By the morning of 26 July, the war Oskar had spent more than a decade preparing for was finally beginning to reveal its true shape.
He stood before one of the tall windows of his private quarters inside the Black Legion headquarters at Königsberg, watching the first pale light spread across the roofs of the East Prussian capital. Behind him, papers covered much of the broad table beside his bed: railway schedules, intelligence summaries, aerial reconnaissance reports, casualty estimates and maps from fronts separated by hundreds of kilometres. Some had arrived during the night, while others had been carried in before dawn by officers who knew better than to wait until breakfast.
The news from the west was bloody, but broadly encouraging. France's great offensive doctrine was already beginning to come apart.
The French First and Second Armies had advanced into Alsace and Lorraine expecting to carry the war onto German soil, only to encounter an army very different from the one their officers had studied before the war. German aircraft ranged far ahead of the ground forces, locating marching columns and reporting their movements almost as soon as they began. Fighters descended upon exposed infantry and cavalry whenever the opportunity presented itself, machine-gun fire forcing entire formations from roads and into ditches, orchards and tree lines before many of them had even reached the battlefield.
The aircraft rarely destroyed entire units by themselves, but they did not need to. Every column forced from a road lost time, every battalion scattered among trees had to be gathered and reorganised, and every frightened horse that bolted beneath the noise of engines or gunfire disrupted whatever formation happened to be moving behind it. By the time many French units finally reached the German positions, their officers had already spent hours rebuilding formations that had been disturbed repeatedly during the approach.
Then the artillery took over. German observers, wireless sets and field telephones allowed batteries to concentrate their fire with a speed and precision the French had not expected. Machine guns covered the most obvious approaches while mortars worked against troops that survived long enough to come close. When the French attacked in mass, German firepower punished the concentration. When they dispersed, coordination became harder and the more mobile German formations found opportunities to move through the resulting gaps.
The tanks had produced some of the ugliest reports upon Oskar's table. One dispatch described three Panzers emerging from woodland and encountering a French infantry company moving across open farmland beside a body of cavalry. The French had attempted to deploy, but rifles and sabres meant little against armour. The tanks drove directly through them, machine guns firing as their tracks crossed men who failed to escape quickly enough, while motorcycles and German infantry followed behind to seize the roads and hedgerows through which the survivors attempted to flee.
By the end of the engagement, the French formation had ceased to exist as an organised body. Some men surrendered, others scattered into the countryside, and many never left the field.
It was exactly the sort of battle Oskar had spent years designing his machines to win, and exactly the sort of victory he knew could become dangerously misleading if men began believing too much of their own propaganda. Tanks were formidable weapons, but they were not invincible, and the latest reports from farther south had already begun proving it.
The German advance was slowing as it approached the great fortified regions stretching from Verdun south toward Toul, Épinal and Belfort. Those positions presented an entirely different problem from infantry caught in open fields. Heavy fortress guns had already destroyed tanks and armoured vehicles, while French field artillery increasingly fought from concealed positions behind woods, villages and broken ground. The French armies had been badly mauled during their offensives, but they were falling back toward ground prepared precisely for the possibility of a German invasion, and fresh troops were already digging wherever permanent fortifications did not cover the approaches.
In some respects, it was Liège again, only on a much greater scale. German machinery could tear exposed infantry apart, accelerate an advance and turn a retreat into a massacre, but armour remained armour. Heavy artillery could still destroy it, and reinforced concrete did not cease to exist simply because a tank appeared in front of it.
Germany continued advancing in the west and had not been stopped in any decisive sense, but the character of the fighting was changing. Before the great French defensive regions could be broken, heavier artillery would have to come forward, ammunition accumulated and attacks prepared more carefully. What had begun as movement would become slower, bloodier and increasingly deliberate.
France had been badly wounded.
It had not yet been broken.
Oskar understood the distinction better than many of the men already celebrating the early victories in Berlin.
