Let's Read Fitzpatrick's War (The Only Steampunk with Rights)

[DragonCobolt]

Bruce kicks off the chapter by describing the fortifications he's been busting his ass to build and HOO BOY!

Six hundred and seventeen of em are built south of the Ganges and east of the San, around the Raajmahal hills: Four foot wide trenches, lined with polymer bags at their base and at their front and back, with firing slits built into the bags (they're reinforced by steel and pressed wood structures) that allows a rifleman to stand in them and shoot at a wide number of angles. Of course, the trenches zig-zag and connect to unlined slit-trenches that run back of the line for communications and ammunition. There are bombardment bunkers if the enemies bring in heavy artillery, and communication is going to be used both voice and mirrors and flashing Morse codes. There are mortar pits three hundred yards behind these lines and miles back, there are the heavy artillery (who are going to be spotted by coordinates beamed down from the Blinking Stars network.) They burn away all vegetation in a few miles of the trenches, turning a once beautiful wilderness area into a gray and black wasteland with plenty of open views, and they lay out stakes to mark ranges.

Half a mile out, you hit them with mortars with anti-personnel shells.

At a mile, the snipers open up (one per ten man squad) - with bolt action .223 (inch, not millimeter) caliber rifles with telescopic sights, firing extra long rounds with a 300 grain bullet that spins every eight inches in the barrel before it comes out (so they're very stabilized.) They're armor piercing and can punch through body armor at this distance.

(As a note, most of the enemy are wearing, like...cloth uniforms.)

At four hundred yards, the .50 Minot rifles open up: They're also bolt action because they're firing fat headed explosive bullets. Fifty caliber explosive bullets. There are two of them per squad, carried by their designated marksmen.

At three hundred yards, the .30 caliber automatic rifles, the Springers, open fire. There are four per ten man squad.

At the hundred yard mark, the one guy with canister tubes pop out and open fire with the canister - which shoot a spread of carbon filament pellets across the open ground AND they trigger the fucking claymore mines.

Counting that up, that's eight men.

Yeah, cause at the same time, each squad's heavy gunner and assistant gunner is going to be sweeping the whole area with their .50 caliber machine guns. Also, there's barbed wire. Also, the Yukon are all wearing body armor, helmets and have deployable little polymer sheeting things that they can swing up to bounce grenades thrown at them out of the trench.

Now, I'm not an expert but I do play a lot of Supreme Commander and love playing as the vampire pirates in Total War: Warhammer 3 (who tend to have a very stationary, defensive combat style built around having a fuckton of overlapping fields of gunfire) but that sounds excessive.

Bruce goes on to explain that most wars against the Yukon were fought in a very different way: Thanks to their overwhelming advantage in artillery and airpower, their enemies would split into lots of tiny units that would then try and overwhelm what the Yukon could not defend, skitting close and launching handheld incendiaries at Yukon forces. The Chinese, using similar tactics but backed by their almost on part technological and massive numbers advantage, actually did manage to win several battles in the Pacific War before Yukon naval and areal victories forced an armistice. But they know they can't fight like that this time.

Bruce notes that the Chinese are in an impossible position: Don't attack and the airbases have impunity to attack their homelands. Attack, and run their troops into this Hell. He has no idea how right he is on the 'impossible position' thing, though...

While doing the final checks after months of construction, Bruce notices something: A flaw in the defenses. There's a hill at an axis point between the Ganges and the San (which serve as the natural borders of the formation, and are guarded by gunboats with MGs and artillery) that, if taken, might allow the Chinese a place to hole up, prepare, then launch attacks at other fortifications. He offers to level it to General Hood.

"I knew you would spot it right off. Put a star besides Colonel Bruce's name," he joked to his secretary.

"Do you want me to correct it, sir?" I asked him. "We could level the hill, or move the other fortifications up making the line-"

He cut me off.

"This is where the Chinese will make the battle," he said. "There, I will give them a proper cappuccino."

"If they don't give you on," I said. "The rumor mill has it there are close to five million Chinese mustering north of the borderline."

"Never believe rumors, Robert," said Hood. "The Blinking Stars tell us that there are approximately five million Revolutionary Guardsmen about Wei. Their total army numbers closer to twenty million."

I was thankful there were no mirrors in the Marshal's tent for I probably turned white when he told me the size of the force that Peking's tyrant had sent to the Himalayas. Hood did not seem to care whether the Chinese Army was large or not. He directed my attention to his twenty four month calendar for 2420 and 2421 he had hanging from his central tent pole.

"They have more men in Tibet than they can feed," he says. "Their logistic capabilities are stretched to the limit and beyond. Every truck in their empire is carrying food to the front, and still a thousand men a week are dying up there from disease, cold, hunger, thirst. When the bombing starts, they will lose a quarter million dead and wounded on cloudy day and two million or more when we have clear sky. They have forty days, minimum. Forty days to march down the Brahmaputra and the Ganges, cross the San, and defeat us utterly at the hill..."

Click to shrink...

Now, if you are saying, "That's...insane", Bruce actually thinks so too. It's such a titanic force, and so clearly unworkable (think of that logistic effort.) However, it's also basically the only thing the Chinese *can* do. Their best airplane, the steam jet (which will be described later), is incredibly fast and quite advanced. It's also short ranged! More like a defensive weapon, ya know, like...a normal country would build, not like the Yukon's world-eating planes. But you can see a way for them to win the war: If they knock out India, then most of the airbases that threaten them are gone, and they might capture some thousand plus Yukon and maybe get a hostage negotiation treaty going on.

And...well, lets say that they may have reason to know that they won't be able to feed most of these soldiers anyway, no matter where they are...

Hood is unperturbed. "Our fathers chastened them with whips. We shall chasten them with scorpions," he says, a paraphrase of First Kings 12:14 and a very metal line from the Bible.

Oh, and one thing: "Make them a Proper Cappuccino" is a Yukon saying that refers to a time before the Storm Times where a Yellowjacket (remember them? The multiethnic "gang" that controlled large swaths of America before the apocalypse) couple arrived at a cafe, ordered a cappuccino, and so the Yukon owner dragged them out back and beat them to death. Like...that's just a hate crime, dude?

How appropriate.

As the building and training continues, we get news of the Conference of the Americas: A diplomatic meeting where Valette (ugh) meets with ambassadors from Mexico, the Caribbean Confederacy, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, the United States of Central America, Guyana, Greater Colombia and Argentina to discuss Fitzpatrick's Four Points. Valette lays them out.

1. The nations will destroy their military and commercial airplanes.
2. The nations will scuttle their warships and the Yukon navy will have rights to enter all points on the ocean.
3. The Yukon merchants will trade without restrictions or tariff and any Yukon on foreign soil was to be protected from the natives by every method possible.
4. Each nation will pay yearly tribute equal to ten percent of their GDP.

Bruce says that the general reaction around the base is that Fitz...must have been playing some kind of vast practical joke in incredibly poor taste. There was no way that anyone, EVER, would sign it - not even countries that he says the Yukon have bullied for centuries. They all are sure Fitz would back down from these points in a few days. Instead, every country save Colombia and Argentina sign it. So, on October 25th, 2420, the Yukon declare war.

Everything we learned in the papers in regard to the bombing raids came from the War Ministry in Cumberland. We read that the Argentine and Columbian forces were destroyed on the ground, and we saw the names of some twenty-some Yukon pilots and navigators killed in action. From our remote perspective, this seemed a peculiar, nearly bloodless war. Armies were not on the march; our forces had the skies and the seas to themselves; our advantages were so overwhelming that there seemed no one else in the war other than Yukons. The photographs we saw showed sleek ships sailing in formation and young seamen resting on sunny decks. One reporter I read took to writing items on the species of fish he had sighted off his ship's bow, as there was nothing else happening that interested him.

