The question about the fallen German pilot caught Ronald so completely that for one dreadful heartbeat he forgot to breathe. Standing there in the dead Frenchman's flying coat, surrounded by British soldiers who were unknowingly searching for him, he had the absurd sensation that the officer in the barn doorway had somehow looked straight through the mud, the stolen uniform, and the clumsy accent and found the German airman beneath it.
The older soldier beside him, however, merely shrugged and approached the officer with the weary indifference of a man reporting that a misplaced crate had failed to turn up.
"No sign of him, sir. Had a proper look round. If Jerry hit the ground out there, he's either buried in the muck or scattered halfway to Paris."
The officer grunted, accepting the German pilot's apparent disappearance with considerably less interest than Ronald would have preferred, and turned his attention instead to the muddy stranger standing before him.
"And what have you brought me here?"
"French flyer, sir. Calls himself Roland. Says he's English by blood, French by nationality. Came down hard, but he's still standing, and his English is better than some of ours."
That earned a snort from one of the men nearby.
The captain stepped forward and examined Ronald with the detached scrutiny of a butcher considering an animal brought to market. He was a broad, weathered man with old blood darkening one sleeve and mud dried almost to his knees, his rough-shaven face lined by too many sleepless nights. His gaze travelled over Ronald's shoulders, arms and legs, pausing only long enough to determine that whatever had fallen out of the sky was still large, healthy, and capable of carrying a rifle.
"Hm. You'll do."
Ronald said nothing.
The captain's nose wrinkled. "Christ alive, though, you stink. Smell like you've been sleeping in a ditch full of corpses." He gave Ronald another measuring look and jerked his thumb toward the barn. "Listen here, Frenchie. This isn't some village tavern where you can sit by the fire while we bring you supper and decide where to send you. You can walk, and by the look of you there's nothing wrong with your arms. So you've got two choices: come with us and make yourself useful, or bugger off and find your own road home. Which'll it be?"
Ronald scarcely had to think. These men were moving toward the fighting and, more importantly, toward the German advance. Dangerous though remaining among them was, every kilometre they carried him eastward offered another chance to slip away and reach his own side.
"I shall come with you," he answered, allowing the French accent to soften his otherwise precise English. "If you are willing to have me."
One of the soldiers stared at him, then laughed.
"I shall come with you, he says. Bloody hell, listen to the scholar."
Another grinned. "Posh little Frenchman, aren't you?"
Ronald managed a tired smile and said nothing more. He had spoken German almost exclusively for so long that hearing English leave his own mouth felt unexpectedly intimate, yet its old rhythms returned without effort: measured, educated, perhaps too careful for the men around him.
The captain merely nodded. "Fine. Get Roland something that doesn't look as though he crawled out of a swamp. Clothes, webbing, rifle, ammunition. Then we move."
Two soldiers disappeared through the barn doors, and Ronald followed the others inside.
The stench hit him almost hard enough to stop him at the threshold.
The building had once housed cattle, and beneath everything else lingered the sour memory of animals and manure, but war had buried that older smell beneath worse things. Blood, urine, vomit, excrement, sweat, wet wool, tobacco smoke, damp straw and human sickness hung beneath the rafters in a thick warmth that seemed almost tangible. Ronald raised a hand instinctively toward his nose before forcing it back down.
The cattle were gone. Men had replaced them.
Wounded soldiers lay wherever enough dung and debris had been cleared away to spread straw or a blanket. Some shivered beneath coats while others coughed until blood appeared upon their lips. A man bent over a bucket and vomited helplessly while the fellow beside him, whose hand ended in a fresh bundle of bandages, stared without expression at the place where his fingers had once been. Groans passed through the barn in a low, almost continuous undertone, punctuated by coughing, whispered prayers and occasional cries for mothers who were hundreds of kilometres away.
Among them moved women from the surrounding French countryside. They spoke no English, and most of the British soldiers appeared to know no French worth mentioning, yet conversation hardly seemed necessary. The women washed blood from wounds, lifted cups to cracked lips, changed dirty cloth and touched frightened men upon the forehead with the simple assurance that someone was still there. Their French came softly and rapidly—doucement, monsieur... voilà... courage... mon pauvre garçon—words many of the wounded plainly did not understand, though the tone required no translation.
A grey-haired woman sat beside one young soldier with a worn prayer book open upon her lap, murmuring prayers in French while a girl scarcely into her teens held his hand and wept silently. The wounded man could not have understood a word, but his fingers remained curled weakly around hers. Nearby, two small boys carried buckets of water between the stalls, solemnly stepping over discarded bandages and muddy boots as though this impossible labour had simply become another farm chore.
