The Radiant Republic

In fact, on the very day of the Battle of the Belitz River and the Raid on Zossen, Comte de Talleyrand, the special envoy of the Commander-in-Chief of the French army, was released from house arrest and isolation. Even so, he remained in that ordinary two-story apartment building, quietly waiting for his prey to walk into the trap of its own accord.

Very soon, Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the brother of the Prussian king, together with the peace-minded representatives of Prussia such as Minister of the Interior Alvensleben, Minister of Justice Struensee, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Comte de Lucchesini, came one after another to call upon the French Comte, hoping to bring this unfortunate war between France and Prussia to an early end.

Yet from beginning to end Talleyrand made no promises at all. He had seen that not one figure from Berlin’s war party had come to the apartment building. So the French envoy merely encouraged, openly and in private, those Prussian nobles who wanted peace to launch a bloodless coup, overthrow the already defeated King Wilhelm II, and place Prince Heinrich of Prussia upon the throne. But the Prussian prince and nobles shrank back in fear.

Talleyrand did not lose heart. He simply turned down every banquet invitation from Berlin with icy indifference and stayed in his room, devoting himself to fine food and wine. Naturally, the greedy cripple never refused political bribes from Berlin. In less than two days, his handsome purse already contained a check worth one hundred thousand thalers. Beyond that, Talleyrand especially enjoyed flirting with the German women who came to visit the apartment.

It had to be said that the French cripple’s methods with women were remarkably effective. Though his physical disability deprived him of the martial masculinity of a soldier, his inborn aristocratic bearing and easy, considerate warmth deeply attracted the opposite sex. Above all, his speech and manners had an almost artistic quality, and he could often make those lonely ladies from grand houses laugh with genuine delight. At the same time, the Prussian princes and nobles eagerly catered to his tastes, sending many of their mistresses, and at times even their own wives and daughters, to that gray apartment building on Unter den Linden, opposite the Berlin Arsenal.

During this time, a Comtesse once asked Talleyrand in private, “You are the king of conversation. What is your secret?”

Talleyrand smiled and replied, “Just as one chooses ground favorable to oneself when fighting generals, I always choose the subject of conversation. I agree to speak only of matters on which I have something to say, or on which I can give orders…”

Through intermediaries, the private envoy of the French Commander-in-Chief delivered a message to the Prussian monarch who had just fled back to Berlin: the power to set the tone in this city now lay in French hands, not in the Berlin Palace and not in City Hall.

On February twenty-second, with one hundred and twenty thousand troops of the Franco-Saxon Coalition already encircling the whole city of Berlin, Comte de Lucchesini, the Prussian Minister of Foreign Affairs, came once again to visit Talleyrand under orders from King Wilhelm II. He hoped to reopen peace negotiations between the two countries as quickly as possible. The French envoy made no effort to conceal his delight. Talleyrand soon made demands so extravagant that no Prussian present could accept them.

First, Prussia was to surrender control of the Duchy of Hesse, the Duchy of Anhalt, and the Duchy of Magdeburg to the Electorate of Saxony. Upper Silesia was to belong to Poland, though for three years it would be jointly administered by France and the Duchy of Saxony. The Kingdom of Austria was to recover its traditional rule in Lower Silesia, while Sweden would receive Eastern Pomerania. Second, Prussia was to pay France war reparations of two hundred million thalers, about eight hundred million francs. Finally, for the next ten years, Prussia was to provide France with two hundred thousand young and able-bodied laborers each year at low cost.

The first demand was, without question, André using the defeated nation’s territory to thank his military allies for their support. Besides, André had no interest in Prussian land, other than the Ruhr which he already controlled. But the second and third demands were Talleyrand’s own additions, his greatly inflated version of an outrageous opening bid.

