To the Empire Eternal Part 4: The 1920s, a decade of revolution

By 1919 Europe was exhausted, with most of the major powers either collapsing or close to collapse. Of these major powers perhaps the worst effected were Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia, one had suffered a socialist revolution, the other had disintegrated and the last was racked with civil disorder and chaos.
Yet just because the guns had fallen silent in the fields of western Germany it did not mean that the soldiers of the Triple Entente could see peace at last, for no sooner had the ink dried on the Treaty of Versailles, when conflict broke out between the Ottoman Empire and Greece.
So France and Britain found themselves once again trudging through the sands of the sick man of Europe as he underwent his death throes.

Soon it was all over, and what land the Greeks did not claim went to the French and the Ottoman Empire was no more.
With peace finally at hand, Britain begun to look towards the future of warfare in order to maintain its security in a changing world. While Kaiser Wilhelm II fled Germany during a populist uprising, bringing into power the Weimar Republic, Britain began construction on its first aircraft carrier.
While the Soviet Union fought its civil war, the Royal Navy began a crash course in destroyer and anti-submarine warfare construction, aware of the effect that Royal Navy submarines had had on Germany during the Great War and equally perilously aware of its vulnerable position as an island heavily dependent on foreign supplies.

These were hard times for Germany, but not as hard as they could have been as the French diplomats were keen to point out, while Germany still had to pay reperations to France and Britain for its role in the Great War (the so-called 'Victors Retribution') it did not have to give up any land in mainland Europe, and so while the Austria-Hungarian Empire collapsed into a series of smaller states, Germany stayed whole, stretching from France to the Soviet Union. Many vocal opponents in Paris decried the softness of the Treaty of Versailles and Field Marshall Foch was heard to mutter 'This is not a peace, it is an armistace for twenty years', as, although France would occupy the Rhineland as payment for missed reparations twice in the 1920s, they were otherwise prohibited from taking the industrial heartland of Germany from it.

Things were not exactly docile in the United Kingdom either, the after effects of the 1916 Easter Uprising and the struggles that followed came to head in 1921 after negotiations with representatives from the Irish side fell through, and the Irish declared themselves independent from the crown.
Their timing could not have been worse, British forces had gained plenty of experience fighting battles in Europe, and their weaponry was honed from this experience. Armoured Cars, Tanks and the new batallion of Royal Marines landed in Dublin and swept through the countryside. Other nations joined in Britains defence, with Greek forces returning the favour that Britain and France had given them against the Ottomans.
Within a year it was all over and the dreams of Irish independence were crushed...for now...

Meanwhile in Italy a curious new form of government arose declaring itself as 'fascism', lead by a strange short man called Benito Mussolini, it sort to strike back against the communist and socialist wave which had tried to spread across Europe in the aftermath of the Russian revolution, however fascism was slow to take foot in the rest of Europe...for now.

Then came the most dramatic event of the 1920s...the Crash.

Suddenly Britain found itself in the middle of a major crisis as unemployment soared and national unrest soared with it. As 1929 drew to a close, the government faced major financial trouble, despite its best attempts to mitigate the worst of the Crash from the workers, it could not be everywhere and factories were forced to close and people marched.

The 1930s would prove to be a difficult time for Europe...