Click to shrink...

Reading this, Bruce confides to his batmen, Charlie and French, that he still thinks the Consul will have to back down. "Strategic bombing doesn't win wars!" he says, firmly and forcefully and directly through time to the United States Pentagon in the year 2005. French, though, scoffs.

"Napoleon might not have won with bombers, but Fitzpatrick is smarter than him."

Well. Maybe not smarter, but to Bruce's shock, French is right: First Columbia, then Argentina both surrender on November 24th and the 28th, a mere 35/39 days after hostilities had started. There's a scene where the Sixth holds a big parade and plays all sorts of patriotic songs...while Bruce, Hood, Stein and Daddy Montrose all sit in a command tent, and Daddy goes: "The only thing I can think of them using are some kind of incendiary that's so horrifying it forced the [Slurs] to give up." Hood nods and says that God is probably not too happy with the Yukon at all.

Stein, who is drunk, says this.

...I'm not including the slurs.

"Will you weep for the [Chinese] you're going to kill as you do over this handful of dead [Latin Americans], old chap?" Stein called after Daddy as the corps commander passed through the tent flaps. "Buckets of blood now, rivers full of them, comilitome!"

"Must you, PEter?" asked Hood.

"I prefer Lord Colonel Stein," said Stein. "Yes. I must..."

Click to shrink...

You know? at least Stein's fucking honest. And we all know...it wasn't incendiaries. Was it?

The twenty million standing army in China has a horrible logic to it now - if you can imagine the swarms of locusts eating their way through Chinese croplands, reports coming in of an unstoppable, seemingly endless wave of insectoid death, the falling food projections, the horrifying math. The Yukon clearly have some method of stopping the swarms (since they must have offered them to the South Americans in exchange for signing the Four Points), but they're not giving it to the Chinese, not without unconditional surrender that would put the Chinese in an even less tenable position than they already have.

So, if they're going to die starving anyway, why not make a desperate bid for victory? And, like, this victory isn't just to aggrandize an Empire, it's literally for freedom from the Yukon boot. They are most emphatically the good guys.

Which is why this book gets to have its cake - the military wank describing all the fortifications and guns and fancy toys pitting our highly trained, elite soldiers against the ORIENTAL HORDES!!!!!! - and then also, eat it: The "Oriental Hordes" are masses of innocent men and women who did not start this war, did not want this war, and are quite literally put between starvation at home or starvation abroad, whose only hope is to overcome impossible odds to bring down a corrupt, evil empire.

With that grim thought, we also learn that Watchcharm Davis, aka, the male Rainbow Dash, has arrived.

"Oh I should say hi," Bruce says.

Hood takes his shoulders, looks into his eyes, and says; "Bruce. I forbid you to get on a plane with that maniac, flat out, you cannot do it, I order you, okay, do not get on that plane."

Bruce is like, "Okay, I wasn't...planning on it???"

"Hood ordered me not to. He seems to think you might kill me."

"I wouldn't kill you. Not on purpose, anyhow. That is, in an airplane, when one dies, everybody dies, don't they?"

"Your navigators must love you."

"Can't seem to keep a permeant one," he confessed. "This last man I had in the back seat transferred to the infantry. Said he'd rather be in the damned trenches than fly together five minuets with me. You're an engineering johnny, Bobby; you understand the geomathics of the rangefinder-"

"The word is geometry, Watchcharm," I said. "We took the class together."

"I remember! I sat behind you, old man. You underood it, and I had a pilot's eyesight to rely on when the test time came. So, any old how, you want to come up with me today?"

"Hood forbate it."

"Judge Jerry will never know."

"I gave him my word," I said.

"Well, if you're afraid then..."

I realized that Watchcharm Davis may not have passed a math exam on his own, nor had he mused upon his life long enough to have even known a moment of self-doubt. I also realized he knew how to provoke a Yukon man. Among us, slander against one's family is endurable when the slanderer smiles, denying God is acceptable in an academic setting, and after a few drinks one can make a disparaging remark about another man's wife. Never, never, never, not until the sun explodes, will we let another doubt our courage...

Click to shrink...

So, Bruce is on the plane. We also learn that Davis has a wife who is basically the female version of Rainbow Dash, and he brags about how, while several months pregnant, she speared a boar from horseback. They're eager to have a child, who they are going to raise just like themselves. Bruce also learns that the pilots have little contests, you know, little fun games they play.

Contests like...

• Flying with low fuel on purpose
• gliding for as long as possible without power
• flying under bridges
• flying the highest, above the oxygen layer so the boiler threatens to go out
• flying as low as possible
• flying as fast as possible
• kissing fish girls

Bruce is beginning to regret his decision. But his patriarchal programming remains strong enough that he's like "Sounds.......fun."

We turned in a wide, slow circle over the long bridge at Bhagalpur to put ourselves on the span's east side. Davis suddenly flipped the plane upside down and made it fall wing over wing like a leaf fluttering down from a dying tree. My stomach bounched off my diaphragm and onto my intestines each time he made the plane roll.

"The F-101 is fast," narrated Davis, who remained outwardly calm while gradually rousing himself from somewhere deep inside. "She's not the most manueverable heap of bolts there is. Hard to handle. You ready to shoot the bridge?"

"W-What does that entail?" i stammered.

"An easy run under a wide section," he said.

He leveled off a few feet above the river and sped straight for the suspension bridge. I had time to think of my wife and close my eyes. Oh, Charlotte, i thought. I am so sorry I am dying like an idiot! In the darkenss I heard a scream sound infront of me. WE were past the bridge and flying straight upwards when I realized the scream had come from my excited pilot.

"Nice and wide under there!" shouted Davis. "The second span from the north bank is around six feet wider than my wings. You have to hit your nose right on the black mark Charlie Smithers painted or you'll take a wing off and its into the drink with you. Not that you would know. Hit the water at six hundred MPHand you might as well crash into steel."

"Charlie Smithers?" i asked. Davis Looped back around and made a second run, this time at the aforementioned narrow second span...

Thank you, Lord, thank you! I thought. Life is good! I love my wife! I love life and living!

"Whoa that was close!" shouted Watchcharm.

"You and Charlie Smithers," I said.

"Smithers?" said Davis. "Charlie only painted the mark. He didn't live long enough to shoot the bridge. We in the 55th squadron had to bury what was left of him outside the camp. You know, I think that mark of his is off to the right..."

Click to shrink...

Surviving his brush with Rainbow Dash, Bruce tries to find something, ANYTHING, to keep himself busy and away from Davis. As he does so, the Four Points continue to march across the world and the Sixth Army continues to prepare - the Chinese are still massing, and the Sixth is getting more and more and more ammo prepped. Valette arrives in Lagos and tries to press the Four Points on Sub-Saharan Africa and the "Disorganized African States" (as the Yukon refer to them) are like, "we can't sign these without permission?"

See, at the time, Africa was controlled by a hodgepodge of colonial powers - Yukons back every Christians, Turks back every Muslim, and the Chinese back every communist (Bruce refers to them merely as "atheists") and decades of constant warfare has obliterated social structures in the area. Bruce says this is because everyone wants access to Africa's resources.

