Chapter 202: Let Model and Kemal Hold the Line

After the meeting concluded, Lelouch quickly got some rest for the night. Early on the morning of December 11, he led his troops south to reinforce the Orio and Greek forces.

However, despite rushing to their aid, he did not immediately take a train. If he had, they would have had to backtrack from Poltava to Kharkiv, then circle east before heading south.

That route would have added at least several hundred kilometers. Given the train speeds of this era, the detour alone would add nearly a full day to the journey.

Therefore, Lelouch had made an impromptu suggestion the night before: they would reinforce the south by cutting directly through the enemy defense zone between Poltava and Kremenchuk, simultaneously shrinking the encirclement by a significant margin.

Kremenchuk had a direct railway line leading to Chisinau, the future capital of Moldova. From there, they could turn south toward Bucharest, the capital of Romania, and continue further south to the Bulgarian-Orio border, linking all the way to Istanbul.

In short, Lelouch's chosen route would shear off the easternmost corner of the current encirclement, depriving the enemy of several thousand square kilometers of territory.

This plan earned a nod of approval from Duke Rupprecht, who treated it as Lelouch doing one last favor for the friendly forces before his departure.

Given the Lusha Army's current state—their combat effectiveness at rock bottom and their morale unimaginably low—this kind of breakthrough was guaranteed to succeed.

At 4:30 AM on December 11, at a breakthrough point along the railway on the northern line, the Demanian Army's supporting artillery began to roar right on schedule. Thousands of shells hurled southward, blasting the Lusha soldiers along the line off their feet amidst deafening explosions.

The Lusha generals had never anticipated this. The enemy had already closed the encirclement, so shouldn't they simply wait for the desperate Lusha Army to attempt a breakout? The Demanian Army only needed to hold their defensive lines and plug any gaps while conserving their strength.

Instead, they ran into Lelouch, someone who never played by the rules. After three days of staunchly defending, conserving their own strength, and exhausting the enemy, the Demanians abruptly shifted from defense to offense on the fourth day. The speed of this transition was nothing short of breathtaking.

Caught completely off guard, the Lusha positions were swiftly breached by Tanks, tearing open an astonishingly massive gap that drove straight toward Kremenchuk on the banks of the Dnieper River. Near Kremenchuk sat a major railway bridge spanning the Dnieper. This was exactly where the railway from Poltava to Chisinau crossed the river, making the city a vital transportation hub.

In the Lusha of 1915, there were only two railway bridges across the entire Dnieper River.

One was in Kyiv, connecting the railway from Kyiv to Odessa, and the other was in Kremenchuk, linking Kharkiv, Poltava, and Chisinau.

This alone highlighted the immense strategic value of the transportation hub.

Lelouch's swift and ferocious assault not only inflicted heavy casualties on the immediate enemy forces—causing them to collapse and surrender in droves—but also struck deep panic into the four or five divisions stationed in the enemy defense zone east of Kremenchuk and north of the Dnieper River. After all, the moment Lelouch pierced through to Kremenchuk and reached the banks of the Dnieper, the Lusha forces further east would be completely cut off from their main army.

Although they were already caught in a grand encirclement, the boundaries of this trap were so vast that the interior remained somewhat loose, much like an airy wonton with little filling.

Now, Lelouch could weave through the grand encirclement and slice it into smaller pockets. The enemies facing the prospect of being isolated within them naturally felt terrified.

Forced into motion, these enemy troops abandoned their original positions and fled westward, which allowed the opposing Demanian encircling forces to advance smoothly across the entire line.

It took Lelouch only one day to arrive at Kremenchuk precisely on schedule. There, he crossed the Dnieper River and reached its southern bank.

The positions on the southern bank had already been secured in advance by Lieutenant General Kusmanek of the Orio 3rd Army.

Lieutenant General Kusmanek's forces had pushed to the vicinity of the southern bank early on, but they had had no means of dealing with the enemies on the northern bank. Now, with Lelouch advancing to meet him head-on from the opposite direction, their two-way push achieved an effect far greater than the sum of its parts.

