Chapter 19
The wartime system of a modern nation carries a meaning completely different from that of states in earlier eras.
That’s because defense spending is like a bottomless pit that does absolutely nothing for economic growth.
Modern states after the industrial age operate on the premise of constant economic growth. If the growth rate falls, the nation starts to wobble, and if the economy shrinks, a panic follows.
Abandon consumer-goods production and focus on munitions?
Give up the budget that goes into the civilian sector and keep pouring water into the army’s bottomless pit?
If such an economic situation dragged on too long, the South would collapse outright.
So once the wartime system began, the South was, in effect, on borrowed time.
And there was only one way to extend that borrowed time.
War.
Through the switch to a wartime system, the South would become a giant war machine that kept itself alive by chewing through its enemies.
You think it’s too much to bring down on the West alone?
I know. Since the West has all its fortresses and major strongholds concentrated along the coastline, it can inflict real damage with its navy alone even without switching to a wartime footing.
But this war won’t end with annexing the West.
If the South invades the West... no matter how depraved the Central region gets, there’s no way it would just sit there and watch.
Pressure would pour in from Central in every form imaginable, economic sanctions would follow, and military pressure would begin. The war might even start alongside political and diplomatic pressure.
That’s why declaring a wartime system only then would be too late.
By then, things would already have gone too far to be solved through diplomacy.
Since the moment Central sided with the West in the Sarcen-Lutetia Treaty issue, the option of diplomacy was practically gone.
“Yeah. Still, this is the right way.”
Even so, I could confidently say this would be a much better ending than the original story’s route, where they fought over claiming the heroine and destroyed themselves together.
And well, it wasn’t as if I had declared martial mobilization without thinking at all.
The West is still undeveloped land.
If we lay railroads, develop the mines, bring down the corrupt nobles and confiscate their lands and property, then even if the mainland South switches to a wartime footing, it can still hold out to some extent.
So I just have to trust the path I chose to push forward.
In the end, I’m the one holding the reins of the beast called the South.
“Your Excellency, the army’s preparations are complete.”
That report came in a week after I declared the switch to a wartime system.
At the port, the dreadnought that had finished its final inspection was spewing black smoke, and on the ground, two divisions and their support units filled the entire field of vision.
A total of 15,000 men.
There were a few reasons for keeping the number this low.
For one, in this world, the grand dukes basically maintain armies in the hundred-thousand range. The Western Grand Duke was no exception.
But having an army and being able to deploy that army where and when it’s needed are two different matters.
Most troops have a border they’re supposed to defend.
In particular, because of its long-standing conflicts with the natives, border guards made up an enormous portion of the West’s military.
On top of that, even if you took the risk and pulled troops off the border, there was another problem. Without railroads, the West needed weeks to move units from one garrison to another.
It’s not like they could draft hundreds of thousands of soldiers the way East Asia did, so the number of men they could conscript wasn’t all that large either.
In practical terms, even if the South gathered its forces, it would only amount to a few tens of thousands.
“Raising a huge army against that many troops would be wasteful.”
The current South was, without question, under a wartime system.
All of the South’s factories were operating at full capacity. Because the factories of this era were monsters that devoured manpower, conscripting a large number of people into the army was a bit of a burden for me too.
And our strategy is to move fast and finish it quickly.
Strike their capital swiftly along the coastline under the cover of battleships.
In a strategy like this, ordinary infantry that moved too slowly would only be dead weight. Even if the numbers increased, if the speed dropped, that advantage would vanish.
“In that sense, we’ll also need to prepare the next weapons system to speed up infantry movement.”
Battleships were definitely powerful weapons.
A fortress floating on the sea with the firepower of ten 305mm naval guns could change the course of a war.
But battleships have one fatal weakness that no other weapon does.
A battleship’s main stage is the sea. It can pose no threat to inland areas beyond the range of its naval guns.
Even if battleships swallowed the West and smashed the East’s fleet, there was no way for them to advance all the way to the Imperial capital.
That’s why we needed new weapons suited to the new era.
Tanks and armored cars.
The new steel that would rule the battlefields of the future.
The South Army’s ultimate goal was a complete mechanized force fully outfitted with armored vehicles.
How terrifying the overwhelming mobility and shock power of a fully mechanized force could be was demonstrated by the German Army in the last world war.