Professor Von Buren leaps on this to go, "Bruce is OBVIOUSLY showing his treason, Yukon interference cannot be blamed for Africa's sorry state. Authorities on the matter agree that the genetic inferiority of the continent's inhabitants are why Africa lacked (and still lacks) political coherence."

...is anyone even shocked at this point? Is there a "tired Oof" meme?

A third Four Points conference is held on January of 2421 with the Slavs, Turks, and other undefined European and Asian powers attending. The CHinese don't show up, the Turks tell them to fuck off, and the third and final conference wraps with Valette swinging by India on his way back, dragging with him his entourage which are a bunch of intensely spoiled rich fops and dandies with Valette deliberately trying to tweak the opinions of all the straight laced gruff and grumbly generals by telling ribald stories in koine - despite knowing that A) ladies are present and B) all the generals speak Greek, so they KNOW that he's flaunting social mores.

One lady does speak Greek and she does laugh and Bruce writes that this lady is none other than Lady Chelsea Virtue DeShay, the future Chrysanthemum Woman - then a "slender eighteen year old" who hadn't yet married the future Consul, Lord Newsom. Professor Von Buren takes up some slack for us with a footnote I will quote in full.

Lady Newsom, the Chrysanthemum Woman, or "The Empress" as many of her enemies would call her, made her debut upon the public stage as an "aide" to Lord Valette. The evil young creature, the future dominant power in the Shay regime, had been a student in Lady Fitzpatrick's school for young ladies, and, as the whole Confederacy would soon learn to regret, Lady Fitzpatrick had seen to it that her young charge was put on the Foreign Minister's staff, probably as a favor to the DeShay family, who were by then bound to the Fitzpatrick's by marriage.

Click to shrink...

So, the Shay Regime, the DESTIBLE SHAY REGIME, that we've been hinted at for the entire book, despite Professor Von Buren trying CONSTANTLY to draw a line between them and the good, noble Fitzpatrick rules, are literally wedded to one and the other, they're interconnected so closely that it makes it absolutely absurd to imagine that one and the other are any fucking different. The Shays are just the sacrificial goat to the Fitzpatrick reputation.

We also learn during this dinner party that Fitzpatrick has quietly put out Consular Edict 23: Lords with "delicate constitution" are freed from their military vows and now, the military is mostly commoners, while the nobles get to go home and have fancy parties. Bruce believes this is to reaffirm noble loyalty to Fitzpatrick (he must be nervous about their private armies) but Von Bruen says it has to have been an "ill advised" decision put forward by the Shays.

You can't blame EVERYTHING on the Shays, Ro!

Stein is almost madder than the generals: He confronts Valette and Lady Chelsea (yes, Valette is being a creeper to an 18 year old girl - like, 18 years old is an adult-ish in our society, but Valette is both married and, like, ten years older than her, he's still being a creeper!) about how he's been wiling away his life with soldiers while all his fellow lords have been getting rich and screwing all the pretty girls. Valette is like, "Pshaw, you'll be back in high society any time now, stop whining, just do what Fitz asks you to do."

Stein is not exactly mollified, but Valette smarms past him to Bruce.

He has...issues with Charlotte. He talks around the issue in a smarmy way until Bruce puts his foot down.

"YWhat you mean to say," I said, enraged to hear the fop speak of CHarlotte so carelessly. "Is how you are to know whether she is aware that Fitz was on familiar terms with the Goyer brothers?"

He took his arm off me and took a long stride away from my side. Valette was the most cunning of men, save for our friend hte COnsul. Like Fitz, he never made a gesture he had not reheresed in his mind an hour earlier. A second earlier he had been my concerned friend in every cell of his pampered body; after I had said the magic name "Gyor" he assumed the role of an offended political insider.

"Why not say that louder so we can both be impaled?" he asked.

Click to shrink...

(Reminder: The Gyors assassinated the Consul, and were known regulars of the tavern that Fitz went to hmm hmm.)

Valette asks if divorce is a possibility. Bruce is like, "I love my wife, sir."

Valette sighs, then goes, "Well...never the less." He turns to go, but drops two bombshells.

One: O'Brian actually HAS been stealing shit and trying to frame Stein for it, and Fitz has the goods on him. Valette is, as you might expect, gleefully excited about this, and lets that maliciousness slip for a second behind his mask.

Two: Mason actually got married. His wife is even in the entourage and he points her out. Bruce asks why Mason isn't here and he's like, "Come on, they're married, not married. Mason is a time zone and four felonies ahead of us."

And with that, they leave on a Zeppelin.

Bruce watches them go.

Then he immediately sprints to a writing desk and dashes out a letter to Charlotte telling her to take herself to the most secure spot in the wilderness, and to ask for Lord Prim-Jones (their liege) to protect him. She is to instruct the men of the family that if a fellow named Zimmerman or any other suspicious types show up, they're to kill them, bury them, and then pretend they never heard of them. Then he writes and sends off another letter, much shorter.

"Dear Buck: I think Fitz wants to kill my wife. Please help."

He sends both letters on a plane that will arrive days before the slow but more comfy zeppelin.

There's a few days of nerve wracking waiting while another Four Points conference begins in London which is argumentative and accomplishes nothing. Buck writes back with a long letter that fills in Bruce on some interesting facts: The Chinese ambassador is suddenly VERY INTERESTED in talking to Fitz and Fitz refuses to hear him, flat out. Lady Joan comes out every few days to sit with Buck in the sun with one of her handmaids, and together, they're all reading Emma aloud to one another. He says Lady Joan has the most beautiful voice in the world.

BUt at the end of the letter, tucked in there, is a single sentence.

"Do not worry about that other thing. If F. does anything, I will prevent it."

FOOTNOTE TIME


FOOTNOTE 5: Bruce actually has daily logs from his officers books (every officer and NCO has to keep on) and Von Buren grumbles about how these are in total accordance with his books - proof that Bruce only lies about political matters.

FOOTNOTE 13: The other casualties in the Latin portion of the Four Points war are from two sailors who die in a boiler explosion and four who are killed when a powder bag explodes premature in a turret.

FOOTNOTE 16: The traditional Yukon battlecry is "Enjoy Hell!" Also, tragically, we learn that the future son of Rainbow Dash, Lord John Issacs Davis, was the only child of the two and...not entirely unpredictably, died in a glider crash at age 15. RIP.

FOOTNOTE 21: The official history is cited here for more details on how the Turks and Chinese alliance worked, but the thing I just noticed is that the pages are "2063-78" which is like, holy shit, that's a really long book? I think that's part of the joke, lol.

FOOTNOTE 26: It is at this point that nobles start wearing a little bit of Purple to indicate that they have sworn fealty to Fitzpatrick. "In imitation of Romans" Von Buren writes, YEAH NO SHIT BUDDY

FOOTNOTE 28: Mason's wife, Tabby, is the older sister of Lady Chelsea and lived at court until she fell out of favor and was strangled to death in her bed during the Shay Regime's many, many, many purges.

FOOTNOTE 30: London is mostly known for their cheese now, lol.

COMING UP NEXT: So much steampunk, you will choke on it...

 

[HeWhoAdds]

Damn, I was expecting the Four Points to try to give Fitz's war a veneer of legitimacy but he's really just demanding unconditional obeisance from the world.

 

[DragonCobolt]

Damn, I was expecting the Four Points to try to give Fitz's war a veneer of legitimacy but he's really just demanding unconditional obeisance from the world.

Click to shrink...

