Yeah, sorry, I don't want to come across as combative here or anything. AH is all about this sort of thing, and, like an article on Sea Lion Press' website I read a little while ago said, there's a tension inherent in "hard AH" between trying to make an interesting and sufficiently different alternate world and trying to make that plausible and detailed. Really I'm just posting all this because I'm impressed at how, by and large, Thande's followed through with the consequences of events and historical trends to a degree beyond pretty much anything else I've ever seen in fiction.Not saying that's it's totally unbelievable, just that it's probably not, IMHO, the most likely outcome. One can do a wank without badly damaging plausibility. It's just that if one is deliberately beefing up a nation compared to OTL, you're putting your thumb on the scales of history, [1] and how hard you are allowed to push is really a matter of personal preference. I don't find Russia implausible enough for it to "spoil" the timeline for me - it makes me raise my eyebrows a little when it thumps its way across the stage, but I'm not calling for it to be retconned or for Thande to admit allohistorical wrongdoing. There's really no reason for people to eat up bandwidth trying to prove me wrong.
[1] And writing a TL without doing so is difficult, since a lot of - probably most - TLs have some sort of preferred outcome.
Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
With a PoD 20 years before WWI it would be very far fetched to have Russia single-handedly curbstomping Germany "Austria-Hungary" and Poland at the same time. But with LTTW we will soon be 200 years from the point of divergence. This is plenty of time for an already large and influential power to "pull a Meiji". There's no reason to expect that the powers in say 1914 will be as strong as they were in OTL. Take Britain for example. In OTL in 1914 it ruled the waves and had a vast empire to drain and turn into warships and guns. Here it only has parts of the home islands and no sphere of influence to speak of. And since it was already at the forefront of industrialization in OTL it would be hard for it to compensate for this by some sort of rapid internal development. 200 years after the PoD OTL top dogs are often TTL's underdogs and vice versa and I find it natural.
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Well, I had to read the past month's updates in a week, but I'm finally caught up with the narrative! And now that I have, I obviously have some things to say. I'll try to keep it short! (A bald-faced lie)
First of all, I wanted to commend Thande on the stellar quality of the recent set of updates. As the Black Twenties is moving into its societist finale, there has been a clear buildup of narrative tension, followed by some truly explosive action. I know that might sound a bit cliched, but I've honestly been thrilled by these past chapters in a way that few other stories I've managed. Appropriately, the only instance I can clearly recall are the Jacobin Wars from this very timeline. In short, bravo!
One element I've greatly enjoyed in particular are the excerpts from Markus Garzius' memoirs. I already mentioned a while ago that a societist perspective was somewhat lacking, but these sections have more than compensated for that. It also helps that you recently pointed out how societist sources are too biased to really be useful, and the promise of an oral history of Carolinian societism in the next volume is therefore very exciting. As for Garzius, I like the awkwardness of his dissident societist perspective, extolling the virtues of the Alfaran era while cursing the present rulers of the Combine. It very much reminds me of crotchety exiles like Trotsky, though Garzius is perhaps somewhat more sympathetic. His narrative segments are also a great reminder of the tremendous rhetorical power contained within societism. As much as I loathe this ideology for its authoritarian and cultural-genocidal tendencies, there is little denying that their reading of the folly of nations is absolutely correct, especially during this period. As Garzius tells it, I certainly don't regret the upcoming societization of Carolina. But of course, we know or at least suspect that it turns out badly.
While I'm on the topic of societism, I've been thinking about how the nations' relation to the Combine will change in the wake of the Black Twenties. You've already hinted at a significant paradigm shift, one where societism will finally be seen as an existential danger rather than a mere UPSA successor state. I think you've even mentioned that it's a deliberate inversion of the OTL perception of the USSR, which increasingly tended towards détente. Still, I wonder if some nations won't try to appease the societists in one way or another. Perhaps one of them will naively allow Combine representatives to operate freely within their borders, leading to a kind of parallel administration which eventually dismantles the original state. On the other hand, those nations which seek to combat the Combine will now no longer ignore the Doctrine of the Last Throw. Every subsequent conflict between nations will be a far more paranoid affair, with both sides trying to keep enough troops in reserve to ward off any societist backstabbing. In a way, it's the LTTW equivalent of mutually assured destruction: if one side tries to destroy the other too fanatically, the Combine will end up absorbing them both.
As for what lies ahead, I definitely have some ideas and suggestions. The first and most obvious one would be an update on rocketry in the Second Interbellum. Now that rockets have once again proven their military relevance, you can be sure that all sides will be scrambling for their own liquid-fueled arsenal. I think some kind of Space Race is the inevitable outcome of such an endeavor. Not only is it a peacetime way of testing the technology, but it keeps people from seeing rockets as primarily weapons of war, and it's a cheap way to build some prestige if you're already developing the missiles anyway. The Combine has a particular interest in pretending their rocket program is all about peace and progress; plus, if Stela Navis is any indication, the societists will likely try to sell spaceflight as a way of uniting Humanity, much like the superpowers of OTL. Now I just wonder what they will call their spacefarers!
Another point of interest would be the further development of narrative genres ITTL. I fondly remember those old updates on automaton fiction and the like, and I'm sure that the peculiar course of TTL will have produced many other odd genres since then. Speaking of which, I think it could be really fun to do a somewhat 'meta' update on some of the more popular alternate histories within this world. For example, what if the UPSA had won the Pandoric War? What if the Jacobins won their invasion of Britain? What if mentianism was the big dangerous ideology (this one could make for a fun DBWI)? You've mentioned the popularity of 'speculative romance' ITTL a few times, and now I'm curious about what that means specifically.
Finally, I just have a few short questions and suggestions. Firstly, I think one of those larger 'overview' update à la England or Spain could be interesting if applied to Belgium/The Low Countries. They've been through some massive changes during the Black Twenties, and this might be a good time to look at the entire course of Belgian history. Secondly, I've noticed that a lot of TTL excerpts are written by dual authors. Is this a diversitarian quirk, or a simple accident of the source selection?
That's it for now. I just want to mention again how great I think the recent chapters have been, and that I can't wait for the great finale at the end of this year. Volume IX can't come soon enough!
First of all, I wanted to commend Thande on the stellar quality of the recent set of updates. As the Black Twenties is moving into its societist finale, there has been a clear buildup of narrative tension, followed by some truly explosive action. I know that might sound a bit cliched, but I've honestly been thrilled by these past chapters in a way that few other stories I've managed. Appropriately, the only instance I can clearly recall are the Jacobin Wars from this very timeline. In short, bravo!
One element I've greatly enjoyed in particular are the excerpts from Markus Garzius' memoirs. I already mentioned a while ago that a societist perspective was somewhat lacking, but these sections have more than compensated for that. It also helps that you recently pointed out how societist sources are too biased to really be useful, and the promise of an oral history of Carolinian societism in the next volume is therefore very exciting. As for Garzius, I like the awkwardness of his dissident societist perspective, extolling the virtues of the Alfaran era while cursing the present rulers of the Combine. It very much reminds me of crotchety exiles like Trotsky, though Garzius is perhaps somewhat more sympathetic. His narrative segments are also a great reminder of the tremendous rhetorical power contained within societism. As much as I loathe this ideology for its authoritarian and cultural-genocidal tendencies, there is little denying that their reading of the folly of nations is absolutely correct, especially during this period. As Garzius tells it, I certainly don't regret the upcoming societization of Carolina. But of course, we know or at least suspect that it turns out badly.
While I'm on the topic of societism, I've been thinking about how the nations' relation to the Combine will change in the wake of the Black Twenties. You've already hinted at a significant paradigm shift, one where societism will finally be seen as an existential danger rather than a mere UPSA successor state. I think you've even mentioned that it's a deliberate inversion of the OTL perception of the USSR, which increasingly tended towards détente. Still, I wonder if some nations won't try to appease the societists in one way or another. Perhaps one of them will naively allow Combine representatives to operate freely within their borders, leading to a kind of parallel administration which eventually dismantles the original state. On the other hand, those nations which seek to combat the Combine will now no longer ignore the Doctrine of the Last Throw. Every subsequent conflict between nations will be a far more paranoid affair, with both sides trying to keep enough troops in reserve to ward off any societist backstabbing. In a way, it's the LTTW equivalent of mutually assured destruction: if one side tries to destroy the other too fanatically, the Combine will end up absorbing them both.
As for what lies ahead, I definitely have some ideas and suggestions. The first and most obvious one would be an update on rocketry in the Second Interbellum. Now that rockets have once again proven their military relevance, you can be sure that all sides will be scrambling for their own liquid-fueled arsenal. I think some kind of Space Race is the inevitable outcome of such an endeavor. Not only is it a peacetime way of testing the technology, but it keeps people from seeing rockets as primarily weapons of war, and it's a cheap way to build some prestige if you're already developing the missiles anyway. The Combine has a particular interest in pretending their rocket program is all about peace and progress; plus, if Stela Navis is any indication, the societists will likely try to sell spaceflight as a way of uniting Humanity, much like the superpowers of OTL. Now I just wonder what they will call their spacefarers!
Another point of interest would be the further development of narrative genres ITTL. I fondly remember those old updates on automaton fiction and the like, and I'm sure that the peculiar course of TTL will have produced many other odd genres since then. Speaking of which, I think it could be really fun to do a somewhat 'meta' update on some of the more popular alternate histories within this world. For example, what if the UPSA had won the Pandoric War? What if the Jacobins won their invasion of Britain? What if mentianism was the big dangerous ideology (this one could make for a fun DBWI)? You've mentioned the popularity of 'speculative romance' ITTL a few times, and now I'm curious about what that means specifically.
Finally, I just have a few short questions and suggestions. Firstly, I think one of those larger 'overview' update à la England or Spain could be interesting if applied to Belgium/The Low Countries. They've been through some massive changes during the Black Twenties, and this might be a good time to look at the entire course of Belgian history. Secondly, I've noticed that a lot of TTL excerpts are written by dual authors. Is this a diversitarian quirk, or a simple accident of the source selection?
That's it for now. I just want to mention again how great I think the recent chapters have been, and that I can't wait for the great finale at the end of this year. Volume IX can't come soon enough!
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It's quite humourous that OTL Britain lost the battle of the Jutland even with all its strength but this TL England won its version despite its weaknesses.
Et tu, @Zaius ?
Meh. I'm blowing this popsicle stand: be back when Thande has something new to post.
Alas, Caesar, I continue to disagree with thee. Power is not set in stone. In the early 19th century France took on most of Europe and gave it a run for its money. But French soldiers who had occupied Moscow could live to see France being quickly defeated by the smaller Prussia and several midgets (by great power standards). Perhaps in an alternate world where France won a similar war you are defending the plausibility of the Franco-Prussian War from "Look to the East" while I claim that it's hard to imagine a single Great Power defeating the French army before 1900.
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I was going to respond, but why waste my time? Anyone who bugs me on this again is going on ignore for a while.
In the second interbellum we will see the rise of Indian (and hopefully) African independence movements. How will these compare to those after WW2?
- One major difference is the presence of local sponsors. Although certain countries like Egypt may have pushed for Algerian independence, and the Third World's collective pressure may have kept decolonization going, so to speak, the majority of the sponsorship came from the US or the USSR, with added threats to the colonial powers if they didn't release the colonies, most notably in Indonesia's case. ITTL however, we have seen local powers back decolonization either as a pragmatic move like Bengal backing Punjab's and Ceylon/Kandy's (in)dependences, the Moroccans and Guineans supplying arms to Algerine nationalists, and the Matetwa spreading anticolonial propaganda in the Cape and Natal. The fruits of the Teoiceot Jandou movement in Chinese India will be seen.
- Another is that these will be non-ideological*. IOTL independence movements defined themselves in more ideological terms than nationalist - communist, Islamist and so on. ITTL with Ideological Revolution associated with The Societists, most anticolonial movements will officially be more purely nationalist- with Panchala's case some more so than others.
A thought I just had (my apologies if this has come up before): What are sports like in the Combine? I can't imagine they'd much like sports teams with a distinctive identity tied to a specific geographical location..... Perhaps an emphasis on individual sports and barnstorming teams?
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I've been thinking about this as well, and am reminded of the comments made by the "ambassador" to Fredericksburg following Rubikon. If the Societists truly view the "nations" of the world in a similar light to how imperial powers viewed the indigenous peoples in the Americas/Africa/Australia, one wonders if the Societists will "respect" borders at all. Aside from being ideologically opposed, you could see:
- Celatores running through any border where there are no landmines/walls/troops to stop them
- Seizure of civilians from border areas to "liberate them"
- A la Rubikon, unannounced attacks and invasions of areas experiencing unrest, either Societist in nature or otherwise
If that's the case, the hyper-militarist response to Societism starts to make a lot of sense. It isn't just rhetorical flourish by the Societists of their plans to overthrow all nation-states, it's decades, if not a near century of Societism attacking and haranguing the "Free World" time and time again, killing hundreds, and utilizing varying forms of nastiness like chemical weapons and rockets at cities and towns all while trying to bring them into the maw of the Combine...
