Factbook: The Commonwealth of Arcansa (AMW)

[The Crooked Beat]

The Commonwealth of Arcansa

Stand on the Word
-State Motto

There's no escape from Him
He's so high, you can't get over Him
He's so low, you can't get under Him
He's so wide, you can't get around Him
If you make your bed in Heaven He's there
If you make your bed in Hell He's there
He's everywhere!
Help me somebody!
-Reverend Clarendon Flanders

Let me watch night fall on the river,
the moon rise up and turn to silver,
the sky move, the ocean shimmer,
the hedge shake, the last living rose quiver

Introduction

Arcansa is one of three states occupying Europe's Northeastern Atlantic Archipelago, a group of two principal and more than six thousand smaller islands cut-off from the continental mainland by rising sea levels at the end of the Devensian Glaciation. It shares the Great Britannic Island with the Grand Empire of the Shield, Arcansa occupying the island's southern portion from just north of the 53rd Parallel to the Britannic Channel, which separates the Atlantic Archipelago from mainland Europe at their nearest point of approach. Modern-day Arcansa has been inhabited by humans continuously for at least ten thousand years, with earliest evidence of an intermittent human and proto-human presence dating to the middle Pleistocene Epoch. The Arcan Commonwealth, however, is a much more recent phenomenon, and it can date its establishment much more precisely. On the twelfth of April, 1653, Captain-General Birchibald Moleman's Army Council promulgated the Ordinance of Sovereignty, formally constituting the traditional Shieldian kingdoms of Mansbar, Daldon, and Wyclyfe as an independent state. The exact origin of 'Arcansa' as a toponym, previously colloquial, for the Shieldian Grand Empire's southern marches is lost to history, though many historians believe that it refers to the quasi-mythical Gorthimer of Arc, whose kingdom supposedly covered much of what is now Aperina in southwestern Mansbar. Its usage had become commonplace over the course of the 40 Years' War as a collective term for anti-Papal forces, which were generally hostile to regional interests and affiliations. Its selection as a name for the newly-independent state was intended quite explicitly to signify both a complete departure from Imperial administrative practice and breaking of sectional power.

Since then, Arcansa has developed into a wealthy, advanced democracy with worldwide interests, seizing and, for the most part, losing an empire in the process. As one of the cradles of industrialization, the Arcan Commonwealth helped to launch what would soon disclose itself to be an all-consuming process of drastic economic transformation, with results that, for good or ill, remain wholly pervasive and in constant evolution to this very day. Over 56 million individuals are entitled to call themselves Arcans, whether or not they might wish to do so, and while Protestant Christians of Britannic or principally Britannic ancestry constitute a majority of that total, modern-day Arcansa exhibits an often surprising level of diversity which reflects, in turn, the nation's complicated, often painful history of colonialism and mercantile exploitation. As the Britannic Archipelago's most populous state and, locally at least, its largest single economy, Arcansa also plays a role of central importance in regional affairs. Recent governments have worked to cultivate ever-closer economic and political ties among the three island neighbors, meeting with mixed success against contrary tides of revolutionary upheaval and dynastic intrigue. Hopes for an eventual union among the Shield, Arcansa, and Walmington on Sea, though undeniably distant and by some measures perhaps never more so, continue to animate an important constituency within Arcan civil society, and it is not uncommon to hear respectable politicians speak with conviction about a future, not so far away, when all three states will belong to a single federal entity. Whether such a scheme, long advocated my Arcansa's most progressive elements, has any hope of realization, will depend on a host of factors almost innumerable and in no small part unforeseen, none of them more immediate than the recent Callahan Restoration and its effect on a severely strained North-South relationship.

Some Basic Statistics

"Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that."

Geography
Location: Northeastern Atlantic, southern Great Britannia, Northeastern Europe
Map references: 52nd parallel, prime meridian
Climate: Oceanic, with mild summers and rainy winters
Terrain: flat, gently-rolling lowlands in Daldon, Wyclyfe and eastern Mansbar; foothills and low mountains in western Mansbar
Elevation extremes: Mount Neddifer (1,085m), Cronut Mere (-4m)
Natural resources: coal, tin, copper, lead, zinc, iron ore, tungsten, lithomarge, ball clay, limestone, dolomite, silica sand, fuller's earth

People
Population: 57,167,620
Nationality: Arcan
Religious Affiliation: United Council of Conciliar Congregations (Presbyterian: 68.4%), Precisian Church (Calvinist: 14.2%), Church of Prophetic Revelation (Restorationist-Nontrinitarian: 1.9%), House of the Philadelphian Seth (Nontrinitarian-Theosophist: 1.7%), Willemite Fraternity (Anabaptist: 1.2%), Hinduism (1.1%), Islamic Ummah (Sunni: 0.7%/Shia: 0.2%), Religious Society of Friends (Quaker: 0.4%), No Affiliation/Atheist/Agnostic/Uncategorized (9.7%)
Languages: Arcan, Shieldian, Old Shieldian, Lyongese, Arabic, Telugu, Oriya
Literacy: age 15 and over can read and write: 99%

Government
Country name:
conventional long form: Commonwealth of Arcansa
conventional short form: Arcansa
abbreviation: CA
National Anthem: O Arcansa!
Government type: presidential republic
Capital: Eltonia
Other Major Cities: Brockway, Ogdenville, Darndale, Wyclyfe City, Harlanville, Haverbrook
Administrative Divisions: 5 Marches, 9 Planning Coordination Sectors, 1 Sealand, 7 Agencies, 1 Division, 73 Cantrefs
Executive:
Head of State: Superintendent Orval Lee Jaggers
Deputy Head of State: Comptroller-General Anacletus Elbert Jamm
Head of Government: Legislative Majority Leader (coalition government) Culbert Proctor Steen
Legislature: The Principal College of Director-Navigators
Composition: 428 legislators (205 constituencies, 223 at-large seats)
Method of Selection: ranked choice voting, proportional representation for at-large elections
Political parties and leaders:
-Knights of Dan: Gibson Trapp Prouty (2)
-Men of Faith United Against the Danite Heresy (C): Parley Taft Hancock (1)
-Loyal Association of True Sons: Elihu Jarthen Pratt (8)
-Christ for All: Rev. Wilford Angell Lavender (29)
-Arcans for Jesus (C): Culbert Proctor Steen (198)
-Worshipful Friends of Seth (C): Leonard Paine Wisner (7)
-Unconditional Union Party (C): Walter David Potter (3)
-New Toleration Party (C): Arthur Bayard Shippen (64)
-Women's Equality Party (C): Clementine Matlack (59)
-Working People's Party (C): Melvin Dix Lodger (41)
-Left Democratic Party: Marsha Greenwood Lisonbee (9)
-Conference for Progressive Political Action: Titus Braxton Law (6)
-People's Green Giant Party: Mann Page (1)
Supreme Judicial Court: the Senior College of Appellate Examiners
Composition:
-Hosea Porter Rock (Examiner Principal) (aged 87)
-Stillman Haynes Swayne
-Lyman Harmon Batt
-Birdsley Cooper Packer
-Lewis Evans Woods
-Gilroy Billings Flake
-Elam Duncan Cannon
-Hiram Grover Clapp
-Seraph Eames Fielding
-Orson Jakes Hooper
-Shadrach Goble Stenhouse
State Officers
-Paymaster-General Terrence Baggis
-Postmaster-General Nemuel Paulding, Jr.
-Engineer-Constructor-in-Chief Ellwood Gregg Crewdson
-Commissary General of Administrative Affairs Cornelius Lurting
-Commissary General of Foreign Affairs Floyd Q. Chowder
-Chairman of the Standing Coordinating Committee for National Security Kenworth Dratch
-Executive Coordinating Director of National Intelligence Emory Graves Pepoon
-Commissary General of the Navy Delroy M. Packwood
-Commissary General of Territorial Defense Brigadier-General (Retired) Lazarus Talmadge
-Commissary General of Public Safety Lionel Hatts
-Commissary General of the Treasury Augustus Ray Daw
-Commissary General of Trade and Industry Jorah Tillotson
-Commissary General of Supply and Production Pythagoras M. Knops
-Commissary General of Agriculture Jerom Pyland
-Commissary General of Transportation Garnett Rex Cantine
-Commissary General of Labor and Pensions Horace Gue
-Commissary General of Water and Power Jemuel B. Loring
-Commissary General of Education Stephanus Dyre
-Commissary General of Health Elnathan J. Sharkley
-Commissary General of Housing and Social Services Lot G. Crashaw
-Commissary General of Works and Construction Osbert M. Jardine
-Director of the National Institute of Standards Heber A. Rampton
-Chairman of the Board of Corporations Elbert R. Schur

Economy
Agriculture - products: wheat, barley, oats, potatoes, sugar beets, dairy products, wool, chicken, beef, mutton, fisheries products
Major Trade Partners: Walmington on Sea, Grand Empire of the Shield, European Confederation, People's Republic of Spyr, Federal Republic of California
Major Industries: automobiles, aerospace equipment, electronics, metallurgy, chemicals, ceramics, textiles, shipbuilding, paper and printing, food processing
Currency: Esterlin
Currency code: ETN
Notable Private Corporations
-Clarkmobile: automobiles, automotive equipment
-Bunce-Bean-Boggis: meat, poultry, and dairy products
-Dalrond Macklin Incorporated: paper and forestry products
-Sparkman Spryvolt: motors, power equipment, electrical components
-Jardine Air Maintenance Company: aircraft repair, aviation services, scrap metal processing
-Piers Brewman: beverages
-Mobilette: motorcycles and automobiles
-Junior Deanville: air passenger and cargo services
-Spiff Industries: consumer goods
-Cott Corporation: food products
-Double Diamond Corporation: automobiles, automotive equipment
-Marvin Square Enterprises: wines, liquors, beverages, vineyard and hop-field cultivation
-Sealuminum and Son: work boats, motor launches, special-purpose ships and craft
-Brockway Terraplane: heavy-duty vehicles, industrial equipment, power equipment
-Moonbeam Superlift: cranes, loaders, construction equipment
-Townsfellow: textiles, consumer goods
-Mr. Data: computers, consumer electronics
-Captain Haddock and Associates: fisheries products
-Electrodrome-Superbit: mainframe computers, data storage systems, electronic components
-Supercargo Brothers: shipping, freight and cargo services
-Royall E. Nutting Autogo (REN-Autogo): heavy-duty vehicles, industrial equipment, power equipment
-Fairport Amalgamated: yachts, sailing vessels, high-speed watercraft
-Newfield Corporation: oil and gas extraction
-Keen & Dapper Corporation: consumer goods
-Loring-Eagleman: aerospace equipment
-Jerome Elks: agricultural and food-processing machinery
-Chess King: textiles, consumer goods, apparel
-Denholm and Lerman: footwear, rubber products
-Speedman Jetway: air cushion vehicles
-Randall Everest Enterprises: construction
Notable Publicly-Owned Enterprises
-Electrocalculon-Arithmetron-Zonoscope: precision and scientific instruments, test and calibration equipment, advanced electronics, engineering research
-Arclines: passenger air transport
-Arcarrier-Arparcel: mail and parcel services
-Arcan Biscuit Company (Arbisco): food products and food machinery
-Arcway: rail transport services and rail equipment
-Consolidated Arlectric (Conarlec): electrical components, appliances, power equipment
-Ordnance Engineering Company (Orenco): arms, ordnance
-Arcatom: energy, power equipment
-Arcwright: shipbuilding, ship repair
-Arcan Apernian (Arpernian): mining, minerals processing
-Arcan Metalman: metallurgy, scrap-metal processing
-Arcan Telecommunications Company (Artelco): broadcasting, public information
-Arcan Aerospace Industries (Arcaero): aerospace equipment
-Metrodyne Superhet: advanced electronics, radar equipment, communications equipment
-Arcan Telephone and Telegraph Agency (Artelen): telecommunications services and infrastructure
-Arcogyro Vertexan: aerospace equipment
Notable Banks and Insurance Providers
-Central Reserve Bank of the Commonwealth (CRBC, publicly-owned): monetary authority
-John Smeagol Partners: investment banking
-Interoceanic Electrobank: commercial banking
-Arvest Bank: commercial banking
-Mordor Brothers: retail banking
-Roon Depositors Mutual Corporation (Roon DMC): retail banking
-Curtis of Isenville: property, casualty, marine and vehicle insurance, reinsurance
-Traveler's Aid Corporation: property, travel and vehicle insurance
-Cardgage Indemnities: property, casualty, liability and credit insurance, reinsurance
-Job Hutt & Bepp International Assurance: marine insurance
-Nearthing Erne Holdings: property, liability and vehicle insurance

[The Crooked Beat]

Spotlight On: Arcan History

Marge: The moral of this story is a good deed is its own reward.
Bart: Hey, we got a reward. The head is cool!
Marge: Well then... I guess the moral is no good deed goes unrewarded.
Homer: Wait a minute! If I hadn't written that nasty letter, we wouldn't have gotten anything!
Marge: Well... then I guess the moral is the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
Lisa: Perhaps there is no moral to this story.
Homer: Exactly! It's just a bunch of stuff that happened.
Marge: But it certainly was a memorable few days.
Homer: Amen to that!

"Peace if possible; truth at all costs:" The Britannic Wars of Religion

Victory at last crowned Ian Rupenn of Shadoran and his house in 1524, when after nearly four decades of ruinous warfare Weshield's outmatched young king finally capitulated to Shadoran and its allies at Editraequan. High King Ian, first meaningful claimant to that title since Damana's day, had won a signal triumph, and he emerged from the Great Brothers War sovereign of what was undoubtedly Europe's leading economic and military power. Moreover, Ian of Shadoran had proven himself one of history's great captains, a gifted strategist and, just as significantly, a masterful, innovative tactician, and his loyal, well-disciplined armies had no continental equal while his reign lasted. Unification of the Shield's fractious constituent kingdoms under a single unquestioned ruler, an objective attained against incredible difficulty, held out immense promise, and as the High King consolidated his authority over the Britannic Island, more than a few hungry eyes were turned to the West. Screened from High King Ian's powerful armies by the inhospitable Walming Sea, the Godfreyite Kingdom, Christian Europe's one and only Protestant state, stood as an affront to Papal dominion which, a new High King having been so recently crowned, was never before so galling. Every bit as skillful and adept at sea as Ian of Shadoran and his lieutenants were on dry land, however, Walming mariners formed an oaken bulwark which neither High King Ian nor any other foe would ever manage to breach, and all thoughts of invasion, notwithstanding Rome's often strident entreaties, remained hazily distant.

For all his courage and battlefield acumen, of course, Ian was also a realist, a man whose conspicuous success rested in no small part on his ability to distinguish what was possible from what was not. While precious little documentary evidence has survived to offer modern-day historians a window into his thoughts, it cannot have been lost on Shadoran's champion that his kingdom was in fact considerably weaker than outside appearances might have suggested. Four decades of earnest, often unspeakably cruel warfare, book-ended by conflict of a more localized character with Mansbar and Apernia, and by unpredictable, frequently catastrophic outbreaks of disease, had left much of the country in a state of desolation, with especially dire conditions prevailing across much of rural Daldon. Impoverishment fell upon peasant and townsman alike as marauding armies disrupted patterns of agricultural production, and as blockading fleets closed access to key continental markets. Peace and consequent demobilization unleashed a tidal wave of banditry across much of Daldon, Mansmouth, and Wyclyfe which persisted for years, drawing painfully upon state resources at a moment when a restoration of normal economic life was perhaps Ian Rupenn's most pressing concern. Millennarian enthusiasm, never far from the minds of marginalized and vulnerable cultivators in those much fought-over southern kingdoms, had reached a fever pitch years before there appeared to be any hope of an end to the fighting, and Ian of Shadoran's accession was interpreted in many quarters as an assumption of earthly power by none other than the antichrist. Rebellions against clerical authority had flared across Daldon, Wyclyfe, and Mansbar years prior to 1519, and the words of Clarendon Flanders, so famously delivered on April 26th of that year, the Feast Day of Saint Cletus and date hammered forever after into the memory of every Arcan schoolchild, sparked an uprising in eastern Daldon from which that kingdom never recovered. Whatever future conquests High King Ian may have contemplated, it remained a deeply unpleasant fact that, for years after the legitimist capitulation, his armies were largely occupied with suppressing anti-clerical revolts and the pervasive brigandage which both provoked and helped to sustain them.

In due course, free to concentrate its forces against each uprising, invariably localized and often messianic in character, in turn, the restored Grand Empire succeeded in imposing order upon its southern marches. Wanton brutality went hand-in-hand with a measured program of support for Daldon's rural landowning class, no few members of which saw in spreading religious dissidence a clear existential threat. Under sheer exhaustion, famine, and threat of extreme violence, peace of a sort gradually returned to a war-ravaged countryside. Less immediately perceptible, perhaps, though of immense significance to subsequent events, the region's religious landscape had undergone a drastic transformation. While armed resistance to the Catholic Church had effectively ceased, clerics across Daldon, Mansmouth, and Wyclyfe noted a widespread sullenness and lack of enthusiasm, manifested in low attendance at mass, indifference to feasts and festivals, a virtual exodus from monasteries and convents, and an annoying proclivity for lay preaching. Although peasant millennarians had been beaten, more or less, into submission, in towns Protestantism flourished as never before, carried by an ascendant class of burghers whose aptitude for business, and especially for finance, bound them inextricably to the state's economic fortunes, and which compelled a perpetually-indebted noble class to rely ever more closely on their credit. Vigorous persecution served above all to drive dissenting groups underground, generating a steady supply of martyrs whose sheer number only helped to underline the pervasiveness of anti-Catholic sentiment.

Secure on his throne, having overcome all plausible domestic rivals to hammer-together what was, for most of the 16th Century, Europe's preeminent state, Ian of Shadoran tended to deal mildly with southern Protestants, townsfolk especially, conscious as he was of their important role in foreign trade. While overt, public acts of heresy seldom escaped punishment, most burghers ensnared by the Inquisition were given ample opportunities to recant, and magistrates usually enjoyed considerable discretion in deciding how closely to pursue dissidents. Between approximately 1530 and 1580, authorities did not, as a rule, go looking for Protestants who refrained from announcing themselves, a policy which, although its wisdom would be debated hotly by historians in light of subsequent events, reaped clear rewards in rising volumes of production and growing revenues. Glowing reports and pleasing receipts submitted by tax collectors and customs officials tended, however, to obscure a brewing discontent among landowning gentry, an increasingly domesticated set of erstwhile men-at-arms, their fathers and grandfathers once knights of independent Daldon and Mansbar, upon whom the Grand Empire relied to keep order and to suppress religious agitation in the countryside. Precious little though any of them may have foreseen the next half-century's dramatic events, the nobility as a whole understood well enough that prosperity for townsmen meant relative immiseration for country gentlemen. Southern Britannia's intricate patchwork of Lords, Barons, Counts, and Margraves found itself caught between rising inflation, driven at least in part by an unlooked-for influx of silver from the Americas, and falling agricultural prices, a function of higher yields brought on by more efficient production techniques and reintegration with the Baltic grain trade. Diminishing returns yielded by feudal farming methods, combined with new demands for luxury goods and a peacetime fashion for ostentatious finery, encouraged many if not most noblemen to borrow heavily, often plunging themselves into deep debt as they sought to sustain a lifestyle beyond their economic means. Even High King Ian was susceptible to the temptation of easy credit, and most historians agree that, upon his death, few if any of his outstanding loans had been repaid.

Indebtedness, as a new century approached, had taken on every dimension of a serious social problem for Shieldian noblemen of every rank, from lowly esquire to the High King himself. Of course, unlike his ostensible bannermen, the High King had at his disposal one sure method for raising funds in a pinch, and as his obligations mounted, he resorted to that means with reckless abandon. For most of the Great Brothers War's four-decade duration, noblemen called to arms found their traditional obsession with taxes displaced by matters of rather more chivalrous nature, by the demands of frequently arduous campaigning and desperate battle. With peace, taxation roared once again to its place at the very center of a typical gentleman's worldly concerns, and he soon discovered that he had much to be concerned about. In conquered Daldon and Mansbar, royal levies fell from their punitive rates to a comparatively more modest level, albeit still well above pre-war standards, between approximately 1532 and 1568, before rising sharply in response to voracious state borrowing. For ancestral barons already squeezed by inflation and falling prices, to say nothing of their personal debt, a tax burden always considered onerous threatened to become unbearable. That southern nobles moved as slowly as they did from grumbling to rebellion undoubtedly reflected well upon the Grand Empire's progress in consolidating central authority, and under different circumstances it is perfectly conceivable that subsequent events might never have taken place. As it happened, Ian of Shadoran's successors, while inheriting every bit of their forefather's appetite for gaming and opulent living, were decidedly ill-supplied with political instinct, and through negligence or miscalculation a number of critical opportunities were missed.