Ronald saw no local men anywhere in the barn, and now that he thought of it, he had seen remarkably few Frenchmen of fighting age for some time. The countryside seemed almost emptied of them. Some had undoubtedly fled south with their families before the German advance, but Ronald suspected that many more had been pulled into the French Army or swept into hastily raised militia and labour detachments. Reports reaching the German lines had spoken often enough of French desperation, particularly in the districts directly threatened by the advance, where every able-bodied man who could still carry a rifle or perform useful work was being called upon to help slow the Germans.
Yet even that thought faded when Ronald began noticing how many of the men around him were completely still.
Some had blankets drawn over their faces. Others lay among the wounded with their eyes closed, indistinguishable at first from sleeping men until one watched long enough to realise that their chests never rose. Death had apparently become too common to earn immediate removal. The living and the dead shared the same straw because there was neither space nor manpower enough to grant them separate accommodations.
Then Ronald noticed what the two soldiers sent for his equipment were doing.
They were examining the corpses.
One crouched beside a dead British infantryman of roughly Ronald's build and tugged at a boot. It resisted, so the soldier braced himself and pulled harder until the leather came free. The second boot followed. His companion stripped away the dead man's webbing, checked the ammunition pouches, recovered what cartridges remained, and then rolled the body far enough to work loose the trousers and coat.
Ronald watched with mounting disbelief.
There was no mockery in it and no deliberate disrespect. That somehow made the scene worse. The dead man simply had things the living still required, and therefore those things were being reclaimed. Boots, clothing, ammunition, rifle: the inventory of a life reduced to what could still be useful after its owner no longer was.
A few minutes later the bundle was placed in Ronald's arms.
"Near enough your size," the soldier said. "Bit tight across you, maybe, but you'll manage." He patted the dead man's coat almost affectionately. "Wear it well, Frenchie. Chap before you won't be needing it."
Ronald looked down at the uniform and then at the Lee-Enfield being offered beside it.
"Dear God..." he murmured.
The soldier gave his shoulder a rough, sympathetic pat. "Ground war's a bit different from all that gentlemanly flying about, eh? Come on. Get changed. We'll be moving once those German bastards have cleared off."
There was little choice but to obey.
Ronald found a quiet corner behind one of the old stall partitions and stripped off the filthy French flying clothes, tossing the mud- and blood-stained leather into a heap of hay. Before reaching for the British uniform, he paused and looked down at his gloved hand. Beneath the leather were the Cross of the New Dawn and Edith's ring, hidden together against his skin.
For a moment his thoughts went home and everything that waited for him beyond the lines.
He hardened his heart.
What he was about to do felt wrong, but there was little choice. Ronald pulled on the dead British soldier's uniform piece by piece, fastening the tunic, webbing and ammunition pouches before settling the service cap upon his head. The wool felt strangely familiar, as did the English voices drifting through the barn, reminders of a country that had once been his own. He refused to dwell upon them. That life belonged behind him now.
Only after taking up the Lee-Enfield did he realize how much seemed to be missing.
No steel helmet. No proper protective equipment. Little beyond wool, leather, ammunition and a rifle stood between an ordinary British infantryman and the violence outside. Ronald had grown so accustomed to the equipment Oskar had introduced into German service—and especially to the heavily protected soldiers of the Black Legion—that he had almost forgotten how exposed most soldiers of this age truly were.
The soft cap upon his head suddenly felt absurdly thin.
For an instant he imagined shell fragments, splintered timber and shards of stone cutting through the air, and beneath the borrowed khaki he felt almost naked.
His grip tightened around the Lee-Enfield. Then he became aware of Edith's ring beneath his glove, its familiar pressure against his finger steadying him.
Ronald drew a breath, rose, and made for the barn doors, the dead man's uniform sitting awkwardly upon his shoulders. At the entrance, the captain was already watching the smoke-filled sky as the last German aircraft turned away toward their own lines to refuel and rearm.
When the final machine disappeared into the haze, he raised a whistle to his lips and blew a long, piercing blast across the farmstead.
"Right, lads! Form up! Two stay with the wounded and the French women. Everyone else, with me. We're moving!"
The farm complex seemed to empty around him. Men emerged from sheds, barns, and ruined outbuildings, shouldering rifles and tightening webbing as they converged upon the road. Ronald fell in among them, Edith's ring and the Cross of the New Dawn hidden safely beneath his glove, and within minutes the remnants of the company were trudging away from the farm.
