Far from the palace halls, in the early morning hours of the 4th of September, 1914, high above the Western Front and not far from Paris, five German fighter aircraft moved through a pale sea of cloud and smoke.
They were older F-1 fighters, biplanes of an earlier generation, their twin wings braced by struts and wire, their narrow bodies built from wood, canvas, and German precision. In shape and spirit they seemed almost to belong to a later age—sturdy, ugly, and dangerous. Their frames were painted a hard military grey, black Iron Crosses standing stark upon wings and tails, while at the nose of each machine, just behind the spinning propeller, sat twin synchronized machine guns timed to fire through the blur of the blades without striking them. Their engines snarled steadily through the cold morning air, and inside each open cockpit sat a pilot dressed no longer like one of the fragile flying enthusiasts of an earlier age, but like a true airman of war: grey leather flight coat, gloves, fitted cap and goggles, breathing apparatus, parachute harness, sidearm, and radio headset.
And in one of those cockpits sat Ronald Tolkien.
He was no mere passenger in this war, nor some reluctant observer swept unwillingly into the sky. He had chosen this. He and his brother both had. When the war began, it had not been only the speeches that moved them, though those had mattered greatly. Oskar's words, and those of the men around him, had made the conflict sound like something far greater than a quarrel between states. This was not some petty border war or dynastic dispute, but a struggle that would decide the fate of nations and perhaps even civilization itself. Ronald had believed it. Above all, he had believed that Germany—and Oskar—had to prevail.
Yet speeches alone had not driven the brothers into uniform. They had watched the war begin with their own eyes. They had seen Oskar ride out in black armour like a knight from some older and fiercer world, mounted upon the vast black beast that was Shadowmane. They had watched German soldiers march through streets beneath flags and cheers, while mothers, sisters, and wives called after them, brothers clapped them upon the shoulders, flowers were pushed into rifle barrels, and songs rose through railway stations and along the roads leading east and west. There had been something intoxicating in it all—not joy exactly, and not madness either, but a solemn exaltation, the strange sensation that history itself had opened before them and demanded witnesses.
Ronald had known, just as Hilary had known, that remaining behind would feel wrong. How could he sit comfortably at a desk writing tales of courage, sacrifice, beauty, sorrow, and war while other men went out and bled for the nation he had come to call his own? How could he write of heroes if he had never tested himself, never heard the guns, never looked death in the face? Germany had given him and his brother shelter, dignity, work, education, purpose, and a future. It had given him Edith. It had given him a life, and to Ronald that meant obligation.
So the brothers had joined.
Not the infantry—never that. Their education, language skills, and position within Oskar's circle had carried them elsewhere, upward into the air service. After training, several short reconnaissance flights, and enough missions to strip away the first foolish shine of war, here they were now: two young men in German grey, flying through the dawn on another mission above the Marne.
Ronald could feel the ring beneath his glove, the band Edith had given him pressing reassuringly against his finger. Somehow it grounded him more securely than the harness holding him inside the aircraft.
Far below the clouds, the earth was already awake with killing. Fields, villages, farm roads, copses of trees, and low ridges passed beneath them, half swallowed by smoke and morning mist. Artillery flashes leapt across the distance in bursts of orange and white, and here and there fires were already burning. German troops were pushing once again toward the Marne, trying to force crossings and break through before the enemy could fully stabilize. Somewhere beyond, hidden intermittently beneath cloud and smoke, lay Paris.
One of the pilots ahead suddenly gave the signal, and Ronald peered through a gap in the cloud layer.
Enemy aircraft.
Not one formation, but three. One group angled north, another held the centre, and the third moved southward, twelve machines in each, all climbing into the sky when by every sensible calculation they should have remained upon the ground. The French had already lost the air in any meaningful sense. They should have known better, and yet there they were again, rising stubbornly into German-controlled skies, whether through desperation, courage, or sheer refusal to surrender them.
Ronald's headset crackled, and the squadron leader's voice came through thick with confidence.
"Ha! Seems the French are getting desperate. No matter. It won't last long. Tolkien brothers, sweep the northern formation. We'll take the centre. Then we regroup and bring down the last. Don't let them get near our boys on the ground."
The pilots acknowledged the order one after another.
"Yes, sir."
Then Hilary's voice followed, clipped and focused.
