[Continuation] Schwarz-Rot-Gold: An Interwar Germany Quest

[mouli]

Schwarz-Rot-Gold: An Interwar Germany Quest

Let us lift Germany, so to speak, into the saddle. Surely when that is achieved, it will succeed at riding as well
-Otto von Bismarck to the Parliament of Confederation, 1867
This is a continuation of the thread here - it is not needed to read that thread to participate here.​

The Unter der Linden is cold in March, in the year of the Lord 1920. The leaves fall like tears from the weeping trees, on the places where the protesters fell. The wind almost seems to howl a lament, a song of wailing cadence akin to saga-song sung of vengeance and grief. The streets near the Unter der Linden in the city of Berlin are empty, bare of the people that normally would throng it to meet under the linden trees. Here in March there are no couples walking hand-in-hand to welcome in the spring and celebrate their closeness, there are no aged or elderly walking slowly with cane in hand as if to simply take in the air before they no longer can. Here in March, there are patrols of gray-uniformed infantry with rifles in hand and twitchy trigger fingers, walking as always in pairs.

For here in Berlin in March of 1920, it was not advised to walk alone.

It began two weeks ago, as anyone in the city would have told you. It was two weeks ago that General Luttwitz and Herr Kapp decided that the government was in the wrong and the nation had been wronged, that the fragile experiment of Weimar's liberal democracy was an easily corrected mistake.

They acted ahead of the police, the same black-uniformed police that warned them off and told them to run. All of them, the National Association as they called themselves, acted fast but not quite fast enough. When General Luttwitz led his Freikorps, his former soldiers, against the Reichstag – there was nobody there. When Wilhelm Kapp, civil servant and nationalist, led his contingent to the high offices of state – they found the doors barred and the offices under guard.

Naturally, they fired. They were fired upon.

There was something of a fracas.

There was more of a disturbance when General Ludendorff secured the Berlin telephone exchange. There was a disturbance across all of Germany when the General spoke of what was to come. A return to the structures of the Second Reich, absent the monarch. A strong, federal state under the guiding hand of the military. A clean, new Germany, shorn of the same politicking that had lost it the war.

First Army Corps in East Prussia raised their banners in homage, and with them half the army.

The banners in the Ruhr were red. In the wake of the same uprising that had almost decapitated the Communist Party, the Party went underground to bide its time. To agitate. To wait for a mistake.

Everyone in the leadership agreed that a coup d'etat was just such a mistake. A mistake that opened the doors to potential revolution.

As if not wanting to miss the chance, like someone desperate not to miss their train, the Communist Party seized northwestern Germany. The red flag flew over the Ruhr while a steady simmering of discontent began underneath it.

A letter went to Moscow. The bearded, neat little man in the Kremlin signed an order. Soviet ships began to dock at Lubeck.

By this time the shooting had already begun.

It took five more months for the guns to fall silent, for peace to return to Germany once more. The nation has mortgaged everything it has to win the war, to secure the future of the Weimar Republic, and that future looks shakier by the day. In the east, the Soviet Union has secured its southern regions and has armies headed for Warsaw. In the west, Germany faces a hostile France, a hostile Belgium and an occupation of the Rhineland by foreign forces that are waiting for an excuse to move.

Germany, moreover, is devastated. The eastern reaches have seen atrocities and worse, the Kapp-Luttwitz-Ludendorff putschists seizing Germany from the Oder-Neisse Line eastwards and holding the Polish border with extreme prejudice. The western parts of Germany have starved, the SPD Government making sure to purchase possible food supplies and deny them to the KPD.

The guns have fallen silent, by the beginning of August 1920. An uneasy peace born of exhaustion reigns over Germany.

The guns have fallen silent, and the long uneasy unstable peace has just begun.

This is a sequel to the thread on Spacebattles, Schwarz-Rot-Gold

Choose play options below:

Each turn will have ground-level perspectives as well as an overview, and some of those will recur. Choose three ground-level perspectives, three lives to follow through the chaos of Weimar Germany, that I will do my best to shoehorn into every turn:

[]The Soldier: Fritz Muller has known little but war for most of his adult life. He was drafted at seventeen, and went to the front in 1914. Muller survived the war, survived the civil war that followed, and has put down his rifle in August 1920 to face a brave new world that he doesn't know how to navigate. His section is dead or crippled, his army has dissolved once more and the Kaiser that he took an oath to serve in 1914 is in Germany no longer. Fritz Muller has been naught but a soldier at war, and now he is one no longer.

[]The Merchant of Death: Gustav Krupp made a deal with the Devil in 1920, a deal to sell arms in conjunction with Sir Basil Zaharoff and Vickers Corporation. Sir Basil has sold arms the world over to anyone who can pay, and with Krupp's former war-plants now disassembled and being 'scrapped' in France by Zaharoff, German-pattern arms will be seen in every war from China to the Balkans. A brave new world, full of rich markets, now beckons.

[]The Communist: Ernst Thalmann is a former soldier, a decorated one, who did a bunk from the Army in 1918 for the sake of the November Revolution and the Uprising that followed it. Thalmann's side of the war has lost...this time. The next time will be different, and that is why Ernst Thalmann has remained in Germany – to organize the workers and make sure that they are in a position to take what is theirs by right. Weimar is unstable, and presents opportunities.

[]The Doctor: Professor Emil Fischer is a practicing surgeon and teacher at the Katharinenhospital in Stuttgart, and has seen the war close-up. Most of the severely wounded were dispatched to his wards for reconstruction, and before that he was a surgeon on the Western Front. Emil Fischer has seen death and conducted triage for five bloody years, and now comes peace. Dr. Fischer has doubts as to the durability of that.

[]The Detective: Detective Arthur Biermann is part of the Berlin Special Branch, trained by a Belgian detective and now coming to terms with his new duties – the Special Branch was founded to deal with terrorism, insurrection and sensitive tasks. With the new peace in the republic, that task will hopefully be of less importance. Biermann wouldn't bet on it.

I will also allow one major timeline change:

[]Eagle Unbowed: Poland has won on the Vistula, at a terrible cost in men and munitions. The eagle is as yet unbowed and unbroken, and the Soviets have been thrown back out of Poland – a peace of mutual exhaustion now reigns in eastern Europe, as the Soviet armies head east to deliver a coup de grace to the White Armies on Russian soil.

