"Gentlemen, this is the famous Federal Governor of Lorraine, the guerrilla hero Clumber Heisen, whom I have introduced to you. Sir, these are guests from afar, Mr. Dart, Mr. Marville, Mr. Mawson, Mr. Anque, ......"

Under the introduction of Colonel Tite, Chief of Staff of the 17th National Defense Division, Weiss shook hands with several guests with special status. They were now located at a federal training ground in central Lorraine, which did not look like anything special, but it was actually the only guerrilla warfare training base in the Federation—and the other was located in the federal state of Camos in the northeastern part of the Federation, next to Wessex, which had been turbulent in recent years.

After the lessons of the two wars, the federal army has fully realized the importance of guerrilla warfare, especially after attacking the hinterland of the Norman Empire, they are surprised to find that the Normans have been able to skillfully use various guerrilla warfare methods, so they hurriedly began the study and practice of counter-guerrilla warfare.

Today, the war is long over, and the total active strength of the Union Army has rapidly shrunk from nearly 10 million at its peak to about 1 million, and the combat force has shrunk from a massive 400 divisions to 72 divisions, about half of which are scattered in the federal states and the rest in strategic locations. Lorraine was located on the frontier and would have been reduced to a battlefield if it was fought against the Normans, so in addition to the 17th National Defense Division, which continued to be stationed, several regular troops were deployed here.

Facing Weiss, the guests were full of admiration. After the interview, they asked a lot of questions in Norman. Weiss's Norman language skills are good enough to cope with everyday communication, but some technical terminology is still being learned and accumulated. Because he knew the identity of these special guests in advance, he carried a bilingual dictionary, and during the conversation, he flipped through the dictionary from time to time, supplemented by descriptive language, so that this special group of people kept nodding their heads. In fact, they had one "innate" thing in common with Weiss, and that was that they had both fought against the Norman army.

They spoke Norman, and naturally they were not the warriors of Wessex or the brave men of Falane, but the rebels of the Norman Empire itself. They fought against the Norman army no less than the Lorraines - these forces of resistance existed long before the accession of Hohenstaufen IV to the throne.

From the beginning of the conversation, the Normans with these special identities asked one question after another. If a problem is a bullet, then they run out of magazines in one go. To an orthodox professional soldier like Colonel Tite, some of these questions were so tricky that the entire Federation probably had only a few experts in the study of guerrilla warfare could answer properly. Fortunately, the current governor of Lorraine not only had rich experience in guerrilla warfare, but was also very good at summing up, and his book "Modern Guerrilla Warfare" was published in the internal journal of the Federal Army and became a recommended textbook for the Deelefig High Staff College.

Each of them asked at least four or five questions, which gave Weiss a "respite", he glanced at the other party unhurriedly, and asked: "Ladies and gentlemen, I have no disrespect, not because of pure curiosity, but considering our long-term cooperation in the future, I hope you can answer truthfully...... Why did you resist the Norman royal family, and why did you ask us for cooperation? ”

Several guests looked at each other, and the eldest replied, "As we expressed in our secret contact with the Federation, we have been rebelling against the rule of the Hohenstaufens for more than a hundred years. In the darkest of times, we live like slaves, no matter how hard we work, always on the verge of hunger and cold, with no hope in sight. In modern times, our way of working has improved with the progress of industrialization, but there has been no change in our living conditions. We begin to understand the outside world, and we slowly learn that we are born with a desire for freedom, and that freedom is called democracy. In this world, the Federation is synonymous with democracy, so we have been trying to seek the help of the Federation for decades. ”

"How much do you know about democracy, and what do you think?" Weiss asks two questions in quick succession, both of which sound simple, but not easy to answer.

Several guests from the Norman Empire hesitated for a long time before the one just replied: "We have longed for the free and democratic system of the Commonwealth, and we have studied it for a long time, and we hope to finally reach this ideal state, and perhaps at some historical opportunity, we can form a larger, highly free state with the Commonwealth, but perhaps in the years of our lives, what we can do is to let the light of democracy come to our country." At present, Albert's constitutional reform is in line with the will of the people to some extent, so it has received a lot of support, but we know that this kind of constitutional government is hypocritical, and the power is still tightly in the hands of the royal family, and it is even more authoritarian than before. True democracy should allow the people to share the power of the state and obtain the benefits commensurate with their labor. ”

Weiss was satisfied with this answer, knowing that according to the secret negotiations between the two sides, hundreds of rebels would come to the Confederation from the Norman Empire in the future, and receive all-round and professional training at the guerrilla training ground in Lorraine, and it was very important to understand their original intentions and grasp their mentality.

After Weiss had finished asking a round of questions, a young special visitor cautiously asked, "I heard that you fought against Ballas and beat him twice?" ”

Weiss thought hard for a moment: "To be exact, I've only won once, and the other time it's a draw. ”

"It's not easy to win once." The man muttered.