"Yes, sir."
Instinctively, Ronald thumped his fist once against his chest in the old salute, though nobody could possibly see him do it. A moment later the formation divided cleanly. The squadron leader and the others drove toward the central group while Ronald and Hilary peeled northward, engines snarling as they tipped their wings and dropped through the clouds.
The freezing wind screamed around Ronald's cockpit as the brothers descended. Below them, the twelve French aircraft still held formation, their pilots either blind to the danger above or simply too slow to recognize it. They had risen once more into a sky they no longer controlled, and for a few final seconds remained completely unaware that death was already diving toward them.
Hilary's voice crackled through the headset.
"One pass through. Pull up. Then we come around again. I take left."
"Understood," Ronald replied. "I take right."
None of the French pilots looked up in time as Ronald and Hilary came out of the clouds like hawks.
Ronald squeezed the triggers, and his twin machine guns erupted in a savage rattling burst. The recoil shivered through the entire frame as bullets slashed downward into the first French machine. Canvas vanished in strips, spars splintered, and the entire right wing tore free from the fuselage. For the briefest instant Ronald glimpsed the pilot pitching sideways inside the shattered cockpit before the aircraft rolled over and dropped from formation, already nothing more than wreckage falling toward the earth.
He shifted his aim almost instantly and fired again.
The second aircraft took the burst through the cockpit and forward frame. Struts snapped, fabric burst outward, and the whole machine seemed to crumple in the air before falling away with one wing folding beneath it.
To Ronald's left, Hilary was proving even deadlier. His first burst tore through the upper frame of one machine and sent it disintegrating downward as though its bones had been cut from within. His second target caught fire through the engine, the propeller shattering as flame swept backward along the fuselage. A third Frenchman attempted to bank away, but too late; Hilary's guns ripped through half the wing and sent the aircraft spinning violently downward in a trail of fragments.
In only a handful of heartbeats, five aircraft were gone.
Twelve had become seven.
Only as the German fighters tore past beneath them did the surviving French pilots fully understand what had happened. Their formation dissolved almost at once. Some climbed too sharply, others broke downward, while several swerved so blindly that they nearly collided with one another before the Germans had even begun their second attack.
Ronald pulled hard upon the stick and sent his fighter climbing. The engine strained as he dragged the machine upward through smoke and open sky, the earth falling away beneath him while he banked sharply around. The entire aircraft shuddered under the combined strain of speed and pressure, but it obeyed.
Behind him, what remained of the northern French group had lost all resemblance to a formation. Seven frightened aircraft scattered across the sky, each pilot now concerned only with survival.
Hilary's voice returned through the headset, remarkably calm amid the chaos.
"Brother, take the right. I'll take the rest left."
"Copy that," Ronald answered.
They dove again.
This time the French saw them coming, but seeing danger was not the same thing as escaping it. Several desperate pilots even raised pistols from their open cockpits and fired upward, tiny flashes of hopeless courage against the diving German fighters.
Ronald's machine guns answered first.
He caught another aircraft at close range, the rounds chewing through frame and cockpit together. The machine lurched beneath the impact, slipped suddenly to one side, and then sagged from the sky, its pilot no longer fighting the controls.
Then Ronald saw movement ahead and slightly above. Another French aircraft was coming directly toward him.
The pilot had half risen from his cockpit, one hand raised with a pistol, his face twisted into a mask of fury and resolve. His mouth opened around words Ronald could never have heard through the howl of wind and engines, yet the shape of them was unmistakable even at a distance.
Vive la France.
Ronald understood at once. The Frenchman was not trying to shoot him down. He was trying to ram him.
"What—" Ronald gasped. "You crazy French bastard—!"
He wrenched at the controls, but too late.
The two machines struck in a shrieking explosion of wood, steel, wire, and canvas. Ronald felt the world snap violently sideways as one of his wings tore away almost at once. The collision smashed through the frame, rattled his teeth together, drove something painfully into his shoulder, and sent the control stick kicking madly beneath his grip.
His aircraft no longer answered him. It began to spin. The earth rushed upward beneath him in a sickening spiral of cratered fields, smoke, and distant artillery flashes. Ronald fought the controls purely from instinct, hauling upon the stick and kicking the pedals in a desperate effort to force the broken fighter level, but there was no aircraft left to command. The machine was dead. Only gravity and momentum remained.
