296.2
Thande
Donor
From: “Mme. Mercier’s Diaries, Volume III: Exile’s Return” (1978, authorised English translation 1981)—
February 14th 1926.
It is the day of Saint-Valentin, or so the calendar says. I remember those days when René and I would be one another’s valentines, and then the long years when my heart hurt to see me left alone as all around me celebrate their love.[5] Now, I barely think of it either way. I find myself barely thinking of anything but the war. It is almost three years since Bertrand asked me to join the coalition government as a triumvir. In that time, the world has gone mad all around me.
I look back on the pages of my diary to that time. I thought things were terrible then. Our boys were fighting the Belgians in the mud of the Meuse, fearful of steerables dropping death-luft on our cities.[6] On paper, things should be better now. No-one can threaten us in Paris, and though the casualty lists are terrible, at least the conflict is safely a long way from us, in Poland. Yet progress eluded us for so long. In recent months, we finally had hope of a resolution, but now...
I drink my cup of foul faux coffee. Things were bad enough when the Societists and the Ottomans cut off the supply, but now Cuba has collapsed into civil war as well. Few Russian ironsharks now prowl the Atlantic, though Povilskaja still, frustratingly, fights on. But even when convoys are safe from the enemy, plague quarantine slows them and there is a focus on military essentials. I am wealthy enough to afford the inflated prices of the Guinea beans, of course. But I must show solidarity with the people in some small way.
I look back on those days again, and it breaks my heart. I think of Renée as a cheeky young girl, calling me old-fashioned. Three years have passed. She should be dressing in unsuitable clothes with rouge on her face, dancing with unsuitable boys to dreadful modern music, shocking me and sticking her tongue out when I tell her to focus on her studies, not to throw away years of Cytherean progress. Instead, she works on a factory line, her face free of makeup, her hair wrapped up in a scarf, as determined as I am to prove that none shall say the political class did not pull their weight. I can feel the shape of that future that could have been, that should have been, and I weep. My daughter should not have had to sacrifice her youth on an altar of war. If le petit pasha had not seen fit to burn the world over Khiva.[7] If the Shah-Advocate had not used the last war as an excuse to push into what Pasha sees as his territory. If Hiedler had not shot David Braithwaite. If, if, if...
Ferbuary 15th 1926.
Valéry shocked me today. I want to blame the influence of Diane, that bloodthirsty girl with all her lurid paperbacks she reads when she thinks I’m not looking. Every day I miss poor Anne-Marie. I must send flowers to her grave once more. If only she was the only one I had lost to la peste noire. There have been times over the past years where I think our girls would be safer if they joined their boyfriends and husbands in the trenches in Poland than if they stayed here. No matter how much we drench our sewers in the green poison, if one rat, one flea is missed and bites you, you are in the hands of the good God. There is no cure, only prevention. Dr Vicaire and his colleagues give us hope now, hope of a new wonder treatment; but it is too late for so many.[8]
I digress. Valéry still fills his head with notions of glory, no matter how long the casualty lists extend. He dreams of fighting in Poland, even in Gavaji, where that fool Chambord has killed so many brave young men of Pérousie to no effect. I have given up trying to reason with him. He is a boy, and he is eleven. I wish I could be confident that this war will not last long enough for him to fight in it...
February 16th 1926.
Extraordinary scenes. I was called in for a meeting by the Duc himself. Again I was struck at how the mobiles on the street now seem to have reverted to the coal and steam of my youth, as all the spirit and sun-oil is directed to the armed forces. Many have even returned to the horse and cart; it makes Paris look like a half-hearted period film trying to depict the ancien régime before the Revolution. At least my veil has come in handy again.
But, the meeting. I must paint a picture with words, before they fade from my memory. More than usual, I am conscious of living through history.
All are there, around the table in the Maison de Montmartre with its vast, now faded map of Europe. It is of little real purpose, as I recall Marshal Picotin commenting, and I have seen the far more detailed maps which the Army uses. I can see the holes where the pins marking the battle lines against Belgium once stood; it is so easy to forget that that foe is defeated, her lands reduced to occupation zones. Or it would be, if I did not have to manage so many minor clashes between the different occupation troops. Over in the east, we see the remaining fronts against Russia. The Front, truly, for we spare little attention for the English and Scandinavians with their limited success in Finland. True also to the south and east, where grey pins mark the Ottoman-Russian fronts along the Black Sea and, almost off the edge of the map, in Anatolia. Grey for limited intelligence, outdated, for neither Constantinople nor Petrograd sees fit to issue us reliable updates on their progress.
It matters little, for all eyes are on the concentration of pins cutting Poland in half. The Russians are finally ejected from the last of German territory, as Ruddel has crowed (one would think the Bundeskaiser would make more of it). But since that brief hope of the Italians and their wonder rockets of the future, now reality has set in. The Russians have conceived how to corrupt the Photel beams that the Italians use to guide their rockets (or so I am told; Valéry, with his young mind full of whirring wheels and giant engines, would probably understand it better). Both sides use death-luft, and both sides have countermeasures, masks, filters, rubber suits. It is hell out there, though at least it is not the hell we had until recently.
I look at the map. The window of the great Rose Room is at the south end. The pins are tall, not flush with the table. They cast shadows. In a lump of German territory west of the river Oder, a crescent shape shows on the map with brighter colours than the surrounding area. It marks the place where pins stood almost unmoving for nearly two years, as men were fed into a meat grinder that slaughtered them to no purpose. We cannot allow that ever to happen again.