The minimum reparations André had authorized were twelve million thalers, roughly equal to the forty million francs in war bonds issued before the war. As for the demand for Prussian laborers, it was meant not only to weaken Prussia’s military potential. The road network and railway construction in the fifteen northern provinces and Belgium, along with the various industrial bases there, were already in urgent need of large numbers of cheap workers. The annual shortfall was at least seventy to eighty thousand.

After that first formal meeting ended badly, Talleyrand learned from the mistresses of the “peace party” that Wilhelm II had never intended to hold any real peace talks with him in any form. He merely wished to stall until the situation changed. The reason was simple. On the previous night, the Russian ambassador in Berlin had assured the Prussian king that British and Russian diplomats in Saint Petersburg had already joined forces and were preparing to exert far greater political and military pressure upon the Commander-in-Chief of the French army, in the hope of forcing the French to abandon their unrealistic demands for compensation.

In addition, the hawks within the Prussian army were urging Wilhelm II to reject any humiliating peace. Rumors in the city said that Marshal Suvorov would, within two weeks, lead one hundred thousand Russian troops and another one hundred thousand East Prussian troops from the Neman River, a thousand kilometers away, and come to Berlin’s rescue.

“…Therefore, my most respected Commander, Wilhelm II and the generals of his war party must be made to suffer, under the eyes of all, a military and diplomatic humiliation outside Berlin so unforgettable that it will shake the British and Russians who are hurrying to Berlin to meddle in the situation.”

That was how Talleyrand put it in his letter to André. Very soon, at the cost of twenty thousand francs, he bribed several well-known courtesans to spread the right whispers in bedchambers, doing everything he could to encourage Marshal Möllendorf and King Wilhelm II to challenge that invincible Frenchman to a public, medieval-style contest outside Berlin, in the hope of reviving the army’s long-failing morale and thereby postponing the date of the French army’s final assault.

Plainly, Talleyrand, with his shrewd reading of men’s minds, had accurately grasped Prussia’s mood after so many consecutive defeats: it desperately wanted a victory to turn the tide, even one with no real military value. And under Talleyrand’s persuasion, André gladly accepted this challenge between the two armies outside Berlin.

...

As early as the war of national defense the year before, the Reims Arsenal had already put a new type of single-shot muzzle-loading rifle into combat service for practical testing. During that period, the rifle regiment equipped with the Reims No. 1 Rifle, using copper-based mercury-fulminate percussion caps and Minié bullets, had performed exceptionally well in the fighting to retake the Verdun fortress complex, namely Fort Vaux and Fort Douaumont. By November 1792, the Reims No. 1 Rifle had first been issued on a large scale to the Guard Division attached to Command Headquarters.

The Reims No. 1 Rifle weighed 4.8 kilograms in total and had a caliber of 17.8 millimeters. Each bullet weighed 32.4 grams, somewhat smaller than the previous ones, yet this round-headed cylindrical lead bullet had a lethal range of 918 meters and could guarantee accurate hits within 550 meters. Its power was immense. Because it was a newly designed muzzle-loading rifle, the ordnance engineers fitted it with a 0.53-meter close-combat bayonet, which could be removed and reattached as quickly as on a standard smoothbore musket, making it convenient for close defense and hand-to-hand fighting.

Simply put, the Reims No. 1 Rifle had already reached the level of the British army rifles used during the Opium War. In the hands of a marksman equipped with a telescopic sight, the Reims No. 1 Rifle could accurately hit any human-shaped target within 500 meters, see Chapter 243.

It was precisely because this new rifle used copper-based mercury-fulminate caps that its ignition became far more reliable, the chance of misfire was greatly reduced, and all-weather combat became possible. Only a small amount of white powder smoke emerged from the rear of the barrel. Even if more than a thousand soldiers in dense formation fired forward at the same moment, they would not bury themselves in an artificial battlefield fog.