Lelouch's original intention had merely been to hurry along his route. Yet, in the process of rushing forward, he incidentally wiped out four Lusha divisions west of Kremenchuk, freeing up more encircling troops for the friendly forces.

The time spent on the road was roughly the same as taking a train on a detour; he had not delayed his primary mission in the slightest.

Upon arriving in Kremenchuk, Lelouch immediately checked to see if the trains he required were ready.

Lieutenant General Kusmanek patted his chest and gave his guarantee. During his advance from the south, he had done his utmost to capture the trains left behind by the enemy in every city they passed through, while also mobilizing several more from the south.

He assured Lelouch that they possessed enough transport capacity to move one or two divisions every day. If more personnel and horses needed to be transported, it would have to be done in successive batches.

This was perfectly reasonable. Large-scale troop mobilizations could never be accomplished in a single stroke. The Britannians, relying on maritime transport to funnel troops from other Aegean islands into Salonika, could only manage a capacity of just over 20,000 men per day.

For the Demanians to move over 20,000 men daily via railway was already an excellent feat.

It was over 500 kilometers from Kremenchuk to Chisinau, another 400-plus kilometers from Chisinau to Bucharest, and still 300-plus kilometers from Bucharest to the Bulgarian-Orio border.

Adding the three segments together, the entire railway journey spanned 1,300 kilometers. In 1915, the railway conditions within Lusha and Romania were poor. Under normal circumstances, trains averaged speeds of 30 to 40 kilometers per hour, meaning it would take roughly 30 to 36 hours to ensure arrival.

However, this railway was only a single track, not a double line. On the return journey, trains would have to wait at major stations like Bucharest and Chisinau to pass oncoming traffic. Assuming they had enough train cars, launching a batch of trains every 36 hours with a 72-hour round trip meant they could amass an additional 50,000 troops at the front line every three days. The 200,000 reinforcements Lelouch desired would likely take nearly two weeks to fully assemble and prepare for an offensive at the Bulgarian-Orio border.

There was no helping it; mobilizing a grand army across more than a thousand kilometers was just that difficult, and the enemy faced the exact same limitations.

In this era, preparing a 200,000-man offensive within two weeks was already considered exceptionally swift.

Today was December 11. Even if he boarded a southbound train before midnight tonight, Lelouch estimated that the earliest they could launch a full-scale counteroffensive against the Britannians would be just before Christmas Eve.

He suddenly realized that he, a transmigrator harboring an Eastern soul, seemed to have picked a fight with the hypocritical whitewashing of the britannian dogs' Christmas truce.

Last year, he had similarly launched the Ypres campaign on Christmas Eve, orchestrating a sneak attack on vital railway strongholds like Stenford behind Ypres, completely severing the British Army's Ypres-Dunkirk railway line.

It looked like another Christmas Eve offensive was in the cards for this year.

For him, every Christmas Eve was a night of slaughter.

Of course, prior to the general offensive, he could initiate some diversionary attacks or deploy his troops directly to the Osman defense lines to assist them in a defensive battle. In short, the goal was simply to keep the enemy from running away.

"Since we can transport two divisions tonight, my division will go first. Have your Hungarian division follow in the next batch. If the subsequent battle progresses smoothly, we can withdraw men early and continue heading south in batches according to the plan."

Having grasped the transport capacity, Lelouch gave Kusmanek his orders.

Despite Kusmanek being a Lieutenant General, he recognized Lelouch's influence. Moreover, Lelouch was the savior who had rescued him from a POW camp. Because of this, he executed Lelouch's demands to the letter, without compromise.

He knew that Lelouch's words were as good as Field Marshal Rupprecht's.

Before boarding the train, Lelouch took a moment to write one final, concise tactical summary, having it sent back for Field Marshal Rupprecht's review.