[]The Heir is Dead: Yakov Sverdlov was Lenin's protege, and he survived his influenza infection in 1919 to direct the decossackization of Ukraine in 1919-1920. Upon his death, the succession in the Soviet Union has been thrown once more into doubt, as the moderate internationalist Sverdlov has left a vacancy that Lenin has hesitated to fill.

 

[mouli]

Mechanics​

Turns in this thread are intended to be six months' game time and no more than that. You are playing as the governing party, which at this time is the SPD, and is in coalition with two other parties – you will need to thus manage not only the Reichstag, public opinion and the stance of various German institutions, but also the stability of your own coalition. To do this, I will rely on a mix of numbers and narrative indicators:

Numbers: Since almost all empire builder threads have numbers that tend to go up, I will follow that tradition with no guarantee that they will go up. They are liable to go down rather often. The numerical indicators that you will manage are:

→Budget: This is a notional indicator for how much you can spend. It is tied to not only the budgeted spending of the nation, but how much is possible to borrow and how much debt the nation already holds – I will background most of the finance, since I don't want to dump bond issuing, specie management etc onto the thread. Budget not spent rolls over to the next turn.

→Coalition Stability: This is an indicator out of 100 that describes how stable your coalition is, and how satisfied your coalition partners are. If you have a simple majority, it describes how satisfied the parties that vote with you are. Below 10 and your government will collapse the following turn. The higher it is, the more options relevant to your own party's agenda will appear in turn. Coalition stability can be spent to pass legislation that the other parties oppose.

→Stability: This is an indicator out of 100, that represents the stability of the nation: How likely is it to see paramilitary violence, assassinations, and so on. Circumstances of the world each turn can also sap stability, e.g. an economic depression. It is highly advised to keep this high. You will begin in Turn 1 with Stability at 15/100. Below 20 Stability, paramilitary violence is frequent and ethnic tensions are bleeding over into violence.

The Coalition: Coalition Stability is, naturally, affected by the coalition. Each party in your coalition has their own agenda, their own priorities with respect to legislation and their own agenda for governing – passive decay of coalition stability rises with more parties and more ideological diversity in governance. A ramshackle grand coalition will soon collapse into infighting. Addressing the governing priorities of other parties as well as yours can lead to ticking positive coalition stability instead of passive decay, though, so remember to ensure your partners are satisfied. The larger the coalition partner, the more you need to do for them. I will have an informational for the coalition.

Economic Management: The Weimar Republic saw the German economy tank in the 1920s, saw hyperinflation and hunger, and the reparations of World War I were a frequent feature of political discussion. As such, we will track economic indicators with notional values that are non-numerical, none of which are directly industrial save for food – you are not running a command economy here:

→Currency: You have a gold-backed currency and a shortage of specie. Currency Stability ranges from Critical→Unstable→Shaky→Solid and it is advised to keep it at Solid. From Unstable onwards there are events that will further sap stability. The Currency indicator will have a short blurb describing issues to resolve.

→Debt: In conjunction with Currency, Debt is a major issue. Debt will be tracked narratively and if it rises too far too fast, it will have massive knock on effects on the economy. World events can also move debt from safe to critical, for instance if an economic depression means nobody buys your bonds anymore.

→Commodities: This is basic feedstock and is tracked for information's sake primarily. The one commodity you have direct distribution networks for is Food, and that is the one currently under focus.

→Reparations: This is measured numerically in terms of Budget per turn. While the Allies decided on a payment schedule only in 1921, the Germans paid in gold, labor and commodities well before that, and you will be meeting provisional reparations targets until the payment plan is finalized. The schedule can be better or worse than historical.

Opinions: The various other players in the grand game of German rebuilding have their own ideas as to how it should proceed. As such, I will describe narratively the opinions of the other institutions:
→ The Army: Frankly, it is the army and not the navy or air force that acts as a major player in government. As a state-within-a-state, the German Army is bent on preservation of its powers and thus will naturally come into conflict with the state. I will show a warning if the army is critically restless – and remember, the army is not or cannot be allowed to become a monolith. You have to exploit its divisions and make use of them to survive.

→The Judiciary: The judiciary is a relic of the Kaiserreich and judges serve for life. The judiciary is in the main anti republican and pro-monarchist, except for the south where things are a bit more nuanced.

→The civil service: The bureaucracy without whom you cannot govern. The bureaucracy can in some cases even stall a coup by going on strike rather than continuing to govern – the gray suits of German ministries are not half as glamorous as the army or as outspoken as the judges, but they are in many senses more important. Keep them satisfied, and your legislation might actually be properly enacted.

In addition to this, I will in the status sheet show areas of critical instability and the turn options will address thing such as paramilitary violence. Most of these indicators are narrative and I am attempting to minimize numbers, and the turns will be complex and long by necessity. Daily updates are possibly a bit of a stretch.
You have five Ministerial categories and three dice in each. Each is a d100.

 

[mouli]

Units and Garrisons

Where my Guards appear, there is no room for democracy.
-Wilhelm II to representatives of German political parties, 1917​

The Reichswehr forms at present a state within a state, as per the informal agreement negotiated between Friedrich Ebert and former Quartermaster-General Wilhelm Groener in 1919. The result is that the Reichswehr maintains a great deal of power over its own affairs and has a similar independence to that enjoyed by the Imperial German Army prior to 1918. This results in regular army formations often hosting heavily politicized elements, and the army in general taking a keen interest in politics. While the army is at present 'above regional politics' that does not mean that its garrisons will not intervene in the case of insurrection, and it remains the single largest force concentration in Germany.

The war may have ended, but the Reichswehr has made sure its guns are close at hand.

---

Map credit to @Mr. Sandman ​

Wehrkreis I (HQ Koenigsberg)

Commander: General Wilhelm Heye

Political Leaning: No outspoken political leaning at present, and at present occupied with reorganizing the East Prussian headquarters to something more suited for peacetime and defending the East. General Heye is an anti-republican conservative monarchist, but his HQ has few if any who would attempt another putsch.

I Corps:
-1st​ Infantry Division (Infantry, Veteran), Garrison: Koenigsberg

Wehrkreis II (HQ Stettin)

Commander: General Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord

Political Leaning: Nationalist Conservative. General von Hammerstein-Equord has been an outspoken critic of the Weimar Republic since its inception in the November Revolution, but has sided with the government out of a distaste for the other factions and – in the case of the Kapp-Luttwitz-Ludendorff putschists – a personal dislike. The Stettin HQ is noted to have a substantial contingent of former veterans liaising with the 'Black Reichswehr' and is one of the openly more right-wing in Germany.

