Chapter 10: Ice-cream and Sausages
13th November 1936
The grey city of ash that had once been Berlin served as a monument to Man’s inhumanity to Man, and the folly of unrestricted nationalism. It was also bloody cold, Alan thought, and perhaps not the best place to set up shop to discuss world affairs and the ongoing crises of various different regional wars.
Then again, he wasn’t the Olympic Committee, and they had decided that Berlin had been chosen to host in 1936 and by God, would it.
Still, for as strange as this all was, it was not the strangest Olympics he had attended, nor the most uncomfortable. It did also mean that many important leaders and officials were within the city, equally as uncomfortable and willing to talk to avoid thinking about their predicament too much.
“Two scoops, please.”
That all being said, Alan sighed, he still did not quite understand the Mighty Cheesare’s insistence on maintain an ice-cream stand for the duration of the Games.
“At this rate, at least we won’t make a loss,” he called back over his shoulder as the line of customers continued to order.
Beancounter lifted his eyes from the newspaper. “Cheesolini doesn’t know how to run a business but he’s good at drumming it up. Very difficult to ignore him when he’s ringing that bell of his.”
Alan winced, and was glad his boss had been tempted away by the Danish king and his ministers to talk about Norway. The man was clearly quite upset, but the frozen confectionary seemed to be helping a little. As Mighty Cheesare always said: “The way to a Man’s heart is through his stomach, and thus, fascism is best spread through enticing confectionery products at a reasonable price.”
It didn’t quite fit on the shop sign, but that was probably for the best.
King Christian X didn’t quite know what to expect when he sought out the advice of the only other proper nationalist dictator in Europe, but this was certainly not it. “I feel as though the world has lost all sense,” he said quietly to himself, and then, noting the suitability of it, repeated it again louder to his table companions.
“Yes,” Cheesolini nodded sagely, crowned by the paper hat of Cheesare’s Ices and the apron of command. “General Catastrophe has been filling me in on the details.”
“As I understand it, together with the information SIM and the Danish military have collated, Norway is in the midst of a mostly successful communist uprising. The Communist party have taken power across most of the country, with only Oslo and the high north remaining free.”
“In the north, the Loyalist army can defend across a very narrow front despite being outnumbered…but Oslo seems certain to fall,” King Christian said gloomily.
“Indeed, sir. Incredibly defendable along a tiny narrow front, but they are heavily outnumbered. Provided the Red Norwegians can’t navally invade behind them however…and they’d probably struggle now in winter, the Norwegians could hold out for some time. The government has for some reason been taken completely by surprise by this massive and highly organised communist uprising and were it not for the army doing winter training in the north, they’d all be captured by now.”
“What a mess. Who’s running Norway now?” Cheesolini asked.
“Well, it should be the democratically elected Labour PM, Johan Nygaardsvold. But…well…he’s in Oslo, as is my brother, King Haakon. For some reason, the free Norwegian army and territory that’s left in the North has gone with Johan H. Andresen.”
“Who’s he?”
“Exceedingly rich. He owns a cigar factory, I believe. And is leader of the Conservatives. But other than that…something of a non-entity in popular imagination.”
“So…not one for everyone to rally round then.”
The King sighed. “I can’t see it happening. Not entirely sure what he was doing in Tromso, but…” he shrugged.
“Where?”
“Excuse me,” he remembered he was speaking to Italians, “Tromsø. As it seems, the last line of defence for Old Norway.”
“Any news on the Royal Family?” Catastrophe enquired.
“We have a ship on its way to see if it can get them out. Hopefully they can make it in time. If not…” Christian’s face darkened and Cheesolini nodded to himself. Here is someone who would go to war over such things.
“Who’s the face of this new Red Menace?” he asked to the table generally.
Catastrophe opened a SIM file and passed round a picture. “Adam Egede-Nissen. Leader of the Norwegian Communist Party.”
“Who he? Who they?”
“The Communist Party of Norway basically exists because they wanted to stay in the Comintern, and the Norwegian Labour Party correctly surmised by the early ‘20s that this was a terrible idea. Initially popular with some parts of the Labour movement, and trade unions that for various reasons were pissed off with Labour, by the 30s this had all fallen to pieces and the Party was the standard mess of competing factions who hated each other just as much as they hated everyone else. Basically no one liked them, and they were seen as tools of Moscow,” Alan shouted from the stall, before serving the next dignitary.
“Thank you, Alan. Ok. What happened then?”
