CHAPTER 64
ANTHRAX AND ANARCHY
A Europan political cartoon showing the horrible situation the Empire was in, "fighting a war for the fat capitalists" for nothing but a medal while families starved back home
Ireland had been using pulmonary anthrax-laced gas in its defense of it shores against the hordes of Scottish and English invaders. The Britannic Union was hellbent on destroying the very fabric of Irish culture, and so King Dominic was determined that Ireland would use any means at its disposal to contain the invasion and assert its long-cherished independence. But Ireland was entirely reliant on supplies coming in from the mainland, and those supplies were becoming scarcer and scarcer as the the war dragged on into 1913. The Battle of Budapest was consuming thousands of men and supplies, barely holding the Russian menace and its League allies at bay. But one thing that Europa had in abundance was gas and poisons, and, as of that point in time, it saw little use for using them in their now defensive posture on the Eastern Front, as they did not want to accidentally gas their own soldiers and civilians. But Ireland asked for them, and Caesar was glad to pawn off some of his vast stockpiles to keep Britannia busy. This lending of gas to Ireland was about to come to a catastrophic conclusion on February 1, 1913.
That morning started like any other. Millions of people woke to another day of unceasing violence. Perrault had just launched an offensive at Reich trenches in the Northern Rheinbund, Russian troops were still shelling Budapest, and in Asia Yankee troops were busy dealing with an outbreak of revolutionary activity in Holy Nippon. Thousands of ships filled the North Atlantic, carrying supplies for the dozens of countries currently involved in the most deadly struggle the world had ever seen. Since the war began in the fall of 1911, over thirty-six million people were believed to have lost their lives, by crude estimates (these estimates included deaths from disease, such as measles, typhus, and the dreaded Beckie Flu). It was on this day, however, that the French-operated civilian transport liner
Bon Chance struck out from the port town of Dunkirk with a massive supply of poison gas bound for Ireland. It was being guarded by two new Europan submersibles, which could dive under water and made the ship look far less menacing than a guarded convoy. Despite the war's barbarity, for some reason civilian liners usually were allowed to pass through open water. General Ian O'reilly, of the Irish Royal Army, was the man who had thought of the plan, and it had worked to bring supplies in for several months. Today, however, would be different.
At approximately one o'clock in the afternoon, halfway between Calais and the famed white cliffs of Dover, the
Bon Chance was spotted by a small English patrol boat. Today was different from usual, and Britannic intelligence had received word that the French ship might be carrying weapons. The English captain used a megaphone to tell the French that, "Please drop anchor and prepare to be boarded. We have been told your ship might be carrying weapons bound for Ireland. We wish innocent civilians no harm, as we have enough spilled blood to go around. Please drop anchor and prepare for search. If nothing is found, you are free to go."
This did not sit well with the captain of one of the submersibles. Thinking it would be a turkey shoot, easy odds, he made a decision. He ordered his men to prepare the torpedoes and to blow the English ship out of the water. The first torpedo was away within a few seconds, rocketing toward the English. When it hit, it blew a hole in the side, sending men, guns, and debris showering into the ocean as the water poured in through the hole. Smiling in his victory, the submersible captain ordered a second shot to finish off the boat. What happened next was a tragedy for both sides. The torpedo malfunctioned in the loading area, suffering from a faulty blasting cap. It detonated in the belly of the submersible, imploding it. Blood, flesh, brass, and steel ripped through the water like a hurricane, sending flames jetting up toward the sky. Even more unfortunately, the flaming debris showered the nearby
Bon Chance, setting the deck alight. The other submersible fired its torpedoes at the English, finally finishing them off. But panic was gripping them because they thought another English ship had struck the other submersible. Rather than surfacing to help put the fires out on the civilian ship, the remaining sub stayed underwater. The Bon Chance was now engulfed in flames, and the fires were beginning to rip through the below deck and toward the massive stash of chemical weapons.