The road beyond had become a muddy, waterlogged ruin. Puddles filled the wagon ruts, boots sank ankle-deep into brown muck, and broken carts, discarded crates, dead horses, and splintered fencing lay wherever the passage of armies had left them. Ronald walked awkwardly at first, trying to accommodate boots that did not quite fit and trousers belonging to a dead man, while the British around him trudged onward with the resigned patience of men long accustomed to discomfort. It felt strangely familiar to hear English spoken around him again, yet every step carried him toward the German lines, and that was all that mattered.
They had been moving for some time when the road opened beside a broad field. Ahead, a distant tree line divided the countryside beneath drifting smoke.
Then something flashed beyond it, and the captain saw it almost at once.
"INCOMING! DOWN, LADS!"
Men scattered toward the roadside ditches. Ronald threw himself into the mud just as the shell arrived.
It came with a hideous rushing shriek. One soldier was caught before he reached cover, the impact tearing away his leg and hurling him sideways; an instant later the shell buried itself among several men crowded into the ditch and exploded.
The earth seemed to open.
Mud, blood, torn cloth, rifles, and pieces of men erupted across the road. Five soldiers simply ceased to exist as recognizable human beings, their remains scattered through the water and grass while the concussion hammered against Ronald's skull. He lay frozen in the ditch, staring through the drifting soil at what had been living men only seconds before.
"Bloody fucking hell!" the captain roared, wiping mud from his face.
He raised himself just high enough to peer through the smoke, spotted cover farther ahead, and immediately thrust an arm toward it.
"Up! MOVE! Tree line ahead—go, you bastards! GO!"
The survivors burst from the ditches in a ragged rush, slipping and stumbling across the churned ground while shells continued falling somewhere behind them. Ronald went with them, awkward in the dead man's boots, nearly losing his footing when one heel slid into a hidden rut. He caught himself against the wet grass, hauled himself upright, and kept moving without allowing his mind to return to the five men who had vanished in the ditch only moments before.
Ahead, another British company had already gathered along a shallow rise where the remains of a stone-and-timber fence ran beside sparse bushes and a thin line of trees. It was scarcely a defensive position and certainly no trench, but on a battlefield such as this, anything solid enough to stand between flesh and bullets quickly became a fortress. Men crowded behind the broken wall, bracing rifles over the stone while machine-gun crews forced their weapons into whatever gaps offered a clear field of fire. Bayonets clicked into place, ammunition was passed forward, and officers moved along the rear of the position shouting at men to close their intervals and keep their heads down.
Ronald reached the line and dropped beside one of the machine-gun crews near the centre. Only then, with the Lee-Enfield resting against the stonework before him, did he properly look across the ground they were expected to defend.
The field stretched broad and exposed beneath the grey morning sky, rolling gently toward a distant tree line through shell holes, broken fencing and stretches of churned mud. There was scarcely enough cover to conceal a handful of men, much less an advancing company. To Ronald it looked less like a battlefield than an execution ground—an open strip of earth upon which men might advance only to discover that there was nowhere to hide from what waited for them.
The remnants of the two British companies were still settling themselves along the fence when German artillery began ranging across the field. The shells came only intermittently, one at a time rather than in any sustained bombardment, bursting among the open ground and sending dark fountains of earth into the air. One landed toward the left of the British position with a flat, violent concussion, and several screams followed from somewhere among the brush. Ronald glanced that way but could see little through the smoke.
The British had nothing immediately at hand with which to answer. They could only keep low behind the stone and timber, endure the occasional shell and wait.
But luckily they did not need to wait long. From somewhere beyond the distant trees came the shrill note of a whistle. It carried strangely clearly across the open ground, followed almost at once by shouting from the German line—hundreds of voices rising together through the smoke.
"Für Gott und Vaterland! Vorwärts!"
Then the rifles began.
Muzzle flashes winked through the trees, and bullets swept across the field toward the British position. Rounds snapped through branches, struck sparks from stone and buried themselves in the earth with vicious little thuds. The soldier beside Ronald suddenly jerked backward with a wet choking sound. A bullet had torn through his throat. He dropped his rifle, clutched instinctively at the blood pouring between his fingers and collapsed into the mud, kicking weakly as he tried and failed to breathe.
For several moments the British position seemed desperately vulnerable. German artillery could reach them; German rifles were already searching the fence; and nothing substantial separated the men from the open field beyond.
Then figures appeared beneath the trees.
The Germans came in force.
Hundreds of grey-coated infantry emerged through the smoke in loose but unmistakable waves, bayonets fixed and rifles firing as they crossed the broken ground. Some dropped behind shell holes or shallow folds to shoot before rising and moving again; others continued almost without pause while officers and sergeants urged them forward from behind. More men followed from the trees until the field seemed to be filling with them.
