On the outskirts of Paris, at the Château de Chantilly, in a hall overlooking the square of the castle's frontage garden, men in several military uniforms and gowns are arguing on either side of a long oak conference table: English with French, French with Latin words, Latin with Slavic accents......

Winston Churchill, who was in the middle of it, was silent with one hand on his cheek, he didn't have nothing to say, he had already finished what he should say, his mouth was dry and exhausted, but the endless and meaningless dispute continued{///Bar friend upload}

It's not his personal stage, he can't control the situation, but he can't suppress the boredom in his heart, he closes his mouth, but he can't plug his ears, he has to listen in order to find any possibility of compromise from this noise

In the past few days, the situation has taken a turn for the worse, and the victories in the Battle of Solomon and Arras, together with the submission of the Ottoman Empire, have been overshadowed by the following two events: first, the invasion of the Chinese army on the coast of the Gulf of Aden; The second is the outbreak of a coup d'état in Russia and its paralysis

Although the Chinese army's attack on the west coast of the Indian Ocean had long been anticipated by the Allied Strategic Coordination Committee, the committee had no way of knowing the specific time, place, and scale of the Chinese army's attack. And it was difficult to count on receiving support from neighboring allied colonies

However, by this time the British Army had no available mobile forces: every regular division of the British Empire, including the Dominions and colonies, was involved in the battle or was on a front that could not be evacuated, from Ypres to Arras, from the Somme to the Aegean Sea, from the Sea of Marmara to the Gulf of Alexandretta, from Jerusalem to Aden, from Mombasa to Dar es Salaam, and from San Cristobal Island to Port Moresby......

Although the losses in the Battle of the Bay of Bengal are being gradually compensated for by the successive completion of the warships, the German High Seas Fleet, which has long recovered from the Kiel air raids, together with the rampant U-boat force, has firmly contained the main force of the Royal Navy. The backbone of the East Asian Combined Fleet is there

The French Army was now bent on defeating the German invading forces on its own soil, and they could do nothing about their distant African colonies – a few months ago, under repeated threats and lures from the British, barely drawing three or four divisions to participate in the Battle of the Channel was already the limit of what the French could bear

The French Navy still had a "superfluous" number of warships, of course, but the spirit of the Battle of the Bay of Bengal was still at work, and the French were reluctant to risk their precious warships in the Indian Ocean unless other allies could simultaneously send a large fleet to rival the combined East Asian fleet – to which the British government was certainly not in a position to promise

The Italians were naturally concerned about their colonial empire in East Africa across Abyssinia, but the Italian army, which had just suffered the defeat of Trentino, could not reinforce it with a single soldier or even a single bullet

The Italian navy was pinned down by the Austro-Hungarian navy on the other side of the Adriatic Sea, and not only did it have no extra forces to deploy, but from time to time it would ask Britain and France to send additional warships to help blockade the Adriatic Sea

France and Italy are clearly powerless, and what about the "Russian steamrollers"?

It is true that the Russians held back the summer offensive of the Yellow Army in the foothills of the Ural Mountains and on the banks of the Ural River, halted the Germanic armies in front of Lake Chud and the Dnieper, and crushed the Romanians in Bessarabia......

Although they lost millions of square kilometers of land, millions of soldiers, more than 40 million inhabitants, and countless towns, mines, and farmlands, their armies did not collapse and steadily retreated to the edge of the empire's core

In this core area, behind the vast army of more than five million men, there are still 110 million people, who run the empire's main arms factories, grain and mining areas, railroads and shipping hubs, and the ports along the Barents and Black Sea coasts are full of arms brought in by the Allies and the machinery used to manufacture them

However, just as they were steady, a lame palace coup pushed the entire empire to the brink of collapse

The pressure of the war had left the Russian ruling class out of their minds, and they were in desperate need of a scapegoat to clear their minds and rebuild their self-confidence, and Tsar Nicholas II was the right choice

Nicholas II was certainly responsible for some of his decisions, but without his hereditary authority and iron determination, the mighty Russian Empire would have fallen apart a decade ago, needless to say, in a war in such a dire strategic situation

He may not have been enlightened and his court was controversial, but he played his role as the supreme authority of a multinational empire across Eurasia, yet his subjects were tired of him and hated all the established institutions of the empire

In any case, overnight, the supreme authority of the Tsar collapsed like an edifice, the nerve centers of the empire were paralyzed, the Duma, the Soviets, the National Salvation Committee, and even the base camp of Moscow were each giving orders, the army and the people were at a loss, and the huge European steamrollers were simply creaking by inertia, threatening to lose their direction and overturn at any moment

The nervous paralysis of Russia is temporarily unable to move, and even if it can still move, the strategic situation of being attacked from many sides also limits the use of its strength, and it is already considered an excessive luxury to ask it to contain the squadrons of Mesopotamia and Persia from the direction of the Caucasus, let alone to expect it to intervene in the Gulf of Aden, which has always had nothing to do with it.

Compared with the crisis in the Gulf of Aden, once the Russian giant collapses, all efforts to sever the strategic ties between China and Germany so far will be in vain, and all the achievements since the Battle of the Straits will be worthless

United States

At present, the only thing that can be counted on is the United States, a "nouveau riche" that people are both looking forward to and worrying about

But the Americans refused to do anything, in other words, they were content with the work they were doing with all their might: to defend Australia with the main naval force and to reinforce France with the main army force

The Americans were not ready for big responsibilities, their war machine was new and untested, their lads were enthusiastic but simply ignorant, so they willingly came to learn war as schoolchildren

The question is, how long are they going to learn? Who decides when they graduate?

If the man is there......

The quarrel came to an abrupt end, it turned out to be lunchtime, and the opponents seemed to clear their minds of the verbal arguments and-for-tat that had just been cleared from their brains, and they walked to the restaurant in pairs, and the conversation changed to things such as the vintage of the red wine and the origin of the steak

Churchill stood up wearily, thinking that the garden below would be alone for a while, only to be blocked by Prime Minister Lloyd George with a telegram in his hand

"The search and rescue fleet of the cruiser HMS Birmingham has returned and no survivors have been found, and no remains of Lord Kitchener have been found......"

Churchill couldn't help but have a sour nose, bitter tears in his eyes, hurriedly pulled out his handkerchief, turned his head and pretended to blow his nose, thinking that he had covered up the past, and when he received the message from Lloyd George with his right hand, he found that the Chinese embroidered handkerchief in his left palm was already drenched...... (To be continued)

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