And yet, as the Duc speaks of ending the war, I find myself troubled. It is the terrible logic of war, that same logic that led Leclerc to form the Protocol of armed neutrality. Once begun, it is very difficult to stop. If fought to a standstill, the only humanitarian outcome would be to end it by any means necessary—but neither side is willing to give way without a prize, or else all those deaths were meaningless. And so it continues. It is like M. Migaud’s observation of the two men imprisoned in a cell with two locks, each with one of the keys.[9] I have never thought myself a woman of blood. The thought of the slaughter in the trenches sickens me. But we cannot be seen to be the side that breaks first.
Henri-Louis (as I sometimes call him in the privacy of my mind) is now in his seventies, a bluff gentleman of the old school whose jollity conceals a keen mind. Or at least, that is how he was when I first met him. I recall he wanted to call me ma chérie all the time; it took me a while to train him out of that. But he means well, and if he slipped today and talked to me like I was some slip of a girl in the ’Sixties, I would not hold it against him.[10] The Duc has almost physically shrunk from the weight of the world upon his shoulders, sagging into his chair, his medals gleaming dimly on his uniform. No-one speaks of it, but present in all our minds like a dark raincloud overhead is the knowledge of what happened to his only predecessor.[11]
Also present were, of course, Bertrand (looking none too well himself), fellow triumvir Thierry Vachaud (I would never have thought to have sympathy for a Noir leader, but he has sacrificed his party’s unity for this war), Controller-General Alain Guibal and a confidential secretary from the Auxiliaire, the only other woman present.[12]
One way in which the Duc’s age has shown is his tendency to ramble. Even Bertrand, no mean waffler himself, looked impatient as he took a while to come to the point. We already knew the situation, of course, but he felt the need to set it out in black and white.
“After so much blood, sweat and tears, we have finally pushed the Russians out of Germany,” Henri-Louis recapped bluntly, pointing at the map. “We needed a victory, a strong position, before we could negotiate, so we do not look like the weak party. Now we’ve done it. So let’s damn’ well end this bloody awful war.”
I glanced at Bertrand. What the Duc wasn’t saying was as important as what he was. If that had been strictly true, we’d have been negotiating with the Russians at least a month ago. He wanted negotiation now because our hopeful breakthrough had slowed to a crawl, not because it had succeeded.
Bertrand spoke diplomatically. “You know that, and I know that, your grace.[13] But does Pasha know it?” He glanced at the grey, forgettable woman from the Auxiliaire. “Please report, mam’zelle. I remind everyone that this information is sub rosa the highest level, and repeating it outside this meeting would endanger our agents.” He said the phrase in a rattled-off, perfunctory manner; all present understood that, and had heard him say it many times.
The nameless woman gave a sharp nod behind her large, face-obscuring glasses. “There is intrigue in the Winter Palace, as always. The Tsar has sunk into depression as the anniversary of his son’s death on the Ottoman front has just passed. In the Soviet, those with ties to the RLPC possess growing concern over the Tsar’s lack of urgency over the American attack on Yapon two weeks ago, and his refusal to deploy reinforcements to General Zhdanovich as he appears to be gaining the upper hand over the Americans in Kamchatka. General Pichegru, the exiled Meridian commander who was the Tsar’s advisor in the earlier part of the war, has fallen out of favour due to his warnings about what the Societists may be planning, which the Tsar is not willing to hear. There are whispers of an alignment with the dowager—”
“Yes, yes,” the bluff Duc cut her off, much to my annoyance. “You see? He’s depressed, mourning his loss. Of course the bastard doesn’t care about the millions of others he’s consigned to an early grave. Uh, pardon my language.” He actually made a point of not addressing that last part to me, which I half-appreciated, though I doubt the Auxiliaire woman was too shy about it either. “Now’s the time to get him to agree to a ceasefire.”
I spoke up. “M. le Duc, there’s a problem. A ceasefire, while we negotiate for an armistice, a treaty...”
“Quite so, ma— Madame,” the Duc nodded, quickly covering his slip. I suppressed a smile.
I tried to explain. “Pasha has one great empire. With the Belgians, Abyssinians and Matetwa out of it, all the other Vitebsk allies border Russia and are under his thumb. He only has to satisfy one group.” I suppose technically that wasn’t true, given what the Auxiliaire girl was saying about his discontented Company people, but never mind, I was making a point. “If we negotiate, we need to get all our allies on side, and if the fighting ceases, we lose the sense of urgency. There’s already grumbling about what should happen to Belgium, as you know, and if our boys are no longer fighting alongside the Germans and Italians on a daily basis...”
“Eh? What do you mean?” the Duc said. I know he knew what I meant, he was just trying not to confront it. He depserately wants this to be over. I cannot blame him for that.
Vachaud spoke up. “She means,” he said, a little rudely I thought, “that we’re only holding together as a team because of a common enemy. Take that away, even temporarily, and our alliance cracks—and then if your ceasefire ends, Pasha can exploit those cracks.” Noir to the core, Vachaud always refuses to use any forms of noble address to the Duc, as though he’s raising a bloody flag over the Bastille.[14]
As always, the Duc affects not to notice. “Yes, yes, but dash it, surely we can hold them together that long,” he complained. “We need to put together a deal that’ll let, eh, Pasha sign up to it and save face. Something he can call a victory, or he won’t go for it.”
Guibal bit his lip. “You’re correct, your grace, but the trouble is, I can’t see any way we can do that. Uh, I believe the Russian rhetoric has started focusing on holding us, I mean, the ‘Protocol’,” he crooked his hands to imply guillemets [speech marks] and made everyone smile, “off on all fronts. He can say he fought us all to a standstill, maybe. But is that a victory?”
“There’s Persia,” Vachaud pointed out.
