Gaming - Worldbuilding, Homebrew, "The Attack of the Dead Men"

Continuing from yesterday's post, discussing the American point of departure for a gaming world I've had brewing for a while - and the first of the Entente powers - time to cross the trenches and discuss the Central Powers, specifically Germany.

The first forty years of German history were marked by rapid expansion of industrial and military power and an increasing rigidity of thought.  The nation that had produced Goethe and the revolutions of 1848 was now the nation of compulsory peacetime military service and international exhibitions devoted to artillery.  At the same time, though, the "Electric '80s" of America had a German mirror, spearheaded by Siemens & Halske of Berlin.  As Edison General Electric was to the American market, so Siemens & Halske was to Europe from Belfast to the Bosporus.  Siemens was one of the first true multi-national corporations, with branches in London, Constantinople, Moscow, and Tokyo.

In the Wireless War, German research on "Hertz waves," coupled with Marconi's familiarity with the Siemens office in London, meant that while Edison's inventions were often more innovative, such as the portable wireless telegraphy set that Edward Marshall took to San Juan Hill European devices were generally better.  An example of this phenomenon in action is that in 1912 the Marconi-equipped Cunard liner RMS Carpathia received a transmission from RMS Titanic, and the much closer Edison-equipped Leyland liner SS Californian did not, because its wireless set was out of operation at the time.  However, this continental standardization and reliability came at a terrible price in 1914, when an emergency recall of all German employees of the company crippled Russia's mobilization and the German army dissected the Russian forces facing it piecemeal.

For all that the Americans led the way in innovation in electric technology, they were not the sole innovators, and the year 1905 would prove fruitful for European researchers as well as Americans, for similar reasons - a chance meeting between an inventor and an investor.  Tesla's remote-controlled torpedo experiments were well-known, and certain naval intelligence officers had expended considerable but fruitless effort in acquiring the technology.  Between this and the accelerating naval arms race with Great Britain, there was a sense of pessimism in naval circles - until an enterprising engineer named Christian Hülsmeyer demonstrated what he called the "Telemobiloscope," a means of detecting metal objects over a distance with radio waves, and the Kaiserliche Marine acquired an interest in the technology as a potential "hole card."  Its importance became obvious to German naval commanders when in 1916, after sinking three British battlecruisers, the German High Seas Fleet detected the approaching Royal Navy Grand Fleet and raced back to Wilhelmshaven having sustained no ships lost.  "Hertzfinder" technology was here to stay.

Of course, Germany's success rested primarily on industry, not electricity, and the period from 1870 to 1914 was almost febrile in the growth of industry and the application specifically in Germany of industry to war.  Germany entered the war with a wide range of artillery, large and small, and the quality of German artillery, both in equipment and personnel, remained constant through the war. The cannon and the machine gun was the first solution the German military tried to their critical manpower problem - ringed in as they were, and after the failure of offensive operations in the west in 1914, Germany's doctrine became to bleed the Entente as badly as possible and try to remove one of the threats facing them from the war.  From the squad level upward, German soldiers were trained to throw grenades, mortar shells, artillery, anything that could kill while reducing risk to themselves while on the defensive.  This also led to the glorification of "sniper aces" (Scharfschutzenexperte, or merely Schutzenexperte) in German media as knights errant in an otherwise faceless war.

Germany's critical manpower shortage led to a series of increasingly questionable decisions by the German High Command.  First of these was, by far, the most noble and laudable, and post-war would be exported worldwide: Germany pioneered the use of hospitals close to the front line and the use of prosthetics to rehabilitate soldiers.  Advancements in prosthetics, and the rapid pace of electrification, meant that crudely functional battery-powered prosthetics with extremely limited feedback capacity were in use by 1916.  German propaganda cartoons embraced this, depicting the legendary Götz von Berlichingen with a modern powered prosthetic fist punching John Bull, to Berlichingen's famous quote: "Und er kann mich im Arsch lecken."  Soldiers whose injuries could be addressed with prosthetics, colloquially known as "Eisenhände" - Iron Hands, after Götz - found themselves in rear-area duties, though as the war continued the definition of "rear" came closer and closer to the front line, and a soldier who requested the Front would never be declined.

Second, the German High Command established a chemical warfare section on the outbreak of war, led by Hauptmann Fritz Haber, a world-renowned chemist and a constant contender for the Nobel Prize.  Haber was given a number of tasks - first, enhance Germany's agriculture by improving fertilizers; second, enhance Germany's munitions production by developing synthetic processes that would extend the country's resources; third, enhance Germany's battlefield capacity.  He had extensive experience already on the first two, but the third was a problem with which he had never dealt directly.  It was this, not the research that made the German chemical industry the envy of the world, that made Haber into one of history's most hotly debated figures.

It began with chemical weapons.  In 1915, Haber personally supervised the deployment of chlorine gas in Flanders, directly observing its effects so that he could improve them.  The results were more than satisfactory, and Haber immediately returned to Berlin to report on it.  While he was there, he got into an argument with his wife, herself a noted chemist and pacifist.  When he stormed off to his office, she shot herself in the heart with his service revolver.  Reports are unclear on the precise order of following events, though Haber's departure the next day for the Eastern Front, to watch another gas attack, are well-attested.  What is known is that Clara Immerwahr Haber, PhD, was never again the same, and the shot, though apparently not fatal, would be heard around the world.  Before she was driven, incisive, and fully the intellectual equal of her husband; after, she was pale, quiet, and withdrawn, and rarely appeared in public.

After the war, certain facts would become known, but at the time, it was hailed as a miracle intervention by a brilliant scientist, proof that German science would triumph over all the combinations arrayed against it.  Those facts are as follows:

In 1891, during a study trip at the Polytechnic College of Zürich, Dr. Haber found a curio in the college's archives, the research notes of Victor Frankenstein.  At the time, he largely forgot about them.  They were, after all, fragmentary and imperfect, and mostly he regarded them as a byproduct of a less scientifically rigorous age.  It is now apparent that Haber continued to turn back to these materials during the later 1890s, during a period where he became a world expert in the field of electrochemistry.  Because Haber's work during this period is well-documented, it seems unlikely that his knowledge was more than theoretical.  However, after the attempted suicide of Clara Haber, she made a miraculous recovery, and in late 1915, the High Command added an office to Haber's chemical-warfare department: the Military Hospital Office for Biochemistry, or the Militär-Sanitäts Amt für Lebenschemie.  Thus began the "second draft."  Most graves found in Germany for this period are for women and children; men, so long as their bodies were sufficiently whole, were sent to the "Haber Regiments."  The Haber Regiments, mostly incapable of complex commands but unstoppable short of bodily destruction, made their debut in mid-winter of 1916-1917 on the Eastern Front, and within six weeks, the Tsar's army refused to fight and the Russian government collapsed.

The full weight, including the Haber Regiments, of the Reichsheer turned westward.