He had seconds, perhaps less.
Training returned in jagged flashes: Do not wait too long. Unbuckle. Get clear of the aircraft. Pull only once you are clear of the tail.
His fingers slipped across the straps once, then again, before finally tearing them loose. Freezing air struck him with astonishing violence as he hauled himself from the ruined cockpit and threw himself into empty sky.
For one terrible instant, Ronald was simply falling.
Then he pulled the parachute release.
The pack burst open, but not properly. The canopy twisted as it emerged, several lines snagging badly enough to send him spinning rather than arresting the fall cleanly. Sky and earth blurred together into a nauseating whirl of pale cloud, smoke, and scarred countryside.
Ronald forced himself to remember his training.
Turn with it. Don't fight it the wrong way. Open your body. Correct.
He kicked his legs, shifted his weight, and dragged at the tangled lines with hands that scarcely seemed willing to obey him. Slowly, painfully, the rotation began to ease.
Then the parachute snapped open properly. The sudden jerk nearly tore his arms from their sockets.
Ronald sucked in a ragged breath and hung there for several seconds, stunned by the simple realization that he was still alive. Only then did his mind begin working again.
Below, his fighter continued its final descent. It struck the earth beyond a shell crater in a sharp, ugly explosion, one wing already gone and the remaining wreckage smashing itself apart in a burst of smoke and fragments.
The French machine was coming down as well. Flames streamed backward from it as it fell almost beneath Ronald's descending path, plunging into a vast shell crater and vanishing in a violent eruption of mud, smoke, and shattered canvas.
Ronald twisted in the harness and looked desperately across the battlefield.
To his right, some distance away, lay the German lines. To his left—and far too close for comfort—were the French.
Then Ronald looked straight down.
He was descending almost perfectly between them.
"Oh, no," he whispered.
Ronald hauled desperately at the parachute lines, trying to force himself toward the German side, but there was too little wind and far too little time. The earth rushed up beneath him through a confusion of smoke, torn grass, mud, and shell holes, growing with horrifying speed until there was no longer any question of steering himself anywhere. He could only brace for impact and hope whatever waited below would not kill him.
He struck hard, dropping into a vast shell crater that opened beneath him like a wound in the earth. Ronald slammed against the muddy slope, rolled violently, and half slid, half tumbled through wet clay before crashing into the basin below, where stagnant brown water had gathered among the wreckage. He splashed through it and rolled again as the parachute collapsed around him, its wet silk and tangled lines wrapping themselves across his arms and legs like something determined to drag him back down. For several frantic seconds he fought blindly against it before finally tearing himself free and scrambling upright, soaked through, panting, and still too stunned to understand how little of him actually seemed broken.
The crater was enormous, the scar of some heavy shell that had bitten deeply into the battlefield and left nothing clean behind. Brown water covered part of the bottom while the exposed slopes rose around him in walls of raw clay and mud, slick enough to steal a man's footing and hold him there once he fell. Smoke drifted across the rim in slow grey sheets, alternately revealing and concealing the pale morning sky, and through it came the distant muttering of artillery like thunder too exhausted to stop.
Then Ronald heard movement.
He turned sharply and saw, on the opposite side of the crater beside the shattered remains of a French aircraft half buried in the mud, another figure stirring. The French pilot had survived as well, though scarcely. He lay twisted against the crater wall as if he had somehow escaped the wreck only to be hurled bodily into the clay. One arm was bent at an angle no arm should take, while both legs disappeared beneath torn cloth and wreckage in a way that told Ronald immediately that the man would not be walking anywhere. His face was pale beneath mud and sweat, every breath visibly hurting him, but his eyes remained open.
For a moment Ronald simply stared. Whatever had happened in the sky was finished now, surely. Down here they were no longer machines trying to tear one another apart but two men who had fallen from the heavens into the same hole in the earth. It seemed absurd, suddenly, to continue. Perhaps the Frenchman could be helped. Perhaps he could be taken prisoner and somehow dragged toward safety, assuming safety still existed anywhere within kilometres of this place.
"Hey!" Ronald called across the crater. "You still breathing?"
