To Stand Against The Night

FD- Fine, geez! Here you go!

Sharur- France is fun, isn't it?

Calbeck- Well, it may not be Clancy, but I'd like to see what Clancy can write in a half hour while IMing his girlfriend and trying to clean! So there! Tom Clancy, are you reading this? I have thrown down the gauntlet!

M506- In real life, I'm an orthopedist. No, actually, I'm a web designer. But I wish I could have seen the look on your face!

January 10, 1937

"An absolute disaster!" Baldwin's voice sounded even more nasal over the telephone than in person. "It's the worst possible news!" Laval grunted and lit a cigar. "There are rumours that they're shooting the volunteers!" Laval snuck a bite of cheese from his lunch. "Pierre, are you even listening?" Laval grunted.

"Stanley, you really do take these things too hard."

"Franco's Nationalists have massacred thousands and set up a new Fascist state on your border, and you- are you eating? How can you be so bloody calm?" Laval sighed.

"One- I've persuaded President-Elect Landon to do something very interesting. Two- Leon Blum, that Red bastard, was just in here being very obsequious, which is all to the good since I beat him in the elections last month. I guess that jobs program extending our fortifications was worthwhile. And three, Franco won't be a problem for long."

"What are you talking about, Laval?"

"As a matter of fact, it should be just about now."

"Oh God. What have you done, Pierre?"

"Stanley, I haven't done anything. However, several of Spain's brightest young staff officers have."

"A coup?"

"I think so. Of course, you know, I can't be certain." Baldwin snorted in dismay.

"What in blazes are you- if you had contacts in Franco's camp, why didn't you do something before the Nationalists overran the country?"

"You won't like the answer, Stanley." Baldwin paused for a moment and sighed. Laval knew that meant he was preparing for an answer. "Very well, then. The Republicans were a rabble- Stalinists and anarchists duking it out, and who do you cheer for in that contest? Franco mopped up a lot of issues that the Republic couldn't. And now we have a stable and friendly power in our rear."

"If not exactly a democratic one." Laval sighed.

"Don't lecture me, Baldwin. French democracy is more important to me than Spanish democracy. Now you need to play host to the Dutch royal family, and I need to call the President of Poland about a military aid package. This is going to be a busy year. Oh, and Stanley- leave the 19th open. I'm planning on hosting a reception for President Quiropa." Baldwin sighed in a temper.

"Who?"

"Well, he should be President of Spain by now. Which reminds me, I need to get down to the shortwave room. I'll talk to you later, Stanley."

"Very well, Pierre. But you had damned well better inform me before you involve the alliance in this sort of adventure again." Laval grunted and hung up. Damned priggish Brits.

Bismarck: [geekery] I did indeed just load up the song. I'm still tinkering with Flash- I've only been using it for a couple of weeks. (Notice there's only one or two real effects!) So you guys are on the blunt end of my experimentation. [/geekery]

BJ: France does have leaders like Laval- rude, cigar-chomping, corrupt shortcut-takers. Of course, so does every other country...

Thanks for the thumbs up, everyone.

January 11, 1937

Jean Denel was not a swearing man, usually. But on special occasions, he could hold his own. He'd been fighting with the Volunteers in Catalonia for five months now, and he couldn't count the number of times he'd been shelled. But this was the first time he'd been shelled from front and behind.

"Merde! God damn their eyes, those sheep-buggering pieces of stinking-" He stopped when his head was jarred by an impact to his helmet. His hands flew up and he checked himself for blood. Slowly, he realized it was just Blair smacking him on the head.

"Dammit, Denel, be quiet. I'm trying to figure something out." Denel rolled his eyes.

"You're a prisoner of war and you're being shelled by two Nationalist factions in the middle of a coup attempt. If you had anything figured out, you'd be swearing louder than me." The lanky Englishman peered at Denel icily and burrowed deeper into their makeshift foxhole.

"I'm just trying to- ah, there." A loud explosion rolled over Barcelona from the rear. "That's Franco's men." Blair took out his ever-present notebook (Denel still had no idea how he'd smuggled it into the camp) and muttered a couple of phrases to himself. When militiamen wearing the emblem of Quiropa's Liberal Conservative Junta entered the camp, Blair shouted "!VIVA QUIROPA!" They laughed and tossed him a loaf of bread and a pack of cigarettes. Trotting east, the militiamen brandished their MAS rifles. One young militiaman, the shadow of a mustache feebly sprouting, waved and shouted.

"Sit tight, Comunistas! We'll have you on a boat for home tonight!"

"AND GOOD RIDDANCE!" bellowed his sergeant, to hearty laughter. Blair offered Denel a cigarette.

"Well, there we are, then. So what are you going to do when you get back to France?" Denel spat.