He turned from the window and looked down at the reports scattered across the table. The western campaign would continue without him. Moltke and the General Staff had millions of men there, and Germany's armies possessed their own commanders, staffs and instructions. Belgium was already collapsing beneath the northern advance, while farther south the French were beginning the desperate work of transforming their fortified regions and whatever defensible ground lay between them into a continuous barrier.
Oskar's concern lay elsewhere.
Russia.
Only a few days earlier, he had gone through the coming campaign one final time with Hindenburg, Ludendorff and the senior commanders of the Black Legion. Intelligence could tell them much: the progress of Russian mobilisation, railway movements, concentrations along the frontier and the enormous gathering of men farther south against Austria-Hungary.
Oskar could tell them somewhat more, not because some miraculous intelligence network reached every office in Saint Petersburg, but because he remembered what Russia had attempted once before.
History would not repeat itself perfectly. Too much had already changed for that. A delayed train, a commander promoted earlier than expected or some decision made hundreds of kilometres from East Prussia could alter an entire campaign. Yet the broad strategic logic remained familiar.
Russia could not simply march west toward Berlin while leaving dangerous enemy forces upon both of its flanks. In the south, the greater share of its opening strength would be directed against Galicia, where enormous Russian armies, approaching two million men in total strength, were preparing to strike Austria-Hungary and force their way toward the Carpathians.
Oskar had warned Vienna accordingly. What the Austro-Hungarian command chose to do with those warnings was now its responsibility.
Germany faced the northern half of that same design.
Once fully mobilised, more than half a million Russian soldiers were expected to advance against East Prussia, where the Black Legion could muster scarcely one hundred and eighty thousand men. Rennenkampf's First Army would come from the northeast, while Samsonov's Second Army drove north from Russian Poland. If the two armies coordinated their movements successfully and closed upon the province from both directions, East Prussia risked being crushed between them, opening the road deeper into Germany.
Oskar had described the danger with such confidence during the planning conferences that Ludendorff had more than once looked at him as though the Crown Prince were consulting some invisible crystal ball.
In a sense, he was. The names after all were already quite familiar to him. Rennenkampf, Samsonov, Tannenberg, and the famous Masurian Lakes.
He remembered the strategy that had once destroyed one Russian army and driven the other back, and Hindenburg and Ludendorff had independently arrived at a version of the same basic solution. East Prussia would be yielded where necessary, the Russians allowed to advance deeper into the province, and Germany's railway network used to exploit the growing separation between their armies. The Black Legion could concentrate first against one, destroy or cripple it, and then turn upon the other before the Russians properly understood what was happening.
Militarily, it was a sound plan and Oskar knew that better than anyone, but he also knew what it required.
East Prussia itself would become the battlefield. German villages would be abandoned before the Russian advance. Families would flee west with whatever they could carry, leaving farms, homes and towns exposed while enemy troops moved through them.
Oskar had refused.
Not because he imagined every Russian soldier as some mindless barbarian waiting to burn the first German village he entered. Millions of those men were ordinary conscripts who wanted little more than to survive the war and eventually return home. But armies were not composed entirely of saints. Among them marched veterans accustomed to violence, frightened young men, opportunists, criminals and ordinary people who might behave very differently once a rifle sat in their hands and no immediate authority appeared capable of restraining them.
Discipline could fail. Alcohol could be found. Property could be stolen. An armed soldier entering the home of a frightened civilian family could discover very quickly how much power he possessed over everyone inside it. Sometimes that power became theft. Sometimes murder. Sometimes something worse.
None of it required an official order to destroy a family.
Oskar had no intention of deliberately exposing his people to those possibilities merely because allowing Russia deeper into East Prussia produced a cleaner operational problem for the army.
So he had rejected the great withdrawal.
That did not mean placing men upon every metre of the political frontier and ordering them to die where they stood. Where rivers, high ground, forests or other natural obstacles offered better defensive ground, the line had been adjusted accordingly. Individual positions could also be abandoned if they became impossible to hold.
But the principle remained unchanged.
The Russians would not be invited deep into East Prussia simply to make them easier to encircle later.
