The sudden, violent displacement of the European powers of 1917 into Evil Land was not a strategic repositioning, but a cataclysm. A flash of malevolent light, a deafening screech that was not of this world, and then the trenches, the rattling machine guns, and the millions of soldiers were simply there. Their meticulously planned battlefields became a surreal nightmare, their rigid military doctrines rendered laughably obsolete by a land that mocked life itself.
The heart of the Entente and Central Powers' conflict—a thousand miles of trenches—was deposited into the blighted, salt-choked desert. The first casualty was morale. The oppressive air, thick with despair, settled on the men like a physical weight, corroding their resolve faster than rust.
The German Empire's meticulous planning and formidable discipline were their first lines of defense. They were the first to recognize that their enemies were not merely the British or the French. General Ludendorff’s commanders, after a horrifying skirmish where fallen soldiers rose to attack their comrades, issued a grim directive: cremate all bodies immediately. But with no wood and the ground refusing to catch fire, this proved impossible. German gas attacks, their most feared weapon, proved horrifically ineffective; the malevolent air simply twisted the gas clouds, often blowing them back on the attackers or, worse, causing mutated fungal growths to sprout from the dead. The German war machine, built on logic and efficiency, found itself fighting an enemy that was fundamentally irrational. Their stormtroopers, meant for brutal close combat, were faced with skeletal wolves and shambling ogres whose very touch carried a curse of petrification.
The French Republic's spirit, forged in the brutal defense of Verdun, was their only hope. Their 'poilu' soldiers, accustomed to suffering and death, were better prepared for the horrors than others. However, their desperate charges and patriotic fervor were met with an enemy that could not be defeated by heroism. The reanimating ground turned every lost squad into an enemy force, and the malevolent rain's curses made their bayonets warp and their rifles jam. They found themselves not only fighting the Germans but also the reanimated corpses of their own dead, a psychological torment that quickly broke the spirit of even the most hardened veteran.
The British Empire, with its massive industrial capacity, tried to establish a semblance of order. They were the first to send out reconnaissance missions in search of resources, only to discover there were none. Their tanks, once symbols of unstoppable power, were slow-moving targets for the harpy swarms and were often disabled when cursed vines, which could only be seen by the terrified eyes of the living, wrapped around their gears. Lord Haig's high command, from their headquarters, tried to impose traditional military discipline, executing soldiers for desertion, not realizing that desertion was the only rational response to the sanity-blasting despair that permeated the air.
The vast, disorganized battlefields of the Eastern Front, stretching across what was once Russia and Austria-Hungary, faced a unique and even more horrifying challenge.
The Russian Empire's army, already suffering from vast supply issues and internal strife, collapsed almost immediately. With no food and no vodka, their morale shattered. The undead wildlife—skeletal bears and snarling wolves—found a feast in the unburied dead, and the vast open plains became a killing field where millions simply starved, only to rise again as a new legion of the undead. Their numbers, once their greatest asset, became their greatest curse.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire, a fragile and multi-ethnic union already on the brink of collapse, fractured. The curse-laden environment of Evil Land amplified their internal resentments. Czechs, Serbs, Hungarians, and Germans, all speaking different languages, could not coordinate in the face of the unified malice of the land. They were consumed by a combination of despair, starvation, and the relentless, unthinking assault of the reanimated dead.
The United States arrived late to this particular hell. Their fresh, well-equipped forces were a horrifyingly potent meal for the Savagery. They established a forward operating base with all their industrial might, but their machines quickly began to fail, and the undead harpies and beak dogs, unphased by a hail of bullets, tore through their ranks. The American "doughboys" were the first to truly grasp the nature of this fight—it was not against an army, but against the very idea of death itself. They quickly realized their war of liberation was utterly pointless in a world where freedom was just a word for a slightly different kind of servitude to the curse.
The Ottoman Empire, far removed from the main European front, found themselves in a unique situation. They were isolated, surrounded by a new, alien landscape, but were saved from the immediate slaughter by their distance from the initial chaos. Their forces, hardened by years of brutal desert warfare, were the best equipped to handle the logistical nightmare of a waterless world. They were the first to organize a semblance of an operational society, creating small, fortified oases by using their few remaining engineers to desalinate the cursed waters of the land.
The old wars were over. The British would no longer fight the Germans over a patch of mud. Instead, the exhausted remnants of the Imperial forces now fought a desperate, combined war of survival against the Sorcerer-Kings, who saw the millions of trapped soldiers as a delicious, never-ending supply of souls. The remnants of Zeon and the Empire, with their advanced technology, found themselves hunting the last, desperate pockets of WWI soldiers, not as enemies, but as a potential fuel source for their war machines. The armies that once defined a continent were now little more than desperate, frightened tribes, their glorious flags tattered banners on a world that had forgotten the very meaning of glory.