While President Woodrow Wilson and his cabinet debated preparedness, finance, neutrality and America's future place in the world, Europe continued to fight. The rains that had plagued the Eastern Front through the latter half of August and into September were finally beginning to subside. Roads were slowly firming, rivers receding, and the skies clearing enough for aircraft to operate with some regularity again. The long weather-imposed pause was coming to an end, and with it the war in the east was preparing to move once more.
After nearly two weeks of leave at home, Crown Prince Oskar von Hohenzollern therefore found himself aboard a military train bound east for Warsaw. Across Germany, returning elements of the Black Legion were making the same journey by rail and motor transport, their brief reunions with wives, children and families already behind them as the formations gathered once more for whatever campaign came next.
Oskar sat beside the window of his reinforced carriage, once again dressed as the Iron Prince. His enormous frame was enclosed within the familiar black plate of his Skull Knight armour, which he had personally repaired, inspected and prepared before departure. His skull-faced helmet rested beside him, his great sword remained secured within easy reach, and his blood-red cape hung heavily from his shoulders. Several carriages behind, Shadowmane travelled in a specially reinforced compartment, wearing the black barding Oskar had likewise inspected and prepared himself.
For all that preparation, Oskar felt little enthusiasm about returning to war. Only hours earlier he had been holding his children, kissing his wives goodbye and promising, once again, that he would come home. He could still remember their arms around his neck and the warmth of those final embraces, yet the memory brought with it an uneasiness he could not quite dismiss, particularly where Tanya was concerned.
She had not shared his bed once during his entire stay. There had always been something demanding her attention. When she was not rehearsing with Karl and Heddy for their little musical trio, she was spending time with the other women, looking after the children or attending to matters at AngelWorks. None of that was especially unusual for Tanya, who had never possessed the slightest talent for idleness, but Oskar had nevertheless noticed how rarely they found themselves alone and how easily those few opportunities seemed to disappear. She remained affectionate enough, smiling, teasing him and kissing him goodbye as she always had, yet there had been something slightly different in her warmth. She had said nothing openly, but Oskar was beginning to suspect that his beloved first wife knew considerably more about his adventures with other women on the Eastern Front than she had chosen to reveal.
Fuck. I really should have told her.
There was little point dwelling upon it now. The rains were ending, the Black Legion could finally move again, and Russia was not going to defeat itself. If Oskar wanted any hope of returning home for good, he would first have to finish this damned war.
He sighed and rested his chin against one armoured hand as the late-afternoon countryside rolled past the window. Golden fields gradually gave way to darker forests, the trees flashing by beneath the fading sunlight. God, I really hope this will be over soon.
For several minutes he continued watching the landscape before finally lowering his gaze toward the folders spread across the table, if only to give himself something else to think about. He already knew most of what they contained. Roads and railways throughout the occupied territories were being restored and, where practical, improved. Muscle Motors pump stations, workshops, depots and new businesses were following behind the Black Legion, while Oskar's companies repaired damaged towns and prepared the countryside for the steadily growing German settler population.
Security had meanwhile passed increasingly into the hands of German police and the SEK. The last men who had ignored the expulsion orders were still being hunted down, while organised resistance was dealt with ruthlessly wherever it appeared. Women were generally permitted to remain and complain as they pleased so long as words did not become action, while those who actively resisted were removed into the developing rehabilitation system, where labour, discipline and eventual integration into the German order offered the principal routes back into ordinary life. The numbers involved remained relatively small. Most people had chosen survival over resistance, allowing the Black Legion to avoid tying down large numbers of regular soldiers in territory it had already conquered.
Instead, engineers, railwaymen, administrators and Oskar's companies could follow the army eastward, repairing what had been destroyed and turning conquered ground into territory capable of supporting both the next advance and the settlements following behind it. Alongside them spread the Church of the New Dawn, establishing churches, schools, clinics and relief stations throughout the occupied lands and gradually binding reconstruction, administration and everyday life into the new order Oskar intended to leave behind.