Ronald stared in disbelief.
He had spent countless hours talking with Oskar about warfare—not merely battles and heroes for the sake of his writing, but tactics, weapons, the changing nature of firepower and the terrible price armies paid when doctrine failed to keep pace with technology. Now those conversations stood before him in flesh and blood. Brave men were advancing across open ground toward prepared rifles and machine guns, as though courage could somehow make modern bullets less murderous.
The British officer commanding the fence line understood exactly what had been offered to him. He raised one hand and held it there while German bullets cracked through the brush around him.
"Steady... steady..."
Men pressed themselves against stone and earth, rifles already shouldered, waiting. The Germans came closer.
The officer continued to wait.
Only when the advancing ranks had committed themselves fully to the exposed field did his arm slash downward.
"Open fire!"
The British position erupted.
Lee-Enfields cracked in rapid, disciplined rhythm, bolts hammering backward and forward while the machine guns joined them in long, tearing bursts. The effect upon the advancing Germans was immediate and brutal. Men pitched forward or crumpled where they stood; others disappeared into shell holes and failed to rise again. Groups that had seemed solid only moments before broke apart beneath the fire, yet those behind continued forward, closing around the spaces left by the fallen.
The machine-gun crew directly in front of Ronald had begun laughing.
"Look at the bloody fools!" the gunner shouted over the hammering weapon.
"Mad bastards!" his loader answered.
Farther along the fence another man cried, "Come on then, Huns! Keep coming, you swine!"
Ronald did not join them, he had not fired a shot.
Something cold and sickening had settled beneath his ribs as he watched the grey figures falling across the field. Those men were Germans—his countrymen. They belonged to the nation that had taken him and Hilary in when their future had been uncertain, given them education, work, friendship and purpose. Germany had given Ronald the life in which he had met Edith and, somewhere along the way, had ceased to be merely the country where he lived and become the place he thought of as home.
Whatever uniform he happened to be wearing now, those were his people being cut down before him.
Every burst from the British guns seemed to drive that truth deeper.
He felt almost physically ill, as though something inside him were demanding that he do something.
Then movement on the far left caught his eye.
Heavy German motorcycle combinations burst from the edge of the trees and raced onto the field. Their sidecars bucked violently over shell holes and broken ground while engines snarled at full throttle. A gunner crouched in each sidecar behind a mounted machine gun, firing toward the British line, while some machines carried another rifleman on the pillion behind the driver. Mud sprayed from their wheels as they swerved around craters and wreckage, and their bursts of fire forced several British soldiers to duck behind the fence.
Ronald nearly swore aloud.
Not because of the bullets snapping around him, but because of the sheer madness of what he was watching.
The motorcycles had been built to exploit mobility: to scout, carry messages and men, shift firepower quickly, and descend upon weak points before an enemy could react. They were fast, heavily armed for their size and tremendously useful when employed properly.
They were not armoured assault vehicles.
And they were certainly not meant to charge headlong across an open field against prepared rifles and machine guns.
Yet that was precisely what their crews were doing.
The sidecars bounced onward through the shell-torn ground, their guns firing as the British machine guns began searching for them. Ronald watched one machine slew violently around a crater and continue racing toward the fence.
If they kept coming like this, the British would tear them to pieces before they ever reached the line.
He hesitated for only a moment before bringing the Lee-Enfield around and levelling it at the back of the laughing gunner's head. The decision seemed to arrive with the pull of the trigger itself.
The rifle cracked.
The .303 round struck the man at the base of the skull and drove him forward across the machine gun. Blood sprayed across the receiver, the ammunition belt and the grass beyond in a sudden dark fan, and his body folded heavily over the weapon.
The loader froze.
Warm blood had spattered across his hands and sleeves. For a second he merely stared at it, as though his mind refused to understand where it had come from. Then he looked toward the gunner and finally turned toward Ronald.
Ronald was already rising onto one knee. His hands shook as he worked the bolt, the spent casing spinning away into the grass.
"Sorry," he muttered.
"What the—"
The loader never finished.
Ronald brought the rifle level with his face. Their eyes met for the briefest instant—confusion in one, horror and determination in the other—and Ronald fired.
The bullet struck through the man's eye and passed through the back of his skull. His head snapped violently aside before he collapsed into the brush, blood darkening the leaves beneath him.
Ronald flinched and nearly retched.