This book is many things, but subtle isn't exactly one of them

 

[bookwyrm]

You can definitely see all the points in which Fitz is setting fire to both the world and to Yukon institutions in order to build and unleash this great colossus he can put himself at the head of. No wonder it all fell apart with the Shays, to ever hope to succeed you'd have to combine a complete dead-eyed absolutism finishing the job of permanently breaking the nobility into one of positions in court and balls in the capital Versailles style, actual administrative genius and technocratic cultivation of the new forms of aristocracy built around soldiers like Bruce winning knighthoods and such to build replacement institutions and not just slave away micromanaging and physically manhandling the sinews of empire yourself, saintly diplomatic acumen and peacemaking to somehow continue the tight-rope balancing act of all the clashing personalities of Fitz's great crusade and Diadochi would-be successors after him, and then the sheer impossibly arrogant force of personality to hold all this with the petulant privileged confidence that you are divinely ordained to rule as the return of King Solomon.

 

[Kadmus]

I do like how the fact that Bruce is, like, generally empathetic towards Buck (and fuck me, couldn't the author have given them slightly more different names?) instead of treating him like a second-class citizen and worthless except for his assassination skills seems to be paying off? It's almost like being a sometimes-good person to other humans is a good thing or something.

It's also very funny that by all indications if Fitz had, you know, not been so 'objectionable' in the bedroom (is he just gay? is he a paedophile? does he just want to sub in defiance of the Proper Role for a Yukon man? does he just want her to peg him? we will never know, as all these things are likely considered equally evil and sinful by the Yukon and so he's just said to have 'depraved tastes', I think it was) then the implications of the Shay regime - that he was murdered and his wife and her family took power - might well have not had the same outcome. Hell, if he could just get on with the wife he explicitly married for the power it gave him, it would probably have secured a better outcome for him.

But no, megalomaniac aristos have to megalomaniac aristo. Instead his best assassin - a man who lives in his house with him! - is madly in love with a woman who hates his guts and the assassin's closest friend, so far as we can tell, has also just given the, and I cannot believe I have to keep repeating this, excellent assassin more reason to want to just murder the shit out of his boss. If Buck doesn't kill Fitz before all this is over at the request of Lady Joan, I'll be genuinely shocked.

 

[DragonCobolt]

I do like how the fact that Bruce is, like, generally empathetic towards Buck (and fuck me, couldn't the author have given them slightly more different names?)

Click to shrink...

You can call him Wilfried, if you want! Not sure how Wilfried shortens to Buck, but it apparently does...

If Buck doesn't kill Fitz before all this is over at the request of Lady Joan, I'll be genuinely shocked.

Click to shrink...

Lady Joan does seem to be the nicest member of the DeShay household, which probably helps a lot. There's several particularly heartbreaking scenes where she asks Bruce to help her "talk" to Fitz and it's like maximum oof.

 

[Coyote Niff]

As the building and training continues, we get news of the Conference of the Americas: A diplomatic meeting where Valette (ugh) meets with ambassadors from Mexico, the Caribbean Confederacy, Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, the United States of Central America, Guyana, Greater Colombia and Argentina to discuss Fitzpatrick's Four Points. Valette lays them out.

1. The nations will destroy their military and commercial airplanes.
2. The nations will scuttle their warships and the Yukon navy will have rights to enter all points on the ocean.
3. The Yukon merchants will trade without restrictions or tariff and any Yukon on foreign soil was to be protected from the natives by every method possible.
4. Each nation will pay yearly tribute equal to ten percent of their GDP.

Bruce says that the general reaction around the base is that Fitz...must have been playing some kind of vast practical joke in incredibly poor taste. There was no way that anyone, EVER, would sign it - not even countries that he says the Yukon have bullied for centuries.

Click to shrink...

Ah, so this is the Four Points...part of me assumed it was a set of geographic points, but the British in particular have often done wars on the backs of treaties or political maneuvers (see the Opium Wars or the War of Jenkins' Ear) so this is also a sensible denouement.

The obvious inference here is that Yukon uses the new deforestation weapon on anyone who resists the "compromise" of the Four Points, which is comparable to a nightmare version of Cold War diplomacy where the US and USSR contained and controlled Vietnam and Afghanistan respectively with a scattering of tactical nukes. Horrid stuff.

See, at the time, Africa was controlled by a hodgepodge of colonial powers - Yukons back every Christians, Turks back every Muslim, and the Chinese back every communist (Bruce refers to them merely as "atheists") and decades of constant warfare has obliterated social structures in the area. Bruce says this is because everyone wants access to Africa's resources.

Click to shrink...

See, this has the potential to be a very interesting sociopolitical theatre later in the story; Yukon's racialist bigotry works just fine for them when posed against the "Turks" and the Chinese (based on their ability to act as a world power, one assumes the Turkish nation also controls portions of the modern Levant and Gulf States), but what about when they have to rely on "native" allies in Africa for the resources to export that bigotry? The Four Points' exceptional violence and clear entrenchment of Yukon dominance won't stop them from having to negotiate their way through the complex power struggles of a decaying colonial/semi-colonial system in a region as varied and complex as the sub-Sahara, and I bet you just like Versailles we'd see ways that non-Yukon nations can shirk the Four Points in the African theatre specifically. Welcome to the suck, Yukon!

A third Four Points conference is held on January of 2421 with the Slavs, Turks, and other undefined European and Asian powers attending. The Chinese don't show up, the Turks tell them to fuck off, and the third and final conference wraps with Valette swinging by India on his way back.

Click to shrink...

So I'm assuming Turkey and China both are allied during this upcoming war? That seems like something that might actually stem the tide of the Yukon Swarm, if the two governments share information, resources, and other capabilities. I know it won't end that way because Narrative, but a girl has to hope.

Buck writes back with a long letter that fills in Bruce on some interesting facts: The Chinese ambassador is suddenly VERY INTERESTED in talking to Fitz and Fitz refuses to hear him, flat out. Lady Joan comes out every few days to sit with Buck in the sun with one of her handmaids, and together, they're all reading Emma aloud to one another. He says Lady Joan has the most beautiful voice in the world.

BUt at the end of the letter, tucked in there, is a single sentence.

"Do not worry about that other thing. If F. does anything, I will prevent it."

Click to shrink...

Yes! Buck! Our eggy queen of getting shit done! You read that book of comedy and manners aloud to your lady love! Also, it's wonderful to see explicit confirmation that Fitz is, in fact, jumping with both feet into war out of a blinkered fashy desire to have the world at his feet-it perfectly encapsulates the broken blind spots in his thought processes.

 

[DragonCobolt]

So I'm assuming Turkey and China both are allied during this upcoming war? That seems like something that might actually stem the tide of the Yukon Swarm, if the two governments share information, resources, and other capabilities. I know it won't end that way because Narrative, but a girl has to hope.

Click to shrink...

...RIGHT, I completely forgot to mention there's a big turkish empire and they're kinda like the Chinese except they're not as "together" when it comes to their internal cohesion and their technology level. Probably because, like...they were building out of the 21st century in the horrid state that America left them in, while the Chinese were building out of the...like, I'm not China expert, but my layman's opinion is that they're basically like America? Lots of problems, but quality of life for their citizens seems fine?

 

[Acolyte]

The polymer filled bag is such a stupid part of the book. Sand does the same job and better, its crazy.

 

[DragonCobolt]

The polymer filled bag is such a stupid part of the book. Sand does the same job and better, its crazy.

Click to shrink...

Really! I'm not a military brain so I was like, "Sounds like it makes sense!"

 

[Acolyte]

Really! I'm not a military brain so I was like, "Sounds like it makes sense!"

