On the Western Front, millions of men were already locked in battle, but there, at least, the armies met one another in numbers that could still be called equal.
On the Eastern Front, the Black Legion faced something older, stranger, and far more mythic.
It was the kind of imbalance that belonged less to modern war than to the old epics: the Spartans at Thermopylae holding the pass against Persia, or Admiral Yi Sun-sin at Myeongnyang in 1597, when thirteen Korean ships defied a Japanese fleet many times their size in the violent waters of the strait.
The old stories had grown with the telling. No ancient army truly faced the endless millions claimed by frightened tongues and heroic songs.
But even stripped of myth, the numbers now before the Black Legion were terrible enough.
One German army, roughly a little over one hundred and eighty thousand men.
Against five Russian armies, of which one had been driven back in the battle for Riga.
Yet even still in places, the odds reached ten to one.
Sometimes more.
The front was so vast and the numbers so massive, that even placed on maps it was hard to comprehend the scale of it all. Across that immense front came what the men in Warsaw had begun calling the Russian Storm: four great Russian armies hammering westward through ash-covered fields, ruined villages, burned roads, and smoke-stained country.
All through the ninth and now the tenth of September, that Russian storm battered the Black Legion's defensive lines. Now even threatening cities such as Šiauliai, Kovno, Białystok, and Lublin.
Names that had once meant little to most men inside the military headquarters in Warsaw were now spoken with tight mouths by Hindenburg, Ludendorff, and their staff officers. Villages that had never mattered suddenly mattered because men were dying there. Farm roads became vital because the mass of Russia could move down them. Bridges wherever they still stood, and river crossing points wherever they were, suddenly became precious enough to mark and name on maps.
Across the flat lands of eastern Poland battle raged, and each passing hour hundreds or even thousands died. The Russian dead piled before the Black Legion's defensive lines, but the enemy continued to come, and under that pressure the German line bent.
But it did not break.
Not yet.
That was the blessing of the Black Legion's structure. Its divisions did not wait helplessly for every order from Warsaw. Local commanders could request supplies, shift guns, adjust positions, and coordinate with neighboring formations as the fight demanded. The line could flex nearly in real-time without strict timetables. It could yield a field, hold a road, abandon a village, reinforce a bridge, and still remain alive.
In Warsaw, the situation grew more complicated by the hour.
On the front, it grew more brutal.
By the evening of the tenth, rain clouds were moving in from the west. The ground that had burned the day before now threatened to become mud. The ash fields, blasted roads, and broken villages would soon turn into a wet bog, harder for masses of men to cross—but also harder for German trucks, armored cars, and supply columns to use. Worse still, heavy rain and lightning threatened to blind or ground the aircraft that had punished the Russian columns thus far.
The second line still held, exhausted but intact, its forward scenery carpeted with Russian dead. Yet every man in command understood what the night might bring.
But for the moment during the evening of the tenth of September, there was a pause.
The Black Legion had killed in numbers that would have broken lesser armies, but the Russians were not broken. They had tasted success and they wanted more. So now, with darkness and rain approaching, Russian commanders prepared to strike again beneath a sky where German aircraft would see less and kill less.
Hindenburg and Ludendorff were already planning for what would happen if the second belt failed.
Yet amid the grim reports, there was one great relief for the Legion.
Earlier that day, on the tenth of September, Riga had fallen. The city was German-held. Although quite broken, burning in part's still, with bloodied street's, but held nonetheless.
Riga Castle was secure. The bridge over the Western Dvina remained standing. The port was damaged but useful, and the Russian first army was in flight.
Meanwhile in the Gulf of Riga, Prince Heinrich's Baltic Fleet had begun its next movement. Marines were returning to landing craft. Supplies were being sorted. The fleet's attention turned north and west toward the great islands guarding the gulf: Ösel, Dagö, and Moon—known in later tongues as Saaremaa, Hiiumaa, and Muhu.
If those islands fell, the Russian sea defenses would weaken. The Baltic would open further. The long road toward Saint Petersburg would grow a little less impossible.
Oskar understood that.
He also understood that Riga had become more than a captured city.
Through the early morning and late into the day, German cameramen and war correspondents had followed him through smoke, ruins, and cheering soldiers. They photographed him standing in the town square, helmet under his left arm, the Imperial German flag in his right armored hand, Shadowmane behind him, and the broken structures of Riga rising in the background.
