Problem for me is I never figured out what parts of the world each Zone referred to.
Look to the West Volume VIII: The Bear and the Basilisk
- Thread starter Thande
- Start date
Given the Societist penchant for population transfers, could it even be a newly planned city a la Brasilia or Canberra of OTL on steroids?
Thande
Donor
Thanks for the comments everyone.
I've known there would be A Big Thing That's Not Just War in the 1920s for a couple of years but had not decided on the details - the pandemic did inspire this, specifically that it led me to research past ones and find out about the Third Plague. When I wrote The Twilight's Last Gleaming I used a quote from HG Wells about how the American spirit enthusiastically rebuilds, coming from something he overheard from some Americans hearing about the San Francisco earthquake. I mentioned at the time that I had to cut out part of the quote in which the Americans add that at least it was the Chinatown that suffered worst, because this sounded appallingly racist even by 1900s standards - which it was, but the context I didn't realise was that people at the time blamed the Chinese for having recently spread the plague into San Francisco. (Come to think of it, plague followed by unrelated disaster which helps snuff it out seems to be a theme in history, see also 1665/6 in London).
I feel called out here
I've known there would be A Big Thing That's Not Just War in the 1920s for a couple of years but had not decided on the details - the pandemic did inspire this, specifically that it led me to research past ones and find out about the Third Plague. When I wrote The Twilight's Last Gleaming I used a quote from HG Wells about how the American spirit enthusiastically rebuilds, coming from something he overheard from some Americans hearing about the San Francisco earthquake. I mentioned at the time that I had to cut out part of the quote in which the Americans add that at least it was the Chinatown that suffered worst, because this sounded appallingly racist even by 1900s standards - which it was, but the context I didn't realise was that people at the time blamed the Chinese for having recently spread the plague into San Francisco. (Come to think of it, plague followed by unrelated disaster which helps snuff it out seems to be a theme in history, see also 1665/6 in London).This was footnoted a few posts ago, in Russian it is Vostochnaya but westerners just say 'Vostok' indiscriminately, in the same way in OTL we'd always say 'Soviet' and not 'Sovietsky' when using it as an adjective.
Correct.
Does this war have a name? Like the big Franco-Russian smack down is obviously part of the Black 20s’s, but doesn’t seem to be all of it. As far as “wars we know happen” it seems far too early to be the Last War of Supremacy. Seems a bit early to be the Sunrise War as well, although if it drags on long enough, and the Combine decides to get even more aggressive.....
The Sunrise War is supposed to occur in the 1950s and it's implied
Last edited:
281.3
Thande
Donor
From: “100 Greatest Film Scenes of the Twentieth Century” edited by A. J. Collachoff[20] (1999)—
Number 71: The Death-luft Attack from Les Guerrières (1970) a.k.a. The Warriors (authorised English dub 1981).
The entirety of this hard-hitting, controversial look at the bleak trench warfare of the Franco-Belgian War in the Black Twenties deserves a wider audience, but if one has to pick a single scene, this is it. Don’t listen to those who complain of historical inaccuracies – this is a Heritage Point of Controversy, after all, though newly rediscovered Russian documents might put that in danger. The Warriors follows two young French soldiers, Raoul and Félix, as they are sent to war and forge an unbreakable bond in the misery of the trenches. Occasional flashbacks show that their great-grandfathers fought across the same land in the Parthian Offensive during the Popular Wars, an element that was criticised as ‘crypto-Societist’ by the Académie des Arts but ultimately survived the censor’s scissors. And the film is all the better for it.
I could mention a half-dozen other scenes that are worthy of inclusion in this weighty tome, but I’ll stick to the film’s shocking climax, which – according to one report – caused a riot in Lyons when a mischievous teenager painted ‘They die at the end’ in giant letters on one odeon the night before the premiere. After Félix and Raoul have become solid, well-rounded characters that we care about, after they have got their way over their tyrannical commanding officer Captain Picault in a way that suggests this is the plot arc of the filmd – both they and Picault are slain in a matter of seconds at the hands of the first Belgian death-luft attack. All their machinations, their elaborate attempts to secure ownership of a valuable looted painting after the war, come to naught in moments. The film even portrays the rolled-up painting being casually discarded into a nearby river, ruined, by the medics who come too late to rescue the dead men, and slowly fades to black on that image.
