Malê Rising
- Thread starter Jonathan Edelstein
- Start date
Thanks! That means a lot coming from the two of you.
Remember that the War of the Triple Alliance never happened in TTL - Paraguay was on the losing side of the Third Platine War, but it didn't fight alone and it got honorable terms. This means that the population wasn't decimated and that the industrial development of the Francia and Lopez regimes continued.
At the moment, Paraguay is considered one of the gaucho republics because it's part of their loose alliance, but its culture is very different from (and substantially more indigenous than) the other three. It isn't very democratic, but the Lopez family no longer rules, and it's more an oligarchy than a dictatorship. It has also become more polyglot than OTL, with immigrants from Europe and the neighboring states coming to Asunción for jobs; there are a fair number of Italians living there, which is another thing that knits it into the gaucho alliance.
The armored trains are a bit slapdash, but all the states in the Southern Cone have good rail networks and they're a fast way to get troops across the open pampas. I'm imagining it more or less like the Russian civil war minus the factional confusion.
Ah, got it. Consider the name amended.
BTW, the political situation in Venetia right now is based on the discussion we had a month or two ago. Malatesta will play a fairly major role during and after the war, although he'll be a flawed hero.
In the Andean republics, Central America and Mexico, their situation is more or less the same. The Mapuche are doing better, because Napoleon III actually recognized the Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia and because TTL's Argentina (which took longer to consolidate) isn't as far along in its conquest of the south. The Amazonian peoples have it worse in some ways because their homeland has been a battleground for half a century, but some of them have also found protection by gravitating to the quilombos.
This is the most globally detailed TL I've seen on the site so far: even world-spanning classics like Decades of Darkness and Look To The West don't have this kind of detail across so much of the world, AFAIK. It's very impressive, especially since it's at least in part a family saga. Eagerly awating the end of the war!
The French have tanks (sort of) now. Well, that probably means that the North Germans and Brits are going to have their own soon enough. Will the war last long enough to see tank-to-tank fighting, I wonder.
Yet another thing that's going to turn around and bite people on the arse come the end of the war. The peace is going to be very hard to win...
Yet another thing that's going to turn around and bite people on the arse come the end of the war. The peace is going to be very hard to win...
Thanks. It's a struggle not to lose focus sometimes - I want to keep Africa, African ideas and religious reformism as the center of this timeline, and if I try to cover the whole world in detail, that can spread things too thin. I could hardly avoid doing so with a global war, though. I suspect that after the war is over, I'll return to a focus on Africa and the places affected by it, with occasional mentions (maybe one or two per narrative cycle) of what's happening in the rest of the world.
(Speaking of which, the places affected by Africa may indeed include Veneto/Venezia. Malatesta would know about Belloism, and while he would disapprove of its religious focus, lack of class-consciousness and potential for statism, he might be attracted its ideal of voluntary, apolitical collective communities that act as centers of education. He'd also have the early Belloist communes of Bornu, the peasant Belloism of Sudan, and the Adamawa trade unions as examples of quasi-anarchist communities that actually worked, although the last might be too syndicalist for his taste. Hey Falecius - what was the land situation in Friuli and Veneto at the time? Would there be room for a bottom-up land reform movement to fuse with anarchist and nationalist resistance groups to form something like the Free Territory?)
They're less tanks than armored cars on treads - they're unarmed and more lightly armored than a tank. They'll carry machine guns soon enough, but they won't mount weapons big enough to use against each other.
And yes, the British and North Germans will have them soon - in fact, they already do on the Baden-Bavaria front - and the peace will be complicated for any number of reasons.
My knowledge on this particular topic is sketchy... but Italy at large experienced a lot of agrarian unrest in this era IOTL (and it got worse in the aftermath of WWI, which would prove essential to the rise of Fascism, so we can assume that after TTLs Great War the pattern could be vaguely similar).
Most of the unrest was concentrated in central Italy and Romagna, and there were attempts by the Anarchists and, later, the Syndacalists to unify it with the urban labor movement, which was stronger in the Northwest.
Venezia was relatively quiet if compared to rest of the country, which still means it was pretty much a mess.
The area was particularly miserable overall, as in, the poorest part of Northern Italy with some areas struck by hunger in bad years. There was also relatively little in the way of agricultural infrastructure. Emigration, especially to South America (most notably the part of Brazil which became Piratini ITTL) was rampant; analphabetism much higher than in the rest of the North (still better than in the South anyway).
I am not sure of the peasant class structure, but complaints about material misery, cynical exploitation and lack of education of the farmer were commonplace even among the burghers.