“For some reason, everyone has decided this year that communism is great, Labour…who had already won the previous year’s election…fell apart, and no one tried to stop increasingly dangerous rhetoric, or the arming of Norwegian cells with what we can only assume is weaponry from Russia,” Christian said, growing increasingly angry.
“Bugger. So no one likes them, but they are very popular. Their leadership is non-existent but better than the apparent alternative, and though Russia isn’t involved, they’re the only ones who could have pulled this off?”
“Basically. Or the country has gone mad. In any case, roughly thirty to eighty thousand communist troops are up against around thirty thousand regulars. But given who is fighting who, this war may be decided more by who decides to intervene rather than who is fighting who in Norway.”
Cheesolini blinked. “You’d actually invade?”
“To save a fellow Nordic nation from communism, my brother from the block, and stop Russia from taking over the Baltic and North Seas?” the King raised an eyebrow. “Of course I would.”
“Do you have the capability?” Catastrophe interjected.
“We’re stronger than Norway was before the coup attempt. Now, I expect if we can land in the south, we will prevail. Unless the local population really are all ardent socialists.”
“Well…good luck with that, then,” Cheesolini said, finishing his treat. “I hope Russia doesn’t intervene, but judging by the year so far, they’re either going to launch an invasion closer to home or fall into a bloody civil war themselves.”
“One can only hope,” the King said plainly. “Thank you for your time gentlemen.” They all rose, but before the Italians made it back to the shop, Cheesolini dashed off again.
“Good lord! Is that…it is! My dear fellow, I am so pleased to see you again.”
Franklin Dell Roosevelt looked up from the fryer and smiled. “Cheesy! I see you went back in time as well. How are things?”
“Same old, same old. Trying to stay out of things these days. Maybe conquer the Balkans so they don’t bother anyone. Honestly, this world’s a bit of a mess, isn’t it?”
“Tell me about it,” FDR turned the onions over and lit a cigarette. “When I woke back up in the Oval Office, I thought I’d gone to hell. Then I went to Congress and it was much worse.”
“What are you doing here? Isn’t there an election on?”
“Yes, but I’m not running again,” FDR shrugged. “I fixed the Depression so the country should be alright so long as they don’t touch anything, and I’m fairly sure Alf Landon is going to win somehow. So the US will be fully neutral and self-contained for a while yet.”
“Who’s he? Alan!” he screamed back at the ice-cream shop, “Who’s Alf Landon?”
“Self-made oil baron, former governor of Kansas, recent president-elect of the United States,” Alan shouted back, somehow with more dignity, “one of those liberal progressive Republicans of the Bull Moose line, tax-cutter, budget balancer, supporter of some of the New Deal, anti-segregation, awful campaigner but seemingly good politician and administrator. Should be a decent president, especially if FDR already pushed the New Deal through.”
“Which I have. All the Depression maluses have been significantly decreased, I leave office a highly popular and beloved one-term president who saved the country, and now I can do far more interesting things,” FDR said smugly. “I did strongly suggest the Pentagon set up War Plan Red…just in case.”
“The British haven’t done much of anything yet. Then again, that was true last time as well…” Cheesolini tailed off, “Don’t suppose you’ve seen Churchill around?”
“Yes I have, but he’s the same as he always was. Drunk and depressed. Difficult to know if he’s from our time or not…but he hasn’t tried to kill either of us so I suspect not.”
“Right…well, anyway, good luck with the hot-dog stand, and come to Rome sometime.”
“Righto,” FDR nodded in farewell, getting back to tossing his onions and flipping sausages.
“Nice man,” Cheesolini said to himself, before frowning at the hubbub around the ice-cream shack in the distance. “Honestly, you leave them alone for five minutes…” muttering under his breath, he raced towards the scene.
“Ah, Mighty Cheesare,” Kaboom saluted him.
“Kaboom? Where the hell have you been?”
Alan and Beancounter rolled their eyes and went back to ice-cream making whilst General Catastrophe looked like he wanted to kill himself and Kaboom in a fiery explosion.
“Well, when you ordered the releasing of the six thousand irregulars…they sort of…didn’t want to go. So, I took them on a skiing trip to raise morale and distract them from the impeding demobbing. Only we sort of got drunk and wandered into the Swiss Alps.”
“Hmm,” Cheesolini looked at the newly rolled out Swiss chocolate stand next to his own shop. “And you stole that?”
