With Austria's strategic focus shifting, the murky situation on the Central European battlefield suddenly became clear.
The Allied forces, originally eager to launch a counteroffensive, had now completely shifted into a defensive posture. As though pinned down by the tide of refugees, they remained entrenched no matter how the French provoked them.
Aircraft and airships filled the skies; trenches, steel-reinforced barbed wire, and machine guns covered the ground. Facing such an enemy, the French were at a loss as well.
To attack would require far too great a price, yet it would still be difficult to achieve satisfactory results.
After all, trenches required no sophisticated technology. Break through one line, and another waited behind it. Simply throwing infantrymen into them was nothing short of being irresponsible with the soldiers' lives.
Though any number of casualties was worth it so long as the war could be won, the Battle of the Rhine River was merely a microcosm of the Continental War.
Lose this battle, and France would be finished outright; win it, and there would still be another battle to fight. One only had to look at the map to know that if France wanted to win the war, it would have to fight at least three to five major battles before it could hope to force the Anti-French Alliance to submit.
If they exhausted all their reserves here, how would they fight the wars to come? Every commander knew that winning first did not mean winning; only the final victor was the true winner.
On one side was a frontline they had been unable to break through for so long; on the other, casualty figures mounting by the day. Marshal Patrice MacMahon at headquarters felt only overwhelming pressure.
"Have the anti-aircraft weapons arrived?"
The Allied forces holding the line were