In peacetime the factory made boots. That put it far down the occupiers’ priority list for repairs; a shell had blown a large hole in the roof and killed most of the workforce, and in this grey January day it was only barely lit, damp, and cold. That was why Jan had chosen it for his rendezvous; that, and the stash of rifles in its vault-like basement. All over Norway there were such private caches of weapons, held ready for stril revolts, but equally suited to fighting a foreign occupier.

The last of his co-conspirators drifted in, and he brought the low murmur of conversation to an end with a peremptory clap of his hands. “All right, we’re all here. Time to get to the point. Which of you strils will fight the Burgundians?”

Nobody spoke for a few seconds; then a stril on his left rose, a powerful ironworker brought in by Jan’s friend Vidar. Like Jan, he got straight to the point. “What’s in it for us?” There was a general murmur of agreement and nodding of heads. Jan shrugged. “The old Army Law has never been repealed.”

This brought a mixture of low, indrawn breaths, and scornful snorts. The self-elected spokesman was among the snorters. “Much good it does us! How many veterans are given a marriage license?”

“Ah, but that’s in peace-time. Now we’re at war, and it’s not going so well. The Bureau will be cooperative, or the Hird will know the reason why.” This brought thoughtful nods, but the ironworker was not so easily convinced. “So in fact, you are offering us a chance to die for the greater glory of the Ynglings, and if anyone should happen to survive, why, he may very graciously marry into the family. Well being an Yngling is nice and all, but what about those years of fighting?”

Jan checked himself; granted that the man’s tone was now verging on the insolent, this was not the time to break any bones, even to enforce the courtesy customs. Besides, the stril had a point, especially in regards to himself; as far as Jan was concerned, he’d just volunteered for several bouts of point duty. For public consumption, though… Jan shrugged again. “I offer you a gamble, yes. What will the Burgundians offer you? They are enemies of the Ynglings, but they’re not particularly kinder of heart. What can you Estonians, you Balts, you Russians expect from them? A vote? I think not. Self-government? Hah. Freedom of organisation? They don’t give that to their own people. Oh, you’d be a little freer than under us, perhaps. But real freedom, like we have, like the Germans have? No. You’d still be second class, unwanted. I asked my friends to choose strils who might take a chance on fighting for something better than that. That’s why you’re here. If you won’t fight for Yngling rights… well, then you don’t deserve them anyway, and nothing I can say would make you worthy. You can go back to your tired barracks and go on living tired little second-class lives, and the Burgundians will very kindly give you a few extra privileges if they win. I wish you much joy of that.”

He was lying, of course; if he couldn’t convince these strils to fight, they couldn’t very well be let go to warn the occupiers of his plans; that was why he’d had each of his friends bring only three. Three to one would be good odds for Ynglings against strils, with the latter unarmed and not expecting to fight. But it would do no good to let them know that; threats would only cow them into sham obedience, and he couldn’t watch all of them every moment. Better to let them think they had a genuine choice; if they were going to fight, they’d have to do so from conviction.

His thoughts were interrupted by another question, not from the ironworker this time, but from near the back of his audience. “You speak of Balts, Estonians, Russians. Does your offer apply to me?” The speaker came forward, and Jan blinked to see that he was a tall black man. He hesitated for a moment – what the devil had Geir been thinking to bring a black? – but he could hardly be seen to go back on his offer; anyway, the man could always disappear if that was convenient, accidents happened in warzones. “Can you fight?” he demanded; the African drew himself up and answered proudly “I am of the Aja.”

“How did you stay out of the destructive-labour camps?” Jan asked before he could stop himself; this was not the time to remind the strils of the harsher facts of life in the Norwegian Realm. The Aja tribe had been the most consistent thorn in the side of the African colonial administration until they’d finally been rounded up in a fit of bureaucratic exasperation; even then, they’d fought to the point where very few even of their women and children had reached the salt mines. The man before him might well be the last adult Aja male alive; almost certainly he was the last one free – even in so relative a freedom as a stril in Sweden had. Still, he should not have let his curiosity overcome the need for propagandising these strils into fighting.

The African shrugged in his turn. “I am a war trophy. You would have to ask my captor why he wanted me. But I can fight.”

“He speaks truth,” came Geir’s voice, and the scarred Yngling came forward to stand beside his stril. “I found him with a bayonet through the leg, and two of our boys dead next to him. Him armed with a spear, mind you, and them with guns, and both of them Ynglings. Well, I reckon he’d done us a favour by chopping out such deadwood as that, so I did him one in turn, as best I could. Anyway, seemed a pity for a fighter like that to go to the mines. He can fight, right enough, that’s why I brought him.”

“All right; in that case, yes. The Ynglings are not proud” – Jan perforce ignored the surreptitious snorts – - “we’ll make do with what we have.” He turned to the rest. “Well now, Sambo here is going to fight. What about the rest of you?”

There was a skeptical rustle; the iron worker who had become the spokesman for the opposition expressed their thought. “You’ll make a nigger into an Yngling? What about the purity of the Yngling blood?”

Jan sighed. “I’m not going to say I like it, but the Burgundians are in the Jotunheim. If he fights, and survives, then yes. As for the blood… It’s a long-term problem. Right here and now, Norway has a bit of a short-term problem.” It wasn’t quite enough; they needed one more push, something to galvanise them into action. He thought for a moment, then got his pistol out of its underarm holster – the Burgundians had very sensibly forbidden the Ynglings firearms, with as much effect as forbidding them to breathe; no Yngling was going to walk about unarmed in a city where strils outnumbered them – and threw it to the African with a “Here, catch.”

Even the Ynglings in the room drew a sharp breath at that; to arm a stril was deep tabu, forbidden by generations of fear of The Rising that would destroy the Yngling people. Several of them went for their own guns with the blurring speed of an Yngling intending to kill, though all managed to stop themselves before the bullets flew. The only man seemingly unaffected was the African; he merely grinned, teeth shocking-white against his skin, and grew another inch or two taller. Jan held his breath a moment – if Geir said the man could fight, he could, and would be extremely dangerous if he decided to take offense at ‘Sambo’. But the gamble had worked; the strils all looked deeply impressed at this breach of both law and custom stronger than any law. To bear arms was the privilege of the ruling caste, nobody else; that was what the Yngling people were for, a tradition going back hundreds of years to the raiders in their dragon-headed ships. All words aside, the strils had not really believed until now that they might actually be given weapons. Now they believed, and crowded forward, eager for the prestige of bearing guns.

