The castle hall had fallen quiet as midnight drew near.
Candlelight trembled along the great dining table, throwing slow-moving shadows across dark timber and ancient stone. Beyond the tall windows, night had long since swallowed Soldau, while somewhere far to the south a vast bank of thunderclouds was moving steadily north across the borderlands. Every few minutes lightning flickered along the distant horizon, still too far away for its thunder to reach the castle clearly, yet close enough to promise the storm that was coming.
Oskar sat alone at the head of the table in a great throne-like chair, one of the few pieces of furniture in the old castle broad enough to accommodate him. His skull-faced helmet rested within reach beside the remains of his meal, its hollow eye sockets staring blankly into the candlelight, while the enormous two-handed sword leaned against the table beside him. Even supported there, its weight made the old wood complain softly whenever Oskar shifted. Most of the castle had gone to sleep hours ago. Only he remained awake with his food and his thoughts.
Before him, the roasted pig brought earlier had been reduced to a broken carcass beneath the steady work of his knife. Nearly everything else had vanished as well, swallowed down with milk and apple juice until, by this late hour, Oskar had consumed enough to feed an entire infantry squad. Yet it scarcely seemed to matter. Rage burned so fiercely within him that everything entering his body appeared to disappear almost as quickly as it entered.
And tonight, more than ever, he could feel it.
There was a strange anticipation inside him that he could not entirely separate from hunger. The Russians were close. By morning, perhaps even before it, men would begin killing one another across the fields south of Soldau. Oskar had known battle before. He had survived bullets, explosions and the chaos of war in another life, but this felt different. Something vast waited beyond the darkness, something that seemed to have been approaching him for eleven years and had finally drawn near enough that he could almost feel its weight.
His heart beat faster whenever he thought about it. He had never wanted this. War had never been his goal, yet despite everything he had done, here he was again, waiting for men to come so that he could kill them before they killed his own. But if this truly was what mankind insisted upon, then perhaps there was no longer any point pretending otherwise. Let the slaughter begin.
For one fleeting instant his gaze moved toward the sword beside him, and some furious part of him wanted to take it, find Shadowmane and ride south into the darkness immediately.
He stopped himself.
It was not time.
But the thought remained, heating his blood until his heart hammered harder against his ribs.
Oskar swallowed another mouthful almost angrily and felt the food descend into him only to seem to vanish at once, as though his stomach had become the mouth of some hidden furnace. Heat spread through his abdomen and chest with unnatural speed. What should have taken hours to digest seemed, in sensation at least, to become fuel almost immediately, warmth rushing through him until the great muscles beneath his armour tightened in answer.
The black plates shifted faintly around his body. They had been made specifically for him, fitted around proportions no ordinary armourer would ever have expected to encounter, yet tonight even they seemed strangely close. His shoulders pressed against the steel whenever he moved, muscles rolling beneath the articulated plates of his arms and chest with enough force to pull the fastenings taut. Every deep breath expanded him against the armour surrounding him, as though some pressure inside his body were slowly pushing outward.
His pulse grew heavier until Oskar finally lowered the knife and simply listened to his own heart. As he concentrated upon that rhythm, some of the rage within him began to subside beneath a different sensation, one at once familiar and impossible.
The mortal heart was there where it had always been, buried behind ribs and muscle, contracting powerfully within his chest. He could almost imagine the blood rushing outward with each beat, travelling through arteries and veins until its warmth reached the tips of his fingers.
Yet beneath that heartbeat, or perhaps somehow within it, another pulse answered.
Oskar closed his eyes.
He had felt it before. Throughout the years there had been moments when something impossible seemed to move inside him, usually during brutal exertion, after injury, beneath overwhelming emotion or within those strange dreams that sometimes followed exhaustion. Whenever he tried to examine the feeling directly, however, it had always slipped away before he could understand it.
But ever since Sarajevo it had become stronger, and tonight it was clearer than ever.
Within his heart of flesh there seemed to beat another heart, one made not of muscle but of light.
The two moved together so perfectly that Oskar could no longer tell where one rhythm ended and the other began. His physical heart contracted and drove blood surging through his body; the other answered with its own silent pulse, sending something alongside that blood through pathways no anatomy book had ever described. It felt as though another circulatory system lay invisibly over the first, veins of light running beside veins of flesh.
