Brigitte Haule

Brigitte Haule, the fourth of seven children, was born in a traditional aristocratic East Europan family of moderate affluence. She was remembered as a well-behaved child who did exceptionally well at school, and possessed a high degree of empathy towards those of lower social status that was generally viewed as lacking in the East Europan aristocracy, a trait that did not go unnoticed by those around her.
At the age of 10, she had hobbies such as violin, tennis, geography, and could read in three different languages. Because of her personality and intellect, she was regarded as the ‘golden child’ of the family, the perfect image of what an East Europan female aristocrat should aspire to.
Her exceptional academic performance and aristocratic background allowed her to enter university to study medicine at the age of 17. There, she met the love of her life, a fellow student who was 2 years older than her, but from a lower social background.
At the outbreak of EW2, she enlisted and became a medic with the rank of lieutenant. But her family pulled connections to make sure that she was assigned to a military hospital in the home front in the city of Bergano, well out of harm’s way.
There, instead of her being able to help people in need as she had thought, she gaped in horror at the scale of the innate social inequalities that wasn't something she had ever personally witnessed: The wounded with aristocratic connections with relatively minor injuries were often able to skip ahead of the triage line, getting priority treatment over those of lower social status, but much more in need of immediate medical attention. When Haule protested to the chief of medicine about this, she was bluntly told that this is simply the way that things work in the Empire, and he asked her how she thinks she was able to get her officer’s commission so quickly if it wasn’t for the same aristocratic privilege. This encounter forced her to doubt her own place in society and her most strongly held personal beliefs, throwing Haule into a state of deep mental turmoil. But she pushed her feeling aside, worked harder everyday under the reasoning that this will be the best way to getting to those truly in need.
The crucial, seminal event for her came when she received news that the man she loved had perished serving on the frontlines. Haule was so shocked by the news that she simply walked out of the hospital, and spent the entire night aimlessly walking the streets of the city while still in her uniform. She finally came to terms with it by becoming fiercely anti-Imperial and anti-traditionalist, deeming all forms of hierarchy to be evil and unjust, and that it is not fair for some to own so much while others have so little.
In the morning, she used the hospital’s PA system to a make a speech to the flabbergasted hospital staff and patients denouncing the entire Imperial government and saying that the war was lost. She was swiftly arrested by the military police and held in the local constable’s office to await instructions from the higher ups on how to deal with this situation, with her father, upon hearing the news, suspecting that his golden child has gone insane due to work related stress.
The inevitable response was an order for her to be dishonorably discharged and sent back home. But, due to delays caused by the increasing levels of civil unrest throughout the Empire, the order did not arrive in time, and she took advantage of the chaos to break out of prison, living in the streets amongst the working-class citizens in the poorer districts in the city. There, she was exposed to the ideas of socialism via attending a secret rally organized by underground trade unions, with her finding a new purpose in life.
When the East Europan Revolution broke out shortly after, she saw an opportunity for the people to at long last cast aside the existing system. She took to the streets captivated crowds with her oratory skills, bringing support to the revolutionary cause through her own personal story of being converted from an aristocrat to the creed of Socialism. Soon, like many of Empire’s cities, Bergano fell under revolutionary control.
When the provisional government in the capital was negotiating with the various local councils to bring them in line, Haule was invited due to her being deemed as the closest thing there was to a ‘leader’ who can represent Bergano. While Haule turned over control of the city to the provisional government, she was not happy with what she saw. She criticized her fellow revolutionaries of all turning into a bunch bureaucrats and setting up a new hierarchy of their own instead of doing away with it all together. If they want to replace the old order so much, they can keep it, and argue with each other about who gets to keep the nice office at the now abandoned palaces. While for her, her eyes looked to the south across the Mediterranean Sea: Alkebulan. A whole continent still under the boot of Imperial oppression and full of possibilities. Dismissing her as just an overzealous recent convert, they let her go, thinking that she is most likely going to get herself killed within a few weeks of arriving there.
Two years passed, and no one has heard back from Haule, and she was mostly forgotten. However, the Empire’s Colonial Office starting getting troubling report about increasing amounts of native unrest in Central Alkebulan, various nationalist organizations have intensified their activities aimed at gaining independence from the Imperial Remnant. Further investigations revealed that these groups were under the leadership of an East Europan women. The women known to the Empire as ‘The Mad Wrench of Bergano’ is back.
Haule has spent the last two years traveling from village to village, gaining the trust of the locals by giving them medical treatment and teaching the children how to read and writing. Afterwards, she would instruct them in her own brand of anarcho-communist doctrine, filling them with revolutionary zeal. Repeating this process over and over again all by herself, she has established an entire network of underground support. Now, she is ready to strike. All throughout Central Alkebulan, colonial authorities and their ‘collaborators’ were driven out if they were lucky, lynched if they were not. While colonial troops barracks and police stations were attacked and their garrisons massacred, with the partisans seizing their weapons and equipment.