The Malmø Rising was underway.

Sunday, November 13th, 1938
Mariakirken (Mary’s church), Bergen

As Ivar entered from the sacristy, he stopped in surprise for a moment. Instead of the usual small flock of elderly worshippers, the church was packed. He had been a priest too long to let his surprise interfere with the Mass, but his thoughts were not entirely on his god as he gave the initial “Hør Herrens ord”. The text was Numbers 31, suitable to a nation at war, and familiar enough that he could give some thought to his sudden wealth of worshippers. It wasn’t very difficult; he’d only gotten as far as killing Balaam the son of Beor when it came to him. The Burgundians had entered the Jotunheim and were pushing hard for Bergen. The old gods, the warrior gods of fire and sword, had failed; and the Ynglings, who in ordinary times of war would light a candle to Odin for victory, and pray for the utter crushing of their foes – they were frightened now, and so they turned to the gentle White Christ, seeking mercy. And his text, one of the bloodier events of the Old Testament, was disappointing them; there was a rustle of restlessness in the back benches.

He stopped his reading and regarded his swollen flock, feeling a slow anger begin to swell. All his life they had neglected Jesus, had ignored the promise of eternal life, focusing instead on their worldly dominion and their mastery of the strils. But now, when the Empire trembled – oh yes, now they would turn to the White Christ, and seek forgiveness for their sins. Well, he was not one to turn anyone away from God; but by God, they’d hear what the price was and they’d pay it truly, or he was no true priest.

“You have not come”, he began slowly, feeling his way into a sermon he had not written beforehand, “to hear of the victories granted by Jehovah to His worshippers. You wish to hear of the mercy that the White Christ gives, and be comforted in this time of danger. And it is true that there is great comfort for us all. But you must not think that Christ is a fool, who gives his gifts to all and sundry, taking no account of their worthiness. No. He spared the adulteress when they would have stoned her, yes. But he also said to her, “Go now, and sin no more.” And that is precisely what you must do, if you want forgiveness: You must promise with all your heart that you repent of your evil, and will sin no more. And I think, my children, I think you will find that hard to do; for you are all of the blood of Yngling, and the old wicked law of the pagans is strong in you.”

“My children, you have sinned. You have let pride in your power to dominate grow in you, worshipping your bloodlines and your strength above all else. You have coveted your neighbour’s goods. For indeed, the strils are your neighbours, and as you have done unto the least among them, it is as though you have done it to Christ himself. You have stolen, taking away the goods that the strils have made. You have committed adultery and rape. All these things, my children, you must sincerely repent, and promise to do no more; or when Judgement comes you will be among those who are turned away into the eternal fires. That is the price of the White Christ’s mercy.”

There was a long, long moment of shocked silence. The Ynglings might perhaps have known, on some abstract level, that the Church disapproved of the Empire, and of strildom; that was one reason they had turned increasingly to neopaganism or atheism. But to have it thrown in their faces like this, as a personal challenge, was something else again, and they were unsure how to deal with it. But then a man in the rear benches broke the moment by simply rising and walking out in silence; and where one had gone, others followed. A rush of Ynglings went down the aisles and out the door, as one after one they decided that things were not so hopeless as all that; and when it ended, Ivar’s flock had shrunk to even less than his usual small band of veterans. Only three Ynglings remained to hear him speak; three Ynglings, in all the vast city of Bergen.

He sighed deeply; he had hoped for a few more, but he knew his people well, and had not really expected them. Resignedly, he quoted to himself: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am.” Then he bent himself once more to the work of the day; if three souls were what he could save, then three souls he would offer up to the Lord, and praise therewith. He began his sermon again:

“I bring good news, my brothers!”

September 22nd, 1938
Lillehammer, on the east bank of Lågen

The radio crackled, then settled into clarity as the questing dial found the frequency. “…is the Voice of Norway, speaking truth to occupied Europe. We now bring you a special broadcast, a speech by Law-Speaker Vidkun Jonssøn to the Storting today.” The squad settled into silence as the Law-Speaker came on. “Nasjonale kamerater!” he began; he sounded tired, but determined. “National comrades! The struggle for hegemony in Europe continues. And let there be no mistake: This is indeed a struggle for hegemony, in which the winner will have a dominant position for all time. For the Yngling people, therefore, this is a struggle for survival. Alone among the nations, we not only understand, but admit, the realities of power. Our state is so constituted, that four-fifths of its subjects are unfree: Unable to bear arms, to duel, or to vote. Such a law cannot long endure in the absence of power, ruthlessly applied; and power depends, above all, on the Will of those who exercise it, and on the belief of those who are its victims. And that belief, the foundation of all inequality, cannot remain in the face of defeat. If the Yngling people is to survive, therefore, we must have victory.

Two weeks ago I had to bring you the hard news that Burgundian troops had forced Öresund and were attacking towards Stockholm. Since then we have had many damaging blows. We have heard in this hall proposals for what amounts to surrender; today we have heard the honourable Tingsmann from Namsos speak in favour of a negotiated settlement. I will not be responsible for such a course; if the honourable Tingsmenn wish to pursue it, they must do so with a different Law-Speaker. I will deceive none: There will be hard battles in the months to come; there will be fearful defeats and heavy sacrifices. This victory is not certain, and if won, will not be lightly bought. But we are not presented with the choice of hard-bought victory or cheap peace; our choice is between continued struggle, come what may, or ceasing to exist as a people. I trust that when the division is called today, the honourable Tingsmenn will prove themselves worthy of that choice, and of the name Yngling.”

