Part #286: Frozen Nightmare
“Criticism continues to mount as Sir Robert Derby, First Commissary of the Imperial Diamondball Federation, insists that plans to reform the rules of the Imperial League to ban soakballs remain on track.[1] This comes despite the joint ultimatum by the Philadelphia Quakers, Chichago Cardinals, Boston Riflemen and Mount-Royal Grenadiers that four of the Big Seven will leave the league before complying with the new rules. All eyes are now on the owners of the New York Knicks, Washington Pipers and New Norfolk Raiders, who for now remain silent. Rumours continue fly concerning alleged money-laundering by California businesses, purportedly an attempt to force the League into compliance with the anti-soakball rules instituted ten years ago for the Adamantine League to pave the way for joint games and the corresponding advertising revenue…”
– Transcription of a C-WNB News Motoscope broadcast,
recorded in Waccamaw Strand, Kingdom of Carolina, 29/03/2020
*
From: “A History of Europe, 1896-1960” by Susan Dempsey (1985)—
The time between April 1924 and November 1925 is frequently referred to as the Two Years of Hell in most of Europe, despite being closer to eighteen months. Nonetheless, it is quite understandable how much larger this period looms in the cultural imagination; journals at the time record that many people felt like the very passage of time itself had slowed to a crawl. This was not synonymous with the presence of the plague in Europe, though it did contain the peak of the first wave; plague had already entered Italy, Catalonia and wartorn, Ottoman-occupied Greece, and the Black Homecoming in Ireland had shocked the continent by showing what impact the out-of-control epidemic could have.
Rather, the Years of Hell refer specifically to the time in which the battle front of the war in Poland and Germany ground almost to a halt, both the Russian and allied armies hollowed out by the devastating plague, yet neither side willing to commit to a ceasefire. Even if Tsar Paul might have considered such an option under other circumstances, the fact that Prince Yengalychev had cited the plague as an excuse to surrender to the Americans in Russian America, and had since been blasted as a traitor by Paul’s propaganda, now made it politically impossible to consider. Furthermore, from Paul’s perspective, Marshal Fanlivenov and General Nesterov were on the verge of a breakthrough, having crossed the Oder and being on course for a penetration of the High Saxon heartland. It took long and painful months before this impression was dented in the eyes of Paul and much of the Imperial Soviet – in part driven by the death of Anatoly Nesterov himself from plague in July 1924. As had been observed centuries before, the plague was no respecter of persons – though the common soldiers in their muddy trenches had a lot more opportunity to catch it than their generals.
And it would be those trenches that would become emblematic of the Years of Hell in Europe, just as much as the yellow quarantine flags flying over cities and the squads of fumigators in rubber suits using death-luft reserves to purge their evacuated slums of rats and fleas.[2] The long front stretching through Germany, Poland and to the borders of Lithuania, from Karaliaučius to Walcz through Fürstenwalde to Rawicz, became practically immobilised for more than a year. It was proposed by generals on both sides that a retreat should be made to fall back to a shorter and stronger defensive line, considering their plague-ridden armies struggled to maintain the line. This was rejected by the leadership of both sides. Paul and the Soviet were, again, stubbornly unwilling to abandon Nesterov’s bridgehead across the Oder. While the Germans considered pulling out of Danzig and Karaliaučius, Chancellor Ruddel and Marshal Prittwitz flatly rejected a proposal to fall back to Silesia, or even to abandon it in favour of a defensive line on the Sudeten Mountains.