When the news of the colonial unrest led by Haule reached the desk of the Central Executive Committee, they were first surprised that she was still even alive. But then the committee quickly realized the propaganda potential that she has, not to mention a perfect opportunity to weaken the Empire without direct confrontation: Ships full of surplus supplies and weapons were smuggled to her partisans, while newspapers and even comic books intended for children titled ‘The Adventures of Comrade Haule!’ were published back home. The romanticized stories of her exploits, depicted her as a beautiful, brave, swashbuckling heroine that enlightens the local peoples over to the cause of world revolution while fighting against evil Imperialist oppressors.
With clandestine support from her homeland, Haule grew bolder as she moved her band of anti-colonial partisans (Whom, much to the annoyance of the Imperial colonial troops, blended in with the civilian population very well, not to mention often having their support) to start burning down plantations, blowing up bridges, and ambushing military patrols that dared to move out of the major towns and cities. This has turned into a massive source of international embarrassment, not to mention economic disruption for the Empire.
Haule’s greatest victory came in the form of her raid against Wobmasa. The area has long been known for it’s abundance of valuable metals and rare materials. As such the Empire has invested heavily in the mining operations to fuel industrial production back in Europa. But with the lost of much of their homeland, the Empire has started to cut back cost by minimizing expenditures on such things as worker salaries, housing, and maintenance of any infrastructure not part of the Imperial resource extraction system, there were even reports of forced labor and the displacment thousands of natives from their homes. When Haule’s partisans arrived in Wobmasa, the people treated them as saviors. She quickly rallied the population, destroying expensive machinery and hard to replace infrastructure, and lynching any Imperial officials and overseers they can get their hands on.
With that, Imperial governor decide that Haule and her band of 'merry men' cannot be allowed to carry on. He will personally set a trap for her….
The governor made a public announcement that Haule was captured recently during a failed raid, and that she begged for her life like a coward before he personally shot her. That was enough to get her attention to launch a raid against the governor's residence directly, to see who will be the one ‘begging like a coward’. This was exactly what he had planned.
The moment that the group made their way into the residence, the doors slammed shut behind them and tucks full of Imperial soldiers appeared outside. Realizing that it was a trap, the partisans decided to make a last stand at the residence.
No one was sure what exactly happened, but after 2 days of fighting, the residence was burned to the ground, Imperial troops suffered surprisingly heavy loses, and the partisans were killed down to the last man… Except for Haule, who somehow managed to shoot her way out. Escaping to the coast, where a sympathetic fisherman took her to a nearby neutral country. She contacted the local UEESR embassy and was quickly extracted a few days later back to East Europa.
During firefight and her subsequent escape, an Imperial solider reportedly managed to shoot her in the legs, resulting in her no longer to be able to walk without using crutches. Her time as an agitator and partisan leader was over, but her time as a national hero for the UEESR has only just begun….
Once back home, she received a hero’s welcome by the public, as military chiefs attempted to analyze her tactics for any lessons that they might be able to learn in terms of military matters. However, back in Central Alkebulan, without her charismatic leadership, the entire resistance movement torn itself apart from infighting. And within little over a month, what it took her 2 years to build and a year to lead was utterly dismantled. The Empire's colonial rule was maintained, no stateless society emerged, and even the mining operations were restored. Despite all the publicity, in the end she achieved absolutely nothing strategically, except getting a lot of natives killed in the Empire’s harsh retributions once the revolts were crushed.
With that, Haule finally decided to offer her services to the UEESR government, judging the world to simply not be ready for a stateless society yet, but if the UEESR was able to succeed, it might just one day create the conditions that will make her dreams a possibility.
A year into her new position in the government, she reorganized and established the UEESR’s own intelligence agency, the Revolutionary Exportation Directorate (RED). Besides standard external intelligence gathering though operatives and spies, RED will also look for opportunities to fund and support leftist revolutions worldwide, and most importantly, look for sympathizer inside the population of the Federation, the Empire, and Gallia. So that when the inevitable Third Europan War begins, they will be able to mobilize friendly partisans units right behind enemy lines, causing chaos and raising revolts to disrupt their home front.
When asked about the Empire still having a massive bounty on her head over a decade later, the RED director said, “There are two labels that I do not mind my enemies giving me. The first one is ‘anarchist’, because that is exactly what I believe in. The second is ‘terrorist’, because the reactionaries SHOULD be terrified of me.”
Category:Civil War Universe
Category:Females
Category:Characters