The Frenchman looked at him, and whatever foolish hope Ronald had entertained died immediately. Pain and hatred twisted together across the man's face as his teeth bared and his eyes sharpened with sudden purpose. With sheer fury drawing strength from a body that ought to have possessed none, he began fumbling at his side for a pistol.
Ronald's stomach dropped. "Oh, shit."
His hand went instinctively to his own holster and found it empty. The pistol must have been torn away during the fall. Panic surged through him for an instant before his hand dropped toward his boot and closed around the knife strapped there. He ripped it free just as the wounded Frenchman managed to drag his weapon another few inches upward.
Ronald did not stop to think. He drew back his arm and threw.
There was nothing graceful about it, nothing resembling the clean precision of drill. It was fear, speed, instinct, and training acting before thought had time to interfere. Yet by the grace of God the knife struck home, the blade driving into the Frenchman's chest hard enough to jerk his body backward and tear a cry from his throat.
He still did not release the pistol.
Ronald swore and lunged across the crater. His boots slipped in the mud as the first shot cracked past his side, and a second snapped over his head just as he threw himself forward. Then he struck the pilot full on, driving them both into the clay while the pistol discharged again somewhere beside Ronald's ear, the shot vanishing uselessly into the smoke above them.
Ronald grabbed for the weapon and missed, then managed to catch the Frenchman's wrist. The man snarled and struck awkwardly with his ruined arm, catching Ronald across the face with more desperation than strength. Ronald shoved back, one knee sinking deep into the mud as he fought for leverage, one hand clamped around the pistol wrist while the other drove down upon the man's shoulder and neck.
"Give it up!" Ronald shouted into his face. "Just give it up!"
But the Frenchman would not.
Broken though he was, he fought with the blind fury of an animal that understood death had already entered the room and intended only to choose how it met him. His fingers remained locked around the pistol as though that little weapon were the final possession left to him, and Ronald was forced to bear down harder, forcing him lower into the mud while trying desperately to wrench the gun away before another shot found his stomach, chest, or throat.
The pistol fired again into the earth beside them, sending wet clay against Ronald's cheek, and then discharged once more into the crater wall. By then Ronald's breathing had become ragged and animal, his thoughts reduced to almost nothing. There was no Frenchman, no war, no honour, no country—only a hand with a pistol and the certainty that if he loosened his grip for even an instant he might die.
So he pushed harder.
The Frenchman thrashed beneath him, violently at first and then with less strength as the seconds passed. Ronald barely noticed the change until the struggling stopped altogether.
For a moment he remained exactly where he was, one hand clamped around the man's wrist and the other holding the back of his head down against the mud. His own breath filled his ears so completely that it took several seconds for understanding to reach him.
Then horror followed.
"Oh God—"
Ronald released him at once and stumbled backward onto his knees. The pistol slipped from lifeless fingers and disappeared halfway into the muck. With shaking hands Ronald seized the pilot by the shoulder and rolled him over, only to find a face plastered with mud and two open eyes in which nothing remained.
"Hey," Ronald said weakly. "Hey—come on."
There was no response. He had killed him. Not from the cockpit of an aircraft, not with machine guns hammering across open sky while men became tiny shapes inside distant machines. There had been distance up there, speed and noise and canvas tearing apart, enough abstraction that death could almost become mechanical.
Not here. Here Ronald had felt the man struggling beneath him. He had felt the strength leaving his body. He had killed him with his own hands in the mud.
His stomach turned violently. Ronald remained kneeling there for several long seconds, breathing hard and staring at the corpse until he noticed that the pilot's jacket had fallen partly open during the struggle. Something pale showed within the breast pocket.
A photograph.
Ronald hesitated before drawing it free. A young woman looked back at him from the little image, standing beside a child.
That hurt more than he expected.
For a while he could do nothing but stare at them, imagining a house somewhere in France, perhaps a table, perhaps a garden, perhaps people who had no idea that the man whose photograph they kept had died facedown in a shell crater that morning.
"I'm sorry," Ronald whispered.
He slid the photograph carefully back into the dead man's pocket and pressed it there once with muddy fingers, a useless gesture perhaps, but the only apology he had to give.
Then voices reached him through the smoke.
They were still some distance away, but approaching quickly, mixed with the endless distant rumble of artillery. Ronald listened once, frowned, and felt every muscle in his body tighten.