Having fought hard to secure the territory they presently had, neither side was willing to surrender any – not least because many politicians expected a peace negotiation sooner or later and wanted to hold more cards to bargain with in trades. Yet none of them were willing to risk the perception of weakness by being the first to pull the trigger and open talks. Under other circumstances, the process might have begun from the sheer momentum of lukewarm allies pulling out of the conflict to focus on dealing with the plague. However, the Black Homecoming in Ireland successfully scared other such countries into maintaining the war. There was also a specific tendency to wish to keep troops overseas, due to fears they would similarly bring the plague back with them (even when the plague was already spreading among civilians, this remained a fear). It was not only smaller countries that would be subject to this fear; much of the history of the twentieth century was inadvertently driven by the fact that President Fouracre and his cabinet began desperately searching for excuses to stop his soldiers coming home, and began looking for new worlds to conquer…
But to return to Europe. With both sides wishing to look strong before they risked opening talks, both sought a symbolic victory – fruitlessly, and at the cost of thousands of lives that mixed into the broader death toll (both military and civilian) of the plague. Trench systems ran on the long, static, overextended front from the Baltic Sea to the Sudeten Mountains.[3] Protguns and aerocraft had not ceased to exist, though they were vulnerable to their skilled drivers, pilots and mechanics falling victim to the plague. This caused a disproportionate reduction in capabilities, as it took much longer to train replacements for these specialised roles than it did to recruit line infantry. The result was two archetypal forms of conflict during the Years of Hell, both ultimately futile.
The first, generally more favoured by the allies and in the earlier part of the period, was to use what protgun and drome strength remained to punch through the enemy lines and outflank them, then try to follow up with infantry strength. This inevitably failed as the plague ripped through both the skilled and unskilled soldiers (and their logistical support), weakening them and favouring the static defenders in their strongpoints, who at least did not have to worry about movement and mobile supply. The second option, more favoured by the Russians (who had already burned up much of their dromes on Nesterov’s last offensive to take the Oder bridgehead) and in the later part of the period, was to focus on mass infantry wave attacks (supported by artillery bombardment) and hope to overwhelm the enemy trenches by sheer numbers. Ultimately, the hopeful doctrines of Fanlivenov’s strategists shattered on conflict with reality, and no amount of bombardment could sufficiently weaken the sick Germans and their allies to stop them from being able to mow down the waves of Russian conscripts with cingular gun fire.
The situation was not helped by the fact that both sides also tended to focus on the Oder bridgehead as the target for their symbolic victory. Paul still envisaged the possibility of taking Berlin, while Ruddel wanted to push the Russians back over the Oder before opening talks. The result was a particularly dense (and plague-ridden) military concentration around the bulge of the bridgehead. Three German offensives were launched throughout the period (Unternehmen Wotan, Unternehmen Siegfried and Unternehmen Johann Georg) and all failed to achieve anything beyond slaughtering thousands of young men.[4] It is a measure of the remarkable ability for Bundeskaiser Anton to
always make the wrong decision during the war that he applied his unpopular father’s name to the third operation, just around the time when his own former anti-war stance could have resonated with the sick and fatigued people. It is believed that the deluded Anton thought that a victory with Johann Georg’s name attached to it would encourage his son Maurice, then on the verge of succumbing to the plague, and for the people to support him – rather than the more obvious option of appending Maurice’s own name to the operation. In the end, the final operation that did succeed in ejecting the Russians at the end of the period would bear the name of the former Chancellor Ziege, with a grieving Anton having washed his hands of participation in the war at exactly the wrong moment.
The Russians also attempted to push westward to Berlin, but fewer details of their plans survive due to later events. Notably, Fanlivenov’s newly-promoted subordinate General Boris Lobabov-Rostovsky, rejected the focus on Berlin in favour of an attack to take Danzig and break the fragile German salient stretching to Karaliaučius. Though he was not spared many troops, Lobanov-Rostovsky came close to a breakthrough in August 1924 before he, too, succumbed to the plague and the leadership of his weakened army collapsed. This is merely the best-known example of a story that was told and retold many sullen, enervating times on the Polish Front. As for the Polish people themselves, they suffered perhaps more than any other civilians in the Black Twenties, with the double punch of war and plague. It was a bitter irony, given that Poland had been one of the few places to be spared the Black Death of six centuries perior.[5]
As the months dragged on and the deaths from both war and disease mounted up, it became increasingly clear that neither side would get the quick victory that would provide them with a face-saving excuse to seek peace. Criticism of the leadership of both sides mounted, but was naturally suppressed – brutally in Russia and, to a lesser extent, Germany, while France and Italy were subject to media blackouts. Only in England and Scandinavia, safely removed from the bitter Polish Front, was some muted public criticism in the written word permitted. Neutral Danubia, with its Grey Societist-led government, was one place where an anti-war position in the media was not only permitted, but positively encouraged. Danubian papers typically emphasised the fact that Danubia was able to devote all her resources to the public health crisis, which – combined with largely sealed borders save for essential imports – ensured that her death tolls would be proportionately smaller. In the early days of close cooperation with the Combine (which then still saw the Danubians as part of the same movement) there was cautious sharing of some of the chemical breakthroughs. While even then the Combine held on to the Tremuriatix recipe, some earlier prototype chemicals were shared, allowing Danubia to fumigate her cities far more effectively than the distracted Germans or Russians, or even the French or Italians.
