The Russians ca wave after wave.
To the n of the Black Legion, it began to feel as if the enemy had no end. Every obstacle Oskar's engineers had placed with such care was swallowed by bodies. Minefields that should have delayed an attack for hours were spent in tens of minutes, cleared not by skill, but by n walking into them until the hidden charges were gone. Traps ant to frighten, wound, and slow the enemy were simply battered through. Broken roads were bypassed. Destroyed bridges were crossed elsewhere. Marsh tracks thought impassable suddenly carried n, horses, and light guns through the rain.
The Black Legion killed them by the thousands, and still the Russian Storm ca on.
At Lublin, in his command post, Lieutenant General Hermann von François watched the reports arrive with a face carved into iron.
His I Corps was being pressed on every front. And from all across the line requests were constantly coming in asking for more ammunition, for artillery support, and reinforcents that did not exist. François had too few n to answer every cry, so he answered with whatever he still had.
Regular police detachnts were sent to hold and construct new defensive positions at key road junctions. SEK special police squads were thrown into threatened gaps.
Supply trucks were loaded with grenades, cartridges, mortar rounds, machine-gun belts, and whatever loose ammunition could be gathered, then driven east through rain and over muddy roads toward positions already half-buried under Russian pressure.
He might have lacked bodies, but he could always compensate with explosives.
Around the outskirts of Lublin, Black Legion artillery fired through rain and lightning. Gun after gun spoke from prepared positions, their crews soaked, half-deaf, and black with powder. Shells arced eastward across the land, bursting among roads, tree lines, villages abandoned by the legion and positions overrun by Russian forces.
By the late evening of the eleventh of September, the storm had begun to weaken, but only in the sky.
The rain slackened. Lightning faded. Grey daylight crept over a ruined world of mud, bodies, smoke, and torn wire.
The line still held, but in places it had bent badly.
At the Russian Second Army headquarters in Brest, General Sergei Mikhailovich Scheidemann listened to reports brought in slowly by mounted couriers riding through rain, darkness, and roads chewed into paste.
So reports promised success.
So spoke of progress.
So swore that German redoubts were close to falling.
Others asked for artillery he did not have, reinforcents he hesitated to send, ammunition that was already too far behind, and cavalry that would be slaughtered if committed too soon.
What struck him hardest were the casualty reports.
Whole formations had been chewed apart in minutes.
Battalions had gone into the marshes and co back as lists of nas no clerk could keep up with. Companies had vanished against wire, mines, and machine guns. Newly ford units of refugees and peasants, n who barely knew how to work their rifles, had been fed into the attack because there was nothing else to send.
Scheidemann felt the weight of it.
He felt every number as more than ink. Each report ant n. Villages. Sons. Fathers. Refugees who had been given rifles and sent west with more anger than training. He knew that many of them were being spent faster than they could even be counted.
But he refused to show that weight before his staff.
After all, a commander's face was part of the army's spine. If he flinched, they would flinch. If he hesitated, hesitation would travel outward through clerks, couriers, officers, and then down into the mud where frightened n were already asking whether the attack could truly succeed.
So Scheidemann kept his face cold.
"Acceptable losses," he said.
The words tasted like ash.
"They have given their lives for the greater good of the Motherland. They will be rembered."
He did not believe that last part as much as he wished to. But he said it anyway, because he could not halt the assault.
Not now.
This was not one small attack that could be stopped with a single order. It was a tid offensive spread across roads, marshes, forests, villages, and whole sectors of the front. Couriers were already riding through rain and mud with orders hours old. So battalions were already engaged. Others were still moving forward. Others would not even receive a halt order until after the next wave had begun.
To stop one part while the others continued would not save n.
It would isolate them.
One formation would halt. Another would press on. A third would advance without knowing its neighbor had stopped. Gaps would open inside the Russian assault itself, and the Black Legion would punish those gaps with guns, mines, aircraft, armored trucks, and counterattacks.
No, he could not halt.
The machine had been set in motion. Now it had to strike with all its weight. And Scheidemann could not attack gently either. A cautious probe would only tell the Germans where to concentrate their fire. A single thrust would be smothered beneath artillery, machine guns, and reserves shifted from quieter sectors. If the Black Legion was given one obvious crisis, it would answer that crisis with terrifying speed.
So the pressure had to be everywhere.