Click to shrink...

Sand is also fire resitant. It doesn't make any sense to use polymer when you have to manufacture and transport it. Sand is right there.

 

[Coyote Niff]

Sand is also fire resitant. It doesn't make any sense to use polymer when you have to manufacture and transport it. Sand is right there.

Click to shrink...

I was about to chime in on this as well-the polymer, assuming it's your standard fireproof gypsum/other cement aircraft polymer based off of it being "sprayed" onto other surfaces, will turn your sandbags basically into cinderblocks...which will shatter into shrapnel once they're stuck. I'm assuming this is just Judson trying to draw GWOT similarities to something like a HESCO barrier but those are again...full of sand. Honestly, I'm baffled too. Maybe this is meant to be a genuine Yuke oversight?

 

[DragonCobolt]

I was about to chime in on this as well-the polymer, assuming it's your standard fireproof gypsum/other cement aircraft polymer based off of it being "sprayed" onto other surfaces, will turn your sandbags basically into cinderblocks...which will shatter into shrapnel once they're stuck. I'm assuming this is just Judson trying to draw GWOT similarities to something like a HESCO barrier but those are again...full of sand. Honestly, I'm baffled too. Maybe this is meant to be a genuine Yuke oversight?

Click to shrink...

It doesn't appear to be in the next chapter. I think he figured it would sound more like they were doing SUPER preparedness.

I'd cover said next chapter right now but I read it and got too sad to describe it, lol.

 

[DragonCobolt]

On the 7th of April, 2421, the rains started - the monsoons have come.

On the 8th, Bruce wakes up hearing the boilers of thousands of airplanes beginning to fire up.

Hood calls a torchlight vigil for thousands of his troops. He reads a passage from the Bible - the Psalms, specifically. I'm lazy and have taken it from an online Bible - the translation is slightly different, but basically the same.

In the LORD I take refuge. How then can you say to me: "Flee like a bird to your mountain.

For look, the wicked bend their bows; they set their arrows against the strings to shoot from the shadows at the upright in heart.

When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?"

The LORD is in his holy temple; the LORD is on his heavenly throne. He observes the sons of men; his eyes examine them.

The LORD examines the righteous, but the wicked and those who love violence his soul hates.

On the wicked he will rain fiery coals and burning sulfur; a scorching wind will be their lot.

For the LORD is righteous, he loves justice; upright men will see his face

Click to shrink...

"Thus God spoke to Israel," says Hood. God has given the Jews a special place in the world - this is why, despite Israel being destroyed (by Hood's count), like, six times (Persians, Greeks, Romans, Turks, British, then Turks again) there are still Jews all over the place. Cause God willed that their soul would be immortal.

He goes on to say that the Yukon don't have this guarantee.

(Speech edited slightly for brevity)

"The secret of the Yukons is that although we have God's word and carry his banner, we, unlike the chosen people, cannot endure a single defeat. Never let a foreigner's soft words deceive you: we are the most hated of all nations. Rome at her acme was beloved compared to us. Nazi Germany and ancient America each had a warmer place in their enemies heart's than we do in ours. Should any foe conquer us, they would not suffer one among us to live. Our conquerors would hunt down every Yukon child, every grandchild, every white-haired mother, and would kill them as cat kills vermin. They would overturn every brick we have placed atop brick and toss every word we have written into the flames. The name Yukon would be remembered only as a curse...a word to frighten Children."

...

"Until [it is over] do not allow yourselves to feel anything but your hatred. Hate your enemies when the flames fall upon them. Hate them when you shoot them down. Kill them when they attack. Kill them when they retreat. Kill them when they try and burrow themselves into the ground. Kill them in the midst of their doomed cities. Kill them when they flee to the wilderness. Kill them all. Kill so many that future Historians will speak in an appalled whisper of the work we have done."

Click to shrink...

...so, in the Starship Troopers novel, it opens with Johnny Rico dropping on a Skinny planet. Within the opening, you are given a series of powerful images that have blazed themselves into the brains of military SF nerds for, oh, almost a hundred years now. Gleaming power armor, grainy green huds, shoulder mounted tac-nukes, that grenade that goes "I AM A GRENADE I WILL EXPLODE IN TEN SECONDS" for intimidation factor. The shock and awe combat sequences. But later on, the war switches to the Bugs: Teeming masses of inhuman creatures, breeding in such vast numbers that they always outnumber you.

The movie would remove their guns, but neither the book or the movie shied away from what they're supposed to be.

Collectivist.

Hive Mind.

Chinese.

The book doesn't even fucking beat around it, it basically says the Bugs are the apotheosis of "Red China"

Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.

Click to shrink...

This element of military sci-fi has been satirized (Helldivers), deconstructed (The Forever War), subverted (The Confederation series), but, also, tragically, played...extremely straight. I still remember once walking through a bookstore and picking up a book.

This book.

​

I didn't buy it, and being about...I dunno, fourteen, fifteen, I genuinely did not understand how absolutely fucking insane this is as a concept. I've googled what Polseen are like. Another nightmare warrior race, unthinking and vast in numbers. Another conscience free murder-target. Orcs again.

On twitter, a while ago, some dumbass troll account posted an asinine "here's how Russia and China can team up to conquer America" by invading through Alaska. Rather than, like, ignoring them or blocking them, this instead created dozens upon dozens of NATO and globe-emoji weirdoes to rant about how the American military would absolutely kick their asses, which led to counter ranting, which led to people spinning up stories about how they'd just hit the Three Gorges Dam, and nu-huh, that's rated to survive a nuclear strike.

In the days running up to the war in Ukraine, a lot of people were confident it wouldn't happen - from both sides of the political spectrum, simply on the ground it would be so incredibly foolish and pointless and destructive. But once it did start, oh, there were so many people eager to bring out the kill counts.

Tanks destroyed. Bridges wrecked. Convoys smashed. Ships sunk.

Just wargames.

Just noble lords, sitting at breakfast. With a saltshaker representing Britain, and a fork indicating ten thousand miles of range for strategic bombers, blithely listing cities to burn.

I now must tell of the Four Points War in the eastern hemisphere, a story every Yukon reader already knows the outlines of full well. For the next thirty eight months the world would not know peace, yet the conflict was decided in only fifty one days. The war would be fought in the earth's three great oceans, in the air above five continents, and in the green hills of northern India. I beheld a small portion of the air war and none of the naval conflict. In India, I was in the eye of the storm. Therefor I will deal with what befell at sea and in the air in a cursory fashion and tell my story of the Indian campaign last.

Click to shrink...

The air war kicks off with Bat Wing bombers hitting strategic targets around the world. Raajmahal Hills launches them against southern and central China. Alaska is where the attacks on Siberia and Japan are launched. The Babuyan Islands launches planes against eastern China from Manchuria to Canton, while bombers from Austria hit southeastern Asia. England, Biko, the Comoros and Madeira bases launch planes all throughout the Turkish Empire.

It works in Turkey - their Empire is not prepped to launch in time, and they weren't exactly eager to fight.

The Chinese, though, were clever. They hid their planes underground, in mountain vastness's and hangers.

So the Yukon retarget: They hit petroleum lines. They hit petroleum refineries. They hit petrol reserves. And these aren't surgical strikes, these are missiles that drop thousands of incendiary pellets over a square mile or more of terrain - incendiaries that burn for five minutes straight on concrete before going out. Then they start hitting bridges. Dams. Factories. Railroad terminals.

What do you think happens to a dam when it gets slagged?

