THE SOUND OF A GREAT AMEN: A HISTORY OF THE GREAT EASTERN WAR

The Sound of a Great Amen: A History of the Great Eastern War

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The Lost Chord, music by Sir Arthur Sullivan, composed on occasion of his brother's death in 1877, with lyrics by Dame Adelaide Anne Procter:

Seated one day at the organ,
I was weary and ill at ease,
And my fingers wandered idly
Over the noisy keys.

I know not what I was playing,
Or what I was dreaming then;
But I struck one chord of music,
Like the sound of a great Amen.

It flooded the crimson twilight,
Like the close of an angel's psalm,
And it lay on my fevered spirit
With a touch of infinite calm.

It quieted pain and sorrow,
Like love overcoming strife;
It seemed the harmonious echo
From our discordant life.

It linked all perplexèd meanings
Into one perfect peace,
And trembled away into silence
As if it were loth to cease.

I have sought, but I seek it vainly,
That one lost chord divine,
Which came from the soul of the organ,
And entered into mine.

It may be that death's bright angel
Will speak in that chord again,
It may be that only in Heav'n
I shall hear that grand Amen.


From John Hale Marston, A History of the Great Eastern War, (United States: Harvard Press, 1906):

The world in the last years of the Belle Epoque was one of form, tradition, and hegemony. In the Western Hemisphere, the United States sat nursing its wounds from the last civil war, and yet sometimes sat reopening its scars. By and large though, reconstruction was occurring, especially under the Grant presidency. Down south, Mexico’s president, Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, began a quiet reign of pseudo-peace. Further still, the great realm of the South American continent was the Empire of Brazil, then under the beloved Pedro II, while a number of lesser realms feuded with vague territorial ambitions.

In Europe, meanwhile, the world was great and gold. Britain was by and large the strongest power on the continent, as its possessions in India, Australia, and elsewhere provided it with great wealth, with Queen Victoria its headmistress. Meanwhile, the German Empire, having newly risen from the corpse of old Prussia, was the new power on the continent, and it had cemented an alliance with its fellow Germanophone nation, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These two states, along with the great Russian behemoth, formed an alliance called the League of the Three Emperors. France, meanwhile, licked its wounds over the recent Franco-Prussian War, and fumed against its old enemy, Britain. Another new power, Italy, had, like Germany to the north, had begun cementing itself as a real power since its unification in 1861. Other, lesser states, like the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, waited patiently for the moves of the great powers. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire, the "Sick Man of Europe," while it still seemed to have impressive holdings, was weak, almost dying, which would be proved by the war soon to come.

In Asia, the Europeans could run rampant. India had been subjugated in the early parts of the century, and was further so in the aftermath of the Sepoy Mutiny. China, meanwhile, under the Qing, was, by all rights, a great power, but its bureaucracy and battles against its own reformers left it open to Western imperialism.

In Africa, Ottoman dominance extended to the greater Egyptian region, for colonialism in the region and not yet really begun. The main dominions were French Algeria and British South Africa, for very little else had been colonized. The Malagasy kingdom of Merina was still independent, as was the Toucouleur Empire, and every other petty African polity.

But all this was to change.

It all began, with, as Chancellor Otto von Bismarck put it, “some damn little revolt in the Balkans." [1]
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IMPORTANT EVENTS:

1875:

January 12th: The Emperor Guangxu of China is coronated.

January 22nd: Famed playwright D.W. Griffith is born; his most well-known works include The Klansman (1915). [2]

March 1st: The United States Congress passes the Civil Rights Act of 1875, prohibiting discrimination in civil areas.

March 3rd: Bizet’s seminal Carmen is first performed.

April 25th: The 12th Dalai Lama of Tibet perishes. He is to be succeeded by Tenzin Gyatso, the 13th Dalai Lama. [3]

May 7th: The Treaty of St. Petersburg is signed; Japan renounces all claims to Sakhalin Island in exchange for much of the Kuril Archipelago. Later, this would prove one of the main cassus belli of Japan against Russia in the Great Eastern War.

May 20th: In Paris, the metric system is finalized.

July 5th: Pera Tunguz, a Herzegovinian bandit, attacks an Ottoman caravan. The Turks, angered, begin preparing to retaliate.

July 9th: The smallest spark which would one day ignite the Great Eastern War begins in Herzegovina. Ottoman forces begin a fight with armed Herzegovinians on this day, beginning the Herzegovinian Rebellion. The rebel forces spread throughout the Ottoman province, and mobs begin attacking Ottoman forts.
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An 1876 depiction of the leaders of the Herzegovinian Rebellion, published in the Serbian magazine Orao; said leaders were Bogdan Zimonjić, Mićo Ljubibratić, Stojan Kovačević, and Pecija Petrović.

