In this country , it is good to kill an admiral from time to time

[DocD]

Omake # 4 Some did wonder why the French never annexed the Golden Republic of the West. Well, this is France... not annexing said republic

As usual, still my own interpretation, still not canon.





Tales of reintegration (The Golden Republic of the West, 1906-1916)

A long time ago, the lands of the Golden Republic of the West were French.

Well, a longer time ago, they belonged to the tribes native to North America. However, no matter how much the various governments of the countries sharing the continent protected the rights of said natives (ranging from “not at all” to “quite well actually” and passing through “depends on the precise tribe”), none recognized them to have constituted a country in the (more “their”) modern sens of the term.

No matter what, Aquarelle and the surrounding lands were then officially ceded to New Orleans after the Louisianan rebellion. Then the Aquarellans themselves rebelled against New Orleans and the French (with Russian help) were all to happy to ensure their independence (and wave it in front of the Louisianans any day of the week).

At that time already, some people in Aquarelle asked to return to the fold of the French Kingdom. But, between the appeal of complete independence (especially the complete financial independence that would allow them to capitalize on the gold rush) and an already massive immigration that would see the French as benefactors but not as fellow countrymen, they were already a minority. The eagerness of the Russians to keep some influence in the region and the lack of appetite of Paris for a showdown with Moscow over such a tiny piece of land ensured the status quo.

In 1906, the Golden Republic of the West was officially neutral, but leaned heavily on the French side. As the French-Russian split was consumed, the Aquarellans wisely decided to focus on their relations with the closest of the two giants. After all, the French would probably be able to conquer them in mere days if they wanted, no matter the amount of help the Russians would send, or rather try to send through the inevitable French blockade. The Russians on the other hand would need to ensure French neutrality to pull the same trick.

Then came the earthquake. On May the 23rd, 1906, at about three o’clock in the morning, with an epicenter of few kilometers offshore and a magnitude of 8.1, it took the city and its surroundings, home to nearly 800,000 of the 1.7 million Aquarellans, wholly unprepared.

The tremors did countless damages, but the worse came from the fires that started as gas pipes were broken and their inflammable contents met live wires all over the place.

The president was found dead, crushed in his bed by a falling ceiling. When his wife returned from a visit to a provincial children hospital in the afternoon, officials carefully avoided telling her that he was found handcuffed to the bed. The vice-president was nowhere to be found (and was later presumed dead). With half the government injured, command fell, among all, to the minister of youth and sports, who soon became much appreciated for his skills in chaos management.

After four days of treating emergency after emergency, the situation was finally stabilized. It was also dramatic. At least half of the capital’s population was now homeless. Thousands were dead, many more injured, nearly all were emotionally shocked. Countless factories had been destroyed, or would need repairs that could no longer be attempted, not with what remained of Aquarellan industry.

The French came to the rescue. They may have been more concerned about a possible annexation by California than by the plight of the Aquarellans, but they came nevertheless.

Two years later, by 1908, Aquarelle was rebuilt. It was also, very discretely, far more dependent on the French than ever before. Most of the Aquarellan industry, whether rebuilt or subsidized for months, was now partially owned by French companies or banks. Treaties had been signed which offered generous conditions to the Golden Republic, but also tied it to the French judiciary system, and made even harder any economic deal with a country outside the French sphere. There was no talk of annexation at the time, but it was more a matter of the French being busy digesting their conquests of the Great War than anything else.

During the 1909 elections, the sympathies for the French were still high in Republic, but none seriously brought the subject of annexation. None but a fringe subgroup of the Progress Party. As the subject was brushed apart, the Progress Party as a whole made a decent score in the election and managed to enter the governmental coalition.

They stayed there for the five year of their term, with partisans of the annexation more and more vocal, to the point of nearly being expelled several times.

In 1914, the Progress Party managed to win the election and govern alone. With a single-seat majority. The pro-annexation seized the opportunity.

Perhaps, if they had listened to opinion pools rather than their wishes, they would have found that there was a clear distinction between feeling grateful for the French help and wanting to become French, or that by this point less than ten percent of the population favored the proposed annexation.

Yet, the minority managed to impose its referendum to president Goliath Ivanovitch. And so the campaign started. In 1916, during the two and a half month preceding the poll, PP members fought PP members among the criticisms of the other parties, which called the whole process a waste of public money (although not always in such polite terms). In the end, seeing the poor support for annexation, the opposition decided to turn the referendum about the PP credibility by calling for a boycott while said party was tearing itself apart from the inside.

The opposition’s gamble was won. Somehow.

Yes, the PP imploded after the vote and would nevermore govern the country. And yes, the referendum results rejected annexation. But as only a mere 19 % of the population took part, far less than in any serious expectation of the opposition, those in favor of joining the French Empire claimed a staggering 48 % of the ballots.

In a few words, the opposition had made a loud and troublesome minority even louder and even more troublesome. And it had just offered a golden argument to some expansionist circles within their juggernaut of a neighbor...

 

[DocD]

Oops... seems I missed yesterday posting. As an apology, here are two pieces (still my own interpretation, still not canon, of course).


Omake (or o-"Mc"?) # 5 is definitely not my best one, but I couldn’t resist the bad pun with the company.

Yet the sea remains stronger (North Atlantic 1906)

The Republic of the Carolinas had never formally forbidden private companies from any specific foreign country to establish regular transatlantic liaisons between its harbors and the old Europe. After all, said Republic relied on immigration to bolster its economy and manpower and, perhaps, keep a fighting chance to survive a war with France. It would thus have done poorly to send mixed signals about the treatment reserved to foreigners willing to do business in the Carolinas.

However, it showed a particular ability in using “alternative means” to ensure that the flags displayed by the prestigious transatlantic ships docking on the major trade hubs of the coast aligned closely with Columbia’s vision of what the global order should be. Weekly, sometimes even daily, administrative controls, documents mysteriously lost in the labyrinth of a hostile bureaucracy, sudden strikes, “unexpected structural check of the docks” keeping the ships waiting for hours while their passengers grew restless and the companies’ profits were redirected to paying delay penalties, … all of these ensured that French, Irish or Spanish ships were a very seldom sighting on the southern part of Northern America’s Atlantic coast.

France didn’t bother with such subtleties. Cargo and passengers ships from hostile countries found themselves banned from French harbors with an implacable regularity. It wasn’t a strategy France liked to implement often. After all, a good look at civilian vessel could sometimes tell many a thing about their military counterpart without endangering the lives of French spies. Thus the bar was set quiet high to describe what constituted a hostile country. But some definitively crossed this threshold.

Before the Great War, no company-held ship of Saxony had visited a French port for decades. This state of affairs was considered a tragedy in Hamburg, where the greatest and finest civilian shipyards of the empire had laid down vast numbers of ocean liners, each faster, bigger and more sophisticated than the previous one. That those ships would never visit an American port further north than Delaware never stopped saddening the heads of Red and Gold Line, main clients of said shipyard and descendants of an industrious Scottish immigrant.

When the town fell to Westphalian hands after the Great War, the yards were nationalized, but the transatlantic company remained in the hands of its private owners. Alas for them, it was now but a shadow of its former self. Of its glorious fleet, only one passenger ship remained, sole survivor of the requisitions of the Imperial Saxon Navy and a string of disastrous encounters with the masters of the seas.

Yet those men has a plan to rise back. Their wealth had exempted them from military service and they had spent the war dreaming. Dreaming of their next ship. It would be the grandest ever built, the most luxurious to ever sail the seas, and the fastest to ever cross the Atlantic.

While the government started to repurpose parts of the shipyard for military vessels (no such installation had survived the attentions of French and their allies on this side of Denmark), the Red and Gold Line made its own order. It was a gamble. The company’s finances were at there lowest and the personal wealth of its owners had been tapped in incredible proportions. And yet most of the costs were paid by a huge loan from three different banks. The sums where kept a secret, but rumors had it that this was the single largest loan in all the banking history of both Saxony and Westphalia. The ship had to succeed.

In a world where people and journalists alike where on the lookout for good news after such a brutal war, the beginning of the work on the new ship, the Ronald, in honor of the company’s founder, got an incredible coverage. The vessel was not even half-built that its maiden voyage was already fully booked. The first trip from Hamburg to Québec took place in the summer 1905 and offered its passengers an ideal weather.

The gamble paid off. The press and passengers were ecstatic. Stories about how stable, how fast, how beautiful the ship was were on every lips and every news article. There wasn’t an aspect of the voyage that was left unheard of, from the quiet of the on-board library to the joyous dinners in the fancy restaurants.

However, on the return trip, no less than three hours after the last passenger had disembarked in the Westphalian city, a fire broke out on one of the upper deck on a promenade. A fast and decisive intervention by the harbor’s very professional fire crews allowed for nearly-nonexistent damages to the ship structure, but weeks of work would be needed to give it back its exterior appearance.

Its creditor fully appeased by the success of the first trip, the Red and Gold Line decided to take another loan and to use this mandatory pit stop to embellish further the ship. Taking into account the first passengers remarks, it added even more open spaces (“open” as in “see-through”; rich passengers definitively liked the idea of an insulating glass between them and the beautiful but way too cold for their well being seascapes of the North Atlantic). At the time, the sacrifice of a few lifeboats in the name of the passenger’s comfort seemed like a good idea.

