The headquarters of the Northern Army Group was not a place of command, but a monument to despair. A miserable collection of commandeered farmhouses and half-frozen tents, hunkered down against the relentless Siberian wind near the Ussuri River, it reeked of defeat. A psychic frost, far colder than the one that silvered the barren trees, had settled over the camp. Discipline was lax, replaced by a sullen, listless apathy. Officers huddled in small, muttering groups, their conversations a toxic blend of blame and self-pity. The soldiers, leaderless and demoralized, simply tried to stay warm, the specter of their humiliating rout a constant, unseen companion.
Into this bleak tableau, Meng Tian arrived. He came not with the pomp and ceremony of a new supreme commander, but like a phantom, unannounced, accompanied only by the fifty silent, grey-clad figures of his White Foxes. They moved through the camp like ghosts, their presence a quiet, unnerving disruption to the camp's lethargy. The defeated soldiers and officers who saw them stopped what they were doing, their eyes wide with a mixture of confusion and dread. They did not see a savior in Meng Tian's cold, impassive face. They saw an executioner, a new broom sent from the capital to sweep away the debris of the old command.
Without a moment's delay, Meng Tian strode into the largest farmhouse, which served as the command center, and ordered a full council of all senior officers. They shuffled in, their faces grim, their uniforms rumpled. They stood before him in the flickering lamplight, a gallery of defeated men, bracing themselves for the purge they knew was coming.
One of the older generals, a veteran of the Japanese war named Chen, stepped forward. He began a long, rambling, and self-serving explanation of their failure, his voice a droning litany of excuses. He blamed the unexpectedly harsh weather, the treacherous terrain, the faulty maps, and, above all, the catastrophically flawed intelligence provided by the capital.
Meng Tian listened, his expression unchanging, his body perfectly still. After letting the general ramble for a full minute, he raised a single hand. The gesture was not dramatic, but it held an absolute, chilling authority that cut the man's words off mid-sentence.
"The past is a corpse," Meng Tian said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion, seeming to suck the warmth from the room. "We will not waste our time performing its autopsy. We will not be re-fighting the last battle."
He turned to his own men. Two of the White Foxes stepped forward and unrolled a massive, new map across the main campaign table. It was not a standard military map. It was a topographical chart of Eastern Siberia, and the most prominent features marked on it were not roads or cities, but the vast, intricate network of rivers and their tributaries that snaked through the wilderness like veins on a great, frozen hand.
"The Russian army expects us to follow the predictable patterns of warfare," Meng Tian announced, his voice a low, cold instrument. "They expect us to regroup, to spend the winter resupplying, and to attempt another clumsy, frontal assault in the spring, once the ground has thawed. We will do no such thing."
He picked up a long, thin pointer and traced a route on the map that made the assembled officers gasp. His line did not follow the railway. It followed the frozen artery of the Amur River, branching off onto the Zeya and Bureya, deep, deep into what was considered the impassable Russian rear.
"These," he said, tapping the blue lines of the rivers, "are not obstacles. In winter, they are highways. Smoother and faster than any road. We will mount our ten thousand most elite infantry on light, horse-drawn sledges. They will be equipped with skis for tactical mobility across the snowfields. We will strip them of every piece of non-essential equipment. We will move only under the cover of the winter's heaviest snowstorms, our movements masked from their cavalry scouts. We will travel at night. We will not engage their border forts. We will not attack their railway garrisons. We will flow around them, like water around stones. We will strike three hundred miles behind their main defensive line."
A stunned, horrified silence filled the room. This was not a military plan. This was madness. It was a logistical nightmare, a suicidal fever dream.
General Chen, the veteran who had been silenced moments before, found his voice again, sputtering with disbelief. "Marshal, this is impossible! Our men are not Mongols! They are not trained for arctic warfare! The supply lines… they would be stretched over hundreds of miles of frozen wasteland! A single unseasonable thaw, and our entire vanguard would be trapped, swallowed by the mud! It is a gamble with no chance of success!"
