General of Infantry Leonid Artamonov stood close enough to the front to smell the powder.
At fifty-five, and only recently elevated to the full rank of General of Infantry, he already looked like a man who had spent most of his life beneath a military cap. His hair had retreated from a high forehead, leaving the broad grey moustache beneath his nose as the most striking feature of an otherwise stern, weathered face. Rain darkened the shoulders of his grey-green field coat, but his posture remained stiff and erect as he stood among the trees with binoculars pressed to his eyes. More than thirty years of service, travel and war had carried him across the Empire and far beyond it, and very little about the prospect of another battlefield seemed capable of unsettling him now.
The morning over Soldau was grey and wet. The storm of the night had already passed northward, but it had left the countryside drowned behind it. Mist lay across the fields in long pale banks, mingling with artillery smoke and the first weak warmth of dawn, while every few seconds another Russian field gun spoke from somewhere behind the southern tree line. The report rolled through the woods before the shell screamed away across the open ground toward the German positions.
Artamonov watched through his binoculars with quiet satisfaction. There was something magnificent about artillery when it was properly handled. Three-inch guns concealed among bushes and broken ground near the forest edge fired almost directly across the fields, their crews able to glimpse portions of the German defensive belt through openings between the trees. Farther back, beyond the woodland, other batteries had unlimbered in small farm fields and patches of open country where there was room enough for the guns, limbers and teams. Those pieces fired indirectly over the canopy, their shells crossing overhead in uneven succession before falling around Soldau.
The bombardment was not overwhelming, nor had Artamonov expected it to be. The terrain south of the town simply did not permit every available gun to be crowded onto the same frontage, and artillery that could neither obtain a useful line of fire nor be supplied through the forest was of little value no matter how many pieces remained elsewhere. What mattered was concentration upon the ground he intended to take, and several dozen guns firing from positions suited to them were more than sufficient for the opening blow.
Shells crashed into the German works. Black soil rose in heavy fountains, sections of barbed wire twisted and collapsed beneath explosions, and every so often a round struck short among the approaches and detonated something hidden beneath the earth. A sharper secondary blast followed as another buried mine disappeared beneath a burst of mud. Other shells travelled farther, passing over the forward trenches and vanishing among the roofs of Soldau, where smoke had already begun to rise above the town.
Beyond even that stood the dark mass of the old Teutonic castle.
Artamonov had already seen at least one shell strike it.
Good.
Let the Germans understand that there was nowhere behind those trenches where they were entirely beyond Russian reach.
His staff officers stood among the trees a short distance behind him, watching the bombardment with considerably less visible satisfaction. More than one had suggested that the corps commander might observe just as effectively from farther back, where a stray German shell would be less likely to remove him from the war before breakfast. Artamonov had dismissed them. He had spent too many years watching officers command battles through maps, reports and telephones until they no longer understood what the men at the front could actually see.
He preferred to look upon the battlefield himself. Here he could smell the powder and wet earth, hear the guns as they fired and judge the enemy line through his own glasses rather than through somebody else's description. Besides, if Russian infantrymen were expected to cross those fields beneath German fire, their general could endure the inconvenience of standing beneath a tree while they did it.
Artamonov finally lowered the binoculars and glanced behind him. Beneath the dripping forest canopy, the first infantry was waiting. Men crouched among roots, brush and low branches in the grey-green field dress of the Imperial Army, their loose tunics darkened by the night's rain and their trousers tucked into high black boots already caked with mud. Soft peaked caps had been pulled low over wet hair and tired eyes, while long Mosin rifles rested across knees or leaned against shoulders, their leather slings and ammunition pouches slick with moisture. Here and there a greatcoat remained wrapped around a man's shoulders against the chill.
The morning had left them miserable. Men breathed into their hands for warmth, coughed quietly beneath the trees or tried to suppress sneezes that seemed absurdly loud between the artillery reports. One soldier rubbed at his nose with the back of a muddy sleeve while another repeatedly checked the bolt of his rifle despite having done so several times already. Officers and NCOs moved among the waiting companies in low voices, passing final instructions and making certain ammunition and equipment were ready. Some soldiers stared silently toward the pale mist beyond the tree line. Others looked down at clasped hands, crossed themselves or murmured prayers beneath their breath.