Wei Stanran said: "Won once, drew once, lost twice. ”

The man was stunned.

"I won't comment on the late old crown prince, but Albert and Barras feel like they're both great characters. But he didn't expect that Albert would simply clean up Ballas and send him to mine through the hands of the United Tribunal. Weiss threw out the introduction.

The eldest of the visitors said, "Yes, we are equally amazed at Albert's skill, for anyone with a little brain would lay his weight on the strong, active, and militarily gifted one, who would have guessed that Albert would have the courage to sell out the entire officer corps—not even a betrayal, but a punitive war against the army for the sake of consolidating the power of the royal family." The war came very suddenly, very quickly, and was remarkably won. The army has lost its backbone, and the military reform under the constitutional system has been carried out very smoothly, and after this military reform, the new army is completely and absolutely loyal to the state and the royal family, and is no longer an appendage of the officer corps. It is indeed a very surprising thing that the problems that have plagued the royal family of Hohenstaufen for hundreds of years have been solved in the hands of a man who seems most improbable. Therefore, we believe that Albert is by no means a holy lord, but an enemy that we have never faced before. In the southwestern part of the Norman Empire, we have been suppressed and besieged by Norman armies for months on end, a situation not seen in half a century. If we continue like this, we will probably have to go the most extreme way......"

"Perhaps, the incurable disease in his body is his deliberate trick to show weakness, which not only avoids the suspicion and suppression of his brother, but also gets the support and alliance of his brother, and when he is in power, he will turn his hands and float clouds." Weiss expressed his speculation.

One of the visitors said almost without thinking: "But that genetic disease is called the 'crown curse,' and in the past few hundred years, there has been at least one or three or four direct members of the Hohenstaufen family in each generation, and none of these patients have lived past the age of forty. However, the development of medical technology may have given them a way to overcome or delay genetic diseases, otherwise, who would choose the person who is destined to die before the age of forty at the critical moment of the power struggle? ”

Weiss listened quietly, not interjecting. The Clumber-Heyssen family had already rebuilt the castle in Somsonas, and Ze took little Kemp and the Lord and his wife to live together. Every time he returned, he would think of the conversation he had when Fries had met Ballas, and he had a faint feeling in his heart that Albert and Ballas were not over yet. The affairs of the two brothers, if they were resolved behind closed doors, were the figures who dominated the fortunes of the Norman nation and affected international stability.

How will that storm come?

Over the next ten days, Weiss took the time to accompany these guerrillas from the Norman Empire to experience the operating rules and training effects of the Federal Army's guerrilla training ground. The training here is divided into two modes: basic training and tactical training, the former is taught by instructors to the participants various basic skills required for guerrilla warfare, including shooting, explosives, driving, etc., in short, it is to let a guerrilla understand the basic principles of various weapons and equipment, and train a low-level version of the special service fighters; The tactical mode is to let the trained guerrillas master various skills of guerrilla warfare through drills and exercises, and try to evade the "enemy" round-up and hunting in various environments, and their core goal is to survive on the organic battlefield, and then carry out all kinds of sabotage and attacks under the conditions they can.

Although it was only a trial training, Weiss noticed that the basic combat skills of the special visitors were very solid, and they did not shy away from their experience of serving in the Norman army. Through Zezhikou, Weiss knew that the reason why the Norman army was strong was that in terms of people, the officer group had a unique status and inheritance, and its ability and confidence were significantly higher than their counterparts in various countries, while the grassroots soldiers were more hard-working, they were receiving a meager salary while receiving rigorous training, and they had to move forward bravely on the battlefield, and even after retiring, they must obey the instructions of the reserve corps, so that they can come and go when they are called, otherwise they will be severely punished by the law.

Where there is oppression, there is resistance. This is a philosophy that conforms to the laws of things. In the history of the Norman Empire, mutinies in the army were very rare, but not never. According to Ze, in the past two centuries or so, the Norman army has had two nasty mutinies, both of which threatened the safety of the royal family and twice led to the execution of commander-in-chief generals, but under the cover of those in power, few people knew the truth. Later, in order to prevent the army from mutiny, and also to prevent the army generals from becoming bigger, the successive rulers of the empire ostensibly reused members of the royal family and the great nobles, allowing them to hold senior positions in the army, and used the officer corps to check and balance behind the scenes, and constantly changed the positions of the generals, making it difficult for them to form absolute leadership over a certain army. Albert's attempt to reshape the military and political rules of the Norman Empire according to his own will by Albert sent members of the royal family, noble generals, and the officer corps to the joint tribunal, seemed to be a successful reshuffle, but Weiss felt that as Ballas said, there was a historical inertia in the operation of the country, and if the rules were broken rashly, they would inevitably be affected by inertia. Perhaps, the real rebels are not in this guerrilla training ground where the guns are roaring, but in the heart of the seemingly calm and even stable heartland.