The strongest presence within that hidden heart was red. It overflowed everything else like living fire, violent and restless, surging outward with every beat. Oskar felt it pour into his shoulders and arms, his back and legs, into every great cord of muscle beneath the armour. Wherever the crimson passed, strength gathered behind it. His hands felt capable of closing around steel and deforming it. His limbs became heavy with restrained force, and even the nerves beneath his skin seemed sharpened by something impatient that wanted movement, resistance and impact.
There was anger within that red. Oskar could feel it feeding upon every bitter thought that still lived inside him, swelling whenever his mind returned to the war and everything that had brought him here. Yet beneath the crimson fire there was something steadier.
Gold.
It did not rage as the red did. The gold seemed heavier, quieter and almost permanent, flowing through the architecture of his body and sinking into bone, skin and sinew. Oskar felt it moving along his ribs and spine before descending through his arms and legs, leaving behind a sensation of solidity so profound that his skeleton seemed less like bone than some living framework being continually reinforced from within. His skin tightened. His joints settled. Old injuries ceased protesting beneath the immense weight of his armour, and his whole body felt harder, denser, more difficult to break.
As he followed that sensation, however, Oskar became aware that the gold was not working alone. Within it moved tiny traces of something purer, faint white sparks drifting through damaged flesh like snow settling across broken ground. Wherever that pale light touched an old wound, pain softened. Scar tissue seemed to loosen. Strained muscles and joints grew quieter. There was even the peculiar impression that it was doing more than merely healing injury, that it was searching through him for whatever it considered imperfect and slowly correcting it. The white restored; the gold strengthened what remained.
The two seemed almost to work together.
Oskar followed the white deeper.
At the very centre of the heart of light, beneath the violent red and the dense gold surrounding it, he found its source. There rested a small core of pure white radiance, the faintest of the three colours and yet somehow the most compelling. It possessed none of the aggression of the crimson and none of the weight of gold. It was gentle and strangely warm, so pure that Oskar could think of nothing except light falling across untouched snow.
Something about it calmed him.
The fury that had been boiling through him only moments before did not disappear, but it seemed to retreat from the centre of his thoughts. His breathing slowed. The white light travelled upward from his chest, flowing along his spine and through his nerves until it reached his skull. The pressure behind his eyes eased. Exhaustion receded. Thoughts that had been colliding beneath anger seemed to settle into clearer lines.
Then the sensation gathered somewhere deep within his mind.
Oskar felt something open.
With his eyes still closed, the darkness around him no longer seemed entirely empty. He could not see the dining hall as he would with ordinary sight, yet he became faintly aware of its shape. The table, walls and chairs existed as dark impressions around him, while beyond the doors came even fainter suggestions of movement. Servants and guards elsewhere within the castle appeared only as vague human shadows, indistinct and almost ghostlike, present without faces or detail.
Oskar opened his eyes briefly, and the ordinary world returned at once.
And when he closed them again, the sensation remained.
His awareness drifted farther, across the stone walls and rain-dark courtyard toward the castle stables. There were many horses within them, overlapping in his strange perception as dark, shapeless presences that he could barely distinguish from one another.
Except for one.
A thin white thread seemed to stretch outward from the light within Oskar's heart, impossibly fine yet distinct enough for him to follow. It crossed the distance between them and disappeared into one particular presence among the horses.
Shadowmane.
The name came to him before he consciously formed it.
Suddenly the stallion became clearer than everything surrounding him. Oskar did not truly see him; the impression remained hazy, as though viewed through dark water, yet he could distinguish the enormous animal beneath his armour, his great neck lowered toward feed as he ate steadily within the stable. Shadowmane appeared utterly untroubled by the barding fitted around him, gathering strength beneath his own armour just as Oskar had been doing beneath his.
The thought almost made Oskar smile.
Of course he was eating, and preparing. Somehow it felt as though the horse understood the same thing he did: that before long something enormous would be demanded of them both.
Then Oskar noticed the light within Shadowmane.