II Corps:
-2nd​ Infantry Division (Infantry, Veteran), Garrison: Stettin
III Corps:
-3rd​ Infantry Division 'Deutschland' (Infantry, Elite), Garrison: Stettin

Wehrkreis III (HQ Berlin)

Commander: General Gotthard Heinrici

Political Leaning: General Heinrici has remained steadily silent about his political leanings, but with his wife being half-Jewish and his divisional command being the staunchly republican Wachtruppe 'Berlin' during the civil war, the general can be assumed to be relatively apolitical. The corps in Berlin is technically a treaty violation, however, and actions have to be taken to deal with that.

AN: The army remains a force in politics, and this informational is quest infrastructure that will update turn by turn. At present only 'active' Wehrkreise are shown in the accordions, and I cannot for the life of me find a map for Weimar Germany. All I have got was one for 1938, so there it is.
Votes remain open.

 

[mouli]

Paramilitaries:​

The erstwhile Weimar Republic was home to numerous highly active anti-state paramilitaries that in many cases were affiliated with existing political parties or espoused fringe views such as the establishment of a 'Thousand Year Reich'. Some of these organizations are nominally apolitical and are shown here due to their membership being highly politicized, and some of them are outright anti-government groups that seek to bring about some form of violent change of regime. The civil war has ended and Germany has dealt with the greatest threats to the republic, but in the shadows the knives remain.

I will, for the sake of simplicity, model only major paramilitary groups. Each one can be one or more of the following:
Umbrella Organizations: These are massive groups of hundreds of thousands that are not in and of themselves a danger to the state, but by the nature of their membership and leadership are able to act as a framework for other antigovernment groups to 'gestate', as it were. Some of them might be outspokenly anti-republic, some might not, but all of them have to be monitored simply due to their size. Most of these have overlaps of some sort or another.

Party Organizations: These are paramilitaries that are aligned with one party or another, or can indeed be from a group of parties and formed for a specific purpose. During the earlier civil war that resulted from the attempted Kapp-Luttwitz-Ludendorff coup, party paramilitaries formed a major source of recruitment for the republic, and they retain a certain degree of prominence in politics as a result of that. Regulation will be difficult.

Membership Numbers move from Low→Medium→Large→Massive. At 'Low' one might be no more than a few chapters in a city, at Medium one might be a party of a few thousand, at Large one is an organization of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, and at Massive one is an organization of a million or more.

Der Stahlhelm (Umbrella Organization)

Stated Aim: Nonpartisan veterans' organization, to 'maintain peace and order, and foster the comradeship that was formed in the battlefield'.

Membership: National, Massive

Status: Rapidly Growing

Overview: The Stahlhelm is a nonpartisan-on-paper organization whose membership mainly consists of right-wing veterans and former Freikorps members, and is growing as the militias and paramilitaries that still exist on the eastern border use it for recruitment and networking. The organization promotes the stab-in-the-back myth and a pro-Imperial view of the republic, and considers the ruling coalition to be traitors to the Kaiser. Its newspaper is a major source of right-wing agitation and its organizational structure lends itself to incubation of paramilitary groups. A substantial chunk of the Stahlhelm are members of the Black Reichswehr in one form or another, either as militiamen who are on the rolls for callup or as members of paramilitaries that are local in scope – or as Stahlhelm chapters en masse.

Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold (Umbrella Organization)

Stated Aim: Pro-republican nonpartisan paramilitary organization formed as a manpower pool/unit creation pool for the civil war of 1920.

Membership: National, Massive

Status: Declining Slowly

Overview: The Reichsbanner was formed in May of 1920 to establish a chain of command and a central organization for the pro-republican paramilitaries who were pressed into service for the civil war. It was intended as a wartime measure and seen as a necessity for the defense of the republic, and thus drew support not just from the SPD but also from the Zentrum and – begrudgingly – the Bavarian People's Party. With the end of the war and the resumption of political infighting among the ruling coalition – not to mention the staunch condemnation of the SPD by the Bavarians – we see a steady drop in the membership of the Reichsbanner. We also note that the SPD membership proportions are increasing, and the Zentrum has been quietly avoiding its share of funding and membership enrollment – perhaps there will be a conservative Catholic paramilitary soon?

Black Reichswehr (Umbrella Organization)

Stated Aim: Covert reserve and anti-insurrection force maintained by the army in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, built up through liaising with Freikorps formations and umbrella organizations such as the Stahlhelm.

Membership: National, Large, Highly Organized, Substantial Berlin Contingent

Status: Steady, Well-Equipped

Overview: The Black Reichswehr are a force of Freikorps, former officers and in some cases chapters drawn from the Stahlhelm and Reichsbanner that are organized into 'disarmed labor battalions' and barracked at Kuestrin in divisional strength. They are armed as a light infantry force and consist mainly of decorated former soldiers, and are also noted to be staunchly nationalist, hard-right and militarist. There are rumors that the army high command also intend to use them as saboteurs and strike units to sow havoc in Silesia, Poland and other disputed territories, and they have already been used to suppress uprisings in Silesia. They are nominally a government force. For now.

Organization Consul

Stated Aims:​

"Spiritual aims:
The cultivation and dissemination of nationalist thinking; warfare against all anti-nationalists and internationalists; warfare against Jewry, Social Democracy and Leftist-radicalism; fomentation of internal unrest in order to attain the overthrow of the anti-nationalist Weimar constitution...

Material aims:
The organization of determined, nationalist-minded men...local shock troops for breaking up meetings of an anti-nationalist nature; maintenance of arms and the preservation of military ability; the education of youth in the use of arms."

Membership: National, Medium, Eastern Cells Growing Rapidly, Western Cells Depleted

Status: Growing, Cell-Structure, Fanatical

Overview: The Organization Consul is an ultranationalist, antisemitic and anticommunist terror organization that was formed by members of the Freikorps unit Marinebrigade Erhardt at the end of the civil war, building on the dissolution of Freikorps units at war's end to recruit more radicalized former soldiers to their cause. From what we know, the founders use Freikorps contacts to recruit people known personally to them, and to their local chapter leadership. It is organized into district commands across Germany, each of them stashing arms stolen from their parent armies in the civil war and capable of planning and executing complex small-unit actions. They are a major threat, and their cell structure means that they will be difficult to unravel.

