Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk

I should point out that I carefully avoided reading about 19th century European history while writing that period in LTTW because I didn't want to subconsciously recreate OTL. Then afterwards Lord Roem told me that that "Russian succession dispute but neither side wants the throne" thing actually happened in the same era in OTL. Can't win.

*Constantine of Poland intensifies*
 
"as you know, the Irish invented the steam-powered tricycle, in this chapter I will show them conquering Singapore"
I wonder if the Singaporeans were as worried about legions of Hibernian steam tricycles sweeping down the Malay Peninsula as the LTTW Germans were about Russian armarts on the Northern European Plain.
 
The world is witnessing the murderous violence inherent in the system of all backwards Societies. It is now clear to all that the criminal cartels known as the Pact and the Protocol did not care about the lives of their subject Humans enough to properly plan out the war they started. As we can see, numerous criminal enterprises are finding themselves unable to handle the number of fronts they have opened, and victories or defeats are no longer a matter of planning, but of chance. But many Humans on both sides refuse to be blinded by the cartels' lies. Is it not clear that millions of Amigos in the unfree Zones are yearning for Social Progress?
 

xsampa

Banned
Is there a prosperous part of TTL’s modern India that isn’t Bengal? It seems that Bengal is an analog to OTL present-day South Africa compared to the rest of the continent
 
I should point out that I carefully avoided reading about 19th century European history while writing that period in LTTW because I didn't want to subconsciously recreate OTL. Then afterwards Lord Roem told me that that "Russian succession dispute but neither side wants the throne" thing actually happened in the same era in OTL. Can't win.
I think, that in any universe, running russia is a shit enough job that sooner or later you'll see a situation where multiple candidates all don't want it at the same time.
 
Lithuania was in personal union with Russia, until the Daftest Succession War Ever* happened.



*in which the two claimants insisted that the other one was the rightful ruler
For the sake of accuracy, there hadn't been a personal union--that's what the Grand Duke of Lithuania was fighting to prevent.
 
280.2

Thande

Donor
From: “The Black Twenties” by Errol Mitchell (1973)—

As the fateful year of 1922 ended, it is worth briefly examining the global state of play.

In central and eastern Europe, the fall of isolated and embattled Czechosilesia to the Germans was now inevitable, while the Russians were also forced to fall back—albeit only slightly—before Germany’s more anaemic advances in Poland, aided by Polish partisan sabotage of the Russian war machine. The uncomfortable alliance between Germany and Scandinavia also bore fruit. Though the naval clashes between the Scandinavian and Vitebsk Pact Baltic forces[5] did not yield filmish epic battles like the Scheldt and Ceylon—both sides mindful of those and seeking to avoid battle at a disadvantage—the Pact was generally held at bay. Things tilted further towards the Scandinavians when their allies were boosted; Germany’s small naval force had been in place since the beginning, but following the Scheldt and less storied defeats of Belgian naval forces in home waters, English and French ships were also able to enter the Baltic to aid their allies. Though revolts in Finland were more limited than Paris had hoped (having underestimated how much the Finns regarded their current autonomy as an improvement on memories of Swedish rule), the grim winter war in Russian Sweden continued to favour the Scandinavians. Though the Russians were, of course, masters of such warfare, ultimately all other fronts were suffering due to the focus on Persia and attempting to subdue Tartary and relieve Pendzhab.

In hindsight, it is easy for us to see how some optimists (more often in London or Dresden than Paris) saw Russia’s slow, defensive retreat on the European fronts to hint that the Tsar’s reputation had proved unexpectedly hollow, and his rotten empire would come crashing down at a bold thrust.[6] Such conclusions undoubtedly played a role in moves such as the fall of Don Federico Borromeo’s cautious government in Rome in favour of one led by Antonio Orsini, who believed that Italy ran the risk of being sidelined at a peace treaty unless she took a more active role. Orsini had grand and slightly quixotic ambitions to demand Russian Erythrea, and its consequent influence over the Abyssinian Empire, at such a treaty—which, based on Russia’s reversals, he regarded as being only a matter of time. Russia’s early situation was probably also a factor in more byzantine (no pun intended) shifts in political influence at Constantinople, as the voices of pro-revanche factions became more prominent.