Where are factories built exactly?

Meanwhile, the Chinese air force launches. Their Florin bombers launch in massive formations that try and fly in boxes together for protection. Their defensive air force are steam jets - or, more accurately, rocket jets: They're basically two big tanks with hydrogen and oxygen and a steam engine that mixes them together and spurts it out the back in a rocket plume. They're fast, they're surprisingly maneuverable, and they do not have a chance: The Blinking Stars, remember? Yukons launch their munitions from miles away and by the time the Chinese get the semaphore message and scramble their jets, it's usually already too late.

The jets that get into the air have no radar.

They seek after their killers - and the Blinking Stars spot them, relay their position and heading, and the Yukon just avoid them.

Within a few days, they don't have the fuel to run the refrigeration systems that keep the hydrogen and the oxygen cold enough to use as fuel.

The Chinese launch the best thing they have for cruise missiles - buzz bombs, similar to V1s. Like V1s, they're incredibly inaccurate. Unlike V1s, they're going up against people with the fucking Blinking Stars: They spot the launches, and then flash down heading and speed and Yukon AA guns launch their missiles which turn cubic miles of the sky into fire.

God, the way this book uses the Blinking Stars is...fascinating and horrifying. Because unlike, say, the Draka's absurd 1980s steampunk mishmash army, this actually is a thing that could exist. They're just modern spy-sats with less advanced communication systems. They're also...well, this is a bit of a 'head canon', but there's a deeper explanation for the Four Points War than just Fitzpatrick's meglomania that the Timmerman will helpfully explain to us later, but I think even that has something that Dr. Murrey won't expound upon.

Remember when Bruce said there are rumors that the Timmermen have anti-orbital weapons to shoot down other people trying to get into space? And Dr. Murrey looked...faintly amused?

My theory is that...like, look at the Chinese. They're not stupid. They have managed to, without electricity, run a society that keeps a billion people alive and maintains a force that's ALMOST a peer to the Yukon. if it weren't for the Blinking Stars, I think this war would go very, very, very differently. Hell, without the Storm Machines, I think the Chinese are prepped to build nukes and go, "Okay, this stops or else we turn Cumberland into a glowing crater."

Maybe one of the reasons why the Timmermen are so happy to let Fitz do this is because the Chinese got a launch that almost made it into space.

They only need to trigger a Kessler Cascade once and the Yukon are fucked.

So, the Timmermen direct the Yukon airforce to bomb the Chinese back into the stone age.

The Chinese do try and bomb back. The Florins are coming - and so, Watchcharm Davis leads his brave, suicidally macho Yukon pilots into the sky and they start hacking Chinese planes apart. A steampunk airplane is even more of a suicidally firey death trap than real airplanes since their internals are made up entirely of fuel lines and fuel tanks. The Yukon attack strategy is to come at the boxes of FLorins in two formations of thirty. All sixty planes drop missiles that spread incendiaries everywhere to hack the planes to bits, then fly in close and start using their MGs and their cannons to rip them apart.

Despite this, a few Florins do get above the fortifications in India and drop a few bombs.

There are guncam footage reels that Bruce, Hood and Daddy Montrose watch.

"How do they ever miss?" Daddy asks, sounding horrified, sickened as he watches the fast, deadly Yukon planes hacking down Florin after Florin.

"No mercy," is all Hood says.

My old friend Watchcharm Davis proved to be the champion of fighter pilots during our massacre of the Chinese Air Force. In seven days, his nose camera recorded Davis killing an astonishing two hundred and sixty seven bombers, far surpassing the forty he had promised his wife. His method was to dive close to the enemy's box formation and release his canister rockets into the heart of the grid so the pellets would do their maximum damage. When using his cannon he would choose until he could see the enemy tail gunner's face, then pepper the FLorin from stern to the pilot's cabin.

He was slicing his two hundred and sixty eighth victim in half when the crippled bomber's port wing exploded and sent metal fragments into the belly of David's fighter. In a flash the eleven Chinese crewman and the five foot seven inch Yukon ace and his navigator went down to their deaths in the same ball of frame. My courageous friend died as bravely as he had lived, happily giving his brief life to a cause that did not merit his sacrifice, or those of the twelve men who perished with him.

Click to shrink...

And...the first of the Basileus dies. As Bruce says, in a war that did not deserve this fight.

I note that the main reason WHY he died was because he was so completely inculcated in the fascist will to power macho bullshit that he fought in a pointlessly dangerous way just to squeeze our a few extra kills against an enemy that basically could not hurt him.

He's not gonna be the last of the Basileus to go.

After three days, the Chinese stop flying jets due to the aforementioned fuel shortages.

After twenty seven days, the last Florin goes down.

In the end, the most damaging thing the Chinese do is release a strain of mosquitos with a deadlier form of malaria. This may seem like a strange, discordant note: If we're meant to look on in horror at the Yukon, to wish their fucking satellites were an expanding cloud of debris, to want their forces to be captured and held for ransom to force the war to an end with the status quo antebellum, why have the Chinese release a bioweapon.

In the modern world, if you get nuked, it's generally agreed the gloves are off.

The first bioweapon was dropped...quite a while ago, remember?

The war at sea lasted longer, yet was more one sided than the air war.

Since the Storm Times, our navy has fought its opponents at a distance with long-ranged guns mounted on huge battleships. The naval strategy has always been to approach the enemy fleet to a distance of about forty miles and to open fire while still unseen and undetected, using the twenty one inch guns of our battleships. The Blinking Stars would give the Yukon gunnery masters posted onboard ship glass domes the positions and headings of the enemy vessels; the masters had but to do the math...

Click to shrink...

The Yukon fleets use this to smash the Turkish fleets and the Chinese fleets. Once again, the Chinese and Turks aren't stupid - they do their best. They use smoke to try and conceal their positions, they sail close to complicated island chains in the hopes that might fool the Blinking Stars. But these aren't like...steampunk satellites. They're modern spy sats, with electricity, and probably even computer enhancement.

Bruce writes that they don't know what happened to the sailors on those ships.

"They probably called encouragement to each other and said aloud the heroic words they had learned when they were young and could believe men in extremis would say such things."

The final and third part of the chapter covers the first half of the land war.

And, um...

Sorry, but I'm going to call it here. Describing this actually genuinely has me very upset.

FOOTNOTES

There aren't any worth talking about, tbh, and I don't really find Von Buren amusing right now.

COMING UP NEXT: The Land War

 

[Grytorm]

Seems like a depressing book. And the framing device suggests that the Yukons aren't going to self destruct. Which just makes it worse.

Let's talk about the egg speculation instead. Just, I'm probably trans and am curious about what the, "Being attracted to women in a lesbian manner" means. And general marks of egg. I seek validation.

 

[DragonCobolt]

Seems like a depressing book. And the framing device suggests that the Yukons aren't going to self destruct. Which just makes it worse.

Let's talk about the egg speculation instead. Just, I'm probably trans and am curious about what the, "Being attracted to women in a lesbian manner" means. And general marks of egg. I seek validation.

Click to shrink...

Man, what...a well timed post, lol, I think you hit send JUST as I updated the new chapter...

And, like...it's hard to exactly describe, but being attracted to a woman in a lesbian way just has this...vibe, you know? *is completely unhelpful*

 

[Acolyte]

So do the planes have the satellite glass receiver inside themselves.

Because otherwise they would have no way of receiving the updated heading once in the air, so defensively the chinese should be able to find them.

 

[DragonCobolt]

So do the planes have the satellite glass receiver inside themselves.