Freikorps Oberland

Stated Aim: Far-right paramilitary organization formed to combat 'Communist' and Polish subversion of Germany and to act in defense of the German right.

Membership: Northern Germany, Medium

Status: Declining

Overview: Freikorps Oberland formed part of the Triumvirate's armies as the 9th​ Infantry Division's 29th​ Infantry Regiment, and is at present yet to dissolve. A substantial chunk of its membership are part of the Black Reichswehr, and they are able to use that as a cover to remain an organized entity. The Freikorps Oberland has also been drawing funding from German nationalists in Silesia and appears to be responsible for multiple atrocities in Silesia – however, they have also acted on behalf of German interests in the disputed Silesian zone. It has recently come under fire from SiPo units assigned to police Silesia due to the questionable nature of its actions, and has therefore drifted a little towards border control.

Bund Bayern und Reich

Stated Aim: Formed from civil militia groups, the Bund is intended to promote a return to the borders of the Second Reich, Catholic and Christian traditionalism, and a Wittelsbach restoration in Bavaria. It is noted to have the tacit support of Minister-President Gustav von Kahr.

Membership: Bavarian, Large

Status: Steady, Well-Equipped

Overview: The Bund are one of the largest and a relatively moderate 'Fatherland society' formed out of the civil militia groups that sprang up postwar. Command is held by Dr. Otto Pittinger, who runs the civil and the military branches of the organization. The military units organized under Bayern und Reich command are nominally the largest in Bavaria: six infantry regiments, ten signal troops, twenty infantry battalions, sixty-five infantry companies, and the same number of "cadre" units. The organization also has the largest number of arms and weaponry of all regional groups, with over 65,000 rifles and 1200 machine guns. Its leaders and local membership tend to be wealthy or well-established and skew older than most paramilitaries, and draws much of its rank and file from the peasantry rather than the cities of Bavaria.

Red Front Fighters' League

Stated Aim: The overthrow of the Weimar Republic and the installation of a communist state that seeks to transfer the ownership of the means of production to the proletariat.

Membership: National, Large

Status: Growing, Cell Structure, Excellent Agitators

Overview: Formed from disbanded militias and insurrectionists who rose up against the Republic on the side of the KPD during the civil war of 1920. the Red Front Righters' League is an organization made up of Communist veterans and organizers who are explicitly armed and planning another rising - they are drawing on the unions and proletarian organizations such as the civilian KPD for a support base, but they are far more violent. They are organized on a cell-structure basis and have long experience in evading policing forces, and have a substantial sympathetic population in western Germany thanks in part to KPD propaganda painting the Republic as the maker of starvation (the Republic was responsible for purchasing most of the Danish harvest and thus denied it to the KPD's territories). We note that several excellent agitators have stayed behind despite being wanted for treason, such as Ernst Thalmann - the KPD remains a force in Germany.

 

[mouli]

Die Wacht am Rhein​

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Es braust ein Ruf wie Donnerhall,
wie Schwertgeklirr und Wogenprall:
Zum Rhein, zum Rhein, zum deutschen Rhein,
wer will des Stromes Hüter sein?​

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The silence that accompanied by the sounds of cloven feet and rubber soles squelching on the mud was overshadowed by the voices of enthusiastic singing, the occasional farmer peeking out from behind their fence to look at the column of men going West under the golden glow of dawn. There was no particular rhyme to their clothing, except for the small armband dyed red and the old Gewehr's strapped across their shoulders. Even from afar, those that were up could hear the loud voices loudly exclaiming "Wacht auf, Verdammte dieser Erde, die stets man noch zum Hungern zwingt! Das Recht wie Glut im Kraterherdenun mit Macht zum Durchbruch dringt!". Guiding the small group of militiamen, was Ferdinand Forstg, the one responsible for this gathering and their mission.

Their group was composed of men of varied backgrounds, Ernst had his farmstead looted by Freikorps retreating through Magdeburg, whilst Rudolph was left jobless as his employer fled from Hamburg when the KPD took control of the city. Ferdinand himself was the son of a shop owner in Münster, though his father cut off relations with him for his support of the communist ideal. For all that their backgrounds were dissimilar, they shared a listlessness and passion for the new regime that led them to join their mission. Ferdinand was the one who came up with the whole idea of course, he possessed the sort of natural charisma that let him to soothe egos and inspire.

With the news of the impending Polish defeat, victory was all but assured for their cause, after all, their Russian brothers would surely help them through the banner of Internationalism! It was with that in mind that he proposed to his friends that they march onwards towards the Rhine, as others were doing. To drive off the bourgeois Frenchman from rightful German land. It wouldn't be easy, but with the Entente exhausted by war and the looming threat of their Soviet comrades, the French would surely fold like wet paper and retreat!

It was with this in mind that the group marched on, unaware that by the next week, most of them would be gone, and the few of those left to tell their tale, only able to do so with an air of melancholy, the spark of enthusiasm gone from their now vacant gaze.

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Und ob mein Herz im Tode bricht,
wirst du doch drum ein Welscher nicht.
Reich, wie an Wasser deine Flut,
ist Deutschland ja an Heldenblut!​

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This omake courtesy of @Mr. Sandman and a reward has yet to be assigned.

 

[mouli]

Three Points of View
Für Republik und Reich! ​

Somewhere in Germany, July 1920

A craftsman should take pride in his works. Maybe your dugout doesn't exactly qualify as "a craftsmans' work", but it is still dry. It is at least better than to lie in a muddy ditch, with the water trying to seep into your boots.
On the other side, the red banner flies. It was once yours. You marched under it, that long time ago. Now, its promises of betterment have turned into bloodred ashes. You've seen the carnage wrought by people you once called comrades on your way to this dugout. They promise peace and bread, and yet all you found was war and corpses. They promise ideals, but they always seem to be around the next day. They blame the aristrocrats. The last aristrocrat you saw wore an ill-fitting lieutenants' uniform and was full of his blood and mud. You buried him with together with the bavarian chaplain in the last graveyard you came through.
The Vons and Zus have never been the workers' friends, but at last the last crop seems to put their lives where their mouths are. Even if that means that they die. You've seen enough lines end on your way here.
Maybe, you should build a new Germany. One you can be proud of. One working like a good machine.

Come, traitor to your comrades, and die against our defenses.