Of course, André placed even greater hopes in breech-loading rifles using metallic cartridges, the sort that could be produced cheaply in large quantities and used in different firing positions, especially prone fire, and above all the kind with a rotating bolt-locking mechanism, such as the famous Mosin-Nagant and Mauser 98k. But André’s design ideas were plainly too advanced, nearly eighty years ahead of history. Though the ordnance engineers constantly tried to keep up with the Commander’s unusual demands, such a breech-loading rifle was simply not something that could be produced in the short term.

...

According to the agreement between the Prussian and French armies, each side would send out one infantry regiment of eight hundred men for a one-against-one contest on the plain west of Berlin. In order to reduce the French military advantage, Marshal Möllendorf even proposed that neither side should use cavalry or artillery. Acting on Commander André’s wishes, General Moncey, the commander at the front, agreed to all these shameless Prussian demands.

Wilhelm II and his marshal naively believed that, although the French had cut an aggressive path all the way from the Rhine to the gates of Berlin and were therefore high in spirit, they had been marching and fighting without pause for some time and the soldiers must already be exhausted. By contrast, although the Prussian army had lost the war, it possessed the advantage of meeting the enemy fresh beneath Berlin’s walls. With the advantages of timing, terrain, and local support, they hoped to strike a hard blow against the arrogant and overbearing elite French infantry regiment. If that happened, morale on the two sides would rise and fall in opposite directions, greatly benefiting the Prussian army defending the city and buying more time for British and Russian diplomatic efforts.

As the commander of the front, General Moncey knew perfectly well the extraordinary performance of the Reims No. 1 Rifle. It was enough to surpass the firearms of every European power. In fact, the Prussians still imagined that the French infantry about to take the field would be using rifles that could fire only one round per minute and were slow and troublesome to load.

Some officers had worried that once this battle was over, information about such an advanced weapon would leak out. But Moncey, like André, believed that no secret about weaponry could be kept for long. Now that the Guard Division had been equipped with it on a considerable scale, the British were bound to learn, by one means or another, of the existence of the copper-based mercury-fulminate caps and Minié bullets.

Likewise, André had great confidence in the old conservative habits of the British War Office. Given the manufacturing power of the British Empire, it would not be hard, indeed it would be very easy, for them to develop mercury-fulminate caps and Minié bullets. But to introduce them across the whole army would be next to impossible. The André artillery that had already shone brilliantly in two wars was a perfect example. The London Arsenal had produced finished models as early as the previous year, yet they still could not put them into service in the British army, because the generals in London stubbornly insisted that good iron cannon suited Britain better than costly bronze cannon. That judgment was true enough, but time would not allow the British to wait for it to become true.

On February twenty-third, the winter sun hung high in the sky, driving off the chill that had lingered for days, and the daytime high rose to around ten degrees.

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Meanwhile, the wall on the southern outskirts of Berlin had plainly become the best grandstand from which to watch the contest between the two armies below. Early in the morning, officials, merchants, and large numbers of townspeople who had heard the news came in carriages, carrying bread, cheese, sausages, and wine, and claimed good places atop the wall. The whole scene looked like a lively picnic ground. Soldiers and civilians moved in and out freely, full of cheer, without the least air of war. That was because the French Commander had already promised the diplomats of every country that on February twenty-third no assault would be launched against the city.

In truth, had there not been large bodies of French troops visible across the Spree, ordinary Berliners would have felt almost no difference from life two weeks earlier. It had to be admitted that compared with the other armies of Europe, the French army was highly disciplined, and far more civilized and restrained than the Prussian army that had invaded France in 1792. Apart from standing duty and patrolling the lines, officers and men usually remained in their camps and did not go out of their way to harass German-speaking women.

When the French soldiers requisitioned grain and livestock from the villages and towns around Berlin, the commissary officers accompanying them would pay the villagers cash in thalers at market rates. Naturally, all such ordinary expenses were entered into the account of the war indemnity to be collected from Prussia, and were meant to be charged to Berlin’s City Hall.