Obviously there is some artistic licence. Prior to its shocking climax, the scene involves Raoul complaining about the elevation of ‘a girl’ to a great office of state, and Félix joking that he is as bad as the old Belgian King (Maximilian IV) in his misogyny. They are clearly meant to be talking about Héloïse Mercier, yet she became France’s first Foreign Ministress on March 22nd 1923, while the first death-luft attack depicted here took play on May 18th; the idea that even front-line soldiers would only just have heard about this is patently improbable. However, as director August Romaine said afterwards, the decision to pair these events was to create an overtone of the attitudes of the old world being swept away, not peacefully but by the violence that follows.
The Warriors’ main controversy, however, was not such continuity matters, nor the Lyons riot, but the objections raised by the Royal Army and veterans’ organisations, who complained that the original cut of the film misrepresented the way in which soldiers were equipped. Specifically, the original ending shows the death-luft bombs being dropped by Belgian Schippers Sch-14 Adelaar bombers on the trenches, then cuts immediately to the dead soldiers on the ground as the billowing death-luft cloud fades. The Army and veterans pointed out that all French front-line soldiers had been equipped with luft masks against such a fear, and the vast majority of them had managed to don them, though some had complacently been caught offguard in the initial attack. It then transpired that the cut of the film presented to the Académie had indeed portrayed the soldiers as scrambling for masks (though ineffectually due to the aforementioned complacency) and then realistically shown them in graphically violent death throes. The Académie censors had simply cut this scene out altogether, removing the violence but also the historical accuracy of the masks’ presence.
This sparked a huge debate over the nature of film censorship in France, and ultimately resulted in a policy change as the intended cut of The Warriors was restored. Thus this is not only a powerful scene in itself, but one which changed the world...
*
From: “The Black Twenties” by Errol Mitchell (1973)—
...despite an inaccurate portrayal in a certain recent French film of note, which some suspect was a Trojan horse to force a confrontation with the film censorship authorities. Arguments about how well French soldiers initially responded to the attack aside, the more critical question is who ordered the attack in the first place. It is unsurprising this has become a divisive matter, to say the least, due to lost Russian records. At the time, many propagandists portrayed the Belgians’ hand as being forced by their Russian puppetmasters. The arguments for this view consist of the facts that the Imperial Stavka had certainly discussed the need to escalate the Franco-Belgian conflict to prevent French support of the successful Germans, and that the luft attack put Belgium in danger of retaliation in kind, which would be of concern to Brussels but little to Petrograd.
However, there are also criticisms to be made of this assumption. Generally speaking, in the war the Russian Stavka only escalated when they felt there was a blow of worth to be struck. Tsar Paul could have doubled down on city bombing after Shiraz; a horrifying thought to us, but at the time the laws of war on the subject had still yet to be written. The Tsar did not, not out of humanitarian concerns, but because he felt Russia lacked sufficient weight of bombers for city bombing to inflict a meaningful defeat on enemy morale, and opened the door for the Bouclier nations to potentially use bombers in kind against Russian cities. By that metric, the death-luft attack on the trenches does not fit the pattern; it shocked the world and shifted public opinion towards the French in neutral nations, yet inflicted relatively minor damage on the French forces. Unlike the Anglo-Americans who had been caught offguard by the Societists a quarter-century earlier (and unlike how it is portrayed in a certain film), the French troops were equipped with luft-masks and weathered the attack. They took losses worse than in a regular artillery barrage or bomb raid, and a number of soldiers were left dehabilitated by burns from the Russian-produced brimstone-mustard death-luft (leading to the issue of rubberised suits alongside masks for certain troops on the front line) but the attack did far more damage to the Russo-Belgians in reputational terms than it militarily inflicted on their foes.
For this reason, many now argue that the Belgians unilaterally launched the attack out of sheer desperation, though whether the order came from Charles Theodore III or a rogue general is questioned. The latter is supported by the fact that the attack consisted only of the Adelaar bombers and was not backed up by shells from the Belgian artillery, though there is evidence that death-luft shells did exist in storage.
The attack was naturally received with shock not only in Paris but across the world. Many in the Grande-Parlement, especially on the opposition benches facing Cazeneuve’s new ramshackle three-party government, indeed called for retaliation in kind. The extreme remnant of the Noir party, those who refused to follow Vachaud into government, even demanded Brussels be bombed with death-luft and (with no sense of irony) that the inferior Germanics who practised such barbaric acts to be wiped from the earth.