I suppose that ITTL there is a slightly better situation, with a higher percentage of peasants as small landowners or autonomous tenants (the usual contracts gave thm half the harvest) than hired workers, thanks to the more leftist outlook at land policies by the Italian government. They will also could have a better access to education.
This is unlikely to amount to very much, but actually might help create a larger progressive educated group of farmers (mainly tenants) who might espouse more radical calls of change in the face of the still dominant misery (as I think it was the case in Tuscany and Romagna IOTL).
Community management of land, however, existed and agrarian communes coul be not unheard of.
ITTL you have more economic, cultural and political faultlines, so I guess there's some scope for something like what you suggest.
OTOH, the dominant farmers interest would be the upgrade from tenant to landowner, hardly going in the way of agrarian socialism. However, if you could manage to blend this with Catholicism, it might be more successful (although hardly in the liking of Malatesta). And hardly all the Venetian peasants were committed Catholics.*
* Blasphemous swearing is a normal part of colloquial speech in rural Venetian vernaculars. It is very common in other parts of Italy as well, but with a particular intensity in the Venetian piedmont. I suppose there should some social-historical reason behind this.
Saragarhi, May 1896
“I can see them clearly now,” said Anil Singh. “They’re definitely ours.”
Ibrahim Abacar accepted his daffadar’s binoculars and looked east. The blur on the distant ridge resolved into a column of troops, and the leading element bore the regimental flag of the 36th Sikhs. Behind them was the 208th, a Congress regiment, and Ibrahim could see others coming after.
“Kapur Singh got through,” he said.
“He did, sidi. The man is useless, but he always seems to get where he’s going.”
“Just like the rest of us, Anil?” Ibrahim swung the binoculars down to another group of soldiers, this one of far more immediate concern. “They see them too,” he said, watching the Afghan officers point and gesticulate at the column coming over the ridge. “They aren’t leaving, though. They’re pointing at us now – getting ready for an attack.”
“Again, sidi?” asked Samdip Singh, a note of despair in his voice. “Wouldn’t they leave, now the relief is here? What would it gain them now?”
The daffadar, not Ibrahim, was the one who answered. “To wreck what they can before they have to leave. To avenge their dead.” His gaze traversed the sixty dead Sikhs on the ramparts and the fourteen hundred Afghan bodies below, all of whom had been living at sunrise that morning.
A shame, Ibrahim thought briefly. They’d held the fort long enough: the Afghans wouldn’t come through by this road to threaten the Sikhs’ homes and families. And it didn’t matter much to him. The relief column was at least two hours away, and he realized with an almost clinical detachment that he didn’t have that long; whatever magic had kept him standing for the past hour with shrapnel in his gut and most of an arm blown off was fading. But the others might have lived.
He remembered that morning, when he’d sent the married men away with Kapur Singh to get help; he’d given the others the chance to go with them, and nobody had. The memory filled him with a fierce pride in them that almost overwhelmed his gusting emotions, but it was matched by sorrow that all these men had been wasted, and all the more so since the last of them would die within sight of help.
He shook his head clear and looked around at his remaining soldiers, and at the breach the Afghans had opened with an explosive charge during their last attack. “We can’t hold them here,” he said. “We should pull back to the inner wall.”
Anil Singh nodded. “Yes,” he said, more for the soldiers’ benefit than anything else. “We might have a chance there.”
“Take the men, then. I’ll stay here, slow them down for a moment. Give you more time to get ready.”
The daffadar started to say something, but swallowed his words. Ibrahim wouldn’t be able to hold off an attack for more than seconds, and the only thing he would accomplish by staying here would be to get killed a few minutes sooner. But most deaths in war were bad ones, and anything that made one better was worth doing. If Captain Abacar preferred to die on his feet in the breach rather than linger on the inner wall, then that was his right.
“They aren’t coming yet,” he said instead. “We can wait here until they start moving.”
Ibrahim nodded wordlessly.
“Do you remember that time Sarah had us to dinner at her hospital,” Anil Singh continued, “and all the nurses squealed about how handsome you were?”
The captain smiled. “Why, do you wish you were there?”
“No, I was just thinking that next time, I’d have them to myself.”
All the Sikhs laughed, although they would no more survive this day than Ibrahim would. “You should have married one,” he riposted. “Then I could have sent you away with Kapur Singh.”
“You should have married one, sidi. Then you could have sent yourself away.”
“True enough.” He thought of Salma in Ilorin, who he was promised to marry, and wondered who her husband would be now. He’d given Kapur Singh a letter for her, along with his notebooks and his unfinished second novel, and the troops on the ridge were a promise that it would be delivered.