Another general chimed in. "The horses will die from the cold! We don't have enough fodder! The men will freeze!"
Meng Tian listened to each objection, his head tilted slightly, as if cataloging their fears. When they had finished, he turned his cold, empty gaze on General Chen.
"You are correct, General," he said softly. "It is a great risk. And you are a man who is clearly incapable of taking it." He turned to an aide. "General Chen is relieved of his command of the Second Corps, effective immediately. He will be reassigned to the rear echelon. His new duty will be to personally oversee the inventory and distribution of winter boots. A vital, but less demanding, role."
The public humiliation was absolute. General Chen's face went white, then a deep, mottled red. He opened his mouth to protest, but the look in Meng Tian's eyes silenced him. He was broken.
Meng Tian's gaze then swept across the remaining, terrified officers until it landed on a young, hungry-looking Colonel named Wei. He was a man with a reputation for daring, almost reckless, cross-border raids, a man the old guard considered an undisciplined upstart.
"Colonel Wei," Meng Tian said. "You are promoted to the rank of General and given command of the vanguard. The Ten Thousand Ghosts. Tell me. Do you see any problems with my plan?"
The terrified, ambitious Colonel, seeing his entire future laid bare in this single moment, snapped to attention so sharply his heels clicked. "No, Marshal!" he barked, his voice ringing with newfound conviction. "I see no problems! I see only victory for the Emperor!"
In a single, ruthless ten-minute meeting, Meng Tian had shattered the army's cautious, defeated command structure. He had swept away the old guard and replaced them with young, aggressive men who were loyal only to him and the impossible vision he had laid out. He was not interested in experience; he was interested in speed, aggression, and absolute, unquestioning obedience. He gave his own White Foxes command of the key shock troop battalions, creating a new spine of fanatical loyalty that ran through the entire army.
That afternoon, a series of brutal new standing orders were issued. Any soldier found carrying more than the bare minimum of personal effects—a single spare pair of socks, a bowl, and his weapons—would be flogged. Rations were cut to the most efficient, energy-dense minimum: dried meat, hardtack, and lard. They would become an army of ghosts, a frozen scythe, stripped of all comfort, all sentiment, all weakness.
That night, in the final briefing with his newly appointed commanders, Meng Tian revealed the true, terrifying scope of his plan. They were not just raiding a supply line to cause chaos. He pointed to a location on the map, a quiet sector of the Trans-Baikal region where Russian intelligence, which he had obtained through his own secret channels, showed three entire reserve armies—nearly one hundred thousand men—wintering in their barracks, believing themselves to be perfectly safe, hundreds of miles from any conceivable threat.
"Our objective," Meng Tian stated, his voice a chilling whisper that made the hairs on the back of every man's neck stand on end, "is the complete encirclement and annihilation of the Russian Second, Third, and Fifth Siberian Armies. We will not defeat them in honorable battle. We will surround them in their sleep. We will cut their single rail line of supply and retreat. We will trap them in the winter dark, and we will starve them into submission. We will not defeat them. We will erase them from the map."
The plan's true genius was now clear. He was not just launching a raid. He was bypassing the entire fortified Russian front to surgically remove the heart of their reserve strength, a blow from which they would be unable to recover.
The great offensive began not with the roar of cannons, but with the whisper of steel on ice. Under the thick, concealing cover of a raging blizzard, the Ten Thousand Ghosts moved out. Not in the grand, vulnerable columns of a traditional army, but in hundreds of small, fast-moving units, their horse-drawn sledges gliding silently over the frozen highways of the Amur and Zeya rivers. Dressed in white winter camouflage, they melted into the storm, invisible, unheard, a river of death flowing deep into the heart of an unsuspecting enemy.
The greatest, most audacious land battle of the 20th century had just begun. And it would be fought not with brute force, but with the cold, silent, and terrifying precision of a scythe's edge.