The refit stretched for several months as a new propeller was also put in place, supposingly shortening the trip by close to two and a half hours. The foundry supposed to deliver the piece had suffered from strikes which led to unacceptable delay when the Ronald was built. The propeller which ended on the flagship had originally been built for another vessel of the company. This vessel, however, never completed the trip from New Saxony after which it should have been refitted. As it wasn’t a perfect fit for the Ronald, and as the new propeller was finally delivered, decision was made to immediately swap them.

The new propeller offered the ship’s boilers the possibility to be pushed to their maximum efficiency. Thus, the company, ahead the Ronald’s second trip, advertised for “lighter, faster, more powerful” vessel, not shying from comparing the ship to one of the North Atlantic thunderstorms in its posters.

On January the 21st, 1906, the refitted ship left Hamburg for the second and last time.

No less than 301 meters of metal (yes, the owners insisted on crossing the symbolic bar of the 300 meter), carrying close to 2,000 passengers and a further 900 crew members, went over the western horizon, finally reaching, even if for only a few hours, the also-symbolic 25 knots it promised to its passengers.

The crossing went uneventful… until its penultimate day. Weather forecasting had become a real science those days, long past the shamans trying to invoke the rains and popular sayings. But it was still in its infancy, and none had predicted the storm that lashed out on the approaches of the coast of Labrador. For hours the Ronald fought against the waves and the winds, its passengers shut up in their cabins or the innermost common rooms.

When the storm receded at long last, more than twenty hours later, everyone on board sighted with relief. But the real tragedy was only about to occur. Gone astray under the wrath of the elements, the ship was lost upon the sea. And a heavy fog prevented the crew from getting their bearings. Caution would have the speed reduced to a minimum. But the ship had survived the storm. It had bested the ocean. What could happen now? Besides, everyone desperately wanted to finally be back on land. So the Ronald resumed its former course, to be corrected as soon as its exact position would be found, and want ahead at 18 knots.

It wouldn’t take a full hour before its exact position was deduced. Alas, this deduction came in the form of a shoal, a few kilometers off a coast. In a mere seconds, the Ronald came to an abrupt stop. Stranded. Worse, ripped open and taking water at an alarming rate.

As a merciful wind dissipated enough of the fog that the coast proper was seen by the ship’s observation posts, lifeboats were prepared and the passengers started to evacuate the wrecked hulk.

But there were so few of them, and the Ronald wouldn’t stay afloat for long. As the telecommunication operators called desperately for help to any ship that would be in the vicinity, the lifeboats, full of women and children, were rowed toward the safety of the coast by a few crew members. By the time they reached the beach, more than forty minutes later, the Ronald already displayed an alarming heeling angle.

As soon as the passengers disembarked the lifeboats, they turned around and made all hast back toward the sinking ship. When they finally reached it, they could no longer be hauled up and passengers had to go down rope ladders to reach the boats. And it wasn’t proceeding fast enough. No sooner had a mere third of the boats received a new complement of passengers, that the heeling angle started to visibly shift. Answering the panicked cries of the boarded passengers, most of the lifeboats moved away from the Ronald. Less than ten minutes later, she went down with all those remaining onboard, and those who choose to jump but weren’t able to swim away fast enough.

The lifeboats moved back in a frenzy to the place where the ship stood moments before, trying to save those who faced the ice-cold seas of the Labrador coast. Not only were they very few, but many didn’t even survive long enough for the boats to reach them.

When the lifeboats reached the beach for the second time on that gray afternoon, less than 700 survivors stood on the wind-battered sand, most aghast and too shocked to properly process what just happened. They were found still standing on the same spot when a Danish cargo boat arrived on site two and a half hours latter.

To the regular and potential passengers of the various liners, the aftermath of this tragedy was summed up in a few reassuring sentences. New regulations were put in place internationally. There would have to be enough lifeboats for everyone onboard. Such a catastrophe would never repeat itself.
To the economist and investor, things were a bit more complex. The Red and Gold Line was finished. A few banks were about to loose large sums of money. The civilian shipbuilding in Hamburg was about to take a hit. Westphalia’s government was planning to step in, and gain more control over its military ships production at the same time.
But to the sailors all over the globe, there was nothing new. No matter how loud the men in and around the shipyards were boasting about their newest marvels, the sea would always remain stronger.







Omake # 6 is the (very short) Granadan equivalent of # 3. (Don't wory, the three remaining ones are longer.)

The 32 provinces of New Granada (UPNG 1922)


When the Great War started, nearly a century after the revolution which birthed the UPNG, few changes were visible on the country’s administrative maps.

A few provinces had been split. A very few provinces had been split. After all, those enjoyed quit a large degree of autonomy, mostly due to the constraints of administrating the country in the first years after the revolution, when difficult terrain, long distances and the poor infrastructures inherited from the colonial period all concurred to the prominence of local rule. For quite a large number of politicians of the first half of the XIXth century, the end goal was a seat in their province’s government, not in the federal one.

The infrastructures brought by the country’s new-found prosperity and the bad memories left by the warlords of the revolutionary era did increase the UPNG’s centralization. However, by the times politicians were ready to play that game some would have called “Gerrymandering” in another timeline and redraw the provinces for gains at the federal level, the Granadans had become attached to their provinces and were not exactly thrilled by the idea of butchering them for the sack of politics.

Thus, the first major changes were those that occurred at the end of the Great War (the few conquests in Central America at the expense of New Spain didn’t mean that much work for the cartographers). French Guyana, soon to be known as East Guyana, large swaths of the Amazonian forest, the Philippines, the Celebs and a few islands in the Pacific all had to be incorporated.

As of 1922, the UPNG were divided as follows.

Dominions

• Celebs (including the neighboring islands), capital Makassar
• Philippines (including OTL Marianas and Kiribati), capital Manilla

Provinces

• Antioquia
• Barcelona
• Barinas
• Bogota (with the capital)
• Caraboro
• Caraca
• Cartagena
• Casanare
• Cipaquira
• Choco
• Cuenca
• Cumana
• Cundinamarca
• East Guyana
• Guayaquil
• Guyana
• Jaen
• Loja
• Mainas
• Maracaibo
• Mariquita
• Neiva
• Pamplona
• Panama
• Popayan
• Quito
• Riohacha
• Santamarta
• Socorro
• Tequendam
• Tunja
• Veragua

Territories

• Caqueta
• San Martin
• South Amazon
• West Amazon

 

[DocD]

Omake # 7 started with the mention of women in the French military enclave if Madagascar. They were probably only members of the soldiers’ families, but, well, TTL is quite harsher than OTL in some aspects, so I thought, "why not balance things a bit ?".

As usual, it's only my interpretation, and not canon (particularly, the last line depends heavily on where Antony plans to go next with his TL).




Fighting for the right to fight (French Empire 1902-1922)

Charlotte of France. Ren of China. Anastasia of Russia. All women. All the heads of the three most powerful nations of Earth in the early XXth century.

Historians, as any group of specialists, have their petty fraternal wars regarding obscure details none else would care about. One of those opposes purists for whom the “era of the three empresses” (Spanish generally push for a renaming into “era of the four empresses”; without much success) starts with Ren’s ascension to the Chinese throne, quibblers who insist for waiting the Chinese reunification and eurocentric partisans of “tendencies” that would equate it with the advances of women’s rights in France and some other countries.

Those advances started with the expansion of the universal male suffrage to, well, universal suffrage as the imperial constitution was amended a mere year after it was redacted. Even this first step did register poorly with the most conservative members of the French society. A few discussions about rescinding the last (mostly ceremonial) privileges of the nobility or throwing the weight of the crown behind the calls for a minimum wage (which actually didn’t need it and would do well on their own a few years down the road) allowed empress Charlotte and her government to carry the day.

The next high-visibility flashpoint between conservatories and progressives would be the army.

Came 1908, the French army was in full reorganization, with dirigibles being cast aside to leave room for the brand new airplanes, armored cars being replaced by tanks and ships running on oil instead of coal. Those new developments meant an increased need for soldiers trained in those nascent specialties. Alas, now that the Great War was over and that their country wan no longer in danger, few were the men willing to risk their lives on the primitive aircrafts the French army was pressing into service.

The rich glory-seekers favored other exploits that would attract a wider media coverage, like the recent Channel crossing or the various challenges to airplanes still present in the empire, were they deserts, mountain ranges or water bodies. The poor adventure-seekers usually ended in the navy and its promises (not always kept) of exotic destinations. Those simply wishing to earn a living avoided like plague the dangers of heavier-than air. And those who simply wanted to flee their daily live and disappear did not particularly enjoy the celebrity of the airmen.

Feminist militants engulfed themselves into that open breach and offered to fill the gaps with women-flown airplanes. To say the more conservative-minded of the French generals and politicians did not enjoy the proposal would count among the biggest euphemisms of the beginning of the century (along with “The Wu emperor was not beneficial to his country.” and “The war did not have a great outcome for the Malagasy.”).

Their attempts to kill such a proposal in its infancy was however rendered vain by no other than one of their peers.

