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10-November-1919
The days kept passing while the war roared, and slowly the winter months arrived.
My predictions had come true. American equipment did not stop arriving and United States troops replaced the Entente's losses, even with the interception effort working, now confirmed by stories of ships loaded with passengers and materials that had sunk to the bottom of the sea.
There were also the great German victories, which took maximum advantage of the ineptitude of the American generals and troops. On several occasions, German forces won by causing true massacres on the enemy side, forcing them to retreat a little more. It was even reported that the number of American prisoners had already reached the millions, and that many of them were working in German factories and farms.
But the front had stalled. In fact, recently it was being reported that it was beginning to slowly retreat. Hindenburg's great offensive had exhausted almost all of his ammunition reserves, which meant they would have to gather equipment and supplies again before attempting another great offensive. The Americans did not have that problem, since thousands of transports kept arriving every month loaded with material.
France itself was suffering the most. Among the information Walter frequently gave me at my request, it was said that the French were furious with the Americans. The disease, that American fever we had successfully named through propaganda among the neutral countries, was causing chaos in the Entente ranks, with millions sick and hundreds of thousands dead among the overcrowded French populations.
Since they had evacuated great numbers of people from the combat zones, millions of Frenchmen lived packed into the cities of western France, where the disease was ravaging civilian lives. Or at least that was what the French prisoners said.
Meanwhile, the disease was beginning to spread through Germany, although Maximiliam and a group of doctors and scientists had developed a vaccine that had already passed human trials. Although, certainly, it was not known whether it would be as effective as expected, since it was simply a vaccine where the virus was isolated and then killed with heat.
Because of that, the effectiveness of said vaccine could vary, and there were doubts over whether it would grant the necessary immunity to prevent people from dying in great numbers. Even so, large quantities of vaccines were already being produced using the Duchy's medical facilities, in addition to other important medical facilities in Germany, manufacturing it desperately and inoculating first the soldiers and the cities on the front line.
I could not profit from this, since the State had applied an emergency law that expropriated the rights to the vaccine by considering it a military necessity. We would be paid after the war, which, with a defeated Germany, meant they would probably pay us nothing for the vaccine. But at least many deaths would be avoided, and the vaccinations were proving effective unless they were hiding the information.
So, while our preparations kept accelerating, accumulating ammunition, weapons and soldiers, we also continued selling food, clothing and medicines to the Russian civil war.
We were beginning to be prepared for that wretched day. The reserves of the Duchy's Central Bank were relatively full, and that gave the Baltic mark a value that did not fluctuate too much.
In addition, I had begun exchanging my Ukrainian marks for German marks, and after that I bought large quantities of Swiss francs, while shielding the Duchy's economy against the approaching storm.
I had even managed to have Lithuania, which still had nothing more than a military governor, pass under the administration of the Baltic Duchy, since what we needed most now was to have the greatest possible amount of operational territory under our effective control.
Our recruitment campaign among the occupation garrisons had been a great success, managing to expand the Duchy's army from its initial thirteen thousand men to almost forty-five thousand, after months of hard work and offering better conditions to the soldiers who changed their destination from Ukraine to the lands of the Duchy. Many began settling in newly founded German colonies, or directly in some cities where there were available rooms and lands we could give them.
The army had grown too much, and it was not healthy for an economy to have to carry so many soldiers under its care without a sufficient demographic base to sustain them. More people were needed to supply that enormous expense, and that was why Lithuania was the best option. They handed its control to me without much difficulty, since it still had not been decided whether Lithuania would be handed to the Poles or left as a vassal kingdom.
Thus, approximately one million seven hundred thousand Lithuanians came under our control, and we had to subject them to the same treatment as everyone else. Although, to be fair, our form of government was not so different from what the military governor of Lithuania had already been doing. At least there were no major protests when the educational reforms and the change of the local administrative language were implemented.
That meant that in the whole territory there would be around 5 million inhabitants, considering the German migrants who arrived following their families, since each soldier brought with him 3 to 8 people.
And so 1919 arrived, while Germany slowly retreated in France, leaving enormous chaos and destruction before the withdrawal of its forces.
It was then that the great protests began, both in Germany and in Austria-Hungary, demanding peace. And, clearly, since we were talking about the multiethnic empire of the Austrians, many of those protests had identitarian tones, which forced the German States to divert a great deal of attention toward the repression of those uprisings.
Meanwhile, I was ordered to mobilize the Eighth Army near Romania, since there was fear that they would enter the war if things kept getting worse. I mobilized almost one hundred thousand men toward the front, leaving everything ready for some German general to take control of the Eighth Army if necessary.
In February, while the pressure on Germany kept growing and growing, the German army of Suez was finally forced to retreat, at last freeing the blockade that had so deeply strangled the British and forced them to travel by the longer route.
Even so, Germany continued resisting, while Austria-Hungary slowly began to crumble.
Months of combat had only managed to push the German forces back to the Alps in the south. In the north, everything seemed to have stalled on the Marne River, where the German forces had fortified themselves with great effort by order of the generals. There they continued retreating in a slow and bloody war of attrition that Germany was still resisting.
In April, news had reached us that the Austro-Hungarian Empire had dissolved. Hungarian independence had been formalized, while the inhabitants of the Balkans rose in revolt. Croatia and Bosnia had been born as new States, and Serbia had returned to the map, claiming all the territories of the new countries that had not yet been annexed.