Artamonov could see the fear among them, and he understood it perfectly well. Any man who claimed never to know fear was either a liar or a fool. Artamonov himself had known it often enough during a lifetime of soldiering. What mattered was what a man did after fear entered him. A Russian soldier might tremble, pray, curse or empty his bowels before an attack if he had to, but when the order came he was expected to rise and advance. Fear was human; allowing fear to master one's duty was something else entirely. An officer or soldier who abandoned his post or refused an order could expect neither sympathy nor indulgence from Leonid Artamonov.
His gaze passed slowly over the waiting men. Some were veterans. Others were young enough that the rifles across their knees still seemed slightly too large for them. Once they entered the field, however, the distinction would matter less than discipline. They did not need to be fearless. They needed only to obey when the moment came.
The bombardment had been running for perhaps two minutes.
That was enough.
Artamonov raised one gloved hand, and the officer beside him immediately straightened. For another moment the general watched the shells falling beyond the trees, measuring their rhythm almost instinctively, before extending his arm toward Soldau.
"First wave. Forward."
A whistle shrieked through the wet forest, and the waiting infantry began to move.
The first Russian skirmishers emerged from the woods in loose order, not as a dense wall of men but in widely spaced chains. One group moved out, then another dozens of metres away, followed by another farther along the frontage until grey-green figures seemed to materialise everywhere through the morning mist. They advanced cautiously across the wet grass and churned earth, rifles held ready as they moved toward Soldau.
Farther east and west, the attack developed differently. There the countryside was narrower and more broken, and the small scattered German strongpoints lay among woods, forest roads and clearings rather than behind the broad open fields immediately south of the town. Russian skirmishers had scarcely moved beyond the shelter of their own trees before German fire began cracking through the branches.
The Russians answered immediately. Mosin rifles snapped from behind trunks, rocks and shallow folds in the ground while several of the heavy Maxims dragged forward during the night opened from concealed positions near the forest edge. The guns were cumbersome beasts, awkward to move even before their ammunition was considered, but once emplaced they worked perfectly well. Their crews poured fire toward whatever portions of the German positions they could identify, trying to keep enemy heads down while the riflemen advanced.
The movement on the flanks became a series of short, violent dashes. One group fired while another ran forward from tree to tree. Men threw themselves behind rocks, fallen trunks and whatever folds of ground offered cover, waited for the German fire to slacken and then moved again. Those who reached the edge of the open clearings beyond the woods stopped there, knowing perfectly well what waited between them and the German strongpoints. The night patrols had already reported mines, and the first German bursts across those narrow openings made any attempt to simply run the whole distance suicidal.
So the skirmishers worked their way forward piece by piece. Rifles fired from the trees while Maxims hammered from farther back. A few men dashed into the open and reached another patch of cover. Others were hit before they made it. Somewhere to the west an explosion rose from the grass as a mine was disturbed, followed almost immediately by shouting and another burst of German fire.
Artamonov could hear the flank battles spreading on either side of him. Individual rifle shots were becoming rolling exchanges through the woodland, punctuated by the heavier hammering of machine guns and occasional explosions among the trees.
The centre remained strangely quiet.
That pleased him.
Two roads approached Soldau from the south, one running close to the railway and another curving toward the town from farther west, but the sheer number of men gathering behind the attack made the roads almost irrelevant to the infantry. Russian skirmishers spilled from the tree line between them and spread across the open ground wherever the terrain allowed.
They moved in scattered chains, stopping occasionally to kneel and fire whenever someone imagined movement in the German works. A rifle cracked, the bolt was worked, and the man moved again. Others advanced without firing at all, keeping their heads low as they crossed the rain-soaked field.
Through his binoculars Artamonov could distinguish very little of the defenders, which he took as another favourable sign. Mist obscured much of the German line, but every so often he caught the silhouette of a helmet or some darker shape moving behind the forward trench. Otherwise the positions appeared almost deserted. Russian shells continued bursting around them while the skirmishers advanced into the open with surprisingly little resistance.
Perhaps the Germans were pinned by the bombardment. Perhaps they were frightened. Either explanation suited him.
Then one of the skirmishers vanished.