General Paul Émilien Joffre was one of the heroes of the Great War. He was also a very old man, clinging to his seat in the Imperial Assembly by the sheer respect he inspired in his fellow countrymen, and probably also by all the efforts of his entourage to mask his advancing senescence. The man had provided France with some resounding successes in the beginning of the war. But, as the time passed and as he was no longer able to adapt to the rapid changes in warfare that came with the first large scale industrial war in human history, he was quietly sidelined to quieter parts of the fronts and then to the political arena, where he lost none of the clout that his military victories conferred to him.
Confident, even overconfident, that he still understood how the world worked, he improvised, in the middle of a hot debate on the subject in the Assembly and to the horror of his peers, a long speech in which he described his vision for the future of military aviation. Of course, airplanes were mere gadgets, maybe useful for recon, but nothing more. How could anyone think they would ever see a real battle? At this rate, if drivers (yeah, “pilots”, whatever) were lacking, why not use the same trick as with the ambulances (not much more useful in warfare, are they?) and bring a few women to drive (oh, please, can you stop with all those fancy, useless words that plague the new generation and keep to the subject?) them? It’s not as if they would be put in any danger, well, any real danger, is it?


As the motion passed and as the recently formed French Armée de l’Air was officially authorized to recruit women (in any position; the bill was originated by a feminist supporter and passed unopposed as most of the conservatories were just far too shell-shocked by Joffre’s tirade to do anything but abstain en masse), women right supporters found themselves suddenly silent, not knowing whether they should congratulate the general for the opportunity he offered them, or to scold him for the reasoning behind his support.

With the empress tacit support, the militants tried to enlarge the scope of the available positions in the army. The Armée de Terre proved itself a far tougher nut to crack than an air force consisting mostly of people either drawn to progress, interested in discovering opportunities everywhere or simply not having a care in the world for conventions. As the infantry arguments about physical strength, however unrealistic they were considering the wartime recruitment criteria of the army, found very attentive ears in the assembly, the efforts of the militants were redirected toward the navy.

Said navy was also quick to rebuke the demands to include women in anything else than land-based support roles (read: secretaries), arguing their concern for them in closed, male-dominated, tension-rich environment. Proponent of the feminization of France’s naval assets counter-attacked by proposing to start with non-mixed crews, starting by the smaller (also safer and far less critical, to assuage the fears of the likes of Joffre) coastal patrol boats.

Then came admiral Hautecrête master plan. Rather than fight back every proposal from the militants (and, by ricochet, their imperial support), the man offered to let the idea backfire by itself (and with a tiny bit of help from the admiralty). By mid-1910, a (very) few places would be opened to form women officers in a one year accelerated training (to allow them to reach their dream jobs quicker of course, why would this have anything to do with their chances of success?), and by the end of 1911, and depending of the outcomes of said training and of the crew members recruitment, anything between one and five boats of the French navy would be operated by women.

The catch was that those boats would not be patrol boats. Citing the higher need for uniform behavior in the coastal patrols and the possible difficulties if women were to conduct inspections on foreign ships (and you wouldn’t want such an important experiment for our armed forces to be influenced by such outside factors, would you?), admiral Hautecrête directed the new recruits to a “more appropriate” kind of boats, that is submarines.

In the 1910s, the French sous-marins were, just as any other submarine in service, closer to a stinking, noisy, damp and claustrophobic can than to an actual ship. Hautecrête basically bet that the onboard conditions would send the feminine crew running in no time, helped, if ever needed, by a few carefully crafted “exercises” where the rest of the navy would be tasked with showing them how vulnerable those boats actually were.

The first months seemed to prove the admiral right, as only a mere two full crews (usual replacements included) ended their training period, to be compared with the five submarines that had been transferred to the program. One of said crews did not last further than their first mission at sea, courtesy of too much friction between the officers. As the admiralty called for an end to the experiment, Hautecrête, now certain of his victory, asked for a few more months in order to get “full results”, or, as he called it in private conversations, so that everyone saw the last of those harpies fail and that no one ever came back with the crazy idea that maybe, perhaps, that crew could have succeeded if only it had been given a chance.

Then came 1912 and the Swiss intervention. The French air force showed their prowess in foreign sky. The whole French air force did, women pilots included. As they were celebrated in the newspaper and as, on board the Otarie, the sole feminine crew of the French navy kept on doing its duty without any hitch, Hautecrête saw the opportunities to end the situation without a monumental backslash disappearing into thin air. Confident his time would come back once all this agitation would have receded, he waited.

And he may have waited to long, for in 1914, the Otarie took part in the assault on Jamaica. Her mission was simply to patrol one of numerous sectors the admiralty had defined around the island, to ensure no nasty surprise would sneak upon the landing ships. Said sector reached the Jamaican coast and covered two tiny fishing harbors, one upstream a river in shallow water.

On her second’s suggestion, and after having been able to make a reconnaissance close enough to the first harbor to discard any possibility of threat there, commandant Honorine Clemenceau send a few women on shore to reach the other harbor. There, they were stunned to spot the Rapier, one of the last torpedo boats of the directorate, boasted as sunk one week earlier by the Granadans, but nevertheless in pristine condition (or, at least, in what passed for pristine condition in that part of the crumbling state). The boat was more hidden than guarded, and the main defenses were mainly designed against the locals, numerous, but poorly equipped.

The Floridians were thus completely caught by surprise when fourteen people with modern arms boarded the ship from the river bed and used her machine-gun on the harbor’s defenders within minutes. It took nearly half an hour for the not-so-professional soldiers of the directorate to locate the heavy weapons needed to counter-attack and bring them to the field. By that time, the Rapier was already out of reach and rendezvousing with the submarine.

The capture and, mostly, the nose-rubbing given afterward to the Granadans put the Otarie in the spotlight. As the boat and her crew were making the headlines (including an infamous “Opération Jupons” as the code names for the various operations of the French navy linked to the capture of Jamaica were picked among clothing items), and as the empress wholeheartedly backed the renewed demands of the progressives, the dreams of Hautecrête shattered with the opening of the French navy to a new class of women recruits.

In the same time, hopping that acting by themselves would allow them to set their own (slower) pace, the army also opened its first combat positions to women in 1915. Due to the successes in Switzerland, which may have led many to underestimate the vulnerability of the tanks crews, and tenacious machismo which expressed itself in the will to only accept women in jobs where “the physical strength would not be the main requirement”, the chars d’assault would be for a time the main opening, along with other motorized equipment like self-propelled artillery, for these women.

Nevertheless, as tensions mounted around the world, the scale of the previous global conflict led the general staff to consider the opportunities offered by women in more “manpower-heavy specialties” (read, infantry). The first plans about voluntary service were presented in 1919. The first women entered the infantry in 1921, three month after another one became the first to command a cruiser.

By late 1922, the war ministry boasted that it had plans, should the war come to France, of partial (and very lax) conscription for women that could bolster the French manpower by more than a million. It was a gross overstatement, mainly destined for propaganda purpose abroad. Yes, they could, maybe, in perfect conditions, conscript close to seven hundred thousand women in the whole empire, but as the conditions for both male and female conscription included the proportion of conscripts in the family, the total gain in manpower would probably be just above half a million. Nonetheless, it was the first evocation of women conscription in the French Empire.

The announcement was received with a very diverse panel of reactions abroad.
Some were laughing, certain the French had gone mad and would soon no longer have a fitting army.
Others screamed bloody murder (or heresy, depending of the country), yelling so repeatedly and so loudly that the army was no place for women that one could have been forgiven to believe it was their own underage daughters the French planned to send on the field of battle.
And some rather felt all of a sudden a strange cold and wet beast crawling upon their spin as they realized that the French juggernaut would soon be an even more formidable foe, less they themselves implemented similar policies.
But few would have enough time to actually react, for war was coming.

 

[Antony444]

The Baltic is Worth a War (European diplomacy 1923)



The reasons why the Foreign Minister of England, who answered to the name of Henry Yates, had decided to attend the ongoing the Gdansk Conference were definitely not altruistic.

For years before the Great War, Denmark had dominated the Baltic, be it militarily or economically, the latter with the help of its extensive merchant fleet. But the former had ended with the enormous downsizing enforced by France.

And now that the union of Denmark-Norway had refused to help any coalition which included President for Life Gunnarsson to mount an anti-Russian alliance, the English trade companies and the people they had helped grab seats in the London Parliament were smelling opportunity.

As France, the foremost authority of the Entente, seemed genuinely disinterested in intervening in Eastern Europe, the moment was excellent to neutralise one of Denmark’s private commerce kingdoms without a shot being fired against the city of Copenhagen.

Naturally, people aware of the respective orders of battle of the Russian military and the Danish land forces would say this was not exactly a reasonable idea: as irritating as Danish patrol boats could be when they declared your papers were invalid, they remained far less dangerous than a potential confrontation with the Russian Empire.

Many diplomats present, like the Austrians and the Polish, whispered between themselves this behaviour was very unlike the one they were used to from King Edward VII. They were perfectly right; the King of England at the moment was severely ill and in his twilight years. The day-to-day duties of the King had been largely given to Crown Prince George so that the throne’s heir could familiarise himself with the responsibilities of the kingship before he was called to rule. The continuity would have been assured without issue if the elections of 1922 had not brought to power Prime Minister August Morley, a man who chaffed at the idea that France, not England, decided the course of action of the entire Entente.

Under the scenes, Morley had already tried to convince many English and non-English key figures to support a war against the Drakan Empire, beginning with a general slave insurrection against the abominable regime of Theodore Roosevelt. It had largely failed. While people agreed the rogue nation of South Africa would have to be eventually dealt with for the ethnic cleansings and atrocities it committed in Madagascar and elsewhere, such a war would be monumentally expensive, and there was no guarantee the mineral wealth of the Drakan Empire would go to fill up London treasury in the aftermath.