France’s allies, naturally somewhat more removed from the action, saw things differently. The English condemned the attack and began issuing luft-masks to people in London and the south-east of England, areas that were conceptually in bombing range from Belgium. In practice, however, Belgium had only launched a couple of cursory raids earlier in the war, with all the firepower of the Koninklijke Luchtmacht focused on defending Belgian aerospace from French attacks. The Germans reacted similarly, not wishing to endanger their informal truce along the border. It was the Scandinavians who condemned the attack most heavily, something which clearly had nothing to do with the fact that their population centres were farthest out of range from the Belgians. The general tack taken by France’s cobelligerents, especially the English and later the Americans, was that the Belgians had been forced into it by the Russians, as mentioned above. It is not clear whether Charles Grey or David Fouracre truly believed this, or whether it was a propaganda ploy – a way to turn the Belgian people against their government and provoke an uprising. Certainly, this is not a tactic that fitted in line with France’s tendency to emphasise past Belgian perfidy and hint at racial purging to restore exiled Walloons to their ancestral lands.
Following desperate quist calls between London, Dresden and Paris, the French position shifted. The newly-appointed Dictateur, the Duc de Berry (veteran of the International Expeditionary Force to South America which had failed to strangle Societism in the cradle[21]) was inclined to listen to England’s logic. Pragmatic, he was keen on anything that would more swiftly knock Belgium out of the war and prevent a large part of the people of France from being in the crosshairs of Belgian bombers, now armed with death-luft. While the Belgians and Russians made only ambiguous noises when the Cannae Mondiale nations demanded an explanation of the death-luft attack, a plan was agreed. On June 4th 1923, after a period in which neither side made further use of death-luft in the trench warfare, the allies issued the Declaration of Colmar. This condemned anew the Belgian attack but held Russia responsible for it, portraying Belgium as a ‘captive nation’ of Petrograd. In a major shift for the tone of international diplomacy, the Cannae effectively applied the Malraux Doctrine to the very nation which it had originally been conceived against: they now argued that their cause was to liberate the Belgian people from their oppressors.
Unsurprisingly, this was a dizzying U-turn for many French people, and was heavily targeted by Societist propaganda an example of the supposed ‘perfidy of nations’. At this time, though little known to European society, Societist activity in Europe was largely focused on Spain, partly for reasons which the Societists themselves would strenuously deny – the old cultural ties between the former UPSA and its old colonial master. A Societist play, performed in both Novalatina and Spanish, circulated throughout Spain and Portugal at this time, despite the attempts by the authorities to suppress it. Titled The Madhouse and set in a surreal fantasy landscape that suggests our own world, it features a scene in which a group of angry ‘Canfresces’ go from destroying ‘Gelba’ works of art to repairing them in an instant when a messenger alerts them. When the traveller and narrator, portrayed as the only sane man, asks why, the ‘Canfresces’ explain that the Gelba are their friends and they have always been their friends, until the time when they are not. This was only the most iconic example of Societist propaganda at that time, both inside and outside Iberia – there was also significant penetration into Ireland and Italy, whose peoples shared with the Spanish a lack of contentment in their governments’ subordination to or alignment with France and French wars.
Even as Russia emerged victorious in Persia, the Cannae nations issued an ultimatum to Charles Theodore III to abdicate and order the Russians to leave Belgium, which was obviously ignored. The Duc de Berry then announced that France would indeed retaliate for the death-luft attack, but would target only enemy soldiers in uniform, and that any soldier who deserted would not face attack. Civilians would not be harmed and postwar Belgium would be treated as a freed colony. Initially this directive did not have much effect, but things changed once the first set of Cannae attacks rolled in from all sides. Concern over the death-luft had forced the English, Scandinavians and even Germans to agree to commit more forces against Belgium.
What was referred to as Case Ondergang (Dutch for ‘downfall’) was launched on June 28th 1923. The French bombarded the front lines with far more death-luft than the Belgians could have brought to bear, using both bombers and artillery. Though the Belgians were also equipped with luft-masks, the sheer overpowering French resources resulted in far more deaths and in far more places, and rumours spread like wildfire. Many took up the Duc’s offer to desert, some of whom were recaptured and/or shot in the back of the head by political officers and Russian Cossacks – which did nothing to convince the rest to stay put. It was this chaos, rather than the direct damage from the death-luft, which caused holes to finally open in the the Belgians’ dense lines of trenches and forts, allowing breakthroughs from French protgun spearheads.