Heaven's inscrutable will, destiny, or random chance chose precisely that volatile moment to introduce an altogether unlooked-for complicating factor. Early in 1591, news reached the Atlantic Archipelago of a new Pope, Gregory XIV. Perhaps best known for his injunction against betting on papal elections, a crime which would have seen thousands of Shieldians excommunicated that winter had it been rigorously enforced, Cardinal Sfondrati found time during his short reign to take an interest in Britannic church affairs, and dispatches from the Bishop of Rome to his premier Shieldian subject made it abundantly clear that he did not at all like what he saw. Heresy, Sfondrati observed, more accurately than he might have guessed, was running rife through the High King's domains, civil authorities and clergy alike demonstrating intolerable laxity in defense of the faith, while showing every kindness to what he characterized as a writhing nest of deceivers, peddlers of Godfreyite falsity. So as to underline his determination that matters be put right, Pope Gregory dispatched one of his top ecclesiastical trouble-shooters and a future contender for the Papacy in his own right, Cardinal Alfonse Baronius. In hopes of being able to present Cardinal Baronius with some real evidence of progress upon his arrival, High King (?) unleashed upon Daldon a campaign of religious persecution not seen in decades. Perhaps several hundred accused protestants were burned or otherwise executed over little more than a month in a spasm of compensatory violence, including, fatally as it would prove, several Barons of Daldon and, flabbergastingly, the young Lord of Hudspeth, Mansmouth's most senior nobleman. Close observers were quick to note that King (?) conspicuously spared Eltonia from his attentions, reportedly extracting a near-wholesale cancellation of his debts in exchange for immunity from religious examination. Cardinal Baronius, a sharp-eyed foe of error, reacted with great dismay when he learned of the High King's actions, and immediately ordered the Royal plan inverted, more or less, reallocating inquisitors from the countryside, whose inhabitants Baronius tended to view with kindness, to Eltonia, the very thought of whose Calvinist financiers could drive him to a high pitch of righteous fury. In common with much else that would take place over the next sixty years, by the time corrective action was taken the damage had already been done, and southern nobles, incensed at the summary manner by which state authority had executed so many heads of ancient and honorable families, were beginning to dust off their old arms.

[The Crooked Beat]

Spotlight on: Telecommunications and Broadcasting in Arcansa

From the transmitter, to the receiver
Across the ether, out of your speaker

Write me a letter
a face in the hall
Hiding from someone
afraid of the fall
And she's waiting for someone
to take her back to where she came from
And she'll wait alone for hours
she won't mind because there's someone
In the story she remembers she remembers in the letter
And the tears locked up inside her make her heart break open wider
Shuts her eyes and takes the picture from the wall

Introduction

Modern life, in affluent post-industrial societies at least, would be almost unrecognizable without technologies of near-instantaneous mass communication. Within less than two hundred years, semaphore systems able to transmit perhaps several words per minute have given way to a globe-spanning web of interconnected computer networks, enabled by advances in engineering, mathematics, and materials science inconceivable even twenty or thirty years earlier, to say nothing of two centuries. Arcansa, a cradle of the industrial revolution which made modernity in its realized form possible to begin with, has also played a central role in the technological revolution still underway. Scientists and inventors working on Arcan soil and at Arcan institutes, whether themselves Arcans or resident foreigners, have been responsible for numerous breakthroughs in fields such as wireless telephony, image broadcasting, computing, and internetworking. Arcansa also pioneered telecommunications infrastructure and institutional architecture, establishing what is widely cited as the world's first public broadcasting agency in 1922, which became in turn the first broadcaster to offer regular, high-definition television service fourteen years later. Broadcasting in Arcansa, as with all forms of media intended for a mass audience, operates within a decidedly complicated environment, however, one in which technological development, or at least technological proliferation and commercialization, must somehow be reconciled with a deeply-seated Christian culture and an often reactionary obsession with moral rectitude. Perennial fear of what would inevitably, if at times not altogether implausibly, be characterized as corrupting influences has served to slow adoption and limit access where other, more permissive societies have often met with greater success in exploiting work begun in Arcansa.

Today, virtually all Arcan households are connected to a fully digitized trunk infrastructure, provided and maintained by the Arcan Telephone and Telegraph Agency, better known as Artelen. Buried coaxial lines continue to predominate, though an expanding fiber-optic network is expected to carry all domestic communications traffic by 2030, and all international cable connections have been replaced with optical fiber. Arcansa's mobile telephone network lags somewhat behind those of most other European states in scope and capacity, with approximately 20% of insular territory, 50% of the Arcan Tropical Agency, and up to 75% of the Arcan Austral Agency lacking regular coverage. Efforts to implement fourth-generation technology have also suffered numerous delays, not least due to competition from Artelen's high-priority fiberization program, while a confusing and restrictive regulatory structure has served to discourage substantial foreign investment. Personal computers, once exceptionally rare, have experienced skyrocketing popularity in recent decades, and although a so far unshakeable protectionist impulse limits Arcan computer users to domestically-produced equipment of comparatively low performance, even that unimpressive standard of capability continues to improve at an astounding pace.

Television: Networks and Programs

Overview: Dozens of large and small efforts put forth across more than half a century, pressed on occasion with a desperate intensity though perhaps more often done in a spirit of resignation, have categorically failed to shake Arcansa's first and, so far, only public television network from its monopoly over terrestrial and cable broadcasting. Founded in 1922 as part of an attempt to rationalize a chaotic radio-licensing system, and initially operated by Arcarrier, the Arcan Radiotelegraph Corporation is the world's oldest national broadcaster. It is also one of the largest broadcasting organizations in existence, with over thirty thousand employees on its payroll, and its significance to the average Arcan citizen's daily life is difficult to overstate. The Arcan Radiotelegraph Corporation, better known by its obsolescent if undeniably stylish acronym ARC, inaugurated its first regular television service in 1936, and from those humble beginnings it has swelled in size and scope far beyond any initial expectation. In addition to its fifteen radio stations, ARC operates no less than ten national and twelve local television channels, presenting a wide range of news, educational, and entertainment programs in seven languages. ARC broadcasts are free from commercial advertising, a point of real pride for Arcan moralists, and viewers are instead charged a relatively modest annual license fee. These payments, while prolifically evaded, cover approximately three-quarters of operating costs, with export revenues and direct budgetary allocations accounting for the remainder.

ARC completed a planned phase-out of its analog services in 2014, and at present transmits an exclusively digital signal. As high-definition television sets are still not widely available in Arcansa, almost all channels broadcast at 576i, though a pilot program using the higher-resolution 1080i format has proven successful, and would appear to indicate the way ahead. Between 70 and 75 percent of the Arcan television audience is equipped with a direct cable connection, a proportion concentrated in and around large urban areas. Terrestrial service remains vital to viewers in rural areas, where expansion of cable infrastructure has proceeded only slowly. Like any large broadcaster, ARC devotes an immense share of its time and resources to audience polling and focus-group testing in an effort to decipher public tastes and thereby maximize its efficiency. Competition from less stringently-regulated albeit markedly more expensive satellite providers is a constant source of worry for ARC's Board of Directors, and market research has demonstrated a consistent preference for satellite programming when presented at equivalent cost. This is often characterized by comparatively higher production values, plots and environments described as more realistic and less melodramatic than ARC's own offerings, and levels of violence and explicit sexuality far beyond what ARC considers acceptable. Despite recent modernization plans, ARC programming remains, in many respects, almost willfully old-fashioned, anchored to what are considered time-tested formats such as talk and variety shows, game shows, talent competitions, and documentaries. An immense writers' department reliably churns out a host of new situational comedies every season, with little to distinguish most of them, and ARC's so-called factory system, in which a given writer might contribute to dozens of individual scripts and screenplays almost haphazardly, without any real chance of influencing a longer narrative arc or a full characterization, has proven ill-adapted to more ambitious fare. Widespread critical scorn, however, has evidently failed to deter a sizable majority of Arcan viewers, most of whom, after all, are every bit as scandalized by blood and bare flesh as any ARC programmer.

A Brief Summary of Channels and Programs

ARC1: Oldest and most respectable of ARC's broadcasting array, ARC1, also known as Channel 1, specializes in mainstream, mass-market entertainment. It is the epitome of the Arcan Radiotelegraph Corporation's mandated emphasis on wholesome, family-friendly, morally edifying content free from any whiff of controversy or disquiet, and as such it is home to a slate of long-running musical variety and talent shows, enduringly popular in spite of their relative vapidity.
A Few Representative Programs: Cavalcade of Bands, Make Mine Music, The Johnny Limb Show, Personally Yours, and Seeing Stars

ARC2: Less tightly-controlled than marquee Channel 1, ARC2 primarily airs comedy programs and freewheeling talk shows, skewing to a young-adult audience. While the ARC charter expressly prohibits obscene language, immodest dress, and suggestive behavior, Channel 2 is a haven for slapstick and absurdism of a not-infrequently thoughtful and creative sort, and it is often described as the one Arcan channel for which a foreign viewer might willingly tune in.
A Few Representative Programs: The Thomas Clown Affair, Eye on the Sky, Ten O'Clock Bulletin, Jazz This Day

ARC3: Channel 3 broadcasts youth programming exclusively. Its daily schedule is split almost evenly between cartoons, from morning to early afternoon, and children's variety shows. Uniquely, in an effort to discourage late bed-times, ARC3 ends its itinerary promptly at nine o'clock each weekday, at ten-thirty on Friday and Saturday, and at eight on Sunday.
A Few Representative Programs: Jeremy Trainsfield, Tower of Shadows, The Joe Bennington Files, Detective Dale, The Brockway Safety Roundup and Singers

[The Crooked Beat]

Rocket Number Nine take off for the planet Venus! Venus!
Rocket Number Nine take off for the planet Venus
Zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom up in the air
Up, zoom, up, zoom, up in the air!

Introduction

Arcan industry has been characterized by a strong spirit of technological innovation from its earliest days, and in aviation, while unable to claim many important 'firsts,' Arcansa has largely succeeded in maintaining very advanced capabilities in basic research, design, and manufacturing. As traditional heavy industries decline in importance, aeronautical engineering has been identified as an essential pillar of national economic development, and there exists a broad consensus among both national aerospace manufacturers and government planning organizations that extra-atmospheric travel will become increasingly viable and important. In its stunning rapidity of progression from theoretical concept to practical realization, orbital spaceflight could arguably be said to surpass even manned aviation, itself often dismissed as a fantasy mere decades prior to its realization. Arcan engineers played a relatively minor, indirect role in foundational early research, credit for most of rocketry's signal breakthroughs accruing to experimenters in North America and continental Europe. Intellectual interest in humankind's next great frontier, however, was by no means lacking, and several of the twentieth century's most renowned science-fiction authors participated in the founding, in 1933, of the Britannic Interplanetary Society.

Taken aback by unexpectedly rapid developments in continental Europe, Arcansa inaugurated its own concerted space program in 1952 as an outgrowth of military ballistic missile research, itself closely intertwined with national atomic efforts. The first successful Arcan space rocket, designated CTV-5, flew in 1957, followed a year later by the much larger AROV. Both of those vehicles were designed, at least in part, to test aspects of flight and reentry performance for a fully-fledged ballistic missile, code-named Champion. Following a decision to rely on cruise missiles for nuclear deterrence, however, Champion was recast as a satellite launcher, and a bilateral consortium, the International Space Launcher Establishment or ISLE, took up rocketry development from where military research ended. Renamed Baritone, the former Champion vehicle made its first successful flight, lifting off from Fort Rickard in the Arcan Austral Agency, on the twenty-first of October, 1964. Subsequent experience would demonstrate that Baritone-Champion fully warranted its original code-name, and although extensive structural reinforcement proved necessary to transform the missile as first designed into a carrier for orbital payloads, it offered a superb foundation for subsequent developments. Arcturus, a purpose-built satellite launcher, followed Baritone in 1969, and in 1971 placed Arcansa's first operational satellite, a small ionospheric-research unit designated S-55, into low-earth orbit.

Work on a Baritone-based launch system proceeded in parallel with Arcturus, and ISLE-1, which joined a payload-bearing AROV to a first-stage Baritone rocket, made its first flight on November 5, 1971. Two years later, in December of 1973, an ISLE-1 vehicle made history when it successfully deployed Artel-1, Arcansa's first commercial satellite. Limited payload space available aboard the experimental AROV encouraged its replacement with Arcturus, however, and the resulting ISLE-2 provided Arcansa with its first economically-viable space-launch vehicle, capable of lifting 600-kilogram payloads into geosynchronous orbit. Champion-Baritone and Arcturus have both demonstrated remarkable longevity, and they continue, more than fifty years after their first flights, to serve as Arcansa's basic means of access to orbital space.

[The Crooked Beat]

Transport
Motorways and tramlines
Starting and then stopping
Taking off and landing

Introduction

Arcansa is a society which travels, to a greater extent than most others, above all by train. Nearly forty thousand kilometers of track connect thousands of large and small stations to a dense network of light, local, freight, and high-speed intercity lines which together carry billions of individual journeys and more than 250 million tons of freight annually. Most fair-minded historians would likely agree that rail transport under steam locomotion developed in Arcansa and its Shieldian neighbor in effect simultaneously, largely as a direct consequence of rapid trans-national industrialization and a deepening level of economic interdependence which, for a time at least, appeared to overshadow past antagonism. Arcansa's first regular cross-country passenger railway, liking Eltonia and Brockway, opened in 1838 after an engineering effort characterized by one contemporary newspaper, perhaps more colorfully than accurately, as "the greatest public work ever executed in either ancient or modern times." Rail lines were built at a manic pace between 1838 and 1847, driven by a precipitous rise in share prices commanded by a proliferation of new railway companies, many of them little more than a shingle over a door, and while many investors were left destitute when prices inevitably collapsed, in leaving in its wake more than ten thousand kilometers of usable track this so-called Railway Mania established a network of routes which continues to serve as the bedrock of Wexarcansa's modern railway system. Eastarcansa, long treated as a resource for exploitation by Wexarcan investors and industrialists and run accordingly with close attention to overhead costs, experienced a far slower pace of railway construction despite its vastly longer distances, in part due to lobbying from established ferry companies. Eastarcansa's first rail line did not open until 1855, fully seventeen years after Brockway and Eltonia were linked by train, and subsequent investment concentrated much more heavily on industrial and agricultural requirements than on passenger service, which in many cases landowners, concerned that their captive population of agricultural laborers might emigrate, explicitly attempted to block. Growing Wexarcan industry, with its ever more intensive demands upon Eastarcansa's rich deposits of key minerals like copper and iron ore, soon succeeded in dragging what had only recently been regarded as, essentially, a colonial backwater into the machine age notwithstanding often virulent opposition from the entrenched planter class, and as elsewhere in Arcansa this profound economic transformation was accompanied and abetted by an expanding web of steel track, an increasing proportion of which originated in Eastarcan foundries.

By 1900, after sixty years of largely continuous growth, a wave of bankruptcies among leading rail-transport firms had announced Arcansa's arrival at a point of saturation for its railway industry. A collapse in profitability at a time when few opportunities for new development remained to explore, and when levels of ridership had attained their maximum level with only decline in prospect as personal automobiles grew more numerous, caused many once-prestigious firms to cease operations often with little or no warning given to their ridership. In order to avert what many leading Senators perceived as a looming transportation crisis, Arcansa in 1903 undertook its most comprehensive experiment to date with industrial nationalization, acquiring, albeit at rates far in excess of its fair market price, infrastructure equal to more than two-thirds of all Arcan track and movable assets corresponding to nearly piece of rolling stock in Eastarcansa and Wexarcansa together. It was, upon its enactment, a deeply unpopular policy with all save those industrialists and owners whose holdings had been purchased at what was in some cases several times their assessed valuation, and those who condemned railway nationalization as little more than a payout to reckless financiers were in large part correct to do so, as documentation publicized subsequently would show. Within a few years, however, organized and led with unanticipated vigor by septuagenarian Admiral Theodorous Mervine, the Great Lines Committee had implemented ambitious reforms to maintenance procedures, working conditions for train crews, safety standards, and expectations for timeliness which together set an unprecedentedly high standard for rail transport services in Arcansa. Moreover, and to the great disappointment of many erstwhile colleagues, Admiral Mervine himself proved a far more shrewd and energetic advocate for the Great Lines Committee than those responsible for his appointment had ever foreseen or intended, frequently outmaneuvering Senators keen to raid his department for funds by means of deft industrial diplomacy, enlisting Arcan engineering firms aghast at possible business losses in consequence of railway bankruptcies to make benevolent use of their legislative influence.

When Arcans voting under the nation's first-ever universal franchise elected a socialist government in 1920, central to whose program was a sweeping nationalization of industry and agriculture, rail services in most of Arcansa had already operated as a public utility for nearly two decades. As a reflection of its expanded remit, which after 1920 included all passenger and cargo railways and rolling stock on Arcan territory with only a negligible amount of industrial and harbor-service track excepted, the Great Lines Committee was duly retitled Arcan Railways, a name it has carried ever since. Arcan Railways, in its prior iteration as the Great Lines Committee, served in no small part as a model for reforms implemented across disparate sectors of Arcansa's industrial economy, and its institutional self-identity as in many respects the administrative foundation for Arcan socialism is reflected in an enduring culture of meticulous, high-performing professionalism. Over almost exactly 120 years of continuous operation, in one form or another, Arcan Railways has maintained a uniquely favorable reputation among its ridership and Arcan citizens at large, who have grown accustomed to reasonably fast, safe, punctual, and wide-reaching train travel, all for a nominal fee.

Lines

Large population centers in both Eastarcansa and Wexarcansa are connected by electrified, double-tracked, high-speed lines designed for Arcan Railways' fleet of Class 370 tilting trains, capable of traveling at 249 kilometers per hour on suitable stretches. Primary inter-regional hubs feed regional rail networks in their turn, providing connections at their most local level to municipal rapid transit and bus services. While high-speed intercity lines are reserved for passenger services, freight trains are provided with their own dedicated inter-regional routes, with freight and passenger traffic sharing space on secondary and feeder routes. Traffic control is centralized at five Sector Transmitting Stations, which monitor all aspects of route and rolling-stock operations by means of the Route Operations Digital Automated Network or RODAN, a close cousin of the DALE air-defense system developed by Electrocalculon-Arithmetron-Zonoscope for the Arcan Air Force. All vehicles traveling on Arcan railways are also equipped with Redundant Onboard Backstop and Braking or ROBB equipment, designed to automatically slow and stop a train, without crew input if necessary, in response to out-of-range readings from an array of fixed and onboard sensors.

High-Speed Intercity Lines

Wexarcan Westway
By far the nation's busiest rail corridor, connecting Eltonia and Brockway with a combined metropolitan population of more than twelve million people, the Wexarcan Westway follows approximately the route of Arcansa's first commercial railway, opened some 185 years previously. Its termini are Evergreen Terrace Station in Eltonia and Meadow Mound Station in Brockway.

Intercoastal Southway
Eastarcansa's vast travel distances, even between destinations in its comparatively populous southern marches, are softened considerably by high-speed links between Arbana, its largest population center, and Gabelston, its fourth most populous city and a tremendously important shipbuilding center. The Intercoastal Southway terminates at Arbana's Newman Station and Gabelston's Tourship Station.

Easter Coastway
One of two main international railways running across the main Britannic island's internal border, the Easter Coastway, built alongside its western partner between 1984 and 1993, links Eltonia with Editraequan. Arcan Railways shares responsibility for route operations with the Shieldian National Railways, each organization maintaining track and infrastructure within its own national territory. In practice, Arcan Railways frequently assists with repairs and inspection work on Shieldian soil as Arcan standards and equipment are used exclusively on both coastal routes. Eltonia's Colonel Leonard Lanley Station is the route's southern terminus.

Summerland Lakeway
The intercity link between Arbana and Larchward, both enduringly popular with Eastarcan vacationers despite very high levels of industrialization, unfortunately therefore also of industrial pollution, to be found at either destination, passes between two of Europe's largest lakes, Van Cleef and Van Heflin, albeit at too great a distance for either to be visible. Termini are Arbana's Elderts Lane Station and Bakers Row Station in Larchward.