The Bon Chance burning just moments before the main explosion
At 1:30 pm, the flames made their way to the stockpiles. The ship exploded into a humongous fireball, casting an orange glow for miles and sending mustard gas, chlorine, and anthrax for miles. Over 1,000 people died instantly. One survivor of the ordeal, Mr. Alexander Lucio, an Italian businessman who was one of the few to recount the ordeal, said:
"I had already jumped overboard by the time the explosion happened. I didn't want to burn up, so I jumped. I did not know anything about chemical weapons. I thought I was going to Ireland to close a deal for my company. We made rations. Anyway, there I was, keeping myself afloat, when the weapons detonated in the ship. The explosion was like nothing that could possibly be imagined. I saw a human hand land in the water nearby. I had no idea what had happened. Then the rest of the corpses and bits of corpses started to splash down, turning the water black, mixing with the oil from the destroyed ships. Then I started to smell it. Then I started to see it. The air turned a nasty sickly-white. At first I thought it was just burning oil. I figured there must have been an oil reserve under the deck. But it was then I noticed the smell. That sickly-sweet pineapple smell the newspapers used to describe gas attacks on the front. Frantically, I dove under the water, took my necktie and wrapped it around my mouth, and began to try to swim as far away as possible. The fountain of gas was descending from the sky in rolling waves, a sheet of death. I lost consciousness soon after. I woke up on the deck of a fishing vessel some time later. I don't know how much time passed. I just know that I saw dozens of vessels, of every flag and faction, running together to escape the oncoming deluge of poison. The water was neutralizing some of it, but the ship was still burning with intensity. I thought it looked like something out of the Bible, and I immediately thanked God I survived. I fell to my knees and cried like a little baby."
- Alexander Lucio, one of only ten survivors of the Sinking of the Bon Chance
As soon as everyone realized what had happened, the Imperial and English coast guard and navies declared the Channel to be a no-go zone. A ceasefire was proclaimed for any ship flying colors at half-staff and every vessel was ordered to flee at once. This moment was one of the very rare ones of the war which saw two enemies working together to guarantee the safety of all. However, as the heavier-than-air poison began to descend and become watered down, the danger was not over. The Europans did not warn the English that the gas was mixed with anthrax. Unsurprisingly, the anthrax proceeded to disperse for miles around. By that night, the shores of England and France were poisoned. Fishermen had enough common sense to cut their lines that day for fear of poisoned fish, but long after that the anthrax was still active. Unknowingly, all over England and France, anthrax was spreading like wildfire. By March, the effects were beginning to hit hard. The fish made the perfect vehicle to carry the bacteria. The scentless, colorless, odorless substance was poisoning thousands of people. On the banks of the Thames, playing children crawled onto the shoreline complaining that they felt nauseous and sick. Within hours, they would be covered in lesions and many died the same day. Others did not encounter enough of the disease to kill them, but it left them in bitter agony and required hospitalization. The hospitals were overrun. First they had to deal with the Beckie Flu, and now this. Morale in England plummeted at first, with the dead and dying all over the southern coast. But then came the anger. If Caesar was going to disguise weapons of mass destruction as civilian passenger boats, all bets were off. The Central Powers announced unrestricted aquatic warfare. From now on, any vessel was free game and could be sunk or captured at the leisure of commanding officers. All civilian travel ground to a halt.
England was not the only one badly hurt by the world's first ecological disaster. On the contrary, the anthrax brought chaos to the French shorelines, killing or infecting thousands. Paris was in an uproar. The famed fishermen who brought in massive hauls to feed the Europan war machine and people were forced to close up shop until the waters were clear again. Roland Babineaux, the head of the Fishing Union, a powerful political entity on the shores of France, famously asked Imperial Prime Minister Othmar Derichs:
"Comment pouvons-nous manger? Comment pouvons-nous travailler?"
"When can we eat? When can we work?"
The Prime Minister replied, "When the waters run pure again. This is completely out of our control. But the ban on fishing must remain until the supplies are safe."
"When the waters run pure again" became the new "Let them eat cake!" to the working-class Imperial citizens (interestingly, both phrases came from an Austrian). Riots broke out all across the French coast. Amiens, Le Havre, Caen, and Brest burned as thousands of hungry, discontent citizens cried out in anger and desperation. Emergency food supplies came in, but they were nowhere near enough. The
Bon Chance Disaster crippled the Empire's will to fight on. Now, Catalonia once again rose up, proclaiming independence as the "Unitary State of Catalonia." Unrest spread all the way into Spain itself, the citizens tired of seeing their sons chewed up in a devastating war for a corrupt government. Portugal had been steadily losing ground in Africa to the Reich, Jacksonland, and South Africa. King Louis IV, descendant of Napoleon I's Etrurian lapdog Louis I, became the first member of the Continental System to sue for peace with the Central Powers. On July 1, 1913, Portugal signed the Treaty of Nampula. The peace agreement surrendered all of Portugal's African colonies besides Senegal. While the Reich took most of the prize, by far, acquiring the Trans-African Railway and connecting their per-exisiting colony of Bechuanaland with the Nordic Congo, the Carolinian colony of Jacksonland interestingly got a slice of Portuguese Angola to add onto itself. This brought Carolinian morale in the war to a new high, as they had also just conquered Hispaniola from the Europans and renamed it "East Carolina." Macau, Portugal's ancient Asian colony, went to the Dutch Government-in-Exile, still operating from England.