Near noon, King Wilhelm II arrived and took his seat upon the wall, surrounded by a large number of cabinet ministers, foreign envoys, and Prussian generals. Directly opposite the Prussians, on the southern bank of the Spree, which was not particularly wide, stood André, the Commander-in-Chief of the French army, together with his commanders. Present as allies of Andréan France were also diplomats and senior officers from Saxony, Sweden, and free Poland. As for Austria, the Austrian ambassador in Berlin sat on the side of the Prussian king, while Metternich was an honored guest of the French.

Passing through the noisy civilian section atop the wall, Alexander, heir to the Russian throne, entered the guarded grandstand reserved for distinguished guests in the company of the Berlin ambassador, Marquis Ivanov, a dried-up old man in appearance, and in doing so stirred up a small commotion. The fashionable married ladies of Berlin were attracted by the Crown Prince’s handsome face, elegant bearing, and uncommon grace, and raised their heads to look at him, each of them commenting freely on his appearance.

The future Tsar, who was seventeen years old, wore his usual Russian officer’s attire: a green uniform with gold ornamentation on the shoulders and a broad red sash, white breeches, white gloves, a large military hat decorated with black and white plumes, low-cut shoes, and a sword at his side. His chestnut hair had been dusted with costly powder made in Prussia. In his mannerisms too, Alexander resembled Peter the Great, the first Russian Tsar to “study in Europe.” In small gestures, the Crown Prince liked to tuck his thumb into his belt.

Because at the age of four, under the orders of his grandmother Catherine the Great, Alexander had begun to study English, French, and German, as well as the strict etiquette of European courts, he showed affability and modesty to everyone he met along the way, winning admiration from all who passed him.

After exchanging a few words of greeting with the Prussian king, Alexander and the ambassador took seats not far to Wilhelm II’s left. A few noblewomen confident in their figures and beauty tried to draw near and tease the young and handsome Prince, but Marquis Ivanov, sly as a monkey, smoothly talked them away.

“Your Excellency,” Alexander asked, looking across the broad strip of withered grass and the quiet Spree, unable to make out the scene two kilometers away, “is André, the Commander-in-Chief of the French army, on the opposite bank?”

Marquis Ivanov nodded and handed him a collapsible spyglass. Yet after the young Crown Prince took it silently, he did not unfold it, but merely turned it over in his hand.

“Marquis Ivanov, what is your prediction for today’s battle?” Alexander asked again.

As Crown Prince, he knew that the dried-up old man beside him, who appeared so unremarkable, though in fact Marquis Ivanov was only in his forties, was one of the Russian diplomats most admired by his grandmother, Catherine the Great. Had the Marquis not publicly argued ten years earlier for easing the heavy burdens borne by domestic serfs, thereby offending the great nobles and great landowners of Saint Petersburg, he might already have risen to become the Russian Empire’s chief Minister of Foreign Affairs.

The ambassador smiled, but instead of answering directly, he asked in return, “Your Highness, how do you regard Prussia’s one-sided defeat in the Second Franco-Prussian War?”

In the war of 1792, the Prussians had still been able to blame their defeat on bad weather, epidemic disease, and poor logistics. But in the Second Franco-Prussian War, the French were the attacking side and had fought deep inside Prussian territory. Those same unfavorable objective conditions should have been the best allies of the Prussians, who possessed the advantages of timing and terrain. Yet in reality the French army’s supply system proved more than sufficient and could even support the daily needs of ninety thousand prisoners from the Prussian army. As for weather and disease, they caused the French hardly any non-combat losses.

“Large numbers of fierce cannon, new rifle regiments, those steam gunboats that take men by surprise, and…” Alexander began at once. During the days since arriving in Berlin, the young Russian Crown Prince had himself been influenced by the view that weapons alone explained everything. That was the “serious conclusion” certain Prussian officers had drawn from their defeat.

