Paris, June 1919
The air in the Palace of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors was not merely warm; it was thick with the concentrated, cloying scent of power, expensive cologne, and a barely suppressed, collective exhaustion. The immense room, designed for the Sun King's vanity, felt less like a cradle of peace and more like a courtroom. The mirrors, spanning every arch, reflected the anxious, proud, and weary faces of the world’s victors, a thousand distorted images of the same exhaustion.
Julian Vane, a young British Foreign Office attaché, stood near the back, his gaze fixed on the center table. At twenty-four, he bore the subtle but permanent mark of the war: a faint, jagged scar just below his left ear where a shell fragment had grazed him at Ypres in 1917. He hadn't been on the front line for two years, but the mud and the screaming felt closer than the polished marble beneath his polished boots. Julian adjusted his starched collar, feeling the pressure mount as the German delegation was finally, humiliatingly, ushered in.
They were a picture of gray dejection, two civilians in drab suits amidst a peacock display of military uniforms. One of them, a man in his late fifties with a stoic, broken face, fumbled with a pen. Julian watched his hand tremble as it made contact with the vellum of the Treaty of Versailles. A ripple of hushed, self-satisfied applause began near the French delegation and spread through the room. Julian did not join it. He saw the cold fury in the eyes of a younger German officer standing guard by the door, a look that spoke not of defeat, but of a promise of future reckoning.
Julian leaned toward Sir Ainsworth, his immediate superior. "We haven't signed a peace, sir," he whispered, his voice dry. "We’ve just signed a receipt for another war in twenty years."
"But look at Article 231," Julian pressed, referencing the infamous 'War Guilt' clause that forced Germany to accept sole responsibility for the entire conflict. "We are asking a proud nation to brand itself with a permanent stain and pay reparations that no economy on earth could bear. It’s not a negotiated peace, it's a Diktat. They will never forget this humiliation."
The ink dried. The delegates exchanged brief, chilly handshakes. The great powers had re-carved the map of Europe. Julian looked at a hand-drawn map in his satchel, tracing the new borders of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. The lines were beautiful and clean on paper, but he knew the ground they covered was messy with centuries of ethnic hatred. The old alliances had created the spark in 1914; this new, vindictive treaty was providing the kindling for the next fire. He walked out into the gardens, feeling the weight of the future pressing down on his shoulders.
Trilogy I: The Iron Ledger - Chapter Two: The Worthless Mark
Berlin, November 1923
The sound of the wooden wheelbarrow's iron-banded wheel on the cobblestones of the Tiergarten was the soundtrack to Karl Von Stetten's humiliation. He was a veteran of the Somme and Verdun, a man who had won the Iron Cross for bravery, but his honor was a forgotten currency. The wheelbarrow was piled high with German Marks—literally millions of them. By the time he reached the bakery on the corner of his street, the price of a single loaf of rye bread had risen from 50 million marks to 80 million. The woman behind the counter shrugged, her face as gray as the bread.
"New price, Herr Von Stetten. News from the Ruhr. The French are seizing more of our coal."
Karl slammed a handful of the notes onto the counter. They were almost weightless. "This isn't money," he spat, "It's kindling."
The Treaty of Versailles, signed four years ago, hung over Germany like a permanent thundercloud. The massive reparations, a sum so astronomical it had no real-world equivalent, had triggered hyperinflation that had vaporized the middle class's savings. Karl’s small pension was worthless. The French occupation of the industrial heartland was the final, grinding insult.
Karl shook his head, slumping into a chair. "They're closing the night shift. No coal to run the machines. It's the Diktat, Elsa. They want us in rags, on our knees."
He started attending political meetings. Not because he was interested in politics, but because they offered a distraction from the gnawing hunger. The speakers were often wild-eyed men, but one in particular, a corporal from Bavaria, spoke with a hypnotic, frantic energy. He promised to tear up the Versailles Treaty, to restore German pride, to give men like Karl jobs and uniforms again. The promises were seductive. The poverty and desperation of the Great Depression, which was beginning to sink its claws into a world still recovering from the last war, made extremism seem like the only solution.
One evening, Karl saw a local shopkeeper, a man he'd known his entire life, being harassed by a group of brown-shirted men as a policeman stood by, doing nothing. When Karl intervened, the policeman shrugged. "Orders, Herr Von Stetten. We can't interfere with their 'patrolling'."
Karl returned home that night, the incident gnawing at him. The state was failing to protect its citizens, to provide basic stability. The "strong characters" of Germany were being forged anew in a crucible of resentment and unemployment, and they were looking for strong leaders who weren't afraid to break the rules that a broken world had forced upon them. The seeds of the next great conflict were already sprouting in the barren soil of a destroyed economy, watered by the bitter tears of Versailles. Julian Vane's premonition was quietly coming true.
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