Lone casing among the rubble

The Great War

Year 1915, 24th day of February. At 23:17 the fleet of the Kingdom of France stands at a safe distance from the coast of the British Republic, a shot is fired towards the city of Dover. The shelling of the British coast was launched by the Safari-class destroyer "Lion".

The aftermath of the surprise attack was the destruction of coastal fortifications and the landing of French naval infantry on the city. Two marine divisions fought a bloody battle with the British coastal defenses, with 1,731 soldiers from both sides killed in the military port over 3 days. The defenders emerged from the battle victorious with the help of the British Air Force. As a result, the infrastructure in the port and several moored ships were destroyed. During the shelling in the city, 42 civilians were killed, an event that officially became the beginning of The Great War - the war that was to end all wars.

Shortly thereafter, the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway, the Kingdom of Spain, the United Republics and other minor states sided with the Kingdom of France. The coalition quickly applied a naval blockade that lasted practically until the end of the war, leading to the deaths of many in the British Isles. On the other side of the barricade, in turn, came the Russian Empire, the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, the Kingdom of Portugal, as well as other states.In a short period of time, the war reached a European and, later, a global character. Eventually, battles were fought on every continent and in most corners of the world, from the sands of Arabian deserts to the frigid ice sheets of Antarctica. Warfare intensified the development of technology, medicine, electrification and so on.

With the war came the extensive motorization of the army, cavalry gave way to trucks, combat vehicles and land-based ships, the skies were taken over by multi-purpose aeroplanes, and new prototypes such as aircraft carriers and deep-sea ships took to the waters. Electronic equipment, long-range radios, combat components for vehicles and firearms developed. Tests of rocket propulsion and nuclear weapons were successfully conducted, including combatively. Chemical and biological weapons, automatic firearms appeared on the battlefields. Medicine made it possible to successfully replace amputated limbs with mechanical prostheses. All this became both a blessing and the bane of the world.

Trench warfare gave way to a much more modern and brutal maneuvering war in 1919. The land was gradually covered with the aftermath of warfare, cities turned into rubble, and the population gradually declined.

In 1924, many countries were devastated by the war, the Kingdom of France was consumed by a socialist revolution, which eventually tipped the balance of power in favor of the Brotherhood Alliance. The combined armies of the alliance crossed the Argonne Forest, the Maritime Alps and carried out a landing along the Normandy and Brittany coasts, Dunkirk was razed to the ground. A Russian ballistic missile with a nuclear warhead launched toward the center of Paris veered off course through a miscalculation. It ultimately hit Versailles in the suburbs. The British army that entered the bombed French capital found the 135-meter statue of Joan of Arc there intact, which was destroyed on General Murphy's orders. Thus fell the symbol of France, on the same day the coalition fell and French government capitulated.

The Treaty of Dover, signed at 12:00 a.m., on August 15, 1924, officially ended the Great War, which lasted 9 years, 5 months, 21 days, 15 hours and 43 minutes and claimed 23,691,221 lives of soldiers and 67,810,712 civilians. It was the bloodiest war in the history of the world, and was supposed to end all wars forever....