Chapter 215: The Tsar Is Too Cooperative

Many of the vicious schemes Lelouch taught Duke Rupprecht were unfit to be spoken of under the sun, yet their effectiveness in governing a state was undeniably extraordinary.

Out of sheer necessity, some of these matters even had to be coordinated with Minister Baden of the Ministry of Prisoner of War and Occupied Territories Affairs.

Although Minister Baden was a well-known figure belonging to the center-left faction, he was a pragmatic man who did not strictly adhere to dogma. He could understand and cooperate with certain initiatives while promising to maintain absolute secrecy to the outside world.

This was one of the brilliant aspects of the strategies Lelouch provided them: every single one of his schemes possessed a completely plausible explanation on the surface, making him fearless of leaks.

Take, for instance, his decision to stop the Emperor and Hindenberg from urgently assaulting Poland, aiming instead for a deliberate, measured advance. He would never reveal his true motive to a fourth person. Instead, he had planted a technical pretext well in advance—"during the bitterest cold of winter, diesel fuel won't ignite, so the tanks will stall out and be unable to advance"—an explanation that could easily withstand public scrutiny.

Therefore, no one could blame him if the ultimate liberation of the Poles came a bit too slowly. Just like during World War II on the Earth plane, when the citizens of Warsaw attempted to liberate themselves at the final juncture without relying on external forces, the external forces simply ground to a halt along the banks of the Vistula River due to technical failures and needed a breather, leading to the Warsaw uprising being crushed.

According to official history, the Poles couldn't point fingers at anyone for that; they had simply courted their own destruction.

And the arrangement Lelouch was engineering today would be executed far more flawlessly than those historical setups. As long as they followed his strategy, future historians would be entirely speechless no matter which angle they examined it from.

This was the reputation fitting the foremost poison-tongued strategist in the world.

Over the next three months, he wouldn't necessarily have to remain at the academy the entire time. He could travel around the rear, visiting major military-industrial conglomerates to foster the technological growth of their armament manufacturing. He also planned to check on the expansion of his sister and brother-in-law's electric arc steel mill, confirming whether their company—which used low-grade steel to manufacture wartime railway tracks and freight car bodies—had smoothly entered production.

The train journey alone would take two or three days. He estimated he would arrive back in Berlin around January 12.

...

Meanwhile, the story shifted elsewhere.

While Lelouch endured the dust and fatigue of his return journey to Berlin, the domestic landscapes across the channel in the Brit Nation, as well as in Lusha to the northeast, were shrouded in bleak gloom and profound upheaval following the catastrophic defeats and total annihilation of their armies at the Battles of Gallipoli and Kyiv.

In London, inside the Prime Minister's official residence at 10 Downing Street, Prime Minister Asquith had locked himself in his room for several consecutive days, claiming sickness and avoiding all callers.

All concrete state affairs had been handed over to Finance Minister Andrew Bonar Law and Minister of Munitions and War Lloyd George to handle temporarily.

He knew very well that with the utter fiasco of the Gallipoli campaign and the destruction of the 750,000-strong army, it wasn't merely Admiralty Minister Wharton Spencer who would face accountability—even his own seat as Prime Minister was likely untenable.

The stakes placed on this gamble had simply been too high. They had even violated Greece's neutrality, causing the diplomatic prestige of the Britannia Empire to plummet and leaving its international reputation in tatters.

And yet, despite all that, they still hadn't won. Instead, they had run face-first into an armored breakthrough and pincer movement by the enemy, falling short just a few thousand kilometers away from Istanbul as their entire army was surrounded—

If Asquith knew Chinese, he would have tilted his head to the heavens and roared: Heaven intends to destroy me! This is no failure of strategic command!

The only reason he hadn't formally stepped down yet was that Britannia had so far suffered only a total military defeat; the total diplomatic defeat had not yet arrived.

If it remained just a military failure, letting Admiralty Minister Wharton take the fall and resign might have been enough. Only when the boot of complete diplomatic failure finally dropped would it be his turn as Prime Minister to face the music.

And today, January 10, 1916—exactly ten days after the military disaster—the boot of utter diplomatic failure finally struck the ground.

Early that morning, the doors to the Prime Minister's office were pushed open. A Secretary of State stepped inside carrying a heavy dispatch.

