PART 76: Begin Again! (1/1/1936 – 7/24/1936)

PART SEVENTY-SIX: Begin Again! (January 1, 1936 – July 24, 1936)

Excerpts from A Soldier’s Life: The Memoirs of Field Marshal Theodora Papadopoulou. By the mid-1930s, described in the selected passages below, Theodora Papadopoulou had long been one of the most storied and well-known soldiers in the Byzantine Commune’s history. After joining a socialist militia as a teenager at the onset of the 1883 Revolution, Papadopoulou survived the disastrous defeat dealt to the Communards by Republican forces in Constantinople (the so-called “Massacre of the Ten Thousand”) and enjoyed a meteoric rise through the ranks of the Red Guard and, eventually, the regular army of the Byzantine Commune. A leading general in the First Great War, she was one of the only army officers to survive the debacle of Byzantium’s defeat and the imposition of the Treaty of Jaragua with her reputation intact, and was one of the architects of the rebuilt New Red Army that fought in the Second Great War. She commanded Byzantine and allied forces in many of the most famous land engagements of the war, including the Battle of Avalon’s Neck, perhaps the linchpin of the Byzantine push to relieve the beleaguered Haida forces along Avalon’s Pacific coast.

Field Marshal Theodora Papadopoulou

At two in the morning, an aide woke me up with news that Poland had launched an invasion of Bohemia at the stroke of midnight.

A hasty meeting of the general staff was convened within hours. Some of my comrade-officers seemed surprised that the ‘peace’ that had lasted since the Polish invasion of the NGF ran out of gas in 1932 broke so suddenly, that once more life in the Near West was punctuated by the sharp cracking of gunfire, the thunder of artillery, the low drone of warplanes.

Idiots.

It was patently obvious that the king of Poland was on Valeria’s shitlist.

It was obvious that he’d go for a softer target than the NGF the first chance he got. Bohemia was an old-style monarchy in a world rapidly losing the patience for such things. Vladan I was popular at home for his role in liberating the Bohemians from Hungary, but he was of a dying breed. Poland dressed up its casus belli in the language of the old world of kings and queens– some bullshit about the Valois-Vexin dynasty having a claim to the Duchy of Bohemia following the messy dissolution of the Kingdom of Hungary– but not even the Poles themselves took that serious. This was a fascist war– not for dynastic glory, but for power, and the blunt exercise thereof.

Discussion quickly turned to the military preparedness of the Byzantine Commune. The verdict: piss poor.

The industry and might of our workers– was hobbled by a soft, peacetime footing. Byzantine factories were tied up in the sort of palliative consumer manufacturing that helped Cavinato hang on after the 1GW, but was anachronistic by 1936. The 2GW didn’t last long enough for anyone to learn their lesson.

Didn’t last long enough for the officer corps of the New Red Army to pull its collective head out of its ass, either. The Navy took all the credit for winning 2GW, just like the Army took all the blame for losing 1GW. So anyone with an ounce of ambition for a military career went right to the Navy, leaving behind a staff of officers not ready for the freight train heading their way. My daughter told me that, in private, Comrade-Tribune Erdemir described the officer corps as ‘sclerotic’.

I’d use stronger language than that. “Completely shit,” maybe. But I didn’t have a chip on my shoulder about showing off a university education despite being born in Bumfuck, Anatolia, like the Tribune did.

But the Commune was still where the revolution burned brightest. Whatever organizational, logistical, or strategic problems the military has, I knew the people were willing to fight.

Willing to go down swinging, if it came down to it.

But I’d rather win than go down swinging.

So across the Commune, the first weeks of 1936 saw troops redeployed, borders manned, fortifications built, plans made. Across a frontline that spanned the subcontinent, RRP and WRE troops massed. Waiting. War was a matter of when, not if.

It’s a rare gift to be able to the shape of things to come so certainly, and plan for that future.

A gift I could only hope the Byzantine Commune wouldn’t squander.

Because the consequences of being caught with your pants down in times like this are swift and deadly.

In Bohemia, the defensive lines were being ground down by the fascists. Dug-in pickets became ad-hoc lines of retreat, which became salients, which became encirclements. Eastern Bohemia was already little more than a charnel-house; by February it seemed a near-certainty that the west, too, would fall.