The Black Legion would defend as much German territory as practical from the beginning.
Oskar's answer was his so-called checkerboard defence.
Rather than attempting to construct one continuous defensive line across East Prussia, the Black Legion broke the front into hundreds of small, mutually supporting strongpoints. At its simplest, a single twelve-man squad would occupy a roughly circular island of trenches and firing pits surrounded by barbed wire. Several hundred metres away another squad might hold a similar position, while behind both sat a heavier supporting strongpoint equipped with machine guns, mortars and, where circumstances allowed, artillery.
Together, these positions formed what Oskar's planners called a defensive triangle.
That basic pattern was then repeated again and again across the front. Behind several such triangles stood larger fortified supply positions—compact field forts protected by trenches, timber barriers, wire and prepared firing points, with ammunition, food and other supplies stored inside and a platoon or more assigned to defend them.
Towns, villages, bridges and important road junctions formed the strongest points in the wider network. Larger formations were concentrated there, turning settlements into local fortresses capable of absorbing the weight of a major Russian attack, while the smaller checkerboard positions filled the countryside between them.
There were gaps between those strongpoints, of course.
But a gap was not the same thing as an open road.
Russian troops attempting to pass between the positions would still find themselves watched and fired upon from the flanks. Machine guns and mortars could rake the spaces between strongpoints, artillery farther behind could strike larger concentrations, and mobile reserves waited deeper in the line for anything that managed to force its way through.
A Russian unit might penetrate one section of the checkerboard, but doing so without first destroying the positions around it meant advancing with German soldiers still upon its flanks and potentially behind it. The deeper it pushed, the more vulnerable its communications, supply routes and retreat became.
The defence was therefore designed to bend where necessary without ever simply opening. Individual strongpoints might fall or withdraw, but the network around them would continue fighting, forcing the enemy to break the checkerboard piece by piece rather than simply punch through a single line and pour into East Prussia.
It was a more stubborn strategy than the one history had once used, and perhaps a more dangerous one as well.
Oskar understood perfectly well what he was gambling. Hindenburg and Ludendorff's proposed withdrawal possessed one enormous advantage that neither man could appreciate: Oskar already knew that, in another history, something very much like it had succeeded.
His own plan possessed no such reassurance.
If it failed, the Russian armies would still enter East Prussia—but only after Oskar had deliberately rejected the safer solution. Every village lost afterward would belong partly to him, and every civilian forced onto the western roads would know whose promise had failed.
He looked once more through the tall windows of his private quarters and watched the first morning light spread across Königsberg.
Tomorrow he would turn twenty-six.
The thought might have amused him under almost any other circumstances. Instead, he found himself wondering whether he would spend his birthday standing in mud beneath Russian artillery, surrounded by screaming men and waiting to discover whether the defensive plan upon which he had gambled East Prussia had actually worked.
A tired breath escaped him, for this was not what he had wanted.
He had died in war once already. In this life he had spent more than a decade building Germany, its armies and alliances partly because he had hoped never to experience that world again: the smoke, the broken bodies, the peculiar exhaustion of knowing that somewhere beyond the horizon another man was trying very hard to kill you.
Yet here he was.
His hand had been forced, and this time there was far more behind him than his own life. Germany had become his country in every way that mattered. His family lived here. His friends lived here. Millions of people who would never know him personally nevertheless depended upon the army he had built to keep Russian soldiers away from their homes.
Oskar took no pleasure in what lay ahead. Yet if he truly meant to win this war and secure the lasting peace he had spent so many years trying to build, he knew he would have to do things he would once have considered unthinkable.
A soft metallic click sounded behind him, drawing his attention away from his thoughts. He glanced over one shoulder and found Patricia and Elise Horn exactly where they had been for most of the morning, the two blonde, blue-eyed women in their maid uniforms working around him with almost absurd concentration.