A flash burst low against the earth, followed by a fountain of wet soil that swallowed the man almost completely. Several soldiers nearby threw themselves down instinctively, and when the mud fell back only one figure remained sprawled where he had been standing. Another explosion followed farther east, though this one was different. Something seemed to leap upward from beneath the grass before bursting above the ground, and several men collapsed around it at once.
"Mines," one of Artamonov's officers murmured.
"I have eyes," Artamonov replied without lowering the binoculars.
The Cossacks had already warned them during the night. Artamonov had therefore ordered part of the bombardment scattered across the approaches as well as the trenches, and several Russian shells had indeed detonated hidden charges beneath the fields. He had never imagined artillery alone would clear the entire approach. That would have required far more time and ammunition than he intended to spend before the infantry moved.
Another mine burst among the skirmishers. One man disappeared beneath mud and smoke while two others went down beside him.
A younger officer near Artamonov shifted uneasily, glancing from the wounded men crawling in the field to the general as though expecting some change of order.
Artamonov noticed.
"Be at ease, Captain."
The officer straightened. "General?"
"The attack is proceeding." Artamonov lowered the glasses enough to look at him. "Do not lose your head because the Germans have hidden explosives beneath a field. See that the second wave is ready and concern yourself with your duty."
"Yes, General."
"Good."
The captain moved away, visibly grateful to have something immediate to occupy him, while Artamonov returned the binoculars to his eyes.
The skirmishers had already begun advancing again. They spread more widely wherever possible, following the tracks of men ahead or passing around those who had fallen. The mines were troublesome and would undoubtedly become more troublesome if the Germans had laid them more densely nearer the wire, but they had not stopped the attack. A mine was ultimately only a machine. It possessed no courage, no judgment and no will of its own. Once buried, it could do nothing except wait until some unfortunate man disturbed it.
Russia possessed men.
A very great many of them.
Artamonov watched another section continue forward and felt his earlier satisfaction return. To an inexperienced observer, perhaps the scene would already have appeared senseless. Foreign correspondents and military critics were especially fond of sneering at the Russian attack. They saw grey-green infantry moving beneath enemy fire and imagined that Russian generals understood nothing beyond throwing peasants at an enemy until one side ran out of bodies.
Fools.
They mistook simplicity for stupidity.
There was a reason Russian attacks possessed weight. A man alone could become frightened, and ten men might hesitate together, but put hundreds into motion with officers among them and comrades advancing on either side and something else began to happen. Courage could pass between men as readily as fear. The forward chains found the enemy and exposed his obstacles. Rifles and machine guns pressed upon whatever positions revealed themselves. Artillery struck what could be identified. Then the supports advanced, adding strength where the first line weakened, while farther behind waited still more men for the moment when pressure became shock.
It was not madness. It was method.
The Russo-Japanese War had taught Russia dearly enough what modern fire could do, and the army had not forgotten. The old offensive spirit had survived, but it had been studied, corrected and hardened by experience. Artamonov had no intention of sending tens of thousands of men blindly across a field at once. He would reveal the German defence piece by piece, force it to fire, force it to expose itself and then increase the weight until something gave way.
The Germans trusted machinery.
Artamonov trusted men.
Another mine detonated farther across the field, dropping several figures around it. The survivors flattened themselves against the wet earth for a few moments, then one rose, another followed, and gradually the scattered chain began moving north again.
Artamonov smiled faintly. Everything was still proceeding.
Then the Germans answered with something more substantial.
The first mortar bombs fell among the leading skirmishers with almost no warning. One burst ahead of a Russian section and threw several men flat, another exploded farther east, and a third landed near the western road. There were not enough to blanket the whole field, but their placement was irritatingly precise, falling wherever the advancing chains began to gather or found easier ground.
A few moments later came the heavier reply.
Artamonov heard the distant reports from beyond Soldau before the first shells arrived. One screamed overhead and vanished into the forest behind him. The next struck the southern tree line.
The woods erupted.
A tree burst apart only several metres from the command group, showering the men with splintered bark, leaves and wet earth. Artamonov ducked on instinct and steadied himself against the nearest trunk as the concussion struck his chest. Somewhere behind him a soldier screamed, but before the sound had finished another German shell crashed deeper into the forest, followed quickly by a third.