The "Portuguese Betrayal" shook Napoleon IV to his very core. Portugal had been a loyal ally for a century, since the reign of Napoleon I, and now it was deserting him before the war even came to their home shores. Furious, he ordered every nation in the Continental System to immediately cease trade with Portugal. While this did definitely further damage Louis IV's reign (he actually allowed the passage of parliamentary reforms limiting his own power afterward), it also damaged the Empire in a way that it most certainly couldn't afford. Portuguese fish were a staple of the Europan civilian population. Now, another access to food was closed. When Prime Minister Derichs warned Napoleon that this could be the beginning of the end if they went through with the Portuguese trade ban, Napoleon told him:
"I will not suffer betrayal. I see the situation which we are currently in, and have very little hope that we shall win this war. But I will not suffer an indignity of this magnitude from the likes of Portugal. I will not. I cannot. If I had the manpower to spare, I would invade Portugal. First, I shall crush Catalonia, then I shall crush Portugal and force it into Europa and hang that lecherous fool Louis. Death always to traitors."
Shortly after the Portuguese debacle, a new assault was launched into Catalonia. The Spanish brutally slaughtered the Catalans en masse, women and children. Whole villages burned and this time, they were thorough. Orders came down from Caesar himself to the Imperial Spanish Guard, the elite infantry of Spain, to absolutely obliterate Catalonia as a symbol of resistance. An aeroship was also sent in to drop bombs and "Greek fire" over the rebels. Over 50,000 Catalans were murdered in just two weeks. The Unitary State crumbled. Above the main thoroughfare in Barcelona, as black smoke spouted out of burning homes and as bodies laid in piles on the sidewalks besides abandoned autos, a sign was hung. It was made out of Catalan flags crudely stitched together. On it, written in black paint or motor oil, was the phrase "Thus always to Traitors" in Spanish and French.
Europan aeroship L'Aiglon drops Greek Fire over a rebellious Catalan town
In the Middle East, Ahmad Shah, the portly emperor of Persia, had been building up his forces for some time now. He greatly feared Viktor and Russia and worried that after Europa would fall then Viktor would turn his attention south to avenge Russia's loss in the war that made Viktor who he was. Portugal proved to him that the Continental Allies were fading. Europa was weak. Shah Ahmad was by no means a tremendous ruler, but his Prime Minister, Reza Pahlavi, was a brilliant strategic thinker and a slick politician. Despite belonging to different branches of Islam, Pahlavi funneled guns into Egypt through Arabia to equip revolutionaries. By mid-August, riots had broken out in the Grand Realm of the Levant, with the Knights of Jerusalem and their garrisons fighting mobs of armed revolutionaries. In Cairo, revolutionary kingpin Fihr Sa'd Qadir proclaimed himself "Field Marshal of Egypt" and stormed the administrative buildings and executed the Imperial Governor, Ambroise Faure, with a sword.
Qadir then proclaimed himself head of the "Islamic State of Egypt" and his followers soon were uniting to wage a
Jihad against the Europan colonials. This now opened up another front in the war for an already overwhelmed Paris, and panic began to take hold of Caesar. The panic became horror when, on September 11, 1913, the Tehran Pact was signed. Persia, Iraq, the Egyptian Revolutionary Government, and Arabia all agreed to fight together to throw Christian influence and Imperial troops and citizens out of the Holy Land. On September 15, Chevalier Cyrille Coste, Grandmaster of the Knights of Jerusalem, held his pith helmet aloft as he stood before his men, telling them that, "Today you fight for God. If we fall here, the Land of Christ will be overrun with the barbarous heathen. We will not let Napoleon II's Crusade be in vain! We will hold Jerusalem and the Grand Realm for God, Pope, and Caesar!" Despite the cheers from his devout men, they knew the odds. As the Persian lion steamrolled toward the border, they braced for impact.
Egyptian revolutionaries in Cairo, 1913
Persian troops on the long march toward the Grand Realm of the Levant
Elsewhere in the world, California fell to Joe Steele on September 20, 1913. And now, with the potential loss of the Suez Canal, there was a chance for the last link to ever-restless India to be cut off. Budapest was holding, but just barely, as the Russians were mostly just regrouping and taking a respite. The continual defeats could be suffered no longer by the Europan citizens. Banding together in the streets across the nation, they demanded an end to the war. Angry mobs gathered outside Fontainebleau Palace and hurled rocks and flaming bottles (nicknamed "shamrock shakes" thanks to their common usage in the ongoing war in Ireland). Others held up signs that said, "We want bread and peace" and "The blood of millions is on your hands." To deal with the situation, Caesar summoned Field Marshal Perrault to come home "with enough men to clear the streets." This would not end well....