The report summarized the tactical successes and failures of his breakthrough to Kremenchuk that day. It also recommended that the Demanian 6th Army review and replicate his methods moving forward. As they tightened the encirclement, they should no longer rely solely on the rigid tactic of pushing flatly across a single front. They needed to deploy unexpected forces appropriately, combining full-line advances with key breakthroughs. In particular, they should engineer situations where they could 'push straight to the banks of the Dnieper River in a single breath at certain weak points.'

At present, the main body of the encirclement was still formed by three railways acting as its three sides, with the Dnieper River slicing straight through the middle.

Consequently, whether the northern bank's encircling forces pushed south to the river or the southern bank's forces pushed north to it, they could effectively sever a segment of the enemy troops. Realizing they were about to be 'sliced from a large dumpling into a smaller dumpling,' these forces would be shaken and forced to scramble for an escape route ahead of time. This would present the besiegers with further opportunities to slaughter and pursue the enemy, granting their advance even greater momentum.

If these concepts were raised on Earth more than two decades later, they would not need to be taught at all, as they would already be standard operational doctrine.

In future armored blitzkriegs, once an encirclement was complete, commanders would dice the large filling into smaller pockets in various ways to consume the trapped enemy as quickly as possible. They would chop it up as finely as they could, rather than 'rolling the filling flat with a rolling pin in a single linear push.'

However, in 1915, armored penetration forces had only just been born, and deep infantry infiltration tactics remained immature, so this kind of experience still needed to be pointed out. Even so, it only required a brief mention; any knowledgeable general would understand it immediately.

Upon receiving the report, Field Marshal Rupprecht agreed wholeheartedly and instantly grasped its brilliance. He assigned a portion of his elite troops to execute the strategy, specifically instructing von Bock, who had remained on the encirclement battlefield, to launch swift infiltrations once the muddy ground froze over in the coming days, accelerating the enemy's annihilation.

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Lelouch himself would not reach the Bulgarian-Orio border until the afternoon of December 13, or possibly even the early hours of December 14.

In the intervening time, he could only count on Model and Kemal to hold their respective front lines on their own.

Kemal was not under Lelouch's direct command; therefore, he received his orders through the Osman forces' Commander-in-Chief, General von Sanders.

The orders instructed him: "When necessary, do not hold out to the bitter end. If friendly forces on the northern Greek-Orio border or the Bulgarian-Orio border collapse first—creating the risk that our troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula will be encircled by the enemy from both front and rear—then the defensive forces on the Gallipoli Peninsula must sequentially withdraw ahead of time or split their forces to reinforce the Greek-Orio border's defenders. Additionally, before you are forced to retreat and abandon your positions, you must do your utmost to destroy your defensive fortifications. This will prevent them from falling into enemy hands and increasing the difficulty of our army's future counteroffensives. As long as you stall them for one to two weeks, there is no need to agonize over the temporary loss of territory. Just wait for the Demanian reinforcements."

True to his immense military talent, the moment Kemal received the orders, he ran a rough simulation in his mind and immediately knew what to do.

Starting on the night of December 10, he had his men systematically sabotage the tunnels at the base of the Gallipoli Peninsula in areas they might abandon in the future—there was no need to fill the tunnels entirely; that would demand too much labor and waste the hard-won results of their defensive construction.

All they had to do was fill the entrances of certain tunnels for ten to twenty meters and apply a bit of camouflage. This ensured that even a direct hit on the entrance by a large-caliber artillery shell would fail to blast it open.

Meanwhile, as long as his side recorded the precise coordinates on their maps, they could simply use excavation equipment to slowly dig the entrances back open upon their return, rendering the tunnels usable once more.

This way, even if the Osman Army was forced to retreat and cede the territory, the tunnel network they had spent months cultivating would not fall into enemy hands. The vast majority of the space inside the tunnels remained empty; the entrances were simply impossible to find.

After spending two days methodically sealing the tunnel entrances, Kemal indeed received grim news from the friendly forces to the north on December 12: the small town of Kadikoy, situated at the corner connecting the mainland to the base of the Gallipoli Peninsula, had been captured by the Britannian Army that very day!

On a battlefield devoid of geographical advantages, the Osman forces predictably failed to withstand the Britannian Army, who boasted an absolute edge in equipment and outnumbered them.