The troops waiting for the second assault began moving among broken branches and drifting smoke. One shell landed beside a Russian Maxim position and silenced the weapon almost instantly. Another exploded near one of the forward three-inch guns, throwing several members of the crew from their feet and sending the nearby horses plunging against their traces.
Artamonov brushed mud from his sleeve.
"German artillery," one of his officers said.
Artamonov gave him a flat look.
"Obviously."
He raised his binoculars again. What interested him was not that the Germans possessed artillery; of course they did. What interested him was how they were using it. Their shells were not wandering blindly across the countryside. Fire was falling around the forest edge, the visible Russian gun positions and those places where troops had gathered beneath the trees.
Someone was observing. Someone was correcting.
Artamonov's mouth tightened into something approaching approval.
Competent work.
He had always preferred competent enemies. Beating fools proved very little.
Across the central field, the skirmishers continued advancing. Men dropped when mortar bombs landed nearby, waited until the fragments had passed and then rose again. On the eastern and western flanks, the fighting around the scattered German strongpoints had become steadily more violent. Russian sections were still working forward from cover to cover beneath rifle and machine-gun fire, and at one position Artamonov could just make out several men near enough to the enemy obstacle to begin throwing coats and branches across the wire.
They were reaching the German positions. They were gaining ground.
Excellent.
Then something changed in the sound behind him.
Artamonov frowned.
One of the forward Russian batteries had stopped firing. A second fell silent moments later, then another. The heavy rhythm that had been pounding the German centre began developing unmistakable gaps. Batteries farther behind the forest continued firing indirectly over the trees, but their slower, more scattered reports could not conceal the sudden quiet spreading among the guns nearest the front.
Artamonov lowered the binoculars.
"What is this?"
The officer beside him glanced around uncertainly. "General?"
"Why have my forward batteries stopped?"
"I don't know, sir."
"Then find out."
Before the man could move, another officer came hurrying through the trees.
"General! The forward batteries are exhausting their ready ammunition."
Artamonov stared at him.
"Their ready ammunition?"
"Yes, sir. The limbers cannot get through the last stretch. The groundâ"
"I am familiar with the ground."
The officer fell silent immediately.
Artamonov glanced behind him and understood the problem without further explanation. He had ordered the guns pushed aggressively forward, concealed among the brush and openings near the tree line where their crews could engage the German positions directly. The placement had given them excellent fields of fire, but the same mud, roots and dense woodland that concealed the guns prevented the ammunition wagons from following them all the way.
Men were carrying shells forward by hand.
Pairs of soldiers struggled between the trees with heavy wooden crates while others carried individual rounds from ammunition stacks farther behind. Boots slipped in the mud, branches caught against the boxes and every journey through the broken woodland consumed time the batteries did not possess. The guns had simply fired through the ammunition stacked beside them faster than the carrying parties could replace it.
Artamonov's expression hardened.
"How long?"
"We are bringing more forward now, General."
"That was not my question."
The officer hesitated.
"Several minutes."
Artamonov muttered a curse beneath his breath.
"Then make them several short minutes. Every shell that can be carried comes forward. I want those guns firing again."
"Yes, General."
"And keep the Maxims working."
The officer hurried away.
Artamonov raised the binoculars again. The batteries farther behind the forest were still firing, but only intermittently now, and the heavy bombardment of the opening minutes had begun to fade into scattered impacts around Soldau.
The Germans noticed.
Black helmets appeared along trenches that had seemed almost empty moments earlier. Men emerged from shelters and communication cuts, moving low toward the firing steps while more dark figures filtered forward from the town itself.
Artamonov understood at once.
They had never been pinned. They had been waiting.
A faint smile touched his face.
"Clever little Germans."
The officer beside him followed his gaze. "They sheltered from the bombardment?"
"Naturally."
It was sensible enough. Why leave men exposed while Russian shells fell when they could wait deeper in the position and return only once the bombardment weakened?
Professional. Very German.
It changed nothing.
Artamonov glanced back toward the second echelon forming up beneath the trees. Companies stood ready with bayonets fixed, though fear was beginning to show as German shells searched the forest around them. One burst farther down the line and tore a tree apart, scattering men beneath branches and fragments. Another struck near a forward three-inch gun and hurled the piece sideways into the mud.