Wester Coastway
Functionally a mirror-image of the Eastern coastal route, the Wester Coastway connects Eltonia and Clyfton, branching off from the Wexarcan Westway at Hacksville to bypass Brockway on its northern side. Its southern terminus is Eltonia's Huston Circle Station.

Firstarcan Fenway
So named for the low-lying landscape of swamps, bogs, and marshes, or Fenland in Arcan parlance, surrounding its northern endpoint in Perryvale Entworth, and for Perryvale's historical importance as the place where early-medieval Daldon's Eastarcan conquerors first made landfall, the Firstarcan Fenway allows a traveler to glide between Eltonia and Kirtland, once a journey of several days at least, in part of an afternoon. Its termini are Eltonia's Syderland Grove Station and Daveman Street Station in Kirtland.

Bayside Northway
Rail connections between Arbana and northern Eastarcansa, with its productive iron ore mines, have traditionally held special strategic importance, and successive Arcan governments have invested heavily in boosting capacity along both north-to-south and lateral routes. High-speed passenger service, however, is not considered as high a priority in those high northern latitudes as elsewhere, and while a more or less constant stream of miners and conscripts serves to fill-out a typical train schedule, the Bayside Northway, named for its course along the Bothnian Bay, halts at New Lots, where ongoing travelers must either transfer to a lateral railway or shift conveyance. Termini are Treelawn Station in Arbana and New Lots Central Station.

[The Crooked Beat]

Climbing up on Solsbury Hill
I could see the city light
Wind was blowing, time stood still
Eagle flew out of the night
He was something to observe
Came in close, I heard a voice
Standing, stretching every nerve
I had to listen, had no choice

Administrative Divisions of Arcansa

Marches (5)

Arban Vale
Gadwall Lakeland Planning Coordination Sector
Torvale Planning Coordination Sector
Green Bay Planning Coordination Sector
Capehaven Sealand
Summerness Agency
Arban Townland
-14 Banners
Westerhill Cantref
Rockdale Cantref
Willetston Cantref
Fenland Cantref
Randalls Cantref
Starett Park Cantref
Lenox Cantref
Benson Court Cantref
Wakefield Cantref
Pelham Cantref
Glenvale Cantref
Fort Arden Cantref
Williamsbridge Cantref
Beechhurst Cantref
Bathgate Cantref

Daldon
Eltonian Daldon Planning Coordination Sector
Dibbsland Planning Coordination Sector
Elton Townland
-52 Compartments
Beltonia Division
Washingville Cantref
Fieldston Cantref
Midland Cantref
Grantsville Cantref
Fairmont Cantref
Port Haven Cantref
Dockland Cantref
Gardenside Cantref
Sylvan Hill Cantref
Tellport Cantref
Arbendale Cantref
Beekman Cantref
Fort Varick Cantref
Cranesville Cantref
Grasmere Cantref
Storkville Cantref
Belmont Cantref
Weaverston Cantref
Egbertville Cantref
Parkdale Cantref
Edgewater Cantref
Pomander Cantref
Allerton Cantref

Deering
Theobalds River Agency
Extree Agency
Fort Grant Agency
Arthurdale Cantref
Tottenvale Cantref
Arverne Cantref
Eltingville Cantref

Mansbar
Eastermans Planning Coordination Sector
Cliftony Planning Coordination Sector
Leofred Planning Coordination Sector
Harlan Agency
Ogden Vale Agency
Penderside Cantref
Castleton Cantref
Woodstock Cantref
Elmhurst Cantref
Fort Baxter Cantref
Statesville Cantref
Holliswood Cantref
Wardsville Cantref
Baychester Cantref
Clason City Cantref
Arrochar Cantref
Yardsville Cantref
Alam's Lynn Cantref
Unionport Cantref
Annadale Cantref
Laurelton Cantref
Motthaven Cantref
Hattenville Cantref
Bayside Cantref
Melrose Cantref
Fort Green Cantref
Lorimer Cantref
Olinville Cantref
Mapleton Cantref
Village Park Cantref

Wyclyffe
Southercliff Planning Coordination Sector
Fort Hamlett Agency
Meadowmere Cantref
New Springville Cantref
Fieldston Cantref
Oakrow Cantref
Mottway Cantref

[The Crooked Beat]

Shilling for the fellow who brings the sheep in
Shilling for the fellow who milks the herd
Shilling for the fellow with a wife for keeping
How can we feed love on a farmboy's wages?

[The Crooked Beat]

I was twenty one years when I wrote this song
I'm twenty two now, but I won't be for long
People ask when will you grow up to be a man
But all the girls I loved at school
Are already pushing prams
I loved you then as I love you still
Tho I put you on a pedestal,
They put you on the pill
I don't feel bad about letting you go
I just feel sad about letting you know

[The Crooked Beat]

A light,
A globe over the horizon
A light
A globe over the horizon

[The Crooked Beat]

Scaffolding climber
Rudolf roof-walker
Aids binocular
Clear a path Jonah

[The Crooked Beat]

Toast is burnt
And your coffee's cold
And you leave all the post
'Cause it's nothing but bills again
Home from work
Put the TV on
Get your kicks watching
Bruce on the old Generation Game
Just dial my number
I've got some plans for you
You're in a bad way
And I can help you through
You're in a bad way
Every day seems just the same (every day)
Just dial my number
Or call my name

Eltonia
Settlement: AD 47
Region: Elton Townland
Government
Local Government Districts: 52 Compartments
Municipal Executive: Director-Principal (rotating)
Municipal Government Type: Directory-Commission-Council system
Municipal Government Institutions: Elton Townland Directory, Select Committee of Compartmental Captaincies, Metropolitan Board of Works
Area
Elton Townland: 1,737.9 sq. km.
Eltonian Daldon Coordinated Planning Sector: 5,185 sq. km.
Estimated Population
Elton Townland: 8,799,800
Eltonian Daldon Coordinated Planning Sector: 14,800,000
Urban Density: 5,598 residents/sq. km.
Overview and History

Brockway
Settlement: AD 600
Region: Mansbar, Berkland Agency
Government
Local Government Districts: 69 Blocks
Municipal Executive: City Major (directly elected)
Municipal Government Type: Majoralty-Council system
Municipal Government Institutions: Secretariat of the City Major, Deliberation of Wardens
Area
Brockway Cantref: 267.8 sq. km.
Berkland Agency: 598.9 sq. km.
Estimated Population
Brockway Cantref: 1,142,494
Berkland Agency: 2,440,986
Eastermans Coordinated Planning Sector: 4,300,000
Urban Density: 4,266 residents/sq. km.
Overview and History

Arbana
Settlement: AD 1000
Region: Arban Townland
Government
Local Government Districts: 14 Banners
Municipal Executive: Sheriff Intendant (rotating)
Municipal Government Type: Directory-Council system
Municipal Government Institutions: Division of Sheriffs, Partnership of Banner-Lieutenants
Area
Arban Townland: 214.6 sq. km.
Gadwall Lakeland Coordinated Planning Sector: 6,519.3 sq. km.
Estimated Population
Arban Townland: 984,748
Gadwall Lakeland Coordinated Planning Sector: 2,415,139
Urban Density: 5,200 residents/sq. km.
Overview and History

Guilderston
Settlement: AD 1100
Region: Greenbay, Capehaven Sealand
Government
Local Government Districts: 17 Halls
Municipal Executive: Calculator (directly elected)
Municipal Government Type: Mayor-Council system
Municipal Government Institutions: Office of the Counteroller, Panel of Halls
Area
Guilderston Cantref: 525.5 sq. km.
Capehaven Sealand: 3,371.8 sq. km.
Estimated Population
Guilderston Cantref: 660,842
Capehaven Sealand: 2,135,634
Urban Density: 2,560 residents/sq. km.
Overview and History

Larchward
Settlement: AD 1260
Region: Summerness, Courterdale Agency
Government
Local Government Districts: 21 Charters
Municipal Executive: Prefect (directly elected)
Municipal Government Type: Mayor-Council-Commission system
Municipal Government Institutions: Prefecture, Federation of Petitioners, College of Recorders
Area
Larchward Townland : 447.8 sq. km.
Courterdale Agency: 3,694 sq. km.
Estimated Population
Larchward Townland: 603,325
Courterdale Agency: 1,077,128
Urban Density: 1,300 residents/sq. km.
Overview and History

Ogdenville
Settlement: AD 1000
Region: Mansbar, Ogden Vale Agency
Government
Local Government Districts: 35 Cases
Municipal Executive: Pensionary (directly elected)
Municipal Government Type: Mayor-Council-Commission system
Municipal Government Institutions: Department of the Pensionary, Wall of Auditors, Commons of Electmen
Area
Ogden Vale Agency : 110 sq. km.
Estimated Population
Ogden Vale Agency: 472,500
Cliftony Coordinated Planning Sector: 1,006,600
Urban Density: 4,248 residents/sq. km.
Overview and History

Pontypandy
Settlement: AD 75
Region: Mansbar, Penderside Cantref
Government
Local Government Districts: 28 Administrations
Municipal Executive: City Major (rotating)
Municipal Government Type: Directory-Commission system
Municipal Government Institutions: Secretariat of the City Major, Board of Administrators-Principal
Area
Pontypandy Majoralty: 140.3 sq. km.
Estimated Population
Pontypandy Majoralty: 359,512
Penderside Cantref: 1,543,293
Urban Density: 4,747 residents/sq. km.
Overview and History

Wye Clyffe
Settlement: AD 47
Region: Wyclyffe, Mottway Cantref
Government
Local Government Districts: 21 Watches
Municipal Executive: Pensionary (directly elected)
Municipal Government Type: Mayor-Council system
Municipal Government Institutions: Department of the Pensionary, Unity of Watchmen
Area
Wye Cliff Pensionariat : 73.3 sq. km.
Southercliff Coordinated Planning Sector: 750 sq. km.
Estimated Population
Wye Cliff Pensionariat: 368,600
Southercliff Coordinated Planning Sector: 836,484
Urban Density: 2,260 residents/sq. km.
Overview and History

Harlanville
Settlement: AD 280
Region: Mansbar, Harlan Agency
Government
Local Government Districts: 18 Residences
Municipal Executive: City Major (rotating)
Municipal Government Type: Directory-Commission system
Municipal Government Institutions: Office of the Majoralty, Board of Electmen-Resident
Area
Leofred Agency : 98.64 sq. km.
Estimated Population
Harlan Agency: 345,324
Leofred Coordinated Planning Sector: 651,000
Urban Density: 3,108 residents/sq. km.
Overview and History

[The Crooked Beat]

Driving 'round the city rings
Staring at the shape of things
I talk in pictures not in words
Overloaded with everything we said
be careful where you tread
Watch the wire

[The Crooked Beat]

I am adding
And subtracting
I'm controlling
And composing

[The Crooked Beat]

It is imperative to redress the negative body count scenario
All personnel to neutralize the high negative environment
We must stabilize the initial low-security profile
No blank volleys and don't spare the bullets

[The Crooked Beat]

Now, I was told not to play with fire
I said, look out Church the flames grow higher
I said, watch those flames lick that spire
I said, look our Church the flames grow higher
{The World's on Fire}

[The Crooked Beat]

I went through all the months of January
Locked up in this cell
I'd like to be at home, but on my own
I didn't do too well

[The Crooked Beat]

… And as the low aggress the high
All you can do is sit and cry
You've only got yourself to blame
Don't try to stop me it's too late
My mind's made up, this job won't wait
There's nothing left for me to say

Up And Arcatom! The Development of Atomic Physics and Applied Nuclear Research in Arcansa

[The Crooked Beat]

A Chronological Register of Arcan Heads-of-State, with Short Biographical Sketches

A white moon appears
Like a hole in the sky,
The mangroves go quiet.
In la Brisa de la Palma
A teenage Rasputin
Takes the sting from a gin,

When a woman learns to walk
She's not dependent anymore
A line front her letter May twenty-four
And out on the bay
The current is strong
A boat can go lost.

But I didn't know someone
Could be so lonesome
Didn't know a heart
Could be tied up
And held for ransom.
Until you take your shoes
And go outside, stride over stride.
Walk to that tide because
The door is open wide.

Superintendents of State (of the Arcan Socialist Commonwealth, 1921-present)

Orion Hall Gresham
(lived 1877-1925, ruled 1921-1925)

Absalom Cleaveland
(lived 1873-1952, ruled 1925-1932)

Grady Lawrence Hamblen
(lived 1881-1947, ruled 1932-1939)

Reigart Brinn
(lived 1889-1958, ruled 1939-1946)

Oscar Carson Flusser
(lived 1893-1974, ruled 1946-1953)

Harold Reeve Field III
(lived 1899-1985, ruled 1953-1960)

Melchior John Sowders
(lived 1908-1994, ruled 1960-1967)

Melchior John Sowders was born in 1908 to one of Eltonia's most prominent political families, a descendant of Sephardic immigrants drawn to Daldon by a cash-strapped High King Ian's tolerant religious policy following the Great Brothers War. Forcibly converted to Congregationalism under a tidal wave of extremist fervor that accompanied Arcan independence in 1653, Sowders patriarchs were able to rehabilitate their family's public stature remarkably quickly, and with profitable interests in banking, insurance, and a budding industrial sector Sowders men acquired a prominent place in early-modern Arcansa's civic life. A series of risky investments, however, bankrupted family finances in the Panic of 1902, and at the time of Melchior's birth five years later very little remained of prior opulence. His father Claude, a medical doctor, had however emerged as a leading municipal reformer, and as Captain of Nicholhost Compartment he worked to establish a public health service that would eventually be taken as a model for national programs under socialist government. Sixteen years of age in 1923, Melchior was too young to take a direct part in the Britannic Revolutionary War, and his Army career began two years later in 1925 when, like nearly all young Arcan men, he received call-up orders for National Service. To his own apparent surprise, Melchior soon proved himself an outstanding soldier and a natural leader, emerging after a standard twenty-five months in the Gardenside Grenadiers, his home regiment, with sergeant's stripes and an appointment to Officer Candidate School. A year later Melchior J. Sowders received a rare first lieutenant's commission, neatly skipping an onerous spell of existence as a despised 'goldbricker.' After three years in platoon and then company command with 84th Infantry Brigade, where he earned high praise from none other than Major-General Redvers Bardwin, he joined the 52nd Division as second deputy operations officer. Five distinguished years in a succession of divisional staff posts brought, in 1936, another promotion and assignment to the 2nd Infantry Brigade as executive officer, an important step towards eventual command of his own division.

April of 1938 found then-Major Melchior J. Sowders fully occupied in preparing his brigade for emergency mobilization. When at just after 4:30 in the morning on 15 April, a typically raw and rainy spring day, civil defense alarms across Arcansa began to sound the Assembly, Melchior was already awake and at his post, his teeth clenched around an outlandish meerschaum pipe carved with great skill to depict a scowling Birchibald Moleman, a birthday gift which would go on to become his personal signature throughout the Great Siege of Arcansa and beyond. Thanks in no small part to Melchior's efforts, mobilization proceeded flawlessly and within three days 2nd Brigade was on its way to northeastern Daldon in full strength. New orders reached Major Sowders in the passenger's seat of his half-ton radio truck, however, sending him at a run alongside hundreds of idling vehicles to where the 5th Gardenside Grenadiers packed, besides their own brimming motor transport, several dozen Quartermaster troop carriers bearing 52nd Division's tricolor recognition flash. Lieutenant-Colonel Gilman Merritt, the Grenadiers' own long-serving commander and a Revolutionary War veteran famous for a number of heroic exploits, had just minutes earlier collapsed from what would prove a fatal heart attack, and without a moment's hesitation Elroy Pierce Hobby, at that early hour leader of 2nd Brigade, selected Melchior J. Sowders as the man's replacement. Minutes before the column moved off in a roar of revving engines and grinding gearboxes, Melchior leapt aboard the lead vehicle, to begin a varied wartime career that would encompass roles of steadily-increasing responsibility with both Eastern and Western army groups.

Melchior J. Sowders would go on to helm 5th Gardenside for almost a year as it worked to contain a determined drive into Maynerfield and Perryland by what was eventually an entire Shieldian field army, battles which cost his command a staggering 1,149 casualties against a list establishment of 971 officers and men. Grievous shrapnel wounds suffered in March of 1939, soon after returning to 2nd Infantry Brigade headquarters as a yet-to-be-promoted Colonel Hobby's deputy, landed Sowders in hospital for much of 1939, and after months of fruitless lobbying he at last obtained release from medical care, together with a new appointment as second-in-command of the 35th Infantry Brigade only weeks before a new Imperial offensive crashed into Arcan lines east of Brockway. In Spring of 1941, promoted to full Colonel at 34 years of age, Sowders took over 35th Brigade upon long-serving Stettin A. Clowney's elevation to divisional command, presiding over what, in line with every Arcan infantry outfit, steadily grew into a sophisticated, immensely formidable all-arms formation through two exacting years in Wyclyfe. Accounts by his fellow servicemen describe a calm, soft-spoken, and above all a tremendously competent officer able, amid circumstances frequently verging on desperate, to inspire trust and confidence in his subordinates. Brigade diarists also depict, however, an individual aged far beyond his years, prematurely graying, permanently stooped, limping, and in chronic pain from accumulated injuries, and a sudden onset of fainting spells, without question a consequence of unrelieved stress and anxiety when combined with lack of sleep and poor diet, brought Sowders orders for six months of mandatory rest. Much restored, if still visibly battered, Sowders received what for any Arcan officer amounted to a ringing professional endorsement with an appointment to lead a division of his own. Released from hospital in November of 1943, he took command of Mottforce, a specially-organized assembly of three rebuilt Wexarcan cavalry brigades designated Mottforce, which had been allocated to 15th Army in northern Eastarcansa as a key component of Lieutenant-General Robardus Snowman Hutts' rigorously-planned Operation Arcminute, intended to expel Walming-Shieldian troops from Eastarcan territory in its entirety. Jumping-off from Port Sprigman on Eastarcansa's Norbray Sea coast, between July of 1944 and June of 1945 Mottforce under Sowders's direction steadily reduced Walmingtonian defenses along the coastal highway with a series of mutually-supporting cross-country marches and amphibious landings. When in February of 1946 15th Army set out on the difficult task of crossing Norbray's own extensively-fortified frontier, Sowders and Mottforce were assigned responsibility for a mission arguably more challenging than any yet attempted by Arcansa's revolutionary army. As V and XV Corps with five divisions between them hammered away at Norbray's heavily-fortified eastern border, Mottforce, increased in strength to four albeit comparatively small 'unhorsed' cavalry brigades, landed in western Norbray to seize control of the all-important Norbray Leads, helping decisively to undermine Walmington's strategic position without need for an inevitably costly and difficult overland attack into prepared defenses.

Clacton Polythress Reckford
(lived 1911-1992, ruled 1967-1974)

Emmet Lear Mooers
(lived 1919-1998, ruled 1974-1981)

Vreeland Gilmore Pegram
(lived 1918-2003, ruled 1981-1988)

George Todd Cauldron
(lived 1924-2015, ruled 1988-1995)

Homer Price Eagle
(lived 1922-2010, ruled 1995-2002)

Gershom Wayne Badger
(lived 1932-2020, ruled 2002-2009)

Duane Larimer Hatch
(lived 1948-present, ruled 2009-2016)

Orval Lee Jaggers
(lived 1959-present, ruled 2016-present)

[The Crooked Beat]

The Arcan Air Force

Learn to love me and assemble the ways
Now, today, tomorrow and always
My only weakness is a listed crime
But last night the plans for a future war was all I saw on Channel 4

Introduction

Arcansa maintains a numerous and technologically-advanced air arm which ranks today as one of Europe's most formidable, boasting first-rate capabilities in air defense, ground attack, and maritime patrol operations. Official inventories record more than 1,100 machines in Air Force service, including some 583 combat aircraft, 52 transport and tanker aircraft, 431 fixed-wing trainers, and 89 helicopters, organized into 38 flying squadrons and three large flight-training schools. Of an additional 16 ground-based squadrons, eleven operate surface-to-air missile systems, while five are equipped with light tanks and armored vehicles for defense of airfields, missile sites, and other support infrastructure. Current plans provide for an establishment of some 119,600 airmen at full mobilization, a total inclusive of all operational and administrative billets, and in common with Arcansa's other two armed services this would consist largely of trained reservists called-up to reinforce a cadre of career personnel and conscripts in training, in this case numbering approximately 47,800 individuals. With its responsibility for continuous surveillance of Arcan airspace, the Air Force is customarily regarded as the nation's first line of defense in case of conflict, and a great deal of effort has been devoted to improving, as far as possible, its chances of detecting, responding to, and surviving a surprise attack. This imperative is reflected in a very high proportion of career servicemen at near-immediate readiness, extensive dispersion of flying facilities, and a pronounced tendency to fortify fixed bases and infrastructure. Unlike many foreign air arms, the Arcan Air Force maintains a very large ground-based air-defense organization consisting of both long-range and short-range missile squadrons, while it is almost unique in operating its own organic light armored units, designed to comprehensively defeat any hostile special-operations or airborne forces deployed against Air Force bases and facilities.