Each stood upon a small stool so they could properly reach him. Elise was tightening one of the final fastenings beneath his enormous shoulder plate, while Patricia carefully arranged the heavy blood-red cape before smoothing the parchment purity seal against the raised black ribs of his breastplate. Small lifting frames had been necessary for the heaviest pieces of armour, though Oskar had helped wherever he could, fastening the lower straps and holding plates steady while the women worked.
By now there was little left to do. The close-fitting black underlayer could be seen only around his neck and through the narrow gaps between articulated plates. Blackened steel enclosed his legs, arms and immense torso, while the skeletal ribs sweeping across his breastplate made it appear almost as though some gigantic iron skeleton had been wrapped around the living man beneath. His enormous sword already rested diagonally across his back, its vertebra-like pommel rising above one shoulder.
Only the skull-faced helmet remained upon the table.
Oskar watched Patricia and Elise for a few moments longer, struck again by how strangely and thoroughly the two women had worked their way into his life. Once, they had been little more than a scandal he desperately wanted to leave behind: two troublesome British women who had discovered his unfortunate weakness for beautiful faces, exploited it shamelessly and then somehow returned years later beneath the shared name Horn as though refusing to disappear had become a personal challenge.
He had tried paying them off. He had tried putting an entire country between them. He had even tried common sense.
None of it had worked.
Then the children had come, and everything had become considerably more complicated.
Six of them now slept in the adjoining room, all carrying the name Horn because none could yet be acknowledged publicly as children of the German Crown Prince. Four were the older children, born within the same month in January 1911: Arthur, Victoria, Alfred and Alice, now three and a half years old and already possessed of distinct personalities, opinions and an alarming amount of energy. The youngest two, Alexandra and Clara, had been born only that February and were scarcely five months old, still spending much of their lives sleeping, feeding and occasionally screaming with remarkable force for creatures so small.
For years they had existed to Oskar mostly as rumours, distant complications and uncomfortable questions he preferred not to examine too closely. That had changed almost immediately after Patricia and Elise were finally allowed to approach him in private.
Patricia, naturally, had understood exactly which weapon to deploy first.
She had come carrying little Arthur in her arms.
The boy had already been told who Oskar was. There had been no frightened uncertainty when those blue eyes first looked upward at the enormous man standing before him, only the solemn curiosity of a three-year-old studying someone he had heard about but never properly known.
Then Patricia had quietly told him to say hello to his father.
Oskar had known precisely what she was doing.
There had been no explicit threat, no demand and certainly nothing that could properly be called blackmail. Patricia did not need any of that anymore. She simply stood there holding his son, looking entirely too innocent while presenting Oskar with a small blond boy who already knew that the giant before him was his father.
It was shameless, manipulative, and it had worked instantly. Whatever objections Oskar had prepared simply collapsed.
Arthur looked at him, hesitated for perhaps half a second, and reached out.
That was enough.
Oskar took the boy from Patricia almost without thinking, and the moment Arthur settled against his chest, whatever sensible distance he had intended to preserve vanished completely. He could hardly tell a three-year-old that dynastic politics were complicated and therefore Father would prefer that he remain an inconvenient rumour somewhere else.
Fortunately, the reunion had taken place entirely in private. No journalists, courtiers or curious officers had been present to witness the German Crown Prince surrender unconditionally to a child weighing scarcely more than one of his gauntlets.
After Arthur, resisting the others had become impossible.
During the past week, Oskar had finally begun to know all six of them properly, and the children had learned him in return—not merely his name or the strange titles adults attached to it, but the much simpler truth that mattered far more to them.
He was their father.
The older four had accepted that fact with the effortless certainty children sometimes possessed. Whenever Oskar sat down, one or another inevitably climbed onto him, tugged at his hair, demanded to be lifted or began asking questions with no apparent end. To them, the Crown Prince of Germany was less a figure of state than an enormous and unusually convenient father whose chief responsibility seemed to be carrying them whenever walking became tiresome. Arthur had already developed a worrying fascination with Oskar's great sword, while Alice seemed considerably more interested in the nearly platinum-blond hair she could reach whenever he lifted her. Victoria and Alfred had each discovered their own equally effective ways of claiming his attention.
