The forge roared like a beast awakening from slumber.
Inside the belly of the Leclerc Works, furnaces spat fire as pistons pumped rhythmically. The same factory that had once produced plows and thresher blades for the French countryside now stood on the brink of transformation—or destruction.
For the workers, little had changed. Steel still had to be heated, shaped, cooled, and cursed at. But for Emil Dufort, everything was different.
He stood atop the central catwalk overlooking the forge floor, his eyes scanning the machinery and the men below. In the dim gaslight, the factory resembled a cathedral to industry: colossal brick arches, overhead belts grinding along pulleys, and dozens of soot-covered men hammering metal like modern Vulcans.
But they weren't building for the fields anymore.
They were building for war.
Or, at least, they would be—if Emil could convince them.
Resistance from Within
"That boy's lost his damn mind," grunted Bruno, the chief machinist, as he pounded a red-hot iron bar into shape. "Says he wants rotating turrets, treads instead of wheels, and armor thick as a church door."
Another worker nearby—Mathieu, an older smith—wiped sweat from his brow and muttered, "We're not building monsters. We're blacksmiths, not soldiers."
Bruno nodded grimly. "And now he wants us running night shifts. With what? Two working boilers and half our coal shipment hijacked in Rouen?"
Overhearing them from the catwalk, Emil made no attempt to hide his approach. His boots echoed on the steel grating until the men looked up.
"You're right," Emil said evenly. "You're blacksmiths. But you're also patriots. And right now, the country doesn't need threshers. It needs salvation."
The forge went quiet.
Bruno folded his arms. "And you're going to save France with a tractor that carries a gun?"
"No," Emil replied. "With ten of them."
The Plan Unfolds
Later that night, Emil gathered the senior workers—Bruno, Henriette, and a few key foremen—in the upstairs conference room. The table was littered with charcoal sketches and scaled diagrams.
"This is the Sanglier Mk I," Emil explained, pointing to a rough cross-section of the vehicle. "It uses continuous tracks for all-terrain movement, a low-profile hull to resist artillery, and an internal combustion engine adapted from tractor schematics."
One of the foremen squinted at the page. "It's huge. Where do we even build the frame?"
Emil walked to the wall map of the facility. "We gut Warehouse B. Clear out the rusted stock. We convert the space into a dry-assembly line. One frame every two weeks, minimum."
Henriette, arms crossed, asked the obvious question. "And how do you plan to fund this fantasy when we can't even meet payroll next month?"
Emil smiled. "We don't sell to farmers anymore. We sell to the Ministry of War."
The Pitch
Two days later, Emil sat in a government office in Rouen, face to face with Colonel Louis Varin, the regional military liaison—stiff-backed, mustached, and deeply unimpressed.
Varin leafed through Emil's design sketches without expression. "Turrets? Tracks? Armor plating thicker than a battleship hatch? This isn't a war machine, Monsieur Dufort. This is science fiction."
"I assure you it's science," Emil replied. "Just... ahead of its time."
The colonel set the papers down. "I've seen plenty of boys with grand ideas since the war began. Flying tanks. Electric cannons. Even a man who swore he could blind the Germans with mirrors. Most of them are in asylums now."
Emil leaned forward.
"I'm not selling you a dream. I'm offering you time. Every week, we lose more men charging into machine guns. I want to give you a machine that outguns them, outmaneuvers them, and scares the hell out of their command."
Varin paused.
"You build one. Show me it moves. Then we talk about orders."
The First Spark
Back at Leclerc Works, the mood had shifted.
Henriette—still skeptical—handled logistics with cold efficiency, cutting off slow suppliers and negotiating coal purchases from private stockpiles. Workers cleared out the old warehouse and began laying the track system. Bruno, though grumbling constantly, took to the turret rotation mechanism with cautious fascination.
"It shouldn't work," he muttered. "But God help me, it just might."
Still, challenges mounted.
The old lathe broke down twice. The boiler failed a pressure test and nearly killed a crewman. Every night Emil stayed in the forge, correcting blueprints, adapting designs, welding joints himself. He didn't sleep. He barely ate. But he remembered.
In 2025, he'd studied the prototypes of World War I tanks—the British Mark I, the French Schneider CA1. Clunky, unreliable beasts. But they had changed everything.
He wouldn't repeat their mistakes.
He'd beat history to the punch.
Steel and Fire
By the end of the second week, the Sanglier Mk I was halfway complete.
The hull took shape—long, sloped, and reinforced with riveted steel sheets scavenged from defunct machinery. The treads were adapted from an old traction engine. The frame was strengthened with internal bracing modeled after naval hulls.
But the heart of the beast—the engine—was still a gamble.
Emil had sketched a hybrid design: steam ignition feeding a compact internal combustion drive, something that shouldn't exist for at least another decade. Bruno studied the diagrams for hours before muttering:
"You've either invented something genius, or you're about to blow us all to hell."
Emil only smiled. "Maybe both."
A Stranger's Visit
On the twenty-third day, a black automobile arrived at the factory gate. Out stepped a man in a tailored coat with a military lapel pin: Colonel Varin.
He walked through the factory with Emil, inspecting the turret moldings, the tread design, the gear assembly. Workers paused to salute. Henriette watched from the stairwell, arms folded tightly.
At last, Varin stopped in front of the nearly completed Sanglier.
"It's hideous," he said.
"It's not meant to be pretty," Emil replied. "It's meant to end wars."
Varin turned to him. "You really believe this thing will hold up under fire?"
"I don't know," Emil admitted. "That's what the test is for."
The colonel held out a folded document.
"You get six weeks. If this machine works, you'll have orders. Rail priority. Steel allocations. And access to national funds."
"And if it fails?"
"Then you go back to building plows—if your workers don't kill you first."
Eyes in the Dark
That night, long after the factory closed, a man in a long coat circled the Sanglier with a notepad hidden in his pocket. He didn't speak to anyone. He didn't light a lamp. But he took careful measurements in the moonlight.
Later, he would write in German:
"The French possess a mobile armored design unlike anything in current use. Field test expected within 10 days. Recommend immediate counterintelligence action."