The announcer came back on: “We may now report that the division went entirely in the Government’s favour, with only four dissenting votes cast against the motion of confidence.
We turn now to reports from the fighting front. A hard struggle for possession of the Lillehammer bridges has ended in victory for the Hird, which remains in control of its bridgeheads on the east side of Lågen.” The soldiers nodded at one another; that was their own personal fight the announcer was speaking of. “In heavy house-to-house fighting, the XIV Hird Skåne has captured several hundred prisoners, who are reported to be in poor spirits; many of them have not yet been issued winter clothing. In the east, enemy landings in the Åland islands were thrown back with heavy casualties…” The voice cut off as Karl flicked the power. “Nåvel…” he chewed on it. “They mentioned us, at least. “
Bjarte, the sergeant, shrugged. “What did you expect, dancing girls? A mention on the radio is more than most will get. It’s a huge war, you know.”
“Yes… I suppose so.” Karl lightened as he changed the subject. “At least it seems we won’t be surrendering.”
“Hah, yes.” Bjarte shook his head. “I wouldn’t have expected it of that spineless little Moderate, but… well, not so spineless after all, I suppose. Burgundians on the Mjøsa, and he spits defiance when the Ting wants to negotiate! The man’s a true Yngling, even if he is soft on the strils.”
“And loyal to his own.”

Here are some screenies I took during the session; I’ll follow up with some large-scale overviews and a spot of narrative later in the week.

The height of the invasion, with Bergen itself threatened and most of the empire cut off:

A small victory in the north, but only the leidang stands between the panzers and escape:

A fantastically well-timed partisan rising:

Counterattack direction Stockholm!

Note the out-of-supply modifier for the Belgian troops, and bless those partisans.

Pockets. Die, foreign invaders!

The heroic leidang holding off all that the Burgundians could scrape up for a counterattack at that particular moment:

June 1st, 1938
Burgundian/Norwegian border, Germany

The border country was old, and steeped in war. Men had landed here in long ships with dragon prows; had set out from stone castles to fight mailclad from horseback; had drilled in disciplined ranks of musket and pike. Now great metal towers whirled where the sentries had stood, keeping their eternally vigilant watch on the sky, and the fortifications were concrete and steel; but the business of war was the same, and the land knew it well.

It began, not with the howl of bomber aircraft that so many had expected, but with the familiar rending crash of a thousand guns firing in unison. Then came the tanks, hundreds of black, crawling insects, their infantry following behind in ordered ranks. The reply was instant: The long guns stuck heavy snouts out of their bunkers, belching tongues of flame bright even in the predawn light, and behind them the crews of heavier guns rushed to their stations.

There had been war in these lands for a thousand years. News of the attack flashed across the ether as fast as operators could warm their crystals; but the Ynglings had never been ones to give over a tradition, if it could be fitted in with newer ways of war. All over the Norwegian Realm, sirens called citizens to their war stations; and on the mountains an older form of warning came into action.

All along the craggy coast the beacons blazed.

————————————————

The Belgian attack came at the worst possible moment for the Norwegian-Polish alliance. Trusting that internal Burgundian politics would shield them for another year, the Yngling ruling caste had decided on a major overhaul of its army, necessitating a long cycle of retraining and equipment familiarisation. At the same time, it had been late in giving the puppet government of Poland permission to upgrade its military to the latest standards. If these two overhauls had been completed, a much more dangerous military machine would have faced the 150 divisions of Burgundy’s Army of the Elbe. However, the Ynglings had underestimated the pugnacity of a nation whose rulers were not compelled constantly to demonstrate their instant readiness to put down any challenge to their authority. The difference between the Revanchist and Conservative factions was not in whether Norway should be attacked, but in when, with the Revanchists favouring immediate all-out attack under any circumstances. Seeing a chance to attack on favourable terms, however, the Conservatives under van Zeeland were happy to make a bid for European hegemony, which the Ynglings found themselves ill prepared to resist.

The initial attack, thus, swept both Norwegians and Poles eastward past the Oder; though the narrow peninsula of Denmark was held for a while, massive armoured attacks eventually compelled its evacuation, which was nevertheless completed in good order. In the east, the Burgundian southern force, facing somewhat undergunned Polish divisions, broke through and raced along the Greek border, threatening to create a vast pocket centered on Lodz and containing most of the Polish army. After liquidating that pocket, the remainder of the vast Polish nation could be swept up at leisure. By heroic efforts the Yngling and Polish defenders averted this disaster and escaped the pocket after a fierce defence lasting a full month; they were powerless to keep their foes out of the industrial heartland that was Poland proper.

Worse yet, easy victories against strong attacks across Storebælt from occupied Denmark made it easy for OYH to look to the concentration of troops that had ended up around Copenhagen when the Belgians – after a brief naval engagement – landed a diversionary attack in Norrköping. The defending Yngling militia, although brave and well-trained, had no artillery and were rapidly forced to retreat in the face of strong naval support, although partisan risings, just as in the Twenty Years’ War, were immediate and powerful. The Hird divisions pulled out of Copenhagen to deal with this threat to the Swedish metal and industry, on which the Norwegian war effort depended, were indeed able to contain the threat; but their comrades found themselves unable to deal with the renewed thrust of a thousand barrels with battleship support, and were compelled to retreat across Öresund, losing much heavy equipment on the way. Moreover, the tide of victory carried the Burgundian attack into Malmö, where a large part of the Ynglinga Hird was surrounded and eventually compelled to surrender.

At this dark point in the war, when a powerful faction even within the Storting was calling for a negotiated peace – after all, Yngling Norway had been forced to cut its losses before, and might survive to fight another day – world politics intervened. The Kingdom of England, always ready to form a balance against any would-be hegemon, now saw its French possessions directly threatened by Burgundian victory. Yngling unpopularity among the electorate was overcome by a strong propaganda effort in which the suffering of the Polish people took first place. The effects of Britain’s entry were immediate, just as the effects of its exit had been in a previous war; with renewed control of the Baltic, the Overkommando Ynglinga Hird could gather its scattered troops to counterattack. Garrison troops and militia were released by control of the sea from their posts all along the long coastline. The armoured spearheads bogged down in the deep forest and the mountains, where the first breath of winter announced that it would be a hard campaign. Worse yet, what was left of the Ynglinga Hird had recovered its balance and its breath; in hard fighting along the Mjøsa, the Burgundian advance was first slowed, then stopped, and at last reversed.

From Battleship to Barrel : Norway 1920-1953, Bergenhus University Publishing

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The American situation; I think it may reasonably be called a little confused.

