It meant something like ‘Slavs Together’.
Perhaps it was Wilhelm’s imagination, but he thought he heard the first bomb drop before he went.
[3] Ostrau is German for what is now in OTL called Ostrava; similarly, the March river is the Morava river.
[4] An ‘Alexandrian bullet’ is a bullet specifically aimed with intent to kill an individual on a battlefield, referencing John Alexander’s action at the Battle of Paris in 1809.
[5] This references an opera based on the Old Norse saga known in German as ‘Thidrekssaga’, about the legendary adventures of Theoderic the Great (who was identified in legends with a figure known as Dietrich of Bern). In OTL, the Thidrekssaga is less well known in Germany than the Nibelungenlied (which also features an appearance by Thidrek), but in TTL the positions are reversed as far as their impact in culture such as operatic works; the Nibelungenlied was obscure in OTL until its rediscovery in the 1750s.
Last edited:
So, Czechmate?
I'll see myself out...
EDIT: Also, the footnotes are missing.
I'll see myself out...
EDIT: Also, the footnotes are missing.