Air defense operations are coordinated by means of the Digital Air-control Linked Environment-4 system, or DALE-4, a fully-digitized descendant of Shortstop, Arcansa's very first early-warning radar network. Although technology has advanced to a level which would have been almost inconceivable at Shortstop's activation in 1939, in its basic principle of operation DALE-4 is largely identical, collecting and collating data from disparate long-range radar sites, thirty-five of which are operational in Westarcansa and Eastarcansa collectively, to build a common picture of the air situation which can then be used to alert ground-based missile sites and to direct interceptor aircraft. DALE-4 incorporates improvements to a distributed computing architecture introduced in 1998 with Version 2, which greatly improves system resilience in that it allows any suitably equipped site to take over command-center functions almost instantaneously should a previously-acting primary node become disabled. Fifteen interceptor squadrons and four long-range missile squadrons provide Arcan air defenses with their primary means of responding to identified threats, while their own radars and electro-optical sensors offer considerable scope for independent action where necessary, and can readily contribute to overall awareness through data-link sharing with DALE-4 stations.

[The Crooked Beat]

The Arcan Navy

We sail the ocean blue,
And our saucy ship's a beauty;
We're sober men and true,
And attentive to our duty

CAPT. I do my best to satisfy you all –
ALL. And with you we're quite content.
CAPT. You're exceedingly polite,
And I think it only right
To return the compliment.
ALL. We're exceedingly polite,
And he thinks it only right
To return the compliment.
CAPT. Bad language or abuse
I never, never use,
Whatever the emergency;
Though "Bother it" I may
Occasionally say,
I never use a big, big D!
ALL. What, never?
CAPT. No, never!
ALL. What, never?
CAPT. Hardly ever!
ALL. Hardly ever swears a big, big D!

Introduction

Some 140,000 men serve under Arcan colors at present, crewing and providing shore-based support for a fleet of thirty-two destroyers and frigates, fifteen nuclear-powered attack submarines, thirty mine countermeasures vessels, fourteen fisheries patrol vessels, eighty-three miscellaneous auxiliaries, ninety-eight assorted landing craft, and two hundred fifteen helicopters. Another 87,000 trained reservists are available for emergency duty, and in peacetime play a vitally important role as coast-watchers and lifeboatmen. Unlike those personnel assigned to Arcansa's two other armed services, Navy men are in almost all cases volunteers for a minimum four-year term of enlistment. Navy service is customarily seen as an essential stepping-stone to a seagoing or maritime career more generally, and the promise of thorough technical training alongside a base rate of pay far higher than that received by conscripts and less-onerous reserve obligations has tended to attract a reliable stream of recruits. In terms of both personnel and tonnage, Arcansa's fleet is easily one of the largest in existence, and its tremendous importance to Arcan strategy guarantees a high level of state investment. Expeditionary capability, beyond that inherent to Arcan nuclear-powered submarines, has however been sacrificed almost completely to an overriding emphasis on trade protection. In line with its single-minded focus upon defense of shipping corridors connecting East and West Arcansa and their continental markets the Arcan Navy has for its entire existence operated without aircraft carriers or ocean-going amphibious warfare vessels, and its character as, for all practical purposes, a destroyer-frigate force is an important source of institutional pride.

Bitter competition for funding and personnel with Arcansa's Air Force, newly-established as an independent arm of service in 1920 and very soon billed as a replacement for all traditional forms of sea-power, has long since given way to close and formalized cooperation stemming from a practical acknowledgement that neither service, nor the Army for that matter, can possibly hope to defend the country on its own. While prohibited, by the terms of 1927's Holland House Agreement and its subsequent codicils, from operating any fixed-wing aircraft of its own beyond a single large squadron of reconnaissance float-planes for the cruiser force, a provision long since lapsed, the Navy receives direct support from two long-range patrol and five attack squadrons which are customarily placed under its operational authority. Task Force flagships customarily control flights of interceptor fighters as well, and in any maritime crisis Arcansa's twenty-two heavily upgraded B-80 jet bombers would be earmarked for anti-shipping missions. Air-sea cooperation, dogged at first by technological shortfalls on both sides, had developed into a realistic proposition by 1940, and by 1950 Arcansa had attained a level of efficiency in maritime strike warfare, sea-based air control, and long-range reconnaissance unsurpassed by any other power. Over seventy years these high standards have been maintained through intensive study and constant practice.

Ships and Craft in Service

Amphibious Warfare Vessels
-4 Myatt class tank landing ships (Myatt, Point Deluce, Palarm, Arbana)
-24 L600 class landing craft mechanized
-31 L470 class landing craft mechanized/coastal utility craft
-10 L581 class landing craft utility
-10 L700 class air-cushion landing craft
-33 L500 class landing craft vehicle and personnel/harbor utility craft
-20 L720 class landing craft vehicle and personnel

Auxiliary Vessels
-2 Dorcheat River class replenishment oilers (Dorcheat River, Cornel River)
-2 Arc River class replenishment oilers (Arc River, Fave River)
-1 Marmaton River class cable repair ship (Marmaton River)
-2 Tensas River class repair ships (Tensas River, Hackberry River)
-4 Piney River class coastal oilers (Piney River, Cossat River, Saline River, Richland River)
-5 Tanager class tenders (Tanager, Sparrow, Bunting, Grosbeak, Babbler)
-2 Mizar class RO-RO cargo ships (Mizar, Meissa)
-2 Mira class RO-RO cargo ships (Mira, Mimosa)
-2 Mount Alester class oceanographic research ships (Mount Alester, Mount Mazarn)
-1 Merrillton class polar research ship (Merrillton)
-1 Russellville class icebreaker/multi-purpose support ship (Russellville)
-2 Pepper Island class salvage and rescue ships (Pepper Island, Salt Island)
-3 Crocker Island class salvage and rescue ships (Crocker Island, Rock Island, Beeren Island)
-7 Abelia class ocean-going tugs (Abelia, Alcea, Artemisia, Agathis, Anemone, Acorus, Amaryllis)
-12 Gladiolus class medium harbor tugs (Gladiolus 1-12)
-10 Jacaranda class small harbor tugs (Jacaranda 1-10)
-10 Zinnia class small harbor tugs (Zinnia 1-10)
-2 Wade Island class submarine rescue ships (Wade Island, League Island)
-1 Erlea Island class submarine rescue ship/deep-sea operations vessel (Erlea Island)
-4 Hawfinch class diver support vessels (Hawfinch, Bullfinch, Rosefinch, Bluefinch)

Patrol Vessels
-14 Griffin class offshore patrol vessels (Griffin, Harpy, Strix, Owlman, Thunderbird, Roc, Alectryon, Ethon, Geryon, Vultan, Shrike, Viero, Nicator, Weaver)
-10 Agate class fast patrol boats (Agate, Azurite, Andorite, Adamantine, Alabaster, Axinite, Aquamarine, Arthurite, Abelsonite, Almandine)
-12 Beryl class fast patrol boats (Beryl, Sunstone, Quartz, Bauxite, Opal, Stellerite, Turquoise, Willemite, Ametrine, Jasper, Carnelian, Gyrolite)

Destroyers
-8 Absalom Cleaveland class guided missile destroyers (Oscar Carson Flusser, Reigart Brinn, Oliver Clay Braine, Dainel Asa Tweenhouse, Oran Henry Crocker, Melchior John Sowders, Addison Temple, Perry Welcome Floger)

Frigates
-16 Norman Byrd class guided missile frigates (Norman Byrd, Howell Augustine Coe, Egbert Keith Wolcott, Edward Nathan Biggs, Easton Charles Cranch, Seth Dale Earwood, Leon Eagleson, Melville Truslow Maxey, Olin Delaney Parlange, Henry Lurton, Amos Sheldon Waddill, Jacob Wentworth Hook, Francis Brearley, Cyrus Marchant (Jr.), John Stamford Morsell, Rehoboth Trent Hourd)
-8 Lamar Aaron Prather class guided missile frigates (Barrett DeFord Samples, Raymond Ramey Quayle, Dennis Jay Rankin, Webb Begley, Joseph Day Morris, Stanford Lewis Pratt, Robert Bell Fett (Jr.), Richard Strong Smeagle)

Mine Warfare Vessels
-15 Nearhouse class mine countermeasures vessels (Nearhouse, Dyer, Dratch Creek, Elm Springs, Cadron, Butterfield, Arkinda, Aplin, Nettleton, Olvey, Marble Falls, Magness, Longview, Totten, Tanyard)
-15 Traskwood class mine countermeasures vessels (Traskwood, Springdale, Lunsford, Darysaw, Wileys Cove, Zent, Starr Hill, Kensett, Keeter, Homan, Gleghorn, Meteau, Cygnesville, Cadron, Naymell)

Submarines
-5 Arbridge class nuclear-powered attack submarines (Arbridge, Crosset, Shelbyville, Costington, Fort Dibb)
-5 Briggsville class nuclear-powered attack submarines (Briggsville, Tackbridge, Marmaton, Belton, Stawbatch)
-5 Haverbrook class nuclear-powered attack submarines (Haverbrook, Bellton, Dorbridge, Wyclyfe, Kirtland)

Aircraft
-110 C/S/R/H/EH-11 multi-role helicopters
-25 SH-14 shipboard helicopters
-28 SH-19 shipboard helicopters
-50 T/UH-12 training/utility helicopters

Historical Overview

Ever since King Escanor the Bashful and his Great Host of New Roodmen arrived off East Scomberland in their clinker-built long ships, Arcan fortunes have been linked to the sea. The loss of Escanor's great-great-grandson Marhouse of Mount Gram, together with nearly all of his immense navy, in a disastrous mass-grounding on the Beeming Sands during the winter of 1097 is widely held to have enabled the Shieldian conquest of Daldon, while Shadoran's control of the seas permitted King Ian to survive initial reverses and emerge victorious from the Great Brothers War, cementing Shieldian maritime preeminence for another century. High King Ian subsequently turned his battle-tested fleet against the Great Venturers Cartel in the so-called Calculonian War, winning control over Baltic trade for a generation and reducing Eastarcansa to near-colonial status. Of course, at a time when Arcan statehood had very nearly been extinguished altogether, Westarcan merchants in Eltonia were recording unheard-of profits and amassing fortunes the likes of which would help to pay for an ultimately successful southern-protestant uprising against Shieldian rule. Reluctant to confront the Grand Empire's formidable fleet directly, and also, it would appear, disinclined to take merchant ships out of lucrative trade for military purposes, protestant leaders limited their maritime efforts to a campaign of piracy and privateering, most productively in Caribbean and mid-Atlantic waters, while leaning on their ally Walmington for insurance against Shieldian blockade and attempted landings. Taken today as an exemplary lesson in naval strategy, Walmington's oceanic campaign in support of Westarcan protestants weakened a dangerous and powerful rival, one moreover with articulated designs on Walmingtonian territory, at comparatively small cost, sparing its people devastation of a sort visited upon the main North Atlantic island. Preoccupation with territorial struggles on land encouraged a dependence on Walmington's fleet which, just as importantly, robbed resources from Westarcan naval development and doomed Birchibald Moleman's planned invasion of Walmingland, meant to stamp-out Godfreyite 'heresy,' almost before it began.

Independent Arcansa struggled for some time to build a fleet of any real consequence, confronted as it was by an unremittingly hostile Grand Empire across a lengthy land border. Captain-General Moleman had seemingly passed his famous aversion to ships and the sea along to his immediate successors, primarily interested in destroying the Shieldian 'antichrist' by means of a mighty crusading army, and until such time as that could be brought about, Arcan leaders found accommodation with Walmington far more convenient than confrontation. Merchants and shipowners generally resisted all attempts to raise taxes for warship-building, preferring instead to buy policies from Arcansa's emerging risk-insurance industry which would often cover a given vessel in excess of its actual value.

[The Crooked Beat]

The Arcan Army

I made a mistake
When I looked over my shoulder
Cromwell was right behind me
In the driving rain
I came out of the bathroom
Looking for my ticket
It's hard to be
Hard to be human again

There's trouble down south
Metal keens through the air
Numbers are falling one by one
Sky fills with blades
Sound falls from above
Smoke rolls through the trees

Secure that sector
Move up the valley and take it out
Look out for wires
The trucks move out
The village burns
Silence in the swamps

Introduction

Sovereign Arcansa in its approximately four centuries of self-government has endured a depressingly lengthy record of wars, rebellions, and crises following on from its often near-apocalyptic and strongly millennarian-shaded struggle for independence from Shieldian rule, at a comprehensive loss of perhaps several million lives in addition to titanic sums of money and widespread devastation of agriculture, industry, and trade. Each of those conflicts, almost without exception, has imposed monstrous burdens on Arcansa's land army and its soldiers across successive generations, and as a consequence of arduous labor and human sacrifice frequently staggering in scale, Arcansa remains a freely-standing nation. Birchibald Moleman's establishment in 1642 of his New Host of Christians Armed in Defense of the True Faith, or New Christian Army for short, marked a decisive shift away from preexisting systems of military organization, still predicated, despite Ian of Shadoran's numerous far-reaching reforms, on landed noblemen and their quasi-private local levies, and toward a recognizably modern structure characterized by centralization, professionalization, strict obedience to orders, and systematic recruitment. While a number of subsequent Arcan leaders went on to construct distinct forces reflecting their own particular methods and ideologies, Landskeeper Kearney Brockman and his Great Reform of 1725 perhaps most significantly, Moleman's basic formulation, his fundamental insistence on rigidly centralized control and complete autonomy from parochial interests, remains operative some three hundred eighty years later.

Today's Arcan Army dates its establishment to February 22nd of 1921, when Captain Barrett DeFord Samples formally assumed command of the 17th Division on Arcansa's northern border, only hours before Shieldian forces opened an offensive meant to extinguish the newly-established socialist state in its entirety. Captain, soon Lieutenant-Colonel and not long thereafter Major-General Samples, together with hundreds of other junior officers belonging to that progressive-minded generation, engineered what was almost certainly Arcansa's most radical program of military reconstruction yet, transforming a backward, oppressive, inefficient and ludicrously top-heavy organization concerned mainly with colonial conquest into a thoroughly modern and tactically innovative force capable of fighting successfully under conditions of industrialized total war. This new structure has remained continuously in use, with some modest alterations, ever since, its basic soundness validated by just over a century of experience.

Personnel

Four or five out of every thousand Arcan citizens are in Army uniform at any typical moment in time, a ratio closer to one in one hundred when only men are considered, women being ineligible for military service, which gives an establishment of between 250,000 and 270,000 personnel or almost exactly half of combined armed forces manpower under normal conditions. Every Arcan male is required to undertake twelve to fourteen months of national service upon receiving notice of mobilization, issued within a year of a given individual's eighteenth birthday, and national servicemen in training accordingly make up rather more than half of that total, officers and noncommissioned officers in permanent billets and reservists on monthly or yearly exercises accounting for the remainder. Whereas the Arcan Air Force and Navy are maintained at close to or more than half of their fully-mobilized strength as a matter of course, their particular roles and requirements leaving less room for rapid expansion in an emergency, under current mobilization plans the Army, if called upon to do so, could balloon to more than half a million men in forty-eight hours, a million men in another forty-eight hours, and more than two million within a month, at which point economic priorities would argue against further recruitment.

Structure

All Arcan conscripts are inducted into their local Regiment, to which, with certain exceptions, they will belong for their entire Army careers whether on active duty or in reserve. While considered by most experts a decidedly imperfect means of training and preparing men for modern combined-arms warfare, with its ever-multiplying complexities and increasingly onerous technological burdens, the Arcan regimental system offers a deciding advantage over alternative schemes in that it softens what might otherwise amount to one of life's most unwelcome obligations. Young conscripts, many of them spending their first nights under another roof, serve in nearly all cases with men from their own communities, in units staffed and run by individuals known to many new recruits personally. Although often pointed to as a main source of the stereotypical Arcan soldier's relative lack of aggressiveness, the regiment's congenial environment is calculated to instill a sense of community and a collaborative mindset among new recruits, who as a rule spend most of their time learning what regimental officers usually speak of as practical skills, above all equipment maintenance, radio procedures, map-reading, and entrenchment.

Each of 55 Arcan Cantrefs is home to a regiment containing at least one line battalion and, in theory, one brigade headquarters battalion, though at present only just over half of all Arcan regiments are capable of providing a brigade staff without special augmentation.

Regiments of the Arcan Army (Brigade Number)
Alam's Lynn Rifles (44th Infantry Brigade)
Allerton Rifles (9th Infantry Brigade)
Benson Court Rifles (398th Infantry Brigade)
Cranesville Rifles (37th Infantry Brigade)
Dockland Rifles (95th Infantry Brigade)

Fort Green Rifles (149th Infantry Brigade)
Mapleton Rifles (21st Infantry Brigade)
Starett Park Rifles (8th Infantry Brigade)
Beekman Rifles (35th Infantry Brigade)
Lenox Rifles (89th Infantry Brigade)

Weavers Rifles (4th Infantry Brigade)
Yardsville Rifles (105th Infantry Brigade)
Storkville Rifles (11th Infantry Brigade)
Lorimer Rifles (79th Infantry Brigade)
Fenland Rifles (202nd Infantry Brigade)

Mottway Rifles (55th Infantry Brigade)
Fort Varick Rifles (57th Infantry Brigade)
Wardsville Rifles (30th Infantry Brigade)
Bayside Rifles (22nd Infantry Brigade)
Laurelton Rifles (71st Infantry Brigade)

Pomander Armored (3rd Armored Brigade)
Randalls Armored (17th Armored Brigade)
Sylvan Hill Armored (5th Armored Brigade)
Hattenville Armored (47th Armored Brigade)
Fort Baxter Armored (33rd Armored Brigade)

Glenvale Armored (28th Armored Brigade)
Rockdale Heights Armored (59th Armored Brigade)
Holliswood Grenadiers (122nd Armored Brigade)
Statesville Grenadiers (304th Armored Brigade)
Arverne Grenadiers (150th Armored Brigade)

Arbendale Grenadiers (7th Infantry Brigade)
Meadowmere Grenadiers (10th Infantry Brigade)
Willetston Grenadiers (48th Infantry Brigade)
Beechhurst Grenadiers (24th Infantry Brigade)
Gardenside Grenadiers (2nd Infantry Brigade)

Elmhurst Grenadiers (84th Infantry Brigade)
Village Park Grenadiers (51st Infantry Brigade)
Annadale Grenadiers (70th Infantry Brigade)
Grasmere Field Artillery
Arrochar Field Artillery

Grantsville Field Artillery
Fort Arden Field Artillery
Tottenvale Field Artillery
Eltingville Field Artillery
New Springville Field Artillery

Tellport Field Artillery
Castleton Field Artillery
Oakrow Field Artillery
North Shore Field Artillery
Westerhill Field Artillery

Egbertville Air Defense Artillery
Midland Air Defense Artillery
Clason City Air Defense Artillery
Belmont Air Defense Artillery
Fieldston Air Defense Artillery

Woodstock Engineers
Bathgate Engineers
Motthaven Engineers
Port Haven Engineers
Parkdale Engineers

Williamsbridge Engineers
Washingville Engineers
Baychester Engineers
Olinville Engineers
Fieldston Signals

Arthurdale Signals
Melrose Signals
Pelham Signals
Fairmont Signals
Wakefield Signals

Unionport Reconnaissance
Edgewater Reconnaissance
Brotherton Reconnaissance

While regiments organize garrison life and administer all training up to company-level, providing their personnel also with a strong sense of corporate identity, since 1938 they have been relegated to strictly non-operational status. Most regiments, however, are capable of converting their normal administrative staff into a headquarters company for a brigade, the Arcan Army's basic all-arms building block for battle. All maneuver brigades adhere to an identical, triangular structure, built around three line battalions with a field artillery battalion and a quartermaster battalion in support, an organization which would number well above five thousand men at full establishment, and before including customary attachments. Brigades as designed are to a considerable extent self-contained and, for a limited span of time, self-supporting, brigade headquarters having assumed many functions previously held at division level. Divisions continue, however, to play a vitally important coordinating role for operations involving multiple brigades, while supporting arms and services beyond what a brigade commander, caught awkwardly at times between battle-management and administrative responsibilities, is able to effectively control are directed by divisional headquarters. Operational commands above division level, Corps or Army headquarters, are no longer maintained in normal circumstances, though if an emergency were to call for coordinated action by multiple divisions, a scenario which would imply mobilization on a scale not seen for half a century, those higher command echelons would be formed from arm-of-service school staffs, Army Department personnel, and a selection of independent or unallocated units otherwise surplus to brigade and divisional organizations.