Something pale showed for an instant amid the ruin at the back of the man's head, and as the body settled Ronald noticed an ugly spreading wetness beneath it. A half-forgotten remark of Oskar's came back to him with dreadful clarity: death was rarely dignified. When the body ceased to function, muscles relaxed. Bladder and bowels might empty. A man could die covered in his own blood, urine and filth, whatever poetry soldiers preferred to tell themselves afterward. Knowing it had been one thing. Standing beside it was another.
Ronald gagged and turned his face away, but the machine gun suddenly hammered another short burst into the field, the dead gunner's weight still bearing against the mechanism.
That brought him back. There was no time to be sick. Ronald shoved the gunner's body aside and laid the Lee-Enfield down in the grass. He seized the machine gun by its grips. The weapon differed from those upon which he had trained in Germany, but not enough to matter now. He hauled it around on its mounting, forcing the heavy barrel away from the advancing Germans and toward the British position to his right.
The movement dragged the muzzle across the dead loader's body before Ronald finally brought the weapon to bear along the British position. For one breath he stared down the length of the line—khaki uniforms pressed against stone and timber, men still firing across the field, most of them completely unaware that the machine gun behind them had changed hands.
Then his grip tightened and he opened fire.
At such close range the effect was immediate and horrifying. The first burst tore through the men nearest him before any of them understood what was happening. Bodies jerked and collapsed against the wall, caps spinning away amid sprays of blood as the heavy rounds ripped through heads, necks and torsos with appalling ease. Within seconds half a dozen men were down, some dead before they struck the earth, others folding into the brush or sliding against the stonework while the gun hammered relentlessly in Ronald's hands.
Panic followed almost at once. Men farther along the line threw themselves flat, convinced that German fire had somehow reached their flank. Others crouched lower behind the wall, pressing themselves into cover that could do nothing against a weapon firing from within their own position. Ronald traversed the gun farther to the right, sending another burst along the fence. Soldiers screamed and scattered. A few turned toward him in stunned disbelief just as the bullets reached them, while others began swinging their rifles around as the impossible truth finally became clear: the supposed French airman they had rescued had seized their own machine gun and was firing into them.
The noise of battle made comprehension slow. German rifles cracked across the field, British weapons answered, artillery rolled beyond the trees, and motorcycle engines screamed through the smoke. Some soldiers never realized what Ronald was doing at all. They remained facing forward, firing desperately at the German advance while men only yards behind them were being cut down from the rear.
Ronald hauled the gun back toward the left. Several men there had begun watching him, their expressions changing as confusion gave way to alarm. Rifles started to rise.
He fired first.
The burst drove them down before they could bring their weapons to bear. Some collapsed outright; others threw themselves behind the wall or crawled into the brush. The older captain from the farm appeared farther back beneath the trees, drawn by the sudden chaos. He looked toward Ronald, saw him behind the captured gun and stared for one disbelieving instant.
"The Frenchman!" he shouted. "The Frenchman's gone bloody mad—!"
A burst from one of the German sidecar guns swept across the trees before he could give another order. The captain vanished into the spray of torn branches and khaki.
That was the moment the British centre ceased to function.
Men who should have been firing across the field were now hiding from a machine gun behind them. Sergeants and officers shouted contradictory orders over the din. Riflemen turned away from the advancing Germans in search of the threat inside their own line, while others abandoned the fence entirely and scrambled deeper among the trees. Whole stretches of the position fell silent.
The German motorcycle combinations reached the line almost immediately afterward.
One came sliding to a halt near a break in the fence, its sidecar gunner pouring fire into the defenders at scarcely more than point-blank range. The driver and the rifleman riding behind him jumped clear and opened fire as another machine arrived beside them, then another. Once across the killing ground, the motorcycles that had seemed so vulnerable in the open became brutally effective, concentrating men and automatic fire wherever the British position had begun to fracture.
German infantry followed only moments behind.
Grey-coated soldiers surged against the fence with bayonets fixed, pouring through the gaps Ronald's attack had helped create. Some vaulted the stonework, others forced themselves through the brush or followed the motorcycles into the broken centre. Rifles now fired at distances measured in yards rather than hundreds of them, and men who only moments earlier had been shooting confidently across an open field suddenly found German soldiers among them.
The British line buckled, then it broke.
Ronald kept the captured gun firing into whatever groups still attempted to hold together, sweeping short bursts across the fence and driving men either to the ground or toward the rear. Each second the British spent hiding from him was another second in which the Germans closed the distance. Another officer rose behind the line, saw Ronald at the machine gun and pointed toward him in stunned outrage.
"What the devil are you doing, Frenchman? Bloody—"
A German rifle bullet struck him from the front before he could finish. He dropped behind the wall and disappeared from sight.
