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April 14, 1941

I had expected Legadonia to cling to the fig leaf of neutrality with all their might. Playing off the Russy Federation's reconnaissance in force as an isolated border incident was well within the usual range of hypocrisy associated with international relations. Back when the shoe was on the other foot, the Legadonia Entente had expected that kind of response from the Empire after their stunt that instead kicked off the Great War.

Events proved that I had been too cynical. Or too optimistic, depending on how I looked at it. While it was nice that Legadonia had joined the fight against communism, they hadn't been content with a simple declaration of war. No, they'd decided that they wanted to make a splash. Enter the war with a bang.

The old familiar tension headache that I got from dealing with idiots was starting to throb. "Who's telling the truth?"

I was holed up in my private office together with Visha, Elya, and Zettour. The table in front of us was covered with conflicting accounts of Legadonia's actions. If you believed the Legadonian newspapers, their brave pilots had struck a crippling blow against the Russy fleet at Ulanograd, sinking several ships with air-dropped torpedoes while their bombers laid waste to the city's naval facilities. On the other side of things, Russy agitprop claimed that they had been the victim of a barbarous attack against innocent civilians.

The Russy claim was accompanied with a picture of a bombed out apartment block, adding a certain weight to their tale. Knowing communists, though, I wouldn't put it past them to have shelled their own people if it made for a useful photograph.

Elya shrugged. "Both."

Elya's relaxed attitude was usually a breath of fresh air. Usually, though, there wasn't a war going on. I narrowed my eyes and fixed her with a serious look. Fortunately, that was enough to get the message across. Elya straightened up and continued in a more serious tone.

"The Legadonians did sink a few ships," Elya said. "Regrettably, their attempts to bomb the naval base were haphazard at best. I don't think they were trying hit any civilian targets, but I'm pretty sure that they did hit them."

I sighed, then turned to face Zettour. "We'll have to condemn their carelessness."

He hesitated before replying. "That won't go over well."

I snorted. "Dropping bombs on civilians doesn't go over very well with me, frankly."

As much as we were trying to win the war at hand, we also had to be conscious of the international audience. I didn't want to be shackled to an ally who thought it was a great idea to give the Russy Federation such sensational grist for the propaganda mill. The most basic task for any military was to fight off enemy armies, not kill foreign civilians.

"Bombing is inherently imprecise," Zettour replied.

"I merely expect to hold the bombardier to the same standard as the artillerist," I said. "If you aren't sure whether you're going to hit a military target or a civilian dwelling, don't take the shot. It's a simple application of the laws of war."

Some laws of war could become quite obscure and complicated, but the law prohibiting the deliberate killing of civilians was about as straightforward as it got. Of course, you could try to be tricky about it and deprive your targets of their civilian status. Sending a flight of bombers overhead, though, with no particular warning or justification, was an open and shut violation.

Also, should Being X twist this world onto the rails of the history from my previous life, the post-war courts would hardly be concerned with legal niceties. I could expect the naked application of victor's justice, held back by only the slightest sense of shame. Only squeaky clean conduct of the war would be enough to force an innocent verdict. I hoped it wouldn't come to that, but it was hard to say with confidence that anything was beneath Being X.

"The laws of war have always been subject to change in light of new technologies," Zettour said. "If the eastern front develops into a stalemate, we may need to pursue large scale bombing campaigns in order to break the deadlock."

"Victory through terror bombing? Do you really think we can prove ourselves more barbarous than the Russy Federation?" I asked. "We could reproduce Arene a hundred times on the eastern front and still fall far short of the atrocities the communists have inflicted on their own people."

Setting aside everything else, bombing civilians wasn't a particularly efficient way to fight a war. It also wasn't a mode of warfare that Germania could execute particularly well. In order for strategic bombing to make a difference, we would have to build such an overwhelming weight of bombers and bombs as to be able to reduce enemy cities to rubble at will. The behemoth Russy Federation was hardly going to be shocked into surrender by a mere six figures worth of civilian deaths.