Bertrand gritted his teeth, looking at me. I knew what he was going to say. “Look, our strategy has always been,” he began, and proceeded to explain something I had conceived myself, with René, years ago, as though I didn’t know about it. That irked me, but I suppose the others needed a refresher. Besides, we did take some inspiration from some earlier policy work under Leclerc.
The strategy for containing Russia had begun with the observation that it seemed likely we could not directly confront the Russians if they expanded into Asia. If they were able to take Constantinople, or more of India, or indeed Persia, there was only so much an expeditionary force could achieve—as we had seen, though we cold-bloodedly pretended to the Persians that our force was anything more than a delaying tactic. The Russians were the ones with the railways and the supply lines to overwhelm us, and it was a wonder Persia had lasted so long as it had.
No, to contain Russia (the argument went), we needed to be able to take territory vital to Russia elsewhere, fight them to a standstill, and then force them to retreat from their new conquests in order to get it back, forcing status quo ante bellum. It had always been something from the cold minds of bloodless diplomats, careless of all those who had to die in the process. I thought I had understood that when we conceived it, thinking of the first Great War.[15] I fear that, even then, I was too naïve.
The Duc frowned. “I know the policy, M. Cazeneuve,” he said sharply. “And we have succeeded. We have occupied territories vital to the Tsar all across the world. We can offer to return some of them in exchange for his withdrawal from Persia.”
Bertrand exchanged a look with me, and I spoke. “That is the problem, your grace,” I said. “We have not occupied those lands. Our allies have. And our influence over them...”
There is a world map there, too, on the wall, not so faded as it does not face the sun. I did my best to summarise briefly, and tried not to treat the Duc as a child, knowing his keen mind is still there behind the bags under his eyes and the sagging shoulders. “The Italians and Scandinavians took Erythrea—and they both want to get all of it at the peace treaty. The Cape Dutch have failed to do much against Povilskaja, even after the Matetwa left the war after clobbering the English.” Everyone smiled slightly at the English being taken down a peg or two, even though I do admire M. Gris and his charming wife. “Bengal drove the Russians from Ceylon and, ah, Pendzhab. The Americans drove them out of North America. That idiot Chambord has failed to take Gavaji. The Ottomans, not even our allies, have Greece and the lands around the mouth of the Danube. The Germans have Czechosilesia, ah, Bohemia back, and the English and Scandinavians have the lands occupied in the Baltic.”
I pressed my palms together, trying to avoid the Duc’s weary, red-rimmed stare. “The only territory one could say we French control is part of the lands occupied in Poland, along with the Germans and Italians. And the only pressure we can exert is to say we could stand our troops down and the front could collapse, erasing all the gains we have spent—spent an ocean of the blood of our young men to pay for.” I hated that my voice cracked, but maybe I would have been a monster if it didn’t. “Do you really think Dresden and Rome would believe us if we threatened to do that?”
The Duc’s frown deepened. “Madame, what are you saying?”
“She’s saying,” Vachaud interjected (again), “that we cannot negotiate with Pasha if all the cards we want to trade are held by our partners, some of them now barely participating in the war and none of them very susceptible to pressure from us.”
“But surely...” the Duc shook his head. “M. Guibal, what about economic pressure?”
Guibal shook his tired head. Having done his job myself during the economic contraction of—nom d’un nom d’un nom, can it be a decade ago?!—I knew how hard he had been working. “Some of our allies have some economic dependence on us, oui, your grace. But we are blessed and cursed to fight on the side of democratic and representative governments. All our allies’ leaderships have anti-war opposition forces breathing down their necks. If we push, we will simply topple those governments and bring their oppositions to power.”
I knew he was the expert in this, having briefed us on it just recently; from speaking to his financial counterparts in our allies’ governments, he knew about their growing oppositions. Just as bloody Vincent and his so-called Rubis group here had formed out of an alliance of anti-war people across parties to oppose the national government, the same was true elsewhere. In England, M. Gris has M. Lightfoot and his so-called Democrats. In Germany, Ruddel has both the monarchist Treuliga and the Niedderad breakaway from his own party. In Scandinavia, the Copper Party has taken control of the national legislatures and is calling for representation in the imperial one. Even in America, M. Gilmore struggles with les Marleys and Eleanor Cross, whom I met once in Cygnia. I wish such a good Cytherean had not nailed her colours to the anti-war mast. But M. Gilmore is probably the least in trouble, as America’s fortune of war has been the most positive of our alliance. It seems likely that, with all these alliances and oppositions across party lines, political landscapes across the world are going to be irrevocably changed by this war.
“But, par Dieu!” The Duc abruptly leapt to his feet like a man half his age, pulled out his marshal’s baton and slammed it down on the map. “We cannot fight in this plague-ridden house forever! We must have peace or all shall be lost!”
The sound of the baton echoed throughout the room, silencing all else. It would have had a lot more effect on me if he hadn’t tried this same trick about a dozen times over the past three years. Nonetheless, I found my gaze drawn to the letters inscribed on the baton: TERROR BELLI, DECUS PACIS. Terror in War, Ornament in Peace. It could have been said as much about the man who held that baton as the ornament itself. The Duc wanted an end. I could not blame him.
Vachaud broke the silence. “Could we launch a full-scale mission to take Povilskaja?” he suggested. “That might be sufficient to force concessions, to start the game of chaises musicales as we swap these damn spots on a map back and forth.”
Bertrand closed his eyes and shook his head. “That would have been a good idea a year ago,” he said harshly. “Now we have burned all our goodwill for such missions on that Gavaji farce. Dammit, you were right about Chambord, Héloïse. I should have listened to you.” I took no pleasure in his admission.
“We have to try,” the Duc insisted. “Pasha’s position may be weaker than we think.” The Auxiliaire girl, carefully neutral, nonetheless almost twitched at this piece of wishful thinking. “Russia cannot be entirely self-sufficient, they will have their own opposition forces...”
