Redoubt Fourteen answered with fire.
The eastern side of the fort vanished behind muzzle flashes. Carbines cracked from behind the timber firing wall. Machine guns hammered from the gatehouse and firing steps. Tracer rounds cut through the rain in burning lines, red and white and yellow, stitching the darkness above the marsh and then vanishing into bodies.
Men fell everywhere.
Some dropped quietly into the black water with soft, final splashes. Others spun, screamed, and collapsed face-first into mud where the rain immediately began washing blood out of them. Heavy machine-gun rounds tore through limbs and shoulders and ribs, punching men apart with a cruelty no bayonet could match. Grenade launcher rounds thumped from the wall and burst among the charging Russians, hurling bodies sideways, opening men with shrapnel, turning courage into meat and noise.
For a few terrible seconds, the Russian charge ceased to be a charge at all.
It became men falling.
Men slipping.
Men crawling.
Men screaming for mothers, for priests, for officers, for God.
The marsh did not care.
It took them all.
The ground sucked at boots. Pools swallowed knees. Black water splashed over faces as men dropped low to escape the fire. Blood spread through the rainwater, and in the half-drowned reeds the first leeches began to find the wounded.
The Russians who still held rifles tried to fire back.
They aimed at shadows, at muzzle flashes, at the dark square shape of the fort half-hidden behind palisades, sandbags, rain, and smoke. Their shots cracked wildly into timber and mud. Some bullets struck the wall. Some hissed overhead. Some disappeared into the darkness without ever finding a target.
But every man who fired unknowingly revealed himself. For their muzzle flashes in the darkness were like mark's of death, which the Black Legion answered at once.
Wherever a man lifted his Mosin-Nagant rifle to fire once, the next heartbeat a machine gun or rifle fire would cut him down. Other's were more clever, one man crawled up beside a drowned log, and fired from behind it, but as he worked his bolt, a sniper round snapped his head backward before he could fire again. Elsewhere an officer rose to lead a charge across the marsh, yet he vanished the next moment in a high explosive mortar shell blast.
Behind the first line, men without rifles snatched weapons from the dead.
One young peasant with a sickle in his hand found a Mosin-Nagant lying in the mud beside a corpse. For one lightning-bright instant his eyes shone with wonder. It was the first rifle he had ever held. A weapon he had seen only in the hands of soldiers, policemen, and men above him. Now it was his.
He felt powerful.
Then he fired once and froze, not understanding why the rifle would not fire again.
Around him, other men had the same problem. Some tugged uselessly at triggers. Some fumbled with bolts in the rain. Some stared at the rifles as if the weapons had betrayed them. They had been given guns but not time. Time to learn. Time to train. Time to become soldiers before being thrown into the night.
The attack did not wait for them.
Near the raised road, a young Russian officer with a saber and a voice too brave for his years began driving men out of the marsh.
"To the road!" he screamed. "To the road! Forward!"
The road was firmer than the bog. Gravel and packed earth ran westward through the wetlands like a spine. It was muddy, yes, but men could run on it. Men could carry ladders on it. Men could reach the fort's ditch without drowning knee-deep in reeds and black water.
So men ran for it, a dozen at first, then more.
They scrambled up from the marsh, slipped onto the raised road, and began sprinting toward the fort with axes, knives, brush bundles, shovels, and crude ladders made from nailed timber and young tree trunks.
Then a mortar fired from inside the redoubt, and a star shell climbed into the storm. It burst above the marsh in hard white light.
For one blinding heartbeat, the world became day.
Rain flashed silver. Bayonets shone. Wet faces looked upward, stunned. Reeds cast long black shadows across the water. The fort appeared in pieces: palisade, ditch, wire, sandbags, and the faceless black figures with masks upon the wall.
Then the second mortar spoke.
Its high-explosive round landed on the road six hundred meters from the fort.
The road opened.
Mud, stones, splinters, and fragments flew outward. Men too close to the burst were torn down at once. Others survived only because they had already thrown themselves low. Shrapnel passed over their backs with a sound like angry insects.
One man in the marsh soiled himself where he lay, dropped his rifle, and clutched the cross around his neck with both hands.
The star shell began to fall. Its dying light swung through the rain, casting huge crooked shadows behind the attackers.
