Re: Blood and Iron

Revolutionary sentiment within France had been curbed for a time, but after suffering through continuous defeats on the battlefield, it became clear that the people had been lied to by those in power.

And this had once more caused protests to break out across the country. Whether it was the Marxist revolutionaries who sought to install a communist utopia within the borders of France, or right-wing reactionaries who blamed the defeats in 1871, and the ongoing losses during the Great War on their own failing republic. All who wished to participate in civil unrest were making their voices heard.

To combat these protests, the French Government began to crack down on them, dispersing any gathering of ten or more people with law enforcement agencies, while imposing a curfew on all citizens.

In addition to this, anyone caught spreading "defeatist" sentiment was jailed without proper legal recourse. Only further adding to the powder keg that was waiting to blow. You see, if someone had a grievance, whether legitimate or otherwise, the last thing you wanted to do was silence them.

Because if you took away the ability of the people to speak of their concerns, whether through legal means, or by trying to ruin their livelihood via socio-economic pressure, then the only thing that remained to express what they believed was violence.

It was perhaps one of the reasons Bruno had feared in his past life the future of his own nation. As when government figures came out stating that free-speech should not be permitted if it allowed the rise of dissenting viewpoints, well then those people who believed such things had only one option left to get their point across.
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And when that happened civil war was but a stone's throw away from engulfing the nation. Public debate and political discourse were the lifeblood of a republic. If you began to suppress opinions you did not like, you only encouraged them to become violently dissident.

This was not a problem for more authoritarian governments such as monarchies, dictatorships, and other forms of autocracies. As they did not falsely preach lofty ideals such as free speech, equality, and democracy. Nor would they care to.

But in a republic, founded under so called "democratic ideals" to reject these notions for thee but not for me was hypocrisy, and hypocrisy was something universally despised by human cultures around the world.

For example, If a leader of a nation was to call themselves an autocrat, and openly preach that they were going to suppress the people's freedom of speech, infringe upon their so called "human rights", rig elections in their party's favor (assuming they even had elections in the first place), imprison their political rivals, and outlaw political parties which expressed disagreement with their worldview?

Most people would accept it. These were the rules they lived in, and while this autocrat in power might be "bad" at least he was honest about what he was doing.

But for the democratically elected politicians who espoused the exact opposite of this behavior, and yet conducted themselves in the same manner? This could not be tolerated! Why was one acceptable and the other was not? Hypocrisy. That alone was a sufficient reason for people to rise up in rebellion.

And this was also the straw that broke the camel's back within the French Republic. For a nation which painted the nations of the Central Powers as autocratic hellholes with no regard for the principles of the enlightenment and democracy, the Republic's own leaders were behaving precisely such.

Thus, once more, violence was being conducted in the streets. The scale and scope of which varied per region, for example in Paris where the Government had the number of law enforcement, and gendarme's available to protect law and order, violence was limited to a few minor engagements between protestors of various political backgrounds, as well as with the agents of the republic.

Built in the countryside everything from bombings, stabbings, shootings, et cetera. But oddly enough, Bruno did not have a role to play in any of this. His focus was on the war effort, and crushing the French Army in a way so devastating that the French would never threaten to test the might of the Reich again.

His strategic goal was to protect the German borders, and the unification of the Reich, as well as to crush the will of the French to fight any further wars in the future. And aiding the chaos occurring within the Republic right now was counter to those goals.

As the French could always use German contributions to the escalation of violence as justification for future wars. And what would be the purpose of being reincarnated into this timeline, and fighting the Great War, if the Second World War would occur in the future, regardless?

Or such were Bruno's thoughts? Was the possibility of ending the hostilities sooner through aiding an abetting French revolutionary forces a possibility? Most certainly, but it was short term thinking. And Bruno would not sacrifice the long-term objectives he had in mind for such petty gains.

However, not everybody within a position of power within the German Reich had a similarly long-term view of this conflict. To Bruno, this was the war that single-handedly ended Western Civilization and put humanity on a route to certain ruin.

A new dark age loomed on the horizon in his past life, and this war was the cause of it. But nobody could possibly understand such A thing, not a normal person who had not lived through the consequences of the Great War.

Most men thought in terms of short term tangible benefits, few had the ability to think five years advance, let alone ten, and god forbid an entire century. Thus, there were people within the Bundesrat, Reichstag, and German High Command, who very much wanted to supply the French Rebels.

And why wouldn't they? The Imperial German Army had hundreds of thousands of Mauser 98s lying in storage, and even more Gewehr 88s. Scrub a few markings here, re-chamber the rifles into 8mm lebel there, chop the barrel into a carbine length, and bam you have a rifle that is butchered just enough to give doubt towards its origins. After all, the Mauser 98 action had been adopted by militaries around the world and came in a wide variety of cartridges.

It would be very difficult to precisely pin such butchered weapons scrubbed of all markings on the German Reich. Sure, everyone may know that the Germans were the ones providing such weapons to French revolutionaries, but… The term "plausible deniability" existed for a reason.

And that was exactly what German high command had done to further instigate the ongoing civil strife within the French Republic. Something which when Bruno discovered would not be the least pleased with….