However, the Ottoman situation was more complex than this, as the empire was also adjacent to Russia’s main area of success and many of its politicians were mindful of this. Despite missteps like the Shiraz Massacre, Russia’s modern mobilised forces were grinding through northern Persia at a slow but steady rate. The Tsar’s decision to focus on aggression here, at the cost of some forces to subdue Tartary and relieve Penzhab, has been criticised by historians, but did badly shake Paris’ confidence. At the cost of much loss of life, the fabled ‘armart legions’, ultimately led by Marshal Mikhail Kobuzev, had indeed triumphed—albeit not in the effortless sweep across nations that some military theorists had imagined. In the early months of the war, Russian forces operating from the Caucasus took the strategic city of Ardabil and then Tabriz, the latter a historical capital and the centre of Persian governance of its possessions in the region. Meanwhile, in the east Kobuzev’s armarts overran the Khanate of Khiva, easily circumventing the small expeditionary forces France had managed to rush there and taking a few high-profile French prisoners.

Persia proper put up more of a fight, with Shah-Advocate Jafar Karim Khan Zand’s modernised and well-equipped army fighting from long-prepared defensive positions and using geography to their advantage. Nonetheless, the overwhelming numbers of the Russians and their aero superiority—despite France’s attempts to counter it—told. Mashhad, one of Persia’s most populous cities, fell in September after being encircled and pounded by Kobuzev’s armies. This opened up the north of the country for Russian supply lines, and in October Gorgan fell, taking with it the whole of the province of Golestan.[7] Gilan, in the west, fell soon afterwards to General Trubetskoy’s forces operating from Ardabil, with only the key city of Resht and its port of Anzali fighting on.

On November 11th, the Russians launched a surprise naval descent across the Caspian Sea, even as Trubetskoy’s and Kobuzev’s forces advanced on land from both east and west. The Tsar’s strike marines redeemed themselves for their embarrassing failure at Fort Fowler in North America; they were able to sabotage the remains of Persia’s Caspian fleet in dock in embattled Anzali, while simultaneously seizing the city of Amol. Military historians now believe the Russians were overextended, and the isolated strike marines could have been ejected from the city if the Persian General Mohammed Dadvey had not ordered a withdrawal. However, it is easy to judge with hindsight, and the portrayal of Dadvey acting in a panic (used as a scapegoat by later Persian accounts) is questionable. At the time, given the limitations of Lectel and Photel, generals were operating in even more of a ‘fog of war’ than in conflicts today, and Dadvey was doubtless mindful of how Persian forces had previously been cut off and overrun by the armart legions in Mashhad. Some biographers have also pointed out that Dadvey was from a noble family with connections to Amol and its province of Mazandaran, and may have had a visceral fear of the Russians turning the ancient region into a battlefield. However, others have criticised this view, as Dadvey’s connection was vague and he had grown up at the court in Shiraz.

Regardless of the reasons, the Russians had executed a perfect tridentine attack, with forces from the west, north and east all meeting to take Mazandaran and turn the Caspian into what was effectively now a Russian lake—as Peter the Great had always dreamed of.[8] Besides its strategic importance, Amol was also a key centre for both industry and food production, and its loss badly hampered the Persian war effort. 1922 ended with the Russians besieging large and important northern Persian cities such as Tehran and the oft-rebellious Semnan.[9] If not the guerre d’éclair that the theorists had envisaged, hampered by the mountainous terrain of Persia and the competent, well-equipped and French-aided Persian army as their opponent, the Russians had certainly pulled off a dramatic victory. The Shah-Advocate was already considering whether it might be in his country’s best interests to come to the negotiating table, but for now he was assured that victory was still possible—after all, this was a global war, and elsewhere in the world it seemed the Russians might brought down elsewhere. This impression was probably fostered by the fact that Shiraz itself was now eerily peaceful; the capital, in the south of Persia in its Farsi heartland, could not be reached by the enemy except by air—and, after the controversy of the Shiraz Massacre, the Tsar had banned the Imperial Aero Fleet from going anywhere near it.