The entire system remained in its infancy, but thus far it appeared to be working. Roads and railways were reopening, German police and administrators were moving into the districts behind the Black Legion, and the first settlers were beginning to establish themselves upon land emptied by retreat and expulsion. The process remained harsh, imperfect and deeply disruptive, yet to Oskar it possessed one virtue above all others: it had direction. However ugly the immediate consequences might be, everything in the east seemed to be moving toward the permanent order he believed Germany would require once the fighting finally ended.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said of the west.
Oskar turned another page, and whatever satisfaction the eastern reports had given him faded almost immediately. The Battle of the Marne was still raging, and the casualty returns were becoming increasingly difficult to contemplate. Tens of thousands of Germans had already been killed or wounded there, while across the war as a whole the number of dead had climbed beyond a hundred thousand, with several times as many wounded, maimed, sick or simply missing somewhere between battlefield and record. The true figure would undoubtedly rise again when the latest returns arrived.
He read the number once, and that was enough. His jaw tightened as the train carried him steadily eastward. Germany was winning; that was what the newspapers proclaimed, what cheering crowds believed and what his father preferred to hear whenever generals gathered around their maps. Yet Oskar had long since learned to distrust victories that existed most clearly in communiqués. Beneath every kilometre gained lay men, ammunition, horses, fuel and machinery being consumed at a rate no headline could soften. Shells vanished almost as quickly as the railways could carry them forward. Trucks were driven until their engines failed. Horses collapsed in harness or died beneath artillery fire, while those that survived required mountains of fodder simply to keep the armies moving. Ambulance trains filled faster than they could be emptied, and hospitals behind the front were already struggling beneath the constant arrival of wounded men.
Still Moltke pressed forward, and that, more than the losses themselves, was what frustrated Oskar. He did not object to sacrifice merely because it was sacrifice. War had cured him of such comfortable simplicity years ago. Men would die if Germany meant to win, and he could accept terrible losses if those losses purchased something lasting. What enraged him was waste: men and resources spent in battles that achieved little beyond making another battle necessary tomorrow.
Belgium had become the clearest example of what he meant. Militarily, Germany continued to advance, yet behind the armies the occupation was becoming an ugly mixture of fear, improvisation and retaliation. Railways required constant guarding, telegraph lines were cut, and rumours of civilians firing from houses or sheltering saboteurs spread almost as quickly as the reports could be investigated. Frightened soldiers increasingly began to see danger in every village through which they marched. Some attacks were real, others confused or exaggerated, but once suspicion took hold the distinction often ceased to matter.
The reprisals that followed were precisely the sort of clumsy brutality Oskar despised. A German soldier would be killed, a village blamed, hostages taken, houses burned and civilians shot in punishment. Hatred would deepen, another act of resistance would follow, and the same miserable cycle would begin again. Some commanders seemed to have reduced the matter almost to arithmetic, as though killing enough civilians for every German casualty would eventually frighten Belgium into obedience.
To Oskar, the lesson was not that harshness itself had failed, but that incoherent harshness had. The western occupation had been indecisive when firmness might have established control, then savage when fear demanded an answer, leaving behind a population frightened enough to hate Germany but still capable of resisting it. It was cruelty without structure, violence repeated because the previous violence had solved nothing.
The east was different in Oskar's mind precisely because he had refused to allow that uncertainty to develop. His rules there were brutal, but they were simple. Non-German men ordered east were expected to leave. Those who remained hidden were searched for, and those who resisted were treated as enemies. The army was not expected to spend months wondering whether a man repairing a railway by day might cut the line at night, or whether a farmer smiling at a patrol kept a rifle hidden beneath his floorboards. If a man had not been registered beneath German authority, placed in approved service or otherwise permitted to remain, then he did not belong behind the Black Legion.
Oskar knew perfectly well how much hatred the policy had created. Men driven east would curse his name, and some of their sons would probably grow up doing the same. Women left behind would remember husbands, fathers and brothers disappearing along the roads toward Russia, even while accepting German food, employment and protection because ordinary life gave them little alternative. Oskar had never expected gratitude.