Alexandra and Clara required considerably less explanation. At only a few months old, the two babies cared little for crowns, titles or politics. So long as they were warm, fed and held securely against him, it made no difference whether the immense chest beneath their cheeks belonged to a prince, a soldier or an emperor.
Oskar had discovered, somewhat to his own dismay, that he enjoyed every moment of it.
That, perhaps, was Patricia and Elise's greatest victory over him. They had once forced their way into his life through scandal, persistence and an almost criminal understanding of his weaknesses. Now none of that was necessary, for the six little children carrying the name Horn had made it impossible for him to pretend that these two troublesome women meant nothing to him.
And lately Oskar had found himself grateful for their presence.
There was something strangely comforting about Patricia fussing over the smallest trace of dust on his armour, Elise checking every fastening twice, and the quiet laughter of women and children drifting through quarters otherwise filled with maps, casualty reports and warnings of approaching armies. Beyond the partly open door slept six children who now knew that the enormous man in the neighbouring room was their father.
They gave the place a softness it otherwise would not have possessed.
More importantly, they reminded Oskar why he was going.
Elise gave the final strap beneath his shoulder a firm tug and stepped down from her stool. Patricia inspected the purity seal resting against the black ribs of his breastplate, adjusted it by the smallest fraction and joined her.
"Finished," she said quietly.
Oskar looked down at them.
For several seconds nobody spoke.
The humour that had carried them through the morning faded naturally as Patricia and Elise regarded the immense figure standing before them. More than a hundred kilograms of blackened steel enclosed his body, the blood-red cape hanging heavily behind him while the great sword rose over one shoulder. Only the skull-faced helmet remained upon the nearby table.
Yet neither woman appeared frightened by what he had become.
They were frightened by where he was going.
Oskar understood well enough.
He reached for Patricia first, drawing the former princess against the hard ribs of his breastplate. She tilted her face upward and he bent to kiss her, slower and more tenderly than either of them probably expected. When they parted, he rested his forehead lightly against hers.
"Stay safe," he murmured. A crooked smile appeared. "And try not to create another international scandal while I'm gone, my troublesome British princess."
Patricia's lips twitched despite the wetness gathering in her eyes.
"I make no promises."
"Naturally."
Then Oskar turned toward Elise.
The petite woman scarcely had time to react before his hands settled around her waist and lifted her from the floor. Elise instinctively wrapped her arms around his neck, her legs briefly drawing around his hips as he brought her level with him and kissed her. There was more heat in that kiss, enough to leave Elise flushed when he finally drew back.
"And you," Oskar murmured. "Behave yourself, my wicked little maid."
Elise stared at him in mock offence.
"I always behave."
Oskar raised an eyebrow.
Patricia actually laughed.
"That may be the most outrageous lie either of us has ever told him."
Oskar chuckled and lowered Elise carefully to the floor. For one brief moment the three of them remained close, Patricia against one arm, Elise beneath the other, warmth pressed around a body wrapped almost entirely in cold steel.
Then Oskar gently smoothed Patricia's hair before doing the same to Elise, his enormous gauntleted hands moving with surprising tenderness.
"Look after yourselves," he said, glancing toward the adjoining room. "And look after the little ones."
"We will," Patricia whispered.
Oskar nodded, took the skull-faced helmet from the table and tucked it beneath one arm before turning toward the door.
"Be careful, Oskar."
He stopped.
All trace of teasing had vanished from Patricia's voice. Elise stood beside her, fingers curled anxiously into the front of her maid's dress.
"Please," she said softly. "Don't get hurt."
Oskar looked back over his shoulder.
"We love you," Elise added.
Patricia nodded, her eyes shining. "Both of us."
For a moment Oskar simply regarded them. Then he raised one gauntleted hand and gave them a faint, reassuring smile.