As mentioned above, things were less rosy for the Russians in Tartary, although France quickly withdrew several half-cocked attempts to directly send expeditionary forces there (her plans having relied on having the support of China). The rebellious Tartars nonetheless benefited from French, German and Italian weapons being supplied to them before the war, and frequently staged successful attacks on the railways that linked up the Russian bases. The Russians, led by General ‘Black Ivan’ Gantimurov, retaliated with terror attacks that, unlike the Shiraz Massacre, were little reported on around the world due to a sheer lack of witnesses. Racial purging followed, with many peoples placed into camps or limited to only former parts of their historic lands, with Russian settlers moved in afterwards (not always of their own will). The full details of the crimes de guerre were not exposed until a memoir written by a haunted veteran of the Russian forces, Alexei Zamotin, in 1937. Though they are frequently today considered one of the emblematically catastrophic events that characterise the Black Twenties, this is therefore something of a hindsight view, as are suggestions of moral equivalence between the Tsar and the Societists. Some have argued that the forced movement of peoples also exacerbated the spread of the primary emblematic catastrophe of the era through Russia...

Gantimurov’s brutal reprisals did not do much for the embattled Russian forces in Pendzhab, facing rebellion from their subjects and Sikh administrators, of which more detail elsewhere. Using their powerful aero forces as a means of resupply, the Russians managed to supply Prince Yengalychev’s troops with just sufficient materiel to make surrender untenable, yet insufficient to actually break out of their fortified positions. Much the same was true farther west on the American front, where the fort of Shemeretvsk was still grimly battling on at the end of 1922, though all its hinterland had long since been lost to the Americans. The Americans had advanced slightly into what was then called Russian America, with aero raids on military facilities at the key cities of Baranovsk and Shevembsk[10] and the seizure of the Russian half of the former Superior Republic. However, while the Russian positions here were still clearly even more neglected than those in Europe, the Americans also needed time to mobilise their own land forces, and some of their recruitment tactics were met with a lukewarm response by the American people. Around this time, Russian propaganda (and not a few European grumbles) claimed that the Americans had been ‘softened’ by President Faulkner’s ‘petticoat government’ Social Americanism, and that young American boys were now unmanly and unfit for war.[11] The primary effect of this was to stop older Americans who’d been saying the same thing, and instead making them rally around the flag and support their troops against this foreign insult. From the start of the campaign season in 1923, the Americans would demonstrate that Social Americanism had not ‘softened’ them one bit.

And what of elsewhere? The war in Africa is an oft-neglected field, with the Russians, Belgians and Matetwa fighting the English, Scandinavians, Italians and Cape Dutch—we will examine in this in more detail later. Further north, there was surprisingly little conflict around the Horn; after the defeat at Ceylon gave the Persians and their Omani subjects cold feet about combining their naval forces with France’s, they were kept in home waters and effectively bottled up the small Russian fleet based on Erythrea. Border conflicts between Russian-backed Abyssinia and Persian-Omani Zanguebar were relatively minor, except where local rulers saw an opportunity for advantage. The war also put the nascent, modernising African state of Kitara at the centre of a three-way conflict.[12] Already in a never-ending brush war with the increasingly Societist-dominated heart of Africa to its west, Kitara was now subject to the influence of rival Persian-Omani and Russian-Abyssinian backed factions at its court in Mengo.[13] Any spark could set the conflict alight.

In India it felt as though both sides were simultaneously on the back foot. The Russians might be embattled in Pendhzab, but they and their Belgian allies benefited from Van de Velde’s triumph at Ceylon: the island became a strong fortress and rallying point from which the Vitebsk Pact forces continued to harry France’s rich coastal possessions. The flames of Bisgani social revolt were fanned, with the so-called Bisnagi Mutiny largely being limited to industrial strike action and protest. This was influenced by the success of the Pérousiens obtaining Home Rule and demanding the latter for the peoples of French India. Although King Chamaraja Wodeyar XII is today often seen as a leader of the Mutiny, in fact he and the Kingdom of Mysore initially regarded it with alarm, as the potential beginnings of a revolution that could sweep the Mysorean state away. It was only when the King was unimpressed with France’s flailing response to the Mutiny that he decided he knew where the future lay, and nailed his colours to the mutineers’ mast. Elsewhere in India, the Bengalis prepared to march into the once-lawless Aryan Void to support the Pendzhabi revolt against the Russians, while all sides (except the Chinese) neglected the surreptitious machinations of the Societists – not in the former Maratha lands as the French had guessed, but in the International Guntoor Region.