Arms and Equipment

-utility/antitank helicopter UH-14
-utility/antitank helicopter UH-19
-transport helicopter UH-11
-training/utility helicopter T/UH-12

-9x19mm semi-automatic pistol B801
-9x19mm semi-automatic pistol B901
-9x19mm sub-machine gun B605
-7.62x51mm select-fire rifle A507
-4.85x49mm select-fire carbine A804
-7.62x51mm general-purpose machine gun A512
-7.62x51mm bolt-action rifle B701
-8.58x63.5 bolt-action rifle B608

-40x365mm automatic cannon A505
-self-propelled anti-aircraft gun G944

-84mm recoilless rifle B504
-84mm single-shot rocket launcher B824
-short/medium-range guided missile Y383
-short-range guided missile Y803
-medium-range guided missile Y707
-medium/long-range guided missile Y550

-manportable short-range guided missile system Y807
-manportable short-range guided missile system Y817
-towed short/medium-range guided missile system Y710
-self-propelled medium-range missile system Y115

-51mm light mortar A207
-81mm medium mortar A704
-120mm heavy mortar A601
-120mm heavy mortar A803
-105mm/32 towed howitzer C501
-155mm/38 towed howitzer C195

-main battle tank G825 (1,187)
-assault gun G6183 (471)
-armored reconnaissance vehicle G5207
-armored reconnaissance vehicle G718
-infantry fighting vehicle G752 (1,952)
-tank destroyer G7521
-tank destroyer G5202
-armored personnel carrier G802
-armored personnel carrier G5203
-armored recovery vehicle G8251
-armored vehicle-launched bridge G8252
-combat engineer vehicle G8253
-combat engineer tractor G735
-light armored recovery vehicle G7523
-light armored repair and recovery vehicle G5206
-light armored repair and recovery vehicle G8019
-armored medical carrier G8021
-armored medical carrier G5204
-armored command vehicle G7524
-armored command vehicle G5205
-armored forward observer vehicle G7525
-armored communications support vehicle G8022
-armored electronic warfare vehicle G7526

-all-terrain motorcycle G807
-utility van G834
-utility van G828
-1-ton all-terrain utility vehicle G401
-1 1/2-ton all-terrain utility vehicle G411
-2 1/2-ton ton all-terrain truck G421
-4-ton all-terrain truck G804
-4 1/2-ton all-terrain truck G701
-6-ton all-terrain truck G702
-8 1/2-ton all-terrain truck G703
-7 1/2-ton truck G781
-10-ton truck G782
-11-ton truck G840
-tractor unit G780
-24-ton all-terrain truck/tractor/chassis G810
-tank transporter/tractor G917
-2 1/4-ton tracked cargo carrier G801
-mobile crane G905
-mobile crane G906
-mobile crane G907
-all-terrain forklift G924
-all-terrain forklift G827

-medium girder bridge W701
-prefabricated truss bridge W505
-foldable floating bridge W801
-pontoon equipment W339
-general support bridge W520
-spooled trackway W901
-infantry assault bridge W905
-tracked bulldozer G925
-tracked excavator G918
-wheeled all-terrain loader/dozer/forklift G201
-wheeled dumper/hauler G470
-wheeled surface grader G826
-wheeled carry-all scraper G833
-mine-clearing line charge W929

-work boat V701
-assault boat V550
-combat support/bridge erection boat V703
-combat support/bridge erection boat V801
-landing craft mechanized V702 (Navy L470 class)
-landing craft utility V901

[The Crooked Beat]

A Chronological Register of Arcan Heads-of-State with Short Biographical Sketches

No weak men in the books at home
The strong men who have made the world
History lives on the books at home
The books at home
The books at home
It's not made by great men
It's not made by great men
It's not made by great men
It's not made by great men!

Correctors-Principal (of the Correctorate Era, or First Arcan Republic, 1652-1714)

Birchibald Moleman
(lived 1609-1661, ruled 1652-1661)

Biographical Sketch
If any one person could be named founder of independent Arcansa, no individual would hold a stronger claim upon such a title than Birchibald Moleman. As leader of the markedly effective New Host of Christians Armed in Defense of the True Faith, shrewd and merciless in his dealings with battlefield opponents and political rivals alike, Moleman and his lieutenants are widely credited with instilling a demoralized Protestant coalition with an iron discipline and a single-minded unity of purpose hitherto conspicuous by their absence. Across a series of campaigns described by later generations of military writers as works of singular brilliance, Moleman transformed an Accorder army once believed to face certain defeat into an instrument of decisive victory, which, after compelling the Shieldian High King at gunpoint to recognize an independent Protestant state, he swiftly set loose upon his erstwhile allies in a program of so-called Confiscations, just as revolutionary in their effect on social development in the North Atlantic Archipelago as Southern independence itself. Always a deeply divisive figure, Moleman endured alternating currents of reverence and vilification in Arcan historiography, according to ideological shifts in domestic politics, more than one Arcan ruler or would-be ruler having sought to claim descent from Moleman's conveniently ill-documented family so as to bolster their own credentials. Modern historians, less inclined than their predecessors to paint in bright colors a moralizing tale of clearly-defined heroes and villains, have largely embraced a view of Moleman as in effect an arch-opportunist, a man so thoroughly convinced of his own precariousness that he could not bear to coexist with any potential challenger, however farfetched a given prospect may have appeared. His military accomplishments, though impressive and tremendously influential, appear under close scrutiny to have been more a function of Walmingtonian material and financial support, and of his Legitimist enemies' exhaustion, than evidence of any special genius, and in key respects his methods foreshadowed Landskeeper Kearney Brockman's establishment of permanent military conscription, together with his imposition of a single, universal manual of arms, just under a century later. Neither man invented any techniques not already seen elsewhere, though few of their predecessors had ever used them with such obvious success. Without question, however, Birchibald Moleman embodied a profound shift in social life for southerners, and his confiscations helped to accelerate the destruction of feudalism by a new form of capitalistic economic relationships.

Moleman was born on Tooness Island, situated among shallow estuarial waters along Daldon's east coast, in a decrepit stone house long since swallowed up by the sea. His father, most likely in common with his entire extended family and local community, supported young Birchibald and an indeterminate number of siblings through a highly flexible combination of fishing, small-scale carrying trade, salvage, smuggling, and, when a chance presented itself, outright piracy. If Moleman's complete lack of reflection or reminiscence upon his childhood years can be taken as indicative of his feelings, it could not have been a happy time, and, after his debut on parish baptismal records, his name next surfaces in 1622 aboard a Walmingtonian ship-master's payroll. At some point shortly thereafter he enlisted in a company of musketeers raised under Walmish colors in North America, and while no detailed account of his service has survived, teenage Birchibald quickly rose through the ranks, a muster roll from 1627 listing him as lieutenant, at the tender age of eighteen, while just three years later he is mentioned in correspondence as a captain, leading a company of his own. Moleman's career as, in effect, a mercenary for Walmish mercantile interests took him from from Newfoundland to Gallaga and Dra-pol, by way of St. Hilda, Ferdinand of Wyke, and Jamesland, his reputation and authority growing with each bloody new battle. His fortune nearly ran out in 1638 when, not yet thirty, he was appointed to command a raid on the Accipiters. As a foreigner, of course, he offered his Godfreyite employers a measure of deniability, and when, after capturing and brutally sacking the archipelago's main settlement, he learned that a peace accord had been signed weeks earlier, Moleman was made to understand that he could either submit to unspecified punishment at Walmish hands or turn outlaw. In a flagrant gesture of disdain for personal safety that would become one of his defining features as general, Moleman surrendered himself to an Imperial galleon and was brought to Walmingland for trial. Political expediency, above all a desire to avoid irrevocable entanglement in the bitter and long-running Shieldian Wars of Religion, encouraged Walmish authorities to make an example of Moleman, and for the benefit of King Ian III's ambassador the future Arcan Corrector was cruelly tortured, before being clapped in irons and sent away to imprisonment in a remote castle. Moleman remained in captivity for just under a year, during which time, fed on little more than a starvation diet and flogged routinely by his jailers, orders for his execution were evidently issued and revoked on three known occasions.

Spring of 1640, however, brought news of unexpected battlefield reverses for the southern Accorders, and with an unwelcome prospect of restored Shieldian unity again on the horizon, Walmish authorities decided that Moleman had not yet outlived his usefulness. Taken from his prison in the dead of night and spirited to Walmington City without explanation, he was summarily washed, trimmed, dressed in a new suit of clothes, and handed a letter authorizing him to draw, staggeringly, upon a loan of one thousand pounds granted by the Wayne banking family. While his instructions to that effect were never issued in writing, or at least have not survived if they were, Moleman immediately set about raising a new mercenary company. To his evident surprise, he found that many of his comrades from past expeditions had been summoned specifically for service in his new organization, and around this cadre of season veterans he built a small army of some four thousand men. Working without pause, Moleman hammered this heterogeneous collection of petty criminals, vagrants, hapless abductees and penniless minor nobles into something resembling an organized military force, and evidently did so much more quickly than his Walmish hosts thought possible. Increasingly eager to be rid of him, Godfreyite officials bundled Moleman and his new corps, which in an unforeseen display of piety he named the New Host of Christians Armed in the Defense of the True Faith, aboard a fleet of several dozen herring busses, only recently seized from their owners, and in appalling mid-winter weather sent them away for Mansbar. That so many survived the crossing, Moleman of course among them, was soon taken as clear evidence of divine favor, though to many of those who happened to witness it his very arrival, seemingly out of thin air, was a sign from Heaven in itself.

Pericles Brule
(lived 1607-1679, ruled 1661-1679)

Biographical Sketch
As is frequently seen when intimate, long-lasting associations between men of rank and authority are taken under close examination, it is by no means difficult to infer, on strength of available evidence, that Pericles Brule and Birchibald Moleman, constant companions from boyhood, were committed to one another more deeply than their society would have allowed them to acknowledge. Their personal correspondence, even if one allows for archaic conventions of language and obsolete colloquialisms, frequently read more or less explicitly as love-letters, and where both men tended to cultivate an image of scowling austerity and unshakeable resolution for public view, they confided in one another freely, exhibiting at times a degree of emotional openness and vulnerability not often associated with their difficult, religiously-saturated era. Whatever may have been the precise and full nature of their relationship, there can be no doubt that Moleman commanded Brule's unwavering, occasionally fanatical loyalty, which Moleman himself repaid by elevating Brule to a level second only to his own, and by naming Brule in no uncertain terms his successor. While his skills as a battlefield commander arguably did not quite equal those of his patron, or those of other key Trunker commanders like Garwood Cramm, Ebenezer Greaton, and Moses Learned for that matter, Brule was usually able to redeem errors of judgement by means of his monumental stubbornness and immense personal bravery, which on more than one occasion delivered victory, albeit at steep cost, against formidable odds.

Perhaps unusually, for a man of such historical prominence, nothing is known of Pericles Brule's origins or early life, though in his mannerisms and his style of writing most historians have accepted evidence of an Eastarcan upbringing. Mariners of all seafaring nations, Walmish prominent among them, raided Eastarcan coastal settlements as a matter of course, carrying off untold numbers of men, women, and children for impressment and sale before any force appeared that was strong enough to prevent it, and on balance of probability it would appear that a young Brule was one of these captives. By his own recollection, not altogether reliable it must be noted, Brule first met and befriended Moleman when the latter joined Brule's ship as an adolescent deckhand. Several years Moleman's senior, and with considerably more sea experience to draw upon, Brule took him under his wing, and when Moleman, sensing greater opportunities ashore, determined to quit seagoing service, Brule followed. Their inseparability, it would seem, made possible their survival as teenage footsoldiers fighting side-by-side through murderous colonial campaigns, each saving the other's life on numerous occasions, and while Moleman soon demonstrated a tactical shrewdness and a talent for organization which Brule arguably never acquired, one went nowhere without the other. Moleman's surrender to Walmington was especially galling therefore, a transgression for which Brule swore revenge against the Godfreyite Empire, and when word reached him of Moleman's release, he was one of the very first to join him. Exceptionally tough, with a bellowing voice and a talent for intimidation, Brule made for an outstanding drillmaster, and if not for his efforts it is unlikely that the New Christian Legion would have performed anywhere near as well as it did.

Garwood Cramm
(lived 1611-1684, ruled 1679-1684)

Biographical Sketch
In many respects a typical volunteer soldier of his desperately warlike age, one of precious few individuals who consciously presented themselves for military service at a time when most men strove mightily to avoid it by almost any means, Garwood Cramm has been described as the most striking beneficiary of Birchibald Moleman's new military system, which made possible, if decidedly improbable, a condemned teenage poacher's ascendancy from lowest pikeman to supreme commander and head of state. Proudly illiterate to his final day, Cramm left no account of his own life, and like most peasants born in Daldon during that era of devastation, displacement, and rampant anabaptism, his existence went unrecorded up to his appointment as lieutenant under Dathur Harm's warrant, issued in 1631. Lack of learning proved no obstacle to Cramm's budding military career, and as Accorder forces began to fall apart under the weight of internal dissention and Imperial pressure, Cramm, falling back on his old poaching habits, formed a band of irregulars to raid and pilfer Imperial baggage trains. Whether consciously intended to impede Northern operations or merely an unexpectedly successful criminal enterprise, Cramm's band grew into the largest and most active of numerous agrarian militias whose aggregate effect was to dissipate Imperial strength at a time when Accorder armies were at their weakest. Though given to millennarian preaching, Cramm himself was at heart a pragmatist, and upon news of Moleman's landing in Mansbar, he let it be known that his allegiance awaited a suitable offer. Moleman, understandably suspicious of Cramm and his intentions, was however in no position to turn down his offer, particularly as Cramm represented perhaps the only armed force of substance not controlled by a real contender for a prospective Southern throne, and while in no actual danger as to such a contingency, Moleman having yet to appreciate the Accord's dire financial straits, he feared also that Cramm might be bought out by a rival bidder.

Both men approached their new alliance warily, even after several chests filled to bursting with freshly-seized Marimaian crownpieces changed hands, though in retrospect it would appear that Cramm, a practiced judge of military effectiveness, had never seriously doubted Moleman's chances of victory, and meant primarily to squeeze him and his Walming benefactors for as much as he could. Moleman quickly learned to appreciate Cramm as well, and in a far-sighted demonstration of confidence in his abilities Moleman appointed Garwood Cramm to a Colonelcy, in command of all Trunker cavalry, which outside Cramm's own followers amounted to very little indeed. It was undoubtedly not lost on Moleman that, much as he might have wished it otherwise, his direct influence over Cramm was limited, and in grudging recognition of that fact he adopted a markedly uncharacteristic looseness in dealing with his cavalry leader. Of course, at a stage where Accorder and Imperial forces alike had fallen back on increasingly stereotyped tactics in their common state of exhaustion, Cramm's unconventional methods, and Moleman's willingness to let him roam more or less freely, paid significant dividends. Trunker cavalrymen under their unlettered leader continued to practice their accustomed form of hit-and-run warfare on an altogether larger scale, studiously avoiding pitched battle with their much heavier Imperial opponents to seek out targets against which they might concentrate overwhelming numbers, unencumbered by any other mission. Moleman's infantry, for its part, had been conditioned to fight without cavalry in direct support, Brule in particular striving to impress upon the men that, while anyone who broke or ran would inevitably be cut down by circling imperial cuirassiers, when drawn up tightly in formation, bristling with pikes, disciplined footsoldiers had nothing to fear.

Nederick Cramm
(lived 1644-1687, ruled 1684-1687)

Biographical Sketch
Arcan electors tempted to relax their vigilance upon Garwood Cramm's timely passing were to a man rudely shocked to discover that his final hours of life had been sufficient to issue a decree appointing his hedonistic son Nederick successor. Too young even by his father's tolerant standards to have fought in the Wars of Religion, Nederick, as one of his contemporaries famously remarked, combined Garwood's crudeness and slyness with a love of luxury and an almost predatory laziness encouraged by his intensely pampered upbringing as heir of a famous and exceptionally powerful father. Where Moleman, in an explicit attempt to root out any latent dynastic impulse before it could spread through society, had made a very public show of disinheriting his own unfortunate son, ill-used Oaksley, and where childless Pericles Brule had no sons to put forward, Cramm, seeing in Arcansa the greatest prize of his entire career, harbored no such inhibitions. Left to his own devices, there was little chance that Nederick would manage to assemble a coalition of sufficient weight to make him a serious contender for leadership, and, knowing this perfectly well, Garwood had spent most of his term as Corrector building exactly that, a rock-solid core of his cavalry stalwarts backed by a shadowy network of Willemite, Danite, and Walmish financiers. Although Nederick himself may not have known anything about it, his election was ramrodded through at gunpoint in a virtual coup d'etat, armed cavalrymen having invaded Council House as balloting was in progress. Nederick, however, lacking his father's ruthlessness, allowed the Permanent Committee, thoroughly humiliated, to disperse in peace, an error which his father would never have committed, and if any Arcan electors might have been prepared to entertain Nederick as Corrector given certain concessions, their attitudes quickly hardened.

What seemed in 1684 a preordained collision between Birchibald Moleman's new military aristocracy and the grating heir foisted upon it by one of that very system's most important architect was derailed, however, by rumblings of renewed belligerence from across the River Dorcheat. For all damage done to once-stellar Arcan military reputations by Pericles Brule's bumbling and fruitless series of campaigns against Apernia between 1669 and 1674, Shieldian military self-confidence had yet to fully recover from Arcan independence, while Lord Andion, whose administrative talents were of such pivotal importance to a Grand Empire still struggling to right its finances and to reestablish a stable domestic political order, advised caution. Andion's diaries indicate that he suspected, with good reason, that Brule and his lieutenants would welcome a Shieldian invasion with open arms as a long-awaited diversion from their Apernian ordeal, turning on their old enemies with a fervor seldom displayed in southwestern battles, while he clearly knew full well that Apernia itself, notwithstanding its ever more desperate pleas for support, would be quite unable, and with Walmingtonian encouragement unwilling, to risk its own hard-pressed forces in a direct attack on Arcansa. Like most Shieldian noblemen of his generation, Lord Andion also harbored a healthy respect for Garwood Cramm, who, as a consumptive and aging Pericles Brule grew despondent, had begun to rule as Corrector-Principal in all save for title, a matter which his accession, postponed by Brule's surprising deathbed resiliency, only served to make official. Never one to throw good money after bad, Cramm had quickly concluded a peace agreement with Apernia and, content to let them stew and safe in knowledge that precious little booty was to be had in that impoverished kingdom, began to cast his covetous glance again north.

Nederick Cramm's elevation to Corrector happened nearly to coincide with the passing of none other than Lord Andion. While two men less alike in manner and temperament than Andion and Garwood Cramm could scarcely have been imagined, they both shared a soundness of judgement and an ability to manage their often insubordinate followers which were singularly lacking in each man's successor. That a man renowned for butchery and pillage should have proven such an indulgent father took his contemporaries as much by surprise as modern historians, yet for whatever his reasons, and as an illiterate he left no explanation for posterity, Garwood Cramm immersed his son Nederick in a life of carefree splendor and opulence, much of it won through unspeakable acts of murder, such as a younger Garwood could scarcely have dreamed up. If Garwood ever wondered how his son would fare as Corrector having studiously avoided any hint of an education in statecraft or military science, the thought did not appear to bother him. Word of Nederick Cramm's scandalous behavior had reached Ianapalis long before his father Garwood's demise, where it was greeted with a mixture of puzzlement and glee. He was, even to a distant observer, a man so unlike Moleman, Brule, and even Garwood Cramm that some astute Shieldian officials could not bring themselves to see him as anything except some sort of figurehead, a stalking-horse of some kind for Eltonian intrigue as yet opaque from so far a distance. That someone else wielded actual power seemed almost certain, though in retrospect it would appear that sober Shieldian opinion failed to account for growing factionalism among Arcansa's military gentry, most of which had passed into the hands of sons and grandsons with no first-hand experience of service in the Wars of Religion. For that larger and much more vocal segment of political opinion in Ianapalis which, hotly offended by the Grand Empire's humiliation at the hands of sectarians, had found Andion's cautiousness intolerable, Nederick Cramm was taken instead as a sign that independent Arcansa had at last fallen into decadence, and would be ripe for reconquest. Bolstered by rumors of dissension in Eltonia, and whispers of plots and counter-plots against what modern historians know to have been an entirely hapless Nederick, irredentism soon won out, and preparations began for an invasion of Wyclyfe in Spring of 1686.

