by Carlo Zen
A mistake once made must be rectified, or it will be repeated.
Colonel von Degurechaff left with a composed salute, and after seeing her out, General von Zettour fell into silent thought for a time.
When he doubted their assumptions and considered the situation…it probably required immediate action. It wouldn’t do to make the same mistake twice.
He reached for the receiver near at hand and said it was urgent. And when Colonel von Lergen appeared soon after, Zettour got straight to the point. “Colonel von Lergen, I want to change my next inspection destination.”
“Yes, sir! I’ll make the arrangements right away. Will that be the southern front you were anxious about? To observe General von Romel’s operation?”
An excellent, ready response. It was natural that a member of the Operations Division would be thinking of the recently stagnant situation on the southern continent.
“No, the east.”
“The east? Operations’ inspection unit will be heading there in a few days. Are you going to go with them?”
Despite the fact that Zettour had launched straight into the business at hand, Lergen was able to offer a plan immediately. When it came to coordinating and providing assistance, Colonel von Lergen was a model staff officer.
But even he was mistaken. No, it was less that he was mistaken, more that he just had no way of knowing. If the fundamental terms in the east had changed, operation-level inspections would be meaningless. What they needed to do was revise the rules of the game.
Zettour shook his head to clear out extraneous thoughts and continued his concise explanation. “I intend to borrow you from Operations, but I don’t have plans to accompany them. I’ll talk to General von Rudersdorf. You just make the necessary preparations.”
“Yes, sir! May I inquire as to our objective?”
Even if he has doubts, he swallows them as is appropriate. It’s amazing that this mid-ranking officer can support Rudersdorf, with all his overflowing confidence. The only reason someone so irresponsible is so efficient at carrying out operations is his people. Under the circumstances, it’ll be tough, but I would really like Lergen for a secret operation.
“Sure. We’re going to inspect logistics administration in the rear area and also for one confidential matter… Oh, right. There’s another favor I’d like to ask of you. Look for a specialist in ethnic group issues. The faster the better.”
“Understood. Would the member of the National Congress we’re seeking to cooperate with in Operations work?”
“I don’t care, as long as we know for sure that they’re not a spy. If possible, the best would be someone we can trust to maintain confidentiality.”
“Do excuse me, General, but please allow me to ask a nosy question. From what you’re saying, sir, it sounds like…the confidential matter has something to do with ethnic issues?”
“I won’t deny it, Colonel. You can think of it as part of our pacification efforts. If possible, I’d like to consider meeting with leadership on the ground.”
“Understood. We want someone who has connections in the area and can keep a secret. By when, sir?”
He’s a quick one, thought General von Zettour with a smile. He was going to cause a lot of trouble for Colonel von Lergen, who was nodding that he had gotten it all through his head. But he didn’t have a choice.
“The beginning of next week.”
“G-General?” But today’s Friday came through unsaid in Lergen’s bewilderment. Zettour had called him up at the end of the day and ordered him to make arrangements by early Monday.
Of course he was bewildered.
But Zettour pressed the strict order on him and gave Lergen a firm look that said, And what about it? They were at war. In wartime, necessity trumps all else.
For an officer of the General Staff, carrying out their military duties with all due haste was their sacred duty.
“Sorry, but please get it set up. If need be, you can work the Service Corps personnel to the bone. Anyhow, we’re short on time. Get going.”
“Yes, sir. Right away.”
SOME DAY IN SEPTEMBER, UNIFIED YEAR 1926, ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF THE COMMONWEALTH CAPITAL LONDINIUM
The duties of an intelligence agency during wartime were manifold and include sharing and analyzing information with related national agencies, as well as gathering raw data.
Even just the collection of intelligence—military, economic, political, public opinion, technological, and so on—had become a subdivided world where only experts could tell the wheat from the chaff.
Chaos, chaos, and more chaos.
It wasn’t easy to sift the precious stones out of a pile of rocks. Even the methods of collection were a complex mix of SIGINT and HUMINT.
Although budget restraints were being removed during the war, intelligence agencies were far from flush with cash. They would have to make do as best they could.
Even just pacifying the heads of each group, who were all convinced their own section was highest priority and deserved the most money, was a struggle in itself. Apparently, Intelligence staffers all have “strong” personalities… Finding someone cooperative was enough for him to want to thank God in spite of himself. Even a slight butting of heads between Intelligence and the Foreign Office was bound to upset his stomach.
But the leader of the Commonwealth’s intelligence agency, Major General Habergram, thought he had accepted all that. So far, he had.
He earnestly believed that steady efforts to regulate things would ultimately bear fruit, and because of that, little by little, he had started to see results.
Currently, the SIGINT efforts to gather military intel were going fine. Their approaches toward enemy identification, jamming, and code breaking were getting results no one could complain about, except how they were eating excessively into the budget.
