Belgium and Luxembourg fell within days. The UMRE had a weapon that they had stolen from the Germans - tanks. They made invasions quick, but the UMRE had spent years preparing for a war - years preparing to conquer Russia and every nation between them and it. The allies had only known about the war for mere months.
Peace had made Russia complacent. The speed with which Belgium and Luxembourg fell had shocked them, as it shocked their allies, especially Germany. The Germans were the UMRE’s next target, and they knew it.
Unfortunately for the allies, that didn’t matter. The Rhine had been crossed with almost no resistance by 1938. The people of Germany, for all that they were descended from the militaristic Prussians, had been exhausted by their wars of unification and their wars against Russia. They needed far more time than they had.
Marxist revolutions within Germany didn’t help. The Bavarian monarch was overthrown by them, and Bavaria allied with the UMRE, although they refused to join. Mecklenburg fell to a combined communist revolt and attack, and the Marxists advanced along the Baltic. Their target was Russia - many French and Italians were still annoyed about the failure of their unprovoked attack and longed for revenge.
A great German army with tanks finally managed to mobilize in July 1939 on the western banks of the Elbe River, and the first great battle of the Second World War was fought.
The Battle on the Elbe was a bloody affair that took two long and cruel months. The German tanks were united with the great Russian western standard army, and the advance was stopped. Russian cannons fired across the river and killed many men on both sides for around a month, and the German tanks fought against the communist ones in a glorious combat. Even despite this, though, the UMRE’s forces had expected and prepared for resistance - most of their army was engaged at the Elbe. The Germans were fighting valiantly, but they were losing.
Thankfully, Tsar Nicholas, who was commanding the Russians on the Elbe’s eastern banks, realized this. He ordered a war council with his allies, and they determined the major advantage that the Western Europeans had. They were quick and could conquer territory in a short amount of time. Tsar Nicholas knew that the easiest way to fight that was to force them into giving up time. He also knew that their need for vengeance outweighed everything else.
At the Eastern Elbe Conference, the Germans and Russians agreed on a common strategy - let the Germans advance across the Elbe. Let them attack and plunder Russian settlements. Give them their revenge and then rip them apart.
It was cold and cruel, and the Tsar despised it, but it was pragmatic. It would ensure a quick victory in this war and prevent the suffering of millions of people on both sides. Even so, Tsar Nicholas’s war journal survived him, and it tells us of how he felt about the strategy - “it is the kindest option… so why does it taste like ash?”.
Meanwhile, the British landed in Brittany and Galicia, hoping to open up a second front. They encountered little resistance - most of the UMRE’s army cared nothing for their ideology or for their leadership’s dreams of world conquest. Most of their army had joined up for revenge for their defeat in the War of Western Aggression, and that could only be achieved in the east. Even their leaders’s council agreed with this plan.
Perhaps they could have ensured their nation and their ideology’s survival if they had been more pragmatic. Still, as October 1939 dawned, the UMRE looked to be on the verge of subjugating all of Europe from Spain to Russia.