Where innate suspicion and frequently hysterical anti-Catholic paranoia failed to complete their picture of events, of course, Arcan Burgesses could also call upon sources of their own within the Grand Empire's still-turbulent religious landscape, and just as encouraging news of Nederick's unpopularity flowed north, warning of Shieldian invasion plans leaked south. Pale shadows of their illustrious forbears though they certainly seem when considered in retrospect, the Burgesses as a class had nonetheless inherited their fathers' fanatical anti-Catholic and anti-Shieldian attitudes in full measure, and while very few were old enough to have endured the New Christian Legion's most desperate moments, none were under any misapprehension as to their probable fate should Mansbar, Daldon, and Wyclyfe be restored to the Grand Empire. An association of fifty-seven Burgesses calling itself the Macedonian Lodge quickly gathered under the leadership of Colonel Kirkadius Increase Wigram, who, in addition to his having inherited Daldon's single largest parcel of landholdings from his father, an original Trunker and perhaps the most avid confiscator of all his storied companions, had proven himself a competent military leader in Apernia and Eastarcansa, surviving both debacles with his personal reputation intact.

As Colonel Wigram and his Macedonians worked feverishly to raise an army against a Shieldian invasion which most expected to take place at any moment, Nederick Cramm, comfortably ensconced in a sumptuous manor house confiscated from a brother of Robidah Atkins, strove just as earnestly to banish all thoughts of politics or strategy from his mind. His father's hand-picked bodyguard, though fast aging and by the winter of 1685-86 distinctly skeletal, remained unwavering in their loyalty, and provided the Corrector, such as he was, with a conveniently impenetrable screen behind which to pursue more gratifying vocations. If Garwood Cramm had demonstrated an almost superhuman appetite for the acquisition of riches, Nederick seemed bent with equal fervor on enjoying them, and his days, if decidedly less than objective contemporary accounts are to be believed, became a blur of raucous feasting, Herculean drinking bouts, and orgiastic masquerades whose extreme duration and ample staffing presumably allowed many Arcan women to change professions. The Macedonian Lodge, upon learning of Nederick's depravities, took what might normally have been considered a treasonous step in publicly disavowing him, and its members, amid much prayer and solemnity, swore an oath to obey Colonel Wigram as their supreme commander. Both Wigram and his Macedonians, and Nederick and his shriveled house guard, were however entirely too preoccupied to settle scores. As winter turned to spring, and Colonel Wigram gathered his newly-christened Legion of Companions in Wyclyfe, he did so with a tacit understanding, or so thought his followers at any rate, that, once the Shieldian invasion had been dealt with, they would march on Eltonia and depose Nederick Cramm.

Unbeknownst to Wigram, however, political winds in Ianapalis had shifted direction yet again. Shieldian officials were evidently taken aback by the rapidity with which Colonel Wigram, hitherto a nonentity in broader matters of state, had succeeded in assembling an army nearly equal in size to that arrayed opposite him, and unsettled to discover that Corrector Nederick's apparent abdication of his formal duties, if by no means his titles, had caused Wigram almost no difficulty whatsoever. Instead of the walk-over so eagerly anticipated the previous summer, when it was assumed that a fractured protestant state, fallen to dissolution, would be ripe for reconquest, it now appeared to all save for the most extreme Shieldian revanchists that they would be confronted with another force of grim and obstinate zealots not unlike the New Christian Legion itself, which had so cruelly traded lives of no consequence for the flower of Shadoranite nobility. With Wigram and his Macedonians firmly established in Wyclyfe, very much appearing to threaten an invasion of Shadoran, ambitious plans from a year earlier were shelved indefinitely.

Shieldian prudence very likely spared Nederick Cramm execution, as, through summer and autumn of 1686, Arcan and Imperial armies engaged in a kind of mirror-image campaign, each maneuvering in a state of mutual incomprehension to block imagined advances, chasing down phantom incursions and pursuing reports of ghostly riders, until winter forced both into seasonal quarters having failed to so much as sight one another. Decades of over-indulgence, however, had at last caught up with Corrector Nederick, and as winter closed in, he fell ill with what many modern historians suspect was blood poisoning, exacerbated by a plethora of lingering maladies attendant to his intemperate habits including, again if less than disinterested contemporary sources are to be believed, syphilis, gout, stomach ulcers, and an infected molar. Nederick suffered through months of what would seem to have been agonizing pain, attended to by a battery of physicians who, whether out of Puritanical spitefulness or simple incomprehension, almost certainly succeeded only in intensifying his suffering. Delirious and insensible in his last days, thrashing weakly among his expensive sheets between alternating episodes of catatonia and violent tremors, Nederick Cramm finally passed away on 4 January, 1687. His torturous physical ordeal at last over, Nederick nonetheless suffered one final indignity. Two of his father's bodyguards, both men of sixty or seventy years at least, were ordered to remove Nederick's corpse, and to haul it to a nearby chapel for funerary arrangements. Despite months of cruel wastage Nederick had retained much of his famous corpulence to the end, and the two decrepit swordsmen found themselves only just able to lift him. Their progress through the Corrector's residence, by that time growing crowded with onlookers, was a simultaneously bleak and hilarious procession of noisy drops, falls, shattered porcelain, and overturned furniture, all amid a swirling thundercloud of obscenities and a throng of fascinated interlopers, many of whom attempted to rip shards of clothing from the corpse notwithstanding dire threats issued by the two attendants. Having at last made it outside with their charge, themselves dripping with sweat in spite of the mid-winter chill and trembling from exertion, Nederick himself by then stripped completely naked by souvenir-hunters, though afforded some protection from further harassment by the bitter cold, the two men struggled along down a muddy lane, making for their specified destination, dropping Nederick again and again. Every time that Nederick slipped out of their grasp, falling into the mud with a nauseating plop, he became yet more difficult to carry, finding purchase more nearly impossible, and after perhaps an hour in which the two men had progressed perhaps several dozen yards from the front door to the Corrector's apartments, they were reduced in their desperation to pushing, pulling, and rolling, a sight so pitiful that both old troopers, if eyewitnesses are to be believed, were by that point weeping abjectly. All at once, however, a mob of what are thought to have been early Danites, distinguishable at least in part by their angular white bonnets and fez-like black hats, descended upon the two men and their lifeless companion, and in a frenzy began pelting Nederick's body with stones. The two bodyguards defended Nederick to the limit of their powers, yet were quickly overwhelmed and presumably lucky to have escaped with their lives. As for what became of Nederick Cramm himself after falling into the hands of the Danites, nothing is known. It is considered most likely that, as an object of special hatred for that sect, he was ritually tortured and dismembered, his mortal remains destroyed.

Roundly condemned though he certainly was by generations of Arcan historians, Nederick Cramm has enjoyed something of a rehabilitation in more recent years. While his performance as head of state was plainly abysmal, if one accepts that a performance was made to begin with, in those few instances where he was given an opportunity to exercise real power, he did so with a mildness and a degree of lenience that was completely alien to his contemporaries, and which in every case those same men saw as evidence of damning weakness. As, arguably, a broadly decent young man used as a game-piece for intrigues plotted by far craftier minds, thrust into a position for which he was totally unprepared, Corrector Nederick is increasingly seen as a sympathetic figure, and his particular trials, especially his excruciating last months and the wanton desecration of his corpse, has proven a fertile source of artistic inspiration. If Arcansa's new ruling class, its military Burgesses, intended however to make an example of him, to underline the Puritan elite's utter refusal to accept dynastic rulers or hereditary monarchs, they plainly succeeded.

Kirkadius Increase Wigram
(lived 1638-1714, ruled 1687-1714)

Eltonia's Wigram family, known prior to 1620 for its highly successful shipping enterprises and as a leading producer of dissident preachers, quickly emerged as a powerful force in separatist politics and as a vitally important source of funding for southern rebels after Daldon and Mansbar rose in revolt against High King Ian III. Egeon Best Wigram, grandfather to future Corrector Kirkadius and an outspoken Precisian, represented what was at first a tiny group of southern townsmen intent on autonomy at least, ideally complete and total independence, from Imperial rule, and less interested in religious toleration than in protestant, specifically Congregationalist, supremacy. His open hostility to Damana VII, whom Wigram despised mainly for his Catholicism, yet also for Damana's widely-surmised intent to establish a southern kingdom abhorrent to Puritan ideology, did not at first preclude cooperation against their common northern enemy. Despite his intractable character, Wigram brought to the gathering rebellion his immense personal fortune, a large merchant fleet, and a commercial network of inter-oceanic scale, effectively guaranteeing him a seat on the Permanent Committee of Direction over strenuous objections voiced by several of Damana's close advisers. Neither side, however, saw their arrangement as anything more than a pragmatic expedient, and as disagreements over aims and strategy deepened into a bitter factionalism, with Damana and his supporters, known to history as Conciliators, opposed by an increasingly radical party composed of protestant hard-liners which contemporaries soon dubbed, pejoratively after their hat of choice, Earcaps, Wigram's extremism, never less than full-throated, became intolerable.

Queen Beatrice II of Daldon, though received enthusiastically upon her arrival in Eltonia, and perceived by a majority of Earcaps as greatly preferable to Damana's son Kendalry, seemed only to inspire new heights of vituperation in Egeon Wigram, who as Dathur Harm's most important ally on the Permanent Committee of Direction was, if anything, even more fiercely opposed to her accession. Wigram turned his vast resources against the Second Accord of Harmony in a campaign of lurid, sensationalized propaganda and intrigue, and while unsuccessful in blocking Beatrice from her accession, Wigram's objections found a ready audience among Eltonian protestants. On Sunday following the Second Accord's publication, a riot broke out among a crowd of Congregationalists, gathered in Eltonia's Packer Square to hear the Reverend Gervase Button give one of his characteristically stirring sermons. Congregationalist mobs set fire to one of the city's few remaining Catholic churches and murdered Catholic worshipers as they fled, an act of violence which may have claimed more than one hundred lives, and which the city watch, one of whose commanders was none other than Egeon Wigram's third-eldest son Ellrod, made no effort to suppress until evening. This so-called Packer Square Massacre, in its immediate aftermath, served perhaps unexpectedly to bolster rather than to weaken Queen Beatrice as Conciliators and moderate Earcaps, taken together still a comfortable majority within rebel councils, united in their condemnation of sectarian bloodletting. Even Wigram, feeling political cross-currents shift, issued expressions of regret, and in correspondence almost certainly leaked for public view chastised his son Ellrod for inaction. While some twenty-two accused rioters were subsequently tried, and nine hanged, Gervase Button himself managed to slip away, almost certainly with Wigram's connivance, reemerging years later as a pirate in Caribbean waters.

Packer Square, as some later historians have observed, reminded hereditary nobles and self-made townsmen alike that there existed, certainly in Eltonia and in Daldon generally, a seething popular discontent, motivated and expressed in religious extremism, threatening to all propertied interests, and for a time at least this danger tended to outweigh differences in dynastic politics. Wigram, having evidently played a central role in provoking an outbreak of public anger which he neither anticipated nor was able to harness, found himself isolated as never before, a lonely radical voice on a Permanent Committee largely united around Queen Beatrice. His deepening irrelevance, however, did nothing to dampen the hostility of Beatrice, her son Edmund, and their supporters, Robidah Atkins prominent among them, who saw in Wigram a mortal enemy. Atkins, tasked with ridding Beatrice of Egeon Wigram for good, organized a spectacularly unsuccessful assassination attempt in 1628, soon after Eltonia received news of Dathur Harm's reverses in Mansbar. Sir Yardley Strode, perhaps Queen Beatrice's most pitiful suitor, led a band of mercenaries in an attack on Wigram's dockside family compound which fell apart when it emerged that the mercenaries themselves were captained by none other than Elder Wigram, Egeon's aptly-named oldest son. Seizing their would-be employer, the mercenaries disappeared into Wigram's household where Sir Yardley was promptly murdered, his corpse dumped unceremoniously into the River Arc. Prince Edmund, having inherited his mother's hatred of Wigram and determined also to secure his own road to power, tried an altogether different approach in 1632, contracting with Pettus Brose, great-grandfather of Danite prophet Athol Brose, to destroy Wigram at all costs. Brose hit upon a strikingly original scheme, making use of what is often described as history's very first vehicular bomb, and on 15 May of that year ignited a series of secret gunpowder caches assembled around and underneath Wigram's otherwise near-impregnable compound. Although reports from a handful of surviving eyewitnesses suggest that Egeon Wigram died very early on, likely crushed by falling masonry, Pettus Brose in his thoroughness had packed nearby streets, piers, and warehouses with all manner of inflammable material, and these quickly caught fire, destroying a vast swath of Eltonia's all-important docklands and killing dozens. Casualties, much to Prince Edmund's satisfaction, included Egeon, his sons Elder, Elvarius, Ellrod, Ellstone, Elmar, Eleathah, and Elbert, his wife Henrietta Gargrave, and a long list of daughters-in-law, nieces and nephews, and grandchildren.

Of Egeon Wigram's offspring, only his daughters Elisheba and Elizapha, safely married off, and his youngest son Elrondus, agent for Wigram family shipping interests in Walmington City, escaped Pettus Brose and his bombs. While history fails to record precisely how Elisheba and Elizapha Wigram reacted upon learning that their mother, father, and seven of their eight brothers had been variously blown up or burned to cinders, if Elrondus can be taken as typical in his response they were likely to have been in equal parts staggered and enraged. Unlike his sisters, Elrondus Galerius Wigram, then a newly-married young man of nineteen years, was in a position to seek vengeance, and despite his youth and inexperience he did so immediately. Elrondus took charge of a swift and well-founded galiot in his family's commercial fleet, outfitted it with two small cannon and a skeleton crew, and set out to plunder Imperial shipping. Piracy proved a career to which Elrondus Wigram was distinctly unsuited, however, and his first voyage was very nearly his last. Ardor having failed to substitute for seamanship, Elrondus soon drove his crew to mutiny, though as heir to what, it appeared, could amount to a sizable fortune, his life was spared. Before his erstwhile shipmates could issue a demand for ransom, their ship was caught in a powerful storm off Cape Ortegal and driven south, making landfall in the Accipiters only by the slimmest of margins. Shieldian authorities, ever watchful for pirates and naturally suspicious of any unexpected arrivals, wasted little time in putting Wigram's crew to death, their bodies joining hundreds of captured and suspected corsairs strung up along St. Clare's waterfront as an imagined deterrent.

Elrondus himself struck his captors as a more challenging proposition, as his literacy and his refined manner were strongly suggestive of a polite, even an aristocratic, upbringing, and lent an element of plausibility to his own insistence that he was a hostage and not, as his former crewmen had claimed with some justification, their captain. Unsure of what, exactly, to do with a captive exhibiting so many contradictory qualities, the Shieldian governor of St. Clare commuted a summary death sentence to an indefinite term of forced labor. For just under five years, between late 1633 and early 1638, Elrondus Wigram toiled away on public works and harbor improvements around St. Clare, among a shifting cast of petty criminals, debtors, war captives, and slaves. His Precisian faith, accepted in years past without much thought, hardened into a firm conviction, and his religious hatreds, in their first stirrings directed mainly at Queen Beatrice, King Edmund, and their supporters, widened into a generalized loathing of Catholics and their church, whose perfidy more than justified ruthless persecution. When in 1638 Birchibald Moleman descended to sack St. Clare, incidentally wrecking much of what Elrondus and his fellow-prisoners had worked so strenuously to build, Egeon's last surviving son perceived what he took to be a confirmation of his faith, and, having impressed Moleman's men with a story that, incredible to be sure, also included a persuasive level of specific detail, he secured passage back to Walmingland, arriving several weeks ahead of Moleman himself.

When he reappeared in Walmington City some six years after leaving it, Elrondus Wigram was at first unrecognizable. His his wife Lettice, by then as old as Elrondus had been when they last saw one another, had long since given him up for dead, and a marriage engagement to a middle-aged bachelor had hurriedly to be terminated lest Elrondus, in no mood for conciliation, take it upon himself to murder both parties. His eldest son Lorus, born in November of 1632, had grown into a sickly and frightened toddler who immediately felt his father's new-found wrath, while a number of supernumerary children present in the Wigram household, explained more or less plausibly as nieces and nephews, were dispersed with urgency to other homes and so depart from the historical record. Elrondus attempted forlornly to resume his former business before at last, deeply indebted and with a new revulsion against Walmingtonians to join his preexisting hostilities, he sold his household in payment of outstanding loans, moved his family to a squalid one-room tenement flat, and accepted a position with the East Gallaga Company as a junior clerk. At some point within that first year following her husband's unexpected return, Lettice gave birth to a second acknowledged son, named Kirkadius after a distant Wigram patriarch, reputed to have been present for Clarendon Flanders' famous Sermon of St. Cletus. Parish records assign Kirkadius a birth-date almost exactly nine months after his father's earliest established reunion with his mother, a symmetry which some modern historians have questioned, and doubts over the future Corrector's actual parentage would appear to be reinforced by court documents detailing no fewer than four cases brought against Elrondus for murdering men in duels, all of which returned acquittals in keeping with the customs of the age. Then again, with no surviving Wigrams save for much-changed Elrondus and prematurely-aged Lorus as examples, insinuations that Kirkadius was not in fact a Wigram by blood would appear to have been speculative at best, as likely as anything else a sneering insult directed against a long-absent husband.

Exile and impoverishment ranged their own special degradations against Elrondus Wigram, who, as a fallen man of wealth and a suspected cuckhold, was an object of disdain for those once his social equals and an object of derision for his similarly-deprived neighbors. Lettice, only twenty years old, died in December of 1639 while giving birth to a baby girl, who outlived her mother by a matter of hours, and bystanders pulled a half-frozen Elrondus from a canal weeks later, saving him from what most historians now believe was an attempt to take his own life, though he was lucky once again to survive a resulting bout of pneumonia. Spring of 1640, however, opened a new chapter for Elrondus and his two sons, and when Birchibald Moleman sent out a call for volunteers to join his New Host of Christians Armed in Defense of the True Faith, Elrondus Wigram hurried to enlist. Moleman, unfamiliar with and uninterested in the nuances of Accorder politics, failed to see in the Wigram heir a man warranting any special treatment, and for five years, through training in Walmingland, the perilous winter crossing, and several bloody campaign seasons in Mansbar and Daldon, Elrondus served as a common musketeer, though as an unusually fervent Precisian, rising above even that famously pious company's impressive level of fanaticism, his talents as preacher were very much sought after, and his eloquence and depth of biblical learning drew the attention of Colonel Ebenezer Greaton, commander of Moleman's Western Incorporation.

[The Crooked Beat]

The Watch-Fires of a Hundred Circling Camps: The Arcan Army, 1945 (An Order of Battle)

Jesus!
One badly mutilated soldier whose wounds
She was dressing kept saying to her
Over and over again (over and over and over again)
I'm 49, divorced

Do you feel completely abandoned and lost?
Ah, that's one of the great questions
Are you falling apart? Ahaha...
Yes
Over and over and over again he cried
Down down, down down
(When I was a baby I was either crying or singing)
Down down, down down
(When I was a baby I was either crying or singing)
What's wrong?
I'm 49, divorced

Some Organizational Notes

Revolutionary Arcansa inherited in 1921 an Army which, as most of its new leaders recognized, was in its fundamental character and structure a historical aberration. For almost five decades, as Senatorial governments pursued expansion and intensification of Arcan authority in Gallaga, a sharp distinction prevailed between troops for overseas service, largely professional, relatively well-equipped, comparatively few in number, and a home-defense militia increasingly starved of resources to benefit more prestigious and more newsworthy colonial campaigns. Socialist victory in 1920's deeply fraught election, however, followed shortly thereafter by a ferocious Walming-Shieldian reaction, brought about a sudden reversal of military priorities as a new mass army was raised, virtually overnight, to give battle on Arcansa's own frontiers. Familiar enough, doubtless, in purpose and composition to past great captains like Birchibald Moleman or Kearney Brockman, this revolutionary army was nonetheless without precedent in Arcan experience, a product of both an advanced industrial economy and a democratic society. Having jettisoned its Senatorial leadership almost entirely, Arcansa's land force invested a generation of remarkably forward-thinking commanders whose progressive doctrines and methods would shape and direct a revived Army, soon to attain heights of strength and efficiency the likes of which Moleman or Brockman could scarcely have imagined, for a century thereafter.