Yet in all of this we have neglected the biggest and bloodiest front of the war at all. Following aero raids on Paris, and amid fears sparked by the Shiraz Massacre, the Cazeneuve Government in Paris decided that the only reasonable course of action was to attempt to knock Belgium out of the war before such barbarism could come to Europe. Thus a continent was set alight once more by an old, old war objective that would have been well familiar to Louis XIV or Marshal Boulanger; France invaded the Low Countries. All the military might, technological advancement and weight of numbers that Europe’s most powerful nation could wield was hurled against a border which had remained fixed for almost a century. The French border cities of Tournai and Mons were turned into armed camps, their Walloon inhabitants almost dazzled by the wall-to-wall reminders of the Route des Larmes and Belgium’s historical crimes. All the propaganda ability of France swung into line, including the nascent sciences of filmmaking and Photel broadcasts, promising the lost Walloon cities of Wittelsbach and Luik (formerly Charleroi and Liége) would be reclaimed for the descendants of those who had been racially purged from them.

Of course, this rhetoric backfired horribly. At the start of the war, Belgium was a country seething with discontent, her king reduced to a cipher by his father’s deal with the devil, half the time treated as a mere colony of Petrograd. The defeat at the Scheldt could have been a trigger for a revolt, as it showed Russia’s inability to protect Belgium from external attack. Instead, Cazeneuve’s policy only served to convince the Belgian people that the French were set on their virtual extermination, leading them to fight resolutely for their homes even if they had little time for their puppet king or his master the Tsar. In particular, those from historically Walloon-populated cities could scarcely compromise with an opponent that sought, at best, to uproot them from their homes and pack them into reserves elsewhere (as they saw it). This also served to erase any remaining barrier between Flemings and Dutch of the former United Provinces, whereas there might still have been a possibility of exploiting such a division, perhaps using France’s alliance with the Cape Dutch. Instead, the propaganda offensive served to give the latter group pause, and would ultimately render them vulnerable to emissaries sent from the now-Societist corpses of the two other former exilic Dutch states...

By the end of 1922, it was clear that Cazeneuve’s ambitions for a quick victory had been rendered hollow. While the Russians in Persia were driving through vast areas of land, in Belgium all the industrial misery of modern warfare was concentrated into a tiny area made hell on earth (in the words of one poet). The French had managed to take Ypres and were threatening Ostend (with rather lukewarm help from the English, who did not return Cazeneuve’s calls about sending troops) and were crawling up the rivers Sambre and Meuse towards Wittelsbach and Namen,[14] yet had relativelty little progress to show for the hundreds of thousands of deaths both sustained and inflicted by her armies in bitter trench warfare. Modern protguns and aero forces made some difference, but the sheer resilience of the Belgians, and generations of fortresses and defensive lines built by paranoid Wittelsbach kings, made the country a terribly hard nut to crack. And while this was ongoing, of course, the very thing Cazeneuve had feared was happening. While both sides pledged to only attack military targets following the Russian massacre at Shiraz, in practice bombing of civilians in both Paris and Brussels, as well as Lille and many other cities, proved unavoidable. France continued to appeal for help from the Germans, who continued to mutter something reassuring-sounding while remaining focused on trying to push into Poland as a fence against the inevitable day when Russia was able to commit more forces. France’s anaemic success was regarded as a point of pride for the Belgians, creating the myth of ‘plucky little Belgium stands alone’ which would continue to influence the country’s national character to the present day. At the same time, Belgium was isolated by the defeat at the Scheldt, her people were starving and her army was low on supplies. Surely they could not last much longer, Cazeneuve told himself, as he nervously watched his numbers in the Grand-Parlement and the wrinkles in King Charles XI’s forehead.

