On the very day the Secret Treaty of Valmy was signed, André had barely waited for the Prussian corps at the Moon Bay fortress to surrender before he urgently signaled, by semaphore telegraph, to General Macdonald, who was blocking the Istres pass, ordering him to concentrate his own force together with the detachment of Colonel Moreau, which was stationed around Verdun, Vaux Fort, and Douaumont. Altogether, twenty-five thousand troops were to launch a large-scale pursuit against the foreign intervention forces entrenched in the étain–Metz–Longwy sector.

  At the same time, the 3rd rifled regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Friant resumed large-scale raids against lines of communication—roads, bridges, and the like—doing everything possible to slow the coalition’s flight and create the best window for the main forces closing from front and rear to encircle and destroy the enemy.

  Aside from the gendarmerie assigned to guard the prisoner camps, the main body of General Moncey’s Army of the Meuse and most of General Custine’s Army of the Moselle also set out together to the north. The Army of the Meuse would first reach the fortress of Sedan, then move down along the Meuse, link up with General Lefebvre, and unleash a powerful offensive in the Ardennes forest.

  In addition, the main body of the Army of the North under General Hoche would coordinate at full strength, striking east against Namur and then encircling and annihilating—or at least badly mauling—the principal force of the Austrian Netherlands, the Bohemian Corps. As for the Army of the Moselle under General Custine, it would block coalition remnants seeking to escape back to northern Germany between the fortresses of Montmédy and Longwy. After joining up with General Macdonald’s forces, it would continue north through the Duchy of Luxembourg, pushing the front line into the German states west of the Rhine.

  To the east, the Army of the Rhine, reinforced from the provinces of central and southern France and restored to a total strength of forty thousand, would, under orders from the Northern Command Headquarters, launch an immediate general counteroffensive. At General Kellermann’s request, the 2nd rifled regiment under Colonel Davout would provide tactical support, helping to recover the lost ground along the Metz and Thionville line. Thereafter, the Army of the Rhine would ride the momentum across the border and occupy a broad swath of territory west of the Rhine, including Saarbrücken, Humboldt, Wadern, Kaiserslautern, Landau, and Mannheim, before finally joining the Army of the Moselle in triumph beneath the walls of Mainz.

  ...

  Captain Marcus swore that if time could turn back and he could choose again, he would rather have retired and returned home—to the little hill village outside Aachen, the city of hot springs, once the capital of Charlemagne and, in the eighteenth century, Austrian territory—instead of carrying a captain’s commission and coming to France to suffer.

  After more than forty thousand coalition soldiers at the Moon Bay fortress had surrendered their arms, the French conscientiously upheld humanitarian principles and treated all prisoners equally, including the soldiers of the émigré detachment. André tacitly treated the 2nd battalion of the 1st Hessian mercenary infantry regiment as having been wiped out to a man. In the coalition prisoner camp twenty kilometers west of Valmy, the French provided not only simple wooden barracks that kept out wind and rain and had stoves for warmth, but also ample food and clean drinking water. Those unfortunate coalition wounded and sick were, by good luck, treated and medicated by French military surgeons.

  As atonement for invading France, any captured coalition soldier had to serve a term of labor, with most of the Prussian Army excepted. Captured officers likewise had to pay their self-redemption in full without the slightest shortfall, though the Prussian Army paid only half. The standard self-redemption for a coalition captain was four thousand five hundred thalers, a base price applicable only to quartermaster and engineer officers who had never seen combat. Since Marcus had served on the coalition staff, the French raised the price by thirty percent, adding 1,350 thalers, for a total of 5,850 thalers, equivalent to roughly twenty-two thousand two hundred livres.

  5,850 thalers was a heavy burden even for many German nobles, roughly one third of the estate of a small landed knight outside Aachen who held more than thirty serfs. Marcus, before he enlisted, had been nothing more than a wretched serf bound to the soil. To escape that cursed status, he had applied to join the Austrian army and had volunteered to serve for fifteen years.

  For Marcus, the year 1792 began with glory and exhilaration, and then plunged into hell, like a roller coaster—thrilling, perilous, and short-lived. Archduke Charles of Austria promoted him to cavalry second lieutenant; the late Colonel Horton advanced him to lieutenant; and Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg brought Marcus into the coalition staff as a captain. Yet now, Marcus felt as though the whole world had abandoned him.

  Beginning in 1781, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II launched a series of political and economic reforms in the Austrian dominions—never thorough, but sustained, at least, for more than ten years. Among them was a policy encouraging semi-serfs who paid redemption to become freeholding peasants of the state. The movement was quickly halted in Bohemia and Hungary under the pressure of entrenched interests, but in the Austrian Netherlands and in Austria proper, it managed to persist.

  This May, in order to free his parents, siblings, wife, and children from the half-serf status that still denied them full liberty, Marcus, after his promotion to cavalry second lieutenant, submitted an application to the Aachen City Hall. Putting up his own guarantee, he redeemed his entire family’s freedom from their landlord, the knightly estate holder, and received in allotment a tract of land that was not small, but was barren. For that, Marcus took on a crushing debt of two thousand thalers.