Für Reich und Republik!​

Somewhere in eastern Germany, July 1920

Traitors, the lot of them. One must not love the republic. But one must keep his oaths. This makes the ones facing you double traitors. To their oath, and to Germany.
Your family has always kept faith. First to the duke, then to the king and then to the Kaiser. To Germany. To be disciplined, to be loyal, to be dutiful. Ones duty does include owing up to failures.
Maybe Ludendorff has gone mad from his failure in the Great War. Once, you belived the republic had stabbed the Reich in the back. Then this war came. The republic did not roll over and die. It fought and prevailed.
Which led you here, to this place. On this road, there was blood. There lion roared, and you followed. The grave does not distinguish between potters' sons and those of ancient lines. You'll gladly lie down in the cold earth next to one.
The king should have taken the Crown from the Gutter, that long time ago. And forged a Germany without division, and animated by the will of its people.
Maybe, in this crucible of war you'll get a do-over. A new Germany. Where ones' mettle is proven, and not assumed.

Come, traitor to your oaths and honor, the reaper is here for you.

Vorwärts!​

Time to step up to your position.
Time to step onto the field.
Time to step into the light, and out of the dark.

Ave, Germania!

---

This omake courtesy of @absent from the SB thread, and a reward has yet to be assigned.
If the thread wants me to, I can also copy across some of the sidestories I had written for that thread. Reading the SB thread is not needed for the sidestories.

 

[Magoose]

Wir Sind Verloren.

November 21st, 1919

For Konrad August, former Feldwebel of the Deutsches Herr, the only thing he wished for was a peaceful life again. The war had already robbed him of his friends and father, and now madness was engulfing his homeland.

But the war was not here, not now at least. And he could thank god and all His blessings that his family and his home were not in battleground.

Sophia, Hans and Nero were safe, and that meant that he could ignore the fighting, ignore the pain from his friends and those who wished only to fight for causes they did not understand. He had his cause, and that was his family.

Everything else was secondary.

He scoffed as he smelt manure and cigarette smoke in the distance. If more men were like him, who cared more for home, family, and the work, then that of land and of community... Germany would not be such a dark and dreary place.

The shouting and sound of hooves in the distance, however, reminded him of so much worse.

"Sophia, take Nero and Hans to the Basement. I'll handle this." You whispered to your wife as you looked out the window. More of those bastards... trying to appeal to political thinking you had long since abandoned when the war ended, his uniform hung in the closet.

"Konrad, please." Your lovely wife took your hand. "You don't have to-"

"I'm not." You replied.

Konrad, for a fleeting moment still wished he had had his old service pistol, but he had long sold that firearm to his friends for a loaf of bread when he returned from the war, to feed his starving, orphaned nephew. When he wished to move to America, Konrad had given everything up to let him go... But he could not give up the lands his forefathers had farmed for generations, not for a chance to start at nothing again. Konrad had something here, Johan did not. And for that, Konrad August would fight with every fiber of his being to see it protected.

"But I will not let them hurt you." He kissed her forehead and she took his infant children to the cellar, to hide, while he took to the door, his gewehr and ammunition clips ready for any eventuality.

Perhaps he was a fool, but he took the ammunition and quietly readied a round, and set it down behind his wall. "Feldwebel!" the voice called out. "We just want to talk!"

Konrad opened the door and walked out, and he realized that Jakob was among them. Faithful Jakob, a Unteroffizer of his unit that seemed destined for so much more. He was smart, dutiful, and educated.

But it seems even he was not immune to the siren's call of whatever the hell was going on. Konrad knew there was a war, but he had focused on the land, and now, he was paying the price for not choosing a side.

Konrad stepped onto his porch and quietly watched the five men walk closer, their horses in the distance, tethered to the fence.

They were five young men, men who had not seen the war, being too young to fight. And Jacob himself... he was leading them. "Feldwebel!" He said again with a smile on his face, his uniform dirty and unkept... not like the clean and friendly boy he met in the Trenches.

Konrad stood tall. "What is the meaning of this Unteroffizer? The war is over, and you should know I am tired of fighting."

The young officer's smile vanished, and he pointed to himself. "General Ludendorff has requested every veteran who is not sick or dead to rejoin the ranks. We are desperate for your support."

Konrad turned around and pointed to his home. "My family needs me more than Ludendorff does Jacob. Do you not understand that? We have already lost so much in the war, that we must continue to fight because we believe we have nothing left. But we do have something left... and we waste it, fighting one another!"

One of his men shouted. "He's just a coward, we should just take what we came for and leave!"

Konrad felt his blood go colder than the winter mud of Verdun. "I'm sorry Sargent... we need your rifle... your food and your ammunition."
Jakob." He whispered. "If you have any honor left from our time together... you will go home to your family."

The pistol was drawn and Konrad dove back into his home.

Three shots rang out with the gewehr now in hand. While he lacked a bayonet, his old Trench knife would have to do.

His door was shot, filled with several small holes, but not broken.

Konrad took aim and shot with the rhythm of combat and training. These men, besides Jakob, were not used to the stress of combat... and even he had never used a pistol. One-shot.

One fell clutching his chest, dripping his pistol, and putting pressure onto the fresh wound.

The second shot was fired and this time there was a short, but violent spray of red from one of the boy's heads, his skull fragmenting from the back from the rifle round.

And then the shooting stopped. The screams of the wounded man who lay dying in Konrad's front yard.

Jakob's voice rang out. "Run, run back to the horses!"

Konrad chambered another round and walked out of his home, taking a brief moment to inspect the damage... only ten bullets hit his wall, and that was an easy fix... he was quite happy none went through the walls and hit the interior.

But Konrad focused on the running men who were getting to their horses. He only had three shots left.

He could reload, or continue to shot at them.

But he took his time, rested himself on his front porch, easing and tracking the targets that were running away.

And he prayed to the Lord almighty that their deaths would be quick.

The third shot fired, and the third man fell. He only had-

Where was Jakob?

"ARGH!" Jakob slammed into his side and the rifle flew from Konrad's hands, but they immediately went to the forearms of the young Unteroffizer. "YOU COWARD, TRAITOR!" He screamed as he tried to send that trench knife into Konrad's throat.

The struggle made Konrad's life flash before his eyes... His father, his mother, both dead to smallpox... his service in the army, his captain, his friends, all dying one after another... and young Jakob, still a boy back then, trying to make the world happier, before it all went to hell.

How strange it was, that Konrad August, the man who lost everything, gained something back, while the boy who still had much to gain... left it all behind in anger.

