Re: Blood and Iron

Smoke and ruins. That was all that remained at the border between what the Italians had gained from their 1914 Winter Offensive, and what Austria currently held. Well, smoke, ruins, and a metric shit ton of dead bodies.

Under Bruno's orders, the Allied Soldiers were fired upon without remorse, or quarter. They had not even had a chance to raiser the white flag and attempt a surrender because the overwhelming volume of fire they were under was enough to completely annihilate their forces.

This was more or less how Bruno had expected this battle to be. His infantry only deployed from the backs of their armored vehicles and scaled into what remained of the allied trenches after the gunfire had ceased. Find your adventure at empire

Their job was simply to confirm that the enemy was dead, and to put anyone unfortunate enough to still be breathing out of their misery. When it came to warfare in the early 20th century, mobility was king. The faster one was able to mobilize the firepower they had available to them onto their targets, the better their chances of victory were.

And Bruno just so happened to be extremely adept at commanding combined arms units. This was, after all the standard format of 21st century units. And how warfare was supposed to be waged against a conventional force.

The way Bruno saw it, his army was damn near unbeatable in the current era. To put it simply, even if the allies had the means to damage or destroy his armored vehicles, which they were currently trying their best to figure out how to effectively do so, they lacked the means to rapidly transport them into play on the battlefield.

Whereas Bruno could sweep past fortification after fortification before he ever met a foe capable of properly countering him. There was just one problem with this: he had the only combined arms field army in the world. Meaning that he had to wait for his much slower allies to catch up to him in order to provide support.

A field army was a sizeable force, and when operating on a battlefield was hard to counter. But the enemy was using army groups on a massive scale to defend their territory. And despite the fact that he possessed superior firepower and mobility, if an entire army group were to withdraw to a singular line of defense to entrap him, there would be no fighting his way out of that mess.

Because of this, Bruno never advanced beyond the support of his allies. After all, a single field army after all could not win a war by itself. Hence why, after taking the fortification at the border, where Allied forces had been their strongest, Bruno and his field army waited for their allies to do their jobs.

It was a rather difficult position to be in. They had just turned the defensive line into a wasteland of rubble and debris. Meanwhile, it would probably be days, or even weeks, before news arrived on the wire of their allies having success with their own assaults.

Because of this, Bruno ordered the armored units to form a line of defense, where the soldiers quickly got to work scavenging what they could while disposing of the corpses that lie hewn across the devastated landscape.

All the while Bruno fancied himself a walk, as he got out of the back of his own armored vehicle and walked towards a rather noticeable ruin. Bruno quickly found himself standing upon what remained of that which he presumed to be the Allied command bunker.

Within the ruins, he found the deceased remains of several Allied officers, including what appeared to be an Italian General. There was also a tattered Italian banner which Bruno found pierced by the pole it had clearly been flying upon prior to the assault.

After grabbing the banner and ripping it off of the iron mast, he quickly unfolded it, revealing the flag of the Kingdom of Italy. However, unlike the Ottoman flag, Bruno did not set the Italian colors ablaze. In stead, he rolled it up nicely into a triangle, and placed it neatly on the lap of the deceased Italian General.

Ian doing so, Bruno said a silent prayer for the recently departed, before speaking in near flawless Italian, saying his apologies to the men he had laid to waste.

"Contrary to my reputation, I never wanted to be at odds with any of you. Had the war been avoidable, and we could have all lived peaceful lives with our wives and children… I would have preferred such a fate… Unfortunately, the powers that be decided that we must wage war against one another.

And your bravery in the face of certain death has been most admirable to witness. You can rest easy General, as I make this solemn vow to you. I promise that I will not lay Rome to waste, and will do everything in my power to preserve the history, culture and architecture of your people, as I march to your capital.

The same cannot however be said for the men I encounter on the way there…"

After saying this, Bruno walked away from the corpses of the Allied Commanders, and returned to his own halftrack, where he got on the radio and listened to the most recent reports. The invasion of Italy had just begun, and Bruno would not rest until Rome fell to his control.

Even so, it was not like the Allies planned to just wait for Bruno and his army to march into the Italian capital. No… They had already been alerted to the assault on their defenses, and were preparing to withdraw their forces further inland to prepare a proper counter attack.

This was despite the fact that Bruno's advance had come far sooner than expected, and ended in victory almost immediately after the battle began. And while the Allies believed they could succeed in resisting his invasion, the soldiers feared that they would be facing an unprecedented number of armored vehicles.

Their assumptions would indeed prove correct, as a tidal wave of steel was waiting to crash over them.