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I could imagine the Combine being keen on something like this Soviet display of mass calisthenics, perhaps giving it a novalatina nsme akin to “Ludi humanis” or “circus humanis.”
299.2
Thande
Donor
From: “A Century of War” by Daniel Bates (1987)—
The ‘Cygnia Gauntlet’ of May is one of the most celebrated episodes of the War of 1926 among Americans. Following the Societists’ repeated use of aero power from their four hiveships, not only to sink rival American fleets but then to support the Libramendus landings and subsequent operations, the conservatives in the Imperial Admiralty had finally been shouted down by Admiral Bartley. With assistance from Major Julian Worth (promoted and brought across the country on a rare authorised series of trains from St Joseph in North Arizpe[11]), hiveship advocate Admiral Zachariah Newbury was tasked with assembling an aero strategy against the Societists’ superiority. Newbury concluded that the only way to challenge the Societists’ force (which, after the Libramendum feints against West Florida, was never divided again) was to build up comparable hiveship forces.
To do so, Newbury successfully lobbied for the accelerated completion of HIMS Hornet and Wasp at Braintree, advanced training for the crew of Eyrie (completed but undergoing sea trials) and the hasty conversion of half-completed lineships and cruiser-frigates into light hiveships. While the latter project proved too ambitious for the short timeline of the war, Newbury’s moves (aided by the skilful project management of J. Albemarle Bush at the Braintree shipyards) did put the ENA in a position where three hiveships might be presented against the Societists’ four as early as July. However, Newbury and Worth were determined that the Cygnia must join them; not merely as one more hiveship, but the only one whose crew had seen frontline action in this new form of warfare.
In this era before Photel was (or could be) routinely deployed on most individual aerocraft, war-fighting experience in functioning as part of a group made an even bigger difference than in other facets of the armed forces. This was proved time and again by the Societists’ aero power operating over Carolina, first from the hiveships and then from aeroports that were taken over or newly constructed by the Celatores’ engineers. Frequently the Celatores were operating at a numerical disadvantage or with limited fuel, yet usually their celagii triumphed over an equal number of American pilots due to experience in fighting as aero companies. This factor tended to apply more to flying artillery and bombers, as Societist fighters had rarely faced comparable opponents in the air, but even in the latter case they had often undergone more relevant training than the Americans – whose doctrine had, until recently, emphasised individual air duels over attempting to coordinate company actions. When the Celatores encountered a particular American pilot with more war experience (such as a veteran of the Russian conflict who had been invalided out) they faced stiffer resistance – but they could typically unite against that pilot and use numbers against him, while his less-experienced American fellows continued to fight as individuals. It is important to understand that the Celatores did not have a magical means of communication, merely the benefit of experience in at least attempting group-fighting tactics, but it made a dramatic difference nonetheless.
The crew of Cygnia was an exception to all this, having rapidly shifted their tactics under the influence of innovators like Worth. Furthermore, they had faced grim odds against the Russians, which had effectively subjected them to a kind of Paleian environmental breeding; those conservatives who relied on fighting alone were now mostly lying at the bottom of the Pacific in twisted metal coffins. The upshot was that bringing Cygnia to meet up with the east coast hiveships was crucial.
Newbury soon ruled out attempting to round the Horn, which would have subjected Cygnia to countless Societist aero bases and naval flotillas along the way. Going the other way, across the Pacific and Indian Oceans before rounding the Cape of Good Hope, was much more long-winded and still potentially left the hiveship vulnerable to Societist ironsharks in the South Atlantic between South America and Africa. The least bad option was, therefore, for the Nicaragua Canal to be cleared and the Cygnia to make a run across the Caribbean. The former had already begun, thanks to Gilmore’s obsession with seeing the canals as the centrepoint of the war. After only six weeks of blocking the canal as Prokapud Dominikus had hoped, HIMS Potomac had been refloated and further clearing work left the canal usable once more. Newbury, and Cygnia’s commander Captain Charles Riddell, rejected suggestions to have dentist-frigates test the route first, instead sending forth Cygnia on April 30th to steam through the canal with the element of surprise.
While the Societists had broken many American codes, the date was sent via a one-time pad and the Celatores fighting in Guatemala’s Costa Rica province were caught offguard. Spotter dromes did not catch a glimpse of Cygnia until she had almost exited the canal, and tooth bombers were unable to find her again afterwards – though they did sink one of the dentist-frigates that belatedly followed Cygnia, HIMS Ontario.
Many films have told the tale of Cygnia’s desperate flight across the Caribbean Sea, dodging Celator dromes operating out of western Cuba, briefly sheltering in Jamaica (and incidentally making it a later target for the Societists) and finally threading the needle east of Puerto Rico while pursued by a force of Societist dentists. There are plenty of moments of heroism in this tale without the embellishments that said filmmakers always seem to feel the need to make. Against the odds, and after one heart-stopping moment north of Bermuda where she was nearly sunk by a Societist ironshark which was only in the area by chance, Cygnia made it into port at Norfolk on May 29th. It was a rare victory for the Americans and, naturally, trumpeted to the skies. As for Cygnia herself, her role in the war was far from over...
*
From: “Letters from the Front”, edited by Paul Thomas (1981)—
Captain Richard Waterhouse, known as Ricardo to his friends due to his supposed resemblance to Italian-Mexican opera singer Ricardo Barone, fought against the Russians in New Siberia in the early part of the Black Twenties conflict. As a lieutenant, he was wounded in February 1923 in a trench outside of Tretyakovsk, during General Welch’s eventually successful push to take the city after Welch’s failures. Waterhouse’s wounds stemmed from being hit with fragments of an exploding Russian shell, injuring a leg, perforating a kidney and leaving him with an infection which, in those pre-peptobrim days, almost killed him. As a result, he was invalided back to his home in Sudbury, a small town west of Boston in South Massachusetts, New England, and spent many months recuperating in hospital. During that time, he witnessed the hospital filling up with plague victims, yet somehow managed to avoid catching the disease himself. In his weakened state, it would amost certainly have been his end if he had caught it. For that reason, his surviving family and friends began to joke of him living a charmed life, to which the dry Waterhouse replied that if this was charmed, he didn’t want to know what cursed was like.
Despite this, Waterhouse was keen to return to the front and do his part for his country. However, a number of factors conspired against him. Imperial government policy at the time, under the Fouracre and Gilmore ministries, was essentially to avoid the movement of troops or any other subjects as much as possible, in order to control the spread of the plague. The government was all too willing to commit the troops already in the north-west to landing in Kamchatka if it stopped their families asking when they would be sent home; however, they had little incentive to commit reinforcements, much less those already recovering from significant injuries. Waterhouse found himself being ordered to speak (from a safe distance, atop an obsolete protgun in a parade) at carefully-controlled tours of the province. To his frustration, he was not even encouraging his fellow men to volunteer for the Army, but merely asking civilians to buy government bonds to help fund the war effort and plague control measures. He feared that, rather than a strong, recovered, indomitable veteran, he was being presented as a pathetic figure appealing to ensure others did not suffer the same fate. Unsurprisingly, by 1925 he had sunk into a depression as a result, and had ceased volunteering to help drill New England’s Confederal Guard, which was principally being used for plague control measures at the time.
The War of 1926 seemed to offer an opportunity to Waterhouse. He, and his fellow injured veterans in similar circumstances across the Empire, were perhaps the only people who welcomed the unexpected attack by the Societists. With the government still unwilling to shift troops by rail more than necessary until it was too late, with (later on) the wave of Societist sabotage of the transport network, with the most professional army trapped in Kamchatka – the Ministry of War had little choice than to turn to these experienced veterans to form the backbone of the new forces that they were hastily assembling.
Waterhouse was hastily promoted to Captain and placed in command of a company of the 84th (Boston) Fusiliers.[11] Most of the men he commanded were not raw recruits, but professional soldiers who had nonetheless spent bored months or years cooped up in garrison forts across the Empire, forbidden from visiting home or joining the front due to the plague control measures, often falling into slough and corruption. His letters home record that he gained a reputation as a strict disciplinarian, but nonetheless eventually became an object of grudging respect and admiration by the men he whipped back into shape.
Here we present extracts from his final letters home to his family (in accorance with their wishes, we have not included those to his fiancée Susan).
April 28th
“...they soon learned their lessons when Sergeant Clough had them scrubbing the chaintracks on our [redacted by censor] all night! Fine fellows still, though, just a little rough around the edges. We need to hone that edge as we approach the front – or, if I am honest, as the front approaches us.
I think of Uncle Mike’s stories facing the torchies in the last war. Their flag is different now, but are they? I wonder. They are certainly as perfidious as he made them out to be. We hear all sorts of stories. That they promise to the men of colour that they will have equality, and to the old traitors that they will have dignity. Meanwhile, I hear from ‘Braino’ Perkins that what they actually get up to these days in the East Indies and Africa is quite different, to no-one’s surprise.
But I will say the traitors do not seem keen to put their necks into a noose by attacking or sabotaging our convoys. I think you should dismiss that article in the News-Letter you mentioned as mere rumour of war.[12] I hardly think they have turned patriot to the Crown and are doing such things to the torchies either, mark you. I see them out in the fields, watching us. Cotton-pickers and molasses-lickers, the men call them. Staring at us with bovine eyes, chewing the cud, doing nothing. Or mayhap that is too insulting a comparison to cows. If you went to Bengal and showed a Hindoo gentleman a cow with such an expression, he might rethink his religion. Trying to get them to understand you want such-and-such a thing – I’d have more luck trying to communicate with an Enwick native in the Arctic, and these are supposed to speak English! Certainly there is no great enthusiasm among the men for going to war to defend such folk. The cry that goes up is always ‘Remember the New York!’ They are certainly keen to avenge the poor sailors of our Navy...”[13]
May 6th
“...will write to you again as soon as I can. I hear a rumour from McCavity, a man of the 128th, that the General Court back home is talking about reintroducing the Test Acts, supposedly as a ‘temporary wartime restriction’. Please tell me there is no truth to this! It would be a sad reflection on we moderns if we resorted to no-popery laws merely because we have been invaded by Catholics, of a sort. I have served alongside men from Mount-Royal or New Ireland who are no less courageous or loyal to our course, for all that they may fumble with the icons of misbelief in tricky moments.
As for the foe, though I am but a humble man of the trenches and the protguns, I hear things about them, too, through my contacts. They say that the enemy has taken [redacted by censor; from contest, probably Creekville] and is now pushing towards [redacted by censor, probably Hawkinsburgh]. It is easy to be alarmed at the speed of their progress, as many of the men are. But it is clear they are overextending themselves, outrunning their supply lines. Thus far they have faced only second-rank adversaries. Local militias, which are about as effective as if the general simply took the little flag representing them from his map and tried to poke Alfarus in the eye with it. Mexican and Guatemalan levies; some of them fine fellows, but perhaps naturally, even they are more keen to fight to defend their own homeland in the south. I can scarcely begrudge them that; if, God forbid, South Massachusetts was under torchy guns, I would not want to be here fighting to defend these barely-human traitors as though they would appreciate it. And then there are our own garrisons. When I think what my own men were like when I took over, and how much worse the reputations of those in Carolina were, I shudder to think. It is scarce any wonder that a mere whiff of death-luft is sufficient for the torchies to clear all in their path.
No more, though. Our forces are closing on them now, from [redacted by censor] and [redacted by censor], I am sure. We will trap them, set them in a Cannae, and annihilate them. And, yes, then we can go home – but not before, I hope, teaching them a lesson they will never forget...”
May 13th
“...apologies for not writing sooner, but things have been hairy. Not long after my last letter, we finally ran into the foe and began exchanging fire. Artillery duels from a distance, the foe still barely visible, but I saw they were in grey uniforms – different from the tan ones Uncle Mike talked about.[14] But the boys are still singing that song I told you about in memory of those days – ‘We Did It Before And We’ll Do It Again!’ And in Uncle Mike’s time, they already held Carolina against us as the defenders. This time, they’re the ones trying to invade – and they’ll be stopped.
We went into action near [redacted by censor] but they fled from us. Put down disciplined enough covering fire as they went, don’t get me wrong – they’re not cowards – but they can’t stand up to our [redacted by censor]s and their [redacted by censor] guns! We have them on the run now...”
