"Field Marshal Golz achieved a historic victory. The Ottoman forces under his command captured the Suez Canal, a vital waterway that was finally out of the control of the Allies. Soon, the whole Mediterranean will become our inner lake, and Britain and France will eventually collapse because of constant blood loss! ”

On 14 September, Wilhelm gave an inspiring speech in the main room of the Reichstag in Berlin, and all the members of the Reichstag, including the Social Democrats, stood up to pay their warmest cheers and most sincere respect to the supreme German monarch. In any respect, the veteran who was awarded the rank of field marshal in 1911 alongside Schlieffen is a record of what he has achieved in the annals of history: he rebuilt the decaying Ottoman army and wielded the sword to bring Britain's vital overseas base to pieces. At this moment, not only the material troops from India, Australia and other colonies will completely detour to the Cape of Good Hope, and the blood transfusion of the British Empire will be greatly reduced; As a result, the door to Africa was slammed open, and the fertile and rich colonies of Britain and France were nakedly exposed to the troops of the Allied countries!

After some deliberations, Germany decided on its strategy for the war. At present, the German army is still the first priority to force France to surrender and induce an internal revolution in Russia, so it is necessary to concentrate all forces on a frontal attack on France and Russia. The task of encompassing the African colonies was entrusted to the Turks, who were eye-catching. With Germany's current influence on the Al-Shabaab government in Istanbul, there was no fear that it would not obey the redistribution of the colonies by the Berlin government after the war. The German High Command then put pressure on the other satellite states to purge their armies. Launch an even more fierce attack on the Entente.

Three days later. It seems to have been stimulated and encouraged by the news of the Ottoman Empire's victory in the capture of the Suez Canal. Shortly after the announcement of its accession to the Central Powers, Romania responded to the call of the Berlin government and began a large-scale offensive against Russia along the Black Sea coast. Although there was not enough time for mobilization, this small Balkan country with a large population still sent nearly 300,000 people from two army groups to the front line of the war. The victory of the Turks in the Middle East did make Bregast's war ambitions unprecedentedly inflated, and the arrival of reinforcements from two German divisions increased their confidence. In the eyes of the Romanians, even the Turks, who had been weak for a hundred years, could reap victory over the British, so why should they be inferior to these weak European sick men?

Driven by this speculative mentality of feeling very good about yourself. The Romanian government did not wait for the complete mobilization of its own army before it impatiently fired their first shot of the war. However, their army was obviously not as powerful as the Ottoman army, which had been trained by German instructors for a long time. The Romanian Army's chronic lack of training, poor equipment, and the government's "flexible strategy" of maneuvering between the two camps of the Alliance before the war also made both sides distrustful of this small country riding on the wall, with little military assistance and cooperation. The Chief of the General Staff, Florescu, did not care about this phenomenon, believing that bright clothing was the only way to improve the combat effectiveness of the troops, and personally devoted himself to the design of military uniforms with fierce enthusiasm.

Thanks to Florescu's efforts, the Romanian army began to endlessly add various gold trims and tassels to their clothing. It was embroidered with the unique heraldic logos of each army and division, and even the cooks and men who accompanied the army were issued with corresponding special uniforms. In terms of aesthetics alone. The Romanian army was the best in Europe, but the disadvantages caused by this were undoubtedly worse than those of the French army in blue shirts and empty trousers.

When the Romanian army appeared on the battlefield, the Russian troops on the opposite side were simply "dazzled by a field of gold, blue, and purple colors", and then they reacted and fired fiercely at these Romanians. As the Russian government had already felt that Romania would declare war on Russia under the leadership of the king of the Hohenzollern family, in the midst of successive defeats in its own army; The garrison of Western Ukraine received an order for combat readiness of the first level early on and developed a strategy to deal with a possible Romanian offensive. Under the cover of the Russian army's guns and bullets, the Romanian army was knocked over one after another like rabbits, and in the face of that gorgeous multicolored cloud, even the Russian reservists with poor marksmanship could achieve a fairly ideal hit rate!

After several border battles, the Romanian army had suffered more than 10,000 casualties; The Russian army, which had not won a few battles since the outbreak of the war, finally found a sense of strength in the Romanians for the first time. The Russian 8th Army, commanded by Yudenich, took the initiative after a successful defense, and after two days of fierce fighting, broke through the northern defense line of the Romanian 1st Army, and the three divisions collapsed under the Russian attack, and only 5,000 people were able to escape. When German reinforcements came to plug this gap in the defensive line, the Romanian army, which had retreated from the front line, actually took the gray of the German uniforms as the gray of the Russian army, and directly waved the white flag and rushed to surrender to it. After being shouted by the Germans, these Romanians, dressed brighter than flowers, realized that they had found the wrong person to surrender, so they turned around and prepared to surrender to the real Russians, who were no less than the Italians!

