A long puff of smoke rose from the foxhole dug just outside the ruins of the Palace of Versailles, half of which had been reduced to rubble in the chaos that overtook the failed French Republic following its humiliating and devastating losses during the Great War.
Over three million Frenchmen lay dead along the border of the German Reich, their bodies turned to mulch beneath the machines of war that climbed over them and pushed forward toward the city of Paris just a year ago.
Their deaths were caused by incompetent, corrupt, and outright ignorant politicians elected by the uneducated masses. These men were sent to fight a war they were incapable of winning and repeatedly thrown into the meat grinder by generals too proud to admit they had no means of penetrating the defenses their enemies had prepared a decade before the first shot was fired.