Artamonov barely moved.
This was battle. Men died. What mattered was whether their deaths bought ground.
The Germans had shown themselves clever with their mines, shelters and prepared positions, but Artamonov found something reassuring in that caution. Men with overwhelming strength did not need to hide. The Germans conserved themselves because they were fewer.
The first wave had found the obstacles and drawn the enemy out.
Now the attack needed weight.
Artamonov lowered his binoculars and looked toward the young captain crouched beneath a nearby tree, fear plain in his face.
"Second wave."
The captain hesitated for only an instant.
"Forward, Captain."
"Yes, General."
His whistle shrieked through the woods, and others answered along the line. Officers immediately began shouting their companies forward as men rose beneath the trees and pushed toward the open ground.
"Forward, brothers!"
"Move, you dogs! Forward!"
"For the Tsar! For Russia!"
Then came the cry.
"URAAA!"
It spread from company to company until hundreds of voices became thousands, rolling out of the forest like thunder. The men shouted against their fear and drew courage from the noise around them as the second wave emerged from the tree line at a hard jog, rifles carried forward and bayonets fixed.
From Artamonov's position the separate companies quickly became a broad grey-green tide moving through the mist. More men continued pouring from the trees even as the leading formations crossed the first quarter of the field. They used shell holes and shallow depressions where they could, sometimes slowing long enough to fire before rising and moving again, but the general movement remained northward.
For a little while the German line stayed strangely quiet, as the Russians crossed perhaps a third of the field.
Artamonov watched through his glasses.
"Yes," he murmured. "Come on."
Then black helmets began appearing above the German parapets.
Armoured figures rose onto firing steps, machine guns swung toward the field and rifles and carbines settled along the trench line. What had seemed almost deserted only moments earlier suddenly came alive.
The Germans opened fire.
Machine guns tore across the field first, their combined roar resembling some enormous mechanical saw. Much of the remnants of the skirmishing line were ripped apart almost immediately before the fire shifted into the second wave. Men folded into the grass, spun beneath impacts or staggered several paces before collapsing, while those behind them bent lower and continued forward.
Then the Black Legion infantry joined in, and Artamonov's eyes narrowed. Their weapons fired with astonishing speed, far faster than ordinary bolt-action rifles. Across whole stretches of trench, the combined crack of their carbines seemed almost continuous. Small explosive rounds began bursting among the Russians as well, while mortars and the remaining mines added their own violence to the advance.
The wave staggered, but it did not stop.
Russians dropped to their knees or threw themselves into shell holes and began firing back. Mosin bolts snapped furiously as hundreds of rifles became thousands, until the return fire merged into a ragged thunder of its own. Russian Maxims joined from the southern tree line, and a handful of three-inch guns that had received fresh ammunition began firing again.
The German line felt the weight of it. Black helmets disappeared behind parapets. Men dropped beside their weapons, and several Russian shells struck among the trenches, throwing earth and timber into the air and forcing portions of the defence briefly under cover.
Artamonov turned toward one of his staff officers.
"Tell the batteries to search beyond the town. Find those German guns and mortars and suppress them. Keep whatever fire we can on the forward trenches."
"Yes, General."
The officer hurried away while Artamonov returned to his binoculars.
The second wave was still advancing. Men rose whenever German fire weakened, ran forward and dropped again when the machine guns returned. Companies were already losing their shape as casualties opened gaps and survivors mixed together, but they continued gaining ground.
Ahead of them, little remained of the first skirmishing line as an organized formation. Bodies and wounded men marked its path across the field, yet a handful of survivors had reached the wire. Artamonov saw one throw a greatcoat over the barbs and begin climbing while another crawled toward a section torn open by artillery. On the flanks, more and more Russian riflemen had also worked their way close to several of the scattered German strongpoints.
They were being killed, but they were reaching the Germans. And that was what mattered.
Then, somewhere beyond the halfway point, the advance began to slow.
The German fire had become too heavy. Men who had been jogging forward now crouched and fired from where they stood. Others dropped into shell holes and remained there. Some flattened themselves behind fallen comrades or folds in the earth, working their rifles but showing no desire to rise again.