What mattered to him was what came afterward. Once the initial violence had passed, the occupied rear had become increasingly governable. There were fewer hidden networks through which armed men could disappear, fewer villages in which soldiers had to wonder who might be a friend by daylight and a saboteur after dark, and fewer occasions for frightened troops to answer uncertainty with indiscriminate reprisals. The hatred had not vanished, but much of the population most capable of turning that hatred into organised resistance had been pushed east with the retreating war.
That was the distinction Oskar wished his father would understand. Belgium remained caught in a cycle of attack, suspicion and punishment because nobody had been willing to impose a coherent settlement upon it. In the east, Oskar had preferred one enormous rupture to an endless succession of smaller ones. Cruelty concentrated once, he believed, was preferable to cruelty repeated indefinitely because no one possessed the courage to decide what came afterward.
Wilhelm had listened when Oskar explained all of this, and that almost made the matter worse. His father had listened as Oskar spoke of production, food, railways, shipping, occupation, policing and the broader shape the war was taking. He had listened when Oskar argued that Russia needed to be broken before the burden of two fronts became intolerable, that Britain could not indefinitely be allowed to shelter its trade behind neutral shipping, and that Germany could not continue pretending the conflict would remain a restrained contest between gentlemen merely because everyone preferred the illusion.
Wilhelm always listened, and then he hesitated. There would be no unrestricted naval campaign, at least not yet. There would be no adoption of Oskar's eastern occupation methods throughout Belgium, not yet. Moltke would not be removed while the western armies were still advancing, not yet. Every argument eventually returned to those same two miserable words, whether Wilhelm spoke them aloud or merely allowed them to hang between them.
Not yet.
Oskar's mouth tightened as the train continued eastward. Those words sounded harmless inside a palace, but on the battlefield they carried a price. Not yet meant more German soldiers dying while commanders waited for the perfect justification to change course. It meant more troops guarding roads and railway stations in Belgium because the civilian population remained uncontrolled, and another week in which Moltke could continue feeding men into the Marne in pursuit of the decisive victory that always seemed to lie just beyond the next village, bridge or line of trees.
Oskar had even given the government gentler words with which to describe what he wanted in the east. He rarely called it expulsion when speaking before ministers or foreign allies. Official documents preferred evacuation, security evacuation or temporary removal of hostile civilian elements from active operational areas. Respectable language made harsh policy easier for respectable men to repeat.
The Austro-Hungarians had understood the implications immediately and had been deeply uncomfortable with them, particularly when they considered what such principles might mean among the nationalities of their own empire. Yet even they had found the results difficult to dismiss. Behind the Black Legion came police, engineers, administrators, railwaymen and settlers, and the army did not have to spend half its strength staring nervously at territory it had supposedly already conquered.
To Oskar, that was what victory ought to mean: secure ground behind the army, strength concentrated ahead of it, and a system capable of turning battlefield success into something permanent. It should not mean leaving behind an endless trail of burned villages and frightened soldiers wondering who might shoot at them next.
At last he closed the folder and leaned back in his seat, listening to the steady rhythm of the train beneath him. Germany was winning, perhaps, but victory meant considerably more to him than moving coloured lines across a map while the nation bled itself white to keep those lines moving. With every fresh report arriving from the west, Oskar found himself wondering how many more Germans would have to die before his father finally stopped answering every unpleasant necessity with those same two words.
Not yet.
The carriage lamps swayed gently with the motion of the train. Opposite Oskar, Captain Carter stood near the door with two men of Third Company, all three silent, black-uniformed and watchful. Beyond them, occupying the adjoining carriages, travelled the remainder of Oskar's personal guard with their weapons, communications equipment, medical supplies and everything else required to accompany the Crown Prince into another campaign. Their presence gave the train less the atmosphere of a royal journey than that of a small fortress moving steadily eastward upon rails.
Third Company had returned with him. First Company remained responsible for protecting his family, while Second Company watched over Karl and the industrial heart of everything they had built together. Third Company belonged more directly to Oskar himself, and now they were returning with him to the one theatre in which his authority remained comparatively undiluted.
