Chapter 587
June, 1902
Georgetown, New Jersey
Over the past months (really the past two years), the Provincial and Centralist Parties would wage internal warfare preparing for the summer Conventions. Dozens of candidates presented themselves or had their proxies do so in their name.
There were no shortfall of candidates:
The Provincial Party offered up Adlai Stevenson, William Jennings Bryan among others.
The Centralists would debate the merits of William McKinley of Wabash, Theodore Roosevelt of New York and even William Howard Taft, also of Wabash.
In truth, none of these men particularly inspired the electorate. Both parties would actively seek the leadership of the most popular man in America, General Hohenzollern. By blood and marriage, he was related to the Hohenzollern, Washington, Burr, Arnold and Bonaparte dynasties, a virtual who's-who of American history. He also had few open political positions. That was a bonus.
The downside was that the good General had few political inclinations at all. He loathed the politicians whom messed with the military over his long career and resented the fools in Manhattan, even those whom begged for him to seek the nomination over the past year were refused point blank. However, after near a year on the shelf and watching the deteriorating situation in Europe, Hohenzollern would finally consent to seek the nomination.
It was just a matter of choosing which side. Eventually, Hohenzollern selected the Centralists. Mainly he did so for two reasons:
1. He had grown to despise the pompous and bombastic Theodore Roosevelt and wanted to keep the man out of the Presidential Mansion.
2. For the past several months, William Jennings Bryon, leader of the radical wing of the Provincial Party, had viciously assaulted Hohenzollern on the campaign trail out of fear that he would have to face him in the Provincial Convention. He derided Hohenzollern as a German potentate and positioned himself as a "man of the people".
This irritated Hohenzollern to no end and as much as anything prompted him to throw his hat in the ring (or allow others to throw his hat in the ring). Within days, the Centralist Party Convention swung away from the debate between the colorless McKinley, the bland Taft and the "traitor" Roosevelt. In less than three votes, Hohenzollern had his majority to gain the nomination.
Tuscany
Despite frequent threats by the Gallic Kingdoms, the Latin King of Spain, Portugal and Italy would consolidate his power over Tuscany. He dispatched his son to jointly rule the entire Italian Peninsula with his new wife, Maria of Tuscany. The Gauls threatened war but the King would hold them back for two reasons:
1. He didn't want Tuscany for his dynasty anyway and didn't believe that the annexation by the Latin Bourbons would be any kind of threat to Gaul. He had yet to see a single person agitate to leave democratic Piedmont in order to live under the thumb of the Latin Bourbon authoritarianism.
2. The situation in Germany threatened to boil over into the petty states of the German Confederation where German nationalist sentiment often moved towards the House of Hohenzollern. If Spain and Italy were not threats to Gaul, a unified German without question would be.
The King directed his Ministers to expand the system of alliances of the western nations into a new League of Armed Neutrality. Gaul, Britain, Ireland, the Dutch Republic, Flanders, Burgundy, the Rhineland and the German Confederation expanded their cooperation to include a new treaty of mutual assistance at sea that would, over the next year, become the League. Eventually, Russia, the Scandinavian Empire and even America would be invited to join though all three would remain aloof for the time being.
Saxony
The first full-scale battle between Hohenzollern and Habsburg forces of the 20th century would occur north of Dresden. The Kingdom of Germany's forces had pressed through half of Saxony en route to "liberating" the Kingdom. It had taken months for the ponderous machinery of the Habsburg "Empire" of Germany to mass and rush to the aid of their ally, the King of Saxony.
The first battle of Dresden would prove a confused affair as the Hohenzollern forces of Brandenburg, Magdeburg, Mecklenburg, Hanover, Schleswig and Holstein would crash into those of Saxony, Sudetenland, Austria, Bavaria, Swabia and Thuringia.
In short order, it was easy to see that the new repeating rifles had made modern warfare a defensive struggle, altering three thousand years of strategy in which Alexander's phalanx's, Roman columns, Arab and Mongol cavalry, British squares and massed French infantry charges had been made obsolete.
Within weeks, the war ground down as both sides sought to dig in and attempt to flank the enemy lines.