Then the fort resumed fire.
Now a pattern appeared. Men with rifles died first, officers died second.
Men carrying ladders, axes, planks, and shovels were allowed to run farther, not from mercy, but because the defenders chose their targets with cold purpose. A rifle could kill a man on the wall. An officer could give orders. A ladder carrier could be killed later, when he had drawn more men into the open.
Down the road ran a big man with an axe, roaring "Ura!" as if noise alone could carry him through bullets.
He crossed the five-hundred-meter mark.
Then the four-hundred.
At three hundred, his boot came down on something buried beneath the wet ground.
There was a tiny click.
Then the road opened under him.
The blast took him from below, lifting him apart in the white glare of the falling star shell. Flesh, cloth, blood, and bone burst outward like a red flower blown apart by rain. His severed head spun once across the road, visible for one grotesque instant, then vanished into the marsh with a splash.
The men behind him stumbled.
Some froze.
Others ran past them.
A man with knives in both hands charged next. He had been given those knives to probe the ground, to feel for wires, to dig at mines if he found them. But the charge had swallowed his purpose. He ran like the axe man had run, blind with terror and courage, and a few seconds later disappeared in another flash. The knives clattered uselessly onto the road.
A third man came with a pitchfork, and he made it farther than the rest, but then he too was gone.
Behind them, a young officer lay flat on his stomach in the mud, pistol in hand, screaming for the men to keep moving. He did not stand. He was not foolish enough for that. He only pointed forward, shouting, threatening, cursing, driving men into the road where death waited in the ground.
Not far away, just off the side of the road, half-hidden behind a mound of tall grass, lay Tomasz.
He was only fourteen years old, and he had seen it all.
His legs dangled in cold marsh water. His cap was too loose. His coat was too large for his scrawny body. His shoes were cheap, old, and already full of mud. Around his right arm was a white band, tied clumsily but proudly. In both hands he held a shovel.
That shovel was his purpose.
He was not meant to shoot. He barely knew how. He was meant to dig. To clear traps. To shape the ditch. To help place a ladder so other men could climb.
At least, that was what they had told him.
For more than a month now, Tomasz had been separated from his family. Since Warsaw. Since the river. Since the day his mother and sister had stayed while he crossed east with the men.
Since then, he had lived among strangers, refugee columns, broken towns, roadside camps, Russian depots, and hungry men who spoke too loudly of revenge because silence made them remember what they had lost.
He had done small jobs where he could. Carried sacks. Hauled water. Helped unload carts. Slept in barns, ditches, abandoned sheds, and once beneath an overturned wagon with three other boys who vanished with his supplies before he woke.
He had been hungry almost constantly, but hunger alone was not enough to hold a boy together.
Instead, it was hatred that had kept him moving.
Hatred of the black-armored giant who had destroyed his life. Hatred of the Iron Prince who had caused his father's death, held his mother, and turned his sister Maria and his mother into traitors.
So Tomasz had found his way to the reforming Second Army—or what remained of it. The officers were young, overwhelmed, and desperate enough not to ask too many questions. Many had been dragged out of military school before graduation, given men, maps, and orders before experience could harden them.
Tomasz had lied about his age, kept his head down, accepted the white armband, and been swallowed into the mass of men moving west.
He had done it. He was a soldier now. He was going to get his family back, or so he had thought.
Now he lay in the marsh, unable to move, watching mines erase men from the world.
His body had stopped listening.
His fingers were locked around the shovel. His breath came too fast. Gunfire pressed against his skull from every direction. But it was the mines that frightened him the most. Bullets, at least, came from men and could be answered.
But how was a man supposed to fight against mines? If a man stepped wrong, the earth murdered him. What good was courage then? Where was the honour in any of this?
It just wasn't fair.
To Tomasz, it was all proof of what the Black Legion truly was. Not an army of soldiers from the old stories, but cowards with machines, traps, bombs, guns, and the technology that allowed them to kille man in multiple different ways before they could ever see whom had killed them.
Because of that he hated their machines, their technology.
He hated that war was no longer swords, horses, fists, and courage. If men fought like knights of old, perhaps he could swing his shovel and smash an enemy's skull. Perhaps, if God favored him, he could even strike the Iron Prince from behind and bring the black giant down with one good blow to the back of the head.