In the east, at least, he did not have to exhaust himself persuading men to accept what he considered obvious. The Black Legion, his police formations, the air arm, armoured divisions, corps commanders, occupation authorities, SEK detachments, engineers, railway officials and intelligence services all operated within a structure he had spent years building and refining. Responsibility could be delegated freely because everyone understood where the final authority rested. War in the east remained terrible, but at least it followed rules Oskar understood—his rules, as he sometimes jokingly called them his house rules, though there was increasingly little humour in what that phrase had come to mean.
He reached for another folder and turned several pages before stopping at the section concerning chemical defence. Whatever faint satisfaction the eastern reports had left him disappeared almost immediately when he read that the French had used tear gas again along the Marne.
They would undoubtedly insist that it meant very little. Diplomats would hide behind careful distinctions between poison and irritant, generals would describe the effects as temporary, and newspapers would avoid the matter unless someone forced them to acknowledge it. Technically, perhaps, the great boundary had not yet been crossed, but someone had placed a foot upon it, and for Oskar that was enough.
Every serious power possessed chemists, and every modern industrial nation possessed the means to produce substances far more dangerous than tear gas if desperation ever overruled restraint. Treaties mattered only while governments believed obedience cost less than violation, and Oskar had seen too much of war to stake German lives upon the assumption that their enemies would remain restrained forever.
During his recent stay in Germany, he had therefore issued the necessary orders. A limited portion of the chemical industry was to begin quietly preparing for military requirements, with the immediate emphasis placed upon research, safe handling, protective equipment and the ability to respond rapidly should another power escalate matters further. Protection came first. Germany already possessed industrial respirators used in mines, factories and chemical works. They were imperfect and had never been designed for armies operating across open battlefields, but they provided a foundation from which better equipment could be developed. The Black Legion would receive proper protection first, followed by the wider army as production permitted.
Oskar closed the folder with a decisive motion. The possibility of chemical warfare did not frighten him so much as confirm something he had already accepted: whatever comfortable language governments continued to employ, this war was becoming total. Nations were mobilising industry, finance, shipping, food production, propaganda and civilian labour against one another. The battlefield was merely the place where the consequences were easiest to see.
Outside the window, the countryside had already begun changing beneath German occupation. Repaired track carried the train across fields beneath a grey afternoon sky, some still scarred by military traffic while others had already been marked for renewed cultivation. Burned farms stood beside newly repaired roads, timber lay stacked near bridges under reconstruction, and German work crews moved among wagons, machinery and piles of building material. Local women worked among them wherever civilian labour was required, earning wages within an economy that was already beginning to turn toward Germany.
Most simply wanted to live, and that suited Oskar perfectly well. Women who wished to continue farming were generally permitted to do so, while those who preferred paid employment increasingly found it as German companies, administrators and reconstruction organisations spread throughout the occupied districts. Work produced wages, wages purchased food, and ordinary necessity gradually accomplished what proclamations rarely could.
The men were largely gone. Those who had obeyed the evacuation orders had moved east with the retreating population, willingly in some cases and under considerable pressure in others. What remained behind was becoming a strange new society of German soldiers, settlers and officials living among local women, children and elderly dependants while the institutions of the Church of the New Dawn expanded steadily around them.
Oskar watched the occupied countryside slide past the window without expression. Somewhere ahead lay Warsaw, and with it a complication he had spent much of the journey trying not to contemplate too closely. Five women were waiting for him there: Patricia, Elise, Helena, Zofia and Maria, and all five were carrying his children.
The thought was enough to make him close his eyes for a moment. Patricia and Elise were different from the others. Whatever absurd path had brought the two women into his life years earlier, he had long since stopped pretending they were merely some embarrassing mistake from his past. Their household had become part of his own, their six children were unmistakably his children as well, and somewhere along the way irritation, affection and responsibility had settled into something permanent. Now both women were pregnant again, which under almost any other circumstances might merely have amused him.
