Germany and its alliance were not the only nation preparing for war. In fact, the French had made substantial investments in machine guns over the years, especially since the Iron Division proved how effective they were in the trenches outside Saint Petersburg and Tsaritsyn.
And while the level of technological progression had increased ever so slightly on the global stage due to Bruno’s interference in the timeline, some things had actually veered off into a less desirable path, at least for the French.
As previously mentioned, the French Army had a serious issue with machine guns leading up to the Great War in Bruno’s past life.
Aside from the paltry sum of such destructive devices actually employed in their army, they also did not create a machine gun that was remotely reliable enough to chew through the mud and blood of the trenches until the fabled Hotchkiss was adopted in 1914 shortly before the outbreak of the infamous global conflict.
This meant that at the start of the Great War, France’s limited machine gun arsenal still largely consisted of those two designs derived from the horrifically unreliable “Bang” gas system. However, this was a lesson they had also failed to understand in this life.
In Bruno’s past life, France and many other powers had routinely refined their machine gun designs until creating something that was functional for the purposes of sustained fire during trench warfare. But that was not the case in this life.
Germany had, after all, as a result of Bruno’s actions, begun mass-producing a variation of the Maxim machine gun much earlier than they had in their past life. The result of this was that after Saint Petersburg and the brutal domination the then Iron Brigade had over the significantly larger Red Army, there was a spur in demand across the world for similar weapons.
France, having never truly adopted the Maxim, instead began development of their own machine gun, resulting in the Puteaux Model 1905 machine gun. This meant that the demand for quantity of machine guns had overridden that of quality.
As a result, France had significantly more machine guns in their arsenal than they had in Bruno’s previous life at the current moment. But these machine guns could barely get through five straight rounds before bogging down the crew operating them.
This meant that they were actually preventing three or more potential riflemen from providing sustained fire against an enemy charge for every machine gun employed on the battlefield. And France had built thousands of these machine guns in preparation for the war.
Even now, as they were only just beginning to realize how flawed their machine guns were, they did not even think about changing production lines to the older Model 1900 Hotchkiss, of which the infamous 1914 machine gun of the same name was a variation and had even seen service in prior wars.
Leon, who was still stuck at the rank of Brigadier General and was seen more as a propaganda piece than a capable military commander, was currently standing outside the border fortifications that had been constructed between Germany and France.
For the sake of showing that these fortifications had not in the slightest bit intimidated the French Army, France had deployed an entire division to the border for “military exercises.” And this division was currently being observed by the Germans on the other side.
Entirely unaware that the man he was posed as the French rival of was standing on the other side of the border, gazing down upon him and his men who were desperately trying to get these poorly conceived machine guns to fire reliably, was none other than Bruno.
Winter had come, and his birthday had passed. Even the Christmas celebrations were gone. Instead, Bruno stood dressed in a stylish military greatcoat, emblazoned with the symbols of his rank as a Generalaoberst upon the French Army below.
And he, of course, had taken notice of Leon. Both men had not seen each other since the start of the last decade. They had both gained positions of power since then and had both been deployed to at least one other battlefield.
And while beneath Bruno’s greatcoat was a series of medals, of which only two belonged to his native nation, Leon was also highly decorated but exclusively in the medals of the French Republic and its Armed Forces.
Both men were silently gazing at a cigarette, one with a stoic expression that reflected his emotionless character, while the other contrasted with a hostile gaze and a wicked sneer. Not towards Bruno, as Leon was entirely unaware that he was being watched, but rather to his own men, at whom he made intimidating gestures and bestial shouts as he reprimanded them for failing to display the “proper might of the French Army.”
The reality was this mediocre display of force was just that. By no fault of the brave soldiers who tried to make the damn thing work. Rather, it was the Puteaux machine gun itself, as Bruno expected, that was the problem.
In fact, he knew this from the very moment he saw the French Army lining up hundreds of such guns that they were liable to jam every three to five rounds within the snow and mud of the trenches. This was only compounded by the fact that they had to rely on the three-plus men who operated the weapons to work tirelessly to strip the malfunction, whatever that may be, before feeding another round into the tray.
Only to perform the exact same action again in the next five seconds. Bruno would be laughing at the French and their mass production of what was possibly the world’s worst heavy machine gun ever put into service if it weren’t for the fact the price that would be paid for these failures would be done so with a sea of blood.
Did Bruno hate the French? Well, no more than any other German of the era. He, of course, despised the French Republic and the politicians whose pettiness and shortsightedness saw to the abominable Treaty of Versailles, which itself was responsible for all the woes of the western world in his previous life.
But the individual men who would go out and die in the millions for such an ignoble cause were no more to blame than the men who stormed into Poland twenty-one years after the Great War came to an end, and in doing so ushered in a second and far more terrible world conflict.
No, Bruno held no hatred for these soldiers whose names would soon be written on a mass of tombstones and wooden crosses. Rather, he felt pity for them.
Not only because they would all be food for the worms soon enough, but also because when the Germans finally won this war and marched through the French countryside, the widows and daughters of these men would line up in droves and throw themselves at the German soldiers who had killed them.
Such happened twice in Bruno’s past life, once in 1914 and again in 1940. After seeing the way Leon berated the troops beneath his command for failures that were not their own, Bruno simply shook his head and commented on it, pointing out the shameful display to the men who stood next to him.
“You see that man, that General shouting obscenities at his troops?”
The soldier looked over at Bruno with a stern gaze, one that was also filled with anxiety. He refused to believe that someone of Bruno’s status would simply speak to him for the sake of engaging in nonsensical banter.
Because of this, the enlisted soldier immediately assumed Bruno was about to give him a critical order, one that might accidentally start a war.
And because of this, he was treating Bruno’s words as if they were more severe than the Ten Commandments given to man by God himself. That is until Bruno finished his statement after exhaling a long plume of smoke from his cigarette before stomping it out beneath his boots.
“You have my permission to put a bullet in my brain if I ever try to do something so contemptible as to try and hold you or any of your comrades responsible for the failures of the engineers who designed such a piece of shit, let alone the politicians who were either corrupt or stupid enough to approve the adoption of such a monstrosity for service in the first place.
My God… That man is a disgrace to the rank he so proudly wears on his shoulders…”
Bruno then walked away without saying another word. The soldier Bruno was speaking to, as well as the other men in the unit who were standing on guard nearby, men who had heard the entire conversation, were silent for a long time before breaking out into jovial laughter, with one of the men saying,
“Holy shit, I didn’t expect the Red Scourge of all people to say such a thing. I mean, I thought I was the only one thinking that French General was a bastard, but he just outright said it!”
Bruno’s statement of condemnation towards Leon and the way he treated his soldiers spread throughout the camp, with his words becoming more and more exaggerated and humorous by the time they circled back to Bruno’s ears.
Nobody expected that he was rather serious when he said such words. Only those who had served with him before would know how much he hated incompetent or foolish leadership, especially those who treated their own soldiers poorly without valid reason to do so.
After all, there was a quote which Bruno generally believed and aspired to follow as a military leader.
“Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys; look upon them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
