Ingermanburg
As was often true of similar instances through history, Black Saturday represented a convergence of circumstances which, by themselves insufficient to set off any colossally serious sort of trouble, when taken together could scarcely be expected to prove anything far short of incendiary. Gandvik in the months since what many were calling the Thortraian War had been brought to a disappointing conclusion by a cease-fire deal almost if not more unpopular than the war itself had endured one political crisis after another, and confidence in a new government, helmed reluctantly by none other than Lieutenant-General Lennart Bjorgstrom, was fading quickly. The shock of war, it seemed, had managed to turn what had been the cracks in Gandvik’s carefully-constructed political system into gaping wounds, which, now torn open, could only be healed through measures more drastic than Bjorgstrom was willing, as a professional officer, or able, in light of his administration’s decidedly unsteady foundations, to pursue. Still, thanks in no small measure to the General’s genuine goodwill and tireless effort, and that of his close advisers, Riga had managed, through careful diplomacy, restraint, and compromise, to avoid total disaster.
When matters did finally take an irredeemable turn, Ingermanburg’s role as epicenter of the collapse struck almost no one in Riga as a surprising development. Granted, the colossal outpouring of public anger which culminated in Governor Oxenstierna’s scandalous eviction from his provincial capital had its roots, months earlier, in faraway Gomey. In retaliation for the fatal poisoning of several of their number from methane-tainted liquor, demobilizing conscripts on their way home from the Weshield war front ransacked the town, murdering several publicans and clashing violently with Civil Guardsmen before Bjorgstrom’s personal intervention, coupled with immensely generous guarantees of clemency for all involved, put a stop to the rioting. It was nonetheless only a prelude to a dangerous breakdown in military discipline, as depots and garrisons across western Gandvik began to experience an almost unprecedented wave of strikes and desertions, born of the suffering caused by a war which struck so many Gandvians as alternately pointless and pointlessly abandoned, and conditioned by deep disaffection with military life felt by vast numbers of those called-up to fight.
War had also caused a slump in economic activity, foreign trade most of all, which, though in broad terms relatively slight, proved more than sufficient to alarm key elements in Gandvik’s political class, particularly those who already saw themselves as under threat by Field Marshal Kniephof’s ever more transparent interest in political centralization. It was largely at their urging that Kniephof himself, discredited by the glaring failure of his belligerent project, was forced from his post as Chief of the Combined Staff, to be replaced by the still-popular, though within the Army not altogether trusted, Bjorgstrom, upon whom was imposed a federalization scheme that effectively institutionalized what had under Andres-Kletsk functioned as an informal, if near-universal, system of patronage and influence. Few governors and provincial bosses, at any rate, were granted much of an opportunity to enjoy their freshly-guaranteed administrative independence before they too found themselves under attack from a wave of industrial action, launched in response to a trade deal with Japan which so many of them had loudly championed. Successive delays in promised electoral reform, which Bjorgstrom, no one’s idea of a politician, could not manage to force through against both military and civil-bureaucratic opposition, only added fuel to an already incendiary mixture, and when in a climate of pervasive opportunism and impunity political parties did start to form, more often than not at the behest of established forces, Bjorgstrom could neither suppress them, such was the tenuous nature of his control over the Interior Ministry, nor could he offer them a framework within which they may have been expected to function according to normal principles. Chancellor Andres-Kletsk’s delicately-balanced house of cards, it very much seemed, was falling apart, and thanks to Kniephof’s commendably thorough purge of his predecessor’s chief loyalists, there remained in government very few who could hope to put things back together.
It would perhaps please the Gull Flag Captain Clayburgh and War Director Madders to learn that, among the factors working in favor of Ingermanburg’s emergence that chilly Saturday as first to fall for the new order of things was its extensive infiltration by the Military Intelligence Office and those working to further its goals, enough evidence of whose presence had been detected by Gandvian intelligence to provide grounds for what were, in hindsight, some immensely questionable initiatives. It was during the course of one early-morning raid that a young student, in a sheer trick of fate, was accidentally shot by a security policeman as he stumbled across a door-threshold with a loaded submachine gun. Governor Oxenstierna’s attempt, in retrospect insane, to mine the tragedy for political capital through its publication, as a discredit to Riga, backfired dramatically, and instead touched-off days of street protests that reached their critical stage early on that January morning, when the usual din of chanting, drumming, and brass bands was shattered by the crack of a pistol-shot that felled a city policeman. The resulting violence quickly spiraled out of control, and when Oxenstierna finally allowed himself to admit as much, the provincial Civil Guard found its path into the city blocked, to its immense shock, by elements of Ingermanburg’s Territorial Army district, fully kitted-out for battle.