It was faint compared with the inferno inside himself, but unmistakably familiar. A dim crimson glow existed somewhere within the stallion's immense frame, threaded with traces of something deeper that Oskar could not yet distinguish. Shadowmane had always been an exceptional horse, large and powerful from the beginning, yet the years had changed him. He had continued growing, becoming broader through the chest, heavier with muscle, stronger and more enduring than any ordinary animal had reason to become. Sarajevo should have broken him, yet the stallion had survived bullets, blood loss and exhaustion with the same stubborn impossibility that seemed to follow Oskar himself.
Perhaps this was why.
Or perhaps Oskar was merely inventing answers because he desperately wanted one. He did not know.
Then Shadowmane stopped eating.
The stallion raised his head and slowly turned toward the castle. Toward him.
Oskar's eyes opened.
The dining hall snapped back into ordinary existence around him.
For several seconds he simply stared toward the wall separating him from the courtyard.
"What...?"
Had Shadowmane felt him?
Oskar closed his eyes again and reached for the strange perception, but this time something else became apparent before he could find the stallion. The white thread leading toward Shadowmane was not alone. More extended outward from whatever burned within Oskar's heart, some stronger than others, many so faint that they disappeared beyond anything he could follow.
He could not see where most of them ended.
Yet he suspected.
The people he loved.
His children.
Those he held closest.
Somewhere far beyond Soldau and the reach of his ordinary senses, faint echoes seemed to answer the light inside him.
Oskar opened his eyes once more.
"What are you?" he murmured.
Yet nothing answered. The candles simply continued burning while the clock crept steadily toward midnight.
Then lightning split the southern horizon.
For one brilliant instant the dining hall became white. The death's-head helmet gleamed upon the table beside him, its empty sockets turned toward Oskar, while the edge of the enormous sword caught the flash and shone like a strip of frozen fire.
Thunder followed, much closer now, as the first heavy drops struck the windows.
Oskar looked south.
Something inside him changed. At first it was only unease, faint enough that he might have dismissed it as anticipation. Then the sensation sharpened. His heart struck once, harder than before, and the crimson surrounding that hidden core flared in answer.
Danger.
He could not see men. He could not count them or know precisely where they were. There was only a vague pressure at the edge of that impossible awareness, something dark and hostile moving beneath the storm from the south.
Oskar remained very still.
He did not know how he knew, he simply did.
Something was coming.
Rain suddenly swept across Soldau in long slanting sheets as the storm rolled north over the town, swallowing the streets beyond the windows beneath darkness and water. Oskar's gaze moved from the black glass to the skull-faced helmet waiting beside his hand, then toward the great sword leaning against the table.
The feeling would not leave him.
And while Oskar sat beneath candlelight within the old Teutonic castle, listening to a warning he could neither explain nor ignore, his instinct was already proving correct.
Beyond Soldau, beneath the gathering storm, Russian riders were moving through the forests that flanked the town. Cossack patrols had pushed ahead of Samsonov's main columns during the night, probing west and east of the German positions in search of some road, forest track or forgotten patch of ground through which the defensive belt might be bypassed. Yet wherever they went they encountered much the same thing.
The woods eventually opened onto long strips of deliberately cleared ground, broad wounds cut through the forest and extending away into the darkness on either side. Beyond those openings, barely visible through the rain, stood wire, trenches and the darker shapes of scattered German strongpoints.
The line was there, and it was wider than they had hoped.
Most of the patrols needed to see no more. Russian aircraft had already reported German fieldworks along the frontier, and the men on the ground could now confirm what the pilots had seen from above. There was no obvious road around Soldau, no convenient gap through which cavalry might simply slip behind the defenders. The checkerboard of German positions continued through the woods and across the surrounding country, each strongpoint separated from the next but placed closely enough that no passage looked inviting once a man stood before it in the darkness.
Those patrols turned back with what they had learned.
Others were less cautious.
One such group waited beneath the trees west of Soldau, several dozen Cossacks gathered silently around their horses while rain whispered through the leaves above them. Their oldest scout crouched near the forest edge and studied the German position across the clearing. He had already seen enough to understand the danger, but there was value in knowing more. If the wire could be crossed quietly, if the trench beyond it proved thinly held, perhaps a path could be opened before dawn and the rest of the patrol brought through behind them.
He chose three younger men.
