Hendalarskara Civil War

The Hendalarskara Civil War was a six-year-long multipartite armed conflict in Hendalarsk between 1919 and 1925. Preceded by years of social and economic stagnation and rising political tensions, the war began on 3rd July 1919 with the Midnight Rising, a fascist coup d'état in the capital, Frehmenwerth, that was accompanied by other fascist-aligned risings across the country. The coup was not, however, a total success - the reigning Archking, Lothar III Dietrich, escaped with his son Magnus to the eastern port of Groß-Maximilianshafen, where they were able to form a secure rump state far from the power centres of the west and gained the support of the Pentapolitan cities through the Grand Bargain.

Opting to crown the Archking's younger brother Kaspar in his place, the fascists, led by the Brotherhood of the Soil, also had to contend with Communist risings across the country. After weeks of rapid campaigning in an effort to secure cohesive territorial bases, the fascists and communists became bogged down in brutal attritional warfare in the valleys and plains between the Fröse and the Zalgis north of Frehmenwerth. This stalemate persisted until the spring of 1923, when the Communists launched the April Offensive in a bid to take Frehmenwerth but were instead decisively defeated by the Brotherhood, while Federal troops, having crushed the Empire of the Mother Mountains in late 1922, exploited the battle in the south to capture Hernemünde and Zalgisbeck. This was followed up by a rapid advance on Frehmenwerth from the east, across mountain terrain previously considered impassable, which achieved total strategic surprise and trapped the Brotherhood army advancing on Zalgisbeck in a pincer movement. Although the strategic initiative lay with Federal armies for the remainder of the war, it still took another two years of bitter fighting in the south and west for the war to conclude. Marked by sustained atrocities on all sides, the war was ruinous economically and socially for Hendalarsk and remains the deadliest conflict in the nation's history. It was also notable for extensive foreign involvement - troops from Yonderre and further afield served in a wide array of volunteer units.

Prelude
The 1910s in Hendalarsk were marked by protracted economic stagnation. Although the nation had taken advantage of its extensive natural resources to become a regional industrial power in the 19th century, failure to modernise equipment and working practices had led to its eclipse by its economic rivals by 1900. This was exacerbated by the Great Depression, which hit the fragile Hendalarskara economy hard. Even after the initial shock of 1910-11 had receded, the economy failed to substantively recover, and by 1918 the economy was only 1% larger than it had been in 1909. This economic malaise caused high unemployment, particularly among young people, while the nature of the Hendalarskara political system fanned tensions. Although the Archkingdom had made some concessions to liberals in the mid-19th century, including the formation of a States-General, the government was still ossified - the States-General was purely advisory, with only the capacity to register approval and disapproval, and its members had to be vetted by royal officials before they could take up their seats. While the Archking, Lothar III Dietrich, was notably reform-minded, by the time the situation reached a crisis point he had achieved very little, only having come to power in 1918; he was also regarded as 'weak' by more reactionary figures in the royal household for his willingness to 'appease' liberal demands. The tense economic and structural state of the country in 1919 was further exacerbated by the ideological spillover of the Red Interregnum. Although Hendalarsk was (and remains) notably culturally distant from Urcea, turmoil in the continent's largest and most powerful nation could not be ignored. The nascent Communist movement, which had been present as an underground but not actively persecuted movement since the 1880s, took inspiration from the revolutionaries. Conservative elements in the armed forces and government saw this as a clear threat, and urged the need to stamp out (Ausmerzung) this radicalism before it could topple the established order. In 1911 they formed the Brotherhood of the Soil, a fascist secret society, with their most significant member being Kaspar von Agendorf und Wannmür, Lothar III Dietrich's nephew and second-in-line to the throne after Lothar's son Magnus. In the unusually hot summer of 1919 the situation in Frehmenwerth was thus extremely tense.

The Midnight Rising
The Midnight Rising was the culmination of these tensions. By 1919, the Brotherhood had succeeded in penetrating various units of the Hendalarskara military, including elements of the Royal Guard in Frehmenwerth itself. Communiqués unearthed in the 1970s reveal that the Brotherhood had actually been aiming for a coup, were it deemed necessary, in the winter of 1919-20, so that weather conditions would make it easier to isolate Frehmenwerth and purge it of dissidents and 'undesirables'. Ranking members of the Brotherhood, however, including Erzprinz Kaspar, became convinced over the course of the spring that their organisation had become compromised, and that they had to act sooner or else risk discovery and capture. On the 2nd July 1919, Brotherhood members became aware that one of the group's cells had resolved to confess to the conspiracy in exchange for clemency. The Grand Council of the Brotherhood therefore actioned the coup for the following night. In the meantime, the renegade cell were captured, along with an unaffiliated Guardsman named Elias Hüberwehn whom the cell had asked to pass on their intelligence; all four men were tortured so extensively before their executions on the 4th July that they were only subsequently identifiable by their dental records.