“But they are not democratic, so they are in the shadows,” Guibal said. “So harder to predict, I would imagine,” he gave the Auxiliaire woman a sidelong look. “What isn’t hard to predict is our own opposition forces.”
Bertrand gritted his teeth. “You’re not wrong. I spoke to M. Rouillard.” I almost sat up in surprise. Camille? Unlike Vincent and his opposition group, Camille had done his best to stay neutral, half-retiring, trying not to exacerbate the split between my wing of the Diamantines and Vincent’s. “He has had enough. His nephew died two weeks ago, in our push trying to rescue the Germans when they lost Czestochowa. If we do not open negotiations now, as M. le Duc desires, he will cross the floor to the Rubis group.”
I wasn’t standing, yet I still felt I had sat down heavily. Camille, the man who had helped me manage that idiot Bouchez as Controller-General, who had become Prime Minister but had always respected my insights, who had given the insight we needed to deal with the Pérousien question—at least, until that moron Chambord has torn it open again. I want to see it as a betrayal, but I cannot. I cannot blame him. What would I think if Valéry were old enough to fight, and had...
“Then we must negotiate,” I said hollowly.
Vachaud closed his eyes. “I agree.”
“So do I,” said Guibal. “Though I fear what will come to pass. Belgium will arise as a question, mark my words. Last week, in the English Parliament, M. Lightfoot pulled out some ancient treaty saying—”
“That Belgium would be carved up, with England taking Zeeland and Holland, France Flanders and Artois—which we didn’t already have at the time—and the rest going to the Dutch Stadtholder, yes, I know,” I cut him off, visibly surprising him. “Louis of Nassau, near the start of the Eighty Years’ War. I don’t think that’ll wash nowadays. The Germans want all the industry and coalfields, for a start. We’ve managed to keep the argument down while the war goes on, but—”
“Enough,” the Duc said tiredly. “I fear you are all correct. And yet, we have no choice. The world is dying outside our narrow focus on this conflict. I do not just mean the plague. D’Orléans in Spain has gone haring off on this madcap scheme after a lost ship, Pérousie is in uproar about Chambord, the Bisnagis are on strike, we have handed over Guiana to the Americans.” He closed his eyes. “We need to end it, gentlemen—and lady,” he added quickly. “Just end it. I’ll accept being judged harshly by our grandchildren, if we can ensure we’ll have any.”
I know this is a mistake, and yet, I cannot see any other option...
February 17th 1926.
We heard back almost immediately from our approach (via Bavaria, of course) with a Russian response. Noncommittal, but not unresponsive. The Russians want Vienna to host instead, with secrecy. An odd choice, but I do not see why not. Perhaps they think a Danubian environment will engender more hostility to the Ottomans...
February 18th 1926.
I wrote to Bertrand today, using circumspect language, but warning him we cannot negotiate alone for long. If our allies discover this—and the Russians could reveal it at any time—it will go very poorly for us. Perhaps that is why they are so keen to talk. Or perhaps I am too pessimistic, and the Duc is correct. Maybe they really are that desperate.
February 19th 1926
Woke to bizarre news from America. Some sort of plot to trigger a stock market run and profit off it, as I recall happening during the last war? The work of Russian agents, even, ready to reveal our secret negotiations? But surely they would wait till we had at least met for the first time, or else we could simply deny everything as a feint?
The alternative is more shocking. The alternative...would be that the news is true. Impossibly true...
[5] St Valentine’s Day, in the modern sense, originated in England and was not a major celebration in France until the nineteenth century. Like OTL, it has crossed the Channel with the help of the cultural influence of America, though one should bear in mind it probably looms larger in Mercier’s mind than the average French person.
[6] The Belgians did not start using death-luft until some months after Mercier became Foreign Ministress, but she is painting a picture of the overall time.
[7] This is a dysphemism for Tsar Paul which has caught on with the French leadership (as we’ll see). It has a double meaning, essentially calling him a jumped-up little man (Pasha is the Russian diminutive for Pavel/Paul, like ‘Paulie’ in English) and also simultaneously a strutting oriental despot (Pasha as in the Ottoman title, which has been seen negatively after the Ottomans’ activities against the Greeks and Armenians).
[8] Mercier is referring to Peptobrim drugs (the TTL name for Sulfa drugs) which are currently being developed by Raymond Vicaire and his colleagues in Germany and England, as mentioned in Part #292. As a senior member of the government, she has been briefed on this still secretive research, but it is approaching wide-scale deployment.
[9] This is a TTL logical/philosophical problem akin to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Its creator is Auguste Migaud, the Pérousien-born philosopher who knew Camille Rouillard (and therefore Mercier) as mentioned in Part #275 of Volume VII.
[10] I.e. the 1860s. Mercier picks this decade because it would have been when the Duc was a child or teenager.
[11] I.e. Napoleon Bonaparte, the only previous wartime Dictateur, who died in office towards the end of the Popular Wars (Part #143 in Volume III).
[12] Recall that the Auxiliaire, short for Bureau Auxiliaire des Statistiques, is the euphemistic title of the French intelligence agency.
[13] In this translation, the forms of address are (sometimes, inconsistently) rendered into English equivalents (i.e. how one would address an English duke) rather than literally translated.
[14] Some would question implicitly equating these two, but recall that Mercier is from a conservative background and was formerly in the National Party.
[15] I.e. the Pandoric War, but it has not widely been given this name yet. Mercier here implies that she guesses that the conflict of the Black Twenties might become known as the Second Great War. Note that in OTL, the term ‘Great War’ was sometimes given to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the nineteenth century, before this name was transferred to the 1914-18 war.
