Chapter 223: The Third Imperial Audience

"What? His Majesty summoned me over such a trivial matter? I am truly humbled... It was just a simple thesis. I wrote it on a whim just to ensure I graduated."

Hearing the reason for Emperor Wilhelm's summons, Lelouch felt uncharacteristically nervous.

He had already been summoned for an imperial audience twice before. This was his third time, so he shouldn't have been too anxious, but today's reason completely exceeded his expectations.

Emperor Wilhelm let out a soft, skeptical scoff. "On a whim? Fine, even if it was just on a whim, you still haven't answered my other question. Did you really come to Wilhelmshaven for three days solely to attend a battleship's commissioning ceremony? Did Hipper invite you?"

Lelouch replied, "Due to previous joint army-navy operations, I've had multiple contacts with Vice-Admiral Hipper. But attending the commissioning ceremony this time was more about carrying out my superior's orders. The commander of the 6th Army, Prince Rupprecht, asked me to represent him and take a look if I had the time. After all, the battleship "Bavaria" is named after his kingdom.

"Of course, as a frontline commander and one of the few who has faced enemy armored units head-on, I have some experience with the use of new weapons. I also took the opportunity during this trip to share some feedback with the technical leads from suppliers like Krupp and DWM."

The Emperor finally recalled the matter. It made perfect sense and was completely reasonable.

Since Lelouch was here representing the Bavarian Royal Family, bringing up weapon development was just a side topic. The Emperor couldn't be bothered to dwell on whether Lelouch was overstepping his bounds.

As for Lelouch and his associates privately opening massive iron mines and steel plants on the Eastern Front, or secretly acquiring shares in new ironworks from Krupp—the Emperor currently had no way to investigate those matters.

Emperor Wilhelm steered the conversation back to business, pressing him about the thesis. "In the introduction of your paper, you wrote that as more nations adopt populist politics in the future, the unpredictability of war will only grow. Therefore, a competent General Staff should formulate combat plans against all neighboring countries and potential adversaries during peacetime, regardless of current alliances or diplomatic relations.

"This point resonates deeply with me. If, back in July 1914, the General Staff had been able to produce a battle plan aimed solely at Lusha, alongside a contingency plan to defend the Western Front with minimal forces just in case, the nation would never have ended up in this current state!"

Only then did Lelouch realize exactly which argument had moved the Emperor. Maintaining a composed, neither servile nor overbearing demeanor, he echoed the sentiment and offered a few more in-depth explanations.

The Emperor raised a hand. "There's no need to explain that. But I want to know—you claim these views aren't your original thoughts, but rather a return to tradition, a true inheritance of the core philosophies of Clausewitz and Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke. Do you have proof of this? Your thesis isn't finished yet. I want to see concrete evidence, not empty slogans."

Emperor Wilhelm suddenly turned dead serious, genuinely wanting to verify the truth.

Was this Lelouch just a sycophant, uttering these words merely to flatter his superior and baselessly attributing them to the ancients? Or did this logic truly align completely with the wisdom of his predecessors?

If Lelouch couldn't provide solid evidence, it would prove he was nothing more than a fawning courtier.

It was a bit like the ancient Eastern tale where the scholar Ouyang Xiu asked the examinee Su Shi, "Where exactly did you read the historical anecdote you cited about Minister Gao Yao ordering three executions and Emperor Yao offering three pardons?" only for Su Shi to breezily reply that he had simply made it up, judging the morals of antiquity by common sense.

But the two situations were not entirely identical.

Su Shi's answer could be praised for its quick wit because his argument wasn't made for personal gain or to flatter those in power.

Lelouch couldn't afford to use that kind of quick wit, because the very words he spoke were exactly what Emperor Wilhelm wanted to hear.

Fortunately, Lelouch wasn't spouting empty words. He immediately spoke with confident fluency: "The great Clausewitz said that 'war is the continuation of politics.' Since it is the continuation of politics, the military departments during peacetime must impartially prepare combat plans against all neighboring countries and potential adversaries.

"Therefore, this is the true inheritance of Clausewitz's ideology. Schlieffen's behavior—taking it upon himself to decide who was a potential adversary and who wasn't—was what truly ruined the nation. What right did a mere soldier like him have to guess who the enemy was? That is a power reserved for politicians! By making that judgment himself, he was effectively a military man meddling in politics."

Lelouch knew that the Emperor used to highly admire Schlieffen—at least during peacetime, during the years when they were slowly building up armaments with Britannia and Francia as their hypothetical enemies. That was because Schlieffen's imagined adversaries aligned perfectly with the Emperor's own.

It was only the later outbreak of the Sarajevo incident—an unpredictable black swan event—and the subsequent diplomatic shifts that caused their actual enemies to differ from the original hypothetical ones. That was what led to the frantic scrambling and the resulting catastrophe.

