At dawn on the tenth of September, the Russians rose again.
They came out of the smoke and the ruined fields, from ditches, woods, villages, and every hollow where they had hidden through the night. They did not wait for the guns to prepare the way properly. They did not wait for food, ammunition, or reinforcements. The previous day had given them something more dangerous than supplies.
It had given them hope.
They had seen the Black Legion retreat. They had taken the first line. They had crossed fire, mines, wire, and burning earth, and still they were alive. So before that courage could cool, the officers drove them forward again.
Across ash-black fields and past villages still smoking from the German fires, the Russian armies moved toward the second defensive belt.
However, this time, the Black Legion did not mean to yield ground so easily.
Yet while the Eastern Front woke beneath ash, gunfire, and the cries of Russian armies moving toward the second defensive belt, the Western Front opened under a different kind of morning.
There, German aircraft rose in groups from their airbases and moved toward the front. Artillery began to speak. Infantry formations stirred again across roads, fields, villages, and ruined crossings. The great German advance, which by every old rule of war should have already exhausted itself, continued.
Against the combined strength of France, Britain, and Belgium, the German armies had pushed far beyond the Marne.
The advance was astonishing.
It was also dangerous.
In places, the Germans had driven over a hundred kilometers beyond the Marne river, forming a huge bulge between Paris and Verdun. While at the center Von Bülow's Second Army had pushed towards the town of Sens, and General von Hausen's Third Army had reached the outskirts of the town of Troyes. To the east, Verdun still held stubbornly under the French Third Army, while Prince Eitel Friedrich's Fifth Army battered at it without yet breaking through.
The Germans had gone far.
Perhaps too far.
The Marne crossings behind them were damaged or gone. Bridges that had stood for generations lay broken in the water, blown by French engineers in desperate attempts to slow the advance. Supplies still came forward, but slowly, painfully, over repaired crossings, muddy roads, and overstretched railheads. Food was not yet the problem, for the land they had taken was rich with farms, forests, wine, bread, and villages abandoned in haste. Unlike the Russians, the French had not burned their own country behind them.
Ammunition was another matter.
Shells did not grow in fields. Rifle cartridges could not be looted from vineyards. Fuel did not appear in village cellars beside old wine.
The German armies looked unstoppable from the outside, but their strength was more and more being stretched like a rope pulled close to snapping.
The French did not know that.
To them, the Germans seemed to be everywhere, advancing in strength no army should still possess after such a march. Yet much of that impression was illusion, born from German firepower rather than German numbers.
Machine guns. Armored trucks. Tanks. Aircraft. Artillery that answered too quickly. Infantry that moved with the confidence of men who expected the enemy to break first.
These things made small German units appear far larger than they truly were, and fear did the rest. A detachment became a regiment in rumor. A single armored truck became the first vehicle of some vast mechanized column. Every aircraft overhead made the open roads feel watched by God Himself.
France was not defeated.
Not yet.
But it was close to breaking.
The government had fled. Paris had emptied. Civilians poured west and south in endless streams, until the roads seemed less like roads than rivers of people. If Paris and the villages around it were counted together, more than three million souls had either fled or been ordered away from the line of battle.
The capital, once loud with life, had become a hollow city of barricades, soldiers, smoke, and fear.
German bombs had helped make it so.
For almost a month, Paris had been learning what it meant to live beneath German aircraft.
The H-1 bombers had not destroyed the city. Paris was too vast for that. But they had struck at its nerves again and again: rail yards, factories, depots, barracks, roads, forts, and industrial districts. The damage was uneven, but the fear was not. To the people of 1914, those twin-engined machines were not merely aircraft. They were the future arriving overhead with explosives in its belly.
Now that future had reached the gates.
On the northeastern side of Paris, Fort de l'Est at Saint-Denis and Fort d'Aubervilliers flew Imperial German flags. They had fallen during the night of the eighth of September, not to some grand army, but to speed, shock, damaged walls, thin garrisons, and the reckless imagination of Ronald Tolkien.
To the Entente, he was a traitor.
To the Germans, increasingly, he was something else.
An Englishman reborn in spirit as a German, a writer with too much imagination and just enough courage to make that imagination dangerous. He was not a general. He was not even a proper commander in the old sense. But he had understood something simple: if Paris was struck hard enough, France would be forced to look away from the rest of the front.
With Lieutenant Egon von Kluck's support, with the borrowed authority of Crown Prince Oskar's name, and with a handful of armored trucks and motorcycles, Tolkien had gathered five understrength companies from forward elements of the First Army's II Corps. Two companies remained behind to hold the captured forts and guard the flanks. Three pushed onward into the northeastern edge of Paris.
Less than a thousand men in all.
They had broken through farther than anyone had expected.
Too far, perhaps.
Behind them, the captured forts still fired when they could. French guns, now turned by German hands, threw shells into the city, breaking roofs, smashing façades, and scattering stone across streets that had already been emptied of civilians. The two armored trucks Tolkien had dragged into the operation sat near the German-held buildings, their machine guns still covering the boulevard, but no longer in long, proud bursts. Ammunition was too low for that now. They fired in short, careful rattles, conserving belts that were almost gone.
Ahead of them lay Paris.
And Paris had not surrendered.
The French Sixth Army had rushed back into the threatened sectors with the help of the famous taxi cabs, a maneuver bold enough to deserve admiration and desperate enough to reveal the truth. General Maunoury had tried to use that same speed to strike at the German flanks beyond the city, but daylight made movement deadly. Taxis in columns became targets. Infantry in open fields became targets. Roads full of men became invitations to German aircraft and artillery.
So the French had been forced to change.