So I made a mistake or two. Mistake number one: Being a newb, I didn’t realise until two sessions into the game that you could abandon a doctrine. Mistake number two: Being impressed with Belgium’s industrial strength, I decided in 1938 that I couldn’t win with the British doctrine path; I therefore switched to the German one. Mistake number three: I thought Belgium would hold off until 1939. So, as you might say, I got caught with my doctrines down, in July of 1938. Then, I did not defend in sufficient depth, and the tanks harried me along, willy-nilly, until full two-thirds the Ynglinga Hird had marched off into captivity.

Even so: Are we not Ynglings? I have lost my good divisions with the strong artillery; the Burgundian rules in Germany and harries the Baltic plain; his panzers stand on the Mjøsa and thrust hard toward Narvik. But now England is in the fight; and winter approaches. It is no joke to fight in Norway in the winter; the mountains and the snows will give us respite. New divisions can be stamped out of the ground; the Poles, with their thousand-year odwaga against the invader, remain strong. This war will not end until it is fought with knives. And we are yet far from that, with these mountains at our back.

And under Dovre, King Olaf stirs uneasily in his sleep.

I’m very sorry to hear that, Phoenix, but yes, it is indeed in the mornings. Ah well – as you say, such is life. Thank you for organising the Royal Navy for us, I’m sure it will be much appreciated by whoever takes over.

We’d be very glad to have you, Hannibal. The Byzantines are alive and well, with roughly their pre-Manzikert borders – Anatolia plus the Balkans south of the Danube, and some insignificant colonies. (As an aside, in a recent perusal of the situation I noticed to my surprise that Norway owns a couple of useless Pacific islands, which I acquired in a colonial trade with Byz that smoothed out some borders elsewhere, and promptly forgot about.) In the recent liquidation of Italy, they also acquired the eastern seaboard of the peninsula, returning the Roman Empire to its home for the first time in more than a thousand years. The Eternal City, however, is in Burgundian hands. I can’t tell from outside, but I strongly suspect that Skar has a serious problem with getting rares.

——————————————–

In speaking of the political parties of the Yngling Ting, it is worth remembering that these were not formal organisations with membership dues and a fixed voter base; rather, they were ideological or philosophical umbrellas, a convenient shorthand by which a candidate could identify his position on a few issues. There was no party discipline as in the British Parliament; Tingsmenn voted their conscience on any and all issues. Conversely, there was no question of party funding or backing being
required for an election; if you wished to stand as, say, a Radical, then you did so. The occasional attempt to game this system by splitting an opposing party’s vote was held in check partly by the threat of retaliation in kind, partly by run-off elections between the two most popular candidates, and partly by that all-purpose Yngling check-and-balance, the duel. Nevertheless, the parties were just sufficiently coherent that it was possible to speak of a government being composed of, say, Moderates. Each individual Cabinet position (including that of King, although as a lifetime position the kingship was a special case) was chosen by a simple majority of the Ting; a coalition, therefore, could be formed by horse-trading with several different parties, without binding anyone to support the government against a motion of no confidence. Like so much of the Yngling system, the parties had grown organically and worked more because people both believed that they did, and wanted them to, rather than for any intrinsic elegance or good design. With this in mind, we can examine the chief parties of the 1930s:

• Radicals: In a sense the oldest political party in Norway. Stemming from the loss of Holstein around 1700, Radicals stand for the most uncompromising formulations of Yngling mysticism. With their rhetoric of superiority, belief in the power of raw Will to overcome all obstacles (often accompanied, it is true, by a fanatic dedication to the discipline and training that make Yngling superiority a battlefield reality), and disdain for all strils as subhumans to be subjugated, Radicals are the caricature that foreign newspapers reach for when they want to present Norway in an unfriendly light. However, although the stril-hating, firebreathing Radical certainly exists, he is by no means a dominant force; the party draws its support mainly from conservative landholders in the backwoods of Scandinavia, where the realities of the industrial age have yet to penetrate.
• White Christ’s Army: Competing with the Radicals for the votes of backwoods districts, these are conservative Christians who strongly oppose the neopagan/atheist makeup of modern Yngling society. It’s worth noting that the Yngling version of Christianity belongs rather more to the Old Testament than the New. It is a warrior creed for a warrior people, and if the truth were told, has always lain rather thinly over the old pagan customs. In spite of their name, it is the Lord God Jehovah of the Hosts, and not the gentle White Christ, that the Christians of Norway worship.
• Ynglinga Lag: The party of the law-Ynglings, those former strils and their descendants who were made Ynglings in the aftermath of the Twenty Years’ War. Although this averted a huge rebellion and civil war on top of the disaster of the Burgundian invasion, it could not give social status to factory workers and small farmers – only rights in law. A thousand years of hereditary privilege is not undone at the stroke of a pen, and the law-Ynglings still find that, in competition for army rank or business opportunity, they just aren’t quite as good as the blood-Ynglings. Eventually, time and intermarriage will blur the distinction; but for now, the law-Ynglings organise themselves for advantage. Their name combines the old sense of ‘lag’, to mean ‘law’, with the new sense of ‘association’.
• Liberals: A tiny minority who want to give legal protection (as opposed to customary privileges), or even votes, to the strils. Usually, but not always, this is associated with a fairly peaceful view of foreign policy.
• Moderates, a catch-all designation for pragmatic men who want to get on with the business of governing an empire, without necessarily steering it in any particular ideological direction. Naturally, this makes them something of an umbrella party, and they dominate most governments simply by virtue of being able to find compromises in all directions. Howeer, their share of the vote has been decreasing as the Ynglings seek ideological solutions to Norway’s problems.

At the moment, the government is a coalition of the Moderates and the Ynglinga Lag, with the former dominating.

