Re: Blood and Iron

Chapter 627: A World Rebuilt

The war in Spain had ended not with the roar of artillery, but with the strange stillness that follows a storm.

In Madrid, the royal standard fluttered over the restored palace, its colors vivid against a sky still streaked with the pale haze of burned powder.

The city’s streets, once choked with barricades and rubble, now rang with the hammering of reconstruction, iron on stone, rivet guns clattering, saws whining.

From the moment the armistice was signed, Berlin, Rome, and Moscow moved with the precision of vultures and surgeons alike.

Cargo ships crossed the Atlantic daily, carrying not just steel and timber, but the promise of a new Spain.

German engineers surveyed rail yards, Italian architects redrew the waterfronts, and Russian dockworkers, hardened veterans of Murmansk, helped rebuild the great port at Valencia, their breath steaming in the cool coastal mornings.

Lisbon too hummed with activity. Portugal, spared from the fighting, had nonetheless thrown itself into the war alongside its royal cousins in Madrid.

Sending Volunteer brigades along with the International Legion.

Now, it reaped the same windfall.

New harbors rose from blasted shorelines, cranes wheeled over skeletal ship hulls in drydock, and airfields sprouted concrete runways where once there were only dusty grass strips.

The militaries of both kingdoms swelled. not merely through the steady flow of lend-lease weapons from Germany and Italy, but through the birth of a true domestic arms industry.

In Seville, the old Hispano-Suiza factories were refitted to produce license-built German armored vehicles based upon the E-10 and E-25 Chassis. Its simple lines ideal for mass production.

Across the border in Porto, workshops turned out old Gewehr 05 semi-automatic rifles under contract, while an aging artillery foundry was modernized to cast barrels for the venerable 88mm gun.

It was more than weapons and machines, it was infrastructure.

A network of electrified railroads now laced through the mountains, linking garrisons to ports in days instead of weeks.

Roads were widened to bear armored columns, bridges reinforced to carry locomotives heavy with fuel and ammunition.

In the skies, Portuguese and Spanish pilots trained in formations of twenty or more, their aircraft painted with fresh roundels, their maneuvers sharper with each month.

To the casual observer, the rebuilding of Iberia was an act of generosity from its allies.

But in Berlin’s chancelleries and Rome’s ministries, the purpose was clear: Spain and Portugal were being reforged into the fortress gates of Western Europe.

Should France ever march again, it would find not fractured kingdoms, but a wall of steel and fire stretching from the Bay of Biscay to the Strait of Gibraltar.

And in the palace at Madrid, the King of Spain stood on a balcony, watching the trains roll into the city.

The war had cost him much, but as the whistles echoed across the rooftops, he could not help but think, perhaps the true war had only just begun.

—

Mexico City baked beneath a high, merciless sun, the air shimmering above the freshly paved avenues that cut through its old colonial heart.

New steel bridges spanned the canals; electric trolleys clattered along rails imported from Pennsylvania; telegraph poles and American-built streetlamps stood in neat, foreign-precise lines. On the surface, it was a capital reborn.

But to those who lived here, the new order was as much occupation as it was liberation.

The Mexican Republic, young, outwardly modern, and very much in Washington’s pocket, had been born from the fires of a revolution that never truly ended.

Years earlier, when the United States chose to involve itself in Mexico rather than Europe’s Great War, it did so with ruthless precision.

American rifles and artillery flowed south, alongside “military advisors” in khaki uniforms and foreign mercenaries, many of them German veterans, provided by the infamous Werwolf Brigade.

These men trained the factions loyal to Washington, helping them crush those who resisted, and pave the way for a client government to take root.

Now, the Presidential Palace was guarded not by ragged campesino militias, but by trim soldiers in American-pattern uniforms, their Springfield rifles gleaming with oil.

Officers wore Sam Browne belts and Stetsons instead of sombreros, their parade drills more suited to West Point than Veracruz.

American companies had carved Mexico into neat concessions: railroads in the north, oilfields along the Gulf, mining concessions in Sonora and Chihuahua.

Signs in English appeared alongside Spanish: “Standard Oil Company,” “Union Pacific Freight Depot,” “Gulf & Pacific Telegraph.” The peso was pegged to the dollar.

Yet beneath the thin gloss of order, cracks showed. Corruption was rampant; governors were appointed as much for loyalty to Washington as for competence.

The army’s loyalty was split between Mexican officers who still dreamed of independence, and those whose commissions came directly from the U.S. Embassy.

The rural South smoldered with resentment, whole villages speaking openly of rebellion once the “yanquis” left. Though everyone knew they never would.

In the U.S. State Department’s ledgers, Mexico was a “success story.” A stable republic, secured against European influence, a bulwark on America’s southern border.

In truth, it was a puppet on a string, dancing in the Shadow of the Eagle.

And in the cantinas of Guadalajara and the markets of Oaxaca, people whispered an old refrain with new meaning:

“Pobre México, tan lejos de Dios, tan cerca de los Estados Unidos.”

Or in Englsih… “Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.”

—

The heat rolled across the courtyard of Riyadh’s Grand Palace, shimmering above polished marble tiles and casting the high, gold-tipped minarets into a hazy silhouette.

In their shadow, delegations from three foreign powers waited in a column of nervous ceremony.

British diplomats in starched khaki, French envoys draped in their Mediterranean whites, and Americans in dark, formal suits more suited to a New York boardroom than the desert.

It had been nearly twenty years since the banners of the Pan-Arabian Kingdom were first raised over these walls.

The memory of that day was carved into the palace gates and written in the hearts of its people: the day the desert rose against the Ottoman Empire, armed and organized by the man in Europe who had kept his word.

While the United Kingdom’s promises to Sharif Hussein were betrayed in another timeline, here, they had been fulfilled.

Bruno von Zehntner had delivered independence, real independence.

The borders of the Kingdom ran from the Red Sea to the Gulf, from the highlands of Yemen to the sands beyond Damascus, touching the gates of Persia.

German engineers had built the railways; German rifles had armed the militias; German coin had stabilized the dinar.

And in exchange, the Arab monarch swore that his people would stand as guardians of the world’s eastern frontier, at the border with Magna Graecia, where Greek banners and German advisers marked the limit of Western influence.

The Turkish Republic had been short-lived. Following its disastrous defeat in the Great War under the Ottoman banner, and with the majority of its Western territory reclaimed by Christendom.

The Turkish people now found themselves a small protectorate between the Borders of the Kingdom of Greece and the Pan-Arab Kingddom.

Today, that frontier was quiet.

The Arab Kingdom had no appetite for Europe’s newest quarrel.

But now the West had come knocking, London, Paris, and Washingtonm seeking allies for a war that had yet to fully ignite.

In the Hall of the Malik, the King listened in silence as the British spoke of “shared history,” the French of “brotherhood in arms,” and the Americans of “mutual prosperity.”

None mentioned past grievances. But the King had not forgotten.

When the envoys had finished, he rose slowly, his voice carrying through the vaulted chamber.

“We are not a people who break their word. In the Great War, Germany kept its promise. The rest of you fought alongside the Ottomans. You come now to speak of alliances? My kingdom stands where it always has, at the border between worlds. We will not march for Berlin, nor for Paris, nor for Washington. But we will not betray the hand that built our freedom.”

The silence that followed was heavier than the desert heat. The message was clear: the Pan-Arabian Kingdom would not join the Allies. And so long as the Germans kept faith, it never would.