"Ladies, look at me. Bullets have tried to kill me. Bombs have tried. Assassins have tried. Yet here I am." His smile widened. "This Crown Prince has proved remarkably difficult to get rid of."
A weak laugh escaped Elise, while Patricia managed only a small, sorrowful smile.
Oskar's expression softened.
"Hold the home front while I'm gone. I'll deal with the Russians—and the rest of this damned war, if I have to."
He started to turn away, only to hesitate.
There was still one thing he had never actually said to them.
His gaze moved from Patricia to Elise, then briefly toward the narrow opening behind them where the edge of one cradle remained visible.
"Oh, and I suppose it's only fair that I tell you this as well."
Both women watched him.
Oskar smiled.
"I love the two of you too."
Silence followed.
Elise's lips parted in stunned disbelief. Patricia seemed to forget how to breathe.
Before either woman could recover, Oskar turned and walked through the doorway.
For several seconds Patricia simply stared after him. Then whatever composure she had been holding began to crack, and she took a hurried step toward the corridor as though intending to follow.
Elise caught her hand.
Patricia turned toward her. Elise's own eyes were wet, but she gently shook her head.
Let him go.
They both understood. Every selfish instinct urged them to run after him, pull him back into the room and keep the father of their children somewhere warm and safe, beyond the reach of Russian rifles and artillery. But Oskar was not merely theirs. East Prussia was waiting for him, and millions of people depended upon what he was about to do.
So Patricia stayed.
Her fingers tightened around Elise's, and the two women remained together in the quiet room, staring at the doorway through which he had disappeared. For the first time since they had forced their troublesome way into Oskar's life years before, he had finally said the words neither had been certain they would ever hear.
Neither quite managed to stop smiling. Neither managed to keep her eyes completely dry.
Oskar, meanwhile, made his way through the waking headquarters. Officers hurried along the corridors with maps and folders beneath their arms, telephones rang behind closed doors, and telegraph keys clicked steadily from the command section where Hindenburg and Ludendorff were already receiving reports from the frontier. There was no reason to disturb them. Everything that needed to be decided had been settled the night before.
With the skull-faced helmet tucked beneath one arm and his enormous sword rising over the opposite shoulder, Oskar descended the main staircase and stepped into the courtyard.
The Third Company of the Eternal Guard awaited him there.
Two hundred mounted guards stood in ordered ranks along either side of the courtyard, their black horses already saddled and prepared for the journey south. Their armour was not the monstrous plate Oskar himself wore, but dark, practical protection of blackened steel covering the chest, shoulders and limbs, combined with smooth helmets, face protection, ammunition webbing and compact modern weapons. To a soldier of 1914, they would have looked less like cavalry than men from some later and considerably darker age.
Captain Carter waited at their head, already mounted.
A short distance beside him stood Shadowmane.
Oskar slowed.
The great stallion looked as though the bullets he had taken during the assassination attempt had never touched him. His wounds had healed, his enormous body had regained its strength, and beneath the dark barding covering his head, chest and flanks he looked more formidable than ever. Even beside the large black horses of the Eternal Guard, Shadowmane seemed built upon another scale—nearly eight hundred kilograms of muscle before armour was added, broad through the chest and shoulders, his armoured silhouette resembling some beast dragged out of an old nightmare and fitted for modern war.
Shadowmane noticed him approaching and stamped one heavy hoof against the stones.
Oskar stopped before him and rested a gauntleted hand against the stallion's armoured neck.
"Ready, old friend?"
Shadowmane snorted.
Oskar glanced toward the sword rising over his shoulder.
"This time it won't be a handful of assassins. There are going to be considerably more men with rifles and pistols waiting for us."
The stallion tossed his head sharply and pawed at the ground again, seemingly offended by the suggestion that this should concern him.
Oskar laughed.
"Yes, yes. I should have known better than to ask."
He seized the saddle and swung himself onto Shadowmane's back. The stallion scarcely shifted beneath the added weight, accepting several hundred kilograms of prince, armour, sword and equipment as though Oskar were little more than another piece of tack.