But facing the Emperor, Lelouch didn't flinch. He knew full well that their visions of the enemy had aligned back then, yet he still had to highlight the crux of the matter: even if they aligned, it was still wrong! As a soldier, even if his guesses matched the Emperor's, it was still interference in politics!

Slamming this massive accusation down, Lelouch fully intended to completely ruin the reputation of Schlieffen, that opportunist who only sought to pander to his superiors. There was no avoiding this. Lelouch was going to write it exactly like this in his future thesis; that was already set in stone. So even if the Emperor was asking him directly right now, he had to give this exact answer.

If he softened his words now out of concern for the Emperor's pride, only to insist on this stance when writing his thesis later, he would easily be branded a two-faced hypocrite.

By directly standing his ground now, even if it temporarily put the Emperor in an awkward spot, Emperor Wilhelm would view him as an honest official with strong principles. He might not be endearing, but he was at least upright and unyielding.

Emperor Wilhelm was indeed having a hard time accepting the blunt words, but logically, he couldn't refute them. It was especially striking since this was the first time in years someone had told him that Schlieffen's attitude of 'only doing exactly what the Emperor told him to do' was, in fact, political interference. Unwittingly, this gave the Emperor a slight sense of relief, as if a fraction of the blame had been lifted from his own shoulders.

Exactly. As a minister, doing what the Emperor commanded well was undoubtedly correct. But for things the Emperor hadn't explicitly ordered—as long as they fell within your jurisdiction—could you simply ignore them? The Emperor didn't know everything. In any specific field, the minister in charge was the primary party responsible. Shouldn't you inherently know what was important, even if the Emperor hadn't explicitly assigned it to you?

Pouring your effort solely into what the Emperor explicitly commanded while ignoring everything he didn't—wasn't that just political interference, administrative laziness, dereliction of duty, and selective enforcement?

With all these labels thrown onto the pile, Schlieffen's posthumous reputation grew a degree or two fouler in the Emperor's heart.

Seeing that the Emperor, despite his grim expression, was genuinely reflecting on the matter, Lelouch struck while the iron was hot, pivoting to praise the merits of former Chief of Staff Helmuth von Moltke:

"Back when Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke was in charge of the General Staff, he proposed a plan. He believed that because the Western Front was shorter, and the future of warfare would see increased firepower density, the Western Front would heavily favor the defending side. The Eastern Front, being much longer, was suited for mobile wars of encirclement and annihilation. Although Lusha's vast territory made direct conquest impossible—not even Napoleon could manage it—by wiping out their effective forces through a series of mobile and annihilation battles, we might be able to exploit Lusha's internal pressures to force them into an armistice on relatively acceptable terms.

"And everything we are putting into practice on the Eastern Front today is actually just a further evolution of Field Marshal Moltke's original concept. It's just that today, we have discovered even more leverage to force the enemy to sue for peace or collapse outright than the old Field Marshal had back then.

"In the old Field Marshal's era, no one could have imagined that the common people of Lusha would grow so dissatisfied with the Tsar, brewing dark undercurrents of dissent. But now that we have this opportunity, we can force the Tsar to divert his strength to deal with internal strife, making it much easier to compel them to seek peace.

"Therefore, every argument I've presented is truly just absorbing and refining the wisdom of our predecessors. There is absolutely no originality in it, and nothing truly worthy of praise."

That last sentence was pure performative modesty. It also served to clarify his stance: Lelouch was absolutely not pandering to the Emperor. He was simply pursuing what he believed to be the objective truth.

Emperor Wilhelm's relationship with Helmuth von Moltke had not been very good. When Wilhelm first ascended the throne in 1888, he ousted Helmuth von Moltke, forcing him into retirement. Moltke didn't actually pass away until 1891, meaning he died three years after being forced into idleness.

Back then, the Emperor had been dissatisfied with Moltke's strategy of defending the West and attacking the East. He felt Schlieffen's strategy of attacking the West and defending the East was far superior. For over a decade, he had been actively preparing for a Western offensive. Who could have known that when war finally broke out, reality would dictate the exact opposite? All those years of preparation had been aimed in the wrong direction.

Confronted with Lelouch's fierce and direct argumentation, Emperor Wilhelm's impression of Helmuth von Moltke finally improved slightly.

Of course, Lelouch certainly wasn't saying all this just to clear the name of an old man who had been dead for twenty-five years. This was merely his first step.

Once Moltke's name was officially vindicated, Lelouch, Marshal Goltz, and even Prince Rupprecht could subtly emerge as the orthodox inheritors of the great first Chief of Staff Marshal Moltke's ideological mantle.

Until now, no such faction had existed within the General Staff. On paper, Moltke had always been respected, but his doctrines had never been genuinely implemented. Schlieffen had constantly styled himself as Moltke's successor, yet in truth, he had merely waved Moltke's banner while paving his own separate path.

Lelouch's goal was to explicitly point out that Schlieffen had never truly inherited Moltke's legacy. Schlieffen was a heretic; Lelouch and his allies were the orthodox successors.