The Danubian papers also frequently implied a refugee crisis, with hordes of not only Poles, but also Germans, French, Italians and others pouring over the border to seek the peace and health of the Hapsburg monarchy. Analysis of these sources shows a fascinating example of how one can draw entirely different conclusions from the same information; some observers will see a convergence of attitude between the local Societists and others, while others will see them as entirely distinct and merely sharing a track in the same direction. Both Societists and others wanted to celebrate what refusing to join the war had done for Danubia, but whereas Societists tended to portray the refugees positively, others sharing the former sentiment wanted to turn them aside. While frequently portrayed as Societist supremacism, much of the public attitudes of Danubia in this period were more borne of traditional Hapbsurg AEIOU –
Austriae est imperare orbi universo or ‘Austria will rule the world’.
It is this distinction, relatively subtle in some eyes, which confuses many attempts to understand Danubia in this period and its relations with the Combine. While Danubia did not open its borders to all refugees, several high-profile anti-war figures from France and Italy did emigrate to Vienna and its thriving cafés and salons, schools of thought largely free from both restrictions on free speech and the deadly plague. Among these were the French writer Julien Massard and the Italian artist Bruno Castellenghi. Both are remembered for their roles in cultural works critical of the war in this period.
Massard collaborated with the Danubian playwright Istvan Rauch on the epic
Troja und Zeit (“Troy and Time”), a new depiction of the Trojan War as described in Homer’s
Iliad. Contrary to popular belief, this was not the first iconoclastic take on the legend. In the nineteenth century, historians’ consensus had been that Troy was entirely legendary, so it had been a shock in 1878 when a joint Belgian-Ottoman expedition had successfully identified the site of Hisarlik, on the southern bank of the Dardanelles, with the ancient city.[6] With Troy now no longer an imagining of Homer but a real city of bricks and mortar, writers and playwrights had already begun considering the question of depicting the war with all the banalities of reality, rather than the glories of the Greek epic. However, Rauch and Massard were the first to hit the public zeitgeist in their depiction. Their portrayal of the Siege of Troy – which, after all, Homer describes as going on for over a decade – makes deliberate and knowing comparisons to the then-ongoing Polish Front. The figure of The Writer appears as a metatextual character in the play (sometimes, though not necessarily, identified with Homer himself) who monologues after each scene to describe what he is writing down. Invariably, there is a harsh and jarring distinction between the bitter realism of the actual scenes and what The Writer records as fantasies of glory and honour. The message was that the cycle would continue, and that one day people might look back on this war as a time of glory – and seek to pursue war themselves thanks to this false memory.
Castellenghi is best known for his illustrations in the satirical magazine
Dei Wult.[7] First and foremost of these is
Erwartungen und Realität – “Expectation and Reality”. With similar themes to
Troja und Zeit, this is a double political cartoon contrasting what people may have envisaged of the war at the top – a thought bubble containing a gentlemanly sword duel between the national personifications of Germany and Russia – with the brutal reality at the bottom. This shows two thuggish, muddy and wounded figures, each with one broken arm, wrestling ineffectually at the bottom of a trench surrounded by spike-wire. In the background, a woman and child drown in a black pool to imply the civilian deaths from the plague, yet neither man turns aside to help her.