Simultaneously, drawing away Belgian aero forces and making the French’s job easier, the Germans crossed the border and the English and Scandinavians attacked from the sea – initially seizing the West Frisian islands as a staging post and defeating what was left of the Belgian and Russian naval forces in the area. According to the plan drawn up in Colmar, Belgium was divided up into conceptual occupation zones, and the northern allies moved to secure their assigned areas. The English took the provinces of Holland, Utrecht, Gelderland and West-Friesland. The Scandinavians took Noord-Mönster, Oost-Friesland, Groningen, Drenthe and Overijssel. The Germans took Palts, Limburg and Luxemburg. And the remainder would go to France, taking in Brabant, Vlaanderan, Antwerpen and, of course, Luik.[22]
Luik, né Liége, had been the most chaotic and troublesome part of the Belgian realm since it had first been welded together, more than a century before, from the Palatinate and the former Austrian Netherlands. Indeed, its history of revolt and rebellion goes back longer even than that; in 1345, a century and a half before the Novamund was discovered, the people of Liége had overthrown their prince-bishop and established a relatively democratic guild law system which had influenced the rest of the region. In and after the Route des Larmes, the Wittelsbach rulers of Belgium had tried again and again to subdue Liége, by racial purging if necessary. Yet even when the city’s original Walloon population had dwindled to a remnant and been replaced with Dutch-Flemish colonists, still ‘Luik’ remained a source of headaches for Brussels. It was as if there was something in the water.
Now, more than a hundred years after it had rose up in support of General Boulanger’s invasion, Luik once again seized the opportunity. Its people were energised by reports (not without foundation) of abuse of its women by Russian Cossacks and Nindzhyas, armed by Cannae agents and equipped with deserting soldiers. The local government was overthrown and the Luikers proclaimed a Free Commune, offering to open their doors to Cannae forces in exchange for guarantees they would not be counter-purged from their land as Walloon groups in France were demanding. Berry and Ruddel, in a deal brokered by Mme Rouvier, seized the opportunity and agreed – though Rouvier extracted a limited right of return to assuage the Walloons’ ancestral grudge.
The Luik Revolution began on July 14th and drastically shifted the nature of the invasion. Initially supported by the adjacent Germans staging from Cologne, later helped by the French through new aerolifts, Luik resisted a makeshift Belgian loyalist counterattack and opened a hole in the back of the enemy lines. The French armies, which had spent months at a snail’s pace trying to take Namen and Wittelsbach, were now able to wheel through Luxemburg province and link up with the Germans and Luik revolutionaries. With a large chunk of Belgium cut off from her armies and the latter in collapse, it was only a matter of time before the kingdom was knocked out of the war.
It is likely Belgium’s last attack was not ordered by Charles Theodore III (whom, it transpired, had already fled Brussels and surrendered to Scandinavian forces on August 29th) nor by the Russians. The remaining bomber forces left Brussels in a quixotic attempt to drop death-luft on civilian targets in London, Paris and Frankfurt (as they did not have the range to reach Dresden). If whomever ordered the attack had focused all his bombers on one target, some of them might have survived to drop bombs. As it was, all were shot down long before reaching their targets – though once again the world of French film wants us to think that a brave pilot sacrificed his life by ramming the last Belgian bomber before it could drop its death-luft bomb right on King Charles’ head. Though entirely ineffectual, the move met with widespread condemnation and led to Russia formally, if belatedly, breaking ties and distancing herself from the central Belgian government. This did not stop her trying to seize power in Belgium’s overseas colonies, of course, with varying degrees of success. Some of the Russian forces in Belgium were successfully evacuated, but the vast majority were either captured or faced mob justice from vengeful Belgians.
By September 17th 1923, the last Belgian forces in Europe had surrendered and been disarmed, and the Cannae powers had secured their occupation zones. The French people had been dubious about Berry’s move, but now the fear of air raids was gone, the triumvirate government enjoyed strong public support again and the opposition was discredited. It seemed to most that, though the ‘Belgian Question’ would remain a problem for some time and the war continued against Russia, at least most French families would no longer have to fear the potential of a deadly killer that struck in the night and stole their blood kin from them.
How wrong they were...
[20] The author is Californian; this is probably an anglicisation of ‘Kolichev’ – names in California are frequently derived from one language out of English, Spanish or Russian but then spelled in another due to past ethnic mixing and different powers being in vogue at different times.
[21] As mentioned in Volume VII, even historians frequently repeat the idea that this was the IEF’s mission, when it was nothing of the sort.