"Go to work on the Wall, I suppose. If Blum had won the election, I might have gotten my old newspaper job back. But the National Front's disintegrated, as rumor has it. Laval's got the whole country under his thumb, and he's making a pretty penny off it as well. You, Eric?" Blair frowned.

"I said to call me George. I'm working." Blair took a deeg drag off his cigarette. "I'm going back to writing myself, I suppose. Baldwin's been a bit easier on our Socialist papers." Blair sighed. "God, am I going to be glad to see the end of Catalonia..."

Laval’s initiatives continued briskly through 1937, with the Allied Military Exchange providing invaluable assistance to the Netherlands, Belgium and Poland. The hidebound French Army was revitalized by the Gamelin Report of October 1937, which summed up the experience of French ‘volunteers’ during the Spanish Civil War and spurred a major rethinking of French military doctrine. Belated efforts to shore up the Chinese Nationalists also began after the Japanese declared war and moved from Manchuria to take Peking. In December of 1937, the French began work on the prototype of the Hotchkiss medium tank, an advanced design superior to anything else on the battlefield. Confidence in Laval’s government surged after the 1936 elections, and Leon Blum’s National Front disintegrated in factional sniping after the narrow loss. Laval played the Socialist splinter groups off one another, and his public works initiatives (centered around the “Little Maginot” along the Belgian border) kept public opinion favorable.

Yet France was still unready to chance a war; its military was woefully understrength. Laval’s decommissioning of the French cavalry units had left the Maginot Line guarded by sixteen divisions, backed by a single armored corps in reserve. While this deficiency in numbers was made up in part by a new doctrinal flexibility and weapons which had effectively tripled the striking power of the French soldier since 1935, the Wehrmacht had enough manpower to punch through the Maginot Line, or to swing through the Low Countries to strike at France’s still-unmanned Belgian defenses. This imbalance encouraged Hitler to take risks which agonized his underlings and moved the world inexorably towards the maelstrom of war…

-From A History of the Second World War, by Prof. Henry Kissinger

rich-love: How could I not throw in Orwell? VERY SMALL SPOILER ALERT: And let's just say you haven't seen the last Famous American Cameo [EDIT: Yes yes, I know Orwell's not American. I got carried away with planning out the cameos. So yes, the next one will be American].

Sharur: I was so happy when that coup worked. I did a little jig. And as you'll see later on, the extended Maginot Line didn't end up doing me a whole lot of good... but all in time.

The game is played through 1944, where I'm having... troubles... with my extremely large save game files. But more about that down the road. For now, go ahead and reread this fanatically, because the next post won't be until Sunday or Monday evening.

Have a good weekend, all! And for the Europeans, you should be in bed! It's what, two or three in the morning?

Thanks, everyone!

The coup was actually a spur-of-the-moment decision. I'm really glad it worked... it would have reeeeeally been bad if I'd botched a coup attempt in Spain. Fortune favors the bold!

The Adventure Continues [TM]!

March 13, 1938

Joint Allied Headquarters had, until the month before, been an unremarkable quiet warehouse on the outskirts of Paris, chosen for its proximity to several rail lines. Now, it was seething with chaos. Junior officers raced from desk to desk, carrying sheafs of paper. Ambassadors and heads of state were arriving, their entourages milling in the way, and over everything the roar of men on the edge of exhaustion. Laval gritted his teeth. This undisciplined mob, skittering about and mopping their brows... these men hoped to oppose Hitler? Angrily he gestured to Marshal Gamelin, who had come to inform Laval of the disaster. Gamelin stepped forward and caught the eye of a lieutenant. The lieutenant caught himself and snapped to attention. At the lieutenant's shout of "ATTENTION!", the room suddenly went still, except for the chatter of telegraphs and the shrill ring of telephones. Laval stepped forward.

"I am here. And the Commonwealth ministers are arriving as well. The situation is in hand. Focus on your assignments, and we'll be able to focus better on ours. Now calm down and simply get the facts. Back to your work." Laval waved his hand and the spell was broken. The French commanders breathed deep and went back to their stations, the urgency now grimness.

Laval went to the map of Europe on the wall, the markers of German divisions driving into Austria. Seyss-Inquart, that toadying fool... he had delivered his country into unimaginable slavery. Laval thought back to a summit he'd had with the former Chancellor of Austria, Schussnigg... Seyss-Inquart had lurked in the background. There'd been something unsettling in the man's cold beady stare. Laval suddenly realized what that look was- the look of the midly intelligent businessman who had gotten in above his head by sheer stubbornness. The man driven to succeed, who had found himself out of his depth and yet determined to hold on to the power he'd stumbled on to.

In short, the man who'd sold Austria reminded Laval too much of himself. Laval lit a cigar, taking care to hide the tremor in his hand.

An aide stepped forward and saluted. "The Commonwealth Ambassadors are here, Your Excellency, but..." The aide furrowed his brow and ground out his next words. "Prime Minister Chamberlain has convened a Cabinet meeting. He has informed our Ambassador that a unified Allied response would be unseemly. He wants to wait for the results of the plebiscite." Laval's blood surged.