February 14th 1926.
It is the day of Saint-Valentin, or so the calendar says. I remember those days when René and I would be one another’s valentines, and then the long years when my heart hurt to see me left alone as all around me celebrate their love.[5] Now, I barely think of it either way. I find myself barely thinking of anything but the war. It is almost three years since Bertrand asked me to join the coalition government as a triumvir. In that time, the world has gone mad all around me.
I look back on the pages of my diary to that time. I thought things were terrible then. Our boys were fighting the Belgians in the mud of the Meuse, fearful of steerables dropping death-luft on our cities.[6] On paper, things should be better now. No-one can threaten us in Paris, and though the casualty lists are terrible, at least the conflict is safely a long way from us, in Poland. Yet progress eluded us for so long. In recent months, we finally had hope of a resolution, but now...
I drink my cup of foul faux coffee. Things were bad enough when the Societists and the Ottomans cut off the supply, but now Cuba has collapsed into civil war as well. Few Russian ironsharks now prowl the Atlantic, though Povilskaja still, frustratingly, fights on. But even when convoys are safe from the enemy, plague quarantine slows them and there is a focus on military essentials. I am wealthy enough to afford the inflated prices of the Guinea beans, of course. But I must show solidarity with the people in some small way.
I look back on those days again, and it breaks my heart. I think of Renée as a cheeky young girl, calling me old-fashioned. Three years have passed. She should be dressing in unsuitable clothes with rouge on her face, dancing with unsuitable boys to dreadful modern music, shocking me and sticking her tongue out when I tell her to focus on her studies, not to throw away years of Cytherean progress. Instead, she works on a factory line, her face free of makeup, her hair wrapped up in a scarf, as determined as I am to prove that none shall say the political class did not pull their weight. I can feel the shape of that future that could have been, that should have been, and I weep. My daughter should not have had to sacrifice her youth on an altar of war. If le petit pasha had not seen fit to burn the world over Khiva.[7] If the Shah-Advocate had not used the last war as an excuse to push into what Pasha sees as his territory. If Hiedler had not shot David Braithwaite. If, if, if...
Ferbuary 15th 1926.
Valéry shocked me today. I want to blame the influence of Diane, that bloodthirsty girl with all her lurid paperbacks she reads when she thinks I’m not looking. Every day I miss poor Anne-Marie. I must send flowers to her grave once more. If only she was the only one I had lost to la peste noire. There have been times over the past years where I think our girls would be safer if they joined their boyfriends and husbands in the trenches in Poland than if they stayed here. No matter how much we drench our sewers in the green poison, if one rat, one flea is missed and bites you, you are in the hands of the good God. There is no cure, only prevention. Dr Vicaire and his colleagues give us hope now, hope of a new wonder treatment; but it is too late for so many.[8]
I digress. Valéry still fills his head with notions of glory, no matter how long the casualty lists extend. He dreams of fighting in Poland, even in Gavaji, where that fool Chambord has killed so many brave young men of Pérousie to no effect. I have given up trying to reason with him. He is a boy, and he is eleven. I wish I could be confident that this war will not last long enough for him to fight in it...
February 16th 1926.
Extraordinary scenes. I was called in for a meeting by the Duc himself. Again I was struck at how the mobiles on the street now seem to have reverted to the coal and steam of my youth, as all the spirit and sun-oil is directed to the armed forces. Many have even returned to the horse and cart; it makes Paris look like a half-hearted period film trying to depict the ancien régime before the Revolution. At least my veil has come in handy again.
But, the meeting. I must paint a picture with words, before they fade from my memory. More than usual, I am conscious of living through history.
All are there, around the table in the Maison de Montmartre with its vast, now faded map of Europe. It is of little real purpose, as I recall Marshal Picotin commenting, and I have seen the far more detailed maps which the Army uses. I can see the holes where the pins marking the battle lines against Belgium once stood; it is so easy to forget that that foe is defeated, her lands reduced to occupation zones. Or it would be, if I did not have to manage so many minor clashes between the different occupation troops. Over in the east, we see the remaining fronts against Russia. The Front, truly, for we spare little attention for the English and Scandinavians with their limited success in Finland. True also to the south and east, where grey pins mark the Ottoman-Russian fronts along the Black Sea and, almost off the edge of the map, in Anatolia. Grey for limited intelligence, outdated, for neither Constantinople nor Petrograd sees fit to issue us reliable updates on their progress.
It matters little, for all eyes are on the concentration of pins cutting Poland in half. The Russians are finally ejected from the last of German territory, as Ruddel has crowed (one would think the Bundeskaiser would make more of it). But since that brief hope of the Italians and their wonder rockets of the future, now reality has set in. The Russians have conceived how to corrupt the Photel beams that the Italians use to guide their rockets (or so I am told; Valéry, with his young mind full of whirring wheels and giant engines, would probably understand it better). Both sides use death-luft, and both sides have countermeasures, masks, filters, rubber suits. It is hell out there, though at least it is not the hell we had until recently.
I look at the map. The window of the great Rose Room is at the south end. The pins are tall, not flush with the table. They cast shadows. In a lump of German territory west of the river Oder, a crescent shape shows on the map with brighter colours than the surrounding area. It marks the place where pins stood almost unmoving for nearly two years, as men were fed into a meat grinder that slaughtered them to no purpose. We cannot allow that ever to happen again.