"Prime Minister—this is a public telegram from Greece. King Constantine I of Greece announced today that the domestic counter-insurgency operations have ended in victory. The traitorous rebel Venizelos was captured alive in Salonika and escorted back to Athens. After an emergency trial, he was publicly executed by firing squad in Syntagma Square just moments ago. Approximately 100,000 Athenian citizens gathered to watch the execution—"

It was over. Everything was over.

The diplomatic defeat had crashed down completely.

With the pro-Britannia traitor and proxy, former Prime Minister Venizelos, formally executed under military law as a national traitor—and with tens of thousands of Athenian citizens throwing rotting food waste and spitting upon his corpse—

The Brit Nation's previous rhetoric of "responding to the invitation of the Greek people to help them overthrow a tyrant" had turned into an out-and-out lie and a total farce. This was the final, fatal strike against the British Prime Minister.

"I—take responsibility and resign. Draft a resignation speech for me." Asquith swallowed hard with great difficulty, yet it did nothing to ease the dry, sticking sensation in his throat. He felt as though his throat had withered completely; he couldn't even muster the strength to speak properly.

Later that evening, Asquith officially announced his resignation from office. Immediately following him, Admiralty Minister Wharton was also forced to resign.

After a series of urgent procedures, George V followed protocol and announced that Finance Minister Andrew Bonar Law would serve as temporary Prime Minister.

Simultaneously, Minister of Munitions and War Lloyd George was reassigned as Finance Minister and Minister of Munitions. Essentially, his post as Minister of War was traded for Finance Minister. On paper, it was a promotion right back up the ladder. Moreover, going forward, Lloyd George held the reins over both the money and the production of munitions—controlling everything from funds to physical supplies—which completely streamlined the coordination chain for the empire's military-industrial production.

As for the formation and command of the army, that would no longer have anything to do with Lloyd George. Truthfully, this situation suited him quite well; if the army suffered another defeat in the future, the blame wouldn't fall on his shoulders. He only had to ensure the weapons were manufactured properly.

If the quantity and quality of the weaponry were flawless, yet the frontline troops still couldn't win, that certainly wouldn't be the fault of the Finance Minister and Minister of Munitions.

On the Earth plane, after Asquith rolled out of office, Lloyd George—being from the same political faction—should have directly stepped up to take the reins, appearing in the posture of a "reformer."

However, in this plane, because the upper echelon of the Brit Nation's military departments had performed so dismally, Lloyd George couldn't be directly promoted due to his tenure as Minister of War. He carried some liability, even if he wasn't the primary culprit like the Prime Minister and the Admiralty Minister.

Consequently, the underlying tone of this cabinet reshuffle shifted from "reform" to "tearing it down and starting over," allowing Asquith's political opposition to rise to power.

Following the violent upheaval among the Brit Nation's upper echelon, Andrew Bonar Law, possessing virtually no military experience, successfully took office as the opposition leader.

Yet looking at the current state of affairs, he was utterly bewildered.

With the Great War fought to this state, were they supposed to beg Demania for peace? That would be far too humiliating. Furthermore, doing so would mean thoroughly betraying Francia and Lusha. The three nations had signed a treaty explicitly forbidding separate peace treaties with Demania. If they actually did that, the centuries of diplomatic credibility the Brit Nation had accumulated would instantly drop to zero.

Therefore, Andrew Bonar Law decided to put up one final struggle.

Since he didn't know how to proceed on his own, he planned to consult the ousted Minister Wharton—a man who supposedly possessed some military insight and resources, but had simply suffered bad luck.

—

On the morning of the 11th, his very first day as Prime Minister, Bonar Law summoned the now office-less Wharton to his chambers to ask for his assessment of the current situation.

"Do you think there is still any chance of saving the Lushans? I'll speak frankly: you have left the political arena, so there is no conflict of interest between us. Speak freely if you have any advice. If it holds value, I will naturally adopt it."

If it wasn't reliable, he obviously wouldn't adopt it; he would just listen casually. After all, Bonar Law himself understood nothing of such matters.

Fat Wharton, despite having fallen from power, still possessed a lot of fighting spirit and was eager to continue offering strategies to those on the stage—a sharp contrast to the thoroughly demoralized former Prime Minister Asquith.

He forced himself to rally his spirits and analyzed vigorously: "With the war reaching this stage, the Lushans' biggest problem is that they have completely lost their capacity to regenerate.

