[ WP ] Out of desperation , the recruits keep getting younger and the training shorter . Your number comes up .

News from the front used to come in fits and spurts. Filtered, of course, but we could all read between the lines. Cheerful headlines like `` 87th Legion retakes Lhasa,'' meant to convince us that the war was going well, gave out more information than intended. `` Retakes Lhasa'' meant that we had lost it again at some point, but that update was not allowed on the radio, was it? Mother said that the worst times were when there was no news at all. 
 
 Despite better equipment and support from our Mongol allies, the war against China was going through men in unprecedented numbers. Father tried his best to shelter me; he did n't want me to be exposed to news of poison gas shellings and images of soldiers chewed apart by machine guns. He wanted to keep the war as far from my mind as possible, to focus on my studies. With all the boys gone, I was expected to grow up and have a career instead of raising a family like my mother. That would be left to the servants from now on. 
 
 Father's best efforts could not shelter me from the latest news out of Rome: the Equality Proclamation. Disguised in language of equal rights for women, it meant one thing: I could now be drafted into the military. Back when war required strength to lift a sword and march 20 kilometers, it made sense that women were excluded. Now, a soldier need only pull a trigger or man an airship; no muscle required. Father was at least able to arrange for me to go into the medical corps; behind the front lines treating soldiers, instead of staring down an angry sea of Ming uniforms. I'd wanted to be a doctor after graduation anyway, so this way I would at least get some training. 
 
 I was loaded on a train through the desert and sent to a staging area in Mongolia to get ready for a big push to Harbin. Legions have been massing here for the past month. The Chinese are expecting an invasion from the East, along the Silk Road. They would never expect an attack from the North. Roman Legions are already attacking Turfan in an elaborately planned feint. Our Korean allies are planning to make a push from the South, cutting off all of the industrial heartland of China. 
 
 I can already hear the artillery booming, and smell the gunpowder in the air. The attack has begun, and soon Beijing will be welcomed into the fold of the Roman Empire. They're already calling this `` the War to End All Wars.'' 
 
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 This is from [ a book I am writing ] ( http: //www.reddit.com/r/Luna_Lovewell/comments/2l5mej/writing_a_book/ ) in which Rome never falls. The book takes place about 200 years later, when China has been conquered and annexed. But I have been piecing together a history of the war between China and Rome, and how it would be their equivalent of WW1. 