Running street battles, though of the stones-and-rubber bullets variety rather than that so recently experienced by many participants, raged through Ingermanburg for days before a disheartened and not wholly unsympathetic metropolitan police force simply quit the field, ceding control of the city center to an immense mass of marchers, their number estimated for Riga’s benefit, conservatively, at not far less than half a million individuals. In a matter of hours the crowds had taken control of the Admiralty, the Stock Exchange, the offices of city government in magnificent Mattarnovi Palace, Pietari fortress, and the abandoned police headquarters at Hirzebruch Palace, and had even managed, by force of persuasion, to secure the release of all non-violent offenders from the municipal lockup. News of Governor Oxenstierna’s departure by helicopter, late Monday morning, for Narva’s rather safer environs was greeted by rapturous cheering in the packed Mattarnovi Square, and signaled the start of a citywide celebration that would not fully subside, according to some later estimates, for two weeks.
Amid the general excitement, it was not difficult to lose sight of wider objectives, and Ingermanburgers principally interested in marking their triumph in a suitable fashion could almost be forgiven for failing to notice the establishment, within the Admiralty Building’s cavernous and rather austerely-decorated interior, of a new city government, one claiming, with some justification, a genuine popular mandate. The Temporary Governing and Steering Committee for Social and Municipal Affairs, a colorful, pluralistic assembly drawn from the vast range of clubs, pseudo-parties, and intellectual tendencies active in what had always been Gandvik’s most politically-aware metropolis, had taken up its new quarters at the behest of an enthusiastic Navy sub-lieutenant, conscious of the Committee’s need for first-rate communications access and a large volume of administrative equipment, both of which were to be had at the Admiralty, fallen lately into disuse but still superbly well-stocked, and had quietly transferred over from its former, not quite adequate, headquarters at the Polytechnic University in a caravan of buses borrowed from the city garrison. What began as a boisterous crowd of students, professors, life-long political outcasts, published intellectuals, junior officers and union leaders stuffed into a single room had with great speed expanded to occupy nearly an entire wing of the Admiralty, and now counted on establishment typists, clerks, liaisons, engineers, even a handful of ‘reliable’ former policemen to deal with those inevitable few who refused to embrace the new civic spirit.
First order of business, by general consensus, was continuity of basic services, such things as water, sanitation, electricity, public transport, fire and rescue, and on that account Committee members were pleased to find the existing department of public works in a cooperative mood, a stroke of tremendously good fortune. Directly following on the itinerary, however, was an issue of equal if perhaps less direct import. While Bjorgstrom had indeed, in a radio address following Oxenstierna’s flight, declared his unwillingness to resolve issues in Ingermanburg by force, indicating also his readiness to negotiate, “with a view to arriving at a lasting accommodation,” the Committee knew full well that Bjorgstrom’s control over his own Army was far from absolute, and it seemed all too possible that a hard-charging, hardline officer, perhaps Igelstrom, or perhaps airmobile force commander Benckendorff, would take matters into his own hands, Bjorgstrom’s goodwill be damned.
As a consequence, messengers were quickly sent out to make direct contact with the men of IV Reserve Army, who had already turned out of their own accord to deter the Civil Guard and who, it was reasoned, might well be persuaded to act as a barrier against future unwanted attention from the outside. The explicit creation of what, after all, could not fail to be interpreted as an independent armed force within a sovereign state that still maintained a military of its own was, as things stood, a long step beyond the lengths to which a comfortable majority of Committee members, if by no means all of them, were willing to go, but just the same, if other domestic political actors were deploying elements of the national armed forces in service of their own narrow ends, could ‘social and democratic’ Ingermanburg be excused for failing to take the measures necessary to secure its own safety?
In that endeavor also, Ingermanburg’s new government found unexpected help from established authority. Requests for assistance were forwarded to friends and relatives with military experience, or still in active service, and in most cases received sympathetic replies. It emerged that the grandfather of one delegate had even commanded a regular army tank division, and while at 72 well past retirement age, his concern for his granddaughter’s well-being was such that he agreed to take command of IV Reserve Army, in place of its absentee leader, at once, the necessary writ having been drawn up by a favorably-inclined Army clerk in Riga under a superior’s Nelson eye.