Because otherwise they would have no way of receiving the updated heading once in the air, so defensively the chinese should be able to find them.

Click to shrink...

yup!

they have little domes in them and the navigator keeps an eye on the receivers. Though I believe the dome is only in the command planes ,which then communicate to the rest of the formation with mirrors and flashing and such

Which means the Blinking Stars have to be really damn complex, considering how many messages they're sending up and getting flashed up to them (since stationary positions or big ships have ultraviolet lights that flash signals up at them.)

 

[Kadmus]

This really is an intensely early-2000s book, isn't it? It couldn't be moreso if it had 'THE IRAQ WAR WAS A POINTLESS WASTE OF LIFE ON ALL SIDES AND JUST A WAY TO POSTURE ABOUT HOW GREAT THE US MILITARY WAS AND HOW MUCH BUSH WANTED HIS DADDY TO SAY HE WAS PROUD OF HIM' painted across every page in fire.

 

[Abby Normal]

The first bioweapon was dropped...quite a while ago, remember?

Click to shrink...

I know you've talked about the locusts in your commentary before, but have they been mentioned as being used/explained in story yet? If they have i might have missed a chapter or need to reread one cause i dont remember it happening

 

[DragonCobolt]

I know you've talked about the locusts in your commentary before, but have they been mentioned as being used/explained in story yet? If they have i might have missed a chapter or need to reread one cause i dont remember it happening

Click to shrink...

They haven't been mentioned, but they've been inferred - remember how quickly the Latin American part of the war wrapped and how Bruce and Hood were wondering how, exactly, that happened.

 

[DragonCobolt]

The land war portion of the Four Points War begins with the Chinese's immerse army of twenty million strong traveling down the narrow valley of the Brahmaputra and into India proper. Moving this many people on foot is pretty hard even under normal circumstances, and the Yukon do not make them particularly normal: They hit bridges, they hit roads, they drop down and use their cannons to set off trucks like "firecrackers." Meanwhile, the Indian army shoots down from the heights.

Within two days, the Chinese have abandoned most of their vehicular support and started going on foot. Bruce marvels at the "fanatical, hateful, courageous Chinese" and thinks that anyone else would have sued for peace by now - but remember: At this moment, Yukon bred locusts are eating their way through Chinese cropland. Everyone involved in this army's leadership knows that they're all going to starve to death here, or starve to death at home. So, they push on.

The majority of the Chinese swarm were only peasants recruited right from their farms. They were dressed in simple black trousers and tunics. For protection they had to call upon their gods, who did not choose to protect them very well in those terrible days. Our Bat Wing and tactical bombers feasted upon those peasants in the canyon and in the muddy fields beyond the Ganges in such numbers that their blood would fertilize the Indian's crops for three decades thereafter.

...

Our men shouted ironic encouragement to the soon to be dead men [approaching us.] "CLoser, my boys!" and "Put your shoulders into it!" they called. For the last time the Yukon soldiers let themselves laugh. Our men threw rocks towards the water and shouted insults the oncoming Chinese could not understand. Someone, History does not record who it was, tired of the fun and could wait no longer: He shot and killed a Revolutionary Guardsman... at close range individual bullets went through several ranks of Chinese, killing them before their bodies could react to swift-winged death. The mortally wounded man did not have time to groan or scream a final protest against the injustice of everything. Moments before, they might have been thinking of their wives and of sunsets and of the crops that they would plant next spring; after the first volley they were thoughtless bunches of lost possibilities...

Click to shrink...

The attack, as you see, does not go well. They attack, and attack again - but then withdraw across the river (They reached it after emerging from the valley, I note.) As this attack founders, they do set up snipers and launch what man portable artillery they have - and the rest of their army sweeps west towards Hajipur and Sonpur, where a million man Indian army waits to fight them. The Yukon fall back, leaving their Indian allies and the civilians there to get chewed up by a large disorganized mass of terrified, armed men. The results are predictable.

Predictable is actually what a great deal of the 14th and 15th chapter are. The pieces have all been set up and Judson knocks them down with excruciating detail. Normally, that kind of description is a pejorative - too much detail can kill pacing stone cold dead. But the prose is deft and descriptive. It's just describing hell.

The Chinese attack across glassed terrain, then get hit by artillery that turns the obsidian black glass into deadly shrapnel.

Bobby sits with an officer and shares tea, and sits in stunned silence as the officer bemoans the lack of sugar - while outside his fortifications, hundreds of thousands of civilians are begging for food.

Yukon gunboats roam up and down the Ganges, shooting men trying to swim across - both away from the fight and towards it.

"A sort of madness overcame us; we had an infinity of bullets and an infinity of Chinese before us. Each one of our men felt he was killing thousands."

Bruce writes that no force can sustain more than forty percent casualties. The Chinese manage to take fifty percent casualties and keep going - they have a distributed command structure and a supply of combat drug called Veritas that keeps up morale. The decentralized command structure is an interesting note, considering how it kinda flies directly in the face of the "tyrannical red despot" vibe that the Yukon use to describe the Chinese.

Still, the battle goes on and on and on and, finally, the Chinese concentrate and attack the hill, the weakness that Hood left deliberately in his own lines. We learn that it's staffed entirely by a bunch of the hardcore nutjob Yukon regiments. The kind of people who wear their "death clothes" (uniforms made by mothers or spouses) into battle, and they're led by General Van Fleet, who is an amalgamation of several whackadoo weirdo Civil War generals: He sucks lemons to keep himself alert, keeps one hand above his head to "balance his humors" and constantly screams out passages from the Book of Joshua.

And, well, the army on that hill is running low on ammo.

So, Hood, with regrets, sends Bruce and teamsters with ammo.

Bruce arrives after the Chinese have attacked the hill so many times that the outer layer of fortifications have collapsed from the amount of incendiaries and bullets hitting it. By now, the Chinese have adopted the strategy of firing their rifles up and arcing bullets down onto the hill from a few hundred meters away - hoping to just kill a Yukon or two through sheerest luck. Bruce keeps resupplying the hill as these attacks go on - heading in and out under fire.

By now, the Chinese are out of rockets. They're out of Vertias. They're out of everything but hope and bravery.

The final attack comes - and it drags on and on. The Yukon on the hill have been taking casualties from sheer amount of bullets being shot their way, and their defenses are crumbling. Hood orders General Van Fleet to withdraw. He responds that he's lived his whole life for this day and isn't going to leave now that he's finally got a proper death. That damn fascist death cult, huh?

Bruce, just as indoctrinated as everyone else in the army as it comes to his "duty", volunteers to take himself forward with his oldest, most veteran teamsters - sending the young lads back to stay safe. Hood shakes his hand, tells him good luck, and lets him go off one last time. On the way to the hill, a corpse that wasn't a corpse at all sat up and opened fire with his automatic rifle and Bruce, forgetting his promise to Charlotte, shoots him dead. From that point on, they shoot the corpses they walk past on general principal.

What's one more war crime, huh?

Coming to the Hill, Bruce finds that Van Fleet has completely lost it: His arm's half gone and he's raving about his long dead brother and spitting Bible quotes. The other officers are all either dead or injured, and the highest ranked sergeant asks if Bruce, being a knight of the field, might take command. Bruce, unable to seem a coward after being asked that, sighs and gets to work. They make some makeshift fortifications to bolster what they have, including looting dead Revolutionary Guardsmen of their actually quite decent body armor - using it to shore up holes. Then...the Chinese start shooting again.