They photographed him speaking not only to Black Legion troops, but to local men wearing red cloth around their heads—men who had been Russian soldiers, militiamen, dockworkers, peasants, fugitives, and poor laborers only hours before.
Now they had begun calling themselves the Chosen. Because their Great Master the Prince of Iron, had chosen them.
Worst of all, to Oskar's mind, were Jonas Kazlauskas, Jānis Ozols, and Father Nikolai. The three had become almost too eager to spread his word, especially after witnessing Oskar kneel before a man with a broken leg, seize the limb in both armored hands, and snap it back into place with one brutal, precise motion. The man had screamed, wept, and then, impossibly, stood again with only limping pain.
To Oskar, it was battlefield first aid.
To them, it was a miracle.
They had seen his strength before. Everyone had. But now they also saw intelligence, skill, and—most dangerous of all—compassion. He was not merely a butcher in black armor. He tended the wounded. He spoke to the frightened. He remembered names. He fought with his men and then cared for them afterward.
A true ruler, they whispered.
A master worthy of obedience.
Oskar had never meant to become that to them.
He was not trying to build a shrine around himself. He was not trying to become a saint, a prophet, or some blood-soaked idol for frightened men to kneel before. He was simply sick of the killing. Sick of nations feeding boys into guns. Sick of flags, crowns, priests, borders, and old hatreds demanding fresh corpses every generation.
More than anything, he wanted to bind men beneath one rule so that, perhaps one day, mankind might stop tearing itself apart over names on maps.
Yet in trying to end the killing, he had begun to speak in dangerous ways.
More than once, in the smoke and blood and madness of Riga, he had allowed himself to sound like something more than a man. He had spoken as judge, savior, master, and executioner. He had offered life with one hand and death with the other. And the men who heard him had looked upon him with the kind of reverence he had never wanted.
He did not want worship.
He did not want men whispering prayers around his name.
He did not want to become another idol standing above the same broken world he claimed he meant to change.
But he understood the power of it.
And so he did not deny it. Not fully. Not now.
If frightened, ignorant, desperate men needed him to be something greater than human before they would stop dying for nothing, then he would wear that shape for a time.
He would hate himself for it later.
But for now, if becoming their master was the price of ending the slaughter, then so be it.
These men after all were not philosophers. Many could not read. Many had never traveled beyond their villages, towns, or districts. Aircraft were demons to them. Tanks were iron beasts. Radios were magic. Even deserts, mountain's, and distant climates were abstractions beyond anything they had seen with their own eyes.
To such men, modern war had arrived like the apocalypse. And then Oskar had arrived inside that apocalypse.
Not as a distant sovereign glimpsed only on church walls, postage stamps, coins, portraits, and official proclamations. Not like the Tsar, that faraway "Little Father" whom generations of peasants had been taught to imagine as holy, merciful, and almost above ordinary mankind—a ruler anointed by God, standing between Russia and chaos.
But by 1914, that old image had begun to rot.
Too many rumors had spread. Too many failures had gathered. Too many men knew of court scandals, weak ministers, Rasputin whispering near the throne, the sickness of the heir whom used German safety gear due to a fear of constant death, and the strange German-born Empress whom many common people did not trust. The Tsar remained sacred in prayer and ritual, but to many he had also become distant, hidden, uncertain—a holy father no one could touch, no one could question, and no one could see standing beside them in the mud.
Oskar was different.
Oskar was there in the flesh. Over two meters of black armor, blood, power, voice, and presence.
He fought at the front. He killed at the front. He stood among smoke, screams, and splintered stone with gore on his vast armored form, while his black steed breathed steam behind him like a beast from the end of days. Then, when the fighting paused, he did not vanish into a palace or behind a curtain of ministers. He spoke to them himself. He judged them himself. He made them kneel himself. He offered death with one hand and life with the other.
For men raised to believe that rulers were semi-holy beings, Oskar looked more like what a ruler was supposed to be than the Tsar ever had.
The Tsar was far away.
Oskar stood before them.
He was so tall that men had to look up to meet his eyes. His voice carried over streets and squares with the force of command. His words promised wisdom, purpose, land, food, women, pay, citizenship, and survival. Some listened because they believed. Some listened because they feared. Some listened because the old world had given them nothing, and the blood-covered giant before them seemed to promise everything.
Whatever the reason, they listened.
White armbands became red.
Red cloths became turbans.
Turbans became banners.
The Red Turban Legion, born in churches and streets during the fall of Riga, now marched behind Oskar's shadow.
