War and Revolution
Beginner historians are generally inclined to write history as if peace is naught but a necessary prelude to war. They treat the brisk four to six year war as if it were the purpose of the preceding twenty years of peace. For the most part they ignore what was, without a doubt, the most brutal period of European history, the period about which I am about to write. Maybe that is because this period gives the lie to the notion that war is glorious.
The fifty years war began in 1725 in the fourth year of Tord Burlow’s reign. It began with Vinland declaring war on Spain over yet another trade embargo. It ended with the fall of the Vinland monarchy. For over fifty years Vinland never knew a full year of peace and in that time Europe never experienced three months of peace. Historians generally get confused trying to sort out when who was at war with whom. I do too and I lived through it. The series of wars fueled by vainglorious and sometimes deranged monarchs left Vinland in a position from which she could have easily conquered the world. In the end she chose a far more glorious national vocation.
The first cycle of wars ended with Vinland humiliating Spain, and devastating what remained of France. In this war, as in every other war in the cycle, Austria came in for special attention and was left with most of her cities in flames. “Remember Marta!” was a battle cry that rang over the battlefields of Central Europe for almost thirty years. That war ended in October 1729. In March of 1730 our troops were once again on the march, this time against Turkey. That war ended with Dubjak and Rumelia being ceded to Vinland and the Uzbeks fully annexed. When the last gun fell silent on the Balkan front in 1733 King Tord begin planning another war against Spain for having the temerity to establish a trading post in Tallahassee. In March of 1734 we declared war on Spain and fought the usual war against the usual European enemies. Although these wars resulted in great gains they were far from glorious. The usual strategy was assembling several siege armies, besieging the enemy’s cities, recruiting more men and feeding them into the sausage grinder. I began to doubt that the conquests were worth the cost in lives, treasure and popular support but Tord would not hear any of it. When I tried to suggest a political solution for the tortured continent Tord simply said, “We must conquer more than the Swede who came before Us!” He was a pompous, vainglorious fool. His only redeeming quality is the fact that his son was worse.
In 1740 the king looked around and realized we didn’t have a casus belli against anyone in Europe, save our Dutch allies who had built a trading post in Tallahassee. The only casus belli we had was against the Empire of the Rising Sun for a trade embargo. Naturally we declared war and set sail with two large forces that went to the north and south of the island chain. The sieges in the Japans dragged on and on with no end in sight. It took four years to wrest the provinces of Kyushu and Honshu from Nippon.
In the meantime of course Europe erupted again. By the time we had wrapped up that series of wars the king was itching to reopen Mascate and Thrace to trade. When we declared war on Turkey in 1750 our Russian and Dutch allies informed us that they were withdrawing from the alliance and that we should expect no aid from them in the future. Tord was outraged and wanted to declare war. I suggested he wait.
On May 3, 1750 as Tord berated a joint session of the Vinthing demanding a declaration of war against Russia and the Netherlands a diplomatic courier came in and gave me a dispatch from The Hague. It was the Netherlands’ declaration of war. I laughed out loud and then held it up to catch the king’s eye. When he paused and I told him what it was he seemed genuinely shocked.
By this time we began to field a more impressive breed of generals. We commissioned Prussians like von Steuben, Poles like Pulaski, and the sons of English émigrés such as Washington, Lee, and Greene. Still, we managed to lose several battles during this period. At one point an Austrian army of 20,000 or so annihilated three of our armies of comparable strength. Of course a great general led that Austrian army. There would be one great and climactic battle between great generals but that would be twenty some years in the future and would effectively end the 50 years war.
By the 1760s our people were restive. I was able to prevent any war from dragging out more than five or six years and so kept actual rebellions to a minimum but in this effort the new king, George Burlow, opposed me. In several cases I negotiated the peace and slipped it in to a stack of papers for George to sign. He never wanted to bother with actually reading anything so it always worked.