[22] These largely resemble the provinces of the Low Countries in OTL with some differences. Because Belgium includes East Frisia, the province corresponding to OTL’s Dutch province of Friesland is specified as West-Friesland. The province of Noord-Mönster is the remnant of a Belgian claim to the whole border area that would have originally included the city of Münster (Mönster in the local dialect, which has been incorporated into the Dutch usage). Palts is a Dutchified form of Pfalz (i.e. the old Electoral Palatinate, though the term here incorporates much of the surrounding area as well). Limburg and Luxemburg both describe larger areas than the OTL province and nation state by that name.
Number 71: The Death-luft Attack from Les Guerrières (1970) a.k.a. The Warriors (authorised English dub 1981).
The entirety of this hard-hitting, controversial look at the bleak trench warfare of the Franco-Belgian War in the Black Twenties deserves a wider audience, but if one has to pick a single scene, this is it. Don’t listen to those who complain of historical inaccuracies – this is a Heritage Point of Controversy, after all, though newly rediscovered Russian documents might put that in danger. The Warriors follows two young French soldiers, Raoul and Félix, as they are sent to war and forge an unbreakable bond in the misery of the trenches. Occasional flashbacks show that their great-grandfathers fought across the same land in the Parthian Offensive during the Popular Wars, an element that was criticised as ‘crypto-Societist’ by the Académie des Arts but ultimately survived the censor’s scissors. And the film is all the better for it.
I could mention a half-dozen other scenes that are worthy of inclusion in this weighty tome, but I’ll stick to the film’s shocking climax, which – according to one report – caused a riot in Lyons when a mischievous teenager painted ‘They die at the end’ in giant letters on one odeon the night before the premiere. After Félix and Raoul have become solid, well-rounded characters that we care about, after they have got their way over their tyrannical commanding officer Captain Picault in a way that suggests this is the plot arc of the filmd – both they and Picault are slain in a matter of seconds at the hands of the first Belgian death-luft attack. All their machinations, their elaborate attempts to secure ownership of a valuable looted painting after the war, come to naught in moments. The film even portrays the rolled-up painting being casually discarded into a nearby river, ruined, by the medics who come too late to rescue the dead men, and slowly fades to black on that image.
Obviously there is some artistic licence. Prior to its shocking climax, the scene involves Raoul complaining about the elevation of ‘a girl’ to a great office of state, and Félix joking that he is as bad as the old Belgian King (Maximilian IV) in his misogyny. They are clearly meant to be talking about Héloïse Mercier, yet she became France’s first Foreign Ministress on March 22nd 1923, while the first death-luft attack depicted here took play on May 18th; the idea that even front-line soldiers would only just have heard about this is patently improbable. However, as director August Romaine said afterwards, the decision to pair these events was to create an overtone of the attitudes of the old world being swept away, not peacefully but by the violence that follows.
The Warriors’ main controversy, however, was not such continuity matters, nor the Lyons riot, but the objections raised by the Royal Army and veterans’ organisations, who complained that the original cut of the film misrepresented the way in which soldiers were equipped. Specifically, the original ending shows the death-luft bombs being dropped by Belgian Schippers Sch-14 Adelaar bombers on the trenches, then cuts immediately to the dead soldiers on the ground as the billowing death-luft cloud fades. The Army and veterans pointed out that all French front-line soldiers had been equipped with luft masks against such a fear, and the vast majority of them had managed to don them, though some had complacently been caught offguard in the initial attack. It then transpired that the cut of the film presented to the Académie had indeed portrayed the soldiers as scrambling for masks (though ineffectually due to the aforementioned complacency) and then realistically shown them in graphically violent death throes. The Académie censors had simply cut this scene out altogether, removing the violence but also the historical accuracy of the masks’ presence.
This sparked a huge debate over the nature of film censorship in France, and ultimately resulted in a policy change as the intended cut of The Warriors was restored. Thus this is not only a powerful scene in itself, but one which changed the world...
*
From: “The Black Twenties” by Errol Mitchell (1973)—
...despite an inaccurate portrayal in a certain recent French film of note, which some suspect was a Trojan horse to force a confrontation with the film censorship authorities. Arguments about how well French soldiers initially responded to the attack aside, the more critical question is who ordered the attack in the first place. It is unsurprising this has become a divisive matter, to say the least, due to lost Russian records. At the time, many propagandists portrayed the Belgians’ hand as being forced by their Russian puppetmasters. The arguments for this view consist of the facts that the Imperial Stavka had certainly discussed the need to escalate the Franco-Belgian conflict to prevent French support of the successful Germans, and that the luft attack put Belgium in danger of retaliation in kind, which would be of concern to Brussels but little to Petrograd.