If socialist Arcansa's surprisingly successful resistance against its Shieldian and Walmingtonian antagonists served as a ringing endorsement of new commanders and their principles, still very few Arcans held out any real hope for a lasting peace. Even as demobilization proceeded at an emergency pace to free workers for industry, drawing a force which numbered almost three million men in early 1923 down to its planned peacetime establishment of some four hundred thousand personnel by January of 1926, officers of a newly-constituted General Staff worked with a palpable sense of urgency to prepare for what nearly all of them assumed was an inevitable resumption of conflict in the North Atlantic Archipelago and its near territories. Rearmament, intended to make good shortages of weapons equipment so painfully felt between 1921 and 1923, particularly after so much had been lost in Gallaga, was without question of greatest interest to both civil policy-makers and uniformed planners involved in often heated budgetary disputes with their Navy and Air Force colleagues. Less visible, though scarcely less controversial within Army circles and of equal if not greater importance, an all-encompassing process of reorganization ran in parallel, intended to convert a somewhat nebulous collection of vestigial Constitutional Force regiments and ad hoc columns to a fully standardized and readily-expandable structure of battalions, brigades, divisions, corps, and armies, tailored to an overriding requirement for an unshakeable defense against overland or amphibious invasion.

Arcansa mobilized its armed forces from April of 1938 very quickly, surprising many skeptical foreign observers whose predictions mostly foresaw a lackadaisical and inefficient process, and within twelve months slightly fewer than one in ten Arcans were in uniform. Aggregate strength for all three services remained at approximately 3.5 million men for the following seven years, and by 1946 something like three out of every ten Arcans, or nearly four out of five Arcan men, had served in some capacity and for some duration of time with the wartime military. Army requirements, inevitably, accounted for a preponderant share of total mobilization, Arcan ground forces reaching a maximum strength of 2,437,500 men in the summer of 1944. While marginally smaller than the Revolutionary army at its peak, the Arcan Ground Force of 1938-46 was in all other respects immensely more powerful, and its appetite for material had increased staggeringly. It was organized for battle into seventeen large 'mobile' divisions of increasingly uniform design, twenty-four independent brigades, and an Anti-Aircraft Command composed of ten effectively static air-defense divisions. These formations fought almost continuously for some eight years across the complete range of Arcan geography, from temperate, settled Daldon and Wyclyfe to polar Ferrywall, accounting themselves well under what were often extremely trying circumstances. Arcan soldiers were, as a rule, furnished with modern and reliable arms and equipment in at least sufficient quantity, scarcity known by Revolutionary War veterans having given way by late 1943 to an almost wasteful over-abundance, of ordnance especially. Their leaders held a well-earned reputation for competence, due in no small part to the fact that most senior sergeants, and nearly all officers at battalion grade and above, had endured the Britannic Revolutionary War's often cataclysmic destructiveness, and they exhibited a concern for sparing men's lives that was conspicuous by its absence among the Shieldian officer class and applied only selectively by Walmingtonian commanders.

When in October of 1920 newly-elected Superintendent Orion Hall Gresham proclaimed Arcansa's renunciation of armed force as an instrument of national policy, simultaneously declaring the new socialist government's commitment to multilateralism and international law, few at that moment of high optimism anticipated the tidal wave of monstrous violence soon to break over the North Atlantic Archipelago and its environs. Plans for demilitarization, predicated on a belief that socialism would shortly triumph in the Shield and Walmington as well, quickly gave way to an emergency program of armaments and armed-forces expansion on a scale without any precedent in Arcan history, and having survived counterrevolution only by a strenuous and bitterly painful all-out effort, by some accounts only by a narrow margin at that, Arcansa's new democratic armed forces were maintained at a high standard of equipment and very short readiness permanently thereafter.

Infantry

Army commanders, despite their relative youth and their almost universal adherence to leftist ideologies, retained what were by international standards quite conservative attitudes to questions of strategy and doctrine. For all their individual disputes and disagreements, Arcan officers shared in a consensus that their mission was fundamentally defensive, and that a mass army alone, its front-line strength composed predominantly of riflemen and its tactical methods based on heavy, concentrated fire, delivered by artillery and automatic weapons, could protect Arcansa from its presumptive enemies. These views were embodied in 1928's Emergency Mobilization Scheme, which provided for no fewer than twenty-eight infantry divisions in a planned 32-division, approximately three-million-man Army. Provisional tables of organization issued some five years after Major-General Redvers Bardwin, then newly-minted Chief of Infantry, convened the first session of his eponymous committee on December 5, 1923, reflected in their striking similarity to the preexisting infantry division a broad lack of consensus among Arcan commanders accustomed by wartime experience to improvisation, and unwilling to be bound within what some characterized as an administrative strait-jacket. In most respects, therefore, the 1928 tables, which although subject to a process of constant modification were not officially withdrawn until 1963 and permanent 'brigadization,' simply endorsed trends already much in evidence, while simultaneously foreshadowing modern concepts of task organization and mission command. Infantry divisions mobilized for service between 1938 and 1946 retained their Senatorial Era predecessor's square shape, built upon two infantry brigades with a brigade of artillery and battalion-scale engineer, cavalry, medical, quartermaster, signals, and administrative groups, broadly equivalent to a headquarters brigade though not designated as such, in support. Whereas the 1917 division contained on paper twelve rifle battalions, a strength seldom attained in practice, the 1928 structure specified a more attainable eight, controlled directly by two infantry brigade headquarters following the Bardwin Committee's decision to relieve Arcan regiments of their tactical role. Each infantry brigade was intended to serve almost as a division in miniature, its four rifle battalions reinforced by a range of supporting arms which the divisional staff would assign from its own pool of resources depending on the needs of a particular scenario.

Rearmament and re-equipment initiatives, which Major-General Bardwin certainly considered equal at least to reorganization as such in importance, were likewise a direct result of Arcan experience during the Britannic Revolutionary War. One wartime lesson about whose implications all Army officers could agree was the overriding importance of firepower, which, as they themselves had so resoundingly established, had made the massed close-order tactics so much in vogue a decade earlier obsolete at best. Gruesome Revolutionary War battlefields served to illustrate in starkest possible terms, or so it seemed, that airy notions of will and national spirit had no place in modern machine-industrial warfare, and Arcan officers who in nearly every case had risen so quickly to such high levels of responsibility as implacable opponents of wasteful human-wave methods were adamant in their demands for ever greater quantities of machine guns, mortars, and field artillery at every level. Tanks, though their infrequent use by Arcansa's counterrevolutionary enemies was not conspicuously successful, loomed large in army planning for future contingencies, especially as Shieldian cavalrymen began to embrace armor as a sort of knightly renaissance, and antitank defense quickly developed into something approaching an obsession among Arcan infantry and artillery commanders. And while the Arcan Army did not, at first, see any pressing need for a tank force of its own, motorization more generally met with near-universal endorsement, Arcan soldiers having long since realized that motor transport alone could satisfy the new division's near-bottomless appetite for munitions and supplies of all types, or could permit rapid repositioning against a threatened enemy breakthrough.

By 1938, then, the standard Arcan infantry division, though at first glance much reduced in strength when compared to its 1917 and 1918 antecedents, was in other respects a substantially more formidable force. Its constituent elements wielded at least 800 machine guns, 100 anti-tank guns, 72 field guns and howitzers, 117 mortars, 48 anti-aircraft guns, and 160 anti-tank rifles, in addition to an array of personal weapons which included large numbers of submachine guns and automatic pistols. Motorization reached every corner of Arcansa's ground force, and while rifle battalions remained very much foot-mobile, each division nevertheless included, on paper at least, more than 2,500 motor vehicles of all types, predominantly the ubiquitous Standard Type 3/4-ton and 3-ton trucks. Most wartime changes were in detail rather than in basic structure, starting in 1938 when the long-serving Lewis Gun, by then showing its age and uncomfortably heavy for a section automatic weapon, began to be replaced by the excellent M3, authorized issue rising from 570 in the first year of the Great Siege to more than a thousand in its final year. Divisional field artillery brigades exchanged their 75mm guns for 105mm howitzers as soon as possible, and by 1943 increased production had made it possible to add a fourth 24-gun battalion. Antitank rifles, of dubious utility against anything more substantial than tankettes and armored cars, were supplanted in turn by the decidedly unpopular if far more effective M1 Projector, a spigot mortar firing a reasonably powerful shaped charge, while 37mm antitank guns gave way to 57mm weapons, their comparative awkwardness of handling more than offset by their vastly greater penetrative performance. These increases in divisional firepower were accompanied by an immense proliferation of radio equipment, reaching down to rifle platoons, which permitted much closer cooperation between Arcan infantrymen and their supporting arms.

Perhaps the greatest departure from peacetime planning involved the employment of armor, relatively scarce prior to 1938 yet increasingly numerous as war production accelerated. At first, Arcan doctrine followed foreign patterns in its distinction between infantry tanks, slow-moving and heavily-armored for direct support of attacking riflemen, and cavalry tanks suitable for an independent scouting and screening role, and to begin with the Army's few hundred 25-ton A12s were brigaded under 5th Army headquarters. Early experience, however, suggested that successful tank-infantry cooperation was in no small part a function of familiarity, so the 97th and 218th Army Tank Brigades were in consequence split up among the four infantry divisions of VII Corps, with which the tankers developed a close and effective working relationship. By 1945, the permanent integration of tanks and infantry had become a basic feature of Arcan doctrine, as evidenced by the addition of an Infantry Tank Battalion with 57 machines to the divisional tables of organization. Divisional armor doubled with the transformation, codified in 1943, of the organic Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron into a fully-fledged tank unit, equipped with three troops of A27 cruiser tanks for a total of 57 vehicles. Whereas its low rifle strength and its reliance upon unarmored or lightly-armored transport limited the organic cavalry squadron in its original configuration to a passive scouting role, which in many cases proved of little value, the tank-equipped squadron added greatly to its parent formation's battlefield utility, and could perform a wide range of missions both offensive and defensive in character.

Cavalry

Arcan war planning as embodied in 1928's Emergency Mobilization Scheme clearly rested upon an assumption, derived from Army commanders' recent experience of the Britannic Revolutionary War, that any future conflict in the North Atlantic Archipelago would be positional in character, an expectation that dictated overriding emphasis on infantry and artillery and which assigned cavalry, the traditional maneuver arm, a secondary part. Mounted troops were nonetheless still considered valuable as a screen during mobilization and as a contingency force for the containment of a hostile descent from seaward, roles in which their mobility would compensate to a large extent for their relative lack of firepower. Perhaps most importantly, at a time when the Arcan Army had committed itself to a sweeping program of motorization, horses remained the only form of transport able to operate conveniently in Eastarcansa's vast Arctic wilderness. As of mid-1938, with the 25th Division in Wexarcansa refitting as an armored formation, the Arcan Army fielded a single cavalry division, the 19th, with its garrison at Fort Bend in Eastarcansa's far north. It was a unique reminder of an earlier age within an Arcan Ground Force from which the horse had otherwise disappeared, though the 19th Cavalry Division's special composition owed nothing to nostalgia and a great deal to its remote and largely roadless operational area, covered in thick forests, swamps, and mountains.

As with all horsed cavalry in the machine age, the 19th Division bought its unmatched cross-country mobility at the price of firepower and battlefield persistence. It was less than half the size of an infantry division, significantly less than half if an infantry division's typical array of attachments were included, with approximately 11,500 men and 7,700 horses organized into two four-squadron cavalry brigades, one horse artillery brigade, and austere divisional services including small engineer, medical, and quartermaster groups, of which the latter was partially motorized. Pitched battle inevitably entailed attrition on a scale which the Arcan cavalry division could not hope to sustain, not least as recruits with enough experience in horsemanship and animal husbandry were scarce and could not be trained from scratch on anything near a practical time-table, and as a result Corps and Army commanders exhibited a marked reluctance to commit the 19th Division except under the most ideal circumstances, lest its unique capabilities be squandered. The 19th Division's cardinal virtue, of course, was its relative independence from the road network, and on a number of occasions this allowed Arcan cavalrymen to surprise and encircle much more numerous enemy forces. Cavalry alone, however, was rarely able to exploit its local successes, and as Arcan commanders accumulated experience of battle in heavily-forested and mountainous terrain, they tended to regard the standard infantry division, bolstered by an attached Engineer Combat Group and supported by supply-dropping aircraft, as a more effective organization.

Armor

Warfare in Gallaga, where Arcan colonial forces routinely fought at a severe numerical disadvantage against local armies able to draw upon seemingly inexhaustible sources of recruitment, encouraged an early interest in motorization and mechanization. Particularly at a time when hardening domestic opposition to the imperial project was forcing commanders in Gallaga to make do with a dwindling infusion of volunteers, armored trains, armored cars, and, eventually, fully-tracked tanks effectively negated what was otherwise a vast numerical advantage enjoyed by the anti-colonial resistance, and these primitive armored forces were of inestimable value to the Arcan Coromandel Protectorate in its struggle to sustain an independent existence after refusing orders to disband. Mechanization in its earliest forms met with a cooler reception in metropolitan Arcansa, where at first a generalized neglect of forces for territorial defense, and later a powerful aversion to anything suggestive of private armies or elite corps, discouraged serious work on armor for a decade. Several dozen machines sent overseas having been purchased from Shieldian manufacturers in 1917, Arcansa did not build tanks of its own until 1929, and these few semi-experimental models, collectively designated A7 in spite of their widely-divergent individual characteristics, were to remain Arcansa's only tanks for another nine years. A dawning awareness of advances being made in foreign armies, however, above all the Royal Walmingtonian Army and the Shieldian Grand Army, prompted Arcan military planners in 1935 to formally include armored-vehicle development in their larger motorization scheme. In early 1938, amid a sharp intensification of international hostility perceptible as the decade drew to a close, the Commissariat of Supply launched a crash program of tank production which, within six months, had managed to increase Arcan tank holdings from several dozen to several hundred machines, a rate of manufacture which would accelerate precipitously over following years.

Acceptance of tanks in principle as useful, even integral elements of a modern ground army, by 1938 a universal sentiment among senior Arcan commanders, did not however translate into a conspicuously successful debut for Arcan armor. Four distinct designs had been approved for mass production early that year, one of them a slow, heavily-armored 'infantry' tank and three comparatively fast, more lightly-protected 'cavalry' tanks, and each bore ample evidence of the urgency in which they had been finalized, approved, and manufactured. Crude finish and missing items of equipment were minor problems next to what was quickly recognized as chronic mechanical unreliability, which forced their crews, almost none of which had any prior armored experience, to spend most of their time on repairs at a moment when a coherent set of procedures for employing tanks in battle, to say nothing of an armored-warfare doctrine, had yet to be devised. Tactical shortcomings, however glaring in nature, were very largely immaterial at first, as mechanical breakdowns would almost inevitably claim Arcan tanks long before they drew close to any real danger, and most front-line commanders, unwilling to allow a thrown track or a seized engine to obstruct their own quartermaster convoys, banned tanks from roads under their control. In that it allowed Arcan tankers time and freedom to familiarize themselves with their machines and to fix their most glaring defects before the test of battle, this pervasive skepticism of armor worked, without doubt, very much to their advantage, though tank commanders exerted themselves so strenuously to prevent the poaching of tank crewmen for other assignments that one, at least, Brigadier General Franchot Clurman, suffered a heart attack and was invalided without ever seeing combat.

The Arcan Ground Force
GOC: Gen. Wilmer Ballard Sproul
HQ: Eltonia

4th Army Group
GOC: Gen. Montgomery Ketler Stans
HQ: Eltonia

5th Army
GOC: Lt. Gen. Rowland Vallis Persons
HQ: Brockway

XX Corps (GOC: Lt. Gen. Harold Reeve Field III)
-9th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Sinclair Seaton Summerfield)
-38th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Gerald Weeks)
-17th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. John Montt Ardmore)
VII Corps (GOC: Maj. Gen. Elroy Pierce Hobby)
-52nd Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Niles Joel Poinsett)
-25th Armored Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Mentor Butler Milton)
-31st Armored Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Hobart Griggs Bliss)
-34th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Lyman Rufus John)
XI Corps (GOC: Lt. Gen. Warren Isaac Scranton)
-15th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Emory Dern Wickard)
-8th Armored Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Homer Biddle)
-21st Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Stettin Abbett Clowney)

10th Army
GOC: Lt. Gen. Salmon Caleb Speed
HQ: Heartfield

III Corps (GOC: Lt. Gen. Forrest Hills Brinegar)
-48th Armored Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Rogers Lynn Marsh)
-11th Armored Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Dean Alfred Quintin)
XVI Corps (GOC: Lt. Gen. Lemuel James Gresham)
-33rd Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Lincoln Jay Todd)
-20th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Eustis Robert Crown)
-5th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Bainbridge Meredith Lane)

8th Army Group
GOC: Gen. Absalom Cleaveland Jr.
HQ: Arbana

15th Army
GOC: Lt. Gen. Robardus Snowman Hutts
HQ: Fort Bend

V Corps (GOC: Lt. Gen. Lindley Albert Moulton)
-1st Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Carter Gregory)
-19th Cavalry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Lamont Smith Olney)
-10th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Wilson Quintus Endicott)
-55th Mountain Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Garland Vilas Harmon)
XV Corps (GOC: Lt. Gen. Swanel Hawk Goucher)
-7th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Boston Hale Clason)
-2nd Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Gwinn Fay Hewes)
-44th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Elton Stanford Beecher)
-32nd Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Woodrow Carol Lemore)

9th Army
GOC: Gen. Melville Spencer Fordice
HQ: Henneth

XXIV Corps (GOC: Lt. Gen. Fielding Green Sillers)
-26th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Raylan Mott Brockman)
-54th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Lyle Clark Florence)
XVII Corps (GOC: Lt. Gen. Sennett Albert Kimble)
-12th Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Hatton Alys Doggett)
-43rd Infantry Division (GOC: Maj. Gen. Clacton Polythress Reckford)

[The Crooked Beat]

There's a new fiend on the loose
On the back of the exhaust clip
Clipped on rich and poor alike
Come to roost again once more
Ol' Nick doesn't go from digs to digs no more
Hit him on the head with a 2 by 4
Nowadays he has a Georgian glazed porch
Used table leg to club son in law
New fiend in your home again
He said show me my quarters and glasses
There's a new fiend on the loose
Jolting in his tradition
It's a fear of the obtuse
He's got patents on the moaning

Deepest Red: The Britannic Revolutionary War

Modernity descended upon ancient Daldon and Mansbar in a falling flight of thunderbolts amid a growling gale made manifest by none other than Birchibald Moleman, monumental, terrible, incandescent, his righteous judgement scouring rock and flesh alike, obliterating those edifices however long-standing by which error had hitherto been upheld. Upon a bed of ashes metaphorical and staggeringly real Moleman and his successors built a state revolutionary in its deepest sense, its structure physical and metaphysical embodying nothing less than a complete and unstinting rejection of all that defied scripture, a repudiation, underlined thrice and thickly in blood, of St. Aiden and his thousand-year-old church. Change, radical, transformative, not at all uncommonly violent, was no stranger to Arcansa, and in its first century of sovereign existence its leaders, together with no small segment of its habitant populace, proceeded with a fanatical enthusiasm to tear out every last vestige of Shadoranite Catholicism, root and branch. Arcansa was, by its bicentennial year, a society remade, to an extent seldom seen before or since, and while at first little appreciated, processes set in motion, largely unwittingly, by a novel type of man as he vindictively crushed Daldon's ancient feudal order, responsible more than any other factor for this new man's unprecedented prosperity, were gathering momentum, and gaining speed with each passing season.