May 19th
“...has run out of steam, it’s clear. They’ve moved into the university town of [redacted by censor, but obviously Corte]. Yes, I was surprised to hear that these sub-humans have a university, too. Perhaps it is staffed entirely by the local men of colour, who seem altogether more intelligent than those I am ashamed to share a race with.
What they don’t realise is General [redacted by censor]’s plan, as I heard it from, let’s say a friend. So apparently the boys with the high foreheads have discovered that the torchies are working from old maps of the place, back when they were lords of the earth here before the turn of the century. Those are still plenty good enough for the most part – Old Nick knows hardly anyone has done anything in this joke of a country since then to change it – but there’s a fly in their ointment. A few years back, apparently some eccentric – which is upper-class speak for ‘nuts’ – chap decided to build some factory near here, and stopped up the river with a dam to power the place. Never came off in the end of course, but they got as far as the dam, at least.[15] The only part that matters is that the torchies will think they have a line of retreat to the north, when there isn’t – not unless they’ve brought a pontoon bridge in their back pocket. We have them now. Soon...”
May 23rd
“...just dashing off a few lines before we go in, I hope Sue got my last one. We have them trapped now. They’re pocketed up in [redacted by censor, but clearly Corte] and we think they’ve worked out they have their backs to the artificial lake now. Even if they do manage to cross the lake, we’ve got soldiers on both sides now, and General [redacted by censor]’s army has joined us from [redacted by censor, probably Savannah].
This won’t be the end of the war by any means, but if we can force this group to surrender, that’ll take out their best offensive forces. The boys reckon that most of their protgun forces are bottled up here. Trouble is, so’s most of their death-luft artillery. If they decide to go out in a blaze of glory, they can hurt us – but we’ll annihilate them.
Happy birthday to Millie [his sister]. Tell her we’ll celebrate the next one together...”
This was the last letter sent by Captain Waterhouse. As of 1980, his precise fate remains unknown, and his remains have not yet been found among those located after the Combine authorities recently permitted limited authorised visits to the site of the Battle of Corte by the Imperial War Graves Commission.
*
From: “Memoirs of the First Born: The Authorised and Annotated Edition with Commentary” by Markus Garzius, edited and annotated by Albert Whitley and Maria Aydenia (1987)—
Of course, I really had no business being anywhere near that damned artificial lake.[16] I have no qualms about putting my life on the line, which is already forfeit, for the cause of Humanity – I hope I have already made that abundantly clear. But there is something frustrating about having one’s particular talents go to waste. Being ordered to the front as just another footsoldier, as it seemed, was not well received by me or my surviving men. We could fight as conventional infantry, of course we could; but so could thousands of others, whereas few could match our skill as Spekuladores.
Yet perhaps I was too influenced by my own emotional state. Part of me had fully expected me to set aside Persephone as soon as I was ordered away, as I had set aside Ayu and Ines before her. But she lingered in my mind. Absurdly, I worried if she was all right, if her arm was recovering, as though she was in more danger than me on this battlefield. (Afterwards, she told me she worried the same about me, a tad more rationally). I suppose it was not quite so absurd; some of the so-called Carolinians did turn back to their bad old ways of attacking darker-skinned humans when they found they would be forced to live in the equitable Fourth Society. But they soon learned they could no longer do it openly; many recent Celator recruits from Zone 19 [Congo] would find themselves tasked with organising reprisals to set an example. A messy and sub-optimal way of stamping out anti-human behaviour, but those were extraordinary times.
I would never regret my love for Persephone, but it was a dangerous distraction at that time. It would be wrong to blame her for it, of course, but I still winced every time I realised I had been trying, imperfectly, to sketch her face in the back of the notebook I was supposed to use for artillery spotting while daydreaming. Or sometimes I would try to convert her name into proper Novalatina to surprise her with the next time I saw her, only to get stuck and fill a whole page with attempts. Such matters were never my strong suit.
Maybe I was a little unfair to say my men and I were stuck being mere infantrymen. At least we were assigned as artillery spotters, equipped with camouflage uniforms and getting a chance to use our skills in infiltrating enemy lines. Lugallus Gonzalus had led his army of about eighty-five thousand men, swelled with reinforcements focusing on this thrust called Operatio Damokles, farther and farther to the north and east, eventually reaching a town then mis-named Corte which housed a famous university. We had outrun our supply lines, leading to my men and I being stuck with the indignity of foraging at one point, and Celatores had been stripped from Lugallii Kadarus and Arminius farther west, hurting those advances and stalling them against the Septens. (I learned much of this later and am speaking in hindsight, of course; I cannot pretend to have had the ear of Gonzalus!) This larger army had gotten itself cut off and isolated from the others, and was now bottled up against an artificial lake, with a large Septen army to the south and an even larger one to the north. They had pushed us back with capable ansukarrus attacks, having access to newer models than their sleepy garrisons we had fought earlier, and had not been shy about using their own pirated version of the Scientific Weapon against us. I was beginning to be sick of the regular sirens warning us to put on our masks and protective rubber garments. Thus far, however, our forces had been too dispersed for the luft to do much damage.
It was obvious what was happening, even to a man of tactics rather than strategy like myself. The Septens had trapped us, pushing us into a confined area with our backs to the lake, using similar tactics to those which had borne us fruit on the way there. If they could compress Gonzalus’ army into a small area with no way of escape, they could pound us with impunity with their artillery, using both luft and conventional shells. At worst, they could simply wait until we ran out of ammunition and supplies. If they did, it would break the back of our offensive, and undo all the sacrifices we had made at once-Pensacola and beyond. It was a self-evidently horrific situation, and some of the men spoke with worry of it, though they were too professional to spread fear in the ranks. For myself, I worried not. I did not have Gonzalus’ ear, but I knew his reputation, and I had an inkling this plan came from a higher level: from Rivarius, at least, if not with input from beyond even him. Men of such genius, selected by the meritocratic tests, did not knowingly send us footsoldiers into a hopeless situation without reason.
I even guessed the basic notion behind the plan, though I would never have worked out how it could be accomplished. Gonzalus was using a tactic that I had encountered and used many times myself as a Spekulador, albeit on a much smaller and less grand scale. It has many names (something that should really be properly rationalised) but I have always known it simply as ‘the reverse trap’. If your opponent knows that you wish to trap him, he will evade capture, refuse to be drawn in, disperse his forces when working on grand levels such as this. So the way to trap him is to convince him that you are the one being trapped. Then, he will gather and concentrate his forces to cut off your retreat. That is when you spring your plan, reverse the trap and trap him in it. True men of genius, and not a little luck, may be able to reverse a genuine trap of the opponent on the fly. More often, reverse traps must be planned in advance, as had been the case here. But they must be simple and swift, not great complex machines that will grind to a halt if one cogwheel slips. All it takes is an opponent to have one moment of suspicion that this is surely too easy.
It was clear to me that Gonzalus wanted to seem to be trapped by the Septens. But for what purpose? They outnumbered him at least two to one with their two armies together, perhaps as much as two and a half to one. What could he do to reverse the trap? What did concentrating their forces achieve? It made the Scientific Weapon more effective, yes, but these Septens had demonstrated many times that they were well drilled in using their protective equipment to resist the luft. They would not be caught napping like their forebears on the very day of my birth, thousands of talcodii away, who had stared dumbly at the sky as the wings over the world dropped the Scientific Weapon upon them. As fast as our engineers could build new aeroports, we only had barely enough celagii to prevent the Septens gaining aero supremacy over us; we certainly could not spare them for bombing runs.
Perhaps I gained a faint suspicion a few days before it happened. Our artillery positions were rapidly shifting as we were pushed farther and farther back against this lake – incidentally also make the Septen trenches facing us grow denser and denser as well as they cut off our retreat. I found myself reporting directly to a zendurion of artillery, Andonius, a man from Zone 7. He was clearly very good at his job, or he would long have been removed for his filthy deviationist habit of swearing in the defiled language known as Dutch. I disliked him but I respected his abilities.
As I removed my helmet with its accompanying camouflage twigs and leaves, and read out my latest observations as two terzerii marked them on the grid map of the surrounding area, I saw that Andonius had, uncharacteristically, ceased paying attention to what I was saying. “Now then lad,” he said in a warning tone (and horrible grammar), “put that thing down. None of those, not yet. Remember what I told you? See you touch those things again and it’s punishment duty for you?”
Judging by the surly expression of the young quindus, who had frozen halfway through removing a shell from a crate, he wanted to talk back to Andonius by opining what punishment duty could be worse than being about to be annihilated by a numerically superior Septen army. But he held his tongue and respected the hierarchy like a good Societist. My eyes drifted from his expression to the shell itself.
I had seen many of them, and even helped fire one or two when they were short-handed (another misuse of my talents, but every man was needed). The Scientific Weapon shells were carefully marked to avoid confusion with the conventional explosive or incendiary ones. The standard colour was an almost painfully bright and sickly, unnatural, shade of yellow; it would have stood out a talcodus to the enemy, so an incentive to keep the shells in their protective crates until they were needed. Yellow shells with no further marking contained the brimstone-mustard luft that was the most common type of Scientific warhead used in those days; the older borussic nocifex [cacodyl cyanide] type bore two red lines as well, while the occasionally-used muriatine luft type had two green lines. Mixing up the types helped keep the opponents on their toes with their preventive drills, although recently there had been orders to keep the use of Scientific warheads strictly to brimstone-mustard and, reading between the lines, as predictable as possible. Suspicious.
Maybe there were other types I hadn’t seen, but this one was very different. Instead of solid yellow, it was a chequerboard pattern of yellow and the bare silvery metal of the shell. Also, the shell was shaped differently, though clearly still designed to fit our standard artillery pieces: the luft warhead, which made a sinister gurgle as the shells arced down, was slightly smaller, and part of the shell seemed to be devoted to a secondary payload. I later learned that some of this type even included a ferralumic [thermite] incendiary component, merely to provide heat as it turned out, though not all did.
Andonius followed my gaze. “Forget you saw that, my lad,” he said quietly. It was frustrating that I couldn’t tell if he was deliberately insulting me, or if it was merely that his Novalatina was so poor! “Forget for a little while, at least.”
I remembered his words three, I think it was, days later. The Septens had overrun some of our outer trenches, and it was clear that the southern army, the one from the city misnamed Savannah, was planning a big push, while the one from alleged-Ultima served to cut off our retreat, helped by the lake. Surely, if there was a trick, it must be now or never?
The Septens were not stupid, and had tried to silence our artillery with their own. Mostly they had not succeeded, but when I fumbled my way through the lines of newly-deployed opponent spike-wire to return to Andonius’ second redoubt in three days, I found his televox[17] operator was lying dead near the fortified entrance, hit by opponent shell fragments. He should have picked a better time to relieve himself, I thought irrelevantly.
Indeed, as I rushed into the command post to report, I saw a harried-looking Andonius answering the televox himself, while his subordinates made more marks on the grid map and looked worriedly at one another. Those marks were advancing ever northwards, towards the lake. I reported directly to them in the absence of Andonius, and what I told them about the new opponent trench positions did not make them any happier.
No sooner had I finished that I felt a hand on my shoulder. Andonius. At first I wondered if he was offended that I had reported to his men, but he merely held out the televox handset to me. “Got an important call coming,” he said without preamble. “Can’t hear a blasted thing. The guns have got to me. Will you?”
Now it was my turn to be offended. Not content with demoting me to artillery spotter, it seemed I was now to be demoted to televox operator. But then, I told myself with a sigh, all roles were equal in the sight of Sanchez. “Very well,” I said, taking the handset. In a fitting illustration of my observation, I could scarcely have dreamed how suddenly important this role would become.
For the next few minutes, I passed on the orders from Gonzalus’ headquarters. My suspicion slowly grew that Andonius wasn’t deaf at all, his Novalatina was simply too poor for him to understand orders once a little crackle of interference was added. He certainly seemed to hear me clearly enough as I passed on the commands to continue to hold fire, to let the infantry pull back, to prepare for a heavy rolling barrage…
Then, a new voice. Unfamiliar, but with the air of authority to it. It spoke only seven words:
“Gonzalus. The Kapud authorises. Trismegistus. 1400 hours.”
I repeated them almost without thinking. Before I knew it, my role had changed again. Now, I was helping Andonius’ men, even Andonius himself, crowbar open that crate of mysterious yellow-silver chequered shells and begin loading his heavy artillery pieces with them. We had already loaded three of the guns before I realised we did not even have orders on target coordinates. But it appeared that Andonius, and his counterparts along the line, had already been briefed. Sections of the battlefield had been carved out for each, and he drew lines on the grid map to indicate ours. On the other side of the army, on the bank of the lake, other cannons were ready to target the northern army.