Artamonov watched one soldier drag two dead men together and use their bodies as cover while he fired toward the trenches. Nearby, several others crowded into a crater, shooting steadily but no longer advancing. Across the field the great wave that had surged from the forest roaring Ura was beginning to dissolve into scattered knots of infantry clinging to whatever shelter they could find.
Artamonov's expression hardened.
Taking cover to fire was one thing. Allowing an attack to sink into the ground was another.
A young lieutenant stood beside one of the craters, waving desperately toward the German line.
"Forward! Up! Forward!"
The men looked at him, but only a few moved, while the rest refused.
Artamonov lowered his binoculars slightly.
"What is this?"
The second wave had not been sent forward to lie in the mud and exchange rifle fire until nightfall. It was supposed to close the distance, reach the wire and break the German position.
His eyes narrowed.
"No," Artamonov said quietly. "That is not how you attack."
Artamonov's gaze shifted from the stalled attack to one of the older officers standing beneath the trees nearby. Major Kaarna was a Finn by birth and a veteran by every other measure that mattered. Grey had spread heavily through his moustache and along his temples, and there was something almost carved into the lines of his face, the expression of a man who had spent too many years around gunfire to waste emotion upon it now. Several of the companies lying motionless out in the field belonged to the formation under his command, and he had watched their advance falter without comment, his revolver hanging quietly at his side.
"Major."
Kaarna turned immediately. "General."
Artamonov pointed across the field with one gloved hand.
"It appears your men have forgotten how an attack is conducted in the Russian Army," Artamonov said, his voice almost conversational. "They seem to be making themselves comfortable out there."
Kaarna looked toward the field for a moment, then back to his commander.
"Go and remind them," Artamonov continued. "Get them on their feet and get the attack moving again."
The Finnish major showed no irritation at the rebuke. His face remained as hard and unreadable as before.
"Yes, General. My apologies. I will see to it."
Artamonov gave a small nod. "Good. Go."
Kaarna drew his revolver and walked out of the trees.
Artamonov found him again through the binoculars a few moments later. The major neither crawled nor dashed from one patch of cover to another. He simply walked forward at a hard, deliberate pace through the wreckage of the attack.
The field around him was already thick with dead and wounded. One man sat staring blankly at a hand from which several fingers were missing. Another dragged himself through the mud on his elbows while a shattered leg trailed uselessly behind him. Men called for stretcher-bearers, officers, mothers or God, their voices rising briefly above the battle before vanishing beneath the hammering machine guns. Kaarna passed through it all without slowing, bullets snapping through the mist around him while shells and mortar bombs burst farther ahead.
By the time he reached the middle of the field, he had come to the place where the second wave had stalled in earnest. Men crowded into shell craters and behind bodies, firing their Mosins over the edges but showing little desire to leave the small islands of safety they had found. A young lieutenant crouched among them, waving his revolver and shouting himself hoarse.
"Forward! Come on, men! Forward!"
Nobody listened.
Kaarna stepped down beside the crater and lowered himself onto one knee, almost like an old father coming to correct children who had made some foolish mistake.
"What is this, boys?"
Several soldiers looked toward him.
Kaarna glanced around at the men lying in the mud, then toward the German trenches beyond them.
"Is this how we intend to take Soldau? Is this how we intend to win the war? Lying here?"
A burst of machine-gun fire passed overhead, and almost everyone around him instinctively pressed themselves lower.
Kaarna did not flinch.
"No, no, boys. This is wrong." He shook his head with almost disappointed amusement. "The Germans are over there. Their trenches are over there. If we intend to throw them out, then we must first reach them."
He pointed across the field with his revolver.
"We will not win this battle from the bottom of a hole."
The young lieutenant stared at him.
Kaarna looked once more toward the German line, then back at the men around him.
"On your feet."
Nobody moved.
His expression hardened slightly.
"Come now. Are you soldiers or earthworms? Up!" He gestured toward Soldau. "We cross this field so quickly the grass bends behind us. We reach that wire, we climb it, and we throw those Germans from their trenches. That is how an attack is made."
Then he rose from the crater.
"With me, brothers."
Kaarna turned his back on them and began walking toward Soldau.
