The Reborn Strategist: A Tale of War, Ambition, and Redemption

The air in the hospital room was thick with the sour tang of antiseptic and the faint, metallic bite of Julien Dubois's own blood. His chest rattled with each shallow breath, a broken bellows struggling against the weight of fifty-six years of regret. The year was 1970, and the once­brilliant mind of France—lauded at nineteen as the next Edison, the pride of the University of Paris—lay withered on a cot, his left leg a stump below the knee, a cruel memento from the Great War. The dim glow of a single bulb flickered above, casting shadows that danced like mocking specters across the cracked plaster walls. Julien's eyes, clouded but sharp with memory, stared at the ceiling, tracing the ghosts of his past. He had been a genius once. Mechanical and electrical engineering bowed to his intellect, his professors whispering of a mind to rival Napoleon's ambition. But ambition curdled after Antoine Lefèvre's death. The bar had been alive with laughter that night in 1911, glasses clinking to celebrate Julien's graduation. Antoine, ever the cautious one, had warned against the shadowed alley on their walk home. Julien, drunk on youth and hubris, laughed it off. "We're invincible, mon ami!" he'd slurred, fists raised like a prizefighter. The thieves came fast—knives glinting, demands barked. Antoine urged compliance; Julien swung instead. A blade found Antoine's chest, and Julien's world shattered in a spray of crimson. From there, the fall was swift. Wine drowned his guilt, women his loneliness, and his family's wealth his shame. The Dubois estate, once a beacon of aristocratic pride, crumbled under his reckless spending. His sister, Élise, four years younger and sharp as a rapier, watched him unravel with eyes that begged for the brother she'd idolized. His mother, Marguerite, offered quiet love; his father, Henri, only stern disappointment. When war came in 1914, Julien enlisted, not for glory but for oblivion. He wanted a bullet to end it all. Instead, he got shrapnel, a lost leg, and a life of lingering pain. Now, as the hospital's clock ticked toward midnight, Julien's heart stuttered. His hand, trembling, clutched the thin sheet. "If I had another chance," he rasped to the empty room, voice barely a whisper, "I'd make it right. I'd save Antoine. Save France. I'd be more than a broken man—I'd be Napoleon reborn." The words felt futile, a prayer to a god he'd long abandoned. His vision blurred, the ceiling dissolving into a void. Death's cold fingers brushed his chest, and he exhaled one final, ragged breath. But death was not the end. A jolt, like lightning through his bones, tore Julien from the darkness. His eyes snapped open to a different ceiling—ornate, gilded, familiar. The air smelled of polished wood and lavender, not decay. His hands, young and unscarred, gripped silk sheets. His legs—both of them—shifted beneath him. Heart pounding, he sat up, staring at the room he hadn't seen in decades: his bedroom in the Dubois estate, 1911. A mirror across the room reflected a face he barely recognized—nineteen, unlined, alive. And in his mind, a flood of knowledge that wasn't his: engineering schematics, economic strategies, chemical formulas, all stamped with the name Patrick Arnaud, a scientist from 2025. Julien laughed, a sharp, disbelieving bark that echoed in the quiet. "Mon Dieu," he muttered, swinging his legs—both legs—off the bed. "I'm back." His mind raced, Antoine's face flashing before him, alive and unstabbed. France, three years from war, unravaged. His family, not yet broken by his failures. He stumbled to the window, the dawn painting the estate's fields in gold. A vow burned in his chest, fierce and unshakable: he would save them all. But first, he needed a plan—and a rifle to change the world. Somewhere in his mind, Patrick Arnaud's voice whispered: Start with the Chauchat. Make it better. Make it yours.