They were quick, eager and still possessed enough confidence to believe that darkness favoured the brave. Leaving their horses behind, the three slipped from the trees and began moving across the clearing on foot, keeping low beneath the rain and placing each step carefully so that boots would not scrape stone or snap some hidden branch. The German position lay perhaps two hundred metres ahead, little more than a black irregularity beneath the opposite tree line whenever lightning briefly illuminated the countryside.
As they advanced, the scouts began noticing strange markers driven into the ground. Rough wooden stakes rose from the wet grass at irregular intervals, each carrying a small board upon which someone had painted a crude black skull. The men paused at the first one, exchanged a few uncertain words, then continued. Perhaps the Germans were marking some boundary or military zone. Perhaps the skull was merely another expression of the death's-head imagery they seemed so fond of.
None of them understood that they were being warned.
Their caution nevertheless saved them more than once. Because they watched the ground so carefully for anything that might betray their approach, their boots happened to fall between things they never recognized. One man stepped across a thin strand half-hidden among the grass. Another planted his foot scarcely a hand's width from a small piece of metal protruding from the mud. The third passed directly beside a patch of disturbed earth without ever noticing it.
They moved on, unaware that chance had already carried them within centimetres of death.
The German trenches remained silent.
That silence encouraged them.
By the time they reached the northern edge of the clearing, the wire had emerged fully from the darkness: several tangled coils of barbed steel stretched between posts before the trench beyond. The scouts withdrew only far enough to gather several heavy branches and short lengths of fallen timber from the forest edge. One of them removed his soaked outer coat and draped it over the worst of the barbs while the others laid branches across the obstacle. Then, carefully distributing their weight, they climbed.
The wire bent and creaked faintly beneath them, but the storm swallowed the sound.
The first Cossack reached the other side and lowered himself into the trench. His boots landed in cold rainwater several centimetres deep. The second followed, then the third, and only once all three were inside did they realize how little room they possessed. It was not a broad earthwork but a narrow fighting trench reinforced with timber, tight enough that they were forced almost into single file as they moved forward.
They had barely rounded the first bend when a figure shifted beneath a small timber shelter built into the trench wall.
A German sentry turned toward the noise. And for a fraction of a second, German and Russian simply stared at one another.
The German had barely begun to say, "What the—" when the Cossack threw himself forward. They collided so violently in the narrow trench that both struck the walls, boots slipping through mud and accumulated rainwater as the German was driven backward. He swung instinctively, catching the Russian across the face, but there was scarcely enough room between the timber-reinforced walls to put much force behind the blow. The Cossack answered by wrenching the knife from his belt and driving it downward toward the German's chest.
The blade struck armour with a hard metallic crack. Instead of entering flesh, the point skidded across the Black Legion soldier's chest plate, and the force of the failed thrust carried the Cossack's arm downward. The knife plunged deep into his own thigh.
He screamed.
The German struck him again and twisted beneath his weight, one hand already clawing for the pistol at his hip. Pain and panic overwhelmed whatever caution the Cossack had possessed moments earlier. He ripped the blade free of his leg, blood immediately soaking his trousers, and forced the German down with his other arm before stabbing again.
This time the knife found the opening above the armour.
It entered beneath the collar and punched deep into the German's neck.
The sentry convulsed. Blood spilled from his mouth and poured across the black plate beneath him, but even as his strength began to fail, his fingers closed around the grip of his pistol. He dragged it free, forced the muzzle upward against the Cossack's ribs and fired three times in rapid succession.
The confined trench magnified the reports into thunder.
The first impact jerked the Russian sideways. The second folded him lower. The third struck close enough to the heart that whatever strength remained in him vanished almost immediately, and he collapsed heavily across the German he had just killed.
Behind the dead men, the two surviving Cossacks had scarcely moved. There had been no room for them to help. Their comrade and the German sentry had filled the narrow trench completely as they fought, thrashing between the timbered walls until both were dead almost within arm's reach. Now their friend lay sprawled across the German, his body pinning the sentry beneath him while blood from both men ran together through the rainwater at the bottom of the trench. The German gave one final twitch and tried weakly to raise his pistol toward them, but the weapon slipped from his fingers before he could aim. His body stiffened for a moment, then went slack.