"GOD DAMN THAT FOOL! You get to the telegraph and you tell the Ambassador to pass this on- this is not about the will of the Austrian people. This is about halting the career of a man bent on a war that will ruin us all. I don't give a flying damn if the Austrian people think Hitler walks on water and heals lepers. And tell Chamberlain if he doesn't see that, he's a bigger fool than Seyss-Inquart!" The aide blinked and stood quietly for a moment. Laval finally sighed and slumped into a chair.

"On second thought, let me work on that statement a little." The aide saluted crisply and departed.

Morph- I wasn't done! O ye of little faith...

June 12, 1938

Neville Chamberlain was a fool. Laval glowered in a plume of cigar smoke, watching the new Hotchkiss tanks go through their drills. The Assembly had refused his request for funding, and so these six prototypes were the only modern tanks in France's arsenal. And Chamberlain... holding a perfumed handkerchief to his nose against the diesel fume. Laval suppressed a juvenile urge to trip him in the mud of the proving grounds.

The tanks rolled over a hill and Chamberlain applauded distantly, as he might for children playing a tennis match for charity. The Prime Minister of Britain turned to Laval.

"I say, they make a dreadful racket, don't they?" Laval puffed on his cigar and grunted sourly. Chamberlain nattered on obliviously. "Well, these new machines are all well and good. But we must speak of more practical matters. The Germans in the Sudetenland are agitating for annexation now. Our agents say the first public announcements are coming soon."

"June 18th, our agents inform us. Nine in the morning, Berlin time."

"Hm. Yes. Well, we-"

"And it's hardly the Sudeten Germans agitating. It's those shiny new printing presses in the Sudetenland marked 'Made in Hamburg.' For God's sake, Chamberlain, Hitler doesn't carry Robert's Rules of Order in his back pocket like you. This is dirty business and the sooner you get that through your head, the better." Chamberlain sniffed.

"Come now, Pierre. We both know that for all Mr. Hitler's histrionics, it's the better class of people really running things in Berlin. The old school boys, who funded him in the first place. They simply backed a winning horse. Behind every minister in my Cabinet, there's a bureaucrat covered in dust pulling the strings. It's the same in Berlin. They're playing hardball, but trust me. Nothing that can't be settled in the club over a nip of sherry." Laval groaned.

"Dammit, Chamberlain, Hitler didn't go to the right schools like you. I know this man, because I was him. I came up from the ranks. My gut churned like his, seeing the 'old school boys' sail through life while he scraped for everything he got. I worked for money. He worked for power. But we come from the same place." Laval lit a fresh cigar, spitting the end on the ground. "The aristocrats who funded Hitler for a tax break or a contract are gone. It's Hitler's party men in charge now. Have you read Hitler's book? It's not a piece of shrewd calculation, no matter how badly you want Hitler to be a man you can talk to on your blinkered terms. There's something deeply wrong inside his head. He wants to remake the world, Chamberlain. He wants a Crusade, an apocalypse. You can't reason with him. He'll smile and shake your hand and then he'll turn around and follow his madman's script just the same." Chamberlain sighed.

"Oratory aside, Pierre, I really do think you're following the wrong tack, fortifying and bullying when Hitler's forces outnumber yours two to one. He doesn't want a war. He wants to go down in history, perhaps, but who doesn't? Trust me." Laval glowered.

"I trust you, Neville. You're too damned priggish to break your word. I don't trust Hitler."

September 29, 1938

Munich.

Laval's gut churned as his limousine drove through Munich to the old castle where the negotiations were taking place. Chamberlain, the fool, had already met twice with Hitler, at Berchtesgaden and Bad Godesburg. Twice, Hitler had erupted in fury, pounding the table and storming out.

You would think, Laval muttered to himself, that twice would be enough. But Chamberlain had still insisted on another round of meetings. Blum's Socialists were reorganizing in the Assembly, blocking attempts at a new callup of forces. France's army needed another year to rearm. The most he'd been able to squeeze out of them was a program of wargames, to test the army's new weapons and tactical thinking. So Laval had finally gone along, grudgingly. He was here to play a delaying game. Gambling with Hitler. This was madness.

The limousine drove silently down the newly scrubbed streets of Munich, concrete pillars holding the red banners of Hitler's New Order. Everywhere, ugly concrete monstrosities were rising out of the ground, testaments to Hitler's tone-deaf sense of grandeur. Laval closed his eyes and concentrated on the task ahead.

He was the last to arrive, ostentatiously ignoring the heel-clicking German attache sent to assist him. As the massive oaken doors to the conference room began to swing open, Laval turned around and solemnly handed the man his spit-soaked cigar butt.

The doors swung shut, and for the first time Laval looked into the eyes of Adolf Hitler.