Cybvep: The size and composition of the Entente armies remain something of a mystery to me. When they were on the offensive in 1916, they seemed limitless, and I haven't exactly been destroying a whole lot of them, certainly not compared to the Russians.
H.Appleby: Yes, France is in for some very interesting times...
Kurt_Steiner : America has remained a somewhat muted threat, owing to the fact that I was never able to build submarines quickly enough to piss them off!
talt/
Viden: The in-game capital has already moved, yes. One of the much-needed improvements over "encircle capital, starve everything else" exploit.
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Chapter I - The Great War - Part XII
One again, General Gallieni found himself in command of an army whose task it was to defend Paris from an inexorable onslaught, not even three years since last faced with the last crisis. But now the odds were stacked impossibly in the enemy's favor. Where the German armies of the Schlieffen Plan were once disorganized, tired, and forced to attack strongly-entrenched positions along a narrow corridor of advance, now the French faced a German army of numerical superiority, surrounding the great metropolis on all sides, and eager to finish the work started three years earlier. Indeed, the situation bore greater similarities to the fateful Paris Commune of 1871 than 1914. Gallieni had twenty-six divisions at his disposal, facing an opponent who could bring as many as eighty-one divisions to bear along the circumference of the line, and he had few illusions as to their ability to resist an all-out assault. Discipline and morale had broken down; many were the survivors of the last several months' fighting, and could scarcely resist the temptations of a hot meal or warm place to sleep within Paris itself, in exchange for the hellish life of the trenches. Nor did the government have any great confidence in a repetition of 1914, having already vacated the capital for distant Bordeaux.
For their part, the Germans were eager to roll up the Parisian pocket and quickly bring the war to a decisive conclusion. Unless Gallieni consented to surrender his army, damaging Paris would be a regrettable, but ultimately necessary, fact of war. If France was willing to jeopardize its capital to devastation, then Germany could scarcely flinch from the prospect. But Gallieni refused to consider any terms of surrender. The French commander was adamant that his men would go down fighting; he would not be remembered as the man who handed Paris to the German invaders. In fact, so adamant was he in snubbing German overtures that the lull in hostilities hardly lasted two days between Paris' encirclement and the resumption of hostilities. On August 10, fifty-nine divisions were thrown against the ramshackle defenders. Day and night, Parisians lived with the endless roar of cannonfire; the flash of guns visible from every direction was a sight none would forget; the city streets were deserted, shops closed, churches and cellars packed with civilians. Slowly but surely, the French defenders were pushed back, constricting the pocket more and more each day. But with every scrap of ground taken, thousands of German soldiers perished, and many on the frontlines had to wonder what kind of city was worth this cost.
The defenders fought on for nearly three weeks against seemingly insurmountable odds, defying all expectations within the German General Staff. But at last, on August 29, his situation hopeless but the honor of French arms intact, Gallieni accepted defeat, surrendering his force to the German army. Though he would not long survive this defeat, for years to come Gallieni's actions would be synonymous with treason, his name reviled by France's nationalists. But his three-week resistance had accomplished much. It had given time for Nivelle and Petain to reform some semblance of a defensive line west and south of Paris, and it had shown to the world France's fighting resolve in the face of disaster. Moreover, his ultimate decision to surrender doubtless preserved many tens of thousands of lives, and spared Paris the heaviest ravages of the Great War that had already reduced much of Europe into crater-marked wasteland.
The fall of Paris was celebrated in Germany just as vividly as the many victories scored on the Eastern Front had been. But a new and profound sense of relief tinged these celebrations: the knowledge that the war was certainly nearly over. Diplomats at the Foreign Ministry began jockeying for positions in the inevitable peace conference that would no doubt be an equal to the Treaty of Westphalia or Congress of Vienna, and the Kaiser began to toy with the idea of going in person, a prelude to a breakout from the straightjacket imposed on him by the military dictatorship running the country. But if the German government expected France to quickly surrender, they were sadly mistaken. Indeed, as the days rolled by, there seemed to be no indication that France had registered this defeat. There were no peace overtures, nor even any declarations of resistance calling for all patriotic Frenchmen to rally around the flag. Diplomatically, France was profoundly silent, much to the discomfort and dismay of the Foreign Ministry.
Finally, on September 6, Germany resumed its offensive, directing the armies that had so recently taken Paris to continue onwards both south and west and perhaps finally bring the French government to the negotiating table. The Entente armies remained in a state of disarray, permitting Germany the luxury of a simultaneous attack against Orleans, Le Mans, and the Normandy region. By the end of September, all three regions had fallen under German control. Once again, Marshal Nivelle had allowed himself to be outmaneuvered, and his entire force of twenty-two divisions was trapped around Caen. By now, it was patently obvious that the Entente military situation, at least in western France, had reached a point of hopelessness. Crack German divisions soon found themselves pitted against African colonial militia forces for control of major cities and strategic geographic points, but enough of an effective Entente military strength remained in the center to repel German offensives directed toward Bourges. And in the east, Petain's defenses in the salient bracketed by Verdun-Longwy-Nancy were as formidable as ever. Hindenburg reasoned that taking this strongpoint would be sufficient to demoralize the French into accepting reality and admitting defeat.
On October 1, the assault on Longwy began, thirty-three divisions facing fifteen French counterparts. It would prove to be another grueling attack, as bloody as any yet seen on the Western Front. His defensive positions were strong, but the military situation had deteriorated such that Petain could hope only to repeat the exploits of Gallieni. On October 30, Longwy fell to the Germans, and within days Nivelle's army in Normandy was forced to surrender as well. Yet still the French government refused to face the hopeless situation and negotiate an armistice, even as the army became less and less capable of even offering the sort of dogged rearguard actions of the past three months. Verdun was carried on November 12 after only eight days of fighting as Petain began pulling whole divisions off the line, and the road was now open to and encirclement of the French forces still in Alsace-Lorraine. But to keep those armies pinned in place for long enough, an attack on the city of Nancy, Petain's headquarters, his army's main supply dump, and perhaps the most heavily defended point in the entire world, was required. It took the primary German strike force twenty days to seize control of Chaumont in the south while their comrades to the north were massacred in suicidal attacks on the heaviest French trench lines around Nancy. In many ways, the Battle of Nancy, in which whole German divisions were decimated, only to be replaced en masse by raw recruits and thrown back into the meat grinder, shattered the pride of the German army - not the generals who oversaw these bloodbaths, but the rank and file. The ease, even eagerness, by which commanders were willing to throw away lives for seemingly trivial strategic concerns, was starkly revealed. Soldiers who saw their comrades slaughtered in the countless thousands could no longer see any glory or honor in what was done, nor was it possible any longer to accept the system that allowed such things to happen. It was disillusionment of the highest, saddest order.
But on December 28, lead units of the German offensive at last reached Belfort, severing the last supply link between Alsace-Lorraine and the rest of unoccupied France. In so doing, the Germany army had encircled another thirty-five divisions in the region that had stood the longest and fought the hardest against the German onslaught. Perhaps once this army was finally forced into surrendering, France would at last admit defeat, four months and millions of casualties since Paris had fallen.