“They’re coming, sidi.” Bhagwan Singh was holding the binoculars and pointing toward the breach. “They’ll be here in a minute.”
“You should go, then.” There were seven besides Ibrahim who would make the last stand: eight men left, to greet eight thousand.
He felt Anil Singh’s hand on his shoulder. “No regrets, sidi?”
“I grew up in the best of cities, and I’ve known the best of people,” he answered. “I’ve lived like a lord in London, and I’ve seen the world.”
“Ha!” The daffadar clapped his back and turned toward the inner wall. “May we meet again.”
Ibrahim stood just outside the breach and watched him go, leaning against what remained of the parapet to steady himself. He was fading now, but he had entered a world without fear or pain, and he felt that God was very close at hand.
The Afghans were climbing up the rubble now, and Ibrahim fired once, twice, three times. They kept coming, over the bodies of the fallen, and now the first of them was almost at the top.
Bole so nihal, Ibrahim thought, and then realized he was no longer a captain of Sikhs but an army of one. “Allah and the Malê!” he cried, and charged with drawn sword.
He died singing a song of praise.
“I can see them clearly now,” said Anil Singh. “They’re definitely ours.”
Ibrahim Abacar accepted his daffadar’s binoculars and looked east. The blur on the distant ridge resolved into a column of troops, and the leading element bore the regimental flag of the 36th Sikhs. Behind them was the 208th, a Congress regiment, and Ibrahim could see others coming after.
“Kapur Singh got through,” he said.
“He did, sidi. The man is useless, but he always seems to get where he’s going.”
“Just like the rest of us, Anil?” Ibrahim swung the binoculars down to another group of soldiers, this one of far more immediate concern. “They see them too,” he said, watching the Afghan officers point and gesticulate at the column coming over the ridge. “They aren’t leaving, though. They’re pointing at us now – getting ready for an attack.”
“Again, sidi?” asked Samdip Singh, a note of despair in his voice. “Wouldn’t they leave, now the relief is here? What would it gain them now?”
The daffadar, not Ibrahim, was the one who answered. “To wreck what they can before they have to leave. To avenge their dead.” His gaze traversed the sixty dead Sikhs on the ramparts and the fourteen hundred Afghan bodies below, all of whom had been living at sunrise that morning.
A shame, Ibrahim thought briefly. They’d held the fort long enough: the Afghans wouldn’t come through by this road to threaten the Sikhs’ homes and families. And it didn’t matter much to him. The relief column was at least two hours away, and he realized with an almost clinical detachment that he didn’t have that long; whatever magic had kept him standing for the past hour with shrapnel in his gut and most of an arm blown off was fading. But the others might have lived.
He remembered that morning, when he’d sent the married men away with Kapur Singh to get help; he’d given the others the chance to go with them, and nobody had. The memory filled him with a fierce pride in them that almost overwhelmed his gusting emotions, but it was matched by sorrow that all these men had been wasted, and all the more so since the last of them would die within sight of help.
He shook his head clear and looked around at his remaining soldiers, and at the breach the Afghans had opened with an explosive charge during their last attack. “We can’t hold them here,” he said. “We should pull back to the inner wall.”
Anil Singh nodded. “Yes,” he said, more for the soldiers’ benefit than anything else. “We might have a chance there.”
“Take the men, then. I’ll stay here, slow them down for a moment. Give you more time to get ready.”
The daffadar started to say something, but swallowed his words. Ibrahim wouldn’t be able to hold off an attack for more than seconds, and the only thing he would accomplish by staying here would be to get killed a few minutes sooner. But most deaths in war were bad ones, and anything that made one better was worth doing. If Captain Abacar preferred to die on his feet in the breach rather than linger on the inner wall, then that was his right.
“They aren’t coming yet,” he said instead. “We can wait here until they start moving.”
Ibrahim nodded wordlessly.
“Do you remember that time Sarah had us to dinner at her hospital,” Anil Singh continued, “and all the nurses squealed about how handsome you were?”
The captain smiled. “Why, do you wish you were there?”
“No, I was just thinking that next time, I’d have them to myself.”
All the Sikhs laughed, although they would no more survive this day than Ibrahim would. “You should have married one,” he riposted. “Then I could have sent you away with Kapur Singh.”
“You should have married one, sidi. Then you could have sent yourself away.”
“True enough.” He thought of Salma in Ilorin, who he was promised to marry, and wondered who her husband would be now. He’d given Kapur Singh a letter for her, along with his notebooks and his unfinished second novel, and the troops on the ridge were a promise that it would be delivered.