Helena, Zofia and Maria were harder to contemplate. Helena had begun as a rescued young scholar and then become his secretary, while Zofia and Maria had entered his life through the chaos of Warsaw, displaced and clinging to whatever security remained after their family had been torn apart. Somewhere during those exhausted days, Oskar had allowed affection, loneliness and spectacularly poor judgement to become entangled until the consequences could no longer be undone.
Maria troubled him most. The memory still brought a flush of shame whenever he allowed himself to examine it too closely. It had happened beside the river, in the confused aftermath of everything that had occurred there, at a moment when grief, relief and exhaustion had left everyone behaving less sensibly than they should have. Oskar had hesitated when he should have thought and surrendered to feeling when he should have exercised restraint. Now there was no taking any of it back, and the question returned with irritating persistence: What the hell was I even thinking?
There was no useful answer. Whatever regret he felt, it was far too late to undo what had happened. He cared for the women, however complicated those feelings had become, and he knew himself well enough to understand that he would never simply abandon them. Zofia had already lost Piotr to the war and Tomasz to exile and hatred, while Helena, Patricia, Elise and Maria had all, in their own ways, chosen to remain beside him. Whatever else Oskar might regret, he could not bring himself to answer that choice by casting any of them aside. He had made his decisions, and now he would live with their consequences, return to Warsaw and face whatever waited for him there.
What troubled him almost as much was the increasingly unpleasant suspicion that Tanya already knew at least part of what had happened. During his time at home he had heard enough to understand what she and Grand Priest Arnold were building through the Church of the New Dawn. Its schools, orphanages, relief houses and missions were spreading across Europe and beyond, and with them came a growing web of people capable of listening, carrying messages, observing, influencing and, when necessary, serving Germany in quieter ways. Orphans raised within the Church, displaced families brought beneath its protection, converts, sympathisers and grateful dependants all formed a natural pool from which future informants and agents could emerge.
Oskar was impressed. Tanya had always understood people better than most, and now she was turning that gift into an information network capable of reaching places armies could not. The problem was that such a network could also reach him. His followers in the east were loyal beyond question, but Oskar had long since noticed that their loyalty did not end with him. The women closest to him carried a reverence of their own, and soldiers, servants and officers who would conceal almost anything from an outsider had little reason to hide anything from Tanya, Patricia, Elise or the others.
That made his present situation rather uncomfortable. Sooner or later, Tanya was probably going to learn exactly what had happened in Warsaw, assuming she did not know already, and then Oskar would have to explain himself.
He pushed the thought aside before it could become any more irritating. There would be time enough for awkward explanations once he reached Warsaw. For now, the war mattered more.
Germany was bleeding men, money and matériel at a rate no nation could sustain indefinitely. Moltke continued driving west while Oskar intended to drive east, and both fronts devoured ammunition, fuel, vehicles, horses and trained manpower faster than even Germany's vast industrial system could replace them. At sea, Britain still had to be fought as well. Oskar had spent years preparing Germany to endure such a conflict, but preparation had never meant infinity.
Sooner or later, one front had to give. If Moltke could force a decision in France, so much the better. If he could not, then Oskar would have to do it in Russia. A decisive eastern victory would release men, matériel and industrial capacity for use elsewhere and transform the war from a struggle across two immense land fronts into something Germany could sustain far more comfortably.
The rains had at least bought him time. Roads had been repaired, railways restored, vehicles overhauled, depots replenished and exhausted formations allowed to recover. Now the weather was beginning to turn again. The ground would harden, the engines would begin moving, and the Black Legion would have another opportunity to force the kind of decision Germany desperately needed.
Oskar settled back against the carriage seat and looked through the window toward the darkening east. He did not expect the coming campaign to be easy, but he needed it to be decisive. One front had to break before Germany exhausted itself trying to win everywhere at once, and if Russia could be forced from the war, perhaps the pressure would finally ease enough for Germany to finish what remained and impose the peace Oskar had spent so many years trying to build.
He watched the horizon in silence as the train carried him onward, then released a tired breath and allowed the same exhausted thought that had followed him throughout the journey to settle once more into his mind.
God, let this be over soon.