However, there are also criticisms to be made of this assumption. Generally speaking, in the war the Russian Stavka only escalated when they felt there was a blow of worth to be struck. Tsar Paul could have doubled down on city bombing after Shiraz; a horrifying thought to us, but at the time the laws of war on the subject had still yet to be written. The Tsar did not, not out of humanitarian concerns, but because he felt Russia lacked sufficient weight of bombers for city bombing to inflict a meaningful defeat on enemy morale, and opened the door for the Bouclier nations to potentially use bombers in kind against Russian cities. By that metric, the death-luft attack on the trenches does not fit the pattern; it shocked the world and shifted public opinion towards the French in neutral nations, yet inflicted relatively minor damage on the French forces. Unlike the Anglo-Americans who had been caught offguard by the Societists a quarter-century earlier (and unlike how it is portrayed in a certain film), the French troops were equipped with luft-masks and weathered the attack. They took losses worse than in a regular artillery barrage or bomb raid, and a number of soldiers were left dehabilitated by burns from the Russian-produced brimstone-mustard death-luft (leading to the issue of rubberised suits alongside masks for certain troops on the front line) but the attack did far more damage to the Russo-Belgians in reputational terms than it militarily inflicted on their foes.
For this reason, many now argue that the Belgians unilaterally launched the attack out of sheer desperation, though whether the order came from Charles Theodore III or a rogue general is questioned. The latter is supported by the fact that the attack consisted only of the Adelaar bombers and was not backed up by shells from the Belgian artillery, though there is evidence that death-luft shells did exist in storage.
The attack was naturally received with shock not only in Paris but across the world. Many in the Grande-Parlement, especially on the opposition benches facing Cazeneuve’s new ramshackle three-party government, indeed called for retaliation in kind. The extreme remnant of the Noir party, those who refused to follow Vachaud into government, even demanded Brussels be bombed with death-luft and (with no sense of irony) that the inferior Germanics who practised such barbaric acts to be wiped from the earth.
France’s allies, naturally somewhat more removed from the action, saw things differently. The English condemned the attack and began issuing luft-masks to people in London and the south-east of England, areas that were conceptually in bombing range from Belgium. In practice, however, Belgium had only launched a couple of cursory raids earlier in the war, with all the firepower of the Koninklijke Luchtmacht focused on defending Belgian aerospace from French attacks. The Germans reacted similarly, not wishing to endanger their informal truce along the border. It was the Scandinavians who condemned the attack most heavily, something which clearly had nothing to do with the fact that their population centres were farthest out of range from the Belgians. The general tack taken by France’s cobelligerents, especially the English and later the Americans, was that the Belgians had been forced into it by the Russians, as mentioned above. It is not clear whether Charles Grey or David Fouracre truly believed this, or whether it was a propaganda ploy – a way to turn the Belgian people against their government and provoke an uprising. Certainly, this is not a tactic that fitted in line with France’s tendency to emphasise past Belgian perfidy and hint at racial purging to restore exiled Walloons to their ancestral lands.
Following desperate quist calls between London, Dresden and Paris, the French position shifted. The newly-appointed Dictateur, the Duc de Berry (veteran of the International Expeditionary Force to South America which had failed to strangle Societism in the cradle[21]) was inclined to listen to England’s logic. Pragmatic, he was keen on anything that would more swiftly knock Belgium out of the war and prevent a large part of the people of France from being in the crosshairs of Belgian bombers, now armed with death-luft. While the Belgians and Russians made only ambiguous noises when the Cannae Mondiale nations demanded an explanation of the death-luft attack, a plan was agreed. On June 4th 1923, after a period in which neither side made further use of death-luft in the trench warfare, the allies issued the Declaration of Colmar. This condemned anew the Belgian attack but held Russia responsible for it, portraying Belgium as a ‘captive nation’ of Petrograd. In a major shift for the tone of international diplomacy, the Cannae effectively applied the Malraux Doctrine to the very nation which it had originally been conceived against: they now argued that their cause was to liberate the Belgian people from their oppressors.
Unsurprisingly, this was a dizzying U-turn for many French people, and was heavily targeted by Societist propaganda an example of the supposed ‘perfidy of nations’. At this time, though little known to European society, Societist activity in Europe was largely focused on Spain, partly for reasons which the Societists themselves would strenuously deny – the old cultural ties between the former UPSA and its old colonial master. A Societist play, performed in both Novalatina and Spanish, circulated throughout Spain and Portugal at this time, despite the attempts by the authorities to suppress it. Titled The Madhouse and set in a surreal fantasy landscape that suggests our own world, it features a scene in which a group of angry ‘Canfresces’ go from destroying ‘Gelba’ works of art to repairing them in an instant when a messenger alerts them. When the traveller and narrator, portrayed as the only sane man, asks why, the ‘Canfresces’ explain that the Gelba are their friends and they have always been their friends, until the time when they are not. This was only the most iconic example of Societist propaganda at that time, both inside and outside Iberia – there was also significant penetration into Ireland and Italy, whose peoples shared with the Spanish a lack of contentment in their governments’ subordination to or alignment with France and French wars.