Konrad felt his old trench knife and brought it up. The blade severed the boy's throat and arteries, spilling blood all over his face.

it was still for a moment, as Jakob's life vanished in an instant...

The two men had just run, abandoning their comrades and their horses, fleeing to the hills before Konrad could find them and kill them with his rifle.

They would be back. But Konrad August would not fall to tyrants.

He just wished to stay with his family... and he would kill to make sure they would remain safe.

AN: Hey @mouli

I have an omake for you.

Is this going to be okay?

Also to the rest of the thread, what reward should I try to get?

 

[mouli]

Memories, Part I
When this bleedin' war is over
No more soldiering for me
When I get my civvies clothes on
Oh, how happy I shall be.

---

​

Oxfordshire
1920

The sun shines over England, the larks are calling as spring comes to an end, and the winter wheat is growing well this year. The golden glow of sunlight dapples the leaves on trees that have stood here in the village of Juniper Hill for generations, some of them for longer than there has been a British Empire. The village itself is a tiny one set like a thatched, inhabited and somehow seemingly ancient jewel amid the vibrant green hills of England, twenty-five households strong and every one of them a countryman's home. Here in Juniper Hill, when looked upon from afar, it almost seems as if the war had not happened. That peace had returned in full.

Juniper Hill, like thousands of other villages across the length and breadth of England, does not rebuff that assumption. It does not mourn demonstratively or act as a home for monuments to grief as in France, as in the villages of the devastated Zones Rouge or the six eternally dead communes of Verdun. It does not see yet more war and shellfire, for it is not in unhappy Germany. Juniper Hill, to an outsider who appears worth talking to, will say that things are not too bad.

The fields are tended, now, as the summer harvest ripens and 1920 seems as if it will be a good year. One can tell, as they ride into the village, that the land is not the tiller's – the fields around Juniper Hill are enclosed and walled off, a nameplate at their entranceways and the ever-present prowling form of the bailiff a reminder that England has her terrible inequalities even in the fair green countryside. Each of the men in those fields has their own little plot, besides what they till for the squire, each of them living off the land with the village of twenty-five households having its own carefully tended hierarchy of farm laborers, ploughmen, carters, shepherds, stockmen and blacksmiths.

On the fields that line the road from Brackley in Northamptonshire is winter wheat growing tall and golden, stalks rippling in the wind as summer draws near. Here one might see 'Pumpkin' Gardiner with his tall swaying gait and red, veiny boozer's nose, always willing to come to the wall and tell a lost stranger the way back to town. One might see the enormous quarter-horse that pulls the plough in planting time and pulls the wagons outside it, with 'Boamer' Jervis on the cart-seat and the squire's carpentry in the back as he goes from Juniper Hill to town. Jervis is a grumpy man, and the big quarter horse knows it as well as anyone else in the tiny village. When a stranger comes along the road, they had best watch their car's paint and finish, for a flashy stranger draws curses from old man Boamer Jervis.

The village itself, as a car struggles over dirt roads and the narrow streets that lead to it, is tiny. There is a single inn with what seems to be more boozers than normal in England – perhaps it is the juniper? Perhaps the gin, here in what seems to be a village named for the fat red berries that make it, that grow wild in the ditches of the roadside.

A driver or a lost stranger might stop for a sip at the Crown, the single inn of Juniper Hill with its carefully tended roofing tiles painted a bright green and its floor strewn with rushes as though the nineteenth century had not yet ended. Gas-lights are too expensive for Juniper Hill and the electric has yet to come, and a stranger would have to sup by candle-light should they wish to eat or drink here. The wind might whistle through tiny gaps in the joinery, for all that every visible one would be doggedly found and patched as the inn ages. So it is in this corner of England, its people living their lives in all weathers and eternally accompanied by it even indoors.

Much like the rest of England, then, it is a place that prizes endurance. A stranger here would be told that things went on, that life went on, and that one musn't flinch from life. One musn't flinch from pain or hardship should it come. A stranger here in 1920 might be told this snappishly and with no little rancor by old man Boamer Jervis, the carter's eyes beady and red-rimmed as though he had been weeping – a fact or assumption that he would strenuously deny. A stranger might be told that nothing is wrong, that things are getting better, and they might be told this by friendly old Pumpkin Gardiner, the same farm-laborer whose red boozer's nose is tended by ale after ale every night, far past nightfall and well into daybreak despite a seeming weakness to the booze, a susceptibility that no hardened drinker would have.

The visitor would naturally be curious albeit somewhat discouraged. Said visitor, should they be a respectable one, would be able to walk about and see the church, a stone building seeming to be too large for a small community and with a single doddering old C of E priest who eyes any stranger from the altar with an unblinking gaze. It would take a second glance and a long look for someone to realize that the old man in his vestments is blind.

At the wall of the church is a small brass plate, and on that plate are eleven names. Ten names in a neat double column, and a single one after that all alone at the bottom. Eleven names, all young men, from Juniper Hill with its twenty-five carefully tended households. One of those names is Gardiner, and another is Jervis.

At the very bottom of the plaque is the curlicued decorated date. It reads August 12th​, 1916.

When the war came, Juniper Hill did not flinch. It sent its young men out to France, and there they remain eternal, like a thousand thousand others from the length and breadth of the British Isles and further beyond through the Empire.

A look at the plaque, and one might reconsider their impression of Juniper Hill.

There are no young men in the fields, no little lad following their father to the fields or being chivvied to school or even skiving off to steal fruits from the squire's apple trees. There are no young men in Juniper Hill, and one would realize with dreadful clarity what it means for Boamer Jervis to tell you about endurance as he stares with red-rimmed eyes. What it means for Pumpkin to tell you that things are getting better, and better still as tankard follows tankard at the Crown.

Juniper Hill did not flinch, and England did not either.

And now? They are tired.

Inspired by Flora Thompson's 'Lark Hill', a fictionalized version of her childhood through the First World War, at the village of Juniper Hill. Ported over from the SB thread.

 

[mouli]

Memories, Part II
This is the word that year by year,
While in her place the school is set,
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with joyful mind
And bear through life Eke a torch in flame,
falling fling to the host behind-
"Play up! Play up! And play the game!"

---

​

It was built in 1440, it was rebuilt century after century in lavishly funded renovations, it was the home and cradle of an elite class that built the British Empire. It is, in a very real sense of the world, a holdover from another age. For better or for worse. That fact is evident in the plaques to great alumni that line its walls, the overdone and elaborate spired architecture of the school's lecture halls, the vast sweeps of carefully tended playing fields with their cricket and rugby boundary lines marked off in chalk-white over the green grass and meadowflowers.