The two Cossacks stared at the bodies in stunned silence, rifles still hanging across their backs. Everything had happened so quickly that neither had quite understood it until it was already over. Only seconds earlier their comrade had been alive beside them; now he and the German were tangled together in the mud like butchered meat, their blood spreading slowly beneath the rain.
Yet the shots that had killed them had carried far beyond the trench.
Out in the darkness, other Cossack patrols were still moving across the cleared ground toward the German positions. Some had heard the pistol fire and stopped immediately. Others, uncertain whether the noise meant discovery or merely some brief struggle farther along the line, began hurriedly withdrawing before the alarm could spread.
One man turned too quickly.
His boot caught a thin wire hidden among the wet grass.
There was a small metallic snap beneath him, followed almost immediately by a dull pop from the earth. He looked down in confusion just as a dark object sprang upward from the mud and rose to roughly the height of his chest.
"What the hell—?"
The mine exploded.
Steel fragments tore through his face, throat and chest and threw him backward into the grass. He landed screaming, hands clawing blindly at himself as blood poured between his fingers. The men nearest him froze, horrified by an enemy they could neither see nor understand.
"Blyat! Mother of God!"
One of them rushed forward instinctively to drag him away, but he had taken only a few steps when another wire snapped beneath the grass. A second mine jumped from the ground and burst through the rain, fragments ripping into his arm and stomach before throwing him sideways beside the first wounded man.
The shouts that followed carried through the woods.
Farther along the clearing another patrol heard them, panicked and began retreating toward the trees. One Cossack planted his boot upon something concealed beneath the softened earth, and the ground erupted beneath him. His lower leg vanished in the blast as he was thrown sideways, while two men beside him were knocked into the mud by fragments and flying soil.
Suddenly nobody knew where it was safe to step.
The field that had appeared empty only moments earlier now seemed alive with hidden death. Men stopped where they stood, afraid even to lift a boot, while others ran for the trees and risked awakening whatever else the Germans had buried beneath the grass. Cries rose from the wounded, and from the forest edge came confused orders to withdraw, advance, help them, stay still.
Back inside the trench, the two surviving infiltrators finally pulled their rifles from their shoulders.
Movement appeared around the next bend.
Another Black Legion soldier emerged from a recessed shelter with an M1 carbine already in his hands. His eyes went first to the dead sentry beneath the Cossack's body, then immediately to the two Russians standing beyond them.
"Enemy in the trench!"
Both Cossacks fired.
The German threw himself backward behind the bend as bullets struck timber and earth around him, sending splinters across the trench. One round passed close enough to tear at his sleeve, but neither found flesh.
"Fucking Russians!" he shouted from behind cover.
The Cossacks worked their rifles frantically, trying to chamber fresh rounds before he could return. The narrow trench made every movement awkward, and the bodies at their feet left them scarcely any room to shift position. One had only just forced his bolt forward when the German leaned back around the corner.
The M1 cracked rapidly in his hands.
The first round struck one Cossack high in the chest and hurled him backward against the trench wall. A second hit before he had even begun to fall. His companion tried to bring his rifle into line, but another bullet entered beneath his mouth and snapped his head violently backward. The German continued firing, sending several more rounds into both men before their bodies collapsed together into the mud.
For a moment he kept the carbine trained upon them. Then his eyes dropped toward the sentry.
The man's throat had been opened beneath the collar, blood still running across his black chest plate and into the water below.
"Man down!" the soldier shouted. "Medic! Medic here!"
Whatever shock or anger might have followed was swallowed almost at once by the larger alarm spreading through the night. The pistol shots had carried far beyond the trench, followed by rifle fire and the sudden explosions from the field, and with them went the secrecy upon which every Russian patrol depended.
Red flares climbed into the storm and burned beneath the low clouds, washing the falling rain in a wavering crimson glow. For a few precious seconds the ground before the German positions became visible. Cossacks stood frozen among the mines, others crouched beside wounded comrades, while farther back men were already turning toward the southern woods.
"Field! One hundred fifty metres! Movement on the left!"
"Fire!"
The machine guns opened first. Long bursts swept across the clearing, throwing wet earth into the air and striking men caught in the open. A Cossack who had reached a wounded companion and was dragging him backward by the collar suddenly folded across him as rounds struck his body. Another managed only a few running steps before he spun and disappeared into the grass.