By then the attackers were everywhere.
The battle dissolved into close-range violence. Bayonets, rifles and shouted orders merged into smoke and confusion as German infantry flooded through the trees. Men grappled in the mud. Rifles fired almost muzzle to chest. The sidecar combinations darted along the shattered position, their mounted guns hammering into whatever pockets of British resistance remained.
Ronald kept firing until there was little immediately before him left to shoot at. British soldiers were retreating through the trees, lying wounded behind the wall or keeping their heads buried against the earth while German troops poured through from the front and left.
At last Ronald released the trigger.
For several seconds his hands remained locked around the grips. Smoke drifted from the barrel. The dead gunner lay crumpled beside the mounting, while the loader stared sightlessly upward from the brush.
Ronald looked at them only briefly. Whatever he felt would have to wait. He abandoned the weapon and scrambled backward just as German soldiers came pouring over the ruined fence.
One of them nearly killed him.
The infantryman burst through the smoke with his bayonet already level. All he saw was British khaki, British webbing and a man standing beside a British machine gun amid dead Germans and British alike.
He lunged.
"Wait!" Ronald shouted in German, throwing both hands up. "Wait, damn you—I'm German!"
The soldier checked himself so violently that his boots slid in the mud, the bayonet stopping scarcely a foot from Ronald's chest.
Ronald tore the British service cap from his head.
"It's me! Ronald Tolkien!"
The soldier stared at him through the smoke, breathing hard, his rifle still half raised.
"What—?"
His eyes narrowed as he studied the mud-streaked face beneath the stolen uniform.
Then recognition came.
"You're Tolkien?"
"Yes!" Ronald snapped. "No time to explain. My aircraft came down behind their line. I did what I had to do. Now stop staring and focus!"
Recognition finally broke through the smoke and confusion.
"Yes, sir!"
Ronald snatched up a rifle from the ground and turned toward the field just as the last organised British groups began withdrawing. Around him the German infantry surged across the captured position, no longer advancing as a blind mass but spreading through the broken line in a savage, disciplined rush, clearing the fence, driving survivors from the ditches, and reforming wherever officers managed to gather them.
The fight did not last much longer.
Within minutes the British position had ceased to exist as a coherent defence. Some men lay dead among the fence and bushes, others had scattered across the fields, while those still capable of retreat were running toward the rear beneath sporadic German fire. The attacking company spread itself raggedly over the captured ground, men shouting for ammunition, calling for comrades, firing after fleeing men, and trying to restore order while the dead and wounded of both armies lay tangled together beneath their boots.
Through the smoke came the German captain.
He advanced with a sword in one hand, his pistol hanging at his side, uniform dark with sweat and mud and his face blackened by powder and dirt. He looked less like a parade-ground officer than something dragged bodily from the furnace of the attack.
Then he noticed Ronald.
The captain stopped and looked him over from head to foot: British tunic and webbing, a mud-stained service cap, Lee-Enfield still clutched in one hand, and filth smeared across nearly every inch of him. At first glance Ronald looked like nothing more than another battered British infantryman who had somehow wandered into the German breakthrough.
The captain's expression hardened.
"And who in God's name," he demanded, "are you supposed to be?"
The soldier beside Ronald answered before anyone else could speak, still staring at him with something approaching disbelief.
"Herr Hauptmann, it's Tolkien!"
The captain frowned. "Tolkien?"
Ronald turned toward him, chest still heaving from the fighting, the borrowed British coat hanging filthy from his shoulders and a rifle clenched in one hand.
"Yes," he said sharply. "And what in God's name do you think you are doing, sending your men to their deaths like this?"
For a moment the captain merely stared at him. Then he stepped closer.
He was older than Ronald, taller by enough to make the difference obvious and broader through the chest, with the weathered look of a man who had spent too long beneath open skies and artillery fire. Mud darkened his uniform, powder stained his face, and whatever patience he might once have possessed appeared to have been ground away somewhere between the frontier and the Marne.
"And what do you think you're doing?" he barked.
He did not wait for an answer. One hand struck Ronald hard in the shoulder, shoving him aside with the dismissive force an older officer might use upon an insolent boy who had wandered somewhere above his station.
"Out of the way. I know who you are. I've seen your name in papers and on books, but that gives you no business interfering here. These are my men. I command them."
Then he turned his back upon Ronald as though the matter had already been settled and raised his voice toward the survivors scattered across the captured position.
"Finish it here! Dress the line! Ammunition forward! We keep moving!"