  If Marcus had remained an Austrian captain, that debt could have been repaid over time. After all, across the German lands, aside from Prussia, no one dared casually insult an officer of the Holy Roman Empire. But now Captain Marcus had become a French prisoner. The knightly landlord—whom Marcus had once beaten badly—would surely seize the chance to strike back and take revenge on Marcus’s family. Marcus therefore had to get out of the prisoner camp as quickly as possible.

  From the grim Field Marshal of Saxe-Coburg, Marcus learned that André, the French Commander-in-Chief, had no intention of entering any kind of peace talks with Austria in the near term. If Marcus wanted to leave the camp, there was only one workable path: pay money to redeem himself. Before long, Captain Marcus applied to the business office of the United Bank inside the prisoner camp for a self-redemption loan of 5,850 thalers.

  Yet in less than twenty-four hours, the United Bank coldly rejected the application. The man from Aachen held no valuable farmland or estate and had no property deed to pledge as collateral. As for the barren plot his family farmed, legal ownership still lay with the Aachen City Hall, and it was worth no more than a few thalers.

  So, after two days of reflection, Marcus saw only one road left: to enter French service. It helped that the scar-faced man had served ten years in an Austrian hussar regiment and had fought Prussians, Poles, Netherlanders, Turks, and now the French he was about to join. On paper, his experience was rich, and he had earned more than a few merits...

  At that moment, in an interrogation room inside the prisoner camp, Marcus stared in extreme tension at the two-man review panel seated across from him. They were about to declare his final fate: to remain in the camp, idle and wasting away, or to enter the French army and preserve some hope for his family. The scene felt like the day ten years before, when Marcus, still a serf, had sought to join the Austrian army in order to escape a miserable destiny.

  Soon, the French colonel who led the panel told Marcus, in a regretful tone, that the army had received too many recent applications from coalition cavalry officers seeking transfer, and that it was no longer accepting such requests from the prisoner camp.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  Just as the man from Aachen was on the brink of despair, the French major beside the colonel rose and called out to stop Marcus, who had begun to turn away. At the same time, the colonel left the interrogation room without a word.

  “Captain, please sit. I am Major Grisel, presently attached to the sixth section of the Military Intelligence Office.” As he introduced himself, Grisel poured Marcus a cup of red wine.

  “I have just read your service record. Well—how shall I put it? It is all quite impressive. The Army of the Meuse does not want you, and that is their great loss. But I should very much like to invite you to join MI6(foreign). If you agree, we can continue and discuss the details. If not, then do your best to forget everything you have heard here and return to the prisoner camp to wait for the day we reach a peace agreement with the Austrians. Because certain major secrets are involved, if you hear the entry terms I am about to state and then refuse afterward to carry them out, your best possible ending will be to work in some bottomless mine until you die. Do you understand?”

  Hearing this, Marcus nodded without hesitation. So long as he could save his family from disaster, anything would do. What he had to do no longer mattered. At worst, he would die.

  Marcus set down his wine and asked, “Major—can the Military Intelligence Office lend me two thousand thalers?”

  Grisel laughed. “To clear your family’s land debt, I presume. Do not worry. There is no need for that now. Once you join MI6(foreign), your first mission will be to follow General Custine’s Army of the Moselle through the Duchy of Luxembourg and occupy all German territories west of the Rhine. As for Aachen, it happens to be the second stop on the Army of the Moselle’s march. Your task is very simple: cooperate with the Army of the Moselle, calm the local population, and root out every saboteur.”

  The major glanced at Marcus’s filthy white Austrian uniform and continued.

  “In a moment, I will take you to the quartermaster to draw a blue uniform. But your rank is not mine to decide; it must wait until training and evaluation are complete. It will not take long—about six to seven days—and the training site is at the Bacourt camp near Reims, forty kilometers away. After you bathe and change, we depart at two o’clock this afternoon.”

  One week later, Marcus passed the Military Intelligence Office training and evaluation with ease. He was granted the French rank of lieutenant, assigned to MI6(foreign), and placed under Major Grisel’s command.

  Many who were fortunate in the same way were officers of German states outside Austria proper, and a small number of soldiers. Before the awakening of German national consciousness, it was entirely normal for Germans to transfer into the service of foreign powers, even enemy powers, without any moral stain. For example, Marshal Luckner, once the commander of the Army of the Rhine, had entered the service of Louis XV as a Prussian general and was later used with particular favor by Louis XVI.

  In September, Colonel Penduvas, the head of Section VI of the Military Intelligence Office, submitted a “lighthouse” plan to André. He hoped to buy over junior officers of the German states, and some soldiers, from among the coalition prisoners, and organize a “foreign army” loyal to Andréan France, the part of France controlled by André. After training, it would advance alongside the French army and be dispatched back to its members’ home regions, where it would incite local serfs, strike at feudal nobles, and carry out secret missions.