And even in terms of HUMINT, they had improved all their observation methods. Though there were as many challenges as ever in imperial territory, they had the former Republic covered.
They had a general handle on the movements of the Imperial Army units scattered all over each region.
Even the tricky business of collecting intel on the southern continent was solved when they dispatched a crack agent. He was an old man who grumbled and sent in complaints, but he was unexpectedly persistent.
He had organized multiple raids, albeit small in scale, on enemy supply lines… And the network of nomadic contacts was being built on schedule. Habergram could leave things up to him for the foreseeable future and have no problems.
Still, it had to be added. There was the inadequate budget, the internal and external arguments, the bureaucratic head-butting between sections. And to top it off, along with everything else, the plausible question of whether a mole had infiltrated their organization haunted him every night.
General Habergram had been suffering for a long time like a CEO in charge of a company about to go bankrupt.
And furthermore, aside from the mole issue—the only hopeless issue that had been endlessly haunting him since the war broke out—something else had mushroomed into a problem so difficult it was virtually impossible to handle.
“The budget but also just people. The intelligence agency is so understaffed. At this rate, we’re just…”
It was people. He didn’t have enough people.
He wanted to puff on a cigar and gripe about the lack of capable people. And it wasn’t just staff. They were also desperately short of management-level leaders and executives.
But although Intelligence had been facing a serious shortage of people since the war began…strictly speaking, they weren’t understaffed in the beginning.
It was once they plunged into wartime that they became thoroughly lacking.
There were two reasons for that.
One was attrition due to war deaths.
It had been a huge mistake to dispatch task forces made up of old hands on joint operations with the Entente Alliance and Republic. They were all attacked
by a special unit from the Reich identified as the 203rd Aerial Mage Battalion. The damage done by the loss of their invaluable veterans was extensive.
As they rebuilt the organization, educated personnel, and reconstructed their network, the undeniable truth was that he couldn’t regret that heavy loss enough.
The Imperial Army had come out swinging with such perfect timing. Even General Habergram, though he didn’t want to suspect his own subordinates…had to think there was a mole lurking in their org.
The Empire’s luck had held out awfully long for it to be a coincidence.
The problem was, he hadn’t yet managed to grasp the thing’s tail. The moment he found this shameless mole, he intended to kill it dead.
All that was more than enough of a headache, but his suffering was compounded by the way the army and navy treated the remaining human resources.
The second issue was that all the veteran agents on loan from the army and navy had been taken back.
“Shit! I can’t believe they would trip up their own allies…”
The army and navy said they were transferring all their personnel to the front lines and packed them off. Habergram would have liked to give them a piece of his mind.
“We don’t have any people as trustworthy as the ones you need to work in Intelligence.”
The logic made sense. But to then basically take them all away by force… The intelligence agency was in shambles.
Thanks to a double punch from both enemies and allies, there was a severe shortage of veteran agents.
As a result, almost immediately after the start of the war, Intelligence was nearly incapacitated by serious losses. Obnoxiously, the disorderly personnel changes were causing issues with the mole hunt.
As if not having anyone to trust didn’t already have him at wit’s end.
Though the ultra-confidential secret that they had broken the Imperial Army’s code hadn’t leaked, everything else had. He couldn’t help but shudder.
No, with the sloppy state of their anti-espionage efforts, it wouldn’t be strange for even top secret intel to leak anytime.
And even under these difficult circumstances, the requests for Intelligence kept coming in.
The Foreign Office was requesting “an urgent survey of the cooperative relationships between the Empire and other countries.”
The Ministry of Supply had given strict orders to investigate “the Imperial Army’s plans for commerce raids.”
The Office of the Admiralty was fairly screaming at them to acquire “all manner of military intelligence on the Imperial Navy’s submarines as well as the whereabouts of their fleet.”
And as for the War Office, it was somehow managing to demand details from the ground on “the status of both the imperial and Federation forces in the east.”
The cabinet was a cabinet, so each minister inquired after their own interests and areas of jurisdiction.
Of course, General Habergram understood that it was both an important job and a patriotic duty to do so. And as a public servant, I respect that. But, he was forced to lament.
Every section was convinced that their requests should be highest priority in this national crisis, and they didn’t hesitate to stubbornly insist on a certain order of things.
Of course, if it were possible, he would want to cooperate. But as it was, he wanted to scream that he didn’t have enough people. Even if he cried out for trustworthy personnel who had passed the screenings, there was no reply.
The strict order from the Committee of Commonwealth Defense was to do his best with what he had.
It made him want to hold his head in his hands.
No, that was all he could do.
He couldn’t even send any Intelligence staff to the continent in the first place because he didn’t have the bodies.
Which was why a plan was proposed to educate the replacements and transform them into a proper fighting force. Logically speaking, that was a sensible response—if you shut your eyes to the social trend of promising young newbies volunteering en masse for frontline service.
