FATEFUL CHOICES · MAR 1918 · THE WESTERN FRONT
The Kaiser’s peace
On 21 March 1918 Ludendorff’s spring offensive tore a forty-mile hole in the British line and stalled short of Amiens, partly because his starving storm troopers stopped to feast in captured British supply dumps. This is the timeline where the spearheads eat marching and take the rail knot of the Western Front.
You are reading the timeline that almost was · notes marked THE RECORD are real history
21 MAR 1918 · 04:40
At 04:40, six thousand six hundred German guns speak at once. For five hours the British Fifth Army lives inside a hurricane of gas and steel; a million shells fall before breakfast. Then the storm troopers come through the fog, trained to flow past strongpoints the way water passes stones. In a week they tear a forty-mile hole in the Western Front, the deepest advance either side has managed since 1914. In our timeline the flood then reached the British supply dumps and sat down: starving men in field grey among white bread and tinned beef, deaf to every order.
In the timeline recorded here, Ludendorff’s order carries one added line. The dumps are sealed for the quartermasters, and the spearheads eat marching. They march on Amiens.
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