Such was the world at the end of 1922. Yet, while all eyes were on men fighting and dying (and frequently taking women and children with them) on a dozen fronts throughout the world, nature would soon remind mankind that no matter how many inventive ways men had conceived to end their lives, they still could not hold a candle to her.

A little after 1923 dawned, according to the western Gregorian calendar, it was time for New Year celebrations according to the different, lunar calendar used in the East. People of sufficient means in both China and Siam returned to their families, or went to capital cities for major celebrations, doubly rejoicing that their wise rulers had kept their nations out of war, ensuring they would not have to fear that their boys would lose their lives.

Or so they thought, as they scratched their flea bites, cursed the rats nibbling at the food in their markets, and read in their newspapers about the new transport links to Yunnan province following the reconciliation and open border between their rival empires...






[5] This author is less prone to resort to misleadingly using the alliance names, but here it is a useful shorthand to avoid having to list Russians, Lithuanians, Poles, Finns, Courlanders etc. separately.

[6] It is worth remembering that in TTL, no external force has seriously tried to invade Russia since Sweden did in the Great Northern War, more than two centuries before this. Unlike OTL, with its example of Napoleon, claims that Russia is a paper tiger and modern technology have obviated its historical geographic advantages are taken somewhat more seriously.

[7] The provinces of Persia are not quite the same as those of modern or historical Iran in OTL, as these formal subdivisions long postdate the POD. At this point in our history, Iran did not have a separate province of Golestan, but does today.

[8] This is passing over details slightly. Peter the Great (in both OTL and TTL) did defeat the Persians in the war of 1722-23 and annex the coastline of the Caspian down to Resht and beyond; however, the lands were returned to the Persians barely a decade later in the Treaty of Resht, partly because of a revival of Persian power under Nader Shah. In any case, Peter had never held the eastern coast of the Caspian (as would be required to truly make it a ‘Russian lake’), as the Russians did not control that part of Central Asia at the time.

[9] Semnan’s vaguely-alluded-to reputation here reflects both a general historical enmity for distant rulers and a more specific connection to the Qajar dynasty, which never succeeded in seizing power in TTL.

[10] OTL Vancouver and Kelowna, BC, Canada, respectively.

[11] ‘Petticoat government’ is a nineteenth and early twentieth century phrase used in OTL to mean either something similar to the modern ‘nanny state’ or sometimes as a disparaging phrase to describe women in government. In this case it is being used in the former sense.

[12] ‘Kitara’ is really the state we call Buganda dominating its neighbours, having had a similar-to-OTL rise to power following the decline of its former master Bunyoro in the eighteenth century. However, in TTL, just as Bunyoro sometimes invoked the name of the old, possibly legendary empire of Kitara to claim legitimacy, Buganda continues to do so. (It should be noted that the history of these kingdoms is based on unreliable and debated sources).

[13] Today in OTL considered only a district of the Ugandan capital of Kampala.

[14] I.e. Namur.
 
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Thande

Donor
Thanks to Gary Oswald aka Youngmarshall (the blog article editor on www.sealionpress.co.uk ) for his help in explaining to me just how little the conventional narrative for the Bunyoro-Buganda history is based on, so I threw up my hands and just slapped a lot of caveats on it.

Anyway, that's it for LTTW now and we go on hiatus for a month. I hope you have enjoyed this volume so far, and please keep up the comments and discussion.

In the meantime, I hope you all have as happy a Christmas break as any of us can have given the current global situation, God bless and let us hope for a brighter 2021!

- Thande
 
Or so they thought, as they scratched their flea bites, cursed the rats nibbling at the food in their markets, and read in their newspapers about the new transport links to Yunnan province following the reconciliation and open border between their rival empires...
Plague?
 

xsampa

Banned
It was only when the King was unimpressed with France’s flailing response to the Mutiny that he decided he knew where the future lay, and nailed his colours to the mutineers’ mast
Will they get autonomy?
Also the Cape Dutch turning Societist is weird
 
I'm not sure that it's the Spanish flu though. There seems to be a focus on rats and fleas, which is more commonly associated with plague. It would also be interesting (and horrifying) if the Black Death returned ttl
That would be another good reason for calling it the Black Twenties. IOTL, there were later outbreaks of Plague, such as the third plague pandemic which lasted from 1850 to 1960, and most recently in 2017 in Madagascar.
 
