Cordon Sanitaire
The following is an account of the 114th Colonial Service Regiment, “Jarnsveld’s Jagers,” in their campaign against insurrectionists in one of the far-flung provinces of the Empire.
Tarbes, Bellecôte Province
21 February 2010
15C/60F
1400H
François Duvalier sipped his coffee slowly, careful not to let the hot liquid burn his tongue; such would ruin the taste of the food he had just ordered, and that simply would not do. Duvalier was a citizen of Tarbes, in the northern Bellecôte Province, about fifty kilometers south of the Bichon Mountains. Like the slim majority of the province’s inhabitants, Duvalier was a French Catholic, and proud of his heritage. Also like many of his compatriots, Duvalier saw himself as an individual, and Bellecôte as a province, as being far more cultured than much of the rest of the Commonwealth. The art of the bistro was dying through much of the country; Duvalier sighed amusedly at the thought of getting a decent bowl of cassoulet in the choking urban crowd of Manetheren or Whitefall.
Clearing his head from daydreams, Duvalier focused on his newspaper; the Monde was a decent paper, a bastion of centrism against the wild tides of both right and left. He chuckled cynically at the front page—apparently the Mayor was at the center of an embarrassing incident involving a certain mistress. Duvalier finished his laugh, and for a moment pondered the absurdity of local politics. Why, it seemed that in a town as (relatively) small as Tarbes, even the—
Crump. Crump. Crump. Duvalier’s inner discourse was interrupted by the distant sound of artillery fire. It still caught him off guard, even if by this time it wasn’t entirely unexpected. Colonial Service troops had been operating out of Tabres and nearby towns for the past two months, attempting to hunt down and exterminate Saint Cyril’s Army, a motley collection of Greek Orthodox separatists who sought to leave the predominantly French Catholic province and establish their own republic. As if to punctuate the point, a military helicopter chose that moment to fly over the downtown section of Tabres where Duvalier sat. Shaking his head, his mood brightened a bit when the waitress brought a steaming bowl of stew to his table. Smiling, his spirits immediately dampened again when he saw three soldiers approach the bistro. In dress uniforms, they were clearly off-duty; they took a table and ordered a bottle of inexpensive wine.
Duvalier could determine their origins almost immediately; as multicultural as the Commonwealth was, it was hard not to have at least a passing familiarity with most of the ethnic groups that called it home. Two soldiers, both lieutenants, spoke a harsh, clipped language. Though he didn’t understand it, Duvalier recognized it as Afrikaans. The other, a captain by his uniform, responded in kind, but with an extremely peculiar accent. It was at once lilting and guttural, singsong and clipped; it marked him instantly as Hailene. Throughout the Commonwealth there was a universal cultural resistance to the Hailene, who formed a solid plurality of the Commonwealth’s population and arrogantly claimed to be the forerunners of mankind; even the name Hailene invoked this cultural arrogance. Translated from the language of the same name, “Hailene” meant quite literally “Forerunner.”
Breaking a crust of bread to dip into his stew, Duvalier paused to look up from his meal, to the north. The Bichon mountains were a stark grey-green against the blue sky; the local geology caused the mountains to rise up abruptly, with little in the way of foothills. Aside from the steady sound of distant artillery fire and the occasional cloud-like wisp of smoke from an exploding shell, it was impossible to tell from this side street in Tarbes that a war was occurring a mere fifty miles north…
20km North of Tarbes, Bellecôte Province
21 February 2010
15C/60F
1505H
…Corporal Pieter van der Merwe slammed another 155mm shell into the breach of the T6, and gave the command to fire. The howitzer, its venerable model in service for close to ten years now, roared as it hurled a shell forty kilometers into the rear echelons of the SCA guerrillas, dug into the Bichon Mountains. Six times a minute, every minute for the past hour, the four guns of this battery and a dozen others rained death and terror onto the rebels in the mountains. In half an hour the barrage was scheduled to end, as three rifle companies and support elements entered the Beaugac Forest at the base of the hills, to clear out remnants of the SCA and secure the densely wooded area against an enemy counter-attack, in preparation for the eventual assault into the mountains themselves; SAS and Manshima Scouts were already in the mountains, wreaking the special sort of havoc that was their profession.
Van der Merwe stepped back from the gun as his replacement came up. The artillerymen worked in ten minute intervals, in order to give each other a rest from lifting the heavy shells and prevent the simple mistakes so often caused by monotony. As he moved a few meters back to sit with his canteen in the shade of a maple tree, Van der Merwe offered up a small prayer of thanks that he wasn’t one of the infantrymen about to head into the Beaugac. He’d seen the aftermath of artillery work, when his battery moved forward into newly-secured territory, and the thought of actually having to fight through the blasted and hellish landscape truly terrified the large Afrikaner. Thinking further, he offered a somewhat more genuine prayer of thanks that he was not on the receiving end of the 114th’s artillery.
OOC: This is a semi-open counter-insurgency RP. By “semi-open” I mean that if you want to RP a journalist or tourist’s perspective, feel free to go ahead (imagine the fun possibilities of a foreign tourist getting taken hostage by guerrillas), but the actual war-aspect of the RP will be limited to my posting (at least for the time being).
For the record, the two combatant forces of this particular RP are the 114th Colonial Service Regiment, a predominantly Afrikaans-speaking unit of the Imperial Army, and Saint Cyril’s Army (SCA, or StAK in Greek), Greek Orthodox separatists seeking to leave the Commonwealth.