"The night before yesterday, the Holy Master sent me a telegram saying that he had an auspicious dream in which the Virgin Mary had descended and sang carols on top of the Winter Palace. Sure enough, yesterday the news of the victory came from the front. ”

In the exquisitely decorated front headquarters, Tsar Nicholas, dressed in military uniform, looked at the battle map hanging on the wall, and his face was full of excitement and joy. He had just led the Russian commander-in-chief for more than ten days, and he had won a brilliant victory: you must know that although Yudenich's army has the name of a group army, its army is only 6 divisions and less than 100,000 troops; In the face of an enemy army with a number of nearly 300,000, it can still have such a record, which is definitely a great deal from any point of view!

"Since his Majesty became commander-in-chief, all our officers and men have been jubilant and excited, and the commanders of all armies have shaken off the shackles of Archduke Nicholas's incompetent command, and under the wise leadership of His Majesty, they have radiated an unprecedented fighting spirit. It is precisely because of this that the soldiers on the front line were able to advance courageously with a completely different courage from the past, and won a great victory of winning more with less. Seeing that Nikolai's interest was so high, a group of high-ranking Russian officers with fat heads and big ears and waists like buckets hurriedly offered sycophants; If you don't take advantage of this time to favor the Tsar, then when will you wait? For a time, the Russian army headquarters was full of rumors, and everyone praised the tsar's wisdom and great achievements in every word, and under their flattery, Nicholas II became the greatest monarch in Russian history after Peter the Great, and his move to remove the Grand Duke from the military post was a solemn and correct decision to turn the tide from a high position, to speed up the morale of the army, and to turn the tide.

Nicholas II listened with a smile, and his eyes couldn't help but show a hint of approval. After he ordered his own uncle to be removed from military power, a large number of officials and generals in the DPRK and China vigorously opposed it; They came to the Winter Palace one after another to admonish him, saying that although the Grand Duke had suffered successive defeats, he was well regarded in the army, and his ability to dispatch and command was also obvious to all, and he was indeed the best candidate for commander-in-chief. And now the victory in Romania proved that his Tsar's decision was extremely correct. After the dismissal of the Grand Duke Rasputin who dared to blaspheme, the Virgin Mary began to favor Russia again, and the Romanians who had fallen into the trap were taught a harsh lesson. Then it will be the turn of the Austrians and the Germans. With the assistance of Saint Rasputin, who can communicate with the gods, the Russian army is bound to be invincible. Now Nikolai's heart is full of remorse for why Rasputin was only discovered by him in 1907, and if this saint could have been enshrined in the palace a few years earlier, how could the great cause of Yellow Russia, which the three generations of Romanov kings had planned for forty years, be buried in his hands like this?

"Alekseev, how is the situation with our army now?"

After Nikolai sighed, he turned his gaze to an elderly general with a long beard next to him and asked. Knowing that he did not know anything about logistics scheduling, conscription and mobilization, and the formulation of battle plans, Nikolai was very conscious and did not stop all the powers, but divided part of the powers of management, and let his subordinates help him manage logistics and command the campaign. However, this has made the already scarce material replenishment of the Russian army even worse. The group of generals relied on and reused by Nikolai were almost all experts in the camp: if they wanted them to do something serious, in the words of the Grand Duke when he took office, it was "difficult to get to the sky", and in the army, they were all at the top of their rope and flattered the Tsar and his royal friend Rasputin, but they were all at the pinnacle, and no one dared to usurp the first place if they were in second place!

When the Grand Duke was in power, these people were afraid of the Grand Duke's majesty and wisdom, and they did not dare to make any big moves; Now, however, the Tsar, who was overjoyed and ignorant of the internal interests of the army, had been appointed commander-in-chief, and these men had no worries. A large amount of food, clothing, meat and poultry, baggage, and even guns, bullets and ammunition were secretly seized by them after a little trickery, and then sold at extremely high prices to the Russian people, who were already mired in scarcity and hunger, in order to seek unprecedented profits. As a result of this back and forth, countless Russian national wealth flowed into the pockets of these private individuals, while the front-line troops suffered from a shortage of supplies, and their morale and combat effectiveness plummeted. (To be continued......)