Protestantism, above all and almost exclusively in its Congregationalist form and which retained well beyond 1800 a keenly Precisian edge, was to all practical ends Arcansa in a word, and much as twenty-first-century visitors are given to remark on Arcan society's religious archaisms, Arcans in 1853 inhabited what, in one Walmingtonian ambassador's evocative words, was best characterized as an armed church, or a monastery expanded, in line with Martin Luther's distant wishes, to encompass everything under Heaven. Strictest piety, however, whether heartfelt or merely demonstrative none could honestly say, was by the early part of the 19th century felt increasingly to overlay a mechanism far and away more elementary to Arcansa's functioning as a state, and explicable in material rather than metaphysical terms. While almost no scholars seriously contend that the system and ideology of social-economic organization known universally as capitalism originated, in either prototypical or recognizable form, in Arcansa or in Ianite Daldon for that matter, almost nowhere else did monetary exchange, investment banking, stock-trading, and bond markets, accompanied in near lock-step by the reorientation of labor contracting to cash wages, enclosure, and resultant workforce mobility, gain such rapid traction, or so completely monopolize economic life at such an early date. Even Godfreyite Walmington, otherwise a founder of modern banking and perhaps more deserving of credit for capitalism's invention, lagged behind Arcansa in some spheres, clinging for instance to mercantilism while Arcansa, lacking an empire of its own, embarked on a more radical path. For pioneering sociologists like Daunton Brett, Avner Maizels, and Kathleen Boraston, whose works though in Brett's case nearing two hundred years old are still intensively read, Arcansa itself provided both an endlessly fascinating subject of study and a kind of living laboratory, particularly as, with a regime installed in Ianapalis amenable, to put it mildly, to Arcan investors, the North Atlantic Archipelago found itself playing host to what was perhaps the world's earliest approximation of a free market.

There persists in popular and polemical writing a definite inclination to cast Britannic history between 1653 and 1819 as a contest between two value systems in almost polar opposition, Arcan rationalism, positivism, and discipline set against Shieldian mysticism and feudalism. It is a dichotomy which, as recent scholars have demonstrated in convincing fashion, unfairly downplays a range of political and strategic assumptions common to both antagonists and obscures much more significant structural elements, attributing to each side a degree of intention and foresight which, as documentary evidence indicates, simply did not exist in any meaningful fashion. Narratives which center emergent capitalism as Arcansa's decisive advantage either overlook or are compelled somewhat awkwardly to square their thesis with Tharian and Shadoranite industrialization, which preceded similar phenomena in historic Daldon and Mansbar, and with a Shieldian manufacturing output which comfortably outstripped corresponding Wexarcan figures up to 1900. It is often forgotten that Kearney Brockman's Army of the Great Reform was armed largely with muskets imported from Walmington or captured from Imperial arsenals in Wyclyfe, and that an often desperate shortage of artillery served as a singularly effective brake on Arcan attempts to exploit battlefield success. Brockman himself in his dual role as head-of-state and Army commander-in-chief consistently favored bludgeoning tactics in his campaigns against Imperial forces, leaning on Arcansa's relative abundance of landless agricultural laborers and its multiplying urban precariat to make good losses which, though consistently much higher than those suffered by Shieldian forces, were for Ianapalis very much more difficult to replace, and archival records indicate that Brockman's expensive if convincing victory in 1749, which among its other results netted a large number of Shieldian cannon, was in truth seen as an argument against increasing capacity at Arcansa's own arsenals. Numbers, however, ultimately told, and when allied to Arcansa's increasingly favorable position in an ever more globalized economy, which permitted Arcan governments to raise capital far more easily than their Northern foes, expanding populations in Daldon, Mansbar, and recently-reconquered Apernia made Southern ascendancy inevitable.

When one last gamble by a Rupenn monarchy driven to desperation met in 1814 with predictable catastrophe, a conflict variously known as the Timber War, Herring War, War of the Meres, Hackberry War, or, mainly in Arcansa, the Eastarcan War handing Arcan forces resounding if very costly victories on land and, for the first time in Arcan history, at sea, while also reuniting the three Marches of Eastarcansa with Wexarcansa after nearly a thousand years of Shieldian rule, it seemed that Protestant supremacy was no longer in dispute. As if to underline this new state of affairs, Molliver Powell, enthroned in a palace coup d'etat several months after his predecessor signed a peace agreement which undid altogether Shieldian policy since 1653, traced his lineage directly to Mansbar's expatriate royal house, and any lingering anger over his ancestors' rough handling by Moleman and his lieutenants had long since given way to a hunger for reconciliation, not least in light of Powell's own precarious position. Neither Yardley Fones nor his designated successor Brampton Trout Smallridge, lawyers-turned-soldiers concerned, in Smallridge's case especially, above all with making rapid and sharp cuts to public spending after painful wartime outlays, appear to have harbored specific expectations regarding future economic relations between North and South, indeed bear little evidence of any thoughts beyond an overriding determination to reduce expenditure, and in their manifest inability to conceptualize subsequent developments they were joined by Molliver Powell. As events proved, want of official state sanction proved no obstacle to Eltonia's bankers and entrepreneurs, many of whom had grown accustomed to dealing with their Northern neighbors in Wyclyfe's highly profitable textile industry, and appealing first in time-honored fashion, like their ninth- and tenth-great-grandfathers, to the Shieldian monarch's expensive tastes, within twenty years Arcan capital had managed to infiltrate every corner of Northern economic life.

In a striking departure from near-universal modern practices, of course, Arcansa's nineteenth-century economy was for practical purposes almost unregulated, lacking entirely any mechanism by which state control might have been exercised to curb volatility in a crisis, and it would be many decades before such a state of affairs was seen as anything other than perfectly natural. Apart from taxation, which a government drawn from and elected by those same entrepreneurs, projectors, bankers and investors held by custom and consensus to a bare minimum level, and a legal system whose jurists considered contracts second only to scripture in sanctity, Arcan capitalists were limited in their selection of possible investments by imagination alone, and for those of an adventurous disposition, tolerant of risk in unexplored country, Shieldian ventures beckoned warmly. Northern indebtedness aided Arcan inroads immensely, as Rupenn war loans had been raised primarily from among Shadoranite and Tharian industrialists who, faced with Molliver Powell's Arcan-abetted default at a time of dizzying inflation, stood to lose vast sums of money. Few indeed, whatever their private feelings, could afford to retain their manufactories, plants, stockyards, and shipyards against an avalanche of Southern bids and offers, inevitably running far below what would have been fair market value years earlier.

Arcan investors, and not infrequently men, exclusively men in that profoundly misogynistic age, who ought to have known better, gave themselves over with abandon to what was quickly dubbed Jaizar Fever, after a Shadoranite river of particular industrial importance, and stocks traded on Eltonia's untiring Commercial Exchange soared correspondingly. First to express in print unease over this Northern invasion of capital was none other than Daunton Brett, who, in his capacity as a junior clerk for Mordor Brothers bank, could train his inquisitive and insightful mind on a vast trove of receipts and records. Brett, though in his preserved correspondence he describes an overwhelming fear that he might in fact precipitate a crisis merely by mentioning one as a possibility, had in 1824 embarked, at twenty years of age, on what would prove his life's work, a comprehensive history of the Arcan banking system which, though necessarily limited in scope by his inability to access many vital documents, is still read widely more than 150 years after its 1868 publication. Of particular significance to his history, around which it would eventually be structured, were eight 'irruptions' or panics which Brett had identified since 1653, destruction of records having obscured from his view financial crises under Imperial rule that later scholars, with access to Shieldian archives, would be able to study in detail. In their headlong rush to buy-up Shieldian assets, Brett suspected, many of Mordor Brothers' clients were sinking their capital into enterprises which were virtually certain to prove unprofitable, an impression only reinforced during a pivotal trip through Tharia in 1826-27. Many Shieldian factories, he observed, were in poor repair, some even stripped of their machinery or inexplicably dismantled, their workers variously demoralized, rebellious, or dispersing in all directions. Many ostensible Arcan owners, as correspondence made clear, had for their part never seen nor bothered to investigate their acquisitions, angling instead to loft share prices ever higher on strength of optimism alone, racing to keep a few steps ahead of a shoe which, even by New Year's Day, 1827, many commentators far less perceptive than Brett expected to drop at any moment.

Jaizar Fever finally broke on October 1st, 1827, known thereafter as Blue Monday, and although it had been preceded by three distinct price shocks earlier that year, few Arcan businessmen were prepared for what one ribald satirist dubbed St. Adie's Revenge. Countless Arcan investors were ruined, fortunes lost, and financial markets thrown into a chill that persisted through 1831. Brett himself, made redundant from Mordor Brothers, had to take refuge in a friend's cottage, dividing his time between research, writing, and cultivating a small vegetable garden upon which his very survival depended. Profits from Eastarcan iron ore mines and consequent increases in steel production helped to revive Arcansa's financial sector by early in 1832, however, and investors who as a class were evidently unchastened by their experience of late promptly began to pump capital into a new craze for railroad-building. Brett, restored to his prior position at Mordor Brothers albeit much depleted, continued to watch with trepidation as money swirled through Eltonia in patterns little more predictable than weather, though that too would soon change. Blue Monday, among its numerous results, threw cold water on Jaizar-mad speculators, many of whom were ruined, others only just keeping afloat, nearly all compelled to jettison their holdings at fire-sale prices in a manner uncomfortably reminiscent of their earlier dealings with erstwhile Shieldian factory-owners. Shieldian opinion, understandably enough, regarded the ruination of so many Arcan interlopers as an altogether just form of punishment, and for a moment it appeared that Eltonia's bid to, in effect, colonize the Shieldian economy had failed.

Yet amid a vast array of hapless, merely opportunistic, downright piratical and wholly criminal Arcans, there did exist a handful of steely, diligent, steadfast and ruthless men of industry, and these few, equally lucky and far-seeing, found in Blue Monday and its aftermath a golden opportunity. Imhotep Arts Trucker, Tenill Aldrey, Baldridge Gord Ballard, John Gervase Butts, names which in time would become synonymous with their 'Free-Trading' century, infamous as well, swept up assets cut loose by their less resolute countrymen with hawk-like attentiveness and immediately set about consolidating them, trimming excess capacity and unproductive enterprises where necessary in order to recapitalize properties and operations considered to hold out some reasonable hope of profitability. Desperation in Eltonia allowed these four men, Trucker, Aldrey, Ballard, and Butts, to acquire what has been estimated at seventy to eighty percent of all Shieldian manufacturing capacity for textiles, eighty percent of steel-making capacity, and fully ninety percent of Northern slipways within at most three years. While the full consequences of this process would not be made readily apparent for another decade, Blue Monday in effect decided the newfound integrated North-South economy in shape and structure for its remaining span of existence, and for all of its eventual distortions and perversities, most of which followed directly from Jaizar Fever's particular course and aftermath, this profoundly unequal arrangement held on for almost ninety exhausting, often back-breaking years, during which Shieldian workers in their hundreds of thousands, if not millions, toiled under conditions certainly no better than were to be found in Arcansa, usually much worse, for absentee industrialists determined to out-compete their rivals by mercilessly shaving margins wherever possible, usually starting with payroll.

[The Crooked Beat]

Call me in the morning just before the breakfast show
We'll watch TV and analyze the weather
Before we go to work, we'll have planned the day ahead
We'll while away the working day together
(While away the working day together)
Work all day or work all night, it's all the same
(Work all day)
If you want to play
Some are nurses, some steal purses
Some are workers, some are not
It is time for a party
Liberation for the nation now!

Deepest Red: The Britannic Revolutionary War (Continued)

Communist historians have argued that persistently high levels of unemployment, a direct result of both enclosure and rising levels of food production, far from impeding economic development in 'Prefectural' Arcansa, were rather a central component of its apparent prosperity. Though by no means an uncontroversial position, subject like almost every thesis and theory in Arcan history and historiography to often withering criticism by a numerous and fractious corps of scholars ensconced within Arcansa's own university system, to say nothing of equally opinionated Shieldians and Walmingtonians, certainly not a mote less hostile by nature, there exists broad consensus on wage levels and their special importance to Arcan politics between 1815 and 1919, their rhetorical weight at times outweighing their material significance quite strikingly. If stock-market ruination meant for most average speculators hunger, discomfort, dislocation, and dishonor, at least temporarily, for working people on both sides of Britannia's internal border financial storms far outside their awareness or easy understanding frequently carried grave consequences. As was remarked by more than one foreign visitor to Arcansa in its younger years, religious fanaticism though widespread and, among townsmen and military men, effectively universal, fit into an exceptionally narrow frame, and for self-professed Christians holding to a view of Holy Scripture more expansive than that established by Precisian doctrine, Birchibald Moleman's personal creed and that of his lieutenants and his first ten successors, this ramrod-straight ideology could begin to imply some jarring contradictions. Precisianism had as one of its fundamental tenets Predestination, an idea which, however strong its scriptural foundations, was sufficiently troubling to compel its replacement as Arcansa's mandated faith by Congregationalism, otherwise dizzying severity mild indeed when placed next to Precisian insistence upon an individual soul's abject powerlessness. Whether or not a vindictive callousness of manner so characteristic of Moleman and his subordinates can be attributed directly to their Precisian convictions, as an influence over behavior more decisive than, for instance, simple economic self-interest or strategic contingency, is again a matter of heated scholarly debate, skeptics of that view pointing not at all unconvincingly to Garwood Cramm and his deliberately provocative acts of impiety. It remains however a well-established matter of historical fact that Moleman, likewise his most senior subordinates Ebenezer Greaton and Moses Learned, to say nothing of Cramm, practiced routine and sometimes ghastly brutality against peasants and laborers, showing at best unconcern for their well-being and at worst a propensity for wanton murder. If perhaps not a direct consequence of Precisianism, it was, most historians concede, entirely in line with Precisian disdain for charity, leniency, or clemency, in keeping as well with a widespread if not strictly doctrinaire Precisian belief that worldly success signaled a soul's election, in view of which, chilling though to spell out in any capacity, a starving farmer or an orphaned child was in effect condemned twice.

No single event more plainly illustrated independent Arcansa's reflexive approach to questions of communitarian politics or organized dissent than the rather misleadingly-named Battle of Loffgate, fought, after a fashion, less than three weeks after peace was signed between Protestant rebels and Prince Ian. That Loffgate should work out to have been Arcansa's very first military engagement as a sovereign state is, today, a source of considerable embarrassment, not least as those qualities of leadership so exemplified by Birchibald Moleman in his capacity as battlefield commander, his meticulousness, his austerity, his insensitivity to hardship and tolerance for great personal risk, were used to perpetrate what by any objective standard must rank as an atrocity. News of a peasant association calling itself the Incorporation of Tillers gathered at Loffgate Common, in heavily-cultivated southeastern Daldon a short distance from Eltonia, brought Moleman and his New Christian Legion trooping south from their despoilment of Shadoran at a forced pace, a feat of rapid redeployment which, in rainy Spring weather and across terrain which Moleman's Legionaries had devastated only weeks earlier, had few close parallels in Britannic military history to that date. Dathur Harm, of early Arcansa's political and military leaders a uniquely appealing character, honorable and conscientious to a fault, had agreed to act as representative for Tiller interests and to intercede upon their behalf with the Permanent Committee of Direction in Eltonia, headed in Moleman's absence by one Easton Cramer Yards, an otherwise unobtrusive figure best remembered for his association with Loffgate. Whether seeking to buy time for Moleman and his troops or merely unsure of his own scope of authority, Yards prevaricated, and an increasingly worried Harm, distrustful of Committeemen in any context, attempted to organize assembled Tillers for their own defense. Steadfastly non-violent, however, Tillers themselves refused to take up arms of any sort, and set about preparing Loffgate Common, its fence torn down in their single noteworthy destructive act, for cultivation.

While no reliable account of Dathur Harm's final days among the Loffgate Tillers survives, it has been taken as strongly suggestive of his support for their cause that he remained in their company, despite what must have been his almost certain expectation of catastrophe. Moleman, for his part, reached Loffgate just before noon on 25th April with a force of several thousand musketeers and pikemen. Though the episode is, unsurprisingly, not given mention in Moleman's own journals, at least not in any surviving form, a number of participants were later to record their experience, and from their accounts it seems most probable that the New Christian Legion, its scouts evidently surprised to discover Loffgate Common unfortified, attacked almost straight off its order of march, taking the Tillers, many of whom were women and children, entirely by surprise. One Legionary described his astonishment at their calm and discipline, which held even as he and his comrades spilled into the Tiller encampment to carry out an indiscriminate slaughter. Precious few of those camped on Loffgate Common, thought to have numbered perhaps several thousand individuals, managed to escape with their lives, and Dathur Harm was not among them. Described as the solitary armed man among the Tillers, Harm is said to have cut down at least two Legionaries before succumbing to their irresistible press of numbers, and his corpse, though viciously mutilated, was duly recovered. Within little more than an hour's time, accounts agree, Legionaries had put nearly every Tiller they managed to catch to the sword. Moleman, it would appear, ordered Tiller prisoners, likely no more than a few dozen in number, executed summarily, a task performed in haste and without any pretense to legal process, and after none were left alive Legionaries were set to building a row of scaffolds from which a number of their victims, most prominently Dathur Harm, were ceremonially hanged.

Loffgate Common served, then, to demonstrate precisely of what nauseating cruelty Moleman, his regime, and by extension a newly independent Arcansa was capable, and while as a single act of mass murder it has never been equaled, or, to faint Arcan credit, even nearly approached in following years, that unspeakable April day would be recreated in miniature across Daldon and Mansbar over five years of so-called Confiscations. Directed as it was primarily against titular nobles and their families, Catholic clergy, and those suspected of harboring 'crypto-Papist' sympathies, Confiscation claimed untold numbers of victims among rural smallholders, laborers, and tenants, with any stirrings of peasant unrest dealt with similarly. While punitive military expeditions largely fell out of use with the end of the Correctorate in 1714, by which stage they were seen increasingly as counterproductive, conditions for peasants and urban workers alike, far and away Arcansa's overwhelming super-majority of inhabitants, showed little sign of improvement as Westley Cregg Spuckler assumed office in 1714 to inaugurate a new era in Arcan government.

Enclosure, as so depressingly illustrated by Loffgate Common, was by no means a rare or an isolated phenomenon even well prior to its peak years. Where noblemen lost or sold their land, especially to their creditors in Eltonia, enclosure of common lands would almost inevitably result, as new owners freed from any sense of feudal obligation worked to turn a profit from their holdings. Confiscation, which destroyed feudal systems of land tenure across Daldon and Mansbar almost in their entirety, served to greatly accelerate a process of agricultural reorganization along commercial lines which had been underway, in fits and starts, from 1600 if not earlier, though enclosure in its best-remembered form, still passionately memorialized and lamented two and three hundred years after its realization, had to await key developments in manufacturing and agricultural practice. By 1720, however, and certainly by 1750, enclosure had taken on unheard-of proportions, spreading more rapidly and more completely than ever before as new plows, mechanical mills, and more efficient planting techniques made farming a lucrative commercial enterprise, its profitability enhanced by labor-saving machinery which rendered an immense proportion of rural Arcans effectively surplus to economic requirements while, simultaneously, producing enough food to support a population growing at an unprecedented rate. Within a century, between 1700 and 1800, census returns for Eltonia nearly doubled, while growing industrial cities like Brockway and Ogdenville witnessed increases which, although more modest in absolute terms, still represented a tripling or quadrupling of urban residents. This inflow in almost its entirety, drawn by rising demands for factory labor and other wage-work positions, was composed of rural workers and cultivators alienated from their ancestral land by commercialization and capitalization.

Shadoran, Tharia, and Weshield witnessed a process nearly identical in shape if rather smaller in scale, and at first more clearly compartmentalized by Shieldian geography. Animal husbandry in remote and rugged Javian and Weshieldian hill country remained at least a minimally viable activity, remarkably little affected by flourishing capitalism at least in its productive stages until well after 1830, when Arcan investment in industrial sheep farming brought about a wave of enclosures virtually identical to those imposed across thickly-settled southern lowlands. Evicted shepherds and cattle ranchers, if they did not attempt to emigrate, almost without fail made their way to bustling factory centers like Clyfton and Haldsborough. Newcomers to urban life in 'Free Trade' Britannia, regardless of precisely where they ended up, could expect to meet with a broadly identical set of conditions, and for individuals brought up amid greenery and fresh air this amounted to a jarring change of pace. As population growth outpaced housing construction, families were squeezed into ever smaller and ever more marginal habitations, packed more and more densely. Overcrowding combined with sanitation infrastructure which nowhere approached bare adequacy to spark periodic outbreaks of disease, on more than one occasion reaching epidemic proportions, while high and volatile prices for necessities joined an almost guaranteed over-supply of factory labor to make continued existence itself a matter of permanent anxiety.