And evidently, the majority of the military forces available to Roosevelt were land-based. This wasn’t the kind of war which was going to make a Prime Minister popular. The English citizens had applauded the destruction of the Scottish threat during the Great War, but the enemy had been next door two decades ago. Risking your life to kill some perfidious Scots was the next best thing to a God-ordained duty an Englishman could receive; losing years of your life in South Africa was a very strange and uninteresting idea by comparison.

Both Crown Prince George and the Prime Minister August Morley praising each and every action he took were thus in perfect agreement: the next war which would bolster England’s reputation on the world stage had to possess three things: it had to be against a nation the Entente would not support under any circumstances, it had to be a war where the participation of England would be limited to the naval theatre of operations, and it had to be a war which would bring enormous trade and economical benefits, be it because their ‘allies’ or ‘enemies’ would be greatly weakened by the hostilities.

For President for Life Gunnarsson and his allies of circumstances, the English promises were more than acceptable. If the sailors of the Crown Prince wanted to battle some of the enormous capital ships which were according to the rumour finishing their sea trials in the eastern Finnish Gulf, so be it. In the mean time, Sweden and Poland led the pack to ask large money loans from the English Crown and banks.

None of the parties involved were exactly bargaining in good faith; England knew that the ruinous interest rates hidden in the accords would bankrupt their ‘allies’ in short order, thus allowing them to take over harbours, critical resources, and state-of-the-art state companies; the Swedish on the other hand had no intention to reimburse the sums in a foreseeable future.

Nevertheless, as the Russian juggernaut continued to destroy the last remnants of Anarchist resistance and was about to reposition its divisions, there was no time to waste anymore. The nations gathered at Gdansk needed the English Navy so that their communications on the Baltic were reasonably secure, and naval trade could continue to supply both military and civilian activities.

The Gdansk Pact was born, and its first unanimous decision was to agree to the demands of the Kingdom of Greece. The threat of a new front which would force the Ottomans to fight against enemies coming from every direction was avoided at the price of formerly Serbian-held territory.

Now they needed a casus belli.

Ironies of ironies, on the very day they were signing the documents about to embrace Europe in a terrible conflagration, another war long expected by the world at large was beginning too.

The Californian-ruled island of Taiwan woke up as torpedo bombers and dive bombers of the Chinese Imperial forces launched their attack one hour after dawn.

The war tens of millions of souls had wanted to avoid at all costs was here.

 

[Mr.Doctor]

What page is the most recent map on and if it’s outdated can we get a new one?

 

[DracoLazarus]

What page is the most recent map on and if it’s outdated can we get a new one?

Page 147, post 2935, and it's not wildly out of date.

 

[DocD]

The war tens of millions of souls had wanted to avoid at all costs was here.

I guess the end of omake # 7 was not that much far from canon after all.

So, probably Gdansk Pact vs Russia on one hand; probably Pacific Powers vs China on the other... It might be a great time for the French (or even the Entente as a whole) to "pull an Ottoman" and watch the rest of the world burn while they pick a few juicy targets.

Unless of course China or Russia seems on the verge of winning and growing even bigger. Could a form of Lend-Lease be a way to both avoid such an unwanted outcome and get in an even more dominant economic position?

By the way, did Charlotte already produce an heir of her own? If I remember correctly her first marriage was childless. If she still has no child, who is the current heir?

 

[Antony444]

I guess the end of omake # 7 was not that much far from canon after all.

So, probably Gdansk Pact vs Russia on one hand; probably Pacific Powers vs China on the other... It might be a great time for the French (or even the Entente as a whole) to "pull an Ottoman" and watch the rest of the world burn while they pick a few juicy targets.

Unless of course China or Russia seems on the verge of winning and growing even bigger. Could a form of Lend-Lease be a way to both avoid such an unwanted outcome and get in an even more dominant economic position?

By the way, did Charlotte already produce an heir of her own? If I remember correctly her first marriage was childless. If she still has no child, who is the current heir?

Indeed, indeed.

Well, I'm not going to spoil the rest of the updates for sure. Otherwise what would be the point of writing them?

Russia growing 'even bigger' is unlikely. The Tsarina's subjects are...struggling to control certain restive populations, shall we say?
There's many reasons why for now, tanks haven't been rolling in Poland to show the Polish soldiers the errors of their ways. The internal economy is one.
The same is true of China, albeit in a lesser way...but they still have to develop the north of the Empire, which was far less developed, and they couldn't rely on foreign trade due to several factors, including UPNG hostility and xenophobia.

France's dynastic succession will be commented upon in a next post. I don't have my notes next to me anyway.

Bests,

 

[Azureora]

Looks like the French companies are going to be making a killing everywhere. And of course, having the distinct pleasure of being the referee and deciding factor of every war going on.

 

[Israel_Dan the Man]

I just want to say... I HOPE CHINA DESTROYS CALIFORNIA!

Taiwan deserves to be freed of the Californian boot, especially because California and the UPNG robbed China in the Great War!

Also, can we expect a death toll comparable to the TTL Great War's 110 million?

 

[DocD]

Omake # 8 is probably the more at risk to collide with the geopolitical subjects of Antony's TL, so especially not canon (and still my own interpretation). It is also quite grimmer.



The fortunes of Africa and the misfortunes of the Africans (Africa 1902-1922)

Drakans’ propaganda posters calling for their (white) citizens to settle their northern lands (those far from the oceans) presented those places as “virgin”, “untouched” and other dream-inducing adjectives, describing them as devoid of population or history. But they were very not so, as was the case for the whole continent.

Africa had known kingdoms and empires of her own in the past, enough to paint the map with names that would definitely not sound European, and those had left legacies of stories, myths, arts and monuments all across the vast continent. More often than not, those would face a dark fate in the hands of the modern conquerors.

The worse was engineered by the Drakans, who would, in their own words, cleanse their lands of the reminders of past barbarism. The closer one would come to the southern tip of Africa, and thus the longer the Drakans would have got to implement their policy, the more systematic were the destruction and pillages. If some sites of peculiar interest were more or less saved in the north of the country, it was only “thank” to some cynical businessmen selling “primitivism” as a remedy to fast pace of the modern world to wealthy families who would spend about a week in some thematic (and very modern) resort with a few (short) trips to the actual (and thoroughly concreted) sites.

There would be far less destruction of the Malagasy history, and so for two main reasons. Firstly, Madagascar was already an industrial nation (well, it had some industries) when it was invaded. Thus, the Malagasy had already started to exploit their own resources, either erasing historical sites themselves in the process, or preserving them in a way that still offered access to the resources (and was cheaper to maintain than starting anew). Of course, some deposits would have been left untouched (either because unknown or because of a will to preserve the surroundings) and the exploitation thereof would sometimes be executed without the slighted though about Malagasy Heritage by the Drakans, but those were few. Secondly, those Drakans, after the losses of the war, wanted to be able to show the world their triumph, and what better way to do so than expose some clearly recognizable Malagasy “stuff” (read, anything the Drakans could put their hands on and wouldn’t need too badly for something else, ranging from potteries to old buildings), but covered with Drakan flags?

New Virginians would have liked nothing less than to outdo the Drakans on this subject, but they lacked both the means and, cue the Spanish, the time. The Spanish official taking charge of the country after its conquest and its incorporation into New Palma even took great pleasure into enforcing every suggestion archaeologists, anthropologists and even zoologists came with concerning their studies of Africa “in its natural state” in the little touched former northern New Virginia. The fact that the geographic scope of this enforcement was quite limited, even in regard of the sole Spanish colony, prevented the colonial lobby from derailing the whole endeavor.

After all, said colonial lobby had already its hands full with the “development” (some would go with “pillage of the natural resources, made possible by the exploitation of the locals”) of New Palma and New Murcia. A few people were becoming very rich very fast in those lands. What was once New Jutland and New Saxony had already been mapped by their former masters and their riches were rip for the taking. The expansion of the companies already present in New Palma was such meteoric, giving even more weight to the colonial lobby. The new territories annexed to New Murcia on the other hand had barely seen a single European before the beginning of the new century. It only served in attracting even more ambitious and even less scrupulous men, the like of which wouldn’t shy to call modern slavery “payment in kind of the taxes by the locals, to be continued until [the ever further point where] the monetary system has adapted”.

The situation was quite different in Southern Andalusia. If the Spanish were exploiting the riches of New Palma and New Murcia, they were settling Southern Andalusia. By 1922, the Holy Empire of Spain could claim that over seventy percent of the inhabitants of their North African territories were Catholics. Someone inclined to check the facts droned out by politicians would nevertheless note that a great part of those seventy percent weren’t settlers or settlers’ descendants, but “christianized” Muslims, many of whom would only pay lip service to the priests sent by Madrid and regularly meet people that would have been called “imam” in the Ottoman Empire, in Persia, in Bengal, or even across the French or Portuguese border for what matters.

The three-way fracture of the South Andalusian society seemed to be heading for a clearer two-way break as the 1920s began. With the religious fanatics in Madrid loosing more and more power to the civil society, the pressure that encouraged false conversions began to decrease, leading to far fewer people joining this “middle-group”; many even left it, either openly renouncing their conversion or, on the contrary, putting the inquisitors and their resisting ancestors in the same bloody bag of religious fanatics and simply abandoning any secret group their parents had been part of to live their lives among the friends they made while “pretending” to mix with the Spanish. At the same time, the hatred from both other sides toward this one only grew as they considered it either cowards that didn’t dare stand for their beliefs or liars who only pretended for some gain or another. The lines were being drawn, and two camps faced each other, both weakened by internal divides on the treatment to offer to those who sincerely converted to Catholicism, both eager to hide this weakness launching all-out attacks against the other. For now, mostly with words. But as the time passed, tensions only grew in Southern Andalusia.