Håkon’s Hall, Bergen
Spring, 1932

To an outsider, the room would have seemed filled with tension about to snap into violence. That was illusion, engendered by one of the many tricks the Ynglings used to maintain their dominance: They were trained to hold their bodies, at all times, in postures of dominance and threat, and thus force their subordinates into either open defiance, to be immediately punished, or to the submissive gestures that would produce a submissive mindset. Thus, even a calm discussion of industrial figures might look like impassioned argument accompanied by threats. Still, the figures made no pleasant hearing; by no means all the displeasure on the Law-Speaker’s face was habitual show.
“Thirty percent? That’s the best you can do?”
The Tingsmann for Finance shrugged. “It’s the best compromise my staff can find. Move people out of the truck factories, and you could get more steel. But then you’d have transport problems – they’re screaming as it is. And so on and so forth. You can rob the Germans and pay the Poles, but you can’t actually increase our output without more skilled manpower.”
“I knew it was bad, but… We’re going to have to export seventy percent of our iron ore?”
Another shrug, slightly defensive now. “At least it keeps the army fed, which frankly I don’t see how we can do otherwise. Look, Vidkun, we’ve known about the problem for years. There just are not enough Ynglings to run our industry and keep our army at this level at the same time. If we dropped the draft period down to three years, even, I could conscript another dozen labour regiments, say from Africa – then they wouldn’t grow up to be rebels; and in five years we could double our steel production. But right now, this is the absolute best I can do.”
“The army is too stretched as it is. If the Revanchist party gets three more seats in Belgium, they’ll go for our throats, and it’ll be touch and go, frankly. They’ve learned quite a bit since our last war – there won’t be any more frontal attacks on our trenches, and it’s not like we enjoyed that. Cut the army by a fourth, and we might as well cut our throats and save some steps.”
“Yes, I know. I’m just saying there isn’t a flake of uncommitted Yngling manpower anywhere outside the army. And we absolutely cannot educate any more strils. We’ve had three factory revolts just this year – in solid, reliable ironworks, or so we thought. We moved some supervisors out to those hydro works that had the trouble last year, they’re just getting back into production. Moved some strils up a bit to take their places. Two months later, boom, they’re organised and it’s “no more iron until you meet our demands”. They were damn smart about fortifying the place, too – lost five troops taking it back, not to mention the damage to the plant. It won’t be back up to full production until next year, at the earliest. Next time we might have to negotiate.”
“No.” There was flat finality in the Law-speaker’s voice, and his posture had withdrawn from its usual forward-leaning threat to utter neutrality. In an Yngling speaking to another, that was a warning sign; it meant that the speaker thought it might be necessary to fight, and was consciously reining in his threats so that primate instinct would not contribute to the tension. “No negotiating with rebels, ever. That way lies the dissolution of the empire.”
“No, no, you’re right of course. Perhaps we could let up on them just a little, though, negotiating in advance as it were. Say maybe we give them an extra meat ration each month.”
“Yes, fine, you’re in charge of that, do as you like. But you won’t double our steel production by tinkering with privileges.”
“No.”
The third man in the room cleared his throat. “One moment, Karl. Let me see if I’ve got this straight. You’re telling us we can’t increase our production, the Belgians have three times our output, and their Revanchists are three seats from getting a givernment.”
“Well, I leave the Belgians to Vidkun, but yes, that’s the situation.”
“Right. In that case, why are we sitting on our asses and not attacking? The army situation will never get any better. Fine, are we not Ynglings? Let’s attack while training and courage still count for something, and take those factories for ourselves!”
Vidkun rubbed his forehead tiredly. “Yes, well, you fought in America in the last war, as I recall.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“We had the advantage in ships then. Their American troops never got reinforced or supplied properly. And anyway, you had room to maneuver. If you’d been on the German front… a nightmare. Sheer butchery. And we’re damn good butchers, I’ll give you that, and we were dug in and they very kindly insisted on attacking us head-on. And never mind what we feed to the strils, still they damn near had us. There’s just too buggering many of the bastards! A hundred million of them, and forty million Ynglings, and half of those are needed to keep an eye on two-hund-red-fif-ty-mill-i-on strils, count’em yourself if you like, who think life is unfair just because we kicked the shit out of their grandparents! And now, with barrels… tell you the truth, I wish we’d never invented the damn things, they make it just too easy to break a defensive line. If I thought we had any kind of chance, you’d be hearing the guns from here, but I just don’t see it.” The blue eyes were tired, almost despairing, and there was silence for a while.
Karl took a deep breath. “All right, look. There’s not enough Ynglings. Fine. Let’s make some more.”
Vidkun smiled twistedly, but did not make the usual joke about lending Karl his wife; instead he said “You think I haven’t thought about it? It can’t be done. Oh, maybe some of our Moderates would agree to it. But the Radicals would break from the government so fast you’d smell smoke, and because that’s true, the Moderates would drum us both out of the party just for suggesting it. And as for Sverre’s Ynglinga Lag, well…” He nodded in the direction of the third man, who took up the tale with a wry twist to his lips. “The one thing we agree with the Radicals on. No more Emancipations, ever! Forty years ago we thought it the finest idea since raiding England, and well we might. And now we’re Ynglings by Law, but not by Blood, and however hard we try we’re just not quite as good as you fine gentlemen. And so we cling to what we do have, and anyone who even breathes the suggestion that the Balts might be fine people worthy of a voice in the Ting, or a duel… Ye gods, you’d think I’d suggested eating our babies. I never rowed so hard in my life, and as it is I’m glad I was drunk that night, it makes a good excuse. No, gentlemen, if you want to see our government collapse and a Radical/Yngling-Lag/White-Christ’s-Army coalition take its place, and ourselves duelled right out of the Ting, just try that.”
“Yes. I know that. But I wasn’t actually thinking of the strils, that’s impossible this generation and the next, and never mind that Yngling-right was never meant for a suicide pact. That is as it will be. But what about the Poles?”
“Well, what about them?”
“Right now they’re our vassals.”
Vidkun waggled his hand, bob-bob-bob. “The Ukrainians and Russians in what used to be the Polish Empire are our vassals. The actual Poles, well, any of them with the education it takes to make a speech about odwaga got himself killed in the Twenty Years’ War, leading a rising against our occupation. So what’s left of them are peasants, basically.”
“Right, right, and the Ukrainians are loyal to us just so long as they think we’re helpful in keeping all that odwaga bottled up. But look you, being Governor of the Tributary Republic is a hardship posting, because who wants to live where everybody hates you? So our man Henrik, I don’t think he feels any too grateful to the Ting that gave him the job. If we give him orders, I think he’ll take them just to spite the Ting. So, that’s a part of the empire we can loosen up without consulting the Ting at all.”
“Well, yes. But they’re not stupid, after all, and unlike the strils they have an army. If we give them a bigger one, who’s to say it’s the Belgians they’ll use it on?”
“Well, if we lose a war with Belgium, then we can certainly kiss our overlordship of Poland goodbye, not to mention our asses. So, if we’re going to lose it anyway, let’s give it away generous-like and hope for gratitude. After all, it’s not as though the Poles like the Belgians any more than they like us, and besides, they depend on our iron for their industry. Suppose we give them the right to vote on an Advisory Assembly, and tell Henrik to pay close attention to what it says? And we could give them the right to duel among themselves, what the heck. It might make them a bit more polite, and any of them challenges an Yngling he’ll get what he deserves. Or else we’ll be rid of a weakling, so we win either way.”
“Ye-es… The thing about power is, you can’t give it away and keep it at the same time. Sooner or later they’ll begin to wonder why that Assembly has ‘Advisory’ in front of it, and they’ll vote for something we don’t like. And then, we’ve either given them real power to hurt us, or else we fight a war to take the Assembly away.”
“I know. It buys us… I don’t know, maybe ten years, maybe thirty. If the Poles will really fight for us, not just go through the motions, we can hold, at any rate.”
“Ah! And in ten years, why, anything could happen! The White Christ might return and solve all our problems for us!” This was a jab at Sverre, who like many of the law-Ynglings still held to the older Christian faith and not the neopaganism that most blood-Ynglings, those who weren’t atheists, swore by. Sverre smiled pleasantly and shot back “In which case you heathens will all go to Hell, but you’re right – my problems would be over. But more to the point, if we have a little time, perhaps we could make the bureaucrats understand that we actually need them to approve marriage licenses for soldiers, thanks kindly.”
“Or get the blood-Ynglings to stop snubbing the law-Ynglings, and by the way I’m sorry about that.”
“Can’t be helped, or anyway not right now. Maybe we could get the Radicals out of our government and back into Opposition where they belong.”
“Yes. Well. Let’s be honest; it’s not likely the situation will be that much better in ten years, but it’s all we’ve got. And maybe, just maybe, the horse will learn to sing.”