When George first came to the throne in 1753 I sensed that he would be catastrophic. I never dreamed he could continue to build an empire and then lose it because his people had grown war weary. In my first meeting with him he announced that he intended to conquer all, “those lands of the unrighteousnessed (sic) sinners… which is our illegitimate right!” He dreamed of finishing the job his father started and conquering Nippon and imagined he would conquer China in one campaign. He also had a special hatred for Russia and Rome as centers of “pompitous (sic) religion and wickedness”. He once told me that he had it on reliable authority that the Czarina Katerina the Great was the great harlot mentioned in the book of Revelation and that the Pope was the Antichrist. He was as dull witted as he was bigoted and it pained me to see him wearing the same crown as Aesgir and Johan. He was the most unworthy king I ever tried to counsel. By 1768 I no longer cared about the wars. We had wrested Novgorod from Russia, annexed Austria and diplomatically annexed Helvetia. We stood completely alone in the world. Had we not also stood astride it like a colossus we would have been in extremis.
On May 4, 1770 I witnessed the last straw. A group of students were protesting our imbecilic king’s latest insane war when a group of soldiers marched onto the University Commons and opened fire. Four students lay dead and several others were wounded. The image forever burned into my mind is of the impossibly young female professor leaning over the body of one of her students and lifting her head with a look of horror on her face. It took many, many years for poor Jane to recover from the shock of seeing her students gunned down by soldiers her husband had once commanded. After that I made contact with a group known as the Sons of Liberty and began plotting the downfall of King George.
In December of 1775 I could sense that the end game had begun for King George. The House of Jarls had agreed to invest the Speaker of the House of Commons with the power to “formulate and execute the fiscal and international policy of Vinland”. The King fumed that it was treason. An orator by the name of Patrick Henry quipped, “If this be treason let us make the most of it!”
From December to July there was an uneasy standoff. Then, On July 4, 1776 the newly styled “Hemispheric Congress” adopted a “Declaration of Deposition” which deposed King George. The King summoned, Henry (“Light Horse Harry”) Lee, the new commander of the Vaestervik garrison and instructed him to arrest the members of the Congress. “I am sorry your majesty. This I cannot do. I have already received orders to arrest your majesty for treason. I choose to obey the orders of the Congress.” In the end I prevailed upon the members of the special court to declare the Burlow family outlaws and effectively banish them rather than become regicides. That choice paid rich dividends within two years.
On October 22, 1778 Nathaniel Greene commanded an army of 35,000 near Novgorod as an army of 45,000 under the command of Alexander Suvarov marched from Moscow. The eight-day battle of Novgorod ended with Greene commanding a force of 11,000… and victorious! As Suvarov limped back to Moscow with nothing but an artillery train of some 55 canon Katarina sent a request for peace in exchange for Pskov and Estonia. We eagerly accepted and thus ended the 50 years war. Vinland would not fight another war in the 18th century. During the next 14 years Vinland adopted a new constitution that only extended full citizenship to those in the western hemisphere. I did not know it but there was a reason for that.
On the occasion of his second inauguration as President in March of 1793 George Washington addressed a joint session of what was now known as the Congress of the United States of Vinland.
“698 years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and possessed of the strength that comes from democratic traditions. In the name of survival we have embraced monarchy, raised the largest armies in world history, become entangled in the European web of alliances and become the greatest empire in world history…” As the crowd roared I beamed with pride. George held his hands up for quiet and continued. “Yet all of our glory threatened something more precious than our power or our standing in the world. It threatened our freedom. While we must acknowledge our debt to those who engineered our rise to power” at this point he looked directly at Aud and me as if to acknowledge us, “we must also recognize that the price of their gift is a great risk of losing liberty again. Large standing armies are not compatible with democracy, neither are alliances with despots. To retain the empire we would need to follow this path. Therefore, in November of the next year the peoples of Europe shall hold an election and choose freely to be admitted as states or to secede. This decision shall be binding…”
As he continued I noticed tears flowing down Aud’s cheeks. I reached over and took her hand and squeezed. She turned and smiled. After the speech I tried to console her and she said, “Oh Ole! You don’t understand. I couldn’t have been more proud of this George if he were my son! Do you remember when we left Dublin? We said we would search the world for a place to call home? We have finally found a people who value freedom more than power. We are home Ole! We are finally home.”