For one with an eye to Gandvian history, events in Ingermanburg before and since Black Saturday would doubtless carry a familiar ring. The city had brought down governments before, and what took place there would more than likely be emulated by Vitstenkyrka, Menesk, and elsewhere before long. All the same, Ingermanburg was not Gandvik, and its hopes and dreams were only valid at a national level for so long as they were shared nationwide, and the last great political upheaval that began in the second city failed to sustain its momentum far beyond city limits. Crucially, however, one important piece was for all practical purposes missing from the present-day chess-board. Field Marshal Kniephof, some did indeed warn, had during his tenure as de facto national leader done immense damage to the Royal Army’s prestige and morale, and whereas, from 1914 to 1927, Konstantinus Strandmann was able to wield the armed forces as arbiter of factional disputes, and guarantor of civic stability, in the wake of its ruinous involvement in a costly and to most minds quite futile war of choice, it appeared unlikely that a Royal Army whose morale and credibility lay in tatters could be counted-upon to play anything like a similar role, to what end result none could accurately say.
Orjalinna
It was someone’s idea of making a statement, no doubt, and as a means of serving notice it absolutely succeeded in its aim, and while he normally wouldn’t find reason to get excessively worked-up over such things, the arrival of a Tatarian Civil Guard detachment intent on shuttering the signals-intelligence facility at mid-morning, after its employees, most of them locals and hardly involved in anything sensitive or strategic, had already made what was by most accounts a lengthy and difficult commute to the city’s dusty and underserved outskirts, struck Captain Tuppurainen as an act of inexcusable rudeness, and he was determined not to leave before saying so. Therefore, as announcement after announcement resonated over the building’s public address system, and coworkers passed by, coats and briefcases in hand, outside, Tuppurainen sat resolutely at his desk, refusing to look up, wearing an annoyed expression as he leafed methodically through a file that, in all likelihood, no longer meant much of anything to anyone.
Tuppurainen sat there in solitude, his sense of indignation rising by the minute, for some time before, heralded by a cacophony of stamping, slamming, and shouting, a quartet of Civil Guardsmen burst through the light faux-wood door. They glared at one another for several moments, each wearing his most annoyed expression, until a Guardsman wearing Corporal’s stripes barked, in thick provincially-accented Gandvian, “Get moving, everybody out! Haven’t you heard the announcements?”
Tuppurainen sighed disdainfully. “Look, I’m sorry, but I am busy with important work, and I ask you to please leave me in peace.” The Corporal met his remark with a furious look. “I don’t know why you fellows insist on barging in here, making all this noise, pulling people away from jobs that need doing, when you could just as easily have called late yesterday, or maybe early today, and let us all stay home. Would that have been so difficult? Hm?”
Rosy-faced, and placing a hand on his leather pistol-holster for emphasis, the Corporal curtly ordered his companions to remove Tuppurainen, willingly or otherwise. The Guardsmen marched across the pile carpet to where Tuppurainen was seated with crashing, shuddering footfalls, and, one to each arm while the third looked on, lifted him bodily from his chair.
“Now look here,” he protested, “there’s no need for this indecency! We’re in the same bloody Army, aren’t we?”
To this, the Corporal, looking him directly in the eye, bellowed with flawless copper-delivery, “Don’t you get smart with us, hear? We say up and out, you get up and out!” His eyes flashed over Tuppurainen’s collar tabs. “Captain, eh? Think you’re a god-damned big shot, eh? Well I’ve got news for you, pal! We’re the ones in charge here, and you better do as we damned well say or we’ll make you wish you had!”
The Guardsmen frog-marched Tuppurainen down the hall and shoved him roughly into an elevator. “Just you wait and see, smart-Alec, things are going to be different around here from now on! No more bowing and slobbering to you god-damned…you damned Germans! So you best get with the program, or make yourselves bloody well scarce!”
Brahe
Plant manager Mueller could take a measure of solace in that his present difficulties had only really started after his factory, a source of engine and transmission components for VMT automobiles, was visited, at very short notice he would add, by a Japanese observer. And it was no wonder, going about, asking, against Mueller’s clear advice, all sorts of troublesome questions, that he’d given the workers such a fright. There was not much, after all, that a Gandvian auto worker feared and loathed more intensely than an expert, for an expert meant scrutiny, which meant change, which meant, more often than not, that someone was going to lose their job. Any kind of workforce reduction or restructuring program, if it was to be carried off smoothly, required not only a generous spread of buyouts and bonuses, but close liaison with the workers themselves and a lengthy adjustment period, or else, as had been so starkly demonstrated, discord could result.