The minutes ticked around to fourteen o’clock, and then, with a roar that might have done in truth what Andonius had claimed about his hearing, it seemed as though every single gun in the service of Humanity had fired at once.
All armed with those strange, unknown shells, identified by a code word that was old Latin, not Novalatina.
Who or what was Trismegistus, I wondered?
*
From: “One Hundred Chemicals That Changed The World” by Sir Jeremiah Saunders (1986)—
THE ALKAHEST. The Universal Solvent. The Third Secret of the Alchemists. The Flag-Breaker, the bounty of Superior Human Science, borne of manly and mature cooperation between scholars rather than the competition of the ‘nationalistically blinded’.
All rot, of course. Hogwash. Mere propaganda, expounded by the Combine and all too eagerly parroted by Diversitarians. The latter are so eager to point the finger at an unknowable war-winning wonder weapon, some Gnostic secret that surely no-one could have foreseen. An unearthly tool of war against which none could be expected to resist. Even a forerunner of the threshold bomb, perhaps, implying all the great effort of research, the time and resources sunk into a seemingly-obscure field of science.
Yet poke at that image of profundity and one will find it is a mere painting on a curtain. Twitch it aside, and one finds a dull and prosaic piece of chemical history reaching back almost to the lifetime of Pablo Sanchez himself. If history had proceeded differently, if the dice of chance had fallen elsewhere on the rouge-et-noir wheel, the vaunted Alkahest would have been nothing more than a footnote in dusty books of interest only to chemists like myself. Of course, the inverse is true of many discoveries made in peacetime that, had they been made at a crucial moment in conflict before all sides could copy them, might have changed the world – though likely not for the better.
Societist propaganda (and Diversitarian copies) generally attribute the discovery of the Alkahest to a researcher named Romerus, just prior to the outbreak of the Black Twenties conflict.[18] Of course, we do not know if Romerus even truly existed, much less that he was an important figure in the Societists’ work using the Alkahest; the development of Tremuriatix is also sometimes attributed to him, so he may merely have been a convenient name-label to stand for all Societist scholars in triumphant propaganda. What is known for certain, however, is that Romerus certainly did not discover the Alkahest, contrary to what is still said even in many school textbooks in free countries. The reason that we know this is that there is plenty of evidence that the Alkahest – though not called that at the time – had already been spotted and logged many decades before.
According to Societist accounts, Romerus discovered the Alkahest by elluftising bixylobrimstone, a foul-smelling waste product from what is called the Halewick Reaction in the English-speaking world, and goes by many other names elsewhere.[19] The fact that they did not identify the specific reaction until the 1960s, when it had already been independently discovered by Ross Halewick and others, is significant. By that point the purges of the Silent Revolution had affected the once-mighty Societist chemical industry, and it is likely that those now running it in its diminished capacity were keen to claim they had arrived years early at particular breakthroughs, long ahead of the ‘bandit regimes of the unliberated Zones’. Furthermore, the individuals in question were usually more noted for their knowledge of this week’s version of orthodox Sanchezista doctrine than their awareness of chemical history, and so this is among many unrealistic claims of particular reactions being discovered implausibly early. Perhaps Romerus did produce the Alkahest by elluftising bixylobrimstone, but that bixylobrimstone was most probably likely derived from natural processes such as those in algae.
Production is not the same as discovery, however. Locked within the notebooks of Meridian Refugiado chemists in the Philippines, mirrored by those in Germany and a number of other countries, show that the so-called Alkahest was first noted in the 1870s at the latest.[20] No particular name has ever been credited as the true ‘first’; as is usual in the messy history of science, it may have been recognised by multiple people around the world almost simultaneously. The name eventually settled on, as cross-national standards bodies eliminated (some!) inconsistencies between them, was bixylobrimstelluftide, sometimes abbreviated to BXBE. This term is now little known nowadays except in a handful of textbooks which look down on even the most stubbornly-persistent trivial chemical names. Even in most journals, it is simply the Alkahest.
One does not need to elluftise bixylobrimstone in order to find the Alkahest. It is produced in significant quantities as a by-product by the Fort process of paper production, in which wood pulp is treated with ‘white liquor’, a heated mixture of water, aquelluftide of natrium (caustic soda) and brimstide of natrium.[21] Though superior to previous paper-production methods, it comes with the disadvantages of producing many noxious brimstone-containing compounds, including the Alkahest. The Fort process was developed in the 1870s in France (hence the name) but did not become the dominant paper-production process until the 1910s, when recovery boilers were devised that allowed the wood-contaminated ‘black liquor’ to be recycled and reused into white liquor. One modern theory is that it was the Societist Combine’s immense need for producing printed propaganda, coming at the same time as this breakthrough, that led to the Fort process becoming ubiquitous in the Combine; this would therefore suggest a different and more obvious means by which the Alkahest might have been noted.
No, the breakthrough of Romerus (or whoever it truly was) in the early 1920s was not merely a chemical discovery. Rather, it was the far subtler and more ground-shaking piece of science that is oft-neglected by headline-chasers: finding that a compound which has been known for years, and consigned to the back of a dusty reference book, has a world-changing property none have previously noticed. It has played out many times over the years, with ‘new’ wonder drugs often being chemicals first recorded fifty years before the disease they treat was even understood. But, perhaps, never has such a phenomenon been seen so dramatically as in the case of the Alkahest.
The Alkahest. According to one version of the tale, the old Alchemists of Western learning were obsessed with finding three secrets. It makes a good story, the three secrets of Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice-Greatest, legendary founder of Hermetic Wisdom.[22] The Philosopher’s Stone, which could transmute base metals to gold; the Elixir of Life, which granted immortality; and the Alkahest, the Universal Solvent. In reality, Hermetists were usually more concerned with the Panacea, the legendary cure for all diseases, which modern accounts will tend to quietly fold into the Elixir of Life to avoid the messiness of a fourth secret. Sometimes alchemists did attribute healing properties to the Alkahest too, and the term ‘Azoth’ might be used to describe a different substance which was also held to be both a panacea and a universal solvent. Azoth, which also appears in Jewish kabbalistic mysticism, is ultimately derived from the Arabic word for quicksilver, which (due to its ability to amalgamate with almost any other metal, seemingly dissolving them) was often identified as the basis for an Azoth or Alkahest. The term Alkahest, though superficially Arabic-looking, has origins which are – perhaps appropriately – unknown.
Many, looking at that list of three secrets, will be struck by the dissonance of the Alkahest. Eternal earthly life and wealth, those are goals which many have sought over the centuries; the former is just as associated with the Taoist alchemical tradition of China. But what is the worth of a universal solvent? It betrays a transition towards a more scientific way of thinking, an urge to understand the universe as a goal in itself, and that, at least, is to be applauded – even if at first it was couched in secretive mysticism that now seems like nonsense to we moderns.
Today, we have a better (though far from perfect) understanding of how solvents work. Introductory textbooks will often make a rather simplistic like-to-like argument; that polar chemicals dissolve in polar-solvents and non-polar ones in non-polar solvents.[23] We now know that, as usual, it’s more complicated than that! To cut a long story short, all solvents theoretically have the ability to form aquaform links, acting as donors (presenting a charge deficit) or acceptors (presenting a charge surfeit). Water is a remarkable example of a solvent which is both a strong donor and a strong acceptor, forming strong links with itself and with other polar molecules. However, this means that there are many substances which water will not dissolve, because water would rather form aquaform links with itself than with the substance – which instead stays as a solid precipitate on the bottom of one’s flask.
Therefore, theoretically, the world’s best solvent would be a molecule which will form strong links with almost any other compound, but not with itself. A molecule that is either all donor and no acceptor, or all acceptor and no donor. Thus far, science has not found a good example of the former – but, as the Societists belatedly discovered, BXBE is the latter. Its elluftium-brimstone polarised bond produces a strong surfeit charge on the elluftium atom, making it an excellent acceptor; but there are no deficit charged aquaform atoms to function as a donor. Therefore, BXBE will, indeed, dissolve almost anything. It is the closest thing science has discovered to the Alkahest that the old alchemists spent so long searching for.
So what? You may ask. What bearing does such an esoteric discovery, a discovery of interest only for the pursuit of science itself, have on the course of a war, of a nation, of history itself? Yet as governments learned when it came to inversion theory and the threshold bomb, one cannot separate scientific curiosity from an urge for a utilitarian focus; world-changing discoveries can come from unexpected places.
BXBE, the Alkahest, has some curious properties. Strangely enough, again like the legendary Alkahest, it has some beneficial medical properties, such as acting as a counter-inflammatory agent (though the jury is still out on how effective it is). It is another property of interest to medicine which changed the world, however. BXBE is not very toxic; there are far worse brimstone compounds. Taking a bath in the stuff is not recommended, but spilling a droplet on one’s hand will not kill one. Oddly, however, an instant later one will taste garlic, symptomatic of brimstone compounds, on the tongue. Why? We are still uncertain of the details, with one theory being that the ganglia of a nerve below the brain are directly activated, rather than the taste receptors themselves. But either way, the astonishing property of the Alkahest is revealed: its remarkable power as a solvent also means it will penetrate the skin and enter the bloodstream, travelling to the extremities of the body in seconds.
Alone, that might mean little beyond a scientific curiosity. But this is the universal solvent; it can be mixed with (almost) anything. Mix in a drug, and it too will be carried with the Alkahest through the skin and into the blood. In fact, BXBE has been used to administer drugs in emergency situations where breaking the skin is impossible or inadvisable.[24] It is possible because, as said above, BXBE itself is not very toxic and a small amount can be tolerated.
It is not a phenomenon that, before 1926, many had had occasion to notice. Although the Alkahest was produced by the Fort process, it also comes with the curious property that it has a very high melting and boiling point, even higher when contaminated with other chemicals (as it was in those waste products). At room temperature, the Alkahest often turns to a solid lump or at least a viscous, treacle-like liquid. To see its properties on full display, one must heat a mixture before administration, unless one is already in a warm environment – such as, for example, the southeastern parts of North America in the right month of the year.
And one has to be careful administering the mixtures lest they escape or drug the wrong person. For BXBE, the Alkahest, does not merely penetrate skin; it can pass through almost anything. Protective equipment such as gloves, masks and filters can only slow it down, not stop it.[25]
The Societists had discovered something which many people outside the chemical community do not understand. There is no distinction between drugs and poisons; a beneficial drug can become deadly in sufficiently high quantities, and from a poison can come life-saving medical breakthroughs. The brimstone-based death-lufts used in the Black Twenties, for example, ultimately led to the development of counter-cancer drugs.[26]
On one fateful day in 1926, however, they would not save lives. Mixed with the Alkahest, an old chemical from a dusty book which few remembered even among chemists, the death-lufts took on a new and deadlier form than ever before. Filters, rubberised suits, training, drills: none of them could stop the poison as it burned into the eyes, the mouths, the lungs of thousands of American soldiers. In disbelief, they tore at their seemingly-useless protection, ripped them away in some cases, only exposing themselves more as the Societists struck at two armies at once. Soon their protguns would arrive to finish the job.
Modern analysis suggests the Societists did not have that many Alkahest-enhanced shells in the Battle of Corte. They did not need them. On that day, and in the days following, the most potent weapon was fear and paranoia. Just as General Boulanger at Lille, more than a century earlier, had frightened his foes with perfectly ordinary cannon moving under the ‘unearthly’ motive force of steam engines, the Societists shattered the morale of the Americans, who had thought themselves safe from the death-luft onslaught. Overnight, they had been reduced to the same terrified, helpless state as their lost fathers and uncles who had died outside the city that would soon be renamed Zon1Urb1, a quarter-century earlier. A certain patriotic song received an ironic refrain: ‘They Did It Before, And They’ve Done It Again’.
No, it was unnecessary for every shell to be an Alkahest one; it was sufficient that this trench of American soldiers feared that the next one might be. And the next trench, and the next, all the way to Fredericksburg and its squabbling politicians…
[10] OTL Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico.
[11] American regiment numbers tend to be artificially high, as they were counted on top of British regiments that now no longer exist as part of the same army (or often at all).
[12] The Boston News-Letter was one of the oldest newspapers in the American colonies, founded in 1704. In OTL it ended in 1776 as its owners, the Drapers, remained loyal to the Crown and left Boston when British forces evacuated it. In TTL, of course, there was no American Revolution and it remains New England’s primary newspaper of record. With the phrasing ‘rumour of war’, Waterhouse is referencing Matthew 24:6 (“Ye will hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled...” in the King James Bible).