His army had to press the whole line, even where the price was hideous. It had to force the Germans to spread their strength, to defend every road, every bridge, every marsh track, every redoubt, every threatened village. If the enemy weakened one place to save another, then perhaps that weakened place would crack. And if one crack opened, Russia could pour n through it.
That was the cold, brutal, yet simple logic of the attack.
And besides, one army's attack was not only its own. Scheidemann was one part of a greater blow ordered by Northwestern Front headquarters under General Yakov Zhilinsky. If his army faltered in the south, the Black Legion could shift strength north. If the north faltered, the pressure on his own front would grow worse. Every army had to keep striking so that sowhere, sohow, the enemy line would fail.
It was a team ga played with corpses.
And beyond Russia, the wider war pressed as well. Reports suggested that France, Britain, and Belgium were striking hard in the west. While Serbia still held in the south, though Belgrade groaned beneath Austro-Hungarian guns from land and from the Danube river flotillas bombarding its forts.
The Central Powers were being squeezed from every side.
If Russia stopped now, the whole pressure might weaken.
If the offensive failed, the army's spirit might fail with it. The n had seen the Black Legion retreat. They had tasted the first proof that Germany could be forced back. To halt now, after such losses, would make those losses aningless. Worse, it would tell the soldiers, the refugees, the cities, and the empire itself that even this great storm had not been enough.
Scheidemann, just like the other Generals could not allow that. So more n were sent, even as the Generals knew what waited.
They sent them because, in that mont, there was no other way to keep the front, the army, and perhaps Russia itself from losing heart.
Yet unknown to the Russian generals, however, the Black Legion line was not like glass or a sheet of steel.
It was like water that bent, it yielded, and it withdrew before pressure beca encirclent.
And in the south, as the eleventh day began to turn to the twelfth, the line began to bend back toward Lublin and the designated fallback positions behind it.
François did not hesitate.
He had Oskar's instructions, and he followed them with brutal obedience.
If Lublin could not be held intact, then Lublin would be flattened.
The order went out.
Evacuate what civilians remained. Pull back military stores toward Warsaw. Move fuel, ammunition, wounded, records, spare parts, dical supplies, and communications gear.
Destroy what cannot be carried.
Prepare the city.
Artillery shells were lowered into basents and cellars. Charges were placed beneath warehouses, rail depots, governnt buildings, churches, schools, barracks, and factories. Whole city blocks were marked for demolition. Engineers moved from street to street with maps, fuses, detonators, and the cold expressions of n who had been told to murder a city before the enemy could inherit it.
François intended to leave the Russians nothing but rubble.
The sa orders echoed elsewhere.
At the center, Lieutenant General August von Mackensen prepared Białystok and it's surroundings for utter destruction.
In the north, Lieutenant General Hans von Seeckt prepared Kovno, the capital of Lithuania—for the sa fate if the line failed there.
It was not re denial or scorched earth, it was Armageddon. The Black Legion would buy ti not only with bullets, but with cities.
As the twelfth of September began, and the twelfth day turned into the rainy days that followed, the Russian Storm continued. Cavalry was pushed forward across muddy ground. Refugees in the rear camps were allowed into the army to fill the ranks. n who had fled west as civilians now marched east again with rifles, armbands, old coats, and dreams of reclaiming their hos.
Their enthusiasm rarely survived the road.
They passed columns of wounded n limping back from the front. They passed carts full of amputees, n without faces, n with bandaged eyes, n who shook and muttered and could no longer explain what they had seen. They passed fields where the dead had been dragged to the roadside like refuse so the living could keep marching.
Then as they began reaching the front, the front began to show them the true face of war.
By the sixteenth of September, Russian troops pushing toward Lublin no longer found the city they rembered.
The Lublin they had fled only a month earlier was gone.
In its place stood an unrecognizable hellscape of rubble, smoke, fire, and shattered stone. Whole districts had been blown apart. Streets had disappeared beneath bricks, beams, bodies, and broken carts. Historic churches, old towers, noble buildings, warehouses, hos, and governnt halls had collapsed into ruin. Where Russian units tried to seize intact ground, the last Black Legion rearguards blew it apart before them.
The city had beco a battlefield made from its own corpse.