The men began to stir almost automatically. They were exhausted, bloodied, and still breathing hard from the assault, yet habit and rank pulled them back into motion. Ammunition was gathered. Rifles were checked. Sergeants shouted men into some semblance of order.
Something inside Ronald broke.
"No."
He did not shout the word, yet it carried clearly enough that the captain stopped.
Slowly, the older man looked back over one shoulder.
Ronald stepped toward him, his face pale beneath the mud and his eyes burning with a fury that had been growing since he first watched German soldiers walk into the British guns.
"Absolutely not," he said, louder now. "If you continue forward like that, you will simply send what remains of these men into another slaughter. You bloody fool."
The captain turned fully.
For perhaps a second he looked genuinely unable to comprehend what he had heard. The mud-covered young writer standing before him had not merely questioned an order; he had addressed him as though rank had ceased to matter.
Disbelief became outrage.
"Why, you insolent little—"
He came forward quickly and swung his right fist toward Ronald's jaw, the heavy, confident punch of an older and stronger man who expected the younger one to stand there and take it.
Ronald did not.
He shifted just enough for the blow to pass beside his face, caught the captain's arm in both hands and turned with his momentum. Training took over where thought ended. The officer's balance vanished beneath him, and a heartbeat later Ronald threw him bodily over his shoulder.
The captain struck the ground with a hard, ugly impact that drove the breath from his lungs.
Several soldiers recoiled.
"Captain!"
The officer tried to rise, but Ronald was already upon him. He caught the man's arm, forced it behind his back and twisted it into a rough lock until the captain stopped struggling.
"No," Ronald snapped. "You listen to me now."
The captain glared upward, humiliation and murderous anger burning together in his face, but Ronald held him there.
"I am Ronald Tolkien," he said, his voice shaking now with exhaustion, fury, and adrenaline. "And the move you just experienced was taught to me personally by Prince Oskar."
The name changed the air.
Men who had been staring in disbelief suddenly became very still, and even the captain's resistance ceased for a moment.
Ronald felt it immediately and pressed the advantage.
"I have spoken with Prince Oskar. I have studied beside him, written for him, argued with him over history, war, language, and the endless stupidity of men. I have listened to him explain what kills soldiers and what keeps them alive." He pointed with his free hand toward the corpse-covered field across which the company had just advanced. "And this is not warfare he would tolerate from any officer in Germany."
Ronald leaned closer, his voice dropping until its restraint made the words more dangerous rather than less.
"So by the authority of the prince—my friend, my patron, and a man to whom every one of us owes rather more than you seem to understand—you are going to listen."
The captain's anger had not disappeared, but something else had entered it now. Calculation. Perhaps even alarm.
Around them, no one spoke.
Oskar's name possessed weight far beyond ordinary rank. These men might complain about generals, curse ministers, and mock distant staff officers who ordered attacks from comfortable rooms, but the Iron Prince belonged to another category altogether. His weapons were in their hands, his factories supplied their armies, and his shadow lay across almost every modern thing Germany possessed.
Ronald released the captain and stepped away.
The older man sat up slowly, breathing hard. When he looked at Ronald again, the contempt had gone. He did not like him any better, but he had realised that the young man standing before him could no longer safely be dismissed.
Ronald gave him no time to recover his pride. He turned instead toward the surviving company.
There were scarcely fifty men remaining in anything resembling organised condition. Their uniforms were soaked in mud, some were streaked with blood that was not necessarily their own, and several still wore the stunned expressions of men who had survived a charge without quite understanding why.
"Forty-six of you still capable of moving?" Ronald called.
A few men nodded while others looked toward their sergeants. Someone counted quickly and confirmed the number.
"Good. Then forty-six men will no longer pretend to be one great lump of flesh waiting for a machine gun to find it. You will divide yourselves into small squads. Choose one man in each who can think while bullets are flying, and make him responsible for the others."
No one moved at first.
The captain began pushing himself upright, but Ronald stopped him with an upraised hand.
"No. You have done enough for the moment."
The captain's expression darkened, but he remained silent.
Ronald faced the men again.
"From now on, you do not charge blindly across open ground like cattle being driven into a slaughterhouse. You use whatever the earth gives you. Walls. Ditches. Hedgerows. Depressions. Tree lines. Ruined buildings. Anything that stops a bullet or keeps the enemy from seeing you clearly."
The soldiers were watching him differently now. Some remained confused, others sceptical, but among the younger men there was something almost desperate in their attention. They had just watched comrades disappear beneath machine-gun fire. Any idea promising fewer dead had earned at least the right to be heard.
Ronald gestured toward the countryside beyond the captured position.