—————————————————

As you can perhaps tell, the conversion from Vicky did not go well for my Norwegian Realm. I had about one-third the industry of Belgium, which annoyed me quite a bit since I’d had three-fourths the Ind score, and indeed had spent the last twenty years promoting a craftsman every three days or so precisely to build that score. It seems the conversion looks at output; if I’d known that, I’d have gone for clerks and cappies rather than raw Ind score. But while mechanics-wise this was bad for me, I have to admit that for realism it’s probably pretty reasonable; Belgium, after all, controls the industrial heartland of Europe, from central Germany through the Rhineland and down to the eastern half of France. And you just don’t get the production from industrial serfs that you do from a real proletariat that can choose its own work. Then, in Vicky I’d spent a lot of time and money building Inf-Art divisions, and the conversion gave me plain vanilla Inf. Finally, Poland, a satellite state in Vicky, was now a plain ally.

Well, that last wasn’t so bad, actually – presumably, the first act of a human Poland would be to fight a war to get out of satellite-hood, and while I’d likely win, I’d be overstrained and fighting from the word go, and easy meat; besides, with my low IC I couldn’t use all the resources I had anyway, so satellites would be pretty useless to me. So… Let the Poles run free!

Some notes on the prior history for new readers too lazy to read the previous sections of the AAR, not that I know why I’m doing such shiftless people any favours. The ‘Ynglings’ are the ruling caste of Norway, originally my ruling family in Crusader Kings. You start in 1066 with two guys, and I ended in 1419 with about 700. Well, if you extrapolate that growth rate, you end up with a few million Ynglings by 1700. Also, because the strils – that is, people who are not Ynglings – were increasingly pushed out of the democratic institutions of Norway by sheer wealth, the Ynglings ended up as a sort of combination of ruling family, warrior caste, and ethnic group. Like the nobles of Poland, the title passes to all sons; in Poland, you ended up with entire villages of peasants all of whom had the right to call themselves noble, but Norway has a colonial empire and won some wars, so the ruling class was able to find land and wealth for most of its sons. However, there were never enough Ynglings to both fight wars and run industries; so there were a few ways for strils to pass into the class, chiefly by volunteering for the army, surviving a tour of duty, and then marrying an Yngling woman. (The extent to which this privilege has been granted has varied with how much the Ynglings have felt under pressure.) Then, from 1880 to 1900 I fought a really incredibly nasty war with the Belgians, Poles, and British; it ended with the Belgians giving up a lot of land, the Poles my vassals, and the British, damn their lucky eyes, being bought off with a large part of Canada. However, in that process I took two million casualties (and as for what I did to the poor Poles, who refused to give up, you don’t want to know) and the Ynglings were finally forced to let all Norse (that’s Danes+Norwegians+Swedes+Finns) into their class – or anyway, all those who had fought in the War, which with conscription and incredible manpower scarcity was everyone down to girls of fourteen. This was the Great Emancipation, and it created a class of ‘law-Ynglings’, as opposed to those who are actually descended from King Olav and are called blood-Ynglings.

If I thought I could win a war with Belgium, we’d be fighting already. But, like Vidkun, I just don’t see it happening with the initial forces, and with the industry, it’s never going to get any better. So, like him, I’m just hunkering down, trying to jury-rig something that’ll let this empire, already a vast mess of special cases, survive ten more years. There’s no actual plan, now; I’m just hoping for the best – say, a falling out between Spain and Belgium over division of the spoils of Italy, or something silly like that. And maybe the horse will learn to sing.

Oh, about Vidkun: I’ve got the Fascist ministers for Norway, who truly suck both as people and as game ministers. But, y’know, the Vidkun Quisling whose name is a byword for treason… why, that was in in another timeline, and besides, the swine is dead. Here we have Vidkun Yngling, a worried man of the Moderate party, trying his best to preserve the empire and the privileges of his caste. He’s not necessarily a nice guy. In truth most Ynglings are towering Fascist swine by our standards. But he has at least the virtues of his vices: He’s brave, an efficient soldier and administrator, feels a duty to protect his subordinates. And loyal to his own.