This situation contrasted greatly with what happened on the other side of the territory’s eastern border. French Libya and Egypt enjoyed at that time the benefits of peace. In Libya, this was mainly due the small size of its population. When France took control of Tripolitania in 1902, more than half of the total (but still small) population of Libya was made of settlers of European descent, mostly French, then Italians. Many of the latter actually came from Tunisia, fleeing the Spanish fanatics.

Egypt was also home to another group of settlers. Many Hindus and Buddhists, after serving in Palestine, elicited to make a new home in a region they sometimes were now more familiar with than their native continent, and where some even found a wife or dear friends. The choice of Egypt over Palestine was simply a matter of willing to make good use of their retirement to rest in peace, not to rest in peace as could easily happen in the neighborhood of the thrice holy city. Not that the French protectorate was that unstable anymore; the problem was rather than by keeping peace, the “non-monotheist” brigades had become a target and an outlet for nearly any malcontent in the region, and the locals had developed an unbelievable ability to recognize those men from afar, even when not on duty.

In the latest census, Muslims were still in the majority in Egypt, but only by the tiniest margin, and counting all those that recognized themselves in the religion without necessarily practicing it. Christianity, both of Coptic and Gallic denominations was the second religion of the territory, followed by various smaller groups, including the aforementioned Hindus and Buddhists and Jews. There were even a few dozen supporters of a pagan revival that had started to call the empress “Pharaoh”, incurring the constant taunts of the few of their neighbors that cared about it. The atheists and agnostics, not included in the official ranking of the number of followers, accounted for the largest part of the loss of prominence of Islam. The financial mane of the Suez Canal helped this large mix of populations focus on the shared benefits they could aspire to by working together rather than on their differences. At the same time, the need of a lingua franca both for mutual understanding within the country and for communication with the passing merchants helped the rapid domination of the French language. In turn, this language helped the spread of French influence and culture within the general population, pursuing the assimilation of Egypt to the French Empire.

In Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, the French similarly successfully integrated the century-old outposts that constituted the core of the territories. The expansion waves of the area of French control were likewise followed in time by expansion waves of assimilation. This meant that most of the place were only owned, and not integrated, by the French, but that more and more of the native population saw its future laying in the empire. Danish and Italian settlers on the other hand generally departed en masse to their homelands, although this only enhanced the opinion their former native subjects had of the French as they were suddenly given back large tracts of land (thanks to a shortage of French settlers). With a strong emphasis by the administration on the local peculiarities of the conquered peoples in order to prevent the emergence of a regional identity that would conflict with French integration, the current situation offered a chance, but not yet a guarantee, of success to the assimilationist policies.

Sudan (more precisely, the northern part of it, the south being under Ethiopian control) was a French colony for nearly half a century when the Great War ended. Whereas in Egypt the French did insist on freedom of religion in order to win the hearts of the population after the Bonaparte episode, in French Sudan, the aftershocks of the fight against the Mahdists led to a far tighter control of the state upon the mosques. In the span of a decade, most religious schools were forcibly closed or brought under strict supervision. The young generation was first taught day after day how they were saved from the fanatics by the French (and a bit by their Ethiopian allies, if the teacher felt generous with them) and, more importantly, how thankful they should be toward their saviors. Then, as the colony became part of the empire, the emphasis switched to the integration of the populations. For some, it was a success; some parents who swallowed the French propaganda were delighted that their children could be part of such an empire. Others, more realist and maybe more cynical too, renounced their centuries-old traditions, in some cases even forbidding their own children to learn their ancestral language, and bet on the integration into a world-spanning empire to offer their descendants a more comfortable, and hopefully better, life that anything their own parents could have dreamed of. But many, seeing their own history being wrested from themselves started to question the authority the French claimed upon their land. Tensions were still far from the boiling point, thanks in part to the low population density, but they were slowly rising.

French Centrafrica and Guinea were two very recent additions to the French domains. The former existed for less than a decade prior to the Great War and more than doubled its territory a few years after; the latter came into existence after said Great War. They could easily both have ended a land of opportunists, the likes of New Murcia, if not for the years spend by the French integrating their Indian lands. More precisely, the saving grace of those territories came less from the teachings of Indian integration and more from the Indians themselves. Both territories saw right from the beginning an important influx of Indian settlers.

In the case of Centrafrica, it was an organized effort from the French authorities which hoped their loyal citizens from South Asia would be better at enduring the local weather than those of Europe or their northernmost American lands, and thus released specially crafted pieces of propaganda enticing said citizens to join in the colonization effort in Africa. In the case of Guinea, it was simply the result of several large groups of Indian recruits sent to fight in this specific front (due to the same considerations about the weather), some of which decided to stay after the war.

The integration of the Indian territories into the French kingdom, and then into the French empire, had been a long running task, with many a bump along the road. Those bumps often took the form of arrogant white men and women considering the local population as their natural inferiors. They were few enough of them, and were “resolved” (as in “someone suddenly found a one-way ticket for Antipodea, if not the Kerguelens”) fast enough that the integration processed forward. They nevertheless left quite a sour taste in the memories of many Indian French. Consequently, the minute an unscrupulous adventurer (generally from European or North American France, but cases were reported from every part of the empire, including native Indians and Africans) started to exploit the locals for his (or sometimes her) own benefits, he (she) soon found himself (herself) in front of a judge (and a definitively not amicable jury).

French Congo didn’t have this chance. The tiny original outpost on the coast first followed the kind of development seen in Senegal and Côte d’Ivoire, but the fast growth of the territory in the decades before and after the Great War sounded like a rallying cry to all the wannabe tyrants that were bared from having their way in other territories. In the 1910s, stories soon started to spread about atrocities happening in the remote African land. Under pressure from public opinion and the empress herself, the government quickly sent a mission… a single man, Jacques Jaurès, on a “fact-finding” mission. With little support from a government far more interested by the latest moves of the opposition than by what could happen in the most remote corners of the empire, Jacques nevertheless spent more than six months on African ground, helped by two assistants (looking more like bodyguards) that he had to pay from his own pocket. When he arrived back in Bata, it was with only one of those assistant, the other having been killed in an “accident” that nearly cost the lives of the two other men. Before boarding a ship back to Europe, Jacques sent a telegram promising “explosive revelations” about the situation in Congo. It would be all that anyone would hear from his findings. Jacques and his last assistant were later found dead “of a brutal fever” in their cabins, Jacques’ notes nowhere to be found.

The fact that the ship’s doctor and captain both had connections to some foggy business group in French Congo and that they chose a sea burial sparked waves of protests at their arrival in Marseilles. Between the calls of the crowd and the fact that one of their own had, in all likeliness, been assassinated, the government finally decided to resort to drastic measures. A group of no less that thirty senior officials from the main administrative bodies, supported by twice as many “policemen”, many of which happened to have been obligingly “lent” by the army to the police a mere days before being affected to this mission, soon headed for the African territory. Their findings happened to be on par with the worst expectation of the human right supporters following Jaurès’ telegram. In less than a month after their arrival, they had already had more than three dozens high profile criminals sent back to Paris for trial, not even counting all the low-level thugs sent to the local jails.

News of the demise of their oppressors spread like wildfire among the natives. And the tragedy happened. On an ordinary day of September 1911, a small group of natives formed on the outskirts of Bondo, a town deep inside Congo where some of those low-level thugs were facing their judges. Maybe they were bolder than others, maybe they had simply lost even more. What matters is that when one of those thugs was acquitted due to insufficient evidence, they decided to make justice themselves. As they marched through the town, though, making their intent very clear, their attempt was brutally ended by the guns of the local gendarmes. The news quickly spread that those recently arrived French were actually no better that their predecessors, and more than half the territory erupted in revolt. It didn’t last for long, not when the revolutionaries faced machine-guns with bare hands. But it lasted long enough to leave indelible scars in the minds of the population. In this remote corner of the empire, people came to hate their rulers with all their hearts. France had just taken back control of its wayward adventurers; it may also had lost the Congo there and then.

South of French Congo, Portugal was in no position to give advice to anyone about colonial management. Control of their colonies was slipping out of their hands and toward the English’s ones. The Portuguese that flew their country to escape a potential Spanish conquest found themselves under a very real English domination. They also found an expletive to those anguishes in the form of an even lower strata than themselves. Their behavior toward the natives ranged from intolerant to fully outward despotic. The sole saving grace in this relationship was the common enemy conveniently present at their southern border. Despite the rampant animosity between colonizers and colonized people (and between the two groups of colonizers), all still worked side by side (if not hand in hand) to ensure their common security against the Drakans.

However, the further north somebody went in Angola or Mozambique, the clearer the divide between the groups stood. Around Lake Luis (OTL Lake Victoria), all pretenses were off, and the atrocities perpetrated easily matched those occurring in the similarly distant parts of Congo and New Murcia. With the neighboring Ethiopian far too busy extending their control over their latest acquisitions to even think about raising the question with their former allies, those parts of Africa soon earned the nickname of “Hell’s corridor” in the anti-colonial pamphlets around the world. Maybe the Drakans could have found some twisted humor in that fact, had they not have to skip through at least half a dozen articles about their own atrocities in between each of those condemning the French and Iberian colonizers.