Our industry couldn't produce such a miracle, not if we also wanted guns and ammunition and tanks and artillery and all the other things we needed to fight the ground war. Given the existence of a field of combat where we were at a disadvantage, it was only natural to cry foul and try to convince everybody else that pursuing such a strategy was immoral.

"The path to victory does not lie through terrorizing and murdering Russy civilians," I continued. "We will win by defeating the Russy armed forces in the field. We will win by toppling communist tyranny wherever we find it. We will win by establishing free and independent nations and rolling back Russy conquests."

If we were going to win a resounding victory in the east, we would need a good number of the people currently under the Russy yoke to take up arms for our cause. If we were going to win at all, we needed most civilians to at least be indifferent between Russy and Germanian success. Neither condition was likely to obtain for long if our army started conducting indiscriminate attacks against civilians.

I kept my eyes locked on Zettour, making sure he understood how seriously I took this point. In the end, I couldn't say that he had been fully persuaded by my arguments, but he at least looked ready to comply with my instructions.

"Tell the Legadonians that we are willing to treat this attack as an unfortunate mistake," I said. "However, if they expect any cooperation with us in the future, they had better conduct themselves in a civilized fashion."

I'd spent years trying to shed the moniker of the Devil of the Rhine. I wasn't about to throw that away over Legadonia. Fortunately, they had committed themselves with their bold attack on the Russy Federation. As long as they were out of the war, I had needed them more than they needed me. Now that they were in, the tables had turned.

"Yes, Chancellor," Zettour said.

With that, our meeting came to an end. Zettour left to implement my instructions, while Elya returned to her post. I held Visha back. I needed a chance to vent, and I didn't feel like waiting until we were at home.

I held my tongue until the door closed behind Elya.

"Killing civilians is always easier than killing soldiers," I said, shaking my head. "What kind of idiot thinks that makes it a good way to win a war?"

Visha stepped forward and gave me a hug. I stiffened in surprise, then relaxed as I reminded myself that we were in a private setting.

As much as I had found it frustrating over the years that Visha was taller than me, it did put her in position to give good hugs. Although, to be fair, I had lived two rather touch-deprived lifetimes, so it was possible I was grading on a lower standard. Regardless, I couldn't stay upset in the face of her charm offensive. My irritation over Legadonia's blundering faded away as she used her free hand to give me a comforting rub up and down my spine.

"There won't be another Arene this time," she said.

Not if I had anything to say about it. If worst came to worst and we had to go on the run, the last thing we needed were war crimes charges hanging over our head. I wanted to be able to seek asylum in a civilized country, not run around the world as some sort of international outlaw.

Well, I should try to stay positive. The war was going well so far. Who knew, maybe Being X would stay out of things and this time the troops really would be home by Christmas.

ooOoo

April 16, 1941

Carl Troeger had never traveled outside of Germania before joining the air force. In two months of war, he had flown from Daneland over the Atlantic Ocean and now from Dacia over the Black Sea. Wherever he went, though, the job didn't change.

He looked down through the bomb sight and fiddled with the controls to keep his target in the center. Sparing a brief glance at the rest of what he could see, he clicked his tongue.

"That's a shitload of ships."

"Just hit the battleship, Troeger," Alspach, the pilot, said. Only the slightest trace of tension in his voice betrayed his readiness to yank the plane off its current heading.

They'd had a rough time of it on their last outing. Their mission had been to disrupt Russy logistics, targeting three bridges behind enemy lines. The first obstacle had been the Russy anti-aircraft fire. The commies didn't play around. One of their flightmates had been taken down, and their plane had suffered a hole punched through the fuselage, though they'd made it home alright. The more pernicious foe had been a low lying fog that had rendered two of their targets completely invisible.

Today, the weather was clear. The Russy ships were well armed, but they didn't seem to have anything that could trouble them at their current altitude. Troeger could take his time to center the battleship in his sights without worrying that the next shell was going to explode in his lap.

"Yeah, yeah," Troeger said. "I've got it."