  In fact, in another world, the French did something like this, but they did it poorly. One major reason was that the commanders of the French occupation forces were too idealistic. They tried to abolish feudal institutions by blunt legal decree and crudely reshape local politics and society, provoking fierce backlash and a series of violent and nonviolent resistances by feudal nobles. After the Thermidorian faction came to power, the left swung right and sought compromise with German feudal lords, but in doing so harmed the interests of the serfs and semi-serfs who had already been freed.

  The result was that revolutionary France pleased neither of the two classes within the German states. After the founding of the First French Empire, matters grew worse still: the occupied German states were subjected to a chaotic series of policies that inflamed popular resentment. The disastrous end of the 1812 invasion of Russia ultimately triggered a broad awakening among the German peoples and planted, for France itself, a curse that would last more than one hundred and thirty years.

  For that reason, from the beginning André, in his capacity as supreme commander of the north, warned the mid- and senior-level commanders of the four corps that they were strictly forbidden to personally involve themselves in political, economic, social, or legal reforms in the occupied zones. Any violator would be removed from office, investigated, and handed over to the gendarmerie command for further examination.

  As for the question of assimilating and absorbing the German occupied zone, the broad territories west of the Rhine, André had already authorized the gendarmerie command and MI6(foreign) to handle it jointly. No other person or department was permitted to interfere.

  As for interference from the Jacobin clubs and the radicals of the National Convention, André had tacitly allowed the gendarmerie and the Military Intelligence Office, when necessary, to take certain decisive actions, with the instruction only that they should handle the aftermath properly. At least for a fairly long time, André had no intention of breaking openly with Paris.

  ...

  For Captain Marcus—well, the man was now only a French lieutenant—this trip to France was unpleasant, but it had not yet become an irreversible tragedy. If his luck held, it might even turn into a comedy.

  As for the noble Maximilian Franz, the younger brother of Queen Marie Antoinette, Elector of Cologne and Archbishop of Münster, his French journey had been ill-starred from the outset, and by the end it was nothing less than a descent into hell.

  Archbishop Franz received a commission from the House of Habsburg in August. He followed the Prussian intervention force under Duc de Brunswick into France, intending to rescue his elder sister. Yet the archbishop’s luxurious travel coach had scarcely reached the frontier before it sank deep into red clay and could not move. When his guards carried the Archbishop of Münster down from the carriage, the party was drenched in an autumn rain in the muddy ground. That night, the archbishop caught a chill and was forced to remain at the fortress of Longwy for a time to recover.

  When Archbishop Franz set out again, it happened to coincide with Prince Hohenlohe-Kirchberg’s concentration of coalition forces to the north and east for the siege of Verdun. That night, when the great coach reached the fortress of étain, bad news came from the front: the coalition force of more than twenty thousand under Prince Hohenlohe-Kirchberg had been encircled and annihilated by the French.

  As for the coalition main body of more than forty thousand under Duc de Brunswick, rumor held that it had already been surrounded by two hundred thousand French in the eastern mountains of Champagne. The men spreading such news were the same ones who, only days earlier, had sworn to the archbishop that the Prusso-Austrian Coalition had taken Chalons-en-Champagne and Reims and was advancing on Paris.

  After consulting with his accompanying staff, Archbishop Franz and his party boarded their carriages—already turned back—and prepared to return to Cologne. A staff officer at the archbishop’s side, a man named Müller, recorded the subsequent flight in detail in his diary:

  At roughly two in the morning, while still half-asleep, I and my colleagues were roused one by one by the archbishop’s guards and informed that we were to return to Cologne at once, or even farther. Yet when our carriages reached the city gate, we found it packed solid with wagons, ox-carts, civilians, and soldiers, as though we had sunk into a bog.

  “Except for the wounded and sick, they are all deserters,” a companion muttered beside me.

  I said nothing. In a certain sense, we too were deserters without uniforms. Fortunately, one hour later a detachment of coalition gendarmerie arrived, and the road out of the city became passable again. Not long after leaving étain, we encountered, amid the great stream of people fleeing north, a French comte, a scion of an ancient noble house from Reims. Two weeks ago, this comte had been in high spirits marching south with the Prussians; now he was forced once more to abandon his home and tramp north on foot.

  The comte begged the bishop, uninvited and in misery, to let him climb into our carriage as well. Regrettably, our party of five coaches had already lost one on the road, and the remainder were badly overloaded. In the end, under the threat of a raised saber from the guards, the wretched French comte had to release the hand with which he clung to the window frame. He collapsed onto the muddy road and howled in tears.

  Hearing his hysterical crying, every one of us grew dispirited and sullen. To abandon a French noble by the roadside without lifting a hand was not the conduct of gentlemen. Yet we soon found ourselves thinking: and who, in turn, would save us?

  On the second day of our flight from étain, we learned a still greater calamity. After several more days surrounded by superior French forces, Duc de Brunswick and his Prussian corps had formally laid down their arms to the French Commander-in-Chief André. This meant that, from the French frontier all the way to Mainz, Bonn, and Cologne, there was almost no longer a single formed German force left to resist the two hundred thousand French troops pouring forward like a flood.