Even as Russia emerged victorious in Persia, the Cannae nations issued an ultimatum to Charles Theodore III to abdicate and order the Russians to leave Belgium, which was obviously ignored. The Duc de Berry then announced that France would indeed retaliate for the death-luft attack, but would target only enemy soldiers in uniform, and that any soldier who deserted would not face attack. Civilians would not be harmed and postwar Belgium would be treated as a freed colony. Initially this directive did not have much effect, but things changed once the first set of Cannae attacks rolled in from all sides. Concern over the death-luft had forced the English, Scandinavians and even Germans to agree to commit more forces against Belgium.
What was referred to as Case Ondergang (Dutch for ‘downfall’) was launched on June 28th 1923. The French bombarded the front lines with far more death-luft than the Belgians could have brought to bear, using both bombers and artillery. Though the Belgians were also equipped with luft-masks, the sheer overpowering French resources resulted in far more deaths and in far more places, and rumours spread like wildfire. Many took up the Duc’s offer to desert, some of whom were recaptured and/or shot in the back of the head by political officers and Russian Cossacks – which did nothing to convince the rest to stay put. It was this chaos, rather than the direct damage from the death-luft, which caused holes to finally open in the the Belgians’ dense lines of trenches and forts, allowing breakthroughs from French protgun spearheads.
Simultaneously, drawing away Belgian aero forces and making the French’s job easier, the Germans crossed the border and the English and Scandinavians attacked from the sea – initially seizing the West Frisian islands as a staging post and defeating what was left of the Belgian and Russian naval forces in the area. According to the plan drawn up in Colmar, Belgium was divided up into conceptual occupation zones, and the northern allies moved to secure their assigned areas. The English took the provinces of Holland, Utrecht, Gelderland and West-Friesland. The Scandinavians took Noord-Mönster, Oost-Friesland, Groningen, Drenthe and Overijssel. The Germans took Palts, Limburg and Luxemburg. And the remainder would go to France, taking in Brabant, Vlaanderan, Antwerpen and, of course, Luik.[22]
Luik, né Liége, had been the most chaotic and troublesome part of the Belgian realm since it had first been welded together, more than a century before, from the Palatinate and the former Austrian Netherlands. Indeed, its history of revolt and rebellion goes back longer even than that; in 1345, a century and a half before the Novamund was discovered, the people of Liége had overthrown their prince-bishop and established a relatively democratic guild law system which had influenced the rest of the region. In and after the Route des Larmes, the Wittelsbach rulers of Belgium had tried again and again to subdue Liége, by racial purging if necessary. Yet even when the city’s original Walloon population had dwindled to a remnant and been replaced with Dutch-Flemish colonists, still ‘Luik’ remained a source of headaches for Brussels. It was as if there was something in the water.
Now, more than a hundred years after it had rose up in support of General Boulanger’s invasion, Luik once again seized the opportunity. Its people were energised by reports (not without foundation) of abuse of its women by Russian Cossacks and Nindzhyas, armed by Cannae agents and equipped with deserting soldiers. The local government was overthrown and the Luikers proclaimed a Free Commune, offering to open their doors to Cannae forces in exchange for guarantees they would not be counter-purged from their land as Walloon groups in France were demanding. Berry and Ruddel, in a deal brokered by Mme Rouvier, seized the opportunity and agreed – though Rouvier extracted a limited right of return to assuage the Walloons’ ancestral grudge.
The Luik Revolution began on July 14th and drastically shifted the nature of the invasion. Initially supported by the adjacent Germans staging from Cologne, later helped by the French through new aerolifts, Luik resisted a makeshift Belgian loyalist counterattack and opened a hole in the back of the enemy lines. The French armies, which had spent months at a snail’s pace trying to take Namen and Wittelsbach, were now able to wheel through Luxemburg province and link up with the Germans and Luik revolutionaries. With a large chunk of Belgium cut off from her armies and the latter in collapse, it was only a matter of time before the kingdom was knocked out of the war.
