The meeting of the Des Moines Alliance was brief, brisk, and without rancor. The recently established Joint Command would take overall leadership, placing General Sitting Bull in command, with the three armies from the member states of the alliance taking a subordinate role to him and his staff. While there were immediate difficulties, mostly regarding the transition of three independent armies into one unified one and some logistics mixups caused by different armies having different calibers of weaponry, by the time they were making their way north, such complications had been ironed out.
And they began moving rapidly, propelled by the network of military infrastructure that had been slowly built up in the area in order to enable responses to raids and by the efficient logistics system of the alliance which featured innovations such as standardized crates and desiccated meals. The various warlord states were not recognized by the three nations of the alliance, and so did not have proper embassies which could receive a declaration of war.
So in advance of the army's arrival, delivery of the declaration came by means of a balloon, which dropped several copies of the document attached to some metal weights and a collection of prominent flags.
If that balloon and those like it also did some investigating of the military depositions of their enemies, none could say for sure.
The capital of the loose, ramshackle alliance of bandit kings, renegade slavers, mercenaries, and warlords was Helena, a town made moderately wealthy by the needs of the limited administration of the territory and an influx of British wealth to facilitate mining and making trouble for their enemies. Guns, bodies, and petty luxuries flowed in, while raw minerals flowed out.
It was towards Helena the Des Moines Army advanced, and they were met by the armies of their enemies along the path. What followed next was a week of maneuvering back and forth, the Des Moines taking advantage of its superior speed to counter their enemy's interior lines.
As the two armies hunted each other, one began to melt away, it's unmotivated and often poorly paid soldiers choosing a path that did not end in them facing the armies which had smashed the United States, while the other started to face strain on its supply lines from the sheer distance they were moving.
If battle did not come soon, one army would dissolve and the other would start having to forage. By what was effectively mutual agreement, they met in the hills surrounding a tiny hamlet that hadn't existed five years ago, a place called Williville.
The battle began with an artillery dual, except that would imply a measure of parity that simply did not exist. While not all the heavy guns were up to the standards of the best weapons of the Freedmen's Republic, rifled cannons and mortars designed to fire for endless hours at high speed, the worst of them was more than a match for most weapons of the warlord armies. Similar, if not more extreme discrepancies existed in the training and morale of the crews manning the guns.
Poorly placed and protected ammunition stockpiles were blown sky-high, resulting in massive casualties, while careful ranging shots and calculations let shells land amongst loose blocks of infantry and batteries of artillery. Earth fountained into the air, and with it, deadly waves of force and barrages of shrapnel, eviscerating formations and the men within them.
The warlord's artillery fired back as best it could, but most only manages to get a few shots off, and only a fraction of those shots landed anywhere near their targets. Even so, many died, scythed through without mercy by a threat they could do nothing but endure.
But then the lines of infantry found themselves in range of each other. Two sharp volleys later, the warlord armies were broken and running, and now was the hour of pursuit.
Neither the Worker's Republic nor the Freedmen's Republic had large cavalry corps. Both had faced significant depletion of their horse stockpiles during the destruction of the United States and the bloody chaos that had followed. But the Turtle Island Confederation did have significant populations of riders and their horses and had grown both and adapted them to warfare using heavy weaponry and breech-loading rifles.
They took the lead during the pursuit, capturing much of the leadership and the gold stockpiles of a number of warlords, but a couple of scattered groups managed to cross the Canadian border. Upon reaching it, the bands of cavalry, uncaring of the sovereignty which had been ruthless in the repression of their distant kin, simply crossed it in hot pursuit.
In addition to capturing their enemies, they also took the opportunity to attack a few settlements that crossed into their path and ravaged the railroad they encountered, before retreating back across the border. While no Canadian or British troops arrived in time to intervene, the government in Ottowa and then London rapidly became aware, and demanded an apology and significant compensation from the Des Moines alliance.
Flushed with victory, the Alliance decided to respond with...
[] A formal apology and reasonable compensation. (Britain is completely mollified, some domestic backlash from hawks)
[] A formal apology with token compensation (Britain will be more hostile, minimal domestic backlash from hawks and from doves)
[] No apology, token compensation, and a statement that the troops were in hot pursuit of an enemy (Britain will be significantly more hostile, very small risk of conflict or war, some domestic backlash from doves)
[] No apology or compensation, but a call for the people of London to rise up and overthrow the crowned heads that oppress them ( Britain will almost certainly declare war, significant domestic backlash from doves)