Last independent native country of Africa since the fall of Madagascar, Ethiopia was no stranger either to rash conquests of vast tracts of land. Over the last half century, it had swallowed large parts of Sudan, the Red Sea cost, lots of neighboring territories inland and, last but definitively not least, the Horn of Africa and the near-totality of the former Omani possessions. And just like the European colonizers, it didn’t have the means to administer its latest conquests with the same efficiency as its core provinces. However, the results were quite different as said latest conquests consisted mainly in Ethiopia’s case of “well-developed” lands, at least when considering the state of its other additions upon conquest.

Most (but, alas, not all) of the governors and generals Menelik IV sent to the former Omani colonies understood that those ports could well be the key to rebuilding the Ethiopian economy from its catastrophic post-Great War state. Ottoman money pouring from their new allies proved instrumental to rebuilding (or building, in case of most inland roads) the region’s infrastructure. So did the knowledge of the local workforce. Thus said workforce quickly became irreplaceable in several key sectors, prompting the already overstretched Ethiopian administration to push the “laissez-faire” doctrine to a whole new level. As the Ethiopian government focused on his (probably unrealistic) attempts to bring its own military on par with the Drakans, the eastern coast of the country started to get some false air of autonomous vassal in a no longer negligible number of areas of competence, to the benefits of its inhabitants.

With the former Omani lands enjoying their freedom and the older conquests of the Ethiopians filled with enough administrators to avoid being turned into what would be called a “far-west” in another timeline, only a small territory was left in disarray. The “chaos triangle of Ethiopia”, as it was nicknamed, stood in the corner between the southernmost pre-Great War conquests of the Ethiopians and their newly acquired east coast. The most accurate succinct description of the situation there was made by a visiting Australasian journalist, named Anna Londres. She wrote “The only reason the Drakans aren’t citing this place in defense of their own wrongdoings, showing that black people could indeed suffer worse fate than in the Snakes’ lands, is seemingly that they collectively lack the intellectual capacity to compare the sufferings of a black man in the hands of a black man to the sufferings of a black man in the hands of a white man, if only because it would somehow put both tormentors, back and white, on an equal footing.” Needless to say, Anna Londres was no longer welcome to either the Drakan or the Ethiopian empires once her article was published. The subjects of her article, them, found it was a shame their ancestral lands couldn’t also be “expelled” from their new masters’ grasp.

 

[DocD]

... And the last one.

Omake # 9 is this time totally canon and fully approved by... Nah! Just kidding! As usual, not canon and only my own interpretation.


You’ve got mail (The world, 1902-1919)

The reign of the self-styled “Maharajah Rao I of the Sky and the Seas, Sovereign of All He Watches, Sublime Emperor of the Ivory Realm” was a short one. It also was one packed with myriads of ideas, most of which allowed the use of “madly extravagant” as a euphemism. Most of which also went back to the void they probably should never have left before the body of the mad Maharajah was cold. Still, a few of them survived their crazy creator, in a fashion at least.

Measuring a “level of civilization” is generally a task which is heavily influenced by the prejudices of the one measuring. As Rao I proved, it can also be influenced by the insanity of the one measuring.

Where some would go for cold, impersonal metrics such as literacy rates, where others would go for byzantine details such as the in intricacies of some ceremonies, where others still would simply skew all the number combinations they could think of until their favorite entity comes on top, Rao decided for a “novative” definition. The mail distribution time over a fixed distance, averaged over a year of actual deliveries.

The maharajah’s pride over his new metrics took quite a hit when he discovered that the lack of infrastructure in the newly annexed Burmese lands sent his kingdom way behind the likes of Hungary-Austria or the Republic of the Carolinas (where some newspapers found no better use for their ink than large amounts of puns on Rao “going postal”). Thus came the orders for a grand rebuild of the Bengali postal services.

Many of the most extravagant ideas of the sovereign happened to fortuitously encounter series of administrative delays after series of administrative delays, quietly bogging them down until Rao forgot them and moved on to another insanity. Or died. Nevertheless, what was still actually implemented, and survived the maharajah, was enough to justify the national pride of the Bengalis on the matter.

A tight web of sorting and distribution offices soon meshed the kingdom, with no village, no matter how remote, farther than two hours away from one of them (that is, using the quit modern means of transportation available to the Bengali postal services, not the feet of the peasants living in said villages). Dropbox appeared in every inhabited place, from the capital to the tiniest hamlets, with mails collected at least once a day, and up to thrice in the busiest population centers.

The roads were the main arteries of mails transportation, with sometimes two drivers per truck, in order to ensure that the longest journeys would not be interrupted by trivial concerns such as meals or sleep. Of course, whenever possible, those long journeys would be switched to rail transportation. But those were scarce in the newly conquered lands, and very little of what the Burmese had built remained serviceable, at least during the short reign of Rao.

In some places, the lack of per-existing infrastructures led to bold innovations. The kingdom of Bengal was soon able to claim the title of first country to ever make a regular use of planes to carry mails. It wasn’t on a large scale. It wasn’t even on long distances. But it definitively was a sight to behold. Fragile aeroplanes, seemingly lighter than their pilots regularly emerged from the remotest jungles and mountains somewhat under control of the central government. Those were never many, with only four different circuits operated by a grand total of six planes. They should have originally been eight, but the untimely death of the monarch didn’t provide for a successor with as much interests in the postal service as Rao.

However, they were numerous enough that, half a world away, in the Iberian peninsula, a Spanish adventurer answering to the name of Demetrios Ramon Urista fell in love with the idea. Left with quiet an impressive fortune after the war with Portugal, he founded in 1909 the Compañía General Aeropostal, starting with a daily rotation between the European mainland and the north-western coast of Southern Andalusia. The success was immediate, and, soon, the list of the cities served by by what was becoming know simply as the Aeropostal grew to encompass most of hubs of both the Spanish mainland and Southern Andalusia.

By 1912, the Aeropostal operated its first trans-Saharan line, with a few sparse oasis acting as pit-stops for both the planes and the pilots. The planes were robust, but only in comparison of other models of the same era. Accidents thus were ineluctable. The first of them happened five months after the line was inaugurated. Most ended in tragedies. A few came to a happy ending, either through the incredible capacities of some pilots, the ever-improved attempts of the company to ready the pilots’ emergency kits for all eventualities, sheer luck, or any combination of those.

But the heroic story about the trans-Saharan flights that would be remembered across the world would not be one of mere accidents. A few years before, the French and the Spanish had divided the remaining “unowned” lands of Africa between themselves (with a few scraps for the Portuguese and the Ethiopians), with the vast Sahara ending in Spanish hands. However, the inhabitants of said “unowned” lands generally had some quite divergent opinions about who had legitimacy to rule them.

The very low population of the Spanish Sahara greatly reduced the frequency of the clashes between the locals and their self-proclaimed new masters. However, it wasn’t enough to avoid them entirely. In 1914, the fort of San Juan, built around the oasis (now, and thanks to the Spanish) of the same name gained an unwelcome symbolic weight in a regional Tuareg uprising. With about a hundred Spanish manning the fort’s defenses, easily four time that number of enemies outside and at least three weeks to hold before reinforcements could be sent (that is, both with sufficient numbers to defeat the besiegers and with enough preparation and equipment to avoid condemning most of them to die in the desert before or after the relief of the fort), the situation looked dire.

Luckily for its garrison, San Juan was not only a fort and an oasis; it was also one of those pit-stops used by the Aeropostal while crossing from South Andalusia to New Palma. During close to a month, the airplanes landing there delivered ammunition, food and medicine and evacuated more than thirty wounded men, no doubt saving the lives of most of them. It was the first air bridge of human history, and it wasn’t even considered by the pilots as their primary mission, for the planes carrying the supplies were still loaded with mails and resumed their circuits as soon the “packages” intended for San Juan were delivered.

Air mail didn’t encounter that level of success everywhere. In the French Empire, among others, it merely stayed a curiosity. Several factors concurred to the success of its competitors.

Many parts of the empire were already meshed by a tight web a railroads, or were in a process to be so. Those offered far more capacity at a far lower price. In an era were planes were still fragile assemblies of easily breakable parts, and therefor were the actual deliveries were depending on the weather, trains were also far more reliable.

It didn’t help the proponents of planes that both trains and postal services were centralized into empire-wide public organisms and that air transport companies were not. The behemoths that were becoming the SICF (Société Impériale de Chemins de fer Français, imperial company of the French railroads) and the SIPTT (Société Impériale des Postes, Télégraphes et Télécoms, imperial company of the posts, telegraphs and telecommunications) were made to work in synergy on the matter of long range mail distribution by a government keen on helping the development of an empire-wide French identity through the uniform appearance of the public services.

Due to the sheer size of the empire, transit over water generally concerned large amounts of parcels. In most of the cases, it was far more than what the current planes could carry, leaving ships as the only viable alternative.

Nonetheless, planes managed to find a few niches in the service of the French postal services. A dozen small companies, none owning more than three planes, serviced the remotest outposts of the French empire in Africa, operating circuits that moved further inland year after year as the roads and railroads progressed further from the coasts, preceded by those colonists the most “attracted by the wilderness” (some may said, “the happiest to be away of Paris’ watchful eyes”). However, those planes were only considered as stopgaps, waiting for the infrastructures to catch up with the territorial expansion of the empire. Another place saw a far more durable implementation of the air transportation: the Caribbeans. There, modest payloads and distances combined with strict impossibility of a terrestrial liaison led to the development by 1917 of a real air-wing integrated to the SIPTT.