[13] Waterhouse’s choice of words here is telling – the New York was Daniels’ flagship lineship, sunk at the attack on the fleet in the Nicaragua Canal. The soldiers have been influenced by Gilmore (or both have been influenced by the same factors) seeing this as the primary Societist attack.
[14] Celatores are supposedly meant to wear the same bright white spotless uniforms they do on parade. In practice, grey is considered a ‘symbolic’ compromise without sacrificing camouflage.
[15] This is in the same location as OTL’s Lake Sinclair, Georgia, but is not as extensive in size as it’s a much smaller project (Lake Sinclair was not created by damming the Oconee until 1953 in OTL).
[16] Probably not an intentional pun, as this is translated from a Novalatina original…
[17] Societists are about the only people who prefer this term to ‘quister’ for OTL telephone.
[18] See Part #275 in Volume VII for a melodramatic Diversitarian rendition of this.
[19] In OTL we would say that he oxidised dimethyl sulfide, a by-product of the Swern Oxidation (which was discovered by American chemist Daniel Swern in 1978; that OTL date provides context for Saunders’ scepticism).
[20] In OTL, it was first officially recorded by Russian chemist Aleksandr Zaytsev in 1867 via a paper published in the German journal Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie, but it had probably been informally noticed before that due to the industrial processes this segment goes on to mention. Zaytsev did use the method attributed to Romerus here, oxidising dimethyl sulfide.
[21] Known in OTL as the Kraft process for the same reason (both words mean ‘strong’, in French and German respectively). The chemicals are in OTL known as sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide.
[22] Hermes Trismegistus originated as a syncretic fusion of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth during the period of Hellenistic rule in Egypt, and became a target of obsession by both European and Arab alchemists in the Middle Ages. In reality, the writings attributed to him (the ‘Hermetica’) are not necessarily connected with the three legendary goals of European alchemy mentioned here.
[23] The concept of magnetic poles (originally derived by analogy from those of the Earth itself) is old and the terms derived from it are a natural parallel evolution. Here, polarity refers to electrostatic charge rather than magnetism; a non-polar molecule, such as the octane in petrol, has a roughly equal negative charge distribution across it rather than the shared electrons being concentrated in one place. This is because octane is made of eight carbon and eighteen hydrogen atoms, which have similar electronegativity (the ability to attract electrons). Water, on the other hand, is a very polar molecule, being made of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms; the oxygen is much more electronegative than hydrogen, so pulls more of the shared electrons towards itself. The water molecule ends up with what is known as a dipole moment, with more negative charge at the oxygen end and less at the hydrogen end. Nearby water molecules can attract one another by effectively touching their negative ends to the other molecule’s positive end; this is the very important phenomenon known as hydrogen bonding (in OTL, and aquaform linking in TTL). This is responsible for water’s unexpectedly high boiling point compared to similar molecules (the similarly-sized methane is a gas at room temperature, for example, whereas water is liquid) and therefore, ultimately, essential for life to exist on Earth.
[24] This has also been achieved in OTL, first being discovered in 1963.
[25] Incidentally, the chemical known in TTL as BXBE or ‘the Alkahest’ is what we in OTL call dimethyl sulfoxide or DMSO.
[26] Studying the effects of sulfur mustard gas from the First World War also led to the development of the first chemotherapy drugs in OTL.
The ‘Cygnia Gauntlet’ of May is one of the most celebrated episodes of the War of 1926 among Americans. Following the Societists’ repeated use of aero power from their four hiveships, not only to sink rival American fleets but then to support the Libramendus landings and subsequent operations, the conservatives in the Imperial Admiralty had finally been shouted down by Admiral Bartley. With assistance from Major Julian Worth (promoted and brought across the country on a rare authorised series of trains from St Joseph in North Arizpe[11]), hiveship advocate Admiral Zachariah Newbury was tasked with assembling an aero strategy against the Societists’ superiority. Newbury concluded that the only way to challenge the Societists’ force (which, after the Libramendum feints against West Florida, was never divided again) was to build up comparable hiveship forces.
To do so, Newbury successfully lobbied for the accelerated completion of HIMS Hornet and Wasp at Braintree, advanced training for the crew of Eyrie (completed but undergoing sea trials) and the hasty conversion of half-completed lineships and cruiser-frigates into light hiveships. While the latter project proved too ambitious for the short timeline of the war, Newbury’s moves (aided by the skilful project management of J. Albemarle Bush at the Braintree shipyards) did put the ENA in a position where three hiveships might be presented against the Societists’ four as early as July. However, Newbury and Worth were determined that the Cygnia must join them; not merely as one more hiveship, but the only one whose crew had seen frontline action in this new form of warfare.
In this era before Photel was (or could be) routinely deployed on most individual aerocraft, war-fighting experience in functioning as part of a group made an even bigger difference than in other facets of the armed forces. This was proved time and again by the Societists’ aero power operating over Carolina, first from the hiveships and then from aeroports that were taken over or newly constructed by the Celatores’ engineers. Frequently the Celatores were operating at a numerical disadvantage or with limited fuel, yet usually their celagii triumphed over an equal number of American pilots due to experience in fighting as aero companies. This factor tended to apply more to flying artillery and bombers, as Societist fighters had rarely faced comparable opponents in the air, but even in the latter case they had often undergone more relevant training than the Americans – whose doctrine had, until recently, emphasised individual air duels over attempting to coordinate company actions. When the Celatores encountered a particular American pilot with more war experience (such as a veteran of the Russian conflict who had been invalided out) they faced stiffer resistance – but they could typically unite against that pilot and use numbers against him, while his less-experienced American fellows continued to fight as individuals. It is important to understand that the Celatores did not have a magical means of communication, merely the benefit of experience in at least attempting group-fighting tactics, but it made a dramatic difference nonetheless.
The crew of Cygnia was an exception to all this, having rapidly shifted their tactics under the influence of innovators like Worth. Furthermore, they had faced grim odds against the Russians, which had effectively subjected them to a kind of Paleian environmental breeding; those conservatives who relied on fighting alone were now mostly lying at the bottom of the Pacific in twisted metal coffins. The upshot was that bringing Cygnia to meet up with the east coast hiveships was crucial.
Newbury soon ruled out attempting to round the Horn, which would have subjected Cygnia to countless Societist aero bases and naval flotillas along the way. Going the other way, across the Pacific and Indian Oceans before rounding the Cape of Good Hope, was much more long-winded and still potentially left the hiveship vulnerable to Societist ironsharks in the South Atlantic between South America and Africa. The least bad option was, therefore, for the Nicaragua Canal to be cleared and the Cygnia to make a run across the Caribbean. The former had already begun, thanks to Gilmore’s obsession with seeing the canals as the centrepoint of the war. After only six weeks of blocking the canal as Prokapud Dominikus had hoped, HIMS Potomac had been refloated and further clearing work left the canal usable once more. Newbury, and Cygnia’s commander Captain Charles Riddell, rejected suggestions to have dentist-frigates test the route first, instead sending forth Cygnia on April 30th to steam through the canal with the element of surprise.
While the Societists had broken many American codes, the date was sent via a one-time pad and the Celatores fighting in Guatemala’s Costa Rica province were caught offguard. Spotter dromes did not catch a glimpse of Cygnia until she had almost exited the canal, and tooth bombers were unable to find her again afterwards – though they did sink one of the dentist-frigates that belatedly followed Cygnia, HIMS Ontario.
Many films have told the tale of Cygnia’s desperate flight across the Caribbean Sea, dodging Celator dromes operating out of western Cuba, briefly sheltering in Jamaica (and incidentally making it a later target for the Societists) and finally threading the needle east of Puerto Rico while pursued by a force of Societist dentists. There are plenty of moments of heroism in this tale without the embellishments that said filmmakers always seem to feel the need to make. Against the odds, and after one heart-stopping moment north of Bermuda where she was nearly sunk by a Societist ironshark which was only in the area by chance, Cygnia made it into port at Norfolk on May 29th. It was a rare victory for the Americans and, naturally, trumpeted to the skies. As for Cygnia herself, her role in the war was far from over...
*
From: “Letters from the Front”, edited by Paul Thomas (1981)—
Captain Richard Waterhouse, known as Ricardo to his friends due to his supposed resemblance to Italian-Mexican opera singer Ricardo Barone, fought against the Russians in New Siberia in the early part of the Black Twenties conflict. As a lieutenant, he was wounded in February 1923 in a trench outside of Tretyakovsk, during General Welch’s eventually successful push to take the city after Welch’s failures. Waterhouse’s wounds stemmed from being hit with fragments of an exploding Russian shell, injuring a leg, perforating a kidney and leaving him with an infection which, in those pre-peptobrim days, almost killed him. As a result, he was invalided back to his home in Sudbury, a small town west of Boston in South Massachusetts, New England, and spent many months recuperating in hospital. During that time, he witnessed the hospital filling up with plague victims, yet somehow managed to avoid catching the disease himself. In his weakened state, it would amost certainly have been his end if he had caught it. For that reason, his surviving family and friends began to joke of him living a charmed life, to which the dry Waterhouse replied that if this was charmed, he didn’t want to know what cursed was like.
Despite this, Waterhouse was keen to return to the front and do his part for his country. However, a number of factors conspired against him. Imperial government policy at the time, under the Fouracre and Gilmore ministries, was essentially to avoid the movement of troops or any other subjects as much as possible, in order to control the spread of the plague. The government was all too willing to commit the troops already in the north-west to landing in Kamchatka if it stopped their families asking when they would be sent home; however, they had little incentive to commit reinforcements, much less those already recovering from significant injuries. Waterhouse found himself being ordered to speak (from a safe distance, atop an obsolete protgun in a parade) at carefully-controlled tours of the province. To his frustration, he was not even encouraging his fellow men to volunteer for the Army, but merely asking civilians to buy government bonds to help fund the war effort and plague control measures. He feared that, rather than a strong, recovered, indomitable veteran, he was being presented as a pathetic figure appealing to ensure others did not suffer the same fate. Unsurprisingly, by 1925 he had sunk into a depression as a result, and had ceased volunteering to help drill New England’s Confederal Guard, which was principally being used for plague control measures at the time.
The War of 1926 seemed to offer an opportunity to Waterhouse. He, and his fellow injured veterans in similar circumstances across the Empire, were perhaps the only people who welcomed the unexpected attack by the Societists. With the government still unwilling to shift troops by rail more than necessary until it was too late, with (later on) the wave of Societist sabotage of the transport network, with the most professional army trapped in Kamchatka – the Ministry of War had little choice than to turn to these experienced veterans to form the backbone of the new forces that they were hastily assembling.
Waterhouse was hastily promoted to Captain and placed in command of a company of the 84th (Boston) Fusiliers.[11] Most of the men he commanded were not raw recruits, but professional soldiers who had nonetheless spent bored months or years cooped up in garrison forts across the Empire, forbidden from visiting home or joining the front due to the plague control measures, often falling into slough and corruption. His letters home record that he gained a reputation as a strict disciplinarian, but nonetheless eventually became an object of grudging respect and admiration by the men he whipped back into shape.
Here we present extracts from his final letters home to his family (in accorance with their wishes, we have not included those to his fiancée Susan).
April 28th
“...they soon learned their lessons when Sergeant Clough had them scrubbing the chaintracks on our [redacted by censor] all night! Fine fellows still, though, just a little rough around the edges. We need to hone that edge as we approach the front – or, if I am honest, as the front approaches us.
I think of Uncle Mike’s stories facing the torchies in the last war. Their flag is different now, but are they? I wonder. They are certainly as perfidious as he made them out to be. We hear all sorts of stories. That they promise to the men of colour that they will have equality, and to the old traitors that they will have dignity. Meanwhile, I hear from ‘Braino’ Perkins that what they actually get up to these days in the East Indies and Africa is quite different, to no-one’s surprise.
