Ticino River Front.
Though the Austrian Empire's airship corps moved slowly, they were an unstoppable force now.
The shadows cast by the enormous airships fell over the French Army's positions. The soldiers stared at the approaching behemoths of war with eyes full of terror and dread.
The Austrian airship crews dropped grenade after grenade, their fuses already lit. The explosions jolted the French Army back to reality, and they began fleeing in a panic to escape the deadly explosives.
Most French soldiers had never seen an airship, a behemoth of war, before. They did not collapse outright as the Italian Allied Forces had at first, but fear still robbed most of them of their fighting strength.
The French commanders at the front tried to reorganize their defenses, but their orders were utterly useless. Some screamed in terror, others kept launching futile attacks at the sky, while most ran around like headless chickens.
In truth, the airships shocked the Austrian soldiers just as much as they did the French, since the vast majority of them had never seen such flying giants before.
Fortunately, they were on their side, so the soldiers felt no fear. On top of that, the chaplains and officers traveling with the army had been talking them up, making the men all the more fervent.
Heavy artillery, rockets, and airships led the assault, tearing the French Army's carefully prepared Ticino River defenses to pieces. The French had launched several counterattacks, but with little effect.
The French soldiers were powerless against all this. There was no point to anything they did except throwing their bodies into the battle line.
If their opponents had been human, then even against an army several times their size, these proud French soldiers might still have dared to fight.
But first they faced cold,