Re: Blood and Iron

Chapter 624: Giants of Clay

The proving ground outside Tours echoed with the groan and clatter of steel monsters.

In the brittle winter air, crews labored over the latest designs, heavy and super-heavy tanks, lumbering shapes draped in camouflage nets, their guns yawning like siege cannons from another age.

General de la Marche stood with a line of officers, his gloved hands clasped behind his back, as the behemoths trundled past on the frozen earth.

Each weighed nearly twice as much as its older model, its guns bored to take shells heavier than any in service before.

The French “lesson” from Spain had been simple, almost childlike in its clarity: they had lost because their armor and guns were not enough.

Speed? Reliability? Mobility? Those words were for the weak, for armies who could not trust their armor to stop a hit.

France, they believed, would build machines so massive that nothing short of an artillery battery could breach them.

The winter wind cut through the parade ground at Satory, but the men stood rigid, eyes fixed on the lumbering colossus before them.

It was France’s pride made steel, sixty tons of riveted armor, a turret housing a gun so massive it seemed to defy balance, its barrel unshaped for streamlining but built for intimidation.

Charles de Gaulle stood in his greatcoat, cap brim low against the light. Around him, his generals murmured in approval as the tank roared forward, crushing the frozen turf under its treads.

The behemoth’s armor plate was thick enough, they claimed, to shrug off anything short of direct artillery fire.

“Look at her,” General Lafontaine said, his voice reverent. “Our answer to the German menace. Nothing they have can match this.”

The turret slewed, slow, ponderous, toward a plywood mock-up of a German E-20. The gun fired.

The shockwave rolled across the reviewing stand, and the target disintegrated in a spray of splinters. Officers clapped gloved hands together.

De Gaulle’s eyes never left the machine. “They’ve finally done it,” he said, his voice low but brimming with conviction. “They’ve finally beaten the Germans.”

In his mind’s eye, he saw columns of these iron titans rolling through Alsace, crushing panzers under their treads, silencing the Reich’s arrogance once and for all.

The shape was crude, the optics little more than glass tubes, the gun unguided by anything more sophisticated than a human hand, but none of that mattered to him.

The size, the armor, the firepower… this, he believed, was the language of victory.

Far away in Tyrol, a man who had already designed the E-30 would have called it something else entirely: obsolete the day it was built.

In a far-off Tyrolean office, the E-50 was already rolling off production lines, an early Cold War MBT in all but name.

With a stabilized main gun, advanced optics, and composite protection decades ahead of its time, Bruno’s tank doctrine valued balance and speed of adaptation over raw mass.

Here in France, they poured resources into fortifying their own obsolescence.

The crew cheered as the latest model rumbled across a shallow trench, its treads sinking, groaning under the weight, the vehicle needing to be hauled out by two recovery tractors.

The generals didn’t see failure. They saw proof that, given more armor and a bigger gun, the next war would be theirs.

No one noticed the E-50’s shadow in the distance, waiting in history’s wings to render all of this irrelevant.

—

Tyrol’s winter air bit against the high windows; the snow outside muted under the glow of the palace’s exterior lamps.

In Bruno’s office, a fire crackled low in the hearth, the warmth mixing with the scent of tobacco and old leather.

Two tumblers of schnapps sat on the desk between the Reichskanzler and Generalfeldmarschall Heinrich von Koch, longtime friend and comrade.

Bruno leafed through a packet of black-and-white reconnaissance photographs, each image revealing the hulking profile of France’s latest military “innovation.”

He studied the welded armor, the ungainly turret, the slab-sided hull. A faint smirk touched his lips.

“Honestly,” he said, setting one photo flat on the desk, “this is part of the problem… When you don’t know what you’re supposed to do, it’s like throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks.”

Heinrich leaned over to get a better look, squinting at the enormous gun barrel protruding from the turret. “It looks like it should be guarding the gates of a bank, not fighting a war.”

Bruno’s smirk deepened. “This giant scrap heap is going to bleed their industry dry. I doubt their bridges can even withstand it…”

He leaned back in his fine leather chair, chuckling to himself while shaking his head.

“The sheer amount of steel needed just to replace one will be catastrophic. At this rate, we might not even have to invade. Their economy will collapse under the weight of this rust bucket.”

Heinrich chuckled, lifting his glass in mock salute toward the photographs. “To the French Ministry of War, our most loyal ally!”

Bruno clinked his tumbler against Heinrich’s. The crystal chime punctuated by the distant whistle of wind against the windows.

“They’re building monuments to their own defeat,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “All we have to do is let them.”

Outside, snow began to fall heavier, blanketing the mountains in white, quiet, steady, and inevitable. Much like the future Bruno was engineering.

France didn’t know it yet… But super-heavy tanks like the one they had just built were not capable of winning wars.

This was a fact discovered during Bruno’s past life. At best, these weapons might be converted into static gun emplacements.

But it would be at least half a decade before France learned that lesson. For now, they would continue to test their new monstrosity, and then eventually begin to mass produce it.

Whereas the New Central Powers tried their best to copy Germany’s example on weapons technology and doctrine.

The Allies began to shift their efforts towards following France. A mistake Bruno knew they would come to sorely regret.