And yet in Byzantium, valuable time and effort was being spent untangling the domestic political situation.

When I first met Iouliana Erdemir, I thought she was soft. Too young for the First Great War, at sea for the Second.

By all accounts, she served with distinction aboard the Hippolyta, the Navy was instrumental to the war’s grand strategy, but let’s face it, the war at sea was just a nautical turkey shoot. Commissioned naval officers are soft. Good at what they do, but soft, spending the war in wardrooms and bridges, staring out across the sea from the quarterdeck. Honorable service, but she wasn’t in the shit with the common soldiers. For all that the officer corps got the blame for losing 1GW– justifiably, even– they were still ankle-deep in mud, down in trenches dug through hell on Earth with the rest of their men and women, enduring round-the-clock artillery bombardment, struggling to breathe through gas-masks.

Well. The officers worth a damn, anyway. Not the ones running the war from their villas in México, miles behind the lines.

Also, Erdemir was fucking my daughter. Reason enough to hold her to a higher standard.

Left: Erinna Papadopoulou, daughter of the famous Field Marshal Papadopoulou; Right: Iouliana Erdemir, Tribune of the Byzantine Commune

As I got to know her, though, I realized there was more to her than I thought. Something that set her apart from the political functionaries who swarmed around the House of the Golden Horn, jockeying for cabinet positions or Ekklesia seats.

Or from the various mediocrities clogging the general staff Field Marshals Barthas, Hayrettin, and I had to sort through, for that matter.

Sometimes– during our frequent meetings on the deteriorating situation in Bohemia, perhaps, or backstage at tedious civic functions, or when Erinna dragged Iouliana alone when she came to visit home– sometimes, Iouliana would get that same faraway look I’d see from veterans of the First Great War. I had no idea what her life was like before what’s in her Naval records, but I decided that clearly she’d been in the shit. In some way or another– there are a lot of ways you can be in the shit, but they all leave a mark. Beneath the rural accent and the folksy wisdom, the sober grey suits and the quiet, knowing smiles, there was iron. There was fire.

In any case, we managed to cobble together a passable command structure for standing Byzantine forces. For the time being, anyway.

Bohemia was burning. The larger nations of Europe circled like hungry wolves, sizing one another up. As usual, though, everyone in the Near West kept a wary eye on the east. In the Ming Empire, Zhang Zhulin threw his weight around, consolidating his power, making sure everyone knew who the boss really was.

Part of this process was splitting up the spoils; some of the outlying territories of the empire were parceled out to his cronies. The Ming frontier with Byzantium in Astrakhan (or “The People’s Republic of Asitelahan”, because apparently Zhang Zhulin has a sense of humor) was given over to Liu Kesan. Word had it Liu was a crook– but, then, every capitalist was. His mandate was to keep the territory in line and the oil flowing to China, and he did so with grim efficiency.

There wasn’t much reason to think Liu posed an imminent threat to Byzantium– by all accounts the Ming Empire and its satellites were more focused on the Allies than the Red Rose Pact– but an army under General Antigone Tassi was still sent to man the line of fortifications across the Caucasus.

Just in case.

Less relevant to Byzantium’s immediate interests but still worth keeping an eye on was Zhongnan, a Ming client state organized from their southeastern conquests– Thailand, Annam, the Khmer Empire, and other old nations erased from the map centuries ago. The now-infamous Cao Liuxian was given free rein over Zhongnan, which in short order became his own private little playground and piggy bank. You’d be tempted to think he was cut from the same cloth as Liu, or even Zhang himself, but there was something different about him. Erratic. Dangerous; a spark on dry kindling.

And then the fucking Sicilians got antsy again. Fascist landships were rolling through Bohemia, the French war machine was revving up, and everything was clearly on the knife’s edge of becoming a complete global clusterfuck, but fuck it, let’s re-litigate some riots from 1930. Sure. Whatever.

You think it’d be clear that Byzantine troops and Byzantine guns and Byzantine forts were the only thing keeping the French from just crushing the whole Italian peninsula under an iron boot.