These and other artistic efforts were suppressed in France, Italy and elsewhere, not only during the war but frequently afterwards as well. Collectively they are known as the Grey Dawn movement, in contrast to the Morne movement which grew up in France (q.v.). Thanks to paranoia and suppression during the Second Black Scare, men such as Massard and Castellenghi are frequently portrayed as Societists, which is strictly untrue at the time they achieved their greatest works. Istvan Rauch was a heterodox Societist (as evidenced by his choice to combine German and Hungarian names, rather than using Martial Latin or Novalatina). Castellenghi described himself as ‘a disciple of Sanchez, but a bad one’ in later life, but Massard always denied any sympathy with Societism of any school. In 1954 he would comment that “If one may no longer say that slaughter without meaning is a bad thing for fear of being accused of raising the black flag, we might as well all hurl ourselves in the sea now and leave this world for the animals” (reflecting his actual, Stewardism-based political beliefs).
In 1970, the critic and historian René Regaud observed that the powerful message of
Troja und Zeit, circulating illegally in Spanish translation, was much more influential in encouraging the Societist message in Iberia than clumsy Combine-produced efforts like
The Madhouse. For this, he faced criticism in his own France for implying a Frenchman had instigated the following events, but – reflecting the fanaticism now dominant in the Combine after the Silent Revolution – he was made the target of a death squad. Paradoxically turned him into a popular martyr among the same French people who had just been criticising him.
So much for the Polish Front, which inflicted so many pointless deaths among the young men of both armies, while preventing their countries from devoting their full attention to the killer plague in their cities. Yet, though the Polish Front was the best-known of the ‘Frozen Fronts’ in the west, it was not the only one – nor even, perhaps, the most influential for the post-war world...
[1] A soakball, in the game of diamondball, is a ball that ‘soaks’ the player, meaning a ball thrown directly at a player running between bases in order to put him out. In OTL this was permitted in the ‘Massachusetts Game’ rules of proto-baseball, but banned by the ‘Knickerbocker Rules’ or ‘New York Game’ which became the dominant one. In TTL it has been retained, but has become increasingly violent and problematic – as balls became weightier and more damaging as materials and aerodynamics shifted.
[2] The origins of the yellow quarantine flag considerably predate the International Code of Signals for which it now signifies the letter Q (and, confusingly, today means clear of disease). It is uncertain exactly how far back it goes, with some even tying it to the use of yellow in the Middle Ages to mean those who should be shunned (whether the diseased, heretics or Jews) but it was certainly used as early as the eighteenth century. The yellow flag is technically a square jack, hence the British term ‘yellow jack’ as an alternative term for yellow fever (though the latter owes its name to yellowed skin being a symptom).
[3] As always, when writers in TTL sound like they are evoking the Western Front of OTL’s First World War, one needs to take this with a pinch of salt. TTL has simply never had a conflict as compressed, dense and static as the Western Front, and even observers who had experienced the war being described here would be horrified with the level of misery, slaughter and lack of movement of OTL’s Western Front. So they are using superlatives here without a basis for comparison; this period of war is much more comparable to the
Eastern Front of the First World War, and the implied ‘continuous’ trench systems have big holes in them by the standards OTL historians would use.
[4] Unternehman means ‘Operation’ in German. In TTL, of course, Wagner and his operas did not exist, but there was a similar (if less intense) growth of interest in Germanic myth as a subject for new novels, plays and operas during the Kulturkrieg period in TTL. One major difference is that, as opposed to Wagner incorporating many elements from Norse myth, the messaging during TTL’s period was explicitly German-supremacist and anti-Norse, due to the attempt to Germanise Jutland being a major focus of the Kulturkrieg. So it is the differences rather than the similarities of the two traditions that are emphasised.
[5] As is commonly the case in OTL, this is a misleading description – the Black Death certainly made it to Poland, it was just a much milder outbreak compared with most of Europe.
[6] This rediscovery was made around the same time in OTL.
[7] The title is meant to humorously imply a typographical error, with a double meaning – is it a mangled rendering of
Die Welt, mocking a serious newspaper at the time, or a grammatically warped version of
Deus Vult, reflecting edgy criticism of the Catholic Church?