Those many developments all around the world led to ever-faster world-wide deliveries, as could be illustrated by what follows. On May the 12th, 1919, Marie-Joséphine Molette, baroness of Morangiès, was accompanying her husband on a business trip in the eastern lands of the kingdom of Bengal. From there she sent a letter in the early afternoon. By the evening, said letter was already collected by the hotel’s staff, handed to the Bengali postal service and transferred to the nearest sorting office where its journey within the kingdom, and the wider world (thanks to the cooperation treaties signed by all the countries it would have to go through), had already been planned.

A bit before midnight, the letter, now bagged with several dozen other sharing an intermediate destination, was put on a train and headed west. By the early hours of the morning on the 14th, it would have switched train twice, joining each time a growing stack of “toward French India, but only as an intermediary step” stack, and arrived at the border. There, the waiting would be minimal thanks to the commercial treaties signed by both parties. French custom officers would have boarded the train at the previous stop and, under the watchful eye of their Bengali counterpart, processed the mail bags along with a few other fast-tracked items. In less than twenty minutes, the last two wagons of the Bengali train and their pre-approved cargo would be attached at the tail of a French train leaving within the hour, leaving behind them the bulk of the train’s load, to be processed on-site.

A few hours later, the letter would reach the French sorting office in Karadia. There, its pre-planned journey would be validated (as a rule of thumb, bureaucracy cannot be accused of not loving redundancy) and, as the employees would have their lunch break, the letter would be boarding another train, this time toward Porbandar. It would reach this port by the 17th, after a brief inspection (not the kind which would require to open the letter) by shady agents of the imperial interior ministry in charge of counter-espionage. Satisfied that neither the expediter nor the recipient of the letter would be likely to engage in correspondence upon classified information, they would refrain to veto the next part of the journey, taking place through Ottoman territory.

Indeed, the letter would use the northern road to Egypt, through the Sublime Porte’s brand new railroads in Mesopotamia and then along the coast of the western Mediterranean, gaining three days on the southern road, through the Red Sea and with stops at Socotra and Aden. Between the transshipment from train to ship and the crossing of the Persian Gulf, the letter would reach Basra in the late afternoon of the 21st. It would then be loaded on the postal wagon of the Orient-Express train making the connection with the ship. Between the train departure and its arrival in Baghdad on the 22nd, the bag containing the letter would be opened at least twice by intelligence agents of various countries, each time considered of little to no interest. In Baghdad, the bag would switch train to continue on the Beirut-Damas-Baghdad railroad, and again in Beirut to take International West Mediterranean Line (which, despite its name, would actually link Adana to Mecca) southward.

It would thus reach the Ottoman-“Palestinian” border on the late evening of the 23rd. There the French custom officers would carefully inspect the whole cargo (“Hey, rookie, be a bit more thorough, would you? Those brutes in the NMB wouldn’t see no difference between a sit-in and an ‘aggressive mob’ as they say. Bet you they wouldn’t see no difference between a postcard and a bomb even if only one of them was ticking!”).
In Jerusalem, by midday on the 24th, it would switch train for the express nord-africain (North African Express, also known as the Jerusalem to Tripoli line) under supervision of the local police force, also known as non-monotheistic brigades (“Hey, rookie, be a bit more thorough, would you? Those cushy-ass on the border wouldn’t recognize a shipment of smuggled guns, even if it was labeled as such!”).
By the evening, the train would reach the border into the empire proper. Due to slight differences in taxes (that some would disdainfully call “buying the peace”), a new custom inspection would occur, this time under the Aegis of the gendarmerie impériale (“Hey, rookie, be a bit more thorough, would you? With the NMB and the customs each counting on the other to do the job, we better keep both eyes open!”).


The last leg of the journey in French Africa would see the letter reach Tripoli on the 27th. During this time, the SICF inspector would generally leave the mail bags alone (“Hey, rookie, why are you looking at these? Suspect provenance? Oh boy! Someone needs to give you a course on inter-administration rivalry! I got a few good stories from my cousin, the one in the vice-royal police. Sit down, boy, you’re in for a treat...”).

In Tripoli, the SIPTT would entrust the mails to the Aeropostal pilots. If most of the mails said pilots loaded in Tripoli would make a first stop in Tunis, once every two days, an Aeropostal flight would connect the Libyan capital directly with Tamanrasset. The letter sent by Marie-Joséphine Molette would reach that city on the morning of the 29th. From there, it would continue toward western New Palma and cross the Atlantic on a sea-plane. The stops in Brazil would be extremely brief, thanks to the terms of the peace treaty between said country and the Spanish Empire (… and thanks to number of Spanish ships participating in “impromptu naval exercises” in Spanish South America each time Brazil simply thought about reneging on those terms).

After a short stop in Buenos Aires, the letter would be delivered back into French hands by the Aeropostal in Villeneuve-du-Sud on the morning of the 31st. Due to the agreements signed between the SIPTT and the Sorbonne university, the letter would then be carried directly to the two-years-long archaeological site where one Marie-Évangéline Molette was working.

There, she was known as Julie Calvet (from one of her additional forenames and her father’s surname) and was, quiet literally, in the process of making a name by herself in the field of archaeology, disregarding her familial legacy. She had spent the last two months day-in, day-out in the mud, extracting, cleaning and cataloging artifacts that would be the crown jewel of her thesis defense when back to Paris.

As the sun was setting, she was finishing packing after the physically-exhausting parts of her day were all complete, leaving at least one more hour of hard work, but on a purely intellectual level.

This is when the letter would be finally delivered personally on the 1st of June, a mere twenty days after being sent, nearly half a world away from there.

…

…

…

Ma très chère Marie-Évangéline,

Si je prends la peine de vous écrire malgré le climat épouvantable de ces contrées où votre père m’a entraîné en dépit de mes protestations, des interminables prolongations qui émaillent ses négociations et du simple bon sens, c’est parce que j’ai de très bonnes nouvelles pour vous.

Me croirez-vous ? Nonobstant votre départ précipité loin de notre chère Paris et votre étrange lubie pour les vieux bibelots, M. Boucart exprime toujours son désir de vous rencontrer et vous invite, pour la seconde année d’affilé, et alors même que vous avez manqué le rendez-vous de l’an passé, aux célébrations qu’il organise à l’occasion de la fête des vendanges en son château.

J’ose espérer que vous nous ferez l’honneur de votre présence et ne manquerez pas de remercier notre hôte pour sa bienveillance. Les années passent cruellement vite et je ne peux que vous encourager à prêter plus d’attention aux propositions de M. Boucart avant que la jeunesse ne vous quitte. Vous verrez bien vite que ces quelques années d’écart dont vous nous faites grand cas se réduiront bientôt au rang de détail trivial.

Votre père et moi vous adressons toute notre affection.

Marie-Joséphine de Morangiès.

(My dearest Marie-Évangéline,

If I go to the trouble of writing to you despite the terrible weather of those lands where your father dragged me in spite of my protests, of the never-ending prolongations peppering his negotiations and of simple common sense, it is because I have some very good news for you.​

Would you believe me? Notwithstanding you hurried departure from our beloved Paris and your strange obsession for old trinkets, Mr Boucart still expresses his wish to meet you, and he invites you, for the second year in a row, no matter that you missed last year gathering, to the festivities he will have in his castle for the harvest.​

I dare hope you will be present and thank our host for his kindness. The years pass by at a terrifying speed and I cannot but encourage you to pay better attention to Mr Boucart’s offers before youth flees you. You will soon find that this little age discrepancy to which you attach a great importance is nothing but a trivial detail.​

Your father and I are sending you all our affection.​

Marie-Joséphine de Morangiès.)

…

…

…

A few seconds later, the letter, enjoining Marie-Évangéline to settle with a rich man while she was still young, entered an additional journey. Right to the wastepaper bin, accompanied by a volley of expletives about a “procurer of a mother”.

Even in this world of technological wonders, keeping faith in humankind was sometimes a thankless task.​

 

[Antony444]

War comes to Taiwan (The Second Great War Begins, April 1923)


Everyone had known a war was coming between China and the Alliance of Pacific Powers.

The Pacific Powers knew it, China knew it...all Great, Middle and Small Powers knew it.

The multitude of past wrongs, insults, and ignored claims which had created tensions in the late 1910s were absolutely not solved by 1923. In fact, it was accurate to describe the situation by ‘nothing has changed in the last four years’.

The UPNG’s newspapers and other media of Central and South America had decreased their mentions of the unpleasant stalemate they found themselves into. For economic and prestige reasons, it was absolutely unconscionable to surrender territories like the island of Taiwan or allow the Chinese merchants to flood the markets of South-East Asia with their goods.

Officially, the Alliance of Pacific Powers didn’t practise colonialism. They weren’t the French or the Russians, thank you very much. But in practise, save a different ‘official’ doctrine, hundreds of thousands of souls worked from morning to sunset in Borneo, the Celebes, or Vietnam, to ensure the United Provinces of New Granada and its allies were enjoying a positive trade balance, cheap resources like rubber, oil, gold, and more.

The system was working, why would they try to change it?