And yet, as the Duc speaks of ending the war, I find myself troubled. It is the terrible logic of war, that same logic that led Leclerc to form the Protocol of armed neutrality. Once begun, it is very difficult to stop. If fought to a standstill, the only humanitarian outcome would be to end it by any means necessary—but neither side is willing to give way without a prize, or else all those deaths were meaningless. And so it continues. It is like M. Migaud’s observation of the two men imprisoned in a cell with two locks, each with one of the keys.[9] I have never thought myself a woman of blood. The thought of the slaughter in the trenches sickens me. But we cannot be seen to be the side that breaks first.
Henri-Louis (as I sometimes call him in the privacy of my mind) is now in his seventies, a bluff gentleman of the old school whose jollity conceals a keen mind. Or at least, that is how he was when I first met him. I recall he wanted to call me ma chérie all the time; it took me a while to train him out of that. But he means well, and if he slipped today and talked to me like I was some slip of a girl in the ’Sixties, I would not hold it against him.[10] The Duc has almost physically shrunk from the weight of the world upon his shoulders, sagging into his chair, his medals gleaming dimly on his uniform. No-one speaks of it, but present in all our minds like a dark raincloud overhead is the knowledge of what happened to his only predecessor.[11]
Also present were, of course, Bertrand (looking none too well himself), fellow triumvir Thierry Vachaud (I would never have thought to have sympathy for a Noir leader, but he has sacrificed his party’s unity for this war), Controller-General Alain Guibal and a confidential secretary from the Auxiliaire, the only other woman present.[12]
One way in which the Duc’s age has shown is his tendency to ramble. Even Bertrand, no mean waffler himself, looked impatient as he took a while to come to the point. We already knew the situation, of course, but he felt the need to set it out in black and white.
“After so much blood, sweat and tears, we have finally pushed the Russians out of Germany,” Henri-Louis recapped bluntly, pointing at the map. “We needed a victory, a strong position, before we could negotiate, so we do not look like the weak party. Now we’ve done it. So let’s damn’ well end this bloody awful war.”
I glanced at Bertrand. What the Duc wasn’t saying was as important as what he was. If that had been strictly true, we’d have been negotiating with the Russians at least a month ago. He wanted negotiation now because our hopeful breakthrough had slowed to a crawl, not because it had succeeded.
Bertrand spoke diplomatically. “You know that, and I know that, your grace.[13] But does Pasha know it?” He glanced at the grey, forgettable woman from the Auxiliaire. “Please report, mam’zelle. I remind everyone that this information is sub rosa the highest level, and repeating it outside this meeting would endanger our agents.” He said the phrase in a rattled-off, perfunctory manner; all present understood that, and had heard him say it many times.
The nameless woman gave a sharp nod behind her large, face-obscuring glasses. “There is intrigue in the Winter Palace, as always. The Tsar has sunk into depression as the anniversary of his son’s death on the Ottoman front has just passed. In the Soviet, those with ties to the RLPC possess growing concern over the Tsar’s lack of urgency over the American attack on Yapon two weeks ago, and his refusal to deploy reinforcements to General Zhdanovich as he appears to be gaining the upper hand over the Americans in Kamchatka. General Pichegru, the exiled Meridian commander who was the Tsar’s advisor in the earlier part of the war, has fallen out of favour due to his warnings about what the Societists may be planning, which the Tsar is not willing to hear. There are whispers of an alignment with the dowager—”
“Yes, yes,” the bluff Duc cut her off, much to my annoyance. “You see? He’s depressed, mourning his loss. Of course the bastard doesn’t care about the millions of others he’s consigned to an early grave. Uh, pardon my language.” He actually made a point of not addressing that last part to me, which I half-appreciated, though I doubt the Auxiliaire woman was too shy about it either. “Now’s the time to get him to agree to a ceasefire.”
I spoke up. “M. le Duc, there’s a problem. A ceasefire, while we negotiate for an armistice, a treaty...”
“Quite so, ma— Madame,” the Duc nodded, quickly covering his slip. I suppressed a smile.
I tried to explain. “Pasha has one great empire. With the Belgians, Abyssinians and Matetwa out of it, all the other Vitebsk allies border Russia and are under his thumb. He only has to satisfy one group.” I suppose technically that wasn’t true, given what the Auxiliaire girl was saying about his discontented Company people, but never mind, I was making a point. “If we negotiate, we need to get all our allies on side, and if the fighting ceases, we lose the sense of urgency. There’s already grumbling about what should happen to Belgium, as you know, and if our boys are no longer fighting alongside the Germans and Italians on a daily basis...”
“Eh? What do you mean?” the Duc said. I know he knew what I meant, he was just trying not to confront it. He depserately wants this to be over. I cannot blame him for that.
Vachaud spoke up. “She means,” he said, a little rudely I thought, “that we’re only holding together as a team because of a common enemy. Take that away, even temporarily, and our alliance cracks—and then if your ceasefire ends, Pasha can exploit those cracks.” Noir to the core, Vachaud always refuses to use any forms of noble address to the Duc, as though he’s raising a bloody flag over the Bastille.[14]
As always, the Duc affects not to notice. “Yes, yes, but dash it, surely we can hold them together that long,” he complained. “We need to put together a deal that’ll let, eh, Pasha sign up to it and save face. Something he can call a victory, or he won’t go for it.”
Guibal bit his lip. “You’re correct, your grace, but the trouble is, I can’t see any way we can do that. Uh, I believe the Russian rhetoric has started focusing on holding us, I mean, the ‘Protocol’,” he crooked his hands to imply guillemets [speech marks] and made everyone smile, “off on all fronts. He can say he fought us all to a standstill, maybe. But is that a victory?”
“There’s Persia,” Vachaud pointed out.
Bertrand gritted his teeth, looking at me. I knew what he was going to say. “Look, our strategy has always been,” he began, and proceeded to explain something I had conceived myself, with René, years ago, as though I didn’t know about it. That irked me, but I suppose the others needed a refresher. Besides, we did take some inspiration from some earlier policy work under Leclerc.