Naturally, the defeated found it much harder to speak openly of shortcomings in intelligence, in command, in troop quality, or in strategy and tactics. It should also be noted that Alexander and the Russian ambassador in Berlin were speaking Russian throughout their conversation. Apart from a few diplomats, almost nobody in the city could understand them. In fact, many great Russian nobles considered it shameful to speak Russian in public.

“True, but not entirely so.” Marquis Ivanov raised two fingers. “In fact, from the very beginning of the war, the Prussian side had already sealed its own miserable end. One need only look at the map. The countries that joined France included Saxony, Sweden, Austria, and half of Poland. On the Prussian side, by contrast, not a single country truly stepped forward to support it. The British seem to value trade with France more and have no intention of continuing the alliance of the Seven Years’ War. As for Russia…”

At that point, the ambassador paused, as if slightly hesitant. Alexander instead supplied the answer himself.

“Until Saint Petersburg finishes digesting Lithuania and the Neman basin, it has no wish at all to go to war with France. So when the Swedish navy entered the Gulf of Finland, His Majesty the Tsar naturally proclaimed neutrality in the Second Franco-Prussian War. To put it more exactly, the diplomatic position of the Prussian army in 1793 is extremely poor. It has enemies on every side and not a single ally nearby. Only one week after Wilhelm II took the initiative and declared war, he was caught completely off guard by French forces arriving from afar. Even if Britain and Russia wished to help, they were so unprepared that they could do almost nothing.”

Hearing this, Marquis Ivanov felt deeply satisfied, and his admiration for Catherine the Great’s wisdom in selecting the imperial heir only grew stronger. The earlier choice, Paul I, had simply been a Russian version of Wilhelm II, only worse, a man useless in success and ruinous in failure. Frederick Wilhelm II’s nickname was “the Fat Giant,” and Paul I too was enormously fat and by no means handsome.

Neither of them had any personal experience of war, nor any real interest in it. Paul I was perhaps a little better, but only because he liked scolding and physically punishing soldiers, using that to vent his resentment against his imperial mother. What mattered most to the two of them was an endless succession of mistresses.

Ambassador Ivanov continued, “The second point is that one must never ignore the presence of the French Commander. In truth, even now I have not been able to discover by what means André successfully persuaded the Regent of Sweden to ally with him. The only thing I know for certain is that the Franco-Swedish alliance began last December, in the administrative palace at Brussels.”

Alexander nodded thoughtfully. “Once the French enter the city, I hope to meet in person the conqueror of Belgium and western Germany.”

One week earlier, on the day after Crown Prince Wilhelm III of Prussia had been ordered to receive the Russian heir Alexander at Stettin, he suddenly received a secret letter from Wilhelm II requiring him, in his capacity as Crown Prince, to go to East Prussia and organize the mobilization of one hundred thousand reserve troops. Alexander himself, however, refused to return to Russia. He accepted Ambassador Ivanov’s advice and continued south to Berlin, determined to meet the conqueror of Europe face to face.

What persuaded Alexander was a single sentence from Marquis Ivanov. The ambassador had said, “Without question, if André and his France continue to support Poland, he will become a formidable enemy of Great Russia. To defeat him, one must imitate the wise Peter the Great: see one’s opponent with one’s own eyes, face him directly, and understand fully both the strengths and the weaknesses possessed by the Commander-in-Chief of the French army.”

...

On the French encampment across the Spree, Commander André, the man so many diplomats had been thinking about, had just inspected the First Infantry Regiment of the Guard Division, which was about to take the field. Before leaving, André gave one instruction to its commander, Colonel Morand:

“Show no mercy. Put down the last Prussian standing before you.”

The point, of course, was to make an example of them. Once André learned that the current King of Prussia and the future Tsar of Russia had both taken their seats in the grandstand upon the wall, he decided to leave those two European monarchs with a memory they would never erase, something dreadful enough to wake them from sleep.