The Great Game nears its end. Long centuries of conquest have brought no peace to Europe, nor has the power of coal and steam chastened its rulers’ will to power. Now a new turn of the cycle brings renewed hope of swift victories and glittering triumph. Across the world mobs shout for blood, and cool-headed staffs confer over maps. Our history is an engine; hatred is its fuel, and the blood-darkened stacks spew out shattered lives for their smoke. But the engine of war cares nothing for that; nothing can halt its course, shaped by a millennium’s battles – nothing except final Victory.

The players:

Allies:
The Kingdom of Burgundy (Belgium), the greatest industrial power in the world.
The Republic of Spain, master of South America and Africa.
The Byzantine Empire, still maintaining its ancient right to rule all the world; for are they not Romans?

Axis:
Yngling Norway, a dark kingdom beset by the military pride of its ruling caste, who claim descent from the hero-King Olaf and through him from the gods themselves. Trained from birth to a warrior ethos, this republic of freemen enforces in America and Russia a tyranny worse than any previously seen.
The Tributary Republic of Poland, Norway’s former foe and now a restive vassal-ally, whose Governor sits uneasy on a throne supported only by the bayonets of Russians and Ukrainians.

Comintern:
The People’s Republic of Greater China, a vast dragon rising from centuries of humiliation at Western hands, bestriding Asia from Vietnam to the frozen north. Within its borders are contained a third of the world’s people, industrious, hardworking, and determined to avenge their country’s long night and restore the Middle Kingdom to its proper position.

Neutral powers:
Great Britain, mistress of the Ocean Sea, Empress of India, her mighty navy the balance among the Powers of Europe.
The Kingdom of Italy, once the leader of Europe in crusade and trade alike, but now a mere shadow of its former self, stripped of colonies and influence.
Hungary-Persia, stretching from the Danube to the Oxus, the conqueror of Turk and Mongol.

The stage is set; let the Great Game continue!

Ah, the organic system. Much beloved of empires through the ages. Have there been any attempts to revise this situation and standardise matters?

Quite a devolved system, if I’m reading correctly. Presumably this means that there is quite a variation in the laws and local institutions within this region?

Well, any attempt to impose an internal tariff is going to get you in serious trouble. The Storting is quite at liberty to set your taxes much higher than the neighbouring regions’, since after all now you’ve got this lovely tariff to help you pay it; and where otherwise an infringement on local privilege would see your neighbours helping you, here they’ll be gloating all the way to the bank. So there is some standardisation on any issue that affects neighbouring regions. For internal matters, standardisation efforts have largely foundered, over the years, on the united opposition of the local tings; but the boundary between what is internal and not does tend to shift a bit over the centuries, especially as the regular army becomes more powerful with respect to the militias.

Fair enough – those are certainly the three responsibilities usually considered the bare minimum for a national government. With this level of devolution there are often arguments over what exactly constitutes a tax, however…

Right; that’s what the army is for. Really, the army is the unifying institution, here.

Layered on by whom? The Storting? Also I count a two-fold split :p

Yep, the Storting deals with the strils. And you quote a two-fold split because you didn’t quote the parts about the military organisation, with a local militia plus the regular army.

Interesting. This implies that the civil infrastructure in Yngling Germany is either non-existent, managed by the army (seems unlikely given the reaction of a Yngling officer detailed to oversee roadworks) or entirely in the hands of the industrialists. Corporate feudalism?

Well, industrialists and officers do tend to overlap, being drawn very much from the same class. I don’t see why an Yngling officer shouldn’t build roads, though – sure, you wouldn’t use hird troops to do it, but you can’t very well keep your stril conscripts drilling all the year; they might get good enough to fight the Ynglings. A bit of labour detail will be good for them. Also, this makes it easy for an industrialist to build a new railroad, should he need one; if he can come up with the materials, he just needs to ask the local army commander (who is likely a relative who owes the industrialist a favour for getting him the position… nepotism isn’t a vice with the Ynglings, it’s a way of life) for labour.

Strange. I would have expected areas settled directly from Norway / Scandinavia to be structured more like those areas than the conquered lands further east. Does this mean that the local Tings in North America are also ‘unofficial’, and if so does this cause much resentment across the Atlantic?

Respectively, yes and no. There’s a limit to how ‘unofficial’ a body can be that has sat continuously for four hundred years, is the only recognised civil power in the area, and probably has the power to secede if it wants to. (Tempered by the fact that a small nation in the Americas is quite a bit like a tasty, cooked pig, running about squealing “Eat me! Eat me!” As witness the fate of the US when it actually did secede.) Norway is like Britain in this respect; it doesn’t have a written constitution, but certain customs have the force of law. ‘Unofficial’ just means they don’t send direct representatives to the Storting (basically impossible at the time they were formed), but they certainly have ways of making their displeasure known, starting with tripling the price of supplies to the army garrisons. (In other words, they can get their taxes back if they want to.) Nobody would dream of imposing taxes on them without quite a bit of consultation and representation.

As always, just because the checks and balances are not written in law doesn’t mean they don’t exist. And, to be sure, Norway does have the ultimate balance: If you really, really piss someone off, he can challenge you to a duel, which goes right across the boundaries of Ting jurisdiction. The formal protection of Tingsmenn against being challenged only lasts until they lose an election; and anyway, you can always challenge a relative. It’s risky, of course; duels can go both ways, and often end with even the victor wounded or crippled. That’s why they’re rarely used. Still, the freedom to duel is one of the reasons Ynglings give for considering themselves the freest people in the world; as important to them as free speech is to modern Americans.

Do the guerillas have any form of organisation or ideology? Or is it very much a ‘kill the interloper’ knee-jerk situation?

Hum. Let’s see. We know they are being supported with weapons by other empires; there would presumably be no ideological strings attached at this time, unlike the Cold War – this is just straightforward colonial rivalry. Such support would be limited, though, by the possibility of retaliation, just as blacks were kept out of active fighting in the Boer war of our timeline. The revolt needs to be kept to a simmer, enough to engage Yngling attention, but not enough to force them into death camps and other nastily effective solutions. It would certainly be possible (well, not in game terms, except accidentally) to end the problem by just depopulating the area, but it hasn’t been necessary yet. The trick is to keep the flame of resistance just sufficiently alive that you can fan it into a real firestorm when the next big European war comes along. Conversely, the Ynglings are getting blooded, experienced troops. It’s a bit of an open question who really benefits the most.