Of course, not all joined.
When Oskar had called into buildings held by Russian soldiers, some answered with curses. Some spat at his offers. Some fired until he broke in, and then, rather than face him, turned rifles or pistols upon themselves. Some surrendered but refused the cloth. Some priests denounced him as a heretic, a deceiver
Those who refused were driven out.
Oskar's home rule took effect with brutal simplicity. Men who accepted him could remain as guests and servants of his new order. Men who refused, especially fighting aged men, were exiled. Women and girls remained under protection.
It was harsh.
It was practical.
It was nation-building with a sword still wet in its hand.
The Red Turbans cheered as the defeated were driven out of the city without arms or supplies, stumbling away like bands of beggars. Oskar watched it happen and felt the ugliness of it, but he did not stop it.
Not now.
There was no time for softness.
So it was that by noon on the tenth of September, Oskar placed General Paul von Rennenkampf in Riga Castle as governor of the new northern Baltic Kingdom — a vassal kingdom Oskar had no formal right to create, yet created anyway.
Its domain began north of the Western Dvina, where the first shape of a Baltic client kingdom formed under German protection. South of the river, Oskar's direct German military administration remained.
Berlin had not approved it.
The Kaiser had not signed it.
But Oskar held the land, he had the money, the army, the fleet, the cameras, the prestige, and the moment.
So he acted, and kept much of what happened in the east censored, softened, or hidden from the capital.
By noon of the tenth of September, Riga was firmly under Black Legion control.
Of course he was not so blind as to trust the Red Turbans to stand alone. Not yet. Against a real Russian army, they would break. So Oskar would lead them north himself, gathering more men as he moved, while Prince Heinrich's fleet seized the islands and opened the coast.
At the same time, the real German hammer moved south.
Rommel's First Armored Division and Seeckt's XVII Corps were released from Riga and ordered toward the greater battle. Any remaining aircraft were redirected from the city to the front. From Königsberg, the forming Second Armored Division, under Erich von Manstein moved towards Šiauliai into place. Oskar's intention was clear: the south would bend and bleed, but the north would strike.
The Russian Tenth Army, pressing westward towards Šiauliai, would soon find German armor not merely before it, but moving toward its rear at Bauska.
It would not be quick or clean. It might take weeks of rain, mud, villages, roads, rivers, and blood.
But the idea was simple enough. Hold in the south and strike from the north.
And while the Black Legion contained the Russian Storm, Oskar would creep further north through the Baltic, converting, exiling, organizing, and opening the road toward Saint Petersburg.
But for now, in the south, beneath the first cold breath of evening rain, the Russian Second Army gathered before the wetlands east of Lublin. Where marsh and mud guarded the approaches better than any wall, François's I Corps would have to hold alone.
The armored divisions were far to the north as was Oskar.
There would be no sudden salvation from the sky, no black-armored giant riding out of the storm, no steel fist arriving in time to break the enemy's momentum.
Only the wetlands, the wire, guns and the men behind them waited there.
Thus as the tenth of September died beneath a closing sky. Clouds rolled in from the west, swallowing moon and stars until the land became a black waste of rain, water, ash, and unseen bodies. Thunder moved over the front like drums beneath the earth. Lightning flashed, and for a heartbeat at a time the marshes appeared: silver water, black reeds, broken trees, and beyond them, the faint rising shapes of men.
Then the Russian guns opened up in short controlled bursts of fire.
The horizon flickered. The earth shook. Shells fell among the German wire and shallow trenches, throwing mud and water into the dark. Then, as lightning split the clouds above Lublin, the Russian Storm rose from the night.
Thousands upon thousands of men surged forward through rain and marsh, their bayonets glinting white in the flashes, their boots sinking into the wet earth, their officers shouting them onward.
Then came the cry.
"Ura! Uraa! Uraaa!"
It rolled across the wetlands like thunder made of human throats, vast enough to tremble through the air and carry for kilometres into the dark.
And in the second defensive line, the Black Legionaries of the I Corps waited alone.
Rain ran down smooth helmets, black masks, shoulder plates, rifles, machine-gun shields, and gloved hands. Men crouched behind wire and mud, silent as the enemy came on and explosions shook their line. For one flash of lightning, the Russians appeared before them in a single dark mass.
Then the guns of François's I Corps erupted in fire, and the marshes flashed white beneath the storm as if dawn itself had been dragged screaming into midnight.
And the night broke.