Only then did Oskar raise the helmet.
The black skull descended over his face, the clasps locking beneath his jaw until the man beneath the armour disappeared. Pale blue eyes remained visible within the hollow sockets of the death's-head mask, while the blood-red cape settled behind the ribbed breastplate.
Captain Carter regarded him for a moment and gave a short nod.
Oskar returned it before turning Shadowmane toward the gates.
"Third Company," he called. "Mount up and follow me."
Saddles creaked and hooves struck stone as the Eternal Guard mounted almost as one.
Then the gates opened.
They rode into Königsberg beneath the growing morning light, Oskar and Shadowmane at their head with Carter close beside him. The city was already alive with the final movements of the Black Legion. Trucks loaded with ammunition, fuel, food and spare parts rumbled toward depots and railway yards, motorcycles threaded between columns carrying dispatches, and soldiers moved toward stations that would carry them to prepared positions nearer the frontier.
People stopped as Oskar passed.
His name travelled ahead of the column almost before he did.
"Oskar!"
"The Iron Prince!"
Men struck fists against their hearts while women crossed themselves and children waved from windows and their parents' shoulders. Flowers fell into the road beneath the hooves of the Eternal Guard.
"God be with you!"
"For God and Fatherland!"
"Long live the Iron Prince!"
"Don't let them through!"
Oskar answered mostly with the occasional inclination of his skull-faced helm.
There was little he could say that would matter more than what he was already doing.
The Russians were coming toward these people.
He was going to meet them.
By the time the column reached the railway station, much of Königsberg seemed to have gathered somewhere along the route to watch them depart. The horses were loaded into waiting railway cars, Shadowmane entering the reinforced compartment prepared specifically for his exceptional size, while men, weapons and equipment disappeared aboard around him.
Within minutes, the locomotive whistle sounded and steam rolled across the platform as the train began its journey south.
Königsberg slowly disappeared behind smoke, rooftops and trees while the last supply trains and reinforcement columns of the Black Legion continued toward their assigned positions across East Prussia.
Oskar watched the city fade into the distance before turning his gaze south, toward Soldau.
There, he intended to meet Samsonov's Second Army.
Hundreds of kilometres away, the man responsible for sending that army toward him was feeling considerably more optimistic.
General Yakov Zhilinsky stood beside an open window in a comfortable manor house outside Białystok, temporarily requisitioned as headquarters for the Russian Northwestern Front. One hand rested behind his back while the other held a cut-crystal glass containing a generous measure of peppered vodka, which he insisted kept the blood moving properly in the morning.
Beyond the window stretched what had once been a perfectly respectable field of carrots.
Now it was an airfield.
Nearly thirty Russian aeroplanes were scattered across the flattened ground: Farmans, Nieuports and other fragile machines of timber, wire and canvas, surrounded by mechanics, pilots, fuel cans and toolboxes. One crew was attempting to start an engine by repeatedly hauling the propeller through its arc until, after several failures and much shouting, the machine finally coughed into life beneath a cloud of oily smoke. Nearby another aircraft sat half-disassembled while mechanics worked around its exposed engine, and farther across the field several soldiers dragged a damaged machine toward a waiting truck.
Zhilinsky watched all of it with considerable satisfaction.
Whatever strange inventions Germany might possess, Russia had aeroplanes too, and more of them than almost anyone in Europe. His scouts had been flying constantly along the approaches to East Prussia, watching roads, railways and frontier positions while the First and Second Armies completed their preparations.
Thus far, the reconnaissance reports had given Zhilinsky little reason for concern.
German border positions were clearly being strengthened. Trenches and fieldworks had appeared around certain towns, roads and river crossings, while fortified villages and scattered infantry concentrations suggested exactly what he expected from an enemy preparing to receive an invasion.
What had not appeared was considerably more reassuring.
No great artillery concentrations had been identified. No tanks or armoured trucks had been seen moving near the frontier. Most strikingly, not a single German military aircraft had yet been reported in the eastern skies.