“No, that’s an outreach scheme. Fascism, after all, is best spread through enticing confectionery products at a reasonable price.”
“Agreed, but what does that have to do with…wait, hang on…”
“Yes, I may or may not have conquered Switzerland and been declared Chancellor of the New Swiss Imperial Confederacy. Or Imperial Helvetia for short. This is my new Prime Minister, Rolf Henne.” He pointed to a very cool hat, beneath which was a fairly non-descript looking man.
“How do you do, Rolf.”
“No way in particular, Mr Cheesare,” Rolf replied neutrally.
Kaboom nodded. “He’s a work in progress. They’re all like that. The army in particular was exceedingly apathetic to the storming of the capital, to the point where I’m beginning to think they all have hidden fascist tendencies buried beneath their bureaucratic grey shells.”
“I see…and how do the Swiss people feel about this new…reality?”
“They feel no strong emotions one way or the other,” Rolf replied.
“Kaboom?”
“There is some democratic unrest…not as much as I was expected, but its there. To be honest, the Ministries and government are exactly as they were beforehand, its just we have the final say and make the big decisions. They’re supremely alright with that. I think they might even agree to become an Italian puppet officially in a little while.”
“Well…this is profoundly strange and unexpected, but not unwelcome I suppose. Cheesolini shrugged. “I find myself bored with the Olympics. Shall we go home and do government things?”
…
26th November 1936
The Cheese Experience featuring Cheesolini-
“We are not called that,” Beancounter interrupted.
The time travellers were in one of the many offices and large conference rooms dotted within various government buildings in Rome. Let’s say this one is in one of those nifty art deco modernist towers the Grand Council of Fascism wanted to build in every town, city and village in Italy.
Yes, really. Google it. It’s no Volks Palace with added microclimate and horrific icicles but still impressively mad.
Anyway, the team, crew, band of botherers extraordinary were spread out across the floor with sheets of paper and crayons, doing something they probably should have done in January: writing out what they remembered from the prior timeline, both in regards to who was actually capable of fighting a modern war and where all the hidden resources were.
“Libya had oil, right? Never really came up since we dominated Europe so absolutely, but that would be useful here.”
“The Balkans has quite a bit too, and we can grab most of it as we go,” Alan commented absently, admiring the beautiful butterfly Cheesolini had drawn next to a list of ‘already deads’.
“The new Italian company/mega colony can handle most of East Africa,” Beancounter ticked them off the map, “so it would be good to at least build a proper railway connecting the whole coastline of Libya. Who did you want to run the mega colony, Mighty Cheesare?”
“Hmm?” Cheesolini looked up from his doodles. “Oh! Prince Amedeo. He’ll be exceedingly competent at everything to do with colonial management, as well as making us very popular in the region.”
“What’s his deal, Alan?” Beancounter turned knowingly to the encyclopaedic and rather more sensible right hand of the Great Leader.
“Amedeo Umberto Isabella Luigi Filippo Maria Giuseppe Giovanni di Savoia-Aosta, third Duke of Aosta. Very, very tall. Very, very English…for an Italian. Excelled in the Artillery in the Great War, also a pretty good pilot and generally considered a competent fellow, soldier and administrator. Married to the Princess of Orleans. Capable of being sympathetic to Ethiopians. Widely travelled. Essentially the perfect viceroy we could have chosen, both in respectability and capability.”
“Hmm. Excellent choice, Mighty Cheesare.”
“My genius knows no bounds,” Cheesolini said gaily, starting on a giraffe next. Then he paused and stood solemnly. “Indeed, I go further. I declare the pacification of Ethiopia, and we can all move on to other matters!”
Then he sat back down and had some crisps.
“Alright then,” Catastrophe said from his sensible-and-rather-more-comfortable-than-the-floor chair. “I can send ten thousand men to the colony to boost the recruitment of their new army. We can’t begin to use all our reserve potential, and 10k is a drop in the bucket anyway. I say we do it a few times until it’s the largest army on the continent and watch the British and French squirm trying to budget a proper garrison in response.”
“I can drink to that,” Cheesolini said, before supping on his silly straw. “I know! I’ll take over as Minister for Corporations as well, given I’ve just invented the largest one in the realm!”
Alan and Beancounter shrugged. “I’ve heard worst reasons for that appointment.”
“That makes me…dear me, what am I now, Alan?”
“Very busy, Mighty Cheesare…on paper at least.”