General Habergram himself was from a distinguished family.
He knew how their youth felt.
As one of their forerunners, it wasn’t as if he felt no warmth at the manifestation of noblesse oblige.
When the youth left college to volunteer for their fatherland, he could only bow his head in respect of their determination and drive.
If there was a problem that he couldn’t overlook, it was that the determination of the young people offering themselves up for their fatherland was too stubborn.
When all the bright students volunteered for the army to fulfill their sense of noblesse oblige, they applied for air units, mage units, service in the naval fleet, or frontline service in a ground unit and so on.
The conclusion was clear.
They had no interest in rear service. The more outstanding and patriotic, the more brimming with perseverance and intellectual capacity—precisely the traits the intelligence agency needed—the more likely it was that they wanted to stand at the head of the pack as a frontline commander or officer in the air or mage forces.
The mental fortitude to not go running for rear service was commendable. And truth be told, General Habergram thought very highly of them.
Their determination was admirable.
But he also wished from the bottom of his heart that they would throw him a bone, as the leader in Intelligence, which made its base in the rear.
Naturally, they couldn’t put out a public call for more Intelligence personnel. And due to the system of recruiting personnel who dealt with confidential information, they couldn’t openly ask for people who wanted to serve in the intelligence agency.
When they reached out to someone, they had to do it under a public-facing name and purpose. Since their identities were confidential, the recruiting calls necessarily ended up being for rear-serving officers for the War Office or the Office of the Admiralty.
Thanks to that, they were having…an awfully hard time recruiting outstanding officers. The army and navy wouldn’t let the truly superior officers go.
So they had no choice but to reach out to individuals one by one… But when you invite a talented, patriotic individual with a strong sense of responsibility to bid farewell to the subordinates they’ve been in charge of and do desk work in the War Office or the Office of the Admiralty, you have to be thankful you’re not getting a kick in the teeth.
“Apparently, someone once even asked, ‘You need officers to abandon their friends on the forward-most line and go to the rear?’ They’re not wrong.”
The problem plaguing all the recruiters was…how pure the young people were. Though they praised the youths’ noble spirits, they were in a real fix.
Ultimately, they decided to focus their recruiting efforts on disabled officers who were barred from war-zone service due to their injuries. Superior talents frequently stood up again with an indefatigable spirit.
Officers who voluntarily came back after being injured in battle and still wanted to fight had become extremely capable Intelligence personnel. General Habergram was sure they were worth more than their weight in gold.
But because of the peculiarities of their appearances, he hesitated to send them into the field as spies. Not that disabled military men were rare, but in neutral or hostile countries, he wanted to avoid attracting attention.
“…Maybe we should start recruiting women as agents?”
He realized that if the military in enemy territory was fully mobilized, then women might actually stand out less. All the adult men had been conscripted and sent to the front lines. And the fact that adult women were starting to fill general labor positions in the rear was another important point.
It wasn’t a bad thing to note.
“Hmm, but when it comes to having women parachute into enemy territory…”
Would the General Staff and Whitehall approve of that? Well, since it’s a secret operation, I
could probably proceed at my own discretion, but…
Was there any danger of them being used by the enemy in their propaganda war?
Considering the political mess that would result if one of them was captured, doing it unilaterally was a big risk. The more he thought about it, the more things it seemed there were to consider.
An expanding workload and dwindling Intelligence personnel…
“Things just don’t go how you’d like.”
General Habergram tapped his finger on the table in irritation.
There was a shortage of the human resources Intelligence needed. Yet the amount of work was rapidly increasing. He may have been a gentleman, but it still made him curse his situation.
But apparently, having no time to think was just part of war.
There was already a subordinate official, carrying a small mountain of paperwork, peeking his head in.
He set the documents down on the table with a thud.
Blimey. With no time to fall into despair, he reached for his pen, and that’s when he realized something. His subordinate was holding out an envelope.
“Excuse me, sir. This is urgent from the Committee of Commonwealth Defense.”
“From the defense committee? Oh, the summons circular?”
Thinking how rare it was to get a summons, he tore open the envelope and looked over the contents. Then he corrected his mistake.
“No, it’s a request for me to attend a meeting. That doesn’t happen very often.”
Having a member of Intelligence attend a meeting that will have official minutes? He wanted to ask what the prime minister was thinking. Still, an order was an order.
And he had no reason or way to disobey a directive the right person gave via the proper channels.
“It says to attend the Commonwealth defense meeting tomorrow. An official request from the prime minister’s office. I’m busy right now, but I guess I can’t argue. Make sure there’s a car ready for me.”
But really, he wondered what the prime minister was going to say to him.
SOME DAY IN SEPTEMBER, UNIFIED YEAR 1926, THE COMMONWEALTH CAPITAL LONDINIUM, IN THE WHITEHALL AREA