But I guess still having a bug up your ass about that one time the empress of a dead empire seized the throne of an even deader kingdom in the year of our Lord fourteen-fucking-sixty-two is way more important than not being run over by a column of landships.

All this against the backdrop of Bohemia’s last stand. Un-fucking-believable, even after all these years.

With Prague fallen and the Bohemian king missing in action (one of the many drawbacks to investing so much national legitimacy in a man with a crown), the fix was in.

Yet, amidst all of this, the Byzantine Commune was still handling the the Sicilian demonstrations with kid gloves. Behind closed doors, at command posts, in barracks, officers began to talk amongst themselves. Saying that the Commune was still shackled to the past, beholden to Republican sentimentality in a world far too dangerous. Saying the Commune was soft.

So it was that April 22nd, 1936, I was approached by Andreas Vasiliakis, a high-ranking officer in the Commune’s military intelligence service. He painted a picture of a decadent civilian political establishment totally unprepared for the crisis looming just over the horizon. It was a time for men and women of action to step up to the plate. It was time for a strong hand on the tiller. The 1884 Revolution would’ve been strangled in the cradle of it weren’t for Spyromilios doing what needed to be done in those critical early days, before he was betrayed by a bunch of idealistic professional revolutionaries at the First International and left to rot. We needed another Spyromilios, Vasiliakis argued. He knew better than to name-drop Müller himself, but we both knew that was what he was really talking about. The Exteberrian Commune was too soft to survive times like these. Tribune Erdemir was too soft.

I told him that what he was saying made a lot of sense, and that I’d think about it. I then very calmly rose from my chair, politely excused myself, and left the room.

I stepped out of the offices of the War Secretariat and onto the streets of Byzantion. All around me, people were going about their usual business. Cars drove to and fro. A small crowd was gathered on the steps of the Labor Secetariat across the street, listening to a woman strumming a tanbur. The sound of jackhammers and cement mixers drifted in from a few blocks away, where construction workers were breaking ground for a new apartment block.

None of them had any idea the Commune was at a fork in history’s road, from which two very different futures stretched out into eternity.

I hailed a cab, and told the driver to take me straight to the House of the Golden Horn. I charged in, sprinted down its corridors, and barged into the Tribune’s office, winded.

And I told Iouliana everything.

Within an hour, that ordinary Byzantion day had been swept away. Loyalist troops were in the streets. The trains ground to a halt. Across the whole Commune, comrades turned on their radios and heard the Tribune’s voice. A handful of shots were exchanged when a few die-hard Müllerists made a futile last stand on the greenbelt that marked where the Theodosian walls used to stand; it was a doomed effort no matter what, but I still was struck by the fact they picked a symbolic location over a strategic one. Idiots.

Before the sun dipped below the waters of the Bosphorus, it was all over.

Was the Commune soft? Maybe, maybe.

But dictatorships are brittle, whether the person at the top calls themself a king or an empress, a kazike or a staatsrat.

A few days later, news of the final collapse of Bohemia reached us.

And the Byzantine Commune continued to prepare for the worst in its own way.

Have to admit, though, when the Sicilian situation finally boiled over, I found myself wondering if I’d made the wrong choice. A mob storming the Magnaura and holding the legislature hostage felt like the sort of shit that should be happening in the 1610s, not 1936.

And yet the Ekklesia actually heard the Sicilians out, instead of just sending in the Army to clear them out, as they richly deserved.

At first glance, it even looked like they caved.

But even if the Commune was soft, I knew Iouliana Erdemir wasn’t. Her decision on the matter was the result of her ironclad convictions, each applied to the Sicilian crisis in turn. The protestors themselves were dealt with harshly, she explained, because they tried to subvert democracy through force. But she had no desire to ratify the killing of civilians by armed soldiers and so paid out reparations to the aggrieved families, arguing that the use of coercive force to bind a nation together was an evil that shouldn’t be taken lightly, or for granted.

But it was a necessary evil, in times like these– any state powerful enough to survive the dangers of the 20th century had to keep it in its back pocket. Nationalism was a poison pill, and if allowed to fester, would pull the whole Commune into its riptide. And so General Stanotas kept her command. And if this happened again, she told me, she would have given the same orders, and paid out the same reparations.

General Zenobia Stanotas