Catastrophe pulled up another map. “The Saudis clearly haven’t marshalled their forces yet, but Yemen has. They’re pushing into the desert, probably trying to make some breathing room for the inevitable counterattack. Oman meanwhile does nothing and is probably resigned to being defeated presently.”
“Anything else of interest?”
“Um…” Catastrophe shuffled his papers nervously.
“Something you want to tell me, General?”
“Kaboom…the whole Swiss thing?”
“Okay…what’s the issue?”
“More details as to what the deal is and what’s going on. He’s in bed with a mysterious group known only as FB. Their aggressively sinister yet cool looking leader, Rolf Henne, have taken over the Swizz Confederation and proclaimed a new Imperial Front to restore Swiss honour and dignity.”
Cheesolini looked over the brief run down, and very cool hat, before turning to Alan. He shrugged. “Rolf is a Nazi, plain and simple. He’s struggled for years to keep control over any group he leads or even founds, because of how much he loves Germany. It’s a bit strange that he is working so openly and…enthusiastically? With some Italian rogue agents.”
“I see. So all that comical neutrality nonsense in Berlin?”
“Nazi tricks, Mighty Cheesare. Nazi tricks that Kaboom appears to have fallen for.”
Cheesolini hummed. “Bugger. Oh well, wire Kaboom and tell him to come back after he’s done on his holidays. Gentlemen…can we use this?”
“Well,” Beancounter said after a moment’s thought, “this destabilises Europe even more. France and Germany now have to worry about Switzerland collapsing into civil war, as there will be strong democratic republican elements determined to destroy the Nazis…and a lot of Germans will be both far and extremely against this new turn. It’s going to play havoc with banking and finance. Probably cause some gold price panic…I suppose if the fascists manage to stay in power thanks to ‘Italian’ ‘help’ of dubious nature, we’ll have a nifty little ally/puppet…albeit at the expense of pissing off everyone else in Western Europe.”
“Iraq has made a push into Iran, meanwhile the Iranians are right outside of Baghdad,” the General pointed.
“Huh. I thought that war might last longer,” Alan commented.
“It might,” Catastrophe said, “Iraq can focus its entire military onto defending their capital and pushing into Iran…but Iran has the Soviet border in two separate places to watch.”
“Ah…” everyone understood.
“We’ve finished the development of radios and are now working on RADAR.” Beancounter turned a page. “We’re continuing with developing dispersed industry since it worked so well last time, and also on Construction II. Using actual modern tools and equipment will do nothing if not improve our work.”
Anything from Norway?”
“Oslo has fallen as expected, albeit bloodlessly. No casualties at all so far, I suppose because the only opposition is far in the north and no one is there to fight them yet.”
Catastrophe cleared his throat. “New updates on the Middle East wars. The Saudis have begun to engage both Yemen and Oman. The former are holding out, the later are already falling back. Soon they will be fully knocked out, I wager.”
“And Iraq and Iran?”
“Iraq continues to push down the coast, sezing oil fields and fighting off border forces. Soon they’ll have a real problem with the terrain though, which is when I imagine Iran wil strike back. Meawnhile Iran remains right outside Baghdad and also seems to have made some headway in the north. Still early days between those two.”
“How goes our support of the brave Spanish Nationalists?” Cheesolini said proudly.
“Poorly, Mighty Cheesare. The Spanish are killing each other at about equal rates, which is bad news for us because we really need to end the northern front as quickly as possible. Oviedo still stands in Republican hands and we are no closer to getting there. I think we have to assume at this point that the southern republican armies are going to arrive before we manage it, and thus the nationalists will be squeezed between both fronts until they collapse. Barring a collapse of the republic, we’re going to lose this one.”
“Oh well,” Cheesolini sighed. “Better luck next time I suppose.”
“I’ll draw up some preliminaries regarding an invasion of Iberia. It’s time we did some Foreign Affairs stuff anyway.”
“I thought we were focusing on boosting Italian industry and resource extraction?” Cheesolini queried.
“We were, but given the state of the world, we should go out and grab as much of the Balkans as we can for free whilst its easy,” Beancounter replied. “Plus it means we can shut the Grand Council of Fascists up, get a bunch more factories, resources and puppets anyway. The Greater Italy plan is not as good as New Roman Empire but finishing it does give us cores and annex the entire Balkans.”
“Everyone just turns Italian? Not even a wider pan-roman identity this time?” Cheesolini said incredulously. “My God, the cheesiness is off the charts…let’s do that!”
