Chapter 108: Improper Communication
A few days passed before everything that needed to be prepared had been properly gathered and shipped off to the Alps. A desolate region of the mountain range near the borders of Italy. Though not exactly on the borders of Italy, as that might be seen as an act of aggression.
Though invited to take part in the military exercise, the Italians chose not to do so. Prompting Kaiser Wilhelm II to believe that maybe Bruno had been right about them not being faithful to the alliance when the day came.
Though it wasn't a serious enough issue to immediately push for their removal from the Central Powers, it did serve to act as a cautionary example. As for Bruno, he was dressed in his field attire. Which was to put it simply, was a standard uniform as issued to the individual soldiers in the army, albeit with the insignia on his collar of a General der Infanterie.
Other than that, he did not sport any fanciful medals, ribbons, or God forbid sashes at this time. Bruno also wore the new standard load bearing equipment of the German army, which did a great job of dispersing the weight across the body.
He also carried mag pouches on it that held stripper clips for the Gewehr 98 he was currently using. In the upcoming war, this would be replaced with the Gewehr 43, or Gewehr 05, as was known in this life. Which was the new semi-automatic rifle that had just recently passed military trials and was now being equipped with German infantrymen.
But for the time being, this was a state secret and was not to be revealed to the greater world, even to allies during a time of joint military exercises. Hence why Bruno was holding a rifle. Though unusual for a man of his rank, Bruno liked to be closer to properly armed in a time of war.
The Austrian generals standing in the rear with Bruno wore far more fanciful uniforms, as if to boast of their status. They also did not even care to wear helmets, as this far in the rear, there was no need to worry about artillery.
For that matter, Bruno also didn't wear a helmet. Even so, his attire was far more similar to what was being used by the soldiers taking part in the exercise. To put it simply, a simulation of trench warfare was taking place.
Blanks would be fired to simulate bullets, and a whole complex system was put in place to score casualties sustained during the exercise. Currently, the Austrians were betting that Bruno's men would not last very long.
"Well, General, I am willing to wager that your men will be overrun by lunch time. Care to take me on?"
There was a reason that the Austrian generals were so smug. The Germans had, after all, deployed a single division worth of troops for the sake of the exercise. While the Austro- Hungarians had deployed twice as many men. There was just one problem: the men that the Germans sent to Austria were mostly veterans of the Iron Division.
Trench warfare was something they had ample experience in during the Russian Civil War. And unlike the Austro-Hungarians, the soldiers the Germans sent all spoke the same language. Thus, their means of communication were swift and efficient.
One of the major problems which the Austro-Hungarian army suffered from was a severe lack of communication in the field. Their officer corps was primarily staffed with Germans. While their NCOs were largely Hungarian, and the enlisted men could be either German, Hungarian, or any other number of ethnic groups which spoke their own distinctive languages, largely from the Balkans.