Re: Blood and Iron

Bruno spent another five days at sea after meeting with Nikola Tesla before eventually returning home. Frankly speaking, he did not want to go to work the next day. But then again, he seldom got to choose his own hours.

Duty and service were things that truly ended only with one's death. One always had a responsibility to their family, community, fatherland, monarch, and God. To shirk these obligations for the sake of rest was a sign of sloth.

Such was one of the seven deadly sins. Reasonably so, as laziness and its temptations had been the ruin of many a great man. Even worse, it was often a gateway to one's personal destruction, both in terms of their immortal soul and physical being.

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It was perhaps because of this that Bruno, despite being exhausted from the visit, made sure to spend some appropriate time with his wife and children, all of whom he loved very much, before eventually retiring for the evening at an appropriate hour.

The next morning, he was up bright and early at the crack of dawn. Was he as well-rested as he could reasonably be? No, not in the slightest. In fact, some form of minor fatigue lingered within his system until being replaced by a healthy dose of coffee. Bruno then kissed his pregnant wife on the cheek before heading back to the office.

Upon arriving at the Central Division of the German Army's high command, Bruno found himself at his desk before something peculiar popped up in front of him. One of his superiors, a Field Marshal whom Bruno both deeply respected and directly answered to, dropped a folder in front of him, speaking with a peculiar grin on his face.

As a legendary "Death's Head Hussar," August von Mackensen was perhaps what one would call a man exemplary of the cavalry spirit-riding through guns blazing on horseback into the fray, while wholly obsolete. It was a tradition of warfare that dated back thousands of years.

Germanic cavalry was known to have played a critical role in Rome's utter humiliation at the Battle of Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

A battle so ingrained in German heritage that a statue of Arminius, otherwise known as Herman the German, was erected in 1875 as a commemoration of their victory over the Romans. This battle ensured that the Germanic peoples were never fully Romanized, or even primarily so.

Only a small portion of Germania was ever conquered and settled by the Romans, which was reclaimed by the various Barbarian Kingdoms after the fall of Rome in 476 AD, and to some extent preceding it.

Perhaps because of this proud and ancient lineage of which Generalfeldmarschall von Mackensen had partaken during the early stages of his career, he had been most aggrieved by Bruno's insistence that the era of cavalry had come to an end.

Initially, he had resisted the attempts to disband the overwhelming majority of cavalry units, relegating what little remained of them to the positions of scouts and forward observers. That is, until he witnessed the destructive nature of the new generation of warfare first-hand with the introduction of modern weaponry among the German Army over the course of the last few years.

The MG-34 alone made cavalry a suicidal position, one that had zero advantage on the battlefield as a combat unit. Then there was long-range artillery. While Bruno's tanks and armored cars were still largely under development, needing a few more years to work out the kinks, one particular vehicle was entering its prototype staging.