Although the thought made his body tremble.
No, he should probably not try that idea. Instead, first his family had to be saved. Maybe after that revenge, maybe.
He nodded then as if making up his mind, yet his body still shook from fear.
Then another thought came, unwanted and sharp.
Father would not have trembled.
He saw his father Piotr in his mind.
Not as he had been in life, but as the river had taken him: floating, limp, one eye gone, the water carrying him away while Zofia stood in Oskar's arms.
Piotr had not been a gentle father, but he had been the man of the house. Tomasz respected him for that. Yes, his father had struck his mother often, sometimes for reasons Tomasz had not understood. But was that not what happened when a woman spoke back too loudly? Had Maria not learned to lower her eyes and keep silent? Had she not understood what their mother never seemed to understand?
A woman survived better when she knew when to close her mouth.
A wife did not challenge her husband and then act surprised when he corrected her.
That was how houses worked.
Ugly, perhaps.
But many true things were ugly.
Piotr had been older when he married Zofia. A man already. She had been poor, young, and without much choice. People had whispered. Tomasz had heard enough to know the marriage had not been born from songs, flowers, and love. It had been necessity. Survival. His father had given her a house, money, and stability.
She should have been grateful.
That was life, after all. A man provided for the family. A woman kept the home. Children obeyed. And when a woman forgot her place, the man corrected her.
That was how Tomasz had been raised to understand the world.
Then, as if from nowhere, the Iron Prince had come and broken it all apart. His mother and sister had remained behind, abandoning Piotr like spoiled meat.
Tomasz could not accept that.
In his mind, they had not simply been captured. They had chosen. They had stayed. They had dishonored his father's memory, and now, as the man of the family, it fell to Tomasz to bring them back and set right what had gone wrong.
The thought burned through his fear.
Then the ladder team pushed through the reeds behind him.
"Move, boy!" one of the men shouted in Polish. "Move!"
Tomasz swallowed.
His father should have disciplined them better.
Now he needed to bring them back himself.
He rose with a scream.
"Ura!"
And charged.
Around him, other men ran with the same mad fury. They rushed from the marsh onto the road and down it at full sprint, tracer rounds whipping overhead, rain stinging their faces, star shell light dying above them.
They crossed the three-hundred-meter mark.
Two men blew apart ahead of them, causing blood and pieces of flesh to spray across those behind.
Then another man stepped on a different kind of mine.
It popped upward from the mud.
Tomasz saw it rise.
For one impossible instant, it hung in the air like a small black egg.
Some instinct seized him then, and he threw himself flat.
The mine burst above the road.
Steel balls and fragments screamed outward in every direction. Two men still upright were hammered apart in a split second, their bodies jerking under hundreds of impacts before collapsing into the mud. A third took the blast across his back and fell without a sound.
Tomasz lay with his face in the road, breath gone, ears ringing. He was alive, although he did not understand how.
Men ran past him.
The two-man ladder team rushed forward in panic, the crude wooden ladder bouncing between them. They made it twenty more meters before the front carrier—a Polish youth from Tomasz's own neighborhood—hit another mine.
His lower body disappeared.
His torso fell onto the road like discarded meat, arms still twitching.
The ladder crashed down beside him.
The rear carrier ran straight into it, lost his balance, and hit the road hard enough to knock the air from his lungs. He rolled onto his side, groaning.
Five more men charged past them. Farther ahead, more mines flashed. Men fell screaming. Others vanished. To either side of the road, explosions bloomed in the marsh as men were shot, blasted, or swallowed by water and mud.
It was madness, all of it.
Tomasz could only stare.
Then the fallen ladder carrier shouted in Polish.
"Come on, boy! Get up! Let's get your whore mother and bitch sister back—and all the rest!"
The words struck Tomasz like a slap, causing anger to rise through the fear.
Not because he disagreed, but because the man had said it. Because the words belonged to Tomasz, not to him.
He grabbed his shovel and forced himself up.
His brown eyes shone in the dark with terror, rage, and sudden purpose.
Together, he and the surviving ladder carrier seized the ladder and ran.
They crossed the hundred-meter mark just as another star shell climbed into the sky and burst above them. Its light revealed the