“They’re coming, sidi.” Bhagwan Singh was holding the binoculars and pointing toward the breach. “They’ll be here in a minute.”
“You should go, then.” There were seven besides Ibrahim who would make the last stand: eight men left, to greet eight thousand.
He felt Anil Singh’s hand on his shoulder. “No regrets, sidi?”
“I grew up in the best of cities, and I’ve known the best of people,” he answered. “I’ve lived like a lord in London, and I’ve seen the world.”
“Ha!” The daffadar clapped his back and turned toward the inner wall. “May we meet again.”
Ibrahim stood just outside the breach and watched him go, leaning against what remained of the parapet to steady himself. He was fading now, but he had entered a world without fear or pain, and he felt that God was very close at hand.
The Afghans were climbing up the rubble now, and Ibrahim fired once, twice, three times. They kept coming, over the bodies of the fallen, and now the first of them was almost at the top.
Bole so nihal, Ibrahim thought, and then realized he was no longer a captain of Sikhs but an army of one. “Allah and the Malê!” he cried, and charged with drawn sword.
He died singing a song of praise.
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Can we have a genealogic tree of the Abacar family? I'm a little confused over who is where in this great war.
Good update anyway.
PS: As I think to French West Africa, it makes me reminding of the transsaharan railway project. Is there anything planned for its construction? From what I've read, the proposal of railway through the west Algerian desert was the most favoured and technically feasible. This way didn't need great amounts of massive works such as tunnels and bridges and would have taken between 5 and 8 years, according to the less optimistic previsions.
I speak of this project as it would be logical in a policy of development of West Africa. It would shorten travels by connecting Senegal and French Soudan to the Algerian ports rather than them being dependent on Dakar or Saint-Louis.
Good update anyway.
PS: As I think to French West Africa, it makes me reminding of the transsaharan railway project. Is there anything planned for its construction? From what I've read, the proposal of railway through the west Algerian desert was the most favoured and technically feasible. This way didn't need great amounts of massive works such as tunnels and bridges and would have taken between 5 and 8 years, according to the less optimistic previsions.
I speak of this project as it would be logical in a policy of development of West Africa. It would shorten travels by connecting Senegal and French Soudan to the Algerian ports rather than them being dependent on Dakar or Saint-Louis.
Jonathan, great update. I love the references to the historical Saragarhi. And it's well-written, though it seems less was actually on the line in this "last stand" than historically. Just one point of clarification - how did Ibrahim end up in India again? I can't remember.
Cheers,
Ganesha
Cheers,
Ganesha
It's certainly a project that makes sense in TTL - it would have to be built around the remaining Toucouleur territories, but it would be feasible and would help the development of the West African territories. The main problems are logistics and money - it would be expensive to feed and maintain thousands of workers in the middle of the desert. At the outbreak of the war, the trans-Saharan railroad was part of the master plan for French West Africa, but only part of it had been built. Depending on events, it might pick up again after the war.
Both Abacar brothers were studying in England when the war broke out, and the British commanders' thinking was that they were "young gentlemen" who ought to be officers but that it would never do for them to command British troops. So Paulo the Younger was sent to Tanganyika as a district officer and Ibrahim to India as a lieutenant in the same Sikh regiment in which his father had served. He was in the Southeast Asia campaign, was detached to Samoa for a while with a half-company as a military adviser (when we visit Samoa after the war, he will be remembered there) and then sent back to rejoin his regiment in the Northwest Frontier.
The stakes at Saragarhi are roughly the same as in OTL: the Afghans (stirred up by Russia in TTL) had crossed the border in force, and if they got to the end of the pass and caught the Raj napping, the consequences for northwest India would be unfortunate. The Saragarhi garrison's job was to hold the fort and delay the Afghans long enough for the main British force to get there and see them off. And in TTL, as in OTL, they succeeded at the price of being killed to the last man.
In TTL, though, the dead of Saragarhi will be known to Indian military legend as "The Seventy" rather than the 21.
He did think about it, but decided that since they were all doomed anyway, he'd let Ibrahim do as he pleased.
"Sad" is my feeling. I'll have to go back over the earlier chapters on Ibrahim; particularly all the talk about his literary importance, realizing that all his memory stems from stuff he dashed off while fighting the war.
The Afghans were acting as Russian agents...I really really don't like the Romanovs.
The Afghans were acting as Russian agents...I really really don't like the Romanovs.