From Milos Zukik, The Herzegovinian Revolt, (Rumelian Federation: Petrobaradin Press, 1903):

The early history of the Herzegovinian Revolt was a dark and a complex one…

Of course, the predominantly Christian minorities living under the Mohammedan Turkish yoke were always unhappy, only kept passive through their peasantry. But several leaders of the Herzegovinians did rise up in 1852, led by the chieftain Luka Vukalović, who began Vukalović's Uprising, which lasted until 1862. However, this ended inconclusively, with Vukalović emigrating to Russia, the place where he perished…

In 1874, rebel sentiment peaked once more. Jovan Gutić, Simun Zečević, Ilija Stevanović, Trivko Grubačić, Prodan Rupar and Petar Radović were the ringleaders of this rebellion, which received the assistance of Nikola I, the prince of Montenegro.

Meanwhile, in Serbia, a second group of conspirators, Vaso Vidović, Simo and Jovo Bilbija, Spasoje Babić and Vaso Pelagić, were plotting. Their plans began with the liberation of a number of villages; then they would take the forts on the Sava and sail down it, and take the city of Banja Luka. All this was to begin on August 18th [1875]. However, due to the imprisonment of priests by Ottoman, massive anger spears against the Turks, and this part of the uprising began on August 15, its leader chosen as Ostoja Kormanoš...Many other existed as well; this was not a well-organized affair....

The Ottomans had four battalions, 1800 men in total, led by Selim Pasha. Pasha stalled for reinforcements, but the rebels had besieged many cities. Four thousand reinforcements had arrived by August, and then four battalions through the Klek peninsula. By August 5th, the city of Trebinje was under rebel control, but soon it was besieged by the Turks once more, and retaken on August the 30th. By the beginning of September, Montenegro and Serbia had declared their support for the rebels in secret, and they offered aide...

The Montenegrins sent generals and many volunteers to the rebels, as did the Serbs, who secretly sent a leader of a previous rebellion, Mićo Ljubibratić.

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Mićo Ljubibratić, one of the leaders of the Rebellion, and later the first Prime Minister of the Rumelian Federation.

Disagreements were often had between the Serbian and Montenegrin rebel factions... [4]
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IMPORTANT EVENTS, cont.

September 18th: Tomás Burgos, future Premier of Socialist South American Federation is born. [5]

October: Due to its weakened state, the Ottoman Empire declares bankruptcy.

November 26th: It is revealed that Isma'il Pasha of Egypt has sold his country's 44% share in the Suez Canal to Britain, without parliamentary consent.
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From Felix Pyat, The Worker's Struggle, (Federated Communes of France: L'Internationale Press, 1905)

The capitalist will say to you that the Great Eastern War was a cause of misery. No! It was no cause at all, it was an effect. The imperialist overlords had brought it upon themselves...

The dastardly and perfidious British Empire had brought it on themselves what with their suppression of the proletariat. The Russians had too, with their sickening serfdom and so forth. Their imperialism was their vanity and their crime, and it proved to be their judge, jury, and their execution as well...

But in the darkness of opportunism and war, the worker's light shone threw.
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Footnotes:
1. You know and love the OTL version of this quote.
2. It's the same D.W. Griffith as OTL, and in OTL, he pursued an unsuccessful career as a playwright, which he later dropped, and went into the film biz instead. The rest is, as they say, history (and virulent racism). The Klansman is based on one of Griffith's OTL inspirations for Birth of a Nation, a novel by Thomas F. Dixon, Jr. called The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. And yes, it is horribly racist. Fun.
3. The same person as the OTL 13th Lama, just known under a different name as Lama.
4. All of this is OTL, to the best of my knowledge. Everything described in this as 'history' is.
5. IOTL, Burgos was a Chilean mutualist and philanthropist. What is the Socialist South American Federation, you ask? Well, as the fourth beast said, come and see.
 
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And now, some FAQs:

Who the hell are you?

I AM ORSON WELLES! I'm doing a new TL.

What is this?

It's based on an escalated Russo-Turkish War of 1877.
 

TFSmith121

Banned
It's an intriguing possible point of departure

It's an intriguing possible point of departure; Europe wasn't quite the armed camp it was even a decade later, but the seeds were certainly there.

It's worth remembering the 1850s-60s were the bloodiest era in European history since the end of the Napoleonic wars, certainly in terms of inter-state conflict; a Russian+allies descent on the Ottoman Empire would have rapidly brought the Eastern Question into play, and all the European powers had an interest in that...

It also predates most of the Scramble for Africa, so the alternative is that the British get bought off with most of that continent (even more so than historically) and the Russians and the other Continental powers divvy up much of the Ottoman and (possibly) the Austrian empires as well.

Or any one of several other possible paths, of course.

Best,
 
This looks interesting.

Dem commies doe. :cool:

Also, "Socialist South American Federation of South America?" Redundancy much? :p
 
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Intriguing. I'm trying to piece together who's supposed to have won this Great Eastern War from hints in the prologue, but it's not easy to conclude. If anything, it seems like none of the involved great powers really "won" at all.
 
Intriguing. I'm trying to piece together who's supposed to have won this Great Eastern War from hints in the prologue, but it's not easy to conclude. If anything, it seems like none of the involved great powers really "won" at all.

Yes, some powers emerged less scarred than others. It'll be discussed in more detail, though.
 
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