Their mission was to take out the battleship that had been pounding away at Dacia's defenses over the last couple of weeks. It would have been nice to do something about the rest of the Russy fleet, but silencing the big guns would go a long way in reducing the damage they could do.

Troeger hummed to himself as he focused on his sight. For the last ten seconds of the approach, the cross hairs were rock steady. Just like always, the actual release of the Fritz X caught him by surprise.

Alspach reacted quickly, hauling them back into a steep climb. Troeger ignored the sinking feeling in his stomach and kept his eyes trained below. Soon after they leveled out, the glowing dot came into view. Give the designers credit, he'd never had trouble spotting Fritz after a drop.

Chasing after the Frankish ships as they maneuvered for battle had pushed the guided bomb to the limits. The Russy ship wasn't maneuvering at all. Troeger only had to nudge Fritz to the left and let gravity do the rest of the work.

"It's a hit," he announced.

The response in the cockpit was celebratory, but muted compared to the first time. After getting an overhead look at the Russy military machine, none of them harbored any illusions about the fact that their part in the war was just beginning.

ooOoo

April 18, 1941

Private Anton Horvat fished his last packet of cigarettes out of his pocket. After offering it around to the rest of the squad, he shared a light with his assistant gunner. The first drag seemed to flow through his whole body, granting him a moment of respite despite the fact that he was still stuck in the same cave he'd been occupying for the last two weeks.

They had a nice view of the Isonzo river, at least, but that had gotten old after the first few days.

He hesitated for a moment before putting the pack away. Conscience getting the better of him, he turned to their recently arrived guest.

"You want one, Hans?"

The Germanian looked up from the rangefinder he'd been fiddling with and scowled at him. He used his free hand to slap himself emphatically on his chest. "Wolfgang! Wolfgang, I tell you this already. And yes."

"No problem, Hans," Horvat replied. He smiled as the proffered cigarette was snatched away, accompanied by a cloud of muttered profanities.

Hans was a strange guy. He'd spent their first day interrogating Horvat and the rest of his squad as to the distance from the cave to local landmarks and their elevation from the river. Between the language barrier and the fact that he hadn't been satisfied with answers like "it's a ten minute walk," it had been a frustrating conversation all around. The next day Hans had returned with the bulky optical rangefinder and spent his time practically glued to the eyepiece when he wasn't writing numbers down in his little journal. He'd barely spared a word for their machine gun squad.

Still, for all his foibles, Hans had earned the team's affection yesterday, their third day together. When the Ildoans tried to force their way across the river yet again, Hans had gotten on the radio. The only part of that conversation that Horvat could understand was a string of numbers. The result had been obvious, though, as a barrage of artillery had obliterated the Ildoans attacking in their sector. There was a reason people called artillery the queen of the battlefield.

Horvat reached up to give his MG40 a reassuring pat, just in case it had sensed the drift of his thoughts. His girl might not throw massive shells like the big guns, but she made up for it with her rate of fire. For all their foibles, Germanians did good work when it came to military hardware. The MG40 cycled fast enough that the shots didn't even sound like gunfire, but more like a chainsaw or sewing machine.

"They're getting ready for something," Sergeant Mlakar, their squad leader, reported. Horvat ducked his head a bit out of reflex. One of the first things any soldier learned was not to poke your head out to take a look at the enemy if you didn't really have to.

If the Ildoans had any sense, they would have given up the assault as a bad job after their first three tries at it had all ended in disaster. But then, if they'd had any sense, they'd have tossed that idiot Muzzioli out on his ass months ago.

Artillery shells rained down from above. Fortunately, they couldn't do much to Horvat's position other than rearranging the dirt on the hillside above. Between the hill and the fortification of the cave entrance, their squad could only really be threatened by a direct explosive attack. That was unlikely to happen, as one of the benefits of going to war alongside the Devil of the Rhine was that the enemy's mages didn't have time to mess around with normal soldiers.

After an hour or so, the shelling stopped. It was time to do the Devil's needlework.