In the political terminology of the East, Lelouch's maneuver would be called shaoshu—reviving the orthodox legacy of a predecessor to legitimize a new agenda.

Hearing this, Emperor Wilhelm recalled the twists and setbacks of the past two years and couldn't help but sigh with deep emotion.

"How could our predecessors have ever predicted that a colossal empire of nearly 200 million people could face internal destabilization simply because its frontline armies were annihilated? Back when Napoleon battered the Lusha people so brutally, the Lusha civilians never rose up to oppose their Tsar."

Emperor Wilhelm had clearly grasped the greatest difference between past and present: the patience of the Lusha civilians in Napoleon's era compared to the Lusha civilians today. Their tolerance for the Tsar's extortionate taxes, brutal levies, and incompetent leadership was drastically different.

If Wilhelm had realized this eight or ten years earlier, he might never have treated Britannia and Francia as hypothetical enemies under the assumption that they would be relatively easier to bully.

At this moment, a profound and genuine regret washed over Wilhelm.

He had vastly underestimated the resistance potential of the masses. Whenever Lusha was mentioned, the standard benchmark was always their fierce resolve against foreign conquest during the Napoleonic era.

Seizing upon the Emperor's lament, Lelouch perfectly timed the addition of his own insights:

"Your Majesty, you were indeed wrong on this point, but our entire Western world has historically been far too dismissive of the power of the people. This includes back when Napoleon first rose to power—every nation on the continent vastly underestimated the Franks.

"Because here on the continent, we've suffered a historic lack of examples and lessons regarding the common people rising up to overthrow dynasties. The destruction of most nations has come from foreign invasions. If we look closer at Eastern history, however, we see that bottom-up dynastic overthrows are incredibly common.

"For a very long time, the people of the East unified their entire known world. Excluding a few later dynasties that were destroyed by external forces like nomadic invasions from the north, for the vast majority of their two-thousand-year history, their empires fell to bottom-up rebellions that replaced the ruling dynasty.

"Without these historical lessons, it's easy for us to ignore the power of the masses. Your words just now reminded me of an ancient Eastern sage named Zhuge Liang. He once delivered a classic discourse on how a weaker faction could reclaim the world, a strategy known as the Longzhong plan...

"...In my opinion, the two most quintessential points of the Longzhong plan are these. First, you must secure your own base of operations and manage it well—forge alliances abroad and cultivate internal governance. The second point is that one must 'wait for a shift in the balance of the world' before launching a multi-pronged northern expedition.

"The true core is exactly that: 'wait for a shift in the balance of the world.' When the weak face the strong, trying to out-develop them isn't guaranteed to work. If you rush for quick success, you often suffer catastrophic losses, and years of accumulation are flushed away.

"However, the side with internal stability—or the side that holds legitimacy and the moral high ground—can afford to wait. In Zhuge Liang's era, if his liege hadn't grown impatient, or hadn't been blinded by... vengeance, and had instead relied purely on rational calculations, they could have waited for the two internal usurpations and dynastic shifts that eventually struck their powerful enemies.

"If you can maintain a steady hold, focus on developing your own territory during peacetime, and exploit the fact that your own regime is secure from collapse, you can wait for the enemy to undergo a regime change. Every time they fall into chaos, you strike and tear off a huge chunk of their flesh. Over time, victory is possible.

"When the Empire's General Staff calculated the strength and weakness of our enemies in the past, this was precisely the mistake they made. They never factored in the risk of internal pressure causing a regime change within the enemy's borders. They always fixated on completely defeating and conquering the enemy on the battlefield.

"If we can apply the principles of the Longzhong plan to dealing with Lusha, we won't seek a rapid victory. We simply perfect our own state during peacetime and wait for a shift in the world balance. We wait for internal chaos to erupt within the enemy. Every time Lusha devolves into turmoil, we march in and carve off a massive piece of territory, all while ensuring our own stability. That is where our true opportunity lies!

"But the prerequisite for all of this is that we ourselves cannot descend into chaos. If we overburden the people with excessive taxes and conscription, subjecting them to starvation and freezing temperatures, then just as the enemy's internals will shift, so will ours—we have to respect the natural laws of the world.

"The Eastern text The Art of War states: 'The skillful fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy. To secure ourselves against defeat lies in our own hands, but the opportunity of defeating the enemy is provided by the enemy himself.' This is another expression of waiting for a shift in the world's balance. Against an unbeatable foe, you must perfect your own defenses, guarantee you won't fall into chaos, and then wait for the enemy to slip up. Ignoring these two principles guarantees a heavy price must be paid."

Emperor Wilhelm was left slightly bewildered by Lelouch's combined East-West arguments. For a moment, he couldn't quite wrap his head around all the heavily translated-sounding terminology.

But his intuition told him that whatever Lelouch was saying sounded incredibly profound.

In the past, the Empire truly had vastly underestimated the internal power of the common people.

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