Berlin City Palace.
"Big brother! Those damned scoundrels and rebels are already walking all over us! How much longer are we supposed to wait?"
Prince William slapped William IV's desk, spittle almost spraying onto the king's face.
"Wait a little longer. Let them fight the Austrians until both sides are battered and bruised, then we'll step in and clean up the mess. By then..."
William IV was cut off mid-sentence by his hot-tempered younger brother.
"By then it'll be too late! Whether the Austrians win or the National Assembly wins, they'll come after us! That's the fate of Prussia!"
"No, they wouldn't dare. We still have a standing army of two hundred thousand, and we can mobilize another hundred and fifty thousand reservists."
William IV spoke as if to himself.
"And what about the Rhineland? Are we just going to hand it over to that holy man?"
By this time, the Rhineland in Prussia was effectively under the control of the Archbishop of Cologne. The main force the Frankfurt National Assembly was using to attack the Austrian Empire was the local Prussian army. Even its military provisions and weapons came from the warehouses of the Kingdom of Prussia.
In fact, before the war against France had ended, many states had already withheld or cut off aid to the front under various pretexts.
Fortunately, there had been no fighting in the later stages, so this weakness had never come to light.
But now that the National Assembly had brazenly declared war on the Austrian Empire, its frailty was laid bare.
The National Assembly's deputies all claimed they were willing to give up everything to support the war. But their publicly declared assets were meager. Three or five hundred florins seemed like a fortune to ordinary people, yet it was a drop