The Black Legion infantry joined almost immediately, their carbines cracking rapidly along the trench line. Muzzle flashes appeared and vanished beneath the rain as men fired at whatever the flares or lightning revealed. The Cossacks threw themselves flat or scrambled toward shallow hollows, and from the southern tree line their companions began firing back with their bolt-action rifles. Russian muzzle flashes flickered between trunks while bullets snapped over the German parapets. One round struck a Black Legion soldier hard against the shoulder plate and knocked him sideways; another glanced from a helmet with a sharp metallic crack, leaving the man beneath it stunned but alive.
For several moments neither side could properly see the other. Darkness, smoke and rain reduced the battlefield to silhouettes and flashes, and men fired toward movement or the brief orange sparks of enemy rifles. The Germans possessed the advantage in volume of fire, however, and once their machine guns shifted toward the woodland the difference became brutal. Bursts tore through branches and undergrowth while grenadiers sent explosive rounds arcing toward the tree line. Each detonation briefly illuminated trunks, running men and terrified horses farther back beneath the trees.
Mortars joined soon afterward. Their launches were almost lost beneath the thunder and gunfire, but the bombs bursting along the forest edge were unmistakable. Mud, roots and broken branches flew upward as the scattered Cossack patrols were driven deeper into cover. Some men still tried to reach comrades lying in the field, crawling forward through the rain or following the paths they remembered taking earlier. Others attempting to retreat stumbled into the mines instead. A hidden charge erupted beneath one runner and threw him into the mud; farther along, another bounding mine leapt from the ground and burst among several men trying to help a wounded companion.
For a few violent minutes the storm and the gunfight seemed to merge into one. Thunder rolled above Soldau while machine guns hammered beneath it. Lightning turned the clearing white for an instant, then darkness returned, broken again by flares, muzzle flashes and explosions. Russians fired from the trees, Germans answered from the trenches, and men on both sides shot largely at shadows.
The clash that had begun with three young Cossacks quietly crossing the wire had awakened the entire sector.
Field telephones rang in German dugouts and backpack wireless sets crackled to life. Reports moved from one strongpoint to the next and back toward company and battalion headquarters, while neighbouring positions roused their men and prepared for the possibility that the scattered shooting was only the beginning of something larger. Within minutes the Black Legion was fully alert.
The Cossacks, meanwhile, had already learned what they had come to discover. The German line was neither sleeping nor easily penetrated. They had found wire, hidden mines, prepared trenches and defenders equipped with weapons unlike anything ordinarily encountered on a European battlefield. Remaining in the open could achieve nothing except more casualties.
The withdrawal began soon afterward. Men crawled back through the wet grass or retraced their own tracks as carefully as they could, suddenly aware that a careless step might kill them. Those already within the forest covered the retreat with intermittent rifle fire, while others risked themselves to drag wounded comrades toward the trees. Some succeeded. Others had to leave men behind where the mines and German fire made reaching them impossible.
The fighting had lasted scarcely ten minutes.
Once the last visible movement disappeared beneath the southern trees, the Germans did not pursue. Orders instead travelled along the trenches to cease fire. Machine guns fell silent one after another, followed by the Carbines, grenade launchers and finally the mortars. Within moments the night belonged to the rain again.
It fell upon the wire, upon scattered cartridge cases and upon the bodies lying between the forest and the German trenches. Somewhere out in the darkness a wounded Russian still called weakly for help, but no one dared enter the minefield to reach him.
The first blood of the East Prussian campaign had been drawn.
Compared with what morning would bring, it was almost nothing.
The storm weakened during the final hours before dawn. The hard downpour softened into a cold, persistent rain, and gaps slowly opened among the clouds as the darkness thinned toward grey. The countryside beneath them had already been transformed. Fields were black and slick with water, shallow depressions had filled with mud, and roads that had been firm beneath the summer sun now clung greedily to boots, hooves and wheels.
By first light, the men of I Corps were already awake and preparing. The night's fighting had removed any hope of further sleep. Machine guns were checked, ammunition brought forward and mortar crews inspected their weapons while signalmen remained at their radios and field telephones. Officers moved quietly through the trenches, but little explanation was necessary. The Russians had tested the line during the night, and everyone understood that something much larger would follow.