Of course, there was a little flaw in the plan. Something had truly changed in the last years. The Chinese Navy had completed a massive naval armament program, to the point it could be safely said it outmassed and outnumbered the entire Navy of the Pacific Powers. In 1919, the three main fleets of Empress Ren had boasted nine Battleships, two Battlecruisers, three Aircraft Cruisers, twenty-six Cruisers, and many escorts and submarines. In 1923, the intelligence services of California estimated the Chinese could count on twelve Battleships, five Battlecruisers, six Aircraft Carriers, forty-two Cruisers, enough Destroyers to escort all those capital ships, and approximately one hundred Submarines.

By the time the spies were confident enough to report all of the warships indeed existed and were crewed by a large number of professional sailors, it was February 1923. The UPNG and California passed quietly several naval armament programs to upgrade and bolster their forces, but there was no denying that in this scenario, their shipbuilding capacity wasn’t enough. Only the Empires of France and Russia had really the wealth and the money to build fleets that powerful, and the Tsarina had chosen not do it, since it was a predominant land power. It also had much bigger political and military issues closer to home to be wary about. Moscow wasn’t going to build dozens of warships to help the Alliance of Pacific Powers or for the sole purpose of giving China a naval humiliation.

Deprived of this strategic alliance which would have forced the Chinese Empress to deploy millions of men on her northern frontier, many diplomats had been sent from Brunei and all members to convince Japan allying with them was in their best interest.

But the Satsuma court was not interested. Leaving the Entente and the alliance with the Bourbons sounded like the kind of foolish move which saw you crucified for generations by your own historians, and besides, if the Chinese xenophobic behaviour was hardly pleasant, Japan had been denied a chance to access the markets of Borneo and the other nations and islands allied with Peru and their co-conspirators. Japan would act in the interests of Japan, and it did not include deploying their modern Battleships in defence of Taiwan. The warships of the Rising Sun were far more useful protecting the vital sea lanes which allowed the Japanese to trade unimpeded with French North America and other provinces of the Bourbon domains.

The Alliance of Pacific Powers thus had no chance but to play a defensive strategy from 1922 onwards. The Californians accelerated the fortification of Taiwan, but the core of the Pacific Powers’ fleet – which was officially named Second Fleet – was concentrated in the Bay of Manila. There, at least, the UNPG and Californian Admirals were confident the Chinese reconnaissance planes and fast Destroyers couldn’t easily spy upon their movements.

That the harbours of Taiwan couldn’t receive so many warships without disrupting severely the civilian trade was a factor which went unmentioned, of course.

This didn’t mean the westernmost possession of California was left undefended, whether from the sea side or another perspective. The Cruiser Isabella, a brand-new hull which was to be the lead ship of a dozen more redoubtable warships, was deployed to the modern harbour of Kaohsiung with an impressive flotilla. The second most important harbour of Keelung was equally as well defended, though the flagship there, the Cruiser Lion de Oro, was old and would need soon to be decommissioned.

It was, obviously, utterly insufficient to stop the Chinese Southern Fleet – which had ‘only’ a division of two Battleships and two Battlecruisers – from taking control of the Taiwan Straits. But contesting this strategic location known for its abominable weather and high waves wasn’t the goal of the Alliance of the Pacific Powers.

All that it mattered was that no Chinese soldiers were able to land on Taiwan, and from this point of view, the defended beaches, the enormous fortifications, and the coastal siege artillery were ready. Many cannons had been specifically conceived to protect soldiers from an assault coming from the sea, and several batteries could fire shells more powerful than any Battleship at its disposal. Some of the most vital strongholds were thought to be able to resist a combined bombardment of five to eight Battleships.

The Californians would have to endure a siege of months, maybe years, but the small warships built in the shipyards of Taiwan could slaughter anything, and especially the frail craft of infantry trying to swim towards the beaches, just before the amphibious assault could seize a foothold.

When it came down to it, politicians and officers safely away in Northern, Central, and Southern America were far more worried about Vietnam: there was no Strait there preventing the Chinese army from rolling in and pouring an endless amount of infantry until the complete collapse of the Vietnamese.

On the sunny day of April 1st, 1923, the Californians realised they should have been more worried about the vulnerability of Taiwan from aerial assault. All major navies had rather slow and unimpressive beginnings when it came to introducing Seaplane Tenders and then Aircraft Carriers, but the UNPG and California had been slower than the average. Some of it was undoubtedly due to budget constraints, but secondary reasons had also been rooted in the absolute belief of the ‘Battleship Supremacy’.

To be fair to them, even Empress Charlotte had been forced to ‘accept the retirement’ of several of the French Navy’s senior Admirals when they were unable to give to her a reason why a ship which could monitor enemy fleet movements beyond the horizon was a bad thing.

But the fact remained: by April 1923, the Californian aviation wings were all land-based, and the first Aircraft Carrier they would commission would not enter sea trials before early 1924 at best.

Worse, the war warning they should have paid attention to, the visit of a Chinese diplomatic delegation at Pondicherry three months ago, negotiating the neutrality of the Entente in exchange of important zones of influence’s recognition, had not been discovered by their intelligence services.

And last but not least, they weren’t six Aircraft Carriers built by the Chinese Empire.

There were twelve of them.

The Californian Admirals could be excused for not knowing about them, though, as the last six had been built on cargo hulls at an unprecedented pace, and the deepest secret had surrounded their construction and their commissioning.

But this meant that one crucial point of the defensive strategy Californian had been counting upon was deeply wrong: the Chinese pilots had the numbers to attack the harbours of Keelung and Kaohsiung at the same time.

Alas it was too late to alter the war plans, as hundreds of torpedo-bombers attacked and transformed the peaceful morning into a moment of destruction and bloodshed.

Asia would remember this day as the opening of the Second Great War.

 

[Israel_Dan the Man]

And last but not least, they weren’t six Aircraft Carriers built by the Chinese Empire.

There were twelve of them.

California and UPNG: We know this was a calculated risk, but boy are we bad at math!

 

[Sébastien]

I would like to know what China exactly promise the Entente because 12 carriers (with adequate escorts I suppose) have the potential to even alarm them. So while the English are "playing" against Russia. France have all the latitude to "think" about the future. Is a potential hostile fleet that powerful a good news or a bad one? I think some people in Paris and Pondicherry but also in Japan are really NOT happy right about now (of course, there is a lot of people not happy right now but France is supposed to be #1 and Japan is a close neighbor)

 

[Israel_Dan the Man]

I would like to know what China exactly promise the Entente because 12 carriers (with adequate escorts I suppose) have the potential to even alarm them. So while the English are "playing" against Russia. France have all the latitude to "think" about the future. Is a potential hostile fleet that powerful a good news or a bad one? I think some people in Paris and Pondicherry but also in Japan are really NOT happy right about now (of course, there is a lot of people not happy right now but France is supposed to be #1 and Japan is a close neighbor)

I mean, Japan aside, no major Entente members are really close enough to threaten and/or be threatened by China's fleet. Not even France's colonies.

 

[DocD]

12 carriers is an impressive fleet, but, for now at least and as I undertand it, it's an impressive fleet when it operates close to chinese coasts. Otherwise it soon becomes a very oil-lacking fleet. Unless I'm mistaken, China lacks the Entente (French) world-spanning web of naval bases. Even if the Chinese were to swallow Vietnam, the Philipines, Brunei and all of the APP islands scattered in the Pacific (which is quite a monstruously big if), the western coast of French North America would still be an incomfortably long way from their bases (and an even less comfortably short way from French supplies) and French India would still be protected by the Malay barrier. Such a situation may be concerning (after all, some French Pacific islands would be in the reach of the Chinese, and French Antipodea could turn a frontline zone at any time), but not alarming: the major industrial centers would still be safe and able to drown the Chinese under new weapons.

On a completely different point, I notice that California has basically, just as many OTL and TTL countries, prepared for the previous war. In such a situation, the wake-up is indeed usually brutal.

 

[Israel_Dan the Man]

Also, will China actually invade Vietnam?

And if they fought Bengal for some reason, is there any chance France DOESN'T join?

 

[Israel_Dan the Man]

12 carriers is an impressive fleet, but, for now at least and as I undertand it, it's an impressive fleet when it operates close to chinese coasts. Otherwise it soon becomes a very oil-lacking fleet. Unless I'm mistaken, China lacks the Entente (French) world-spanning web of naval bases. Even if the Chinese were to swallow Vietnam, the Philipines, Brunei and all of the APP islands scattered in the Pacific (which is quite a monstruously big if), the western coast of French North America would still be an incomfortably long way from their bases (and an even less comfortably short way from French supplies) and French India would still be protected by the Malay barrier. Such a situation may be concerning (after all, some French Pacific islands would be in the reach of the Chinese, and French Antipodea could turn a frontline zone at any time), but not alarming: the major industrial centers would still be safe and able to drown the Chinese under new weapons.

The thing is, why would China even want to fight France?

France didn't promise 2 juicy islands (one of which is completely Chinese in terms of population) and then keep them for themselves while millions of Chinese died.

France didn't try and stop Chuan China from ending the horrific Wu regime with sanctions.

France didn't try making an alliance meant only to counter China.

 

[Sébastien]

No but China hate the foreigners, it isn't because they are talking with the Entente that China trust the Entente. It just is common sense to reduce the numbers on enemy you need to fight. Do not forget that before the implosion of the realm, China consider itself the greatest empire of all time and that all kingdoms across the world were their tributaries.