The strategy for containing Russia had begun with the observation that it seemed likely we could not directly confront the Russians if they expanded into Asia. If they were able to take Constantinople, or more of India, or indeed Persia, there was only so much an expeditionary force could achieve—as we had seen, though we cold-bloodedly pretended to the Persians that our force was anything more than a delaying tactic. The Russians were the ones with the railways and the supply lines to overwhelm us, and it was a wonder Persia had lasted so long as it had.
No, to contain Russia (the argument went), we needed to be able to take territory vital to Russia elsewhere, fight them to a standstill, and then force them to retreat from their new conquests in order to get it back, forcing status quo ante bellum. It had always been something from the cold minds of bloodless diplomats, careless of all those who had to die in the process. I thought I had understood that when we conceived it, thinking of the first Great War.[15] I fear that, even then, I was too naïve.
The Duc frowned. “I know the policy, M. Cazeneuve,” he said sharply. “And we have succeeded. We have occupied territories vital to the Tsar all across the world. We can offer to return some of them in exchange for his withdrawal from Persia.”
Bertrand exchanged a look with me, and I spoke. “That is the problem, your grace,” I said. “We have not occupied those lands. Our allies have. And our influence over them...”
There is a world map there, too, on the wall, not so faded as it does not face the sun. I did my best to summarise briefly, and tried not to treat the Duc as a child, knowing his keen mind is still there behind the bags under his eyes and the sagging shoulders. “The Italians and Scandinavians took Erythrea—and they both want to get all of it at the peace treaty. The Cape Dutch have failed to do much against Povilskaja, even after the Matetwa left the war after clobbering the English.” Everyone smiled slightly at the English being taken down a peg or two, even though I do admire M. Gris and his charming wife. “Bengal drove the Russians from Ceylon and, ah, Pendzhab. The Americans drove them out of North America. That idiot Chambord has failed to take Gavaji. The Ottomans, not even our allies, have Greece and the lands around the mouth of the Danube. The Germans have Czechosilesia, ah, Bohemia back, and the English and Scandinavians have the lands occupied in the Baltic.”
I pressed my palms together, trying to avoid the Duc’s weary, red-rimmed stare. “The only territory one could say we French control is part of the lands occupied in Poland, along with the Germans and Italians. And the only pressure we can exert is to say we could stand our troops down and the front could collapse, erasing all the gains we have spent—spent an ocean of the blood of our young men to pay for.” I hated that my voice cracked, but maybe I would have been a monster if it didn’t. “Do you really think Dresden and Rome would believe us if we threatened to do that?”
The Duc’s frown deepened. “Madame, what are you saying?”
“She’s saying,” Vachaud interjected (again), “that we cannot negotiate with Pasha if all the cards we want to trade are held by our partners, some of them now barely participating in the war and none of them very susceptible to pressure from us.”
“But surely...” the Duc shook his head. “M. Guibal, what about economic pressure?”
Guibal shook his tired head. Having done his job myself during the economic contraction of—nom d’un nom d’un nom, can it be a decade ago?!—I knew how hard he had been working. “Some of our allies have some economic dependence on us, oui, your grace. But we are blessed and cursed to fight on the side of democratic and representative governments. All our allies’ leaderships have anti-war opposition forces breathing down their necks. If we push, we will simply topple those governments and bring their oppositions to power.”
I knew he was the expert in this, having briefed us on it just recently; from speaking to his financial counterparts in our allies’ governments, he knew about their growing oppositions. Just as bloody Vincent and his so-called Rubis group here had formed out of an alliance of anti-war people across parties to oppose the national government, the same was true elsewhere. In England, M. Gris has M. Lightfoot and his so-called Democrats. In Germany, Ruddel has both the monarchist Treuliga and the Niedderad breakaway from his own party. In Scandinavia, the Copper Party has taken control of the national legislatures and is calling for representation in the imperial one. Even in America, M. Gilmore struggles with les Marleys and Eleanor Cross, whom I met once in Cygnia. I wish such a good Cytherean had not nailed her colours to the anti-war mast. But M. Gilmore is probably the least in trouble, as America’s fortune of war has been the most positive of our alliance. It seems likely that, with all these alliances and oppositions across party lines, political landscapes across the world are going to be irrevocably changed by this war.
“But, par Dieu!” The Duc abruptly leapt to his feet like a man half his age, pulled out his marshal’s baton and slammed it down on the map. “We cannot fight in this plague-ridden house forever! We must have peace or all shall be lost!”
The sound of the baton echoed throughout the room, silencing all else. It would have had a lot more effect on me if he hadn’t tried this same trick about a dozen times over the past three years. Nonetheless, I found my gaze drawn to the letters inscribed on the baton: TERROR BELLI, DECUS PACIS. Terror in War, Ornament in Peace. It could have been said as much about the man who held that baton as the ornament itself. The Duc wanted an end. I could not blame him.
Vachaud broke the silence. “Could we launch a full-scale mission to take Povilskaja?” he suggested. “That might be sufficient to force concessions, to start the game of chaises musicales as we swap these damn spots on a map back and forth.”
Bertrand closed his eyes and shook his head. “That would have been a good idea a year ago,” he said harshly. “Now we have burned all our goodwill for such missions on that Gavaji farce. Dammit, you were right about Chambord, Héloïse. I should have listened to you.” I took no pleasure in his admission.
“We have to try,” the Duc insisted. “Pasha’s position may be weaker than we think.” The Auxiliaire girl, carefully neutral, nonetheless almost twitched at this piece of wishful thinking. “Russia cannot be entirely self-sufficient, they will have their own opposition forces...”