Horvat settled into position, watching the battlefield below over the sights of his MG40. The river was out of his effective range, but he could see well enough as the Ildoans finished putting their floating bridges together. They were getting pretty good at it with all their practice.

Soon enough there were three bridges stretching across the Isonzo, at least that he could see. He had the best angle on the one in the center and kept his sights trained on it as the first Ildoan tank trundled across. The tank itself was too well armored for him to damage, but the men walking along behind it were vulnerable. Once they crossed into the farmer's field—or what used to be a farmer's field, before the war—that marked the edge of his range, he took aim in earnest. As soon as an Ildoan soldier popped into sight from behind his armored escort, Horvat fired off a quick burst.

The soldier fell. Stray bullets caused sparks as they deflected off of armor, but the tank was unaffected, continuing its steady advance. It looked like the king of the battlefield until the defensive artillery opened up.

There had been a time when Horvat had been jealous of his friends who got to ride around the battlefield in a tank. The thick armor and big gun were everything that he wanted to bring with him to war. Then he'd seen what happened when an artillery shell scored a direct hit.

Now, Horvat just focused on his work, picking off any of the enemy who appeared in his sight. He settled into a steady rhythm. Fire. Fire. Wait for the barrel to be swapped out. Fire some more.

Finally, a few minutes passed without any Ildoans trying their luck. Horvat couldn't have said how long the battle had lasted. At least an hour, judging by the cramping in his fingers.

Just when he thought the fighting was over for the day, he heard the familiar rumble of a tank engine echoing up the hill. Something sounded a bit off, but he couldn't put his finger on it until the first tank of many burst into view from their own back line, charging towards the river. A blur of motion passed overhead and resolved itself into a mage platoon, planted in front of the pontoon bridges and firing towards the Ildoan back line.

"What the hell?"

Hans popped his head up far enough to see what was going on, then burst into laughter. "You didn't think we came all this way just to defend, did you?"

Below, the first Germanian tank had reached the bridge and continued on without pausing, using the enemy's engineering as a springboard for a counterattack. Horvat just stared at the scene and shook his head. He was glad the crazy bastards were on his side.

ooOoo

April 20, 1941

Captain Karoly Meszaros stepped carefully over a pile of horse shit in the middle of the road. It was the most persistent danger that he'd faced since his artillery battery had been attached to the Germanian forces invading Yugoslavia. So far, the only thing that had slowed them down was the atrocious state of the roads.

He was stepping around another pile when he heard a whip crack and had to blink as an unexpected plume of dirt was kicked up into his eyes. He didn't realize what had just happened until he heard a Germanian curse from down the line. Looking up the hill they were passing by, he saw the flash of rifle fire from high up. The hill was too thickly covered in trees to make out any details.

With a yell, most of a Germanian battalion went charging off the road into the woods. Meszaros noted that the other battalion traveling with them had started directing covering fire towards the woods before he turned to his own men.

"Move! We need to return fire!" he ordered. "Novak, unhitch the fucking horse!"

The men snapped into action. They didn't move quite as quickly as they did during drill, but once they started moving they kept moving, paying no mind to the sporadic rifle fire coming down from the hilltop. Meszaros uttered a silent prayer of thanks to the crazy bastards who had charged into the forests for giving the attackers something to think about besides their aim.

Soon enough their gun had been unlimbered and was ready to fire. The gunner turned to look at Meszaros for direction. Fortunately, the top of the hill was close enough that complicated calculations wouldn't be needed.

"Direct fire!" Meszaros barked out. "Top half of the hill!"

The whole situation was far more improvisational than he would have liked. All that he could do was make sure not to hit his allies and try to be useful.

The gun boomed out. Up on the hill, a tree exploded in a shower of splinters. The men worked as a well oiled team, reloading and firing almost without direction. They walked their fire up the hill, taking care to stay ahead of the Germanian charge.

Eventually, the Germanian infantry came visible in a clearing near the top of the hill, and they ceased fire. Meszaros watched as the Germanians pushed the rest of the way up the hill and started firing down the other side.

With the excitement of battle over, Meszaros could finally think about the overall situation. Looking up and down the line, he had to stifle a sigh.