Black Legion troops fought from hills of rubble and shattered walls. Platoon leaders stood with pistols and swords, yelling through smoke, laughing like madn when the Russians ca too close. Machine guns fired from broken upper floors. Grenades rolled down stairwells. Carbines cracked from behind collapsed masonry. Bayonets t blades in alleys filled with ash and rainwater. Fires burned in basents. Shells burst against half-standing buildings. n climbed over ruins only to be cut down on the far side.
The Russians sward forward like ants over a crushed nest.
The Black Legion killed them from the high ground until the high ground itself was blown apart.
In Białystok the defence held stronger due to Princess Tanya having heard of the struggle, she had sent part of the 1st Eternal Guard Company under Captain Conrad to oversee the destruction and stiffen the defense. There, as in Lublin, civilization was stripped away block by block. Anything useful to the Russians was burned, mined, collapsed, or smashed. The city was not surrendered.
It was unmade.
And slowly, the Russian Storm began to lose its force. Not because Russia lacked courage. Not because Russia lacked bodies.
But because the land it gained was a graveyard that gave nothing back. No food, hardly any clean water, no shelter from the rain or the coming winter, no safe roads to feed the armies and feed the advance.
Every kiloter had to be paid for in blood, and when it was taken, it offered only ash. The deeper the Russians pushed, the more exhausted they beca. Their artillery struggled through mud. Their supply lines lengthened. Their wounded clogged the roads. Their fresh recruits saw the dead and lost the fire that had brought them forward.
Still they pressed on.
At Šiauliai, the Russian Tenth Army achieved what should have been a triumph. Against all odds, it broke into the city.
But the victory was poisoned from the beginning.
Roml's 1st Armored Division and Seeckt's XVII Corps, having driven through Bauska, ca in from the east. From Königsberg, Manstein's forming 2nd Armored Division pressed into position. The Tenth Army, which had thought itself advancing, now found German armor moving toward its rear.
The noose began to close.
In the center and south, Black Legion forces continued falling back toward Warsaw, yielding ruined ground and poisoned prizes. In the north, the Black Legion fought to surround and destroy the Russian Tenth Army, then sweep south to recover what had been lost.
By the night of September seventeenth, the remnants of the Russian Second, Ninth, and Seventh Armies made one last desperate push.
They ant to strike deep into the German-occupied lands. They ant to prove the Black Legion could be broken. They ant, perhaps, to glimpse Warsaw.
But Warsaw remained far beyond them.
They saw only chimney smoke on the distant horizon.
Königsberg was even more impossible. Any illusion of reaching it died as the Russian Tenth Army buckled under the armored blows in the north. German tanks and armored trucks broke through its lines. Black Legion infantry began hunting down scattered formations in forests, villages, and roads, while the Russian command struggled to remain coherent.
Lieutenant General Vasily Egorovich Flug refused to yield easily.
At the front, he ordered his remaining n to split, scatter, and create maximum chaos. If the army could no longer win, then it would delay. It would bleed the Germans. It would force them to hunt every fragnt. Flug intended to prove that his German heritage ant nothing against his loyalty to the Russian Empire.
He would fight for Russia to the end.
On the seventeenth, the Russians suffered terribly.
More than fifty thousand n were lost in the fighting that day alone, including thousands of elite cavalry. At last, even the Russian advance had to halt.
And yet, in their own reports, the eighteenth of September would be marked as victory.
They had reclaid land. They had forced the Black Legion back. They had shown the world that Russia could still fight.
That was the story they would tell.
At Northwestern Front headquarters, however, no one was foolish enough to fully believe the victory they were preparing to announce.
Still, General Yakov Zhilinsky sent the good news to the capital anyway.
Russia, and especially Zhilinsky himself needed a victory.
So Russia would be given one.
Yet behind the words sent eastward, the situation remained dangerous. The northern flank was exposed. The Tenth Army was in crisis. The ground regained in the center and south was devastated, empty, and almost impossible to supply. Every kiloter taken from the Black Legion had been paid for in blood, and much of it offered nothing in return but ash, mud, ruins, and corpses.
And farther north, through the Baltics, a new danger was spreading.
Not rely a German advance, sothing stranger.
The Red Turban Legion was growing.
In official reports, the Russians called it a rebellion. A disturbance. A band of traitors, deserters, peasants, and German-fed collaborators.
But n at headquarters knew better than to dismiss it completely.
Because at the head of that so-called rebellion rode the Iron Prince himself.
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