“But they are not democratic, so they are in the shadows,” Guibal said. “So harder to predict, I would imagine,” he gave the Auxiliaire woman a sidelong look. “What isn’t hard to predict is our own opposition forces.”
Bertrand gritted his teeth. “You’re not wrong. I spoke to M. Rouillard.” I almost sat up in surprise. Camille? Unlike Vincent and his opposition group, Camille had done his best to stay neutral, half-retiring, trying not to exacerbate the split between my wing of the Diamantines and Vincent’s. “He has had enough. His nephew died two weeks ago, in our push trying to rescue the Germans when they lost Czestochowa. If we do not open negotiations now, as M. le Duc desires, he will cross the floor to the Rubis group.”
I wasn’t standing, yet I still felt I had sat down heavily. Camille, the man who had helped me manage that idiot Bouchez as Controller-General, who had become Prime Minister but had always respected my insights, who had given the insight we needed to deal with the Pérousien question—at least, until that moron Chambord has torn it open again. I want to see it as a betrayal, but I cannot. I cannot blame him. What would I think if Valéry were old enough to fight, and had...
“Then we must negotiate,” I said hollowly.
Vachaud closed his eyes. “I agree.”
“So do I,” said Guibal. “Though I fear what will come to pass. Belgium will arise as a question, mark my words. Last week, in the English Parliament, M. Lightfoot pulled out some ancient treaty saying—”
“That Belgium would be carved up, with England taking Zeeland and Holland, France Flanders and Artois—which we didn’t already have at the time—and the rest going to the Dutch Stadtholder, yes, I know,” I cut him off, visibly surprising him. “Louis of Nassau, near the start of the Eighty Years’ War. I don’t think that’ll wash nowadays. The Germans want all the industry and coalfields, for a start. We’ve managed to keep the argument down while the war goes on, but—”
“Enough,” the Duc said tiredly. “I fear you are all correct. And yet, we have no choice. The world is dying outside our narrow focus on this conflict. I do not just mean the plague. D’Orléans in Spain has gone haring off on this madcap scheme after a lost ship, Pérousie is in uproar about Chambord, the Bisnagis are on strike, we have handed over Guiana to the Americans.” He closed his eyes. “We need to end it, gentlemen—and lady,” he added quickly. “Just end it. I’ll accept being judged harshly by our grandchildren, if we can ensure we’ll have any.”
I know this is a mistake, and yet, I cannot see any other option...
February 17th 1926.
We heard back almost immediately from our approach (via Bavaria, of course) with a Russian response. Noncommittal, but not unresponsive. The Russians want Vienna to host instead, with secrecy. An odd choice, but I do not see why not. Perhaps they think a Danubian environment will engender more hostility to the Ottomans...
February 18th 1926.
I wrote to Bertrand today, using circumspect language, but warning him we cannot negotiate alone for long. If our allies discover this—and the Russians could reveal it at any time—it will go very poorly for us. Perhaps that is why they are so keen to talk. Or perhaps I am too pessimistic, and the Duc is correct. Maybe they really are that desperate.
February 19th 1926
Woke to bizarre news from America. Some sort of plot to trigger a stock market run and profit off it, as I recall happening during the last war? The work of Russian agents, even, ready to reveal our secret negotiations? But surely they would wait till we had at least met for the first time, or else we could simply deny everything as a feint?
The alternative is more shocking. The alternative...would be that the news is true. Impossibly true...
[5] St Valentine’s Day, in the modern sense, originated in England and was not a major celebration in France until the nineteenth century. Like OTL, it has crossed the Channel with the help of the cultural influence of America, though one should bear in mind it probably looms larger in Mercier’s mind than the average French person.
[6] The Belgians did not start using death-luft until some months after Mercier became Foreign Ministress, but she is painting a picture of the overall time.
[7] This is a dysphemism for Tsar Paul which has caught on with the French leadership (as we’ll see). It has a double meaning, essentially calling him a jumped-up little man (Pasha is the Russian diminutive for Pavel/Paul, like ‘Paulie’ in English) and also simultaneously a strutting oriental despot (Pasha as in the Ottoman title, which has been seen negatively after the Ottomans’ activities against the Greeks and Armenians).
[8] Mercier is referring to Peptobrim drugs (the TTL name for Sulfa drugs) which are currently being developed by Raymond Vicaire and his colleagues in Germany and England, as mentioned in Part #292. As a senior member of the government, she has been briefed on this still secretive research, but it is approaching wide-scale deployment.
[9] This is a TTL logical/philosophical problem akin to the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Its creator is Auguste Migaud, the Pérousien-born philosopher who knew Camille Rouillard (and therefore Mercier) as mentioned in Part #275 of Volume VII.
[10] I.e. the 1860s. Mercier picks this decade because it would have been when the Duc was a child or teenager.
[11] I.e. Napoleon Bonaparte, the only previous wartime Dictateur, who died in office towards the end of the Popular Wars (Part #143 in Volume III).
[12] Recall that the Auxiliaire, short for Bureau Auxiliaire des Statistiques, is the euphemistic title of the French intelligence agency.
[13] In this translation, the forms of address are (sometimes, inconsistently) rendered into English equivalents (i.e. how one would address an English duke) rather than literally translated.
[14] Some would question implicitly equating these two, but recall that Mercier is from a conservative background and was formerly in the National Party.
[15] I.e. the Pandoric War, but it has not widely been given this name yet. Mercier here implies that she guesses that the conflict of the Black Twenties might become known as the Second Great War. Note that in OTL, the term ‘Great War’ was sometimes given to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the nineteenth century, before this name was transferred to the 1914-18 war.
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