But I will say the traitors do not seem keen to put their necks into a noose by attacking or sabotaging our convoys. I think you should dismiss that article in the News-Letter you mentioned as mere rumour of war.[12] I hardly think they have turned patriot to the Crown and are doing such things to the torchies either, mark you. I see them out in the fields, watching us. Cotton-pickers and molasses-lickers, the men call them. Staring at us with bovine eyes, chewing the cud, doing nothing. Or mayhap that is too insulting a comparison to cows. If you went to Bengal and showed a Hindoo gentleman a cow with such an expression, he might rethink his religion. Trying to get them to understand you want such-and-such a thing – I’d have more luck trying to communicate with an Enwick native in the Arctic, and these are supposed to speak English! Certainly there is no great enthusiasm among the men for going to war to defend such folk. The cry that goes up is always ‘Remember the New York!’ They are certainly keen to avenge the poor sailors of our Navy...”[13]
May 6th
“...will write to you again as soon as I can. I hear a rumour from McCavity, a man of the 128th, that the General Court back home is talking about reintroducing the Test Acts, supposedly as a ‘temporary wartime restriction’. Please tell me there is no truth to this! It would be a sad reflection on we moderns if we resorted to no-popery laws merely because we have been invaded by Catholics, of a sort. I have served alongside men from Mount-Royal or New Ireland who are no less courageous or loyal to our course, for all that they may fumble with the icons of misbelief in tricky moments.
As for the foe, though I am but a humble man of the trenches and the protguns, I hear things about them, too, through my contacts. They say that the enemy has taken [redacted by censor; from contest, probably Creekville] and is now pushing towards [redacted by censor, probably Hawkinsburgh]. It is easy to be alarmed at the speed of their progress, as many of the men are. But it is clear they are overextending themselves, outrunning their supply lines. Thus far they have faced only second-rank adversaries. Local militias, which are about as effective as if the general simply took the little flag representing them from his map and tried to poke Alfarus in the eye with it. Mexican and Guatemalan levies; some of them fine fellows, but perhaps naturally, even they are more keen to fight to defend their own homeland in the south. I can scarcely begrudge them that; if, God forbid, South Massachusetts was under torchy guns, I would not want to be here fighting to defend these barely-human traitors as though they would appreciate it. And then there are our own garrisons. When I think what my own men were like when I took over, and how much worse the reputations of those in Carolina were, I shudder to think. It is scarce any wonder that a mere whiff of death-luft is sufficient for the torchies to clear all in their path.
No more, though. Our forces are closing on them now, from [redacted by censor] and [redacted by censor], I am sure. We will trap them, set them in a Cannae, and annihilate them. And, yes, then we can go home – but not before, I hope, teaching them a lesson they will never forget...”
May 13th
“...apologies for not writing sooner, but things have been hairy. Not long after my last letter, we finally ran into the foe and began exchanging fire. Artillery duels from a distance, the foe still barely visible, but I saw they were in grey uniforms – different from the tan ones Uncle Mike talked about.[14] But the boys are still singing that song I told you about in memory of those days – ‘We Did It Before And We’ll Do It Again!’ And in Uncle Mike’s time, they already held Carolina against us as the defenders. This time, they’re the ones trying to invade – and they’ll be stopped.
We went into action near [redacted by censor] but they fled from us. Put down disciplined enough covering fire as they went, don’t get me wrong – they’re not cowards – but they can’t stand up to our [redacted by censor]s and their [redacted by censor] guns! We have them on the run now...”
May 19th
“...has run out of steam, it’s clear. They’ve moved into the university town of [redacted by censor, but obviously Corte]. Yes, I was surprised to hear that these sub-humans have a university, too. Perhaps it is staffed entirely by the local men of colour, who seem altogether more intelligent than those I am ashamed to share a race with.
What they don’t realise is General [redacted by censor]’s plan, as I heard it from, let’s say a friend. So apparently the boys with the high foreheads have discovered that the torchies are working from old maps of the place, back when they were lords of the earth here before the turn of the century. Those are still plenty good enough for the most part – Old Nick knows hardly anyone has done anything in this joke of a country since then to change it – but there’s a fly in their ointment. A few years back, apparently some eccentric – which is upper-class speak for ‘nuts’ – chap decided to build some factory near here, and stopped up the river with a dam to power the place. Never came off in the end of course, but they got as far as the dam, at least.[15] The only part that matters is that the torchies will think they have a line of retreat to the north, when there isn’t – not unless they’ve brought a pontoon bridge in their back pocket. We have them now. Soon...”
May 23rd
“...just dashing off a few lines before we go in, I hope Sue got my last one. We have them trapped now. They’re pocketed up in [redacted by censor, but clearly Corte] and we think they’ve worked out they have their backs to the artificial lake now. Even if they do manage to cross the lake, we’ve got soldiers on both sides now, and General [redacted by censor]’s army has joined us from [redacted by censor, probably Savannah].
This won’t be the end of the war by any means, but if we can force this group to surrender, that’ll take out their best offensive forces. The boys reckon that most of their protgun forces are bottled up here. Trouble is, so’s most of their death-luft artillery. If they decide to go out in a blaze of glory, they can hurt us – but we’ll annihilate them.
Happy birthday to Millie [his sister]. Tell her we’ll celebrate the next one together...”
This was the last letter sent by Captain Waterhouse. As of 1980, his precise fate remains unknown, and his remains have not yet been found among those located after the Combine authorities recently permitted limited authorised visits to the site of the Battle of Corte by the Imperial War Graves Commission.
*
From: “Memoirs of the First Born: The Authorised and Annotated Edition with Commentary” by Markus Garzius, edited and annotated by Albert Whitley and Maria Aydenia (1987)—
Of course, I really had no business being anywhere near that damned artificial lake.[16] I have no qualms about putting my life on the line, which is already forfeit, for the cause of Humanity – I hope I have already made that abundantly clear. But there is something frustrating about having one’s particular talents go to waste. Being ordered to the front as just another footsoldier, as it seemed, was not well received by me or my surviving men. We could fight as conventional infantry, of course we could; but so could thousands of others, whereas few could match our skill as Spekuladores.
Yet perhaps I was too influenced by my own emotional state. Part of me had fully expected me to set aside Persephone as soon as I was ordered away, as I had set aside Ayu and Ines before her. But she lingered in my mind. Absurdly, I worried if she was all right, if her arm was recovering, as though she was in more danger than me on this battlefield. (Afterwards, she told me she worried the same about me, a tad more rationally). I suppose it was not quite so absurd; some of the so-called Carolinians did turn back to their bad old ways of attacking darker-skinned humans when they found they would be forced to live in the equitable Fourth Society. But they soon learned they could no longer do it openly; many recent Celator recruits from Zone 19 [Congo] would find themselves tasked with organising reprisals to set an example. A messy and sub-optimal way of stamping out anti-human behaviour, but those were extraordinary times.
I would never regret my love for Persephone, but it was a dangerous distraction at that time. It would be wrong to blame her for it, of course, but I still winced every time I realised I had been trying, imperfectly, to sketch her face in the back of the notebook I was supposed to use for artillery spotting while daydreaming. Or sometimes I would try to convert her name into proper Novalatina to surprise her with the next time I saw her, only to get stuck and fill a whole page with attempts. Such matters were never my strong suit.
Maybe I was a little unfair to say my men and I were stuck being mere infantrymen. At least we were assigned as artillery spotters, equipped with camouflage uniforms and getting a chance to use our skills in infiltrating enemy lines. Lugallus Gonzalus had led his army of about eighty-five thousand men, swelled with reinforcements focusing on this thrust called Operatio Damokles, farther and farther to the north and east, eventually reaching a town then mis-named Corte which housed a famous university. We had outrun our supply lines, leading to my men and I being stuck with the indignity of foraging at one point, and Celatores had been stripped from Lugallii Kadarus and Arminius farther west, hurting those advances and stalling them against the Septens. (I learned much of this later and am speaking in hindsight, of course; I cannot pretend to have had the ear of Gonzalus!) This larger army had gotten itself cut off and isolated from the others, and was now bottled up against an artificial lake, with a large Septen army to the south and an even larger one to the north. They had pushed us back with capable ansukarrus attacks, having access to newer models than their sleepy garrisons we had fought earlier, and had not been shy about using their own pirated version of the Scientific Weapon against us. I was beginning to be sick of the regular sirens warning us to put on our masks and protective rubber garments. Thus far, however, our forces had been too dispersed for the luft to do much damage.
It was obvious what was happening, even to a man of tactics rather than strategy like myself. The Septens had trapped us, pushing us into a confined area with our backs to the lake, using similar tactics to those which had borne us fruit on the way there. If they could compress Gonzalus’ army into a small area with no way of escape, they could pound us with impunity with their artillery, using both luft and conventional shells. At worst, they could simply wait until we ran out of ammunition and supplies. If they did, it would break the back of our offensive, and undo all the sacrifices we had made at once-Pensacola and beyond. It was a self-evidently horrific situation, and some of the men spoke with worry of it, though they were too professional to spread fear in the ranks. For myself, I worried not. I did not have Gonzalus’ ear, but I knew his reputation, and I had an inkling this plan came from a higher level: from Rivarius, at least, if not with input from beyond even him. Men of such genius, selected by the meritocratic tests, did not knowingly send us footsoldiers into a hopeless situation without reason.
I even guessed the basic notion behind the plan, though I would never have worked out how it could be accomplished. Gonzalus was using a tactic that I had encountered and used many times myself as a Spekulador, albeit on a much smaller and less grand scale. It has many names (something that should really be properly rationalised) but I have always known it simply as ‘the reverse trap’. If your opponent knows that you wish to trap him, he will evade capture, refuse to be drawn in, disperse his forces when working on grand levels such as this. So the way to trap him is to convince him that you are the one being trapped. Then, he will gather and concentrate his forces to cut off your retreat. That is when you spring your plan, reverse the trap and trap him in it. True men of genius, and not a little luck, may be able to reverse a genuine trap of the opponent on the fly. More often, reverse traps must be planned in advance, as had been the case here. But they must be simple and swift, not great complex machines that will grind to a halt if one cogwheel slips. All it takes is an opponent to have one moment of suspicion that this is surely too easy.
It was clear to me that Gonzalus wanted to seem to be trapped by the Septens. But for what purpose? They outnumbered him at least two to one with their two armies together, perhaps as much as two and a half to one. What could he do to reverse the trap? What did concentrating their forces achieve? It made the Scientific Weapon more effective, yes, but these Septens had demonstrated many times that they were well drilled in using their protective equipment to resist the luft. They would not be caught napping like their forebears on the very day of my birth, thousands of talcodii away, who had stared dumbly at the sky as the wings over the world dropped the Scientific Weapon upon them. As fast as our engineers could build new aeroports, we only had barely enough celagii to prevent the Septens gaining aero supremacy over us; we certainly could not spare them for bombing runs.
Perhaps I gained a faint suspicion a few days before it happened. Our artillery positions were rapidly shifting as we were pushed farther and farther back against this lake – incidentally also make the Septen trenches facing us grow denser and denser as well as they cut off our retreat. I found myself reporting directly to a zendurion of artillery, Andonius, a man from Zone 7. He was clearly very good at his job, or he would long have been removed for his filthy deviationist habit of swearing in the defiled language known as Dutch. I disliked him but I respected his abilities.
As I removed my helmet with its accompanying camouflage twigs and leaves, and read out my latest observations as two terzerii marked them on the grid map of the surrounding area, I saw that Andonius had, uncharacteristically, ceased paying attention to what I was saying. “Now then lad,” he said in a warning tone (and horrible grammar), “put that thing down. None of those, not yet. Remember what I told you? See you touch those things again and it’s punishment duty for you?”
Judging by the surly expression of the young quindus, who had frozen halfway through removing a shell from a crate, he wanted to talk back to Andonius by opining what punishment duty could be worse than being about to be annihilated by a numerically superior Septen army. But he held his tongue and respected the hierarchy like a good Societist. My eyes drifted from his expression to the shell itself.
I had seen many of them, and even helped fire one or two when they were short-handed (another misuse of my talents, but every man was needed). The Scientific Weapon shells were carefully marked to avoid confusion with the conventional explosive or incendiary ones. The standard colour was an almost painfully bright and sickly, unnatural, shade of yellow; it would have stood out a talcodus to the enemy, so an incentive to keep the shells in their protective crates until they were needed. Yellow shells with no further marking contained the brimstone-mustard luft that was the most common type of Scientific warhead used in those days; the older borussic nocifex [cacodyl cyanide] type bore two red lines as well, while the occasionally-used muriatine luft type had two green lines. Mixing up the types helped keep the opponents on their toes with their preventive drills, although recently there had been orders to keep the use of Scientific warheads strictly to brimstone-mustard and, reading between the lines, as predictable as possible. Suspicious.
Maybe there were other types I hadn’t seen, but this one was very different. Instead of solid yellow, it was a chequerboard pattern of yellow and the bare silvery metal of the shell. Also, the shell was shaped differently, though clearly still designed to fit our standard artillery pieces: the luft warhead, which made a sinister gurgle as the shells arced down, was slightly smaller, and part of the shell seemed to be devoted to a secondary payload. I later learned that some of this type even included a ferralumic [thermite] incendiary component, merely to provide heat as it turned out, though not all did.