The children here, as we look into the halls of the ornate, recently-renovated main building in 1914, are on the cusp of adulthood. The dining halls are filled with chatter and cheer as old banners and flags and solemn plaques line the walls as if to remind the children of who they are and where they are – when that does not suffice to maintain order, the teachers move in. Young, earnest and painfully new, much of the staff teach the new disciplines – chemistry, mathematics, the sciences with which Britain claimed to have won the world. Eton College has educated the children of the elite for centuries, and its masters have had that fact drilled into them.

Here is the son of a Liverpool magnate, whose father's estate is fat with the money born of empire and whose family now looks for social cachet. Here is the son of the Duke of Argyll, Scottish nobility stretching back to before the reign of Victoria and the French Revolution. Here is someone in between, a son of one of the 'new nobility' who won their knighthoods in the scramble for Africa and who made their gold from the blood of that continent in the Rand goldfields. All of them are almost about the graduate, all of them are blissfully insulated from the proud tower of Edwardian England with its cracking foundations borne of centuries of brutal inequality and rising tensions among the labouring class. All of them – or almost all of them, save for perhaps Charles O'Reilly whose father was an Irish Unionist at the Curragh – have imbibed well the sort of rhetoric that Eton specializes in providing.

The graduating class at Eton of 1914 are the sort of young men who would grow into the same sort of men who built an empire on the blithe belief in British superiority and a determined confidence in a civilizing mission, the sort of thing that led to great and terrible deeds across the sea in the Empire.

When the war comes in 1914, the graduating class thus chooses to enlist. Charles O'Reilly becomes a lieutenant in the 5th​ Infantry Division, leading a platoon of young men from London with a brash confidence that belies his nervousness. Michael Davis from Liverpool joins the army in the Guards, his father arranging it with Lord Derby at his son's insistence. Davis joins a regiment where he is an outsider and has no chance at rising, a place that gives his father the social cachet he craves and gives Davis himself the feeling that he's doing what he has to do. For Archie Campbell whose father's castle looks out over Loch Fyne all grim and ancient, the Household Cavalry are the place to be. It's what his father wants, and for this one single time so far, Campbell and his father are in agreement – the war has come, and Archie Campbell has to play the game and do his duty.

1914 comes and goes in shellfire, at Mons and Le Cateau as the British Army of before the war gives its all and dies for it. The Old Army does what it was paid to do, and the gentleman officers or new enlistees from Eton are there in those serried ranks of khaki on the plains of northern France.

It is 1915. There are pictures in the dining hall that appear far younger than the alumni alongside them. Charles O'Reilly smiling out through sepia, the Victoria Cross beneath the photo-frame and a note that says Ypres. There is Michael Davis unsmiling in a single painting from three years before graduation, his father unable to find another picture and unwilling to come near school after his son died aflame. The note beneath the image says Grenadier Guards, Loos. There are more names, on the lips of the faculty and the students and determinedly not mentioned officially.
Britain is at war, says the headmaster. We have our duty.

Another class goes out. Another class joins up in khaki. With them is James Hanna, whose father is a Brigadier and who claimed that he wouldn't be put into the combat arms because of it.

A year passes. Photographs of students are in the dining hall, quiet subdued siblings of the fallen eating where there once was laughter. The masters are older now, retirees called up for the war while their younger brethren have donned the uniforms the students did.

Nobody is sure what happened to most of them. The mathematics master came back, in December of 1915. He is missing a leg, and he is snappish now. Surly and irritable, where he used to be a student favorite. His face is pale and thin, his eyes baggy.

Shell shock, says the headmaster. The students learn the new phrase as dutifully as they learn their Latin – or perhaps more dutifully.

They will use it much in the years to come.

It is 1916. There's a poster smuggled into the dormitories and pinned up on 'Frenchie' Wilson's wall, the eyes of Lord Kitchener staring out at the onlooker and saying that England needs her sons. It's the same thing that the elderly Scots P.E. instructor barks at them as he limps around the cricket field, between telling stories of Africa and the Boxer War. When Britain calls for volunteers, the graduating classes of 1916 make up an entire battalion on their own, a thousand young men from Eton come to the colours as one of the Public Schools Battalions. For many of them it's a lark – Frenchie Wilson somehow makes corporal to his friends' amusement. The class clowns are every bit as amusing in uniform as they were outside of it. The physics master joins up, painfully earnest and concerned for his students – for James Douglas this is as much a teacher's duty as the lecture halls are. Douglas is made a lieutenant for his trouble, Archie Campbell's brother pulling strings for a teacher that the unruly upper-crust Etonians have a soft spot for.

It is 1916. It is the Somme, and the Pals – the Public Schools Battalion – are to cross No Man's Land when their officers' whistles blow. The graduating class move up as one, up from the jumpoff trenches and into the scything fire of German machine-guns, singing all the while. Frenchie Wilson starts it, singing the school song as they move up when James Douglas' whistle blows, the same school song that brings back memories of happier times and home.

The Public Schools battalion is marked combat ineffective in HQ that day, a notecard removed from the general staff's planning brief. For Major General Henry Wilson, his son was there.
Wilson's hand is rock-steady as he write his reports. The attack was not a success.

James Douglas receives the Victoria Cross for courage under fire, for bringing back two of his wounded students.

It is posthumous.

Eton goes on.

It is 1917. There are black wreaths hung on the walls. Nobody will admit to what's technically a breach of school rules, but the masters are mind to let them be. The students are quiet, and the students are few in number. Some of them laugh and joke and play the same pranks that their grandfathers did, but it has a forced air about it. As though they are attempting to forget. Most of the masters are old men now, bearded and reminiscent of a past age – when they tell stories about the Empire and the glory days of the scramble for Africa, their pupils listen with a feverish intensity. Again, as if to leave the present behind for a single golden moment.

It is 1917. A draft has been passed.

Eton does its duty, and the graduating class are swept into the army. Jock Cunningham whose father was a squire and whose ancestors have been squires since before the Conquest is a class clown, a clumsy oaf who takes pride in his oafishness – or so his Latin master says. The Latin master is a thin young man who is missing half a leg, and he blinks back tears when Cunningham proudly informs the class that his draft card has come. Cunningham's parents pull strings, and he gets a lieutenantcy in the Grenadier Guards with Archie Campbell as his captain.