Before returning to his own seat, André first exchanged greetings with the envoy of the Electorate of Saxony. Next came the Austrian envoy Metternich. It was the latter who, through firm argument and with the support of Prince de Kaunitz-Rietberg, had finally persuaded Vienna to send troops into Lower Silesia and successfully recover that ancestral land which Frederick the Great had seized decades before. By virtue of this achievement, the young Metternich had already become Austria’s Consul General in Brussels.

Even so, this “Viennese butterfly,” as André called him, still felt considerable regret, because André had flatly refused his proposal. Austria had hoped to buy Upper Silesia from the French for twenty million francs in gold. André, however, declared that the region already belonged to free Poland.

In the dictator’s view, Saxony and Poland had to possess a free land route between them, and that was precisely what wealthy Upper Silesia provided. Once Berlin no longer possessed the Ruhr, the base of steelmaking and the arms industry and other heavy industries, nor Upper and Lower Silesia, where brewing, food processing, cotton textiles, and other light industries were centered, Prussia’s road to industrial revolution would become extraordinarily difficult, perhaps ten times harder than in the other timeline.

On the other side, Vicomte Mörner, the private envoy of the Regent of Sweden, was speaking cordially with General Penduvas, who would soon depart for Stockholm to assume his duties as the Saxon ambassador to Berlin. The subject of their discussion was naturally military. Sweden urgently needed French instructors to train its infantry and artillery, and above all the long-ranged and highly destructive André artillery, which every soldier and diplomat in Europe longed to obtain.

“No, no, Your Excellency,” the Swedish diplomat explained. “What the Swedish army needs, as France’s most steadfast ally, is not fifty twelve-pound André cannon, but two hundred, perhaps even more.”

Ever since the French had opened arms sales to their allies, several Swedish generals had written privately to Vicomte Mörner, strongly urging the large-scale purchase of André cannon. In the Russo-Swedish War a few years earlier, the Swedish navy had, at the cost of only four warships and three hundred sailors, captured or sunk sixty-four warships of the Russian Gulf of Finland Fleet and destroyed more than seven thousand sailors, thereby winning the great victory at Svensksund.

Yet at the same time, seventy thousand Swedish troops on land had been defeated by only forty thousand Russians, nearly nullifying the naval triumph altogether. Had Sweden not hurriedly signed a secret anti-Russian alliance with Turkey, giving Saint Petersburg pause, the savage Russian army might well have counterattacked from Finland all the way to Stockholm.

When General Penduvas instinctively shifted his gaze in order to delay answering the eager Swedish diplomat, he saw Commander André nearby giving him a nod, clearly signaling that the Saxon ambassador was to grant Vicomte Mörner’s request. More than that, André soon reached a package agreement on naval cooperation with the private envoy of the Regent of Sweden.

André wanted to turn the inland steam gunboats into true sea-going steam warships. The first would sail in the Baltic. The reason for this new idea was that Engineer Fulton, now already a French citizen, had proposed that the next step should be to build ship keels and ribs with steel, and then construct the first steam frigate for ocean service.

As for the naval construction base, it would be located in the port of Stettin, capital of Eastern Pomerania, which Sweden had just recovered. Situated on the lower Oder, south of the Stettiner Haff, and northward close to the Stettin Bay and the Bay of Pomerania of the Baltic Sea, it could rely upon the protection of the powerful Swedish navy and thereby avoid interference from the British fleet and the Russian Baltic Fleet.

During this discussion, André said to the Swedish diplomat, “Monsieur le Vicomte, I have in hand a piece of intelligence known to you as well. It shows that the Russians are preparing to violate the Viller Treaty signed in August 1790 and secretly build a great number of new warships in the Gulf of Finland. It can be foreseen that three years from now, Saint Petersburg will possess forty-six to fifty warships in the Baltic. As for the Swedish navy, tell me yourself how many it will have: eighteen, or twenty? … Believe me, if Stockholm gives sufficient support and understanding, I am certain that the French navy, as Sweden’s ally, can make up for the remaining gap of thirty warships in the Swedish Baltic Fleet.”