A number of worrying rumors had been circulating as of late, rumors of an imminent sale to a Japanese conglomerate, of savage cuts in headcount, of asset stripping as prelude to total closure, and try as Mueller had to control them, Mr. Hayashi’s visit, far from calming tensions, had served to ignite a full-blown strike action. Words like efficiency, productivity, terms like time-and-motion, carried for the average Gandvian industrial worker a connotation similar in effect to a lewd gesture, and the plant’s industries, as Mueller predicted, had replied accordingly, pelting the unfortunate foreigner with half-eaten sandwiches before switching off their machines and walking out. Mueller hadn’t seen a single one of his employees for five days until, entirely unannounced, they reappeared one morning, though their return evidently had everything to do with a desire to protect the factory machinery from possible sale or removal, and nothing at all to do with a resumption of work. At one end of the factory floor the younger men had gathered to drink beer, play darts, and listen to one of anarcho-punk group Sector 70’s high-powered releases on cassette, while at the opposite end, a group of older workers, disconcertingly, were engaged in what looked a great deal like bible study, seated around an old transistor radio that they had tuned to an evangelical station.
Normally, such disturbances were cured by a mixture of pay raises, a round of appointments to posts in the industrial bureaucracy, and mediation by representatives from the Ministry of Trade, but Mueller’s appeals for ministerial assistance had not only gone unheeded, but had in fact received no reply whatsoever from a department already stretched, by all accounts, far beyond its means. Local authorities had proven similarly unhelpful. Slowly, it was dawning on Mueller that he would have to do something himself, or risk his own livelihood and standing, but he could not even begin to imagine what.
Western Ruthenia
For someone who had been left for dead, to begin with, had survived, while entirely unconscious, the destruction by mortar fire of an ambulance in which he was riding, and last of all had narrowly escaped death by hemorrhage while in surgery, Major Robert Alver, if he was being honest with himself, had to admit that things had never looked better. He’d emerged from hospital after a four-month stay not only having escaped crippling or disfiguring injury, but newly engaged, to a charming, brilliant physician no less, while, instead of the medical discharge papers which he had been told to expect, he received both a promotion to Lieutenant-Colonel and an appointment to command his old regiment, PR 32.
Although Alver did not expect a warm welcome, the full coolness of his reception proved nonetheless a deeply unpleasant surprise. Things began to go strangely from the start, when he stepped off the train to find neither car nor driver awaiting his arrival and was forced instead to ask for a lift from the driver of a truck wearing PR 32’s identification flash. He then endured a lengthy ride over rough, pitted winter roads at what seemed like a crawling pace, next to a middle-aged Sergeant who, beyond the regular swish-and-spit of chewing tobacco, offered not a word of conversation. Alver arrived, after what must have been two and a half hours at least, at an unfamiliar and visibly run-down barracks near the edge of a flat and open tank-training area, a gated vehicle entrance guarded by a sentry box that, at first glance empty, on closer inspection was revealed to harbor a fair-haired young man in tankers’ overalls brazenly napping while on duty.
There did not appear to be very much going on inside the garrison either, which flew a limp national flag from a flagpole whose coat of regulation white was chipping glaringly. A few men moved about on various errands, sloshing through a layer of freshly-fallen snow with little evident sense of haste, none as yet taking any notice of their new commanding officer’s arrival, and it was left to Alver, feeling strange indeed, to find his own way to regimental headquarters.
As he rounded a half-collapsed, abandoned barracks shed now heaped with various refuse, Alver was met by the familiar profile of a Savander radio van, diesel generator gurgling peacefully as a light shone in the window. Suddenly, a field telephone began to buzz, and a moment later Alver picked up Captain Johanson’s familiar voice, albeit reedier and hoarser than usual. As he talked, Johanson seemed to become more and more agitated, until he reached a plane of evident rage.
“Now you listen to me, lieutenant!” he roared at the top of his voice, “I have had it with your excuses! I don’t care who’s gone missing, who’s drunk, who’s strung out, who’s fallen down a bloody well! C company will, I repeat, will turn out for inspection at zero-seven-hundred sharp tomorrow morning, and will, I say again, will pass said inspection! C company is your responsibility, and if you can’t hack it, then, by the good lord, I will find something that you can do! Have I made myself clear?”