There was no heroic sprint and no effort to make himself a smaller target. He simply walked upright through the gunfire, revolver at his side until movement appeared along the German parapet. Then he raised the weapon, fired twice and continued forward.
"For the Tsar! For Russia! Forward!"
The men behind him stared.
There was something almost absurd about the sight. Hundreds of soldiers had flattened themselves into the mud because the field ahead seemed impossible to cross, yet this grey-haired Finn walked through it as if the bullets were merely rain.
Kaarna raised his revolver again.
"URAAA!"
A rifle cracked from somewhere far beyond the forward trenches.
Kaarna's head snapped violently aside. Blood and fragments sprayed across the men behind him, and his body collapsed into the wet grass before the sound of the shot had fully reached them.
The young lieutenant stared past him toward the distant silhouette of the old Teutonic castle. The shot had come from somewhere high above the battlefield, perhaps one of the towers from which other unnervingly precise shots had already been falling throughout the morning.
For one terrible second, the Russians around Kaarna remained motionless.
Then the lieutenant looked at the major's body. Blood had struck his own cheek. He wiped it away with the back of his hand, stared briefly at the red smear left upon his skin, and then climbed out of the crater.
"Forward, men of Russia!" he roared. "Forward! URAAA!"
Another officer rose beside him. Then a soldier. Then another.
The lieutenant began running.
"URAAA!"
The cry spread through the stalled companies almost as if Kaarna's death had released something inside them. Men who had been pressed behind corpses and shell holes moments earlier began climbing to their feet. Some advanced crouched, firing whenever they found an opportunity; others simply gripped their rifles and ran after the officers moving ahead of them. Those too badly wounded to rise continued firing from the ground, sending what cover they could over the heads of their comrades.
Within moments hundreds were moving again, and then thousands.
"URAAAA!"
Artamonov watched the line come back to life and smiled.
Kaarna was dead, certainly, but his death had accomplished more than another hundred shouted commands from men lying safely behind cover. Fear could spread through an army with terrible speed, but courage was contagious as well. One man stood and ten saw him. Ten followed, and a hundred became ashamed to remain behind. Soon the individual soldier ceased asking whether he himself was afraid, because the men beside him were already moving and there was no longer any courage required simply to follow.
The attack had momentum again.
At almost the same moment, Russian artillery began strengthening. More ammunition had reached several of the forward guns, while the batteries farther back continued shifting their fire onto Soldau and the German positions beyond it. Shells burst around the defensive works, occasionally forcing machine-gun crews below the parapets and giving the infantry precious seconds in which to cross another stretch of ground.
The Russians paid heavily for every metre, but they were gaining those metres.
Bodies lay thick across the approaches now. The first skirmishing line had almost disappeared beneath the second wave, dead and wounded scattered along the route the larger assault was following. Yet men continued moving among them, and the enormous volume of Russian rifle fire was beginning to matter. Whenever hundreds of Mosins concentrated upon one section of trench, even the Black Legion had to keep its heads down, and every moment of reduced German fire allowed another knot of attackers to rush forward.
Little by little, Artamonov saw Russians reaching the wire in increasing numbers.
The surviving skirmishers were already there, desperately trying to force passages through the obstacle. One had thrown his greatcoat over the barbs. Others pushed broken branches into the coils or crowded toward gaps torn open by artillery. German machine guns swept those passages again and again, killing men almost as quickly as they entered them.
Still they came.
Bodies accumulated across the wire, and those bodies themselves became part of the attack. One dead soldier lay sprawled across the coils, his weight crushing them lower. Another man stepped onto his back and tried to cross. A second followed. Some were shot and fell into the wire themselves, but each body pressed it farther down for the men behind.
Then one Russian made it across.
An explosion burst behind him as he threw himself over the obstacle, stumbled forward and disappeared into the foremost German trench.
Artamonov's smile returned.
There.
One man now, a hundred soon enough.
Then something rose above the smoke near the centre of the field.
The Imperial Russian standard.
A soldier had carried the double-headed eagle all the way to the German wire. He climbed onto the churned ground before it and raised the banner high above his head, its soaked cloth snapping weakly in the wind. For an instant the flag stood clear through the mist, visible to hundreds of men scattered across the slope behind him.
