Re: Blood and Iron

Vienna had become secure and stable… The price was gruesome, more than many were willing to admit. The number of deaths was still being calculated, but the figure was already staggering.

Tens of thousands of civilians, criminals, brigands, deserters, and revolutionaries had been claimed in the violence, while a few dozen of the Werwolf Brigade were slain in the process, with a hundred or two more injured.

But they could be replaced, their bodies to be issued crosses, medals of the organization granted to those who had perished with valor. Meanwhile, Franz Joseph could only grieve for his city. The destruction, not just to life but to property, had been so much larger than he had anticipated that he could not help but give Bruno a call. The fury in his voice was clear and precise as he tried to pin the blame for the toll this war had cost him and his people.

"You said these mercenaries of yours were professionals! What is remotely professional about tens of thousands of innocents lying dead in the streets of Vienna?!"

The number was by no means an exaggeration, but what was perhaps the most shocking was the lack of emotion in Bruno's tone from the other end of the line. There was no lament, no grief, no remorse, no guilt.

No, his words were as expressionless as the dead which the Austrian Archduke was trying to pin responsibility onto him. His words, however, pierced sharper than a knife as he stated the true cost of his services in figures so staggering that the aging Emperor damn near had a heart attack.

"Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands… Your city was so corrupt, degenerate, and beyond rehabilitation that the men you employed had no option but to wipe them out. These things are contagious to a healthy population, and if left unchecked, your entire country would be damned to hell in the wake of their sins.

You owe me in ways you cannot even begin to fathom, my friend, and the war has not yet concluded. You hired the Werwolf Brigade to restore law and order to your lands, and you also authorized them to use any means at their disposal to do so.

It would appear you have been away from the battlefield for too long. Sitting in your luxury while you and your family were safe and protected, believing that no force on this earth could ever bring your Empire to ruin.

But you were deceived, blinded by your own hubris, and now the price must be paid to ensure that you and your family continue to rule and that Austria survives the turbulent era to come.

Blood will be spilled, iron will be forged, engines of war will be built on a scale never before witnessed in history, and in the end, you will emerge victorious. And when the Werwolf Brigade has obliterated the revolutionaries who would see you and your family lined up against a wall if ever given the chance, the price will be paid in full as you agreed upon in advance.

So the next time that the consequences of your naivety prove too great for your feeble old mind to bear responsibility for, do not come seeking me to shift the blame in a poor attempt to assuage your conscience and its need for expiation of guilt.

You will hear from me when the time comes to settle your debts. Until then, sit back and reminisce on the days long forgotten, because it is a new era—one in which your chivalrous notions have no place left on the battlefield. I thought the Great War would have taught you that lesson, but I fear you were too stubborn to fully let it take effect."

Bruno hung up immediately after saying this, gazing down at the paperwork on his desk, all the while leaving the Austro-Hungarian Emperor stupefied at what he had done and whom he had brought into his home, completely unaware of his desires.

An army of wolves now marched from Vienna across the Austrian landscape, doing to it as they had done in the capital. And those loyalists to the crown—those men who had come home from the war forever changed by its brutality, but strong enough to resist the temptations of soul-damning vice? They were right by the side of the wolves who led them into battle.

It was an unstoppable war machine that sought to burn everything in its path, and Franz Joseph had been the cause of its creation.

As for Bruno, he was fulfilling his military obligations at the high command of the German Army. He had drafted a proposal designed for the reorganization of the German Armed Forces.

This included the creation of a new branch, turning the Luftstreitkräfte into its own independent organization to complement the Heer and Kaiserliche Marine perfectly. In addition to this, the German Naval Infantry had expanded into a corps-sized unit within the jurisdiction of the Kaiserliche Marine.

In the coming wars, these men would be the bulk of the German Armed Forces needed for amphibious landings. However, there was another unit that Bruno had helped create from scratch during this new era of peace and prosperity that the German Reich now found itself in.

Fallschirmjägers. The German Paratroopers. Bruno wanted to begin expanding upon these units, integrating them into the army command structure like paratroopers were in the American Armed Forces of the 21st century, rather than the Luftwaffe as they had been in Bruno's past life.

But these weren't the airborne infantry of the Second World War in Bruno's past life… Oh no… The Fallschirmjäger Korps Bruno had planned was far more similar to the Russian VDV of the 21st century.

Airborne combined arms forces dropped from the air into hostile and austere theaters of combat. Instant relief for those ground forces that were besieged by a greater number of combatants than they could reasonably hold out against on their own.

There were, of course, problems with this, and it would take a minimum of two decades to solve them. But here and now, in 1917, Bruno intended to lay the groundwork for this grand scheme.

The intention was that by the year 1939, presuming the timeline proceeded in a way that allowed the Second World War to break out at roughly the same time as the one Bruno had already lived through, Germany would be in a place to deploy forces anywhere across the world—if all things went as planned, that is…