"Take everything we can carry. Blow up whatever we can’t!"
Even while pulling back, Wilhelm wasn’t wasting any time. He assigned men specifically to sweep up every piece of supply they could grab along the way.
To keep the frontline troops fed and armed, the Germans had built a bunch of supply depots behind the lines — and those depots weren’t on German soil. They were sitting on French land.
With the war over, every inch of occupied territory — including Alsace and Lorraine — had to be handed back to the French. Any depot left behind would just become free loot for the French.
But of course, Wilhelm wasn’t just grabbing their own supply caches. Farms, towns, food, matériel — even people — the Germans hauled off whatever they could along the route.
Alsace and Lorraine had been under German rule for nearly 50 years, and a ton of German-speaking ethnic Germans still lived there. The Second Reich had long treated them as core territory. Losing them to defeat stung bad.
But land? Land can’t run away. They could always take it back later.
The German civilians living there, though? Absolutely had to go. Given how much the French hated Germany, anyone left behind would be prime targets for persecution. Who knows how many would even survive.
The locals were hesitant at first about packing up and leaving. But when they heard it was Crown Prince Wilhelm himself who’d ordered the evacuation because he was worried about their safety, all their doubts vanished. They packed their bags and followed the army out.
Wilhelm had no idea this decision would trigger a bonus from the system.
[Side Quest Completed — Protect the People of Alsace and Lorraine. Reward: Merit Points equal to one-tenth of the number of people protected.]
[Quest Description: As the future Emperor of the Empire, it is your duty to protect all of your subjects from persecution by foreign powers!]
Wilhelm had studied the system before. It didn’t hand out quests proactively. Triggering and completing this side quest by accident? That was a straight-up pleasant surprise.
According to the army’s headcount, a total of 1.13 million Germans had been evacuated from Alsace and Lorraine. With the one-tenth reward, that meant 113,000 merit points.
Add that to the merit points he’d racked up from over a week of fighting the Americans? He was sitting on 228,000 points. Converted into modern currency, that was roughly 2.3 billion RMB.
He’d been stressing over how he was gonna earn merit points in peacetime. Now, with this windfall, he didn’t have to worry about cash flow for at least a few months.
Twenty billion RMB in purchasing power? That was serious money. It meant he could get a whole lot done after the war.
And this evacuation quest opened his eyes:
If evacuating Germans from Alsace and Lorraine earned him points, what about pulling Germans out of Danzig, the Sudetenland, Silesia, West Prussia, and North Schleswig? Would that count too?
There were over ten million Germans living in those territories. If this strategy worked, he’d be looking at over a million merit points.
Thinking about it that way, losing all that land after the war didn’t feel quite so bad.
Feeling flush, Wilhelm didn’t hold back. He dropped 30,000 merit points on the system shop to trade for 80,000 tons of grain, oil, flour, and emergency medical supplies for wounded soldiers. Gotta keep the army’s morale and operations running smooth.
That stash alone could feed 700,000 German soldiers for six months — or, including the million-plus civilians he’d brought out, keep everyone fed for three months.
By then, even the slowest bureaucrats in Berlin should have sorted out their supply situation, right?
The only real pity? Because of the war, a ton of civilians had already fled Alsace and Lorraine. According to the 1910 German census, around 1.83 million people lived there. If they’d all stayed, he’d have pocketed another 70,000 points.
Okay, claiming the reward felt great in the moment. But getting these people back to Germany and settling them? That was a giant headache.
The post-war German economy was in the toilet. Forget the peasants who lost their land — even veterans coming home from the front were going hungry.
Fifty million marks for a single loaf of bread. Look it up.
...
Because they were dragging along tons of civilians and supplies, Army Group B moved way slower than the other units pulling back from other fronts.
By December, they finally crossed back into German territory.
By then, the border regions were already jam-packed with German troops who’d retreated from the front lines.
Compared to those lifeless, morale-crushed friendly units stationed there, Crown Prince Wilhelm and his Army Group B looked like a whole different species. Heads turned the second they showed up.
Back home, the country was in chaos, and frontline supplies had dried up completely. These soldiers had marched over mountains and through hell to get to their stations — exhausted doesn’t even begin to cover it.
The small border towns couldn’t possibly hold that many men. They had to set up camp on empty ground outside the cities. But without proper tents and gear, the camps were rough as hell — some men were living in little more than shanties.
Some soldiers were wearing uniforms caked in mud and grease and blood that hadn’t been washed in God knows how long. They looked like straight-up beggars.
Meanwhile, Crown Prince Wilhelm’s Army Group B? They’d just won a battle before pulling back. Plus Wilhelm’s system-bought supplies kept everyone fed and clothed. The whole unit was sharp, clean, and morale was sky-high. They didn’t look like a defeated army at all.
Looked like a damn victorious one.
And the wildest part? They were marching home with over a million civilians in tow.
The other German soldiers couldn’t believe how squared-away Army Group B looked. And Army Group B’s boys were equally shocked by how ragged every other unit was.
What the hell happened to these guys? Their morale looks shot.
Seeing German troops in such a sorry state broke Wilhelm’s heart. These were battle-hardened veterans — and they’d been ground down to this!
They should’ve been marching through the streets of Paris as victors, tasting the spoils of war. Not crawling home like filthy rats, just fighting to survive.
As Crown Prince, he felt like he had to say something:
"Soldiers! I am Crown Prince Wilhelm, commander of Army Group B — and your future Emperor!"