One manages to get close and chucks a grenade in and it lands before Bruce and his batman, Charlie - the man that Charlotte worked so hard to rescue from privation and hardship - picks it up to throw it back before it explodes, killing him.

"He was to marry my sister," French, the other batman that Charlotte rescued, says.

As the attack heats up in the final paroxysm of violence, General Van Fleet remembers his flare gun. He gives it to Bruce and bids him to fire "the purple flare." Bruce does so.

We in the fort did not know until after daybreak what had happened. When my composite group and I had been north of the Ganges, Hood had ordered his demolitions men to mine the land a mile infront of the hill and plant thousands of tons of dynamite one hundred and twenty feet in the earth in sixteen different places and connect the explosives with chemical fuses. The purple flare had been the signal to blast the sixteen craters that made a two-mile-long ditch across the front shared by the three adjoining front. Tactical bombers swooped down and dropped Fire Sticks into the ditch after the dust had settled and burned the excavation even deeper into the ground.

At 0456 the Chinese attacked the hill en-mass for the seventy ninth and final time. In the predawn darkness they charged straight from the mortar cloud and into the enormous ditch. Our artillerymen knew the exact range of the crater from their position. I could write that what transpired in that manmade ravine when the waves of men and the 220 shells arrived at the same moment was beyond my capacity to witness. After having beheld the rest of the Battle of Northern India, I would say the slaughter there was no worse than what I had already seen. From the hill fort I could not see the thousands of frantic Chinese trying to crawl up the melted wall of the ditch as bits of shrapnel and balsitic glass did their ditty work. I was thankful I was spared that sight.

A couple score of the enemy did somehow manage to emerge on our side of the long crater; the Yukon infantry shouted "Enjoy Hell!" to those brave few and shot them down.

Click to shrink...

And with that, it's done.

The bad guys have won.

The Chinese survivors are breaking and running and the Yukon bands immediately start playing their favorite songs while they take prisoners - stripping them and binding them up because they're assholes. But then...

At the bottom of the crater a group of diminutive Chinese refused to remove their black tunics as the others had. A tall, burly sergeant from the Second Division slid down the glassy slope and ordered them in gestures to undress. He grabbed the Chinese soldier nearest him and rippled the soldier's blouse. The entire Yukon contingent in the vicinity gasped at what they saw.

"They're women!" the Yukon exclaimed. "Women! They used women in place of the men!"

"Kill them!" someone on the south side yelled. "Kill the whores!"

The sergeant ripped the clothing off two more of the frightened women. His squad slid into the ditch after him...I thought of my wife on the day she left INdia. The memory made me feel something I could not name for [these women] I did not know. Contrary to my years of training, I at once resolved to save her and her companions.

"Leave them be!" I shouted to the men below.

Click to shrink...

The soldiers resist - because I guess they just haven't had ENOUGH senseless murder for one day - and Bruce has to show them his medals and impress them with the fact he's a Knight of the Field. He orders them to treat the prisoners well...and he's not the only one. Hood, also, has passed this order down, despite Fitz sending a message to kill everyone they captured.

But...

There's a very, very, VERY important part here, something that I feel like a less good book wouldn't have included.

The Chinese were as startled as the Yukons had been when we told them they were to go up the slope and be fed. One of the women kissed my hands as she went by me, which was not much of a salve upon my feelings; her simple act of gratitude instead made me think of how I could never justify to my wife the terrible things we had done here...

Click to shrink...

Bruce, like a normal human being, recognizes that...being nice to a scant few survivors after you butcher literally millions of people doesn't make you a good person. It makes you a sick joke.

And, to underline this, there is a footnote from Von Buren: "What does Bruce mean in this passage? Does he imply that he's ashamed he saved the Chinese women or - as is more likely, given his perverse manner of thinking - is he for some reason ashamed of something that happened in the battle? Gerald himself (pp. 2943-2947) mentions Bruce's heroism on Van Fleet's Hill and Bruce was given golden petals for his silver rose and made a double Knight by his superior. Why would he be ashamed of that?"

Why indeed.

The air force takes the Turkish army apart as it tries to form up and without the cohesion or training of the Chinese army, that's that. They give up and go home before they get wholesale butchered anymore.

Five and a half thousand Yukons died. They get a teeny tiny plaque that, according to Von Buren, takes him a solid 25 minuets to find once he set out to search it out to refute Bruce's bitterness as to the memorial they get.

The Chinese get bulldozed into mass graves.

This is the high water mark of the Yukon Confederacy's mastery over the world. While they will continue to sit on top for some time, Lord Fitzpatrick's reign is shakier than it seems. He's about to begin his Any% Fascism SElf Destruction speedrun.

And after this?

I think we all can't fucking wait.

FOOTNOTE TIME

Still not very amused by Von Buren right now.

COMING UP NEXT: The Cracks Appear - and the Next Basileus to Bite the Dust

AFTERWARD

I know I did a lot of skimming this chapter, so I just want to underline here just how unrelentingly grim this chapter is. The tactics and the strategy of the battle seem fairly internally consistent to my layman's eye, but they fall away in the face of the relentless horror that has only gotten more effective and more disturbing the older I get. To steal a quote from another one of my favorite books, I have gotten old enough to believe in death after life, which makes it a lot harder to enjoy the kill counts and the artillery barrages.

 

[MalReynolds]

It's late, but I would like to mention one thing. In the chapters you've just described, the Chinese do manage to win against the Indian forces. Raising two points. First, the Chinese aren't idiots and, when going up against forces that aren't practically speaking at least half a century more advanced than they are (thanks to the Yukon's reconnaissance/communications satellites), they are able to do quite well. And second, that they manage to do quite well even when things are absolutely falling apart for them.

Also, I have to point out this is very much one of things that Judson does well. In my impression, while you're reading these chapters, until the end you have some level of sympathy to Bruce and the other Yukons. It's the first half of, as you say, Steampunk with rights. But as things build to the end, you see more and more that what you're seeing is not so much a wonderful, victorious war but, given the disparity between the Yukons and the rest of the world, a more and more one sided massacre. The several thousand Yukon dead, who's memorial it takes nearly half an hour to find, were matched by tens of million Chinese dead. And, if I remember correctly, that's merely the army sent to India.

So again, one of the things this book does very well is to deconstruct, not merely some of the attitudes I assume you might find in some steampunk, but the attitudes that exist in most any form of imperialism. Whether it be Rorke's Drift or our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, without much reflection one can talk about the bravery of the forces in those fights that were ultimately the invaders. But when you actually look at the body counts, I would say it necessarily becomes harder and harder to view those as anything that could be described as a good outcome.

 

[DragonCobolt]

It's late, but I would like to mention one thing. In the chapters you've just described, the Chinese do manage to win against the Indian forces. Raising two points. First, the Chinese aren't idiots and, when going up against forces that aren't practically speaking at least half a century more advanced than they are (thanks to the Yukon's reconnaissance/communications satellites), they are able to do quite well. And second, that they manage to do quite well even when things are absolutely falling apart for them.

Click to shrink...

Yup! They're doing their best, it's just...their best ain't good enough.

Part of what makes the grimness hit really hard is how the book does really do the extra work, constantly, to remind you that the bad guy are human. Which, um...a lot of other books don't. Even books I really like often slip into making the bad guys so vile and inhuman that you can watch them getting thwacked all day and just cheer - and that...can be fun.

It's still good to have books like this to remind you.

 

[Acolyte]

That sounds super grim.

Now I have an urge to have write some sort SI in this world or at least a short hop in a multicross.