English.
British English.
He looked down at himself, then at the dead French pilot beside him, and suddenly understood exactly what anyone climbing over that crater rim was going to see: a wrecked French aircraft, a dead French airman, and one living man standing beside him dressed in German flying clothes.
There was no time for grief anymore. Ronald moved. He tore away his own jacket and cap and dragged the dead pilot's leather coat, goggles, headgear, and whatever else could be made useful from the body. The work was clumsy, ugly, and frantic, but the battlefield itself helped him. Mud had already destroyed clean colours and sharp details, turning uniforms and insignia into filthy approximations of what they had once been. Ronald pulled the French flying coat over himself, changed what clothing he could, tightened the dead man's belt around his waist, and jammed the cap and goggles into place. He then kicked mud over the discarded German garments and around the corpse, not enough to conceal either completely, but enough that a hurried glance from above might not immediately reveal what had happened.
By the time he straightened, breathing heavily, he looked half drowned, half resurrected, and sufficiently ruined that perhaps nobody would think to examine him too closely.
Three soldiers appeared on the crater rim almost at once.
They were British infantrymen, muddy from boots to webbing, rifles already coming level as soon as they spotted the lone figure below.
"You there!" one shouted. "Who are you? You all right? What happened?"
Ronald looked up at them while dirty water dripped from the borrowed French coat. His chest still hurt from the fall and the struggle, and every breath seemed to scrape through him.
For one terrible instant, the wrong language nearly came out.
German rose naturally toward his tongue. He caught it just before the first word escaped and instead pointed weakly toward himself, blinking up at them with what he hoped looked like the confusion of a wounded man rather than the terror of a German airman caught in enemy clothing.
"Moi… je… Roland—"
He stopped, swallowed, and allowed the French to collapse awkwardly into English beneath an exaggerated accent.
"I am Roland," he said, his voice raw and unsteady. "English by blood, but French by nationality. My good Englishmen, please… can you help me?"
He gestured shakily toward the smoking remains of the aircraft.
"By God's mercy, my plane—it crashed. I survived somehow, I think. Please, can you help me find my bearings? I do not know exactly where I came down, or how it is that I am even alive at this moment."
The British soldiers exchanged glances. One of them laughed, short and incredulous.
"A Frenchman speaking decent English. Well, that's a novelty."
Another lowered his rifle slightly, though his expression remained caught somewhere between suspicion and amusement. "Better than finding another dead one, I suppose."
The third man was older, with a rain-darkened moustache and the exhausted face of someone who had already seen too much morning for one lifetime. He peered down into the crater, his eyes passing over the wreckage and mud before returning to Ronald.
"You're lucky, that's what you are," he said. "Alive, which is more than can be said for a fair number round here. As for where you are, I couldn't tell you the exact spot if you paid me. We're moving up, that's all I know. Orders are orders. There's a gap between the German armies, so they tell us, and we're meant to press on and make use of it."
He studied Ronald for another moment, weighing him in the casual fashion of a soldier who had learned to decide quickly whether another human being was useful.
"If you can still walk and hold a rifle, you may as well come along. One more pair of hands is one more pair of hands."
Ronald hesitated, and in doing so finally looked properly at the crater around him.
The brown water pooled at the bottom was not empty. Shapes floated beneath its filthy skin: the pale suggestion of a face, a boot protruding from the mud wall, a hand lying apart from whoever had once owned it. Torn cloth, splintered wood, leather, pieces of harness, and the remains of men and horses had been mixed so thoroughly into the clay that the battlefield seemed almost to have absorbed them into itself.
For Ronald, who had spent so many hours writing and reading of ancient wars, the sight carried a dreadful familiarity. It resembled the dark fields of legend after the songs had ended, once the banners had fallen and all the poetry had been scraped away. There were no shining heroes here, no clean sword strokes or noble deaths beneath sunset skies. There was only mud, meat, ruined machinery, and men who had died frightened and anonymous.
One of the British soldiers noticed the colour leaving his face.
"Don't go green on us now, Frenchie."
His companion jerked his head toward the rim. "Come along."
Ronald swallowed. "All right."
They hauled him the last few feet from the crater, and together the four men moved away, following a shallow ditch rather than walking openly toward the nearest gunfire. From there they crossed broken ground toward a battered farmhouse standing some distance away.