Yes, that's the part I didn't mention in post 1882 - that the "translation" of The Silent Ones into dance will be posthumous, and that Ibrahim's literary output was written before and during the war. (He started writing religious poetry when he was eleven, but most of what he wrote at that age wasn't much good.)
Part of his literary reputation will in fact come from his early death - he never got a chance to make the mistakes of his grandfather, father and brother, so he'll be remembered as the slain hero, the unfulfilled promise.
I'll admit that I changed my mind several times about this latest update - the original plan was for Ibrahim to die in battle, but at a couple of points, I resolved to let him survive the war. At the end of the day, though, this is a war, and war is death and loss. Thirty-odd million offstage deaths are perilously close to a statistic; sometimes one has to happen onstage in order to show the tragedy.
And with that, I'll leave you with one of Ibrahim's less irreverent war poems (all his war poems were irreverent, the polar opposite of his religious ones), written at Saragarhi and contained in the notebooks he sent off with Kapur Singh:
On parade at morning
Staring at the dawning
Sky, rising forever
From a martial stance:
Hark now to the colonel
Praising us eternal
For battles won together,
Partners in the dance.
"Now, as victory's wages,
Go where battle rages.
Off, you, to wherever!"
"Russia, then, or France?"
"Doesn't matter, brother,
One's like any other.
They fight us together,
Partners in the dance."
Night-time, telling stories
On the road to glory:
Hoping something clever
Can turn blood to romance;
Then, in darkness' cover,
Promise one another
To face what comes together,
Partners in the dance.
Dawn again: the lighting
Now unveils the fighting.
"In you go, boys! Whether
You come out - trust chance;"
"Mark you well the foe, now -
Came by the same road now.
Have it out together,
Partners in the dance."
"Forward, boys! Now faster!
Give it to the bastards!"
War, loosed from its tether
Turns death to a trance;
On to where they're standing
At the same commanding
And we fall together,
Partners in the dance.
Staring at the dawning
Sky, rising forever
From a martial stance:
Hark now to the colonel
Praising us eternal
For battles won together,
Partners in the dance.
"Now, as victory's wages,
Go where battle rages.
Off, you, to wherever!"
"Russia, then, or France?"
"Doesn't matter, brother,
One's like any other.
They fight us together,
Partners in the dance."
Night-time, telling stories
On the road to glory:
Hoping something clever
Can turn blood to romance;
Then, in darkness' cover,
Promise one another
To face what comes together,
Partners in the dance.
Dawn again: the lighting
Now unveils the fighting.
"In you go, boys! Whether
You come out - trust chance;"
"Mark you well the foe, now -
Came by the same road now.
Have it out together,
Partners in the dance."
"Forward, boys! Now faster!
Give it to the bastards!"
War, loosed from its tether
Turns death to a trance;
On to where they're standing
At the same commanding
And we fall together,
Partners in the dance.
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Really quite good. This would be a translation, right? What language might he be writing in originally?
Cheers,
Ganesha
Back in the post about motor cars in northern France, there is a mention of a Georges Melies.
In OTL, Melies was a filmmaker who is considered an innovator in movies and who did the movie A Trip to the Moon in 1902 (and became the victim of piracy) (1).
Is this an ATL sibling?
(1) Interestingly, Jonathan, Melies is a character in the film Hugo and you should see the Smashing Pumpkins music video Tonight, Tonight, which is a tribute to his work.
In OTL, Melies was a filmmaker who is considered an innovator in movies and who did the movie A Trip to the Moon in 1902 (and became the victim of piracy) (1).
Is this an ATL sibling?
(1) Interestingly, Jonathan, Melies is a character in the film Hugo and you should see the Smashing Pumpkins music video Tonight, Tonight, which is a tribute to his work.
He may have actually written it in English - remember that, by that time, he'd spent three years as a British officer and a year or two at Magdalen before that. If not, then he wrote it in Sudanic, the Fulfulde-Portuguese-Yoruba-Arabic creole that is the daily speech of Ilorin and the lingua franca of the Malê successor states.
In terms of style, I was going for something like the aesthetic of the British war poets; the reader can judge whether I managed it.
Yes he is. He'll tinker with cameras eventually, and the work he's doing in mechanical research and development will make itself felt in special effects.
The Afghans could be trouble sometimes in OTL, witness the 1897 invasion during which the historical battle of Saragarhi took place. In TTL, the Russians have given guns and money to as many Afghan chiefs and princes as they could, and pointed them in the general direction of India, so the Raj is facing a lot more than a single tribe or small confederacy.
And there are other protagonists, or rather the protagonist is the family and not any single person in it.