For all the extraordinary stories coming from Belgium and France, East Prussia seemed almost disappointingly ordinary.
Perhaps Germany simply did not possess enough of its remarkable machines to place them everywhere.
Zhilinsky took another drink.
That suited him perfectly.
The Northwestern Front already possessed more than half a million men between Rennenkampf's First Army and Samsonov's Second, and more were coming. Railway stations throughout the Russian Empire continued swallowing conscripts and sending them westward by the trainload. Rifles, ammunition, horses, wagons and artillery followed them, and Saint Petersburg was already receiving offers of foreign loans, industrial matériel and military supplies from powers eager to see Germany broken.
Russia's armies would only grow larger, while the enemy waiting in East Prussia would not.
Intelligence estimates remained uncertain—one hundred thousand Germans, perhaps somewhat more. Even the highest figures failed to approach two hundred thousand.
Zhilinsky commanded nearly three times that number.
He smiled into his glass.
Rennenkampf would enter from the northeast. Samsonov would come from the south. Whatever personal dislike existed between the two old generals—and whatever embarrassing quarrels they had carried from earlier wars—both were experienced soldiers. They did not need to like one another. They needed only to keep moving until East Prussia was crushed between them.
And standing somewhere behind those German lines was Crown Prince Oskar.
That possibility pleased Zhilinsky most of all.
The famous Iron Prince had chosen to come east personally, apparently convinced that his presence could somehow compensate for Russia's overwhelming superiority. Zhilinsky almost admired the boy's courage.
Almost.
Oskar might be enormous, brilliant and surrounded by machines nobody entirely understood, but he was still only twenty-five years old. Zhilinsky had spent a lifetime in uniform. Rennenkampf and Samsonov had commanded men before the Crown Prince was old enough to shave.
What clever plan could a young prince possibly devise that half a million Russians could not simply overwhelm?
Tomorrow would be the twenty-seventh of July. Oskar's twenty-sixth birthday.
Zhilinsky found the coincidence delightful.
By the time the next sun went down, Russian armies would already be advancing into East Prussia. Perhaps within days Königsberg would be threatened. Perhaps, if fortune proved especially generous, the Iron Prince himself would be brought before Zhilinsky under guard.
The thought produced an almost boyish pleasure.
Imagine the telegram to Saint Petersburg.
PRINCE OSKAR CAPTURED.
The Tsar would remember the man who had delivered such a prize. Decorations, promotion, estates, prestige—perhaps a place in history beside the great commanders of Russia.
Zhilinsky allowed himself another slow drink.
He did not think particularly hard about how many Russian soldiers might die producing that telegram. There would always be more soldiers. Russia possessed millions of men, and more trains were already bringing them west.
Victory was what history remembered.
Outside, another aircraft engine coughed, sputtered and finally caught, its propeller blurring as the machine began to tremble against the summer morning.
Zhilinsky smiled into his glass.
Everything appeared ready.
What neither he nor his pilots understood was how deceptive East Prussia could be.
From the air, East Prussia appeared peaceful enough: broad rye and potato fields broken by pasture, lakes, villages and long belts of dark woodland. Its soil had never been Germany's richest, yet years of drainage, fertilizers, machinery and improved breeding had made the province increasingly productive. Cattle grazed the richer river meadows, the great horse-breeding estates remained among the finest in Germany, and timber, grain and livestock moved steadily toward Königsberg and Memel.
Yet that same beauty concealed much of the Black Legion's strength.
Artillery, armour, trucks and ammunition had been dispersed beneath trees, hidden inside barns and farm buildings, tucked among villages or covered beneath camouflage netting and branches. Entire concentrations of men and machines could disappear into woods and folds in the countryside that Russian observers, flying high above in an age only beginning to understand aerial reconnaissance and concealment, scarcely knew how to search properly.
The Russians had looked down upon East Prussia and seen remarkably little.
Zhilinsky had mistaken that for emptiness.
Tomorrow, he intended to march more than half a million men into it.