Later historians called it part of the "era of the Ship," but when the war started, only the innermost circles of the Government and some of the military knew of its eventual aim. It was begun in the south and centered around a small village by the name of Canbau, which sat at the intersection of three of the major trade routes in that area. The town's major industries were legal and illegal highway robbery, bars offering something politely labeled the Black Death, and bordellos. The Caroline garrison there synthesized the needed incident when it "found" a cargo of illegal armaments secreted away in a Yuma caravan.
TheCarolineRepublic demanded an apology for sending arms to revolutionaries operating in her mountains. The Yuma Foreign Office had the stupidity to note that this was the first mention of any sort of insurrection in the Caroline. Publicizing this as a deliberate evasion and an intolerable display of arrogance by Yuma, a force of Caroline cavalry was sent to plunder all Yuma caravans on the three roads. Yuma, still not seeing the point of the affair, protested first with several notes and then with the destruction of a Caroline irrigation dam which a hasty survey determined to be within Yuma'sborders.
The Caroline's sense of justice and right being offended, an attack was launched from Canbau. One could almost hear the chuckling coming from the War Office, the Office of Reconstruction, and Caltroon. Caroline mounted forces supported, it was rumored, by horse-drawn artillery of a very ancient vintage (and consequently, of a very high state of efficiency), swept westward. They reached the eastern border, wheeled, and drove northeast, diagonally across the country.
It was not a very bloody conflict, for in those days of fluid alliances, loyalty often depended upon which way the chips happened to be falling at the moment. One by one the towns of Yuma surrendered until, four months and one day after the first incident, the black and silver of the Caroline was run up the State House flagpole at Bannon der-Main, Yuma's capital. The only real battle developed in the north, a week after the formal truce. A group of die-hard patriots, crying God and Constitution, barricaded themselves in the Armories. There, emplaced in cliffs overlooking the Tyne, they managed to hold the entire Caroline expeditionary force at bay for a month.
Since the Caroline liked to preserve the image of a perfect war fought in a perfect way to a perfect victory, contemporary accounts of the battle at the Armories are generally sketchy. But there are songs about that place: the confidential war diaries of the units involved provide enough material for the construction of legends. The Tyne was supposed to have flowed red for a week and the peasants living in the surrounding regions now tell of a hideous battle between men and demigods.
There is now a small lake, fed by the Tyne, where the frontal galleries of the Armories used to be, and one has only to overturn a stone or clod of soil to find some blackened instrument of war.
The 42nd Imperial Hussars garnered another battle pennant. Toriman sent a wagon load of wine to the survivors and a shipment of fine coffins to the dead.