All the propaganda ability of France swung into line, including the nascent sciences of filmmaking and Photel broadcasts, promising the lost Walloon cities of Wittelsbach and Luik (formerly Charleroi and Liége) would be reclaimed for the descendants of those who had been racially purged from them.

Of course, this rhetoric backfired horribly. At the start of the war, Belgium was a country seething with discontent, her king reduced to a cipher by his father’s deal with the devil, half the time treated as a mere colony of Petrograd. The defeat at the Scheldt could have been a trigger for a revolt, as it showed Russia’s inability to protect Belgium from external attack. Instead, Cazeneuve’s policy only served to convince the Belgian people that the French were set on their virtual extermination, leading them to fight resolutely for their homes even if they had little time for their puppet king or his master the Tsar. In particular, those from historically Walloon-populated cities could scarcely compromise with an opponent that sought, at best, to uproot them from their homes and pack them into reserves elsewhere (as they saw it).

With most German military forces focused on Case Charlemagne, advances into Poland from Pomerania and Brandenburg were largely half-hearted by comparison. The circumstances of the whole matter illustrate just why Emperor Anton thought it so reasonable to take a view that the war would inevitably be a disaster. On paper, this weak-willed, vaccilating compromise between two bold but risky plans, risking the downsides of both, should have failed badly. The fact it did not represents a very lucky moment for the German state, if not its monarchy, and one it was arguably due for after some of the reversals of the Pandoric War! It turned out that the General Staff had overestimated the forces the Russians could bring to bear in Europe at this point, as well as how much the Russians could rely on the Poles (who took a stance of being as unhelpful as they could get away with, including quietly sabotaging internal rail links). Paradoxically, the Germans’ aforementioned unenthusiastic pushes into Poland came across as a deliberate attempt to avoid antagonising the Poles, rather than the result of an inadequate compromise, and ensured such sabotage continued. The same was true of how the Luftkorps focused its aero attacks on the Charlemagne campaign and avoided attacking Polish military targets, focusing on Russian bases in Poland for reasons of limited resources rather than a deliberate policy. However, the advantages of this were quickly realised by Maurice and from 1923 it became an actual order to avoid unnecessary damage to the Poles.

The exiled King Albert IV returned and the old Kingdom of Bohemia was proclaimed once again—naturally leading to counter-persecution of the Czechs once again, storing up more problems for the future.

By threatening the Belgians with expulsion the French have strengthened Belgian resistance, while a different approach could have allowed them to shut the Belgian front down quickly and help the remaining allies. "What if France framed its invasion of Belgium as a liberation from Russian occupation?" could end up being a very popular what-if question in this timeline. A fast Belgian collapse would have put even more pressure on Russia at a time when the war already seemed to be going against it, perhaps even bringing Russia to the peace table and ending the war before the worst of the Black Twenties. By not antagonizing the Poles Germany has managed to reduce the pressure on its eastern front. (Of course this was helped by the fact that LTTW Germany was unified by Saxony. Unlike Prussia, Saxony did not annex important pieces of Poland. So the Saxon-led Germany and Poland easily accepted a border based on the old Polish-Holy Roman Empire border, and the present German offensives into Poland are meant to secure a buffer zone instead of annexing territory.) Antagonizing the Czechs is implied to cause problems in the future, perhaps very soon. The Kingdom of Bohemia is beginning to sound a bit like OTL Yugoslavia. The lesson would seem to be clear: recognition of other nations' separate existence gains their sympathy and is profitable while threatening and suppressing them causes problems. Has Europe accidentally stumbled onto the beginnings of diversitarianism?
 
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xsampa

Banned
Re: India. The Bengalis marching across Chinese India into Punjab can be seen as a beginning of why Panchala is so screwed up, on top of the Black death from the metropole
 
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