The countryside between them and the farm looked as though it had been torn apart and then badly stitched together by a drunk surgeon. The road had become a churned ribbon of mud beneath boots, wagon wheels, and hooves. An abandoned cart leaned sideways into a ditch with one dead horse still tangled in the traces, while another lay swollen inside a crater farther along. A man had fallen beside the road and remained there, half buried beneath mud because no one still alive possessed the time to care for the dead. Smoke clung low over the fields, and everywhere Ronald looked the ground offered another small obscenity: fingers beneath water, a face pressed into the earth, a blood-dark coat turned almost inside out by blast.
Then the drone of an engine rose overhead.
Every man dropped instinctively.
Ronald threw himself into the ditch beside the British soldiers while one of them muttered, "Christ, not again," and craned his head toward the sky.
A German fighter swept through the smoke above them.
Ronald recognised the aircraft immediately.
Hilary.
His brother was circling the battlefield, searching for him.
For one dangerous moment Ronald forgot the three armed British soldiers lying within arm's reach. He raised one hand barely above the edge of the ditch and held it there, scarcely daring to move more than a few fingers.
The fighter continued past, banked through the smoke, and returned.
Just before turning away again, its wings dipped by the smallest possible degree. That tiny movement struck Ronald harder than the crash had.
Hilary had seen him. He was alive, and Hilary was alive, and his brother now knew that Ronald had survived as well. For the moment, amid all the death surrounding them, that knowledge was enough.
The German fighter disappeared into the smoke. One of the British soldiers watched it go and spat into the mud.
"Bloody Germans are devils in the air," he muttered. "No peace from them. You think the sky's clear and the next thing you know they're over your bloody head."
"Can't move, can't eat, can't so much as piss in a ditch without one of the bastards having a look," another complained.
Ronald kept his face empty and said nothing.
They continued across the broken ground, keeping to the shallow folds and ditches wherever they could until at last they reached a dirt road churned almost beyond recognition by boots, wagon wheels, and hooves. Abandoned carts stood crooked along its edges, one tipped half into a ditch with its shafts buried in the mud, while discarded harness and splintered crates lay wherever men had found them too burdensome to carry farther. Beyond the road stood a walled farmstead, a low complex of stone buildings gathered around a muddy yard, its barns and sheds pressed close together behind a rough perimeter wall.
Whatever peaceful life the place had once known was gone. The largest barn, perhaps used for cattle before the war came through, had been turned into some kind of forward headquarters. Soldiers crouched along the wall and in the roadside ditch whenever aircraft passed overhead, while men came and went through the yard carrying ammunition boxes, papers, rifles, and whatever else was needed closer to the fighting. A pair of horses stood sweating beneath an open shed, still harnessed to a wagon, and near the barn several rifles had been propped against the stonework beside packs and rolled blankets.
As Ronald and the three British soldiers crossed the road and entered the farmyard, the barn door opened and a messenger came hurrying out. He was little more than a boy, mud to his knees and a folded dispatch clutched tightly in one hand. He scarcely looked at them as he broke into a run, crossed the yard, and disappeared down the road in the direction of the French positions.
Ronald watched him go for only a moment before the sound of engines drew his eyes back toward the sky.
Far beyond the farm, through gaps in the drifting smoke, the air battle was still being fought. A French aircraft was coming down in the distance, trailing a long black ribbon behind it as it slipped toward the earth. Higher above, several German fighters wheeled through the pale morning sky, circling and diving upon what remained of the French formations.
His squadron. They were still up there, finishing what had begun only minutes before.
Ronald lowered his gaze before any of the men beside him noticed where he was looking.
They were almost at the barn now. The great wooden doors stood mostly closed, leaving only a narrow opening between them. Mud had been trampled thick before the entrance, and against the wall beside it leaned three rifles, their bayonets fixed, with a field pack and an empty ammunition crate abandoned nearby.
One of the doors shifted inward.
A man appeared in the opening, one hand still upon the heavy timber as he looked first toward the three soldiers and then toward Ronald.
"Well?" he called. "Did you find the German pilot?"
The soldiers had scarcely begun to answer when the man frowned and glanced past them toward the battlefield.
"His machine came down close by. He can't have got far."