The day after the royal audience, the work began. Armed with the King's signed decree, men acting on behalf of Baron Fievé walked into the main state armory, presented the document to the stunned military quartermaster, and began a full inventory. Simultaneously, a notice was posted on the door of a ministry building near the docks, requisitioning it as the new headquarters for the National Armaments Committee. The quiet political victory at the palace was immediately translated into the hard, undeniable language of physical occupation.
The weeks that followed were a blur of calculated, relentless activity, a real-world montage of a nation being forcibly dragged into a new century.
Under Baron Fievé's direction, the industrial mobilization began. Teams of engineers and clerks, armed with the royal decree, took control of state workshops and "persuaded" private foundry owners of the patriotic necessity of placing their facilities under committee direction. Steam engines, purchased from Britain with Fievé's capital, were installed in repurposed warehouses, their rhythmic thumping a new heartbeat for the city's industry. Raw materials were rerouted by executive order—iron from England, coal from Bornholm, and a steady stream of oak from Christian's own Norwegian holdings, now destined for shipyards instead of the auction block. The Eskildsen rifle conversion factory expanded at a terrifying rate, the workforce tripling as three new assembly lines were built alongside the first. The daily output of converted rifles climbed from dozens to hundreds.
Simultaneously, Admiral Løvenskiold's naval renaissance began. The design competition for the new ironclad warship was announced across Europe. The old admiral, revitalized and brimming with purpose, chaired a board of naval architects and engineers. They reviewed proposals from the finest shipyards in the world. Christian, sitting in on their meetings, stunned them all by dismissing most of the designs as obsolete. With his future knowledge, he guided them toward a radical proposal that featured a central armored casemate for the main guns combined with a revolving armored turret forward—a hybrid design offering maximum protection and a wide field of fire, years ahead of its time. Under his guidance, the old Copenhagen naval yard began a massive overhaul, clearing slipways to build the facilities necessary to forge and assemble an iron hull.
Christian himself was the ghost in this new machine, his presence felt everywhere. The evening classes for his foremen expanded, creating a core of loyal, technically-literate managers—including Stig and Soren, brought to the capital from Eskildsgård—who could be trusted to run the new workshops according to the "Eskildsen Method." He spent his days striding through the mud of construction sites and the noisy chaos of the factory floors, and his nights poring over production schedules and engineering diagrams.
One evening, walking through the rifle factory amidst the deafening roar of machinery, he watched the faces of the workers—farmers' sons, fishermen, young men from the city slums—all performing their single, repetitive tasks with focused intensity. He had built this. He was responsible for these people, for this immense, powerful, and dehumanizing system. The weight of it was immense.
The system's first major test came a month after it was created. The second, much larger shipment of two thousand converted rifles had reached the front. A new dispatch arrived from General de Meza at the front lines, delivered directly to the committee's new headquarters. Christian read it with Fievé and Løvenskiold looking over his shoulder.
The news was a confirmation, but also a dire warning. The newly armed regiments were performing miracles in skirmishes, repelling Prussian patrols with ease. The reputation of the "Devil's sewing machine" had grown to the point where Prussian infantry now showed extreme reluctance to engage in direct assaults against any position known to be held by the Royal Life Guards.
But the Prussians were not fools. They were adapting.
The dispatch reported a new enemy tactic: where they could not win with infantry, they would win with artillery. Prussian batteries, far outside the effective range of the Danish rifles, were now methodically targeting any position that showed an unusual rate of fire. They were using their superiority in modern, rifled cannon to simply obliterate the Danish redoubts from a distance.
Christian placed the dispatch down on the large map of the Dybbøl front. He had solved the rifle gap. He had given his soldiers the ability to fight back on equal terms. But in doing so, he had forced the enemy to change its strategy, revealing the next, even more critical Danish weakness: their own antiquated artillery.
His brilliant solution had only illuminated a dozen other, more complex problems. He had built a magnificent new engine of state. Now, he realized, he had to make it outrun a cannonball. The arms race had truly begun.