There may or may not be Marxist, Anarchist, and even Liberal and Christian cadre/organisers/missionaries among them, but there’s no native leadership educated in Europe and picking up those ideologies from there, as happened in our history. And white people are not exactly popular in Norwegian Africa at the moment. So I’d say that the closest thing the rebels have to a unifying ideology is Islam – sub-Saharan Africa is one of the last remaining bastions of that religion, what with the Crusades being so effective.

Now, about the administration, it’s a bit of a mish-mash, and depends on when the area in question was added to the Realm. In Scandinavia proper – the area that was conquered first – the Ynglings basically took over the old regional Tings, which still exist – now with only Yngling representation, but they’ve sat continuously since Viking times. Now that all Norse (I think it’s pretty useless to divide the North Germanic ethnic group into Norwegian, Dane and Swede, after seven hundred years of the important distinction being Yngling or stril, so I just call them all Norse) have the vote, this area looks reasonably like a modern democracy, although with a particularly belligerent and imperialistic electorate. Local administration is done by the regional Tings, corresponding roughly to Norwegian fylker and Swedish län in our timeline; cities, towns, and rural districts also send representatives to the Storting in Bergen, which sets taxes, decides on foreign policy, and elects the King.

The Baltic and Russia were conquered while the Ynglings could still reasonably be referred to as a family, being less than a thousand in number; thus, they just took over the feudal privileges of the old ruling classes, the boyars and whatnot. Of course, you can’t very well run a modern state on that basis; so what you have is a fourfold split: The Ynglings have local gatherings, which they call Tings, but are not recognised as such in Norwegian law; these deal with whatever local disputes crop up among the Ynglings. The descendants of the old barons still have their ancient privilege of keeping large private armies, dating to the times when these were frontier areas that needed to be defended against Polish raids (not to mention raiding a bit themselves – profit is where you find it), but these days it doesn’t amount to any more than being in command of the regional militia. Which, while tough and well-trained, doesn’t have the heavy equipment to fight modern wars, so it’s a bit of an anachronism. Real defense is provided by the regular hird, and command of that is in the gift of the OYH, Overkommando Ynglinga Hird, based in Bergen and answering to the King. Finally, there’s a bureaucracy to deal with the strils, which doesn’t have a central node as such; it just sort of growed, as one regulation and agency after another was layered on through the centuries. It is prevented from stiffening into complete rigor mortis by the custom of the duel; an agency that doesn’t implement orders from home (and to some extent the local Tings) will find its chiefs challenged by the very best professional duelists the local grandees can hire. Conversely, though, if a local Ting should be too obstreperous, it’ll find that its strils are suddenly given dispensation to do all kinds of things they don’t like – move elsewhere (and trained manpower is always in demand, in Norway), join the army, marry into the Yngling class (for the veterans). Checks and balances, Viking style!

Next are the Norwegian parts of Germany, fairly recently re-conquered. These have no local Yngling squirearchy or militia, having been re-settled in an industrial age; instead, there is a large group of managers and factory owners, who don’t expect to live there permanently and thus need no permanent structure of local administration. Problems are instead referred to the regular army, whose command structure is again appointed from Bergen. Also, here there are no surviving feudal privileges for the strils, and the bureaucracy is much more streamlined, having been imposed over a much shorter period. This is a good thing for the productivity of the local economy, but does nothing for the welfare of the strils. Germany is a conquered and occupied land, not a place for settlement.

The American colonies are of two kinds: Those settled by Norwegians, and those conquered from other colonial empires. The administration of the first sort is much like that of Russia, without the complication of feudal leftovers, since the Amerindians had no such structure and what they did have was smashed rather than taken over. So there are local Tings with a self-defense militia and a large amount of autonomy, and a regular army commander appointed in Bergen – who will nonetheless listen to the locals if he knows what’s good for his supply-line. The strils here are of two kinds. There was considerable emigration from Norway even among the underclass, back in the old days before the restrictions on personal mobility came down. In a man-hungry land, these managed, by banding together, using their economic power, and occasional bits of outright fighting, to maintain a precarious position as the most privileged strils anywhere in the Realm; a middle class of freeholders and even small-scale traders. Then there are actual slaves, imported from Africa to work the cotton plantations; they are just as badly off as those of our timeline, and there is no abolitionist movement in this Norway. In those parts of America conquered from other empires, the situation is much as in Germany: An occupation economy run by the army. Unlike in Germany, though, the white ruling class here was largely managed to get out of the way, bringing their possessions and a seething hatred of all things Yngling to the rest of their colonial empires; so you get a thin crust of Yngling managers backed by the army, over a thick mass of Indians and Africans.

Finally, we have the African colonies; in theory they are colonies of settlement, but in actual practice they are ongoing, low-level civil wars. Yngling plantations are fortified settlements, and the army runs regular kill-sweeps through the jungle in retaliation for native raids. There just aren’t enough Yngling settlers to really pacify the area, especially since somebody keeps shipping in modern arms. But it does make a splendid place to blood new recruits and give them some experience of fighting without exposing them to too much danger.

The main point of interest is Finland. Everyone else appears to be funding education as much as possible, with some exceptions for wars.

As for screenies of Chinese human-wave attacks, I’ve got plenty. These battles of Mei Xian were fought from March 1882 to March 1885, almost the entire duration of the war. During that time the Chinese war exhaustion rose from 30 to 60 percent. Pay particular attention to the last two, taken two weeks apart during the same battle. In a tactical sense these enormous collisions of masses of maneouvre accomplished nothing: In 1885 the coalition forces were just as firmly lodged in their beachhead as three years earlier. But strategically they achieved their purpose of locking down the coalition forces, keeping them in place and attriting, not the expeditionary forces, but the will to fight of the coalition governments. Any time we tried to move out of Mei Xian, those hundred divisions would come down like the hammer of God and force us right back.