Their remaining territory has lost ninety percent of its coal, eighty percent of its iron ore, and sixty percent of its steel refining capacity compared to their peak. Furthermore, they are facing an absolute deficit of at least ten million tons of basic food supplies.

Right now, the most terrifying thing isn't the Demanians continuing their triumphant advance to push deeper into Lusha.

If those Demanian dogs are willing to attack, things would actually be manageable. At the very least, we could sit back and watch as two massive hordes of gray cattle trade lives to drain the Demanians' manpower reserves.

What is truly terrifying is if the Demanians firmly occupy Lusha's core resource regions and slowly digest them for their own use, while simultaneously tightening their blockade to entirely seal off the Lushans' import channels for steel, weapons, grain, and coal.

If that happens, within a year the Lushans will be reduced to a state where they can't even scrape together enough rifles and artillery, forcing them to rely purely on throwing human lives into the meat grinder!"

Bonar Law waved his hand to disperse the cigar smoke Fat Wharton had excitedly puffed out, summarizing coldly: "So what you mean is, if we still want to save Lusha, the key is to open up maritime transport routes and continue giving Lusha blood transfusions. Only then can we efficiently utilize Lusha's human resources to continue bleeding Demania's manpower dry?

Be specific: what sea routes do we still have left that might save them? Your Gallipoli plan failed, the Black Sea is impossible to recover, and the Baltic Sea has long since become the home nest of the Demanian fleet."

The situation facing the Lushans in this plane was even more tragic than on the Earth plane. Here, the Eastern world remained isolated from outside affairs and refused to get involved in the division of spoils between the imperialist powers.

In this plane, Lusha didn't even possess the seaside village of Vladivostok, meaning there was no Pacific sea route at all. Relying on the pitiful transport capacity of the Trans-Siberian Railway was entirely out of the question.

Consequently, even Fat Wharton—a man deeply versed in naval affairs who had spent half his life studying maritime trade lifelines—couldn't produce many alternatives: "To save Lusha, there are only two paths left. Either we ensure the northern route through the Arctic Ocean can deliver weapons, ammunition, and grain to the Lushans—I heard Nicholas II already began pushing hard on this late last November, rushing construction on a new port called Murmansk at all costs to replace the easily frozen port of Arkhangelsk.

But even if the port is finished, they still have to simultaneously rush the construction of a railway connecting Saint Petersburg to Murmansk. Otherwise, even if the supplies arrive at Murmansk Port by sea, they will just sit rotting in the warehouses, unable to reach Saint Petersburg.

Aside from the Northern Sea Route plan, the Lushans' only other remaining option is to punch through the Middle Eastern region south of the Caucasus, striking from Egypt—which our nation controls—all the way through Osman-controlled Syria, Iraq, and Persia. Although the Lushans have lost naval supremacy in the Black Sea, they can still bypass the Caucasus Mountains via inland lake transport across the Caspian Sea.

As for us, we must ensure grain from India can transit through Iraq or Persia to reach the Transcaucasus."

Prime Minister Bonar Law knitted his brows in deep contemplation for a moment, then probed without much confidence: "But regarding the first route you mentioned, this Murmansk issue, there really isn't anything we can do to help, is there?

Our naval supremacy in the North Sea is certainly secure; the Demanians' High Seas Fleet can only hide inside their Baltic shell and wouldn't dare emerge to contest North Sea control. But constructing the port and railway at Murmansk depends entirely on the Lushans themselves.

As for the southern Middle Eastern plan, I recall that right when the war began, the empire attempted to launch an offensive into the Osman region of Iraq from the tribal emirates along the southern coast of the Gulf, but we suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of General Goltz—the commander the Demanians sent to lead the Osman Middle Eastern front.

Are you seriously expecting us to send the empire's elite forces back to the Middle East for another risky landing operation? That would be even more of a suicide mission than the Gallipoli campaign!"

Having his past failures exposed right to his face naturally filled Fat Wharton with intense resentment. Yet his conviction of hatred toward Demania allowed him to swallow his pride: "I am well aware that our empire's current army is no longer a match for the Demanians. There is no hope of resolving this through pure military means with our own forces.

But if Your Excellency decides to cultivate the Middle Eastern route and take one last gamble, I happen to know someone named Thomas Edward Lawrence. He might be able to find Your Excellency an alternative path by inciting other ethnic groups under Osman rule in the Middle East to rise up in rebellion on their own. When the time comes, the empire will only need to supply them primarily with guns and ammunition, letting them throw their lives away fighting the Demanians and Osmans!