Andonius followed my gaze. “Forget you saw that, my lad,” he said quietly. It was frustrating that I couldn’t tell if he was deliberately insulting me, or if it was merely that his Novalatina was so poor! “Forget for a little while, at least.”
I remembered his words three, I think it was, days later. The Septens had overrun some of our outer trenches, and it was clear that the southern army, the one from the city misnamed Savannah, was planning a big push, while the one from alleged-Ultima served to cut off our retreat, helped by the lake. Surely, if there was a trick, it must be now or never?
The Septens were not stupid, and had tried to silence our artillery with their own. Mostly they had not succeeded, but when I fumbled my way through the lines of newly-deployed opponent spike-wire to return to Andonius’ second redoubt in three days, I found his televox[17] operator was lying dead near the fortified entrance, hit by opponent shell fragments. He should have picked a better time to relieve himself, I thought irrelevantly.
Indeed, as I rushed into the command post to report, I saw a harried-looking Andonius answering the televox himself, while his subordinates made more marks on the grid map and looked worriedly at one another. Those marks were advancing ever northwards, towards the lake. I reported directly to them in the absence of Andonius, and what I told them about the new opponent trench positions did not make them any happier.
No sooner had I finished that I felt a hand on my shoulder. Andonius. At first I wondered if he was offended that I had reported to his men, but he merely held out the televox handset to me. “Got an important call coming,” he said without preamble. “Can’t hear a blasted thing. The guns have got to me. Will you?”
Now it was my turn to be offended. Not content with demoting me to artillery spotter, it seemed I was now to be demoted to televox operator. But then, I told myself with a sigh, all roles were equal in the sight of Sanchez. “Very well,” I said, taking the handset. In a fitting illustration of my observation, I could scarcely have dreamed how suddenly important this role would become.
For the next few minutes, I passed on the orders from Gonzalus’ headquarters. My suspicion slowly grew that Andonius wasn’t deaf at all, his Novalatina was simply too poor for him to understand orders once a little crackle of interference was added. He certainly seemed to hear me clearly enough as I passed on the commands to continue to hold fire, to let the infantry pull back, to prepare for a heavy rolling barrage…
Then, a new voice. Unfamiliar, but with the air of authority to it. It spoke only seven words:
“Gonzalus. The Kapud authorises. Trismegistus. 1400 hours.”
I repeated them almost without thinking. Before I knew it, my role had changed again. Now, I was helping Andonius’ men, even Andonius himself, crowbar open that crate of mysterious yellow-silver chequered shells and begin loading his heavy artillery pieces with them. We had already loaded three of the guns before I realised we did not even have orders on target coordinates. But it appeared that Andonius, and his counterparts along the line, had already been briefed. Sections of the battlefield had been carved out for each, and he drew lines on the grid map to indicate ours. On the other side of the army, on the bank of the lake, other cannons were ready to target the northern army.
The minutes ticked around to fourteen o’clock, and then, with a roar that might have done in truth what Andonius had claimed about his hearing, it seemed as though every single gun in the service of Humanity had fired at once.
All armed with those strange, unknown shells, identified by a code word that was old Latin, not Novalatina.
Who or what was Trismegistus, I wondered?
*
From: “One Hundred Chemicals That Changed The World” by Sir Jeremiah Saunders (1986)—
THE ALKAHEST. The Universal Solvent. The Third Secret of the Alchemists. The Flag-Breaker, the bounty of Superior Human Science, borne of manly and mature cooperation between scholars rather than the competition of the ‘nationalistically blinded’.
All rot, of course. Hogwash. Mere propaganda, expounded by the Combine and all too eagerly parroted by Diversitarians. The latter are so eager to point the finger at an unknowable war-winning wonder weapon, some Gnostic secret that surely no-one could have foreseen. An unearthly tool of war against which none could be expected to resist. Even a forerunner of the threshold bomb, perhaps, implying all the great effort of research, the time and resources sunk into a seemingly-obscure field of science.
Yet poke at that image of profundity and one will find it is a mere painting on a curtain. Twitch it aside, and one finds a dull and prosaic piece of chemical history reaching back almost to the lifetime of Pablo Sanchez himself. If history had proceeded differently, if the dice of chance had fallen elsewhere on the rouge-et-noir wheel, the vaunted Alkahest would have been nothing more than a footnote in dusty books of interest only to chemists like myself. Of course, the inverse is true of many discoveries made in peacetime that, had they been made at a crucial moment in conflict before all sides could copy them, might have changed the world – though likely not for the better.
Societist propaganda (and Diversitarian copies) generally attribute the discovery of the Alkahest to a researcher named Romerus, just prior to the outbreak of the Black Twenties conflict.[18] Of course, we do not know if Romerus even truly existed, much less that he was an important figure in the Societists’ work using the Alkahest; the development of Tremuriatix is also sometimes attributed to him, so he may merely have been a convenient name-label to stand for all Societist scholars in triumphant propaganda. What is known for certain, however, is that Romerus certainly did not discover the Alkahest, contrary to what is still said even in many school textbooks in free countries. The reason that we know this is that there is plenty of evidence that the Alkahest – though not called that at the time – had already been spotted and logged many decades before.
According to Societist accounts, Romerus discovered the Alkahest by elluftising bixylobrimstone, a foul-smelling waste product from what is called the Halewick Reaction in the English-speaking world, and goes by many other names elsewhere.[19] The fact that they did not identify the specific reaction until the 1960s, when it had already been independently discovered by Ross Halewick and others, is significant. By that point the purges of the Silent Revolution had affected the once-mighty Societist chemical industry, and it is likely that those now running it in its diminished capacity were keen to claim they had arrived years early at particular breakthroughs, long ahead of the ‘bandit regimes of the unliberated Zones’. Furthermore, the individuals in question were usually more noted for their knowledge of this week’s version of orthodox Sanchezista doctrine than their awareness of chemical history, and so this is among many unrealistic claims of particular reactions being discovered implausibly early. Perhaps Romerus did produce the Alkahest by elluftising bixylobrimstone, but that bixylobrimstone was most probably likely derived from natural processes such as those in algae.
Production is not the same as discovery, however. Locked within the notebooks of Meridian Refugiado chemists in the Philippines, mirrored by those in Germany and a number of other countries, show that the so-called Alkahest was first noted in the 1870s at the latest.[20] No particular name has ever been credited as the true ‘first’; as is usual in the messy history of science, it may have been recognised by multiple people around the world almost simultaneously. The name eventually settled on, as cross-national standards bodies eliminated (some!) inconsistencies between them, was bixylobrimstelluftide, sometimes abbreviated to BXBE. This term is now little known nowadays except in a handful of textbooks which look down on even the most stubbornly-persistent trivial chemical names. Even in most journals, it is simply the Alkahest.
One does not need to elluftise bixylobrimstone in order to find the Alkahest. It is produced in significant quantities as a by-product by the Fort process of paper production, in which wood pulp is treated with ‘white liquor’, a heated mixture of water, aquelluftide of natrium (caustic soda) and brimstide of natrium.[21] Though superior to previous paper-production methods, it comes with the disadvantages of producing many noxious brimstone-containing compounds, including the Alkahest. The Fort process was developed in the 1870s in France (hence the name) but did not become the dominant paper-production process until the 1910s, when recovery boilers were devised that allowed the wood-contaminated ‘black liquor’ to be recycled and reused into white liquor. One modern theory is that it was the Societist Combine’s immense need for producing printed propaganda, coming at the same time as this breakthrough, that led to the Fort process becoming ubiquitous in the Combine; this would therefore suggest a different and more obvious means by which the Alkahest might have been noted.
No, the breakthrough of Romerus (or whoever it truly was) in the early 1920s was not merely a chemical discovery. Rather, it was the far subtler and more ground-shaking piece of science that is oft-neglected by headline-chasers: finding that a compound which has been known for years, and consigned to the back of a dusty reference book, has a world-changing property none have previously noticed. It has played out many times over the years, with ‘new’ wonder drugs often being chemicals first recorded fifty years before the disease they treat was even understood. But, perhaps, never has such a phenomenon been seen so dramatically as in the case of the Alkahest.
The Alkahest. According to one version of the tale, the old Alchemists of Western learning were obsessed with finding three secrets. It makes a good story, the three secrets of Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes the Thrice-Greatest, legendary founder of Hermetic Wisdom.[22] The Philosopher’s Stone, which could transmute base metals to gold; the Elixir of Life, which granted immortality; and the Alkahest, the Universal Solvent. In reality, Hermetists were usually more concerned with the Panacea, the legendary cure for all diseases, which modern accounts will tend to quietly fold into the Elixir of Life to avoid the messiness of a fourth secret. Sometimes alchemists did attribute healing properties to the Alkahest too, and the term ‘Azoth’ might be used to describe a different substance which was also held to be both a panacea and a universal solvent. Azoth, which also appears in Jewish kabbalistic mysticism, is ultimately derived from the Arabic word for quicksilver, which (due to its ability to amalgamate with almost any other metal, seemingly dissolving them) was often identified as the basis for an Azoth or Alkahest. The term Alkahest, though superficially Arabic-looking, has origins which are – perhaps appropriately – unknown.
Many, looking at that list of three secrets, will be struck by the dissonance of the Alkahest. Eternal earthly life and wealth, those are goals which many have sought over the centuries; the former is just as associated with the Taoist alchemical tradition of China. But what is the worth of a universal solvent? It betrays a transition towards a more scientific way of thinking, an urge to understand the universe as a goal in itself, and that, at least, is to be applauded – even if at first it was couched in secretive mysticism that now seems like nonsense to we moderns.
Today, we have a better (though far from perfect) understanding of how solvents work. Introductory textbooks will often make a rather simplistic like-to-like argument; that polar chemicals dissolve in polar-solvents and non-polar ones in non-polar solvents.[23] We now know that, as usual, it’s more complicated than that! To cut a long story short, all solvents theoretically have the ability to form aquaform links, acting as donors (presenting a charge deficit) or acceptors (presenting a charge surfeit). Water is a remarkable example of a solvent which is both a strong donor and a strong acceptor, forming strong links with itself and with other polar molecules. However, this means that there are many substances which water will not dissolve, because water would rather form aquaform links with itself than with the substance – which instead stays as a solid precipitate on the bottom of one’s flask.
Therefore, theoretically, the world’s best solvent would be a molecule which will form strong links with almost any other compound, but not with itself. A molecule that is either all donor and no acceptor, or all acceptor and no donor. Thus far, science has not found a good example of the former – but, as the Societists belatedly discovered, BXBE is the latter. Its elluftium-brimstone polarised bond produces a strong surfeit charge on the elluftium atom, making it an excellent acceptor; but there are no deficit charged aquaform atoms to function as a donor. Therefore, BXBE will, indeed, dissolve almost anything. It is the closest thing science has discovered to the Alkahest that the old alchemists spent so long searching for.
So what? You may ask. What bearing does such an esoteric discovery, a discovery of interest only for the pursuit of science itself, have on the course of a war, of a nation, of history itself? Yet as governments learned when it came to inversion theory and the threshold bomb, one cannot separate scientific curiosity from an urge for a utilitarian focus; world-changing discoveries can come from unexpected places.
BXBE, the Alkahest, has some curious properties. Strangely enough, again like the legendary Alkahest, it has some beneficial medical properties, such as acting as a counter-inflammatory agent (though the jury is still out on how effective it is). It is another property of interest to medicine which changed the world, however. BXBE is not very toxic; there are far worse brimstone compounds. Taking a bath in the stuff is not recommended, but spilling a droplet on one’s hand will not kill one. Oddly, however, an instant later one will taste garlic, symptomatic of brimstone compounds, on the tongue. Why? We are still uncertain of the details, with one theory being that the ganglia of a nerve below the brain are directly activated, rather than the taste receptors themselves. But either way, the astonishing property of the Alkahest is revealed: its remarkable power as a solvent also means it will penetrate the skin and enter the bloodstream, travelling to the extremities of the body in seconds.
Alone, that might mean little beyond a scientific curiosity. But this is the universal solvent; it can be mixed with (almost) anything. Mix in a drug, and it too will be carried with the Alkahest through the skin and into the blood. In fact, BXBE has been used to administer drugs in emergency situations where breaking the skin is impossible or inadvisable.[24] It is possible because, as said above, BXBE itself is not very toxic and a small amount can be tolerated.
It is not a phenomenon that, before 1926, many had had occasion to notice. Although the Alkahest was produced by the Fort process, it also comes with the curious property that it has a very high melting and boiling point, even higher when contaminated with other chemicals (as it was in those waste products). At room temperature, the Alkahest often turns to a solid lump or at least a viscous, treacle-like liquid. To see its properties on full display, one must heat a mixture before administration, unless one is already in a warm environment – such as, for example, the southeastern parts of North America in the right month of the year.
