Nobody really knows how it started, and frankly, nobody cared enough to stop it. Somewhere between the invasion of Poland and the fall of Paris, a few scattered engineers — or maybe just bored radio operators — figured out a way to send short, meaningless messages through a chaotic web of cables, antennas, static, and oversized machines that required their own railway cars. By late 1939, without anyone quite agreeing to it, the internet existed. It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t smart. But it was everywhere.
Every army immediately appointed someone to be the “network guy,” usually the quietest man with the worst handwriting. His job was to sit in a tent full of static, wait for something to load, and then shout out the latest: “The Americans are arguing again!” or “Someone in Norway just posted a potato!” These updates rarely helped the war effort, but they gave everyone something to believe in. Soldiers began to check “the feed” between offensives, hoping for a distraction, or a blurry image of someone else’s lunch.
There were videos. Technically. They were the size of postage stamps and sounded like a pig being stabbed underwater, but if the shelling stopped for just a few moments — and if the soldier watching them had enough inner stillness — he might catch a tune, a word, maybe even a phrase. Sometimes the blur resolved itself into something unmistakably human: the ghost of a smile, the flash of an eye. Some swore they saw a familiar face. Some claimed the videos spoke directly to them. They were usually sent home.
The British used it to send sarcasm. The Germans, bullet-pointed orders. The French mostly posted philosophical questions and weather complaints. The Italians tried to upload recipes. The Americans flooded the system with motivational quotes and baseball scores. The Soviets... well, no one really knows what the Soviets did, but half the network traffic came from somewhere near Smolensk and involved a lot of shouting.
Soon there were memes. Sort of. Poorly drawn faces. Catchphrases with no clear origin. A looping .gif of a tank doing a little hop. Some of them reached the enemy trenches, distorted beyond recognition, but still somehow funny. There are reports of a brief ceasefire outside Warsaw after both sides received the same stick figure cartoon of a general slipping on soup.
Morale reports were quietly replaced by “engagement metrics.” Certain commanders became obsessed with their reach. One colonel refused to attack until his last post reached ten approvals from anonymous users in the Balkans. Airdrops began to include printouts of trending slogans. A division was once delayed because someone misspelled the word “advance” and the troops assumed it was an ironic joke.
The system began to feed on itself. Comments spawned replies, replies spiraled into threads. Entire units went silent for hours, waiting on one post to load. And still, the videos trickled in — three pixels wide, three seconds long. “Not now, Captain,” one soldier said. “My yodeling got a comment.”
By the time the war ended, the network had become something more than cables and static. It was ritual. Religion. Everyone hated it, everyone needed it, and no one wanted to go back to letters. The official servers were dismantled, the big machines boxed up. But the habit remained.
Ask any old veteran, and he’ll tell you the same thing:
“Back then, we didn’t fight for land. We fought for bandwidth.”