Gas chokes the fields of France as men drown in the mud of Passchendaele, and the Guards are called up for the spearhead. The Grenadier Guards, with their gentleman-officers and their fiercely cultivated tradition are called upon to take an impossible objective in mud and blood and gas, and they die doing it in droves, driven on by discipline and the weight of a tradition heavier than lives.

Jock Cunningham makes captain. Archie Campbell doesn't make it back.

There is another sepia photograph in the dining hall at school, Campbell's face smiling out with some Frenchwoman at his side. His father can't bring himself to object to that.

It's too late, after all.

1917 comes and goes. 1918 rolls in with artillery fire and the last draft from Eton of the war. The class is half the size of what it was before the war, and the masters are universally the old or the crippled. They are twitchy, the students caricaturizing their twitchy masters who jump at loud noises.

They are told that this is shell shock. They nod and memorize the phrase. Their brothers tell them about it in letters from the front.

When the draft comes, Eton does its duty one last time. The graduating class stands in line as they take draft cards from the mail, and they don their khaki in unison. They are painfully young now, barely old enough to shave and not half as self-confident as the ones that came before.
Nevertheless, they go.

Armistice Day 1918 is celebrated, but quietly. Black wreaths and photos line the walls of the school. There are plaques and donated medals that rest beneath the photos. There is word that there will be a monument, a memorial.

The students take it all in with wide eyes. The masters are tired or old or both, and the students are young. Between the two of them is a hollow generation.

Eton has come through the war, but Eton has changed forever. Its students and its masters played the game and did their duty by their country.

And they died for it.

---

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
— Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds
-Wilfred Owen

---

​

AN: Something from the squire's side of the fence. Votes will close in two hours.

 

[Cyberphilosipher]

To Fly like a Valkyrie

Reinhard Wolfff POV

Somewhere in Eastern Germany 1919.

It was a dream to fly.

Men had dreamed it for decades...centuries...millennia and when it came.

When it came it was filled with Wonder and Glory.

And then the Great War came around to Ruin the fun of it all.

Now you weren't one to complain, you actually managed to stay out of trouble long enough to become a pilot.

And it wasn't easy given your...predisposition for "Ungentlemanly Conduct."

Now...during the War, things weren't easy to get with the blockades, the lack of raw material and equipment and a willingness to pay to get it.

Fortunately, you were a pilot, of decent rank, so getting things was easier then if you were a grunt in a trench.

But the real thrill is the mess you made WHILE flying...now you were no Red Baron, Eight kills is nothing compared to his legendary record but it was in many eyes a sign of promise.

A promise that had nearly gotten you hanged when you tried to liberate some goods and tried to sell them on the Black Market.

As well as telling a few men just what you felt about Ludendorff and his Freikorps.

Getting out of that mess left you nearly penniless but then again, that's life.

------------------------------------------

The Door opened revealing an older man in a Military Uniform, you knew he wasn't with the full endeavor, nor was he a paramilitary like the last man who had gotten you on this side of the interrogation.

No...he was a Sicherheitspolizei, or security police, one of the Waimer Government attack dogs on the national level, so he by obligation couldn't just attack you for any number of petty reasons like the rest of the men running around with weapons claiming to be the government.

In fact it is likely the only reason you were still alive.

"Hmmm….State your name for the police record?" He said calmly as you put your hands on the table.

"Do you want me to include my rank as well?" You said patting the old trench coat you wore, one of the few things you had left after your home was burned down, well the coat, your gun and a longing for flying.

"No sir...from what I heard you were demobilized along with the rest of your unit." He said.

"Reinhard Wolff,Formerly Leutnant of the Imperial Air Corp. There I said my name now are you going to go hang me before dawn and dump me in an unmarked grave or are you actually going to go through the effort to put on a farce of Justice with extra steps and then hang me?" You said crudely as the older man seemed to scoff for a moment.

"I am a servant of the law of this republic, Herr Wolff, we are not barbarians looking for a scapegoat to punish." He said.

"Look outside lately? We can barely do shit without some brand of the Mob of the Week bitching about everything." you said.

"That's democracy for you...a violent endeavor barely kept civil. But its been working out for us so far? So I'm not one to complain." He said with only the slightest hint of bitterness.

"Smuggling? Really a man of your talents? And at your age? Twenty One?" He continued.

"I'm Twenty Two." You said.

"Hmm...and what do you actually want to do with your life?" He said.

You were quiet, and above all, in thought.

In thought about the rest of your life, something that you had never really considered since the war ended. Mostly all you wanted to do with your life was try to fly again and have a decent meal.

None of those have actually happened yet so you still had something to do with your life but after that…

After that it was a fine blank. No true future, no plans and no obvious future.

You were lost and it was a difficult thing to come to terms with.

"So am I going to prison?" You asked.

"Depends on the Jury at this point...if you're lucky you'll only get a fine...if not two years in prison. But given how things have been going lately they might drop some things all together and drop you on the street scarcely with the clothes on your back. Or even less if they really hate you." He said.

"Hmm, so where can a pilot actually find a Job should I walk out of this unscathed?" You said.

"Hypothetically… Well I can think of a few people in Germany that will like a young man that knows how to fly a plane...Passengers across the German States to cities and regions in a day or so...or at least what some of the types in the Newspaper are chatting about?" he said.

He then handed over a Newspaper. "A full plane made of Metal...they call it a Junkers F-13. Say they are going to fly passengers in it...so Things to consider."

"It's an entirely different kind of flying, flying people." You said.

"But it's something to consider." He said. "If nothing else."

"I'm gonna fly again...and I pray that the Jury is at least in some ways sympathetic." You said.

Then you stopped . "Why are you even talking to me at all?"

"You seemed like the sort of person that needed some advice after everything you've been through." He said.

That had been the kind of advice you've been waiting for, a year worth of waiting for that.

Now...you wait.

It didn't matter now, you had a goal, you had a plan you can work towards, and that gave purpose.

And with purpose, nothing could stop you.

Now you wait, as your judgment is coming soon.

-----------------------

AN: First Omake, trying to get the feel of the world, and getting the idea of the Lost Generation.

Also Reinhard isn't evil or malicious, just desperate and without any purpose in his life like most of his generation.

At least he stayed away from all the drugs and most of the paramilitaries which is a miracle, because that might get him off the hook if he does well .

And really this is here to have a little fun with a little Aviation History thrown in.

Enjoy.