And one has to be careful administering the mixtures lest they escape or drug the wrong person. For BXBE, the Alkahest, does not merely penetrate skin; it can pass through almost anything. Protective equipment such as gloves, masks and filters can only slow it down, not stop it.[25]
The Societists had discovered something which many people outside the chemical community do not understand. There is no distinction between drugs and poisons; a beneficial drug can become deadly in sufficiently high quantities, and from a poison can come life-saving medical breakthroughs. The brimstone-based death-lufts used in the Black Twenties, for example, ultimately led to the development of counter-cancer drugs.[26]
On one fateful day in 1926, however, they would not save lives. Mixed with the Alkahest, an old chemical from a dusty book which few remembered even among chemists, the death-lufts took on a new and deadlier form than ever before. Filters, rubberised suits, training, drills: none of them could stop the poison as it burned into the eyes, the mouths, the lungs of thousands of American soldiers. In disbelief, they tore at their seemingly-useless protection, ripped them away in some cases, only exposing themselves more as the Societists struck at two armies at once. Soon their protguns would arrive to finish the job.
Modern analysis suggests the Societists did not have that many Alkahest-enhanced shells in the Battle of Corte. They did not need them. On that day, and in the days following, the most potent weapon was fear and paranoia. Just as General Boulanger at Lille, more than a century earlier, had frightened his foes with perfectly ordinary cannon moving under the ‘unearthly’ motive force of steam engines, the Societists shattered the morale of the Americans, who had thought themselves safe from the death-luft onslaught. Overnight, they had been reduced to the same terrified, helpless state as their lost fathers and uncles who had died outside the city that would soon be renamed Zon1Urb1, a quarter-century earlier. A certain patriotic song received an ironic refrain: ‘They Did It Before, And They’ve Done It Again’.
No, it was unnecessary for every shell to be an Alkahest one; it was sufficient that this trench of American soldiers feared that the next one might be. And the next trench, and the next, all the way to Fredericksburg and its squabbling politicians…
[10] OTL Guaymas, Sonora, Mexico.
[11] American regiment numbers tend to be artificially high, as they were counted on top of British regiments that now no longer exist as part of the same army (or often at all).
[12] The Boston News-Letter was one of the oldest newspapers in the American colonies, founded in 1704. In OTL it ended in 1776 as its owners, the Drapers, remained loyal to the Crown and left Boston when British forces evacuated it. In TTL, of course, there was no American Revolution and it remains New England’s primary newspaper of record. With the phrasing ‘rumour of war’, Waterhouse is referencing Matthew 24:6 (“Ye will hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled...” in the King James Bible).
[13] Waterhouse’s choice of words here is telling – the New York was Daniels’ flagship lineship, sunk at the attack on the fleet in the Nicaragua Canal. The soldiers have been influenced by Gilmore (or both have been influenced by the same factors) seeing this as the primary Societist attack.
[14] Celatores are supposedly meant to wear the same bright white spotless uniforms they do on parade. In practice, grey is considered a ‘symbolic’ compromise without sacrificing camouflage.
[15] This is in the same location as OTL’s Lake Sinclair, Georgia, but is not as extensive in size as it’s a much smaller project (Lake Sinclair was not created by damming the Oconee until 1953 in OTL).
[16] Probably not an intentional pun, as this is translated from a Novalatina original…
[17] Societists are about the only people who prefer this term to ‘quister’ for OTL telephone.
[18] See Part #275 in Volume VII for a melodramatic Diversitarian rendition of this.
[19] In OTL we would say that he oxidised dimethyl sulfide, a by-product of the Swern Oxidation (which was discovered by American chemist Daniel Swern in 1978; that OTL date provides context for Saunders’ scepticism).
[20] In OTL, it was first officially recorded by Russian chemist Aleksandr Zaytsev in 1867 via a paper published in the German journal Annalen der Chemie und Pharmacie, but it had probably been informally noticed before that due to the industrial processes this segment goes on to mention. Zaytsev did use the method attributed to Romerus here, oxidising dimethyl sulfide.
[21] Known in OTL as the Kraft process for the same reason (both words mean ‘strong’, in French and German respectively). The chemicals are in OTL known as sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfide.
[22] Hermes Trismegistus originated as a syncretic fusion of the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth during the period of Hellenistic rule in Egypt, and became a target of obsession by both European and Arab alchemists in the Middle Ages. In reality, the writings attributed to him (the ‘Hermetica’) are not necessarily connected with the three legendary goals of European alchemy mentioned here.
[23] The concept of magnetic poles (originally derived by analogy from those of the Earth itself) is old and the terms derived from it are a natural parallel evolution. Here, polarity refers to electrostatic charge rather than magnetism; a non-polar molecule, such as the octane in petrol, has a roughly equal negative charge distribution across it rather than the shared electrons being concentrated in one place. This is because octane is made of eight carbon and eighteen hydrogen atoms, which have similar electronegativity (the ability to attract electrons). Water, on the other hand, is a very polar molecule, being made of one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms; the oxygen is much more electronegative than hydrogen, so pulls more of the shared electrons towards itself. The water molecule ends up with what is known as a dipole moment, with more negative charge at the oxygen end and less at the hydrogen end. Nearby water molecules can attract one another by effectively touching their negative ends to the other molecule’s positive end; this is the very important phenomenon known as hydrogen bonding (in OTL, and aquaform linking in TTL). This is responsible for water’s unexpectedly high boiling point compared to similar molecules (the similarly-sized methane is a gas at room temperature, for example, whereas water is liquid) and therefore, ultimately, essential for life to exist on Earth.
[24] This has also been achieved in OTL, first being discovered in 1963.
[25] Incidentally, the chemical known in TTL as BXBE or ‘the Alkahest’ is what we in OTL call dimethyl sulfoxide or DMSO.
[26] Studying the effects of sulfur mustard gas from the First World War also led to the development of the first chemotherapy drugs in OTL.
Thande
Donor
I've been planning to write something akin to that scene since at least 2017, so it's a relief to finally get to it!
The Alkahest was originally going to feature in the first use of the Scientific Weapon on the stroke of midnight 1900 at the end of Volume VI, but I realised it made more sense for just poison gas itself to be the wonder weapon in that case, and for it to be enhanced later. You may wonder if this has ever been tried in OTL; well I did some research, and apparently some researchers in, yes, a South American country did look into it at one point, and found out in experiments on literal guinea pigs that DMSO indeed dramatically increases the impact of mustard gas. The reason it's never been deployed in war in OTL is (1) the general prohibition on war gas to start with and (2) it requires a warm background climate due to DMSO's high melting point, which places a limit on where it would be useful.
Incidentally, Garzius' monologue about reverse traps is a bit of 'an homage', shall we say, to Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne (the original, not the films which you will be unable to enjoy after seeing how much better the books are).
The Alkahest was originally going to feature in the first use of the Scientific Weapon on the stroke of midnight 1900 at the end of Volume VI, but I realised it made more sense for just poison gas itself to be the wonder weapon in that case, and for it to be enhanced later. You may wonder if this has ever been tried in OTL; well I did some research, and apparently some researchers in, yes, a South American country did look into it at one point, and found out in experiments on literal guinea pigs that DMSO indeed dramatically increases the impact of mustard gas. The reason it's never been deployed in war in OTL is (1) the general prohibition on war gas to start with and (2) it requires a warm background climate due to DMSO's high melting point, which places a limit on where it would be useful.
Incidentally, Garzius' monologue about reverse traps is a bit of 'an homage', shall we say, to Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne (the original, not the films which you will be unable to enjoy after seeing how much better the books are).
Thande
Donor
The way I look at it is:So, Russia, with essentially no allies, is still fighting England, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Persia and the Ottomans to a standstill (North America has problems of its own at this point). Whatever else this crazy, magnificent TL may be, it's definitely a bit of a Czarist Russia wank.
1. Remember in 1914, the Kaiser thought that he had to go for a European war soon or Russia, now it was beginning to properly industrialise and build more railways, would outweigh the Central Powers on the Eastern Front within a couple of years. TTL's Russia started industrialising on a western European scale decades earlier - in fact it was arguably the first country to pioneer railways full stop in TTL!
2. This Russia has avoided all the grievous losses and damage caused by Napoleon's 1812 invasion, which had longterm demographic impact (of course in OTL, Russia/the USSR managed to go through that, 1914-18, the blood loss of the Revolution, Civil War and famines, the horrors of the Nazi invasion in 1941, and still be the second superpower of the Cold War, make it first to space, etc. etc).
3. OTL Russia in the 19th and early 20th centuries was held in check by a) an international alliance aimed at preserving the balance of power vis-a-vis the Ottomans in wars that haven't happened (in the same way) because the Ottomans modernised, b) the British Empire in India which never formed in the same way as OTL and British power has collapsed, and c) Japan, which of course never modernised and became a Russian colony. Of course the Russians do have the ENA to deal with, but they were doing so in the North American continent, far from home.
I think there is a criticism to be made of how Russia has been presented in TTL, but it's more that I've probably de-emphasised and brushed over (in my descriptions) rising social discontent due to the growth of a worker class in the cities much earlier than OTL - though be assured that is certainly simmering beneath the surface...
edit: On re-reading your posts, I think I and others mistook what you meant - it's not implausible Russia could be this powerful if the earlier industrialisation happened through the right decisions, but I think you were saying would taking the right decisions be likely given the OTL mismanagement of the Romanovs? That's a fairer criticism - I suppose the thing about Russian autocracy is that history can be drastically different depending on who happens to sit in the throne, whether through birth or Catherine the Great means. I know in TTL I probably brush over 'Peter III stays as Tsar and somehow the country doesn't self-destruct as a result' early on.
edit 2: (Unrelated) Also, thank you to @TheInnerMoon and others for the suggestions for later on - I suspect I will use your idea of doing a contextual rundown of the history of Belgium/The Low Countries in Volume IX, especially as I recently read Simon Winder's book on that subject in OTL ("Lotharingia"), which I would recommend.
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I'm guessing this was, in fact, NOT deliberate, but rather a desperate response to having gotten stuck due to lack of local intelligence.
Excellent update! The mention of Societists sending Congolese military police to enforce order in Carolina is exactly the sort of irony this timeline has to a T. I like Markus Garzius as a character since he seems like someone you can root for while still recognizing his flaws.
One thing I’ve been wondering about is the number and composition of nobility in the ENA. As someone living in the United States, it’s hard to wrap my head around what kind of role they would play in society. Despite their historic ties to Britain, they’d still have to be created from scratch rather than just recreating such-and-such old titles. (If this is a misunderstanding of the monarchist system on my part, I’d welcome the clarification.) Have there been any major examples of this in the timeline so far, aside from having the Washingtons and Hamiltons given peerages in the empire’s early days? Since the imperial Parliament has a House of Lords that’s filled by appointees from the confederations, their political impact doesn’t seem that important, but I don’t really have a baseline for how relevant a House of Lords is supposed to be anyway. And as a bit of a side note, does the crown prince of the ENA have a similar title to “Prince of Wales” that’s local to the continent?
One thing I’ve been wondering about is the number and composition of nobility in the ENA. As someone living in the United States, it’s hard to wrap my head around what kind of role they would play in society. Despite their historic ties to Britain, they’d still have to be created from scratch rather than just recreating such-and-such old titles. (If this is a misunderstanding of the monarchist system on my part, I’d welcome the clarification.) Have there been any major examples of this in the timeline so far, aside from having the Washingtons and Hamiltons given peerages in the empire’s early days? Since the imperial Parliament has a House of Lords that’s filled by appointees from the confederations, their political impact doesn’t seem that important, but I don’t really have a baseline for how relevant a House of Lords is supposed to be anyway. And as a bit of a side note, does the crown prince of the ENA have a similar title to “Prince of Wales” that’s local to the continent?
Seconding this, though I explicitly remember that Washington's family was the Marquess of Fredericksburg and Hamilton's family were Viscounts Hamilton, so creating new titles is clearly the norm in America.
And if the Emperor's heir doesn't have a unique title he certainly should by now with the formal split up of the House of Hanover into American and English branches.
They didn't. The original period of Dutch rule over the island ended before the POD. Then, as Europeans were coming to China, Formosa was split between Britain, Portugal and Netherlands. The Dutch part was then taken by the Spanish/Castillians and after that, the UPSA gained both the Portuguese and Castillian parts. The island was finally unified under a republic, which has only recently come under Feng influence.