Revolutionary World

     Sometime in the summer of 1789, one of the most powerful nations in the world collapsed into shambles. As the palace of civilization collapsed, the reverberations and shock rippled in catastrophy throughout the world. Even the shock waves were so powerful that historians designate this event as the birth of modern Europe.
     As France committed seppuku, the other nations and nobles of Europe circled the corpse, sending in small scouting and claimant parties to secure land, resources, and influence. From that xenophobic invasion fear, the French united behind a skillful, innovative commander who led the defense of his nation so well that his armies march past their own borders to capture the heart and breath of the continent. It was after those years of tumultuous uncertainty when Paris gutted her heart and brain tens of thousands of times that the first steps of ingenuity took hold and sprouted from the blood that soaked the land.
     One of the most immediate and frightening products of that call to arms across the countryside of one of the largest nations, of every measure, was the implementation of total war. All men fought. All women worked. All industry produced maximum output for the effort of the war. The war of one man but also of one country to define itself and its legacy to history. One man and one nation held off the invasion of a continent then nearly broke that continent into the submission of his own will. The lessons of total war became clear when great nations battled again on the same lands a century later.
     That mobilization of every resource saw incredible changes to the tapestry of humanity. Since full societal mobilization needed manpower, slaves were freed and peasants became generals. Men took hold of their lives and sought out their brothers as proclamations of nationalism rang forth through the streets of Paris and every city her armies conquered. The newly liberated society was free from the oppression of feudalism as well as the encompassing ownership of the Catholic Church. Frenchmen used their Enlightened ideals to philosophize, invent, and explore the realms of medicine, psychology, and art with profound techniques. Napoleon held prizes for scientific innovations. From those efforts, the world gained graphite and pencils, chemical batteries, and canned foods.
     These changes in art and philosophy created a new world for the mind as well as a new political map and ideologies. Record keeping, cataloging expeditions and discoveries, and the analysis of history all developed from these changes. While art, science, and philosophy founded the bedrocks of their modern principles, the political world also departed from the ruts of history. The French Revolution murdered the oldest royal aristocratic line in Europe, but from that came democratic political parties that spoke the minds of the people. The political spectrum changed so drastically that terms "left" and "right" stemmed from the pattern that representatives of ideological views sat by during sessions.
     No period of upheaval can afford to endure continuously. After ten years of executions and fifteen years of war, France settled into a calmer ritual, and dust across the empire finally settled on the battlefields. Instead, the energy of the people turned from swords to shouts as revolutions seized the cities of Europe in 1848 with cries of nationalist fervor. Napoleonic laws influenced the laws of modern France and were reflected in the colonial holdings during the Imperial Age.

     Napoleon's reforms changed how Europeans saw themselves. Through simplification of the borders of splintered peoples in Germany, Italy, and Poland, the energies of nationalism sought unity. The calm of the Long Century was broken up by civil wars of unification for Germans and Italians that emerged as powers in their own right over the next one-hundred years. By removing the old codes and houses, Napoleon ushered in a century of alternation. The old regimes in Britain, Austria, and Russia continued after Napoleon, but the power and structure of society was shifted. One man used the energies of one people to shift a continent, and from that leverage, one man shifted the world.

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Agatha Tyche

Vanity of War

     Outside of the descriptions of glory and gold obtained by victorious kings in battles against the enemy, war is only ever described as the worst imaginable descriptors. Rough, dirty, raw, terrifying, and horrendous, war has never been for the weak stomach or the soft of heart.
     As the weapons of modern war developed alongside improved medical techniques, the devastatingly wounded soldiers of World War I trenches found themselves in an odd spot of history. They were injured in record numbers, but they did not die. Shrapnel from large and small artillery shells ripped uneven gashes into the bodies and faces of trench-bound soldiers. The trenches themselves, leaving the head most prone to injury in the line of fire from enemy marksmen, were effectively suited to harm the minds and faces of men.

     Because of the high survival rate and the horror that facial disfigurement created, the British and French governments set up departments to handle reconstruction of veteran faces. In its infancy, plastic surgeons developed skin and bone grafts to regrow faces, notably Harold Gillies; while the most serious facial injuries required masks, often made of thin sheets of copper, to hide the disfigurements. After the first day of the battle of Somme, a flood of two thousand facially injured soldiers appeared at the hospital for Harold Gillies. Because multiple, gradual surgeries were required for most patients, of the 5,000 men cared for in the years of the hospital's operation, over 100,000 surgeries were performed, some 11,000 by Dr. Gillies himself.
     While World War I saw the terrible capabilities of man's ability to war, the pressures of the war saw innovation in many other areas. Communication, travel, flight, and medicine all benefited from the focused efforts made during the war. Despite the ingenious attempts of aiding, caring for, and recovering the personality of the wounded, plastic surgery could only do so much. Not even half of facial injuries in Britain were ever addressed, only the most grievous cases. Of an estimated 20,000, the success of those 5,000 seems a much smaller number. Given the knowledge, skill, and successes of the time, remarkable achievement were accomplished by the surgeons, nurses, and patients that worked long years after the war to finish their work.
     Unfortunately, even regrowing faces only covers the wounds. Psychological effects continued for a lifetime for the soldiers and their families. One of the overseeing doctors observed, "The psychological effect on a man who must go through life, an object of horror to himself as well as to others, is beyond description. It is a fairly common experience for the maladjusted person to feel like a stranger to his world. It must be unmitigated hell to feel like a stranger to yourself."
     Much like the actual battlefields of the Great War, these small victories of one man seem inconsequential given that a thousand men could fall for no ground, yet it is the efforts of the soldiers that stayed brave through their treatment and the doctors who served to find methods that paved hope for the future's peace. A peace, that while short lived, learned some of the lessons of this earlier punishment of the thirst for glory and the vanity of war.

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Agatha Tyche