This young man possesses an absolute talent for winning over and understanding the locals. Even Foreign Minister Balfour thinks highly of him. If Your Excellency doesn't believe me, you can verify this with Balfour."

Seeing Fat Wharton invoke Arthur Balfour to back up his claim, Prime Minister Bonar Law had no choice but to treat the matter with a bit more gravity, temporarily committing the name and strategy to memory.

He planned to find some free time in a few days to speak with this young man named Lawrence.

Speak of the Tsar, and the Tsar appears.

While Fat Wharton and Prime Minister Bonar Law were discussing how to save the Tsar, Nicholas II himself was naturally scrambling to save himself.

The food shortage issues across Lusha's major northern cities had already become evident at the very beginning of winter.

The reason it manifested with such immediate, brutal impact was primarily that Lusha's food crisis hadn't developed overnight.

The war's devastation on agricultural production had been far too severe. Coupled with Lusha's excessively high mobilization rate, vast numbers of able-bodied young men had been forcibly conscripted, leaving mostly women tending the fields across the provinces.

As a dead-broke empire, Lusha lacked agricultural mechanization; almost no one farmed with tractors. As early as the winter of early 1915, major cities like Petersburg and Moscow had already experienced famine.

Now, shifting from late 1915 into early 1916, this was actually the second winter famine Lusha faced since the war broke out.

Under these circumstances, stacking an additional deficit of over ten million tons of grain made the grim reality almost unimaginable.

"Just how large is this year's grain deficit? What is the situation in Petersburg, Moscow, Minsk, and Warsaw? How many people have starved to death?"

Inside the Winter Palace of Petersburg, Nicholas II asked his visiting minister of general affairs, Ivan Logginovich Goremykin, with deep furrows in his brow.

This minister of general affairs had only been appointed to his post after the war began. Originally famous for opposing reform, he stubbornly refused to make concessions to the bourgeois class while ruthlessly squeezing serfs and laborers.

He also shared an exceptionally close, conspiratorial relationship with Rasputin, the favored mystic at the Tsar's side. At this moment, however, he lowered his gaze meekly and answered the thorny question in a quiet voice: "According to municipal statistics, the number of civilians who starved to death in Petersburg stands at one thousand six hundred and twenty."

"And the actual figure?"

"Roughly—over eighty thousand."

"What? And that is just in Petersburg alone?" Nicholas II stared so wide-eyed that the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes stretched completely flat. "Then added all together across the nation, how many must there be—"

Minister Goremykin replied, "Your Majesty, figures from other regions have yet to be fully compiled, but the Council of Ministers is doing its utmost to stabilize the situation. The conditions in Warsaw, Lodz, and other places are countless times more grim.

Our current strategy is to aggressively requisition surplus grain from across Poland and western Belarus to guarantee supplies for our most critical cities like Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Novgorod."

Nicholas II let out a heavy sigh: "Even if we transport it, what difference does it make? Can the empire distribute the grain directly into the hands of ordinary citizens? Who knows how many corrupt officials would line their pockets during the distribution process! And if we expect civilians to purchase grain themselves, the price of bread outside has already skyrocketed several dozen times over! I hear it is still climbing!"

It appeared Nicholas II possessed a shred of self-awareness, knowing full well just how rotten and filthy Lusha's civil service bureaucracy truly was.

Minister Goremykin couldn't help but flush red in his old face at these words, hastily explaining: "We still have options. The Council of Ministers has currently formulated a solution: work-for-relief. We will take the civilians who cannot afford food and mobilize them en masse to participate in the construction of Murmansk Port and the railway connecting Murmansk to Saint Petersburg."

On the Earth plane, the port of Murmansk was finally completed on October 4, 1916 (September 21 on the Russian calendar). Once finished, that port was indeed capable of functioning normally, handling incoming and outgoing cargo vessels.

However, the railway connecting to the port was in far worse shape. Officially, the line entered trial operations on November 3, 1916 (October 21 on the Russian calendar), exactly one month after the port's completion.

In reality, outside of running a few freight trains on the day trial operations were announced, they immediately declared issues requiring inspection and repairs. To put it bluntly, the railway's construction quality fell drastically short of standards; running a train would even cause roadbed sinking. It was nothing more than a rushed vanity project meant to placate the Tsar. Right up until March 1917, when the Tsar was overthrown, that railway never managed to operate at full capacity.