A roar answered from the field.
"URAAA!"
The standard-bearer waved the colours once, urging the men onward, and German fire found him almost immediately. Bullets struck his body and sent him staggering against the wire. Yet even as his legs failed, he drove the staff into the wet earth with both hands and collapsed with it, face striking the mud while his fingers remained locked around the shaft.
The flag stayed upright above him.
Bullets punched holes through its wet fabric, but the double-headed eagle continued to move over the dead man's body.
Another roar rose from the Russians below.
"URAAAA!"
Men began climbing the slope toward it. Some ran, others crawled between shell holes, while those already at the wire threw coats and branches over the barbs or climbed across the bodies of men who had fallen there before them. Machine guns continued tearing into them, but the movement no longer stopped.
Artamonov watched through his binoculars and felt his smile return.
The sight was horrific. Any sane man could see that. The field was covered with dead and wounded, the wire tangled with bodies while shells and mortar bombs burst among those still advancing.
Yet there was something beautiful in it as well.
They were still moving.
Men who had begun the morning beneath the southern trees were now touching the German wire. Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Tatars, Finns and others from across the Empire were advancing beneath one eagle, paying for every metre with blood and continuing anyway.
That was what stirred Artamonov. Not the death, but the sacrifice.
The Germans were magnificently armed and fighting with extraordinary discipline, but even that seemed to confirm what Artamonov already suspected. They had concentrated their best here because they had to. Soldau was too important to lose, and no army could possibly possess this many machine guns, rapid-firing rifles, mortars and armoured soldiers everywhere along its front.
Break them here, and he would break the strongest point.
He glanced behind him toward the third echelon gathering beneath the trees. Fresh battalions were forming beneath their officers, rifles ready and bayonets fixed.
A little more pressure.
That was all.
"Prepare the third..."
Artamonov stopped. Something big was moving through the smoke beyond the German trenches.
He raised his binoculars again.
At first he thought it was merely a mounted black legion officer coming down from Soldau. Then the mist shifted, and what emerged from it seemed almost too large to belong upon a battlefield of ordinary men.
A vast black horse walked steadily toward the front, carrying an equally immense rider wrapped in dark steel.
For one irrational heartbeat, Artamonov did not see a German officer.
He saw Death.
A black horseman advancing across a field of corpses, skull-faced and unhurried, like some living engine of war that had come from Soldau to reap whatever souls remained before its walls.
A chill ran through him.
Artamonov took a half-step backward and crossed himself almost without thinking.
"Gospodi..."
One of his officers had raised his own field glasses.
"General..."
Artamonov kept staring.
"Isn't that..." The officer hesitated. "The Iron Prince?"
Recognition struck.
The horse. The armour. The red cloak.
Photographs and newspaper illustrations suddenly returned to him.
"My God," Artamonov murmured. "It is."
The photographs had not done the man justice. Even through mist and distance, Oskar seemed monstrous, less like a prince than something forged for war and given life.
For several seconds Artamonov simply watched him.
Then fear gave way to another thought. The Iron Prince was here. At the front, within reach.
Artamonov slowly lowered his binoculars.
"If we break them now," he said, "he is ours."
His staff looked toward him.
The Kaiser's son. The famous Iron Prince. The man whose name seemed to stand behind every impossible German weapon they had encountered. Capture him here and Soldau would become more than a victory. Germany would suffer a humiliation impossible to conceal, and perhaps possession of such a prisoner might even bring the war closer to an end.
And if nothing else, history would remember the man who had taken him.
Artamonov looked back toward the waiting battalions. A faint smile appeared beneath his grey moustache.
"Third wave."
For the briefest moment his officers hesitated.
Then Artamonov pointed toward the black rider moving through the smoke.
"Forward. Break the line."
His voice hardened.
"And bring me the Prince alive."
Whistles shrieked beneath the trees.
Officers shouted. Thousands of men rose with rifles and fixed bayonets as the order passed down the line.
Artamonov raised his binoculars once more.
For an instant, looking upon the skull-faced rider, he felt that cold touch of fear again.
Then ambition swallowed it.
"Forward."
The whistles screamed.
And the forest answered.
"URAAAAA!"
The third wave began to move.