FRANKFURT
A week into the bitter Imperial offensive into Thuringia, the guns along the Thuringian front have fallen still. Along sector E6, a white cloudy haze of ash obscures a silent battlefield of wreckage, weapon emplacements, and two fleets frozen quietly in formation.
Sources indicate that the cessation of fighting occurred organically, after several heavy battlecruisers in the Kolleda battlegroup of the Imperial Fleet reportedly refused orders to advance - instead, broadcasting a general call to ‘cease the futile bloodshed of fellow Rheinlanders.’ When issued counter-offensive orders to exploit the gap in the Kolleda formation, Federalist battlegroup Bayern similarly rejected orders and maintained their defensive posture. Within hours, the rest of the Imperial and Federal fleets followed suit - in what many have begun calling, ‘Der Weihnachtsfrieden.’
Following earlier preliminary reports of the armistice throughout the Rheinland colonies, renewed widespread protests have broken out on New Berlin, Hamburg, Holstein, Stuttgart, and Weimar, calling for an end to the now unpopular Civil War. In the previous months, many similar protests occurred on a smaller scale following unsubstantiated reports of Imperial and Federalist forces refusing to fight on the Frankfurt front - and the indication of wide-spread war weariness may have been the catalyst to the desperate renewed offensive on Thuringia.
Neither the Imperial nor the Federalist regimes have issued official statements on the matter as of yet, and it is unclear what this ceasefire means for the civil war - but Rheinland waits with bated breath for the hope of an end to the fighting by Christmas.