Chapter 413: The Rotten Fruit of Liberty
A long puff of smoke rose from the foxhole dug just outside the ruins of the Palace of Versailles, half of which had been reduced to rubble in the chaos that overtook the failed French Republic following its humiliating and devastating losses during the Great War.
Over three million Frenchmen lay dead along the border of the German Reich, their bodies turned to mulch beneath the machines of war that climbed over them and pushed forward toward the city of Paris just a year ago.
Their deaths were caused by incompetent, corrupt, and outright ignorant politicians elected by the uneducated masses. These men were sent to fight a war they were incapable of winning and repeatedly thrown into the meat grinder by generals too proud to admit they had no means of penetrating the defenses their enemies had prepared a decade before the first shot was fired.
It had been a senseless slaughter of epic proportions—one with longer-lasting effects than anyone had anticipated. The French soldiers who were lucky enough to be captured alive by the Germans—and who were treated like guests at a four-star resort during their tenure as prisoners of war—returned to find their families buried beneath the earth.
Disease, starvation, and the collapse of internal order allowed less civilized elements to form roving bands that ravaged the countryside while ideologues fought for control in the metropolitan areas.
The colonies? An afterthought of a government desperately trying to cling to power. They tried to commission returning soldiers—bitter and hardened by war—to fight the revolutionaries, both Marxist and reactionary in origin.
There was just one problem: with no sustainable economy, and with the country under the control of brigand kings, local warlords, and fanatical murderers of every denomination, what could they possibly offer these men? What promise could convince them to risk their lives for a government that had already betrayed them?
Instead, many took up arms not for the glory of France or the survival of its Republic—which, let’s face it, was already dead and buried beneath the weight of properly forged German steel—but because the struggle was all they had left.
Rifles from every conceivable nation were in their hands—German, Italian, British, French, Spanish. If a port existed, weapons found their way into the hands of those trying to stake their claim.
Charles de Gaulle led one such militia, having seized the estate grounds of the ruined Palace of Versailles and converted them into a fortress—a staging ground for an advance into the shattered city of Paris.