...Of course, the true form of Nazi Germany’s so-called ‘mechanized’ divisions was soldiers drugged to the limit with methamphetamine.
Naturally, I had no intention of copying even that.
Compared to Nazi Germany, which started a war because of the Fuhrer’s rash judgment, our South was in a far more favorable position in many ways.
Nazi Germany had to fight the great powers from the very start, but our South was different.
The Empire’s second-largest industrial region, the North, was on the opposite side of the Empire.
The North, which was busy fighting monsters, had no spare capacity to worry about the South.
The Republic, which was relatively free from the pressure of mages and knights—and from the pressure of the entrenched powers—was also carrying out its own modernization, but... it was in no position to think about anything else right now, with the economic panic it was dealing with.
On top of that, our pace of modernization was the fastest.
No one could modernize more efficiently than I could, not after knowing the history of modernization Earth has gone through.
That meant we had the luxury of growing at our own pace while beating up the East, West, and Central.
Right now, it was time to enjoy that advantage to the fullest.
With my hands behind my back, I looked down out the window and gave the order.
“Lucila, send a declaration of war to the West.”
“Must we really do that? Since the West carried out a nighttime surprise attack, we already have grounds to launch a surprise offensive without a declaration of war.”
“If you want to win a battle, you can do that. But if you want to win a war, you can’t.”
An honorable army that, even after being attacked in a midnight raid, declared war, warned the civilians in advance, and then began the war.
That was the image I wanted our army to show the West.
“Prohibit all looting in occupied territories completely. Also include whether the officers have contracted venereal diseases in their performance evaluations, and keep strict watch over the soldiers’ impulsive behavior.”
I knew that looting an occupied area was an effective way to boost morale.
The old generals didn’t allow looting because they were fools. Morale was just as important to an army as its life.
But we didn’t need to do that.
Morale?
Was there any better morale booster than an enemy army collapsing under the battleship’s shelling?
Just knowing that firepower on that level was on your side made you feel secure and eager to fight.
“As soon as the supply units are ready, we’ll set out.”
With that, I put on my coat.
I would be taking part in this battle as well.
Charles Raymonz.
It was time to go look at the face of that shameless bastard who had launched a surprise raid and then gone silent for a week.
***
The West did not fail to realize that the South was preparing for war.
No matter how shameless the West’s nobles were, they didn’t think that after launching a massive nighttime air raid without a declaration of war, they would simply escape retaliation.
So had the West also prepared thoroughly?
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
“Resistance from the native tribes on the Western border is intense! They’ve launched an offensive bringing in shamans and even high-ranking monsters that hadn’t shown up much until now!”
“The wyvern corps is taking losses! Where the hell did those natives suddenly get this kind of force...”
“We only need to hold this attack off, but we can’t! We don’t have enough wyvern knights!”
The tribes on the once-quiet Western border had started pushing back fiercely.
News had spread that in the past week, the West had lost almost all of its main wyvern knight forces in clashes with the South.
The West’s natives gathered everything they could and started a guerrilla war in the borderlands.
Public opinion in the West about the war wasn’t very good either.
In the West, where the only thing they had was an army, the military was a privileged class. More precisely, that was true of the noble-born soldiers, excluding the commoner conscripts.
But in the last few battles, a great many of the West’s noble-born soldiers and knights had been cut down.
That gap could only be filled by squeezing the common people dry.
Conscription began, and the nobles imposed an emergency war tax to extort money from the populace.
Naturally, public opinion was terrible.
If the West had been attacked first and had some justification like defending its own land, it might have been different, but this was ultimately the West picking a fight with the South first over the Sarcen Fortress issue.
Support for the war was infinitely low.
There simply weren’t many people who wanted to fight against the South, with whom they shared such a high degree of cultural and ethnic similarity.
It was the price the West had paid for squeezing its people dry to wage war over the past several decades.
The morale and training of the forcibly gathered soldiers were hopelessly low, and the taxes being collected were pitiful.
It was an army far too shabby to stop the South’s elite forces armed with guns and battleships.
The only people who didn’t know that were the upper ranks of the West.
“We’ve gathered 40,000 men. Since the number alone is four times theirs, we should be able to block the South’s attack just fine.”
The nobles, swayed by the flattering words of their sycophants, were convinced of victory.
And so, while the West was assembling an army stitched together like rags, the South’s army crossed the border of the Count of Sarcen’s domain.