It was said that oceans of grain transported from British colonies for Lusha sat piled up at Murmansk Port, impossible to transport inland yet lacking proper storage conditions. This resulted in tens of thousands of people starving to death daily across Lusha while countless piles of grain rotted and molded in the open-air freight yards of Murmansk.

And now, due to the loss of the Great Plain of Kievan Rus and the entire southern resource zone, the critical importance of Murmansk Port to Lusha had increased exponentially.

The Tsar of this plane clearly couldn't afford to wait until November of this year for the port and railway to be completed; he needed to push the solution forward by nearly an entire year.

Moreover, due to the Demanian Navy's dominance in the Baltic Sea, the covert route of shipping goods through Norway in collusion with pro-Britannia and pro-Norway factions in Sweden had been severed, rendering the path from the Gulf of Bothnia to Helsinki entirely useless.

All these shifts made Murmansk the Lushans' sole remaining hope for self-salvage.

Nicholas II finally grasped this reality. He resolved to summon a determination thousands of times greater than Qin Shi Huang building the Great Wall or Emperor Yang of Sui digging the Grand Canal, braving the bitter winter to rush the construction of Murmansk Port and the Murmansk-Saint Petersburg Railway.

"Very well, since matters have reached this point, we have no other choice. Announce the work-for-relief initiative. Take the surplus labor force from major cities—anyone who cannot afford food—and haul them off to build the port and railway in exchange for a bite to eat."

"Your Majesty is brilliant!" Minister Goremykin let out a slight breath of relief, secretly celebrating having survived another hurdle.

There were some things he kept to himself: if food was absolutely insufficient and many people were destined to starve regardless, the most ideal outcome was to let those who were doomed to die perish as systematically and quickly as possible.

Otherwise, if they dragged their lives through the winter only to starve during the spring famine, they would consume an extra three months of grain before dying. Not only would they fail to survive, but they would also squeeze out three months of rations from someone else who might have lived—resulting in a lose-lose scenario.

Therefore, sending people into the brutal winter of the Arctic Circle to build a port and railway was simply a matter of harsh necessity.

The latitude of Murmansk Port sat at 68.5 degrees.

Anyone with middle school geography knowledge knew the Earth's axial tilt was roughly 23.5 degrees, meaning any location above 66.5 degrees fell inside the pure frigid zone of the Arctic Circle.

Murmansk sat two degrees further north than the Arctic Circle itself. Yet today, during a bitter winter plagued by severe shortages of grain and coal, Lusha had no choice but to send millions of people to Murmansk to lay railroad tracks.

Most of these laborers were bottom-tier urban residents—some were casual laborers, others industrial workers. But because there was no coal or steel, the factories had shut down, leaving workers with no jobs and severed livelihoods. With grain prices surging by dozens of times, they could only let themselves be hauled away to construct the railway.

Even more of those rounded up were landlords, independent farmers, and Polish landed aristocracy from the Poland region who resisted the Tsar's grain requisitions—in short, dissidents of every stripe.

From that point forward, thousands upon thousands of people froze and starved to death daily along the construction sites of the Murmansk railway.

On January 20, the largest blizzard recorded in historical weather logs struck. Over a single night, an astronomical number of people froze and starved to death across the construction camps. The piles of bleached bones along the Murmansk railway soon reached a point where the number of human thigh bones far outnumbered the wooden railway ties.

In the end, the death toll caused by Nicholas II building this railway and port easily surpassed several times over the combined casualties of Emperor Yang of Sui digging the Grand Canal and launching three campaigns against Goguryeo.

The resentment the Lusha people felt toward Nicholas II had finally been kindled to its breaking point. All that was missing now was a single spark.

The only reason the populace hadn't immediately rebelled was the belief that if they endured just a little longer—if the railway and Murmansk Port were finished, overseas transport restored, and the economy revived—they might tolerate the Tsar's rule for a while yet.

But if, after the railway and port were completed, this vital lifeline of a sea route was once again choked off by the Demanian Navy—then without a doubt, a rebellion to execute the Tsar would detonate instantly.

The Murmansk railway and port were already the final card Nicholas II had wagered on the three-hundred-year rule of the Romanov dynasty.

It was a card paid for with the lives of millions of human beings. As soon as this card was crushed, it wouldn't be the least bit surprising if the rebellion broke out more than half a year earlier than it did on the Earth plane.

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