Word came over the wire shortly after the battle had concluded. In the dead of winter, amidst one of the fiercest storms the Alps had ever seen in recorded history. The Italian Army made a desperate move. One that had paid off the dividends and then some.
The front lines at Isonzo collapsed overnight, and the secondary lines fell not long after. Reinforcements arrived just in time to hold the line in the third region of defense. But fighting was continuing, even now, as Bruno sat in his office drinking a shot of vodka as he looked over the reports in his hands.
The Austro-Hungarians had assumed nobody would be crossing no-man’s-land in such frigid and unforgiving weather. And rightfully so… It was not a wise move to make. But desperate men seldom acted with wisdom in mind.
Perhaps because it was such an unpredictable move, or at least one of such low probability that the senior leadership in Isonzo had been lax on their soldiers who desperately huddled around fires with all the coats and blankets they could find.
This lack of concern for protecting the lines of defense had ultimately been their ruin. And as far as Bruno was concerned, he would have never allowed such a thing to come to pass had he been in charge of the theater.
Why was this the case? Because the man understood human nature exceptionally well, and was also deeply paranoid as a result of it. Even in such frost fall, Bruno would have ensured at the very least men were on sentry rotation.
His men surely would have hated him for it, but at the end of the day, while one was deployed to a war zone, comfort was secondary on the list of priorities to operational security. A measure the Austro-Hungarian leadership had learned through the price of blood. And by the sound of it, rivers of it…
After drinking the shot of vodka, Bruno poured himself another while Heinrich approached him with more information in his hands. And it was further bad news from the look of the expression on his face.
“So… Your request to the Naval High Command to begin adoption of the Landing Craft you have prepared was accepted.”
The words Heinrich spoke did not necessarily match the look on his face or the tone in his voice. Causing Bruno to speak with a stern tone in his own as he responded with his inquiry with a single word.
“And?”
The way Bruno said this made Heinrich chuckle and shake his head as he handed the papers over to Bruno before walking off with a dismissive gesture.
“Check for yourself. I have to go lead my brigade on a punitive expedition against Militants in Kosovo…. When I get back, you and I need to have a serious discussion about this little engagement that you and your wife have cooked up behind my back!”
Bruno did not care to respond to this statement, as he instead was in the act of reading the report with his full attention. And the news was not good. Not in the slightest. While the Admiralty agreed to the adoption of the Landing Craft, as well as the Bundesrat Committee for Naval Affairs.
They had more or less decided to use them entirely for their own purposes, commandeering the vessels for a “future invasion of the British Isles should such a thing become necessary…” His plots to invade Gallipoli and free the Black Sea Fleet from its confinement had been thoroughly dashed before it could begin, and because of that, Bruno was outraged. It took all of his inner strength to restrain the urge to throw the bottle of vodka in his hands out the window at that very moment.
Instead, he sighed heavily and shook his head, before pulling out a map of the Black Sea region, and the railways which led through it. It was a good thing Bruno believed in contingencies. He was not the type of man to bet all of his money in one stock.
No, if his first plan did not succeed for whatever reason, then it was time for Plan B, or Plan C if even that failed. For every course of action he chose to take in life, he had at least two backup plans waiting on the bench to put into play should the need arise.
And for taking out the Ottoman Empire, there were indeed three courses of actions he had prepared for. With his fleet of Landing Craft adopted and commandeered by the Kaiserliche Marine for their own foolish endeavors, Bruno had now two options.
The first of these two invasion plans, was to leave behind a small force of Austro-Hungarian Gendarmes in the Balkans to continue fighting the local militants, and to also maintain law and order while the rest of his forces got themselves and their equipments on the railway and road it to Odessa.
Where they would board the Black Sea Fleet and deploy to Eastern Thrace, avoiding the Bosphorus Strait entirely. Ideally, they could seize Constantinople before spring came to the Mediterranean, and in doing so, knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war in the early months of 1915.
However, to do this, they would need the assistance of the Kingdom of Bulgaria, at least in the form of military access to allow the Hellenic Army to catch the Ottoman forces stationed in Eastern Thrace in a two-war front.
And that would never happen. As Bulgaria and Greece appeared to be fighting for control over the entire region. Because of this, there was, of course, a third option. Provoke Bulgaria into the war on behalf of the Allied Powers, and march into their capital before they can receive aid from the Ottomans and then move into Eastern Thrace.
Either way, the existence of the Kingdom of Bulgaria, and their refusal to negotiate with Greece and by extension the Central Powers was ultimately the biggest factor in preventing either of these two plans from being more ideal than invading through Gallipoli, hence why Bruno had considered them as his contingencies and not his primary invasion plan. Decisions, decisions…