The Legacy of the Trenches (Germany 1902-1912)
For Central Europe and more precisely the German-speaking populations, the Great War resulted in a lot of changes. Most of them were deeply unpleasant for the local populations who had supported the European Union.
Dutch Germany was no more. The realm had been more an artificial nation as France and its allies weren’t eager to swallow towns with tens of thousands of insurgents before the world was set in fire. But what was true before the Great War wasn’t after the fact. The Entente troops had wiped out an incredibly number of rebels and irregular troops, and the number of Dutch German killed for treasonous plots, sabotages and anti-Entente actions increased a lot year after year. Many public offenders were exiled overseas, where they would join the ranks of the Alliance or other discontents.
But for the Germans, this didn’t change the fact that the Entente had won and the Union had lost. Saxony, once a mighty colossus boasting it was reunify everything between the Rhine and the Oder under its banner, was now of a shadow of itself. By 1902, the newly formed Republic of Saxony had 10 million inhabitants and was utterly bankrupt.
The 1900s were a particular dark time for the Saxons. While they still had relationships with Poland, they were now surrounded by larger and hostile powers. Bavaria especially had several years to experience what the ‘Saxon benevolence’ truly meant, and it was not an equal-to-equal relationship, more like master-servant.
Saxony was ruined, its economy barely sufficient to cover the costs of rebuilding and housing the refugees who had been expelled from the lands annexed by their neighbours. Unemployment was rife, food riots were not an uncommon sight, and political coups happened so often the foreign newspapers stopped commenting it with anything resembling surprise.
From 1901 to 1907, Saxony went through two extremely short-lived monarchic restorations, three different Republican constitutions and it was rumoured that one of the many usurpers was the incognito disgraced Emperor. This unruly period only ended when a former Colonel overthrew the last unpopular regime and proclaimed the Dominion of Saxony. The officer declared himself Protector of the Dominion, and many theoretical laws concerning freedom of press and assembly were immediately declared null and void. The reign of the self-proclaimed Protector Friedrich von Sachsen had begun.
South of it, the Kingdom of Bavaria and its 14 million inhabitants were governed by Maximillian III ‘the Paranoiac’. After Saxony launched a surprise attack and years of humiliation, the new monarch of Southern Germany had absolutely zero trust in Saxony and Hungary-Austria, and began to orient his country towards a pro-western course. The Bavarians definitely approved. While trade connections were still important with the rest of Central Europe, the representatives of Regensburg had many times to report the time where the trade tariffs were low belonged to a long-gone era. Bavaria had invested in a brand-new army and many brand-new airplanes by 1910. Neutrality had been tried and hadn’t worked. Now Munich and its loyal subjects would ensure their protection by force of arms and potential invaders would be received with shells and bullets.
This strategy of course demanded the support of Paris, as the frontier between Bavaria and Westphalia had been completely devastated by the terrible years of trench warfare. Fortunately for the treasury of poor Bavaria, Empress Charlotte agreed. France had fought the Saxons and the Union in Germany, and it had spared the French frontier territories. The Bavarians could be useful keeping the Saxons and the Dual-Republic in check if the divisions of the Rhine needed to mobilise.
Of course, the monumental damage done to Germany didn’t heal in a single day or even in a year. There had been so many landmines hidden, so many shells fired, so many waste of the horrors of industrial warfare, that even with the support of France, the demining and salvage operations would continue for the next decade. As photos revealed the scale of the devastation, dark-themed artists outnumbered for a few years everything else. The no-man’s land, the craters, the desolations...everything was shredded and pulverised in the war-torn areas.
In the middle of this disaster, Westphalia emerged the winner. Now under the rule of Grand-Duke Albrecht IV, the state under French protection had proven its loyalty to the Entente and managed to save most of its most valuable industry. By 1903 and the divide was complete, Westphalia had 27 million citizens and the parliamentary monarchic-duchy shield-nation was poised to become the dominant force in German lands. It had been granted the access to the North it had wanted for decades, boosting its economy as 1910 arrived, and it had only Denmark and Saxony as potentially hostile neighbours.
The Free City of Amsterdam, Major Koen van Casteel and its six hundred thousand inhabitants remained as complex oddity in this new world. No one, including the Entente and the survivors of the Alliance, was exactly sure to do about them. Yet pragmatism and real-life concerns rapidly ensured a role was found for it. The extremely liberal taxation and the freedom granted by the lax laws ensured rapidly the ‘Northern Venice’ became a neutral ground where all other Empires and kingdoms could meet each other without starting diplomatic incidents. Human nature being what it was, fiscal evasions increased massively in Amsterdam’s direction, and all sort of gambling and exotic establishments opened between 1905 and 1912.
Still, stone by stone, the heavy legacy of the era began to be erased from the fields and the forests, if not from the memories and the hearts.
But not far from these countries, another crisis was brewing. And it was going to begin in Switzerland.
in the Atlantic France hold the small islands, by virtue of them having total naval supremacy in the theatre.