They'd taken the hill. But he'd been through this part of the country before. There were a lot of hills.

ooOoo

April 27, 1941

General Janos Nemeth sat around the map table alongside the rest of Dacian high command. The room was silent. All of them were staring down at the map, hoping for a brilliant stroke of insight or a miraculous report from the field.

They had known since the beginning of the war that the Russy Federation was a formidable foe. It was inevitable that the Rus would strike out with terrible strength. The only question was where the blow would land.

Three days ago, they had received the answer. Dacia and Legadonia were both pressed hard by a tide of men and materiel. Reports of large gatherings of Russy forces came from all up and down the defensive line, freezing any possible reinforcements in place. Meanwhile, the troops in the far north and far south were forced to bear the brunt of the attack.

The Russy Federation was pressing Dacia hard along a front that stretched over one hundred kilometers from the Black Sea. Constant bombardment from the air harassed the defenders while an endless stream of tanks and mobile artillery sought to exploit any cracks in the line. The Dacian troops had reaped a terrible harvest of lives, but the attacks kept coming.

By the end of the third day, the Dacians had been forced to retreat to their second line of defenses. They could no longer take advantage of the Dniester River, but the retreat did compress their defensive line somewhat, helping to mitigate the effect of their losses.

Unfortunately, the Rus showed no aftereffects from their losses either, attacking with the same vigor on the fourth day of their offensive that they had shown on the first. The only saving grace was that the absolute worst case scenario suggested by Germanian intelligence of the deployment of a secret Russy aerial mage force hadn't come to pass. Even so, the Dacian forces were holding on by their fingernails. They had one more prepared fallback position. After that, matters would become rather dire.

General Nemeth was in overall command of the Dacian army. Removed from the front line as he was, the nation's strategy already determined and put into practice, there wasn't much he could do at the moment to influence the course of events. The only real choice left to him was when they would commit the army's reserve forces to battle.

He'd held them back this long out of an excess of caution. Falling back to the second defensive line wasn't a terrible defeat, and the Russy Federation certainly had enough men to cause problems if he committed too many men to the response to their initial attack. More and more, though it looked like the Rus intended nothing more and nothing less than to drive through the southern end of the Dacian line.

The door opened to admit a messenger. The young man saluted, then hesitated a moment before he spoke. "Sir, the commander of the southern flank reports that our defenses have been breached at multiple points. Without reinforcements, he will have to pull back at the end of the day."

General Nemeth steepled his fingers together as he thought. Much as he wanted to keep his reserve units available, at some point holding them out of the battle simply wasted their potential contribution. The Russy attack didn't make much sense as a diversion. If he sent in the reserve they wouldn't be available to reinforce the northern defenses, but Dacia's northern terrain was all forests and hills, slow going for any army. On the other hand, if he held back and the Rus punched through with their current attack they'd be able to fly across Dacia's southern plains.

Just as General Nemeth was about to issue his orders, another messenger burst into the room. He skidded to a halt and bent over, gulping down several huge breaths before he could say anything. "Sir... a Russy attack... from the south."

"Yes," General Nemeth said, gesturing at the map that was amply decorated with enemy units pushing through the south of their defensive line. "We know."

"No," the messenger said, shaking his head. "The southern border! A Russy army is forcing its way across!"

His heart dropped. The southern border was protected by the mighty Danube river. He had stationed a screening force there strong enough to repel any invasion force that Yugoslavia could put together with ease. If a whole Russy army was attacking... the Dacian capital was far too close to the southern border for comfort. Not to mention the oil fields.

Well, at least he knew where he'd be sending the reserves.

General Nemeth steeled his heart and began issuing orders. The men around him jumped into action, working to impose a semblance of order as they sent the army rushing south to defend against this unexpected assault.

Seeing that his directives were being put into action, General Nemeth turned his attention to the report he was going to have to deliver this evening in what was going to be a very uncomfortable meeting with the prime minister.

To save time, he probably ought to start working on a letter of resignation as well.