The title of 'Sick Man of Western Asia' was well-deserved indeed. Without the Demanians' help, the Osman Empire's standalone combat strength was simply far too weak.

Kemal knew that if he did not split his forces and retreat now, he and the rest of the friendly troops on the Gallipoli Peninsula risked having their escape routes severed.

That night, Kemal withdrew the single division under his direct command, along with two other divisions temporarily entrusted to his care. Relocating these three Osman divisions from the Gallipoli Peninsula to the mainland, he positioned them right against the eastern edge of the Kadikoy township—where the Britannian vanguard had penetrated the deepest—and continued to mount a fighting retreat.

With the extraction of these three relatively elite divisions, the defensive capabilities of the Osman forces remaining on the Gallipoli Peninsula plummeted.

Combined with the orderly abandonment and camouflage of many of their tunnels, the scope within which the defenders could employ an elastic defense became even more constrained.

In stark contrast, the opposing Britannian landing forces were surging with momentum, especially the ANZAC generals, who were exceedingly daring in their willingness to pile on human lives for fierce charges.

Moreover, to fight the mountain battles in Gallipoli and Greece, the upper echelons of the Britannia Empire had recently brought in the elite Gurkha Mountain Regiment from the Indian colonial army, drawn from the southern foothills of the Himalayas.

A mere few regiments of Gurkha mountain troops proved deeply overwhelming for the Osman defenders, who had never encountered such forces before. They exclaimed in alarm that the Gurkhas traversed mountains and ridges as though walking on flat ground; their climbing and cross-country combat prowess during mountain assaults was simply absurd.

Even the Demanian and Orio Alpine mountain divisions likely couldn't match such cross-country capability.

Unable to hold on any longer, the last Osman defenders on the Gallipoli Peninsula finally began to collapse at an accelerating rate.

Finally, having fought to the bitter end until December 18, the Osman forces were utterly driven off the Gallipoli Peninsula.

Striking from both front and rear, the Britannian landing forces captured the entirety of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Pushing ever forward, they finally fought their way into the Tekirdag region, the last open basin plains west of Istanbul.

Truth be told, as long as the British Army conquered the two small cities in this plain area—Tekirdag to the south and Corlu to the north—and advanced east for the final eighty kilometers, they would reach the urban districts of Istanbul!

Over half a month prior, when Britannian Naval Minister Warton pitched his strategy of 'forgetting about saving face, shamelessly violating Greece's neutrality by force, installing puppets, and landing in Greece to open a second front' to Prime Minister Asquith, the Britannian Army had still been two hundred kilometers away from Istanbul.

After adopting Minister Warton's shameless and underhanded scheme, Britannia's international reputation had indeed soured slightly, but the results were instantaneous.

Case in point: it had only been twenty days since they took action, yet the original two hundred kilometers had been slashed to a mere eighty!

If they could actually conquer Istanbul in the end, they would completely open up the Black Sea Straits, bring about the downfall of Osman, and potentially even rescue the Lusha forces from their desperate straits.

Compared to such colossal gains, what did saving face matter?

Although the King of Greece was still being protected and putting up resistance on the Peloponnese peninsula to the south in Greece, and a few other minor accidents had occurred, none of it impacted the big picture anymore.

The Allied Forces surged forward like a tidal wave, piling in all their fresh reinforcements. Hundreds of thousands of troops now had but a single objective in their eyes: conquer the millennial imperial capital of Constantinople, restore the glory the Western world had lost since 1453, and become great conquerors etched into the annals of history.

As for the risks—what bloody risks? The absolute main force of the Demanians was still engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the Lushans at Kyiv. Rumor had it that the designations of the primary elite units from the Demanian 10th and 6th Armies had all shown their faces near Kyiv, and their radio signals were still clustered around the city. They obviously intended to swallow Kyiv whole before coming to the rescue here.

This was perfectly fair. The Demanians would devour Kyiv, and the Britannians would devour Istanbul; it was an even exchange of capitals.

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