Prelude to the Second Weltkrieg - Part 4: Canada

Part 1

NOTES FOR NON KAISERREICH PLAYERS: At the end of the Great War (or Weltkrieg), French morale collapsed, and the United Kingdom pulled all their troops out from the country. France surrendered, but there remained a stalemate between Britain and the Central Powers, who couldn't invade Britain itself because of the strength of the Royal Navy. Eventually the two sides signed the "Peace with Honour" that left most of Britain alone but saw Britain recognize Germany's gains from France and formally ended the war. Of all the sides in the Entente, Britain left the war in the best position. It didn't last.

In the 1920s, as Britain tried demobilizing their economy, the country essentially fell apart. Just like in France a few years earlier, there was a socialist revolution and civil war. The syndicalist forces soon took over the country, starting in heavily unionized cities and imposed their own political system in which unions took over ownership of their factories and took apart the traditional British political and economic systems.

Fearing for their future, the British monarchy, along with almost 200,000 loyalists, fled Britain for Canada, the nearest loyal dominion. As the syndicalists took over all power in the British Islands (except Ireland, which took the chance to declare independence), the monarchy set up a government-in-exile in Canada. Many other parts of the British Empire also collapsed in this chaos, as Germany took their African colonies, India mostly fell out of their control, and all their holdings in Asia slipped away.

Now trapped in Canada, the loyalist exiles - mostly nobility and rich industrialists who feared syndicalist reprisals in Britain - have been building plans to re-establish their once glorious Empire against the syndicalists, disloyal subjects, and everyone else who wronged them.

February 3, 1937 – Montreal, Quebec, Canada

Reginald Spenser examined the world and found it lacking.

The world, from Reginald's exalted perspective, lacked order. Two of the many, many maps spread out before him on his drawing room's enormous table summarized this disorder. One map was of the world before the World War – the Weltkrieg, if he gave in to popular nomenclature. The other map was of the world as of September 22, 1936, the most recent verisimilitude he'd been able to acquire.

The map before the World War was composed of orderly lines in rational segments, each dissection of the great land masses a clear, even beautiful, feat of human ingenuity blending with natural features. Whether it was the British Isles natural formation together, or the unmistakable identity of the Italian "boot" stretched from heel to knee, from great Qing China's chicken-like shape dwarfing the rest of Asia, to India – oh India! – in its united entirety, this was a world where nations made sense. A world where order had been imposed by centuries of mankind's will.

The world as it stood on September 22, 1936, by comparison, was a chaotic, eminently disordered one. The fact that Spenser had had to scribble over parts of northwestern China – what he considered northwestern China at the very least – to describe the recent subjugation of the so-called Kumul Khanate by the so-called Xinjiang Clique, just went to show how disordered this world had become. In the last year and a half, Spenser had had to order no fewer than five maps from the cartographer on Sherbrooke Street just to keep up with the constant shifting of borders, names, and politics which had taken place. Five maps! In eighteen months! It was simply sickening to think about.

Far beyond the speed of change though, was the nonsensical nature of it. The way countries emerged or disappeared seemingly at random, without any obvious guiding force to provide direction to all these far away nations. China alone had gone from one country to – at his latest count – eleven different states. Were the people of this place not the same as they had been twenty years earlier? Were they not all still Chinese? Surely they had no desire to live in such fractured and broken places, where the death of one man could spawn fifty new warlords, each with delusions of grandeur? Surely they would welcome a return to the good times of the past where things had been kept in neat, symmetrical balance by the combined efforts of the Europeans on the other side of the world? Surely they could see the beauty of their home country on a map!