Austria still controlled Bohemia and Slovenia, which were the areas it had managed to hold with the forces withdrawn from the front, in addition to South Tyrol. The new Italian States, created after the armistice with Italy, had united into a Republic of Lombardy-Venetia, and it seemed they had no intention of returning to the Kingdom of Italy.
That caused millions of Austro-Hungarian troops to begin withdrawing from the front, especially the soldiers of the new States, who wanted to return to fight for their country in what seemed like a new front within the ruins of the Austrian Empire.
Germany did everything possible to prevent them from abandoning the front, but, apparently, that finally caused Germany to be brought to the negotiating table with the other powers.
Walter kept me informed of everything, but the first peace drafts were rejected immediately after the talks began in The Hague, in the Netherlands, since they practically wanted to offer a treaty far worse than the one Germany had suffered historically because of the enormous costs of the war.
That was why the war continued and, although American casualties were rising like foam, the German army kept resisting in its dozens of trench lines, which practically made the Americans lose lives senselessly while the front moved barely a few meters.
Several months of American offensives passed like that, since, so far, the French and British were barely supporting those operations. The Americans suffered butchery after butchery, while Germany continued offering leonine resistance.
Estimated American casualties were rapidly approaching eight figures, and between the many protests that continued striking Germany and what remained of the Austrians, these began generating shortages of ammunition and even canned food at the front.
Finally, they met again in The Hague to negotiate. Something Walter had been explaining to me was that the Entente wanted to negotiate separately with each member of the Central Powers, but Germany had managed to keep its negotiating capacity united, refusing to deal separately and demanding that negotiations always be conducted as a bloc.
That was why, in August, a one-month truce had been signed while the sides prepared for the signing of a more definitive treaty.
Three weeks of negotiations passed, where sometimes it was the German envoys who left the table, and other times it was the French and Americans who abandoned the talks, while the British, for the most part, still wanted to negotiate.
In the end, an agreement was reached that was unpopular among the Allies because of how soft it had been on Germany, especially from the French point of view.
It had been made public that the American envoy had threatened the French and British that, if they did not accept the peace treaty, they would simply stop leading offensives against the German trenches, since the casualties suffered by the Americans were already a scandal in their country.
At the end of the day, I was somewhat pleased to see that many of the harshest conditions had been omitted, but that did not change one thing: we had lost. Although the vision of the American president had prevailed greatly, making clear the enormous influence of the United States in the negotiation.
Alsace-Lorraine would become a zone under international observation, where in five years a plebiscite would be held to vote which State its inhabitants wished to belong to. The same would happen in Northern Schleswig and Posen, where there were cultural groups seeking self-determination. Something similar would also be applied in Macedonia, where the Bulgarians were, and in South Tyrol,Galicia and Lodomeria and Slavonia within the former Austrian territories.
Germany would lose all its African and Asian colonies, handed over mostly to France, except for East Africa, which remained under British rule. Everything else was taken by France.
Twenty billion gold marks would have to be paid in war compensations. Only three billion would be compensations that had to be paid immediately. Ten billion would enter a five-year payment category, and the remaining seven billion would be free payments, without interest, distributed among all the countries that had been members of the Central Powers. It was a rather enormous sum, although smaller when compared to the brutal reparations Germany had suffered historically.
Throughout the negotiations, it was rejected that Germany bore exclusive guilt for the war. No matter how much the French insisted on that, they did not achieve much, since everything depended on what the Americans said.
All countries accepted their respective military restrictions. Germany could not have more than five hundred thousand men mobilized. The other States had similar limits, in addition to being forced to destroy a great number of fortifications.
And the cherry on top for the Americans was the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: Germany had to reject it completely and immediately free the occupied populations to allow the creation of new States under the principle of self-determination.
To my surprise, the Ukrainian State was considered legitimate by the Americans, since its king had been democratically elected, although they demanded that Vasyl be ratified as king when the Ukrainian Congress was elected again, without the laws imposed by Germany. If he wanted to remain in power, he had to be chosen by his people.
Meanwhile, the other States created by Germany had to dissolve and allow local politicians to form their own governments.
The Ottoman Empire had to free all the Russian territory gained during the war to allow the formation of new States. In the Middle East, Wilson's American influence was very noticeable, since the secret agreements between the British and the Arabs were largely respected, although a single State was not created.
Since they were multiethnic zones, a system of one State with several nations was considered, where one State was created in Arabia and another in the Levant. Both would have to form structures that represented their different peoples within the country, something similar to the United States, but based on cultural groups. It was something strange.
The Ottoman Empire had lost all its territories in the Levant, but kept Mesopotamia.
So, beyond all the war reparations and the military restrictions, the Central Powers had lost, but they had not been destroyed.
Although my signature was necessary for the treaty, I ignored every summons they sent me to attend, and in the end everything was resolved without my signature.
''Mein Herzog, there is a group of envoys from the League of Nations waiting in the Riga parliament. They have come to demand that you hand power over to the local political groups'' the bureaucrat said as he opened the door.
''Well… time to put everything on the line'' I said, smiling while taking out my pistol and placing it in the inner pocket of my coat.
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