Chapter 372: Too Little Too Late
Bruno had been given the greatest honor by the Kaiser, and that was operational command of the entire Western Front, the only major front left that Germany really cared about. As a result, he was no longer given the option to command in the field, and the German 8th Army he had been in command of now fell to the control of Heinrich who by no was a Lieutenant general.
As a result, Bruno would be spending the majority of what remained of the war far enough away from enemy lines to be threatened by the enemy, but close enough to maintain full control over every front and the forces of the Central Powers located there.
Because he was no longer stationed at the chaos of the front, Bruno had easy access to ongoing news around the globe. Hence he immediately heard about what happened in French Indo-China and the field day the United States Press, who was not under his control, were having with it.
But it was too little too late. The French lines had broken. Their country was on fire suffering from internal revolt, while the countryside was ravaged with brigandry. The newly formed conscripted army designed to hold the line, having received poor training, equipment, and severely lacking in the robust chain of command their adversaries had, especially at the NCO level made for widespread routs and desertion whenever the French Army made contact with the Central Powers.
If there was one thing this war had taught Bruno, or perhaps I should say reinforced his modern knowledge, it was that a highly trained professional army was always better than a force of conscripts.
Either way, Wilson’s attempts to drag the United States out of isolation, and spark a war with the central powers was a futile one. At the current rate Bruno would be parading through Paris within a fortnight at the latest, and because of this he could only smirk and snicker upon reading all about what the Americans had planned.
"Perhaps if you had won the 1912 election, you may have been able to get troops and supplies on European soil in time to stall the inevitable. But unfortunately for you, it is now too little, too late...."
After saying this to nobody in particular, Bruno folded up the paper on his lap neatly, and stashed it away. Having done this, he approached the command center that was a established within Germany territory near the western border within France.
Casualty reports were flooding in, and while the soldiers of the Central Powers had sustained minimal losses thus far in their current push, the French Army’s figures were staggering, increasing by the thousands per second.
One thing was certain, by the time this war came to an end, and peace was secured, France in its current state would not survive the immediate aftermath... No... They were likely to fracture, and wage war against itself similar to the troubles the Weimar Republic found itself having early on within its existence during Bruno’s past life.