"If I tell you to take a farmhouse, that does not mean forty men run straight at the door until enough corpses pile up for the rest to climb over them. The farmhouse is the objective, nothing more. One group keeps the enemy's heads down while another moves. Another works around the flank. One watches for whatever comes to help them, and one remains ready to reinforce whichever part begins to fail."
He looked across the survivors, letting his gaze rest upon the exhausted faces one by one.
"We cannot afford to keep losing men like this."
That sentence silenced even those who had been ready to object.
Every man present had only to look behind him to understand its truth.
Ronald began pointing.
"You five—together. Sergeant, they're yours. Keep them close."
He shifted his hand.
"You four, take the left and use that hedge. Never move across bare ground when you can move behind something."
Another gesture.
"You six remain in the centre as reserve. Keep low, watch the others, and do not move until someone actually needs you."
The orders came more easily as he continued. What had begun as instinct rapidly hardened into structure, fed by years of conversations with Oskar and by everything Ronald had watched go wrong since touching the ground.
At last he turned toward the captain.
"And you."
The older officer stared back suspiciously.
"You come with me."
His face hardened. "What?"
"You heard me."
For a long second the two men simply looked at one another.
The captain might have refused. Perhaps under any ordinary circumstances he would have. Yet when he glanced around, he found his own authority no longer standing where he had left it. His soldiers were watching Ronald now. Behind them lay the dead from the attack he had ordered, while above everything hovered the name of Oskar like an unseen judgment.
The captain clenched his jaw and said nothing.
Ronald drew a slow breath, forcing his racing heart under control.
"Choose your leaders," he called to the company. "Count your ammunition, spread yourselves out, and for God's sake stop standing together where one shell can kill half of you."
At last the men moved.
There was nothing elegant about the reorganisation. Ronald's forty-six survivors had never been trained to fight in the smaller groups he now demanded of them, and the first attempts were clumsy, confused and held together largely by sergeants shouting men into place. Yet gradually the company began to spread itself through the hedges, ditches and broken ground instead of gathering into one great target.
It was improvised, but it was something. And in that small corner of the Marne, something changed.
The battle itself rolled on across France, vast and indifferent, artillery thundering beneath a horizon dark with smoke. Ronald's handful of men could not decide its course, but their movement altered one tiny piece of it. Where once they had advanced blindly, they now began to manoeuvre, and with Ronald at their head they pushed onward again toward the French lines—and, somewhere far beyond them, Paris.
Only hours before he had looked down upon war from the sky. Now he was inside it, trying to shape it.
Far behind him, Hilary had already returned to the German aerodrome, his F-1 being refuelled and rearmed while he prepared to fly again.
Neither brother knew what was happening in Potsdam.
Prince Oskar knew little more than Edith had been able to tell him: Ronald and Hilary had joined the air service and been sent somewhere to the Western Front. Where precisely, neither she nor anyone immediately available to him could say.
Oskar was unwilling to wait for bureaucracy to discover the answer.
Instead, he turned to the Third Company of the Eternal Guard and summoned the five-man detachment whose reputation had been forged during the Second Balkan War.
The Suicide Squad.
They waited for him inside their barracks in full field gear, their equipment laid out around them: carbines, ammunition, grenades, Max's shotgun, Göbels's machine gun, packs and everything else they might require once they entered the confusion of the Western Front.
Oskar stood before the five and hesitated briefly before speaking the name aloud.
"Suicide Squad."
The men straightened.
"You were chosen because you are among the finest men of the Eternal Guard. You have fought together before. You know one another, and you know what to do when plans fail."
His gaze passed slowly across them.
"Your mission may seem simple, but its importance could prove greater than any of us presently understand. Ronald and Hilary Tolkien are somewhere on the Western Front. Find them."
His expression hardened.
"And bring them home alive."
For a moment, Oskar said nothing more. Then he placed his faith in the only thing available to him now: the men standing before him.
"I trust you. Have faith, do your duty, and bring them back—for God and Fatherland, unto death if necessary."
He gave them one final look.
"Good luck."
Then he turned and left.
For several seconds the five remained silent. Gunther finally looked to the others, and that was enough. Weapons were lifted, magazines disappeared into pouches, straps were tightened and packs shouldered.
No one needed another speech. The Suicide Squad was going to France.
Ronald knew nothing of it. With forty-six exhausted soldiers moving behind him, he continued toward the French lines and the distant road to Paris, unaware that somewhere far behind him five of the Eternal Guard's finest were already preparing to follow.
Their orders were simple. Find the Tolkien brothers and bring them home.