Johanson returned the handset to its cradle with a crash, and was about to smash his fist on the fold-down desk top, covered with papers and dispatches, in frustration when he caught sight of Alver standing outside the open doorway, the original door, removed for minor repairs, having not yet been returned.
“Can I help you with something?” asked Johanson, stubble-faced, squinting against the outdoor sunlight, in a tone far from welcoming. “If you’re looking for regimental HQ, this is it.”
Alver did not quite know how to proceed. Johanson evidently did not recognize him, and if Alver himself hadn’t known better, he might not have recognized Johanson either, such was the change in his appearance, and he stood for a moment considering his words.
“Well? Out with it!” barked Johanson, shifting his gaze to a stack of reports pending signature.
“Colonel Alver reporting, captain,” offered Alver in his most authoritative tone. “I’m to be the new CO.”
“Oh,” replied Johanson, giving Alver a wary look. “Alver, yes, 2nd Battalion. You’ll have to excuse me, we’ve had a lot of new faces around here. Bit of a high turnover since you’ve been gone.” Johanson eyed the order-of-St. Stanislaus-medal ribbon pinned to Alver’s jacket-front disapprovingly.
“Yes, it seems so, Captain,” Alver offered. In truth, while he had tried to keep pace with regimental developments, he had not imagined the actual scale of its losses during the brief Thortraian War. As 2 Division’s spearhead across the Bug, PR 32 suffered grievous casualties from the outset, of which Alver was one of the first, and in the space of a single week had been almost totally destroyed. The dead, mostly armored infantry and IFV crews, numbered over 100 at last count, the total wounded higher still, and of those who managed to survive the ordeal, almost all had been demobilized. Colonel Hagen, PR 32’s original commanding officer, had apparently been granted extended leave for reasons of personal health, an attempt, as rumor had it, to kick a nasty amphetamine addiction that he’d picked up during the war, while nearly all regimental officers above company grade had either been killed, discharged, or transferred to other posts, except of course for Johanson, left as a sort of custodian for the wrecked formation for the past months, doing his best to carry it, virtually alone, on his own visibly weary shoulders.
“I should like, if possible,” continued Alver, “to inspect the regiment, say, sometime tomorrow morning? Nothing terribly formal. I’d just like to see everyone’s faces, to shake hands, introduce myself, that sort of thing, if it isn’t too much of an interruption.”
“Well, Major…sorry, Colonel, you’re welcome to do as you please. It’s your outfit now. I have to warn you, though, I don’t know if you’ll like what you see. We’re under strength by, oh, about seventy-five percent, on a good day, and the material we do have, well, it isn’t exactly first-class…we’ve been through the ringer, you see, right around the bend, and we’re moving as fast as we can, mind, but fast as we can isn’t very fast. Hard, bitter work, you see.” Johnson added, under his breath, “Not like some people, on some spa getaway…” and immediately regretted doing so.
“I’m sorry, what was that, Captain?” came Alver’s automatic retort, though on a moment’s further reflection he thought it better not to make anything more of it. Perhaps it was no way, no way at all, to address a superior officer, but clearly Johanson was under a lot of strain, and an occasional slip of the tongue, in light of those circumstances, could be dealt with by means short of courts-martial. Confrontation, obviously, would not get Alver anywhere. “While it’s fresh in my mind, Johanson, I want to say, honestly, that I have nothing but respect for the work that you’ve done here so far. Clearly you’ve taken quite a difficult situation, and made the best of it. It is not my intention, I promise you, to criticize any element of your performance as regimental commander. You have to understand, and I believe you do, that I’m going to need your help in running this regiment...”
Johanson sat silently, staring with a guilty look at the papers on his desk. Alver was taken quite aback to detect a faint quiver in his upper lip. My goodness, thought Alver, he really does seem shaken-up. “Above all, I hope we can agree to be clear and open with one another. I like to think I’m a reasonable, even-tempered sort of fellow, and all I ask is for you to deal with me the same way…Alright, I won’t keep you any longer. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.”
Full of worry, feeling far worse than when he arrived, Alver, looking back momentarily on a Captain Johanson then shuddering lightly with faint sobs, walked away to track down his other officers, and to find a place where he might expect to sleep.