They moved by night, through rain, through gardens, alleys, courtyards, bushes, and broken walls. It humiliated them. The French Army still believed in courage, attack, and the bayonet. Many officers wanted nothing more than to gather their men, cross the street in a single roaring rush, and throw the Germans out by steel and spirit.
But the sky would not allow it.
The moment men gathered in mass, bombs found them. The moment a column formed, fighters came down upon it. Even inside Paris, where the buildings offered cover, aircraft still plunged low over boulevards and dropped bombs among barricades, rooflines, and French-held blocks. The French did not lack courage. If anything, they had too much of it. What they lacked was the freedom to use it as they had been taught.
They had even begun dragging strange anti-aircraft contraptions into the streets: coupled Maxim guns bolted to movable frames, heavy and awkward, aimed upward by sweating crews whenever German aircraft came too low. They were crude, clumsy, and rarely effective.
But they were something.
The French air arm over Paris had, for the moment, all but vanished. No one wished to waste the few remaining aircraft by feeding them into the German fighters. The war above the city belonged to Germany.
The streets below did not.
Ronald Tolkien knew almost none of the wider situation.
He did not know that the British Expeditionary Force and the Belgians were pressing from the north against von Kluck's already thin flank. He did not know that French forces were probing and attacking from the south, searching for weak seams in the German line. He did not know that the First Army had no real reserves to throw after him, no neat column of fresh infantry waiting to exploit his breakthrough, no mass of tanks ready to roll into Paris behind him.
He knew only the hotel, the boulevard, the French bullets, and the Eiffel Tower in the distance.
By the morning of the tenth of September, Tolkien and his men held a large hotel on the northeastern heights of Paris. Once, it had been respectable, perhaps even elegant in a modest way, serving travelers, merchants, and officials moving between the outer districts and the city proper. Now its windows were broken, its carpets torn by boots and glass, its walls scarred by bullets, its upper floors turned into firing positions.
From near the top, through smoke and dust, Tolkien could see the Eiffel Tower less than ten kilometers away.
It looked close enough to touch.
It looked like the end of the war.
And yet between him and that prize lay a boulevard full of death.
The French held the buildings opposite. Blue coats and red trousers flashed behind shattered windows, barricades, doorways, and piles of stone. Lebel rifles cracked from every angle. Whenever the French tried to rush the open street, German machine guns cut them down before they reached bayonet range. Whenever the Germans tried to cross, French fire forced them back just as quickly.
So both sides remained trapped, shooting through dust, smoke, and broken glass.
Tolkien crouched beside a shattered window, rifle in hand, as another bomb fell somewhere ahead. The boulevard jumped. A French-held building spat brick and flame. Men screamed through the smoke. For one wild moment, the way seemed open.
Then the firing began again.
French rifles cracked from the haze.
A machine gun hammered from behind a barricade.
Tolkien muttered a curse under his breath and looked down into the street. Bodies lay where the last rush had failed. Two crows worked at one corpse with grim professionalism. Near them, absurdly, a peacock wandered through the wreckage, offended by the noise and apparently determined to understand nothing.
Tolkien decided he had no desire to join the dead below.
He turned from the window and shouted into the stairwell.
"Status!"
The answers came back from below, floor by floor, voices echoing up through the damaged hotel.
"Second floor, yellow!"
"Third floor, yellow!"
"Grenades red!"
"Machine-gun belts yellow!"
"Fourth floor, black on carbine ammunition!"
"Medic says two dressings left!"
Yellow meant low.
Red meant almost gone.
Black meant empty.
The hotel was turning yellow and red around him.
Some men were already sharing clips. Others had picked up French rifles from the dead and were learning, awkwardly and angrily, how to keep them firing. The grenadier had only a few rounds left. The machine gunners were counting bursts. The armored trucks outside could no longer sweep the boulevard properly, only spit short rattles at windows and barricades.
"Bollocks," Tolkien whispered.
They had done it.
That was what maddened him.
They had taken the forts. They had punched into Paris. They had opened a wound in the greatest city in France. All that was needed now was for the army to arrive in strength and force the cut open.
So where was it?
Where were the reinforcements?
Where were the supply trucks?
Where were the tanks?
He did not know the cruel answer.
There were none to spare.
Von Kluck's First Army was fighting for its own flanks, its own roads, its own ammunition. The German machine looked enormous from the French side of the barricades, but at the point of the spear it had become terribly thin. Tolkien had not opened a door for an army waiting behind him.
He had outrun the army.
Above the boulevard, another German aircraft screamed low, one of Hilary's companions perhaps, or another pilot sent to keep the French heads down. It strafed the far buildings, bullets stitching along windows and rooflines. From somewhere below came the harsh chatter of the French coupled Maxim guns, firing wildly upward. The aircraft banked away, apparently unharmed.
Good, Tolkien thought. Good, but sadly aircraft could not hold buildings.
Bombs could not carry ammunition up staircases.
Fighters could not clear cellars with bayonets.
He needed men, lots of men, and probably tanks as well.
He needed the army.
Then a voice shouted from the lower floors, echoing up through the stairwell.
"Friendly reinforcements from the northeast! They've got armor!"
For one bright second, Tolkien almost cheered.
He leaned toward the stairwell, heart suddenly lifting.
"How many?"
There was a pause below.
Too long a pause.
Then the answer came back.
"Five men, sir! Maybe six! And one tank!"
His hope rose, struck the ceiling, and died there.
One tank.
Five men.
That was not reinforcement.
That was a prayer with tracks.
Tolkien closed his eyes for half a second, swallowed the curse rising in his throat, and looked again toward the smoke-veiled shape of the Eiffel Tower in the distance.
One tank was not an army.
But trapped in a Paris hotel, with ammunition running low, Frenchmen pressing from every street, and the end of the war still glittering just beyond reach, one tank was all Ronald Tolkien had.