Farther south, Samsonov's army was waking as well. Infantrymen rose stiffly from fields, roadsides and woodland camps, some having slept beneath cloaks or beside wagons, others directly upon the wet earth. Bugles sounded through the damp morning while officers and NCOs restored order to the formations. Rifles were collected, packs returned to aching shoulders and great marching columns once more began moving north.
As they approached the German defensive belt, those columns broke apart into their assigned formations. Regiments turned toward separate sectors, battalions left the roads and companies spread through the fields and forests according to the ground before them. Across a southern front stretching nearly a hundred kilometres, more than two hundred thousand soldiers of Samsonov's Second Army were beginning to take their places.
Around Soldau itself, nearly sixty thousand infantry were assembling opposite the German positions.
Behind the dark line of trees, men checked ammunition and worked the bolts of their Mosin rifles while long bayonets were fixed with cold metallic clicks. Officers moved among them with maps and watches in hand, looking north toward the German positions obscured by mist, trees and the lingering rain.
The artillery was coming forward behind them. Teams of horses dragged three-inch field guns along roads churned by the storm, wooden wheels sinking into the softened ground while gunners walked beside the teams and pushed whenever mud threatened to halt them completely. Some batteries unlimbered farther back in concealed positions, while others were brought toward clearings and forest edges from which observers could better direct their fire onto the German strongpoints ahead.
The movement was slow and imperfect. Roads clogged, wagons became stuck and woodland forced units to separate and reform, but little by little the batteries found their places.
Then the pale morning spread across the soaked countryside, and the Russian guns began to speak.
One battery fired, then another farther along the front. Within minutes the separate reports had merged into a rolling concussion. Shells screamed over the fields and struck the German defensive belt, throwing black earth, timber and twisted lengths of wire into the air around trenches and strongpoints. The bombardment was not yet the endless hurricane of artillery that later years of war would make familiar. Samsonov's army relied heavily upon its light three-inch field pieces, and ammunition could not simply be expended without thought. Instead the batteries concentrated upon selected sectors where the infantry was expected to attack, pounding visible trenches and suspected strongpoints in preparation for the advance.
Another salvo crossed the fields.
One shell travelled too far.
Whether through an imperfect range estimate, some variation in the charge or simple chance, the projectile passed above the forward German positions and continued toward Soldau. It crossed the rooftops of the town before striking the outer wall of the old Teutonic castle.
The explosion shook the ancient structure from foundation to rafters. Stone and mortar burst outward into the courtyard, windows shattered along nearby corridors and dust sifted from heavy beams that had survived centuries of quieter history.
Deep inside the castle, Oskar stirred.
He had eventually left the dining hall during the last hours of darkness, although he had never gone to bed. Instead he had entered one of the castle's old audience chambers, where a massive high-backed chair of dark carved wood stood beneath faded banners and heavy timber beams. Perhaps some Teutonic commander or lord had once occupied it; whatever name had belonged to him had long since been forgotten.
For most men the chair would have appeared almost throne-like. For Oskar, it possessed the simpler advantage of being large enough.
He had settled into it without removing his armour. Black steel still enclosed him from shoulders to boots, swallowing most of the weak candlelight that remained within the chamber. His skull-faced helmet rested across his lap, while the enormous two-handed sword leaned beside the chair with its point against the stone floor.
At some point during the final hours before dawn, exhaustion had overcome him.
Oskar had fallen asleep sitting upright, his head resting faintly against the carved wood behind him. In the dimness he looked less like a sleeping prince than some enormous armoured effigy left behind by a forgotten knightly order, waiting beneath ancient banners for the moment when it would be called back to life.
Another explosion sounded somewhere outside, and dust drifted from the ceiling.
The castle was fully awake now. Men shouted in the courtyard, boots hammered through the corridors and orders carried through Soldau as soldiers hurried toward positions already under fire.
Oskar remained still for several seconds longer.
Then his eyes opened.
Pale blue caught the dying candlelight as he listened to the artillery rolling across the fields beyond the castle walls. His gaze lowered toward the skull mask resting upon his lap, then toward the great sword beside him.
He said nothing.
It was the morning of 27 July 1914.
Oskar of Prussia was twenty-six years old.
And this was how his birthday began.