It is likely Belgium’s last attack was not ordered by Charles Theodore III (whom, it transpired, had already fled Brussels and surrendered to Scandinavian forces on August 29th) nor by the Russians. The remaining bomber forces left Brussels in a quixotic attempt to drop death-luft on civilian targets in London, Paris and Frankfurt (as they did not have the range to reach Dresden). If whomever ordered the attack had focused all his bombers on one target, some of them might have survived to drop bombs. As it was, all were shot down long before reaching their targets – though once again the world of French film wants us to think that a brave pilot sacrificed his life by ramming the last Belgian bomber before it could drop its death-luft bomb right on King Charles’ head. Though entirely ineffectual, the move met with widespread condemnation and led to Russia formally, if belatedly, breaking ties and distancing herself from the central Belgian government. This did not stop her trying to seize power in Belgium’s overseas colonies, of course, with varying degrees of success. Some of the Russian forces in Belgium were successfully evacuated, but the vast majority were either captured or faced mob justice from vengeful Belgians.
By September 17th 1923, the last Belgian forces in Europe had surrendered and been disarmed, and the Cannae powers had secured their occupation zones. The French people had been dubious about Berry’s move, but now the fear of air raids was gone, the triumvirate government enjoyed strong public support again and the opposition was discredited. It seemed to most that, though the ‘Belgian Question’ would remain a problem for some time and the war continued against Russia, at least most French families would no longer have to fear the potential of a deadly killer that struck in the night and stole their blood kin from them.
How wrong they were...
[20] The author is Californian; this is probably an anglicisation of ‘Kolichev’ – names in California are frequently derived from one language out of English, Spanish or Russian but then spelled in another due to past ethnic mixing and different powers being in vogue at different times.
[21] As mentioned in Volume VII, even historians frequently repeat the idea that this was the IEF’s mission, when it was nothing of the sort.
[22] These largely resemble the provinces of the Low Countries in OTL with some differences. Because Belgium includes East Frisia, the province corresponding to OTL’s Dutch province of Friesland is specified as West-Friesland. The province of Noord-Mönster is the remnant of a Belgian claim to the whole border area that would have originally included the city of Münster (Mönster in the local dialect, which has been incorporated into the Dutch usage). Palts is a Dutchified form of Pfalz (i.e. the old Electoral Palatinate, though the term here incorporates much of the surrounding area as well). Limburg and Luxemburg both describe larger areas than the OTL province and nation state by that name.
We don't have a full picture of the situation towards the end of 1923 but it seems to be pretty bad for the Russians. The ENA is presumably advancing in North America. Russian forces in India have been described as just barely strong enough to prevent total defeat. The German armies were performing decently on the central European front so now that the French armies are free to join them the liberation of Poland may be on the cards. And even if Persia is on the defensive, events elsewhere seem to justify its strategy of taking on the main Russian attack to allow the allies to make decisive victories elsewhere. The Cannae Mondiale may well think that they have basically won. But the Tsar evidently thinks that he can still turn the tide or at least bleed the Cannae Mondiale enough to make them limit their demands.
Oh yes, the "Snape kills Dumbledore" and "Darth Vader is Luke's father" of LttW.
So it begins. The "the frontier of civilisation" is about to be re-established.
What is a "historical arc"?
The last (confirmed) plague outbreak in western Europe was in Glasgow, in 1900. (Though another one supposedly struck in Suffolk in 1910, according to Wikipedia.)
I suspect it will spread a wee bit more than that ITTL.
I suspect it will spread a wee bit more than that ITTL.
You misspelled Vlaanderen. Also, as a native Dutch-speaker, it strikes me as strange that the term 'Mönster' would become common in this timeline's Dutch, given how rare ö's are in general. And I keep forgetting that the Waddeneilanden are known as the "West Frisian Islands" in English.
Aside from that, though, this is pretty great.
U mean besides the fact it encompasses most of the Low Countries, didn’t get invaded twice by Germany to flank France, and so far as I can tell never did anything a tenth as bad as the Congo Free State with TTL colonial holdings?
Yeah but it won’t be a total defeat or Pyrrhic victory here
THAT disaster happens during the Sunrise War
As I understand it, TTL Belgium's official language is a Flemish-derived "Standaard-Nederlands" which is distinct enough from the northern dialects to have engendered some resentment in the past. I'm not quite sure if it would manifest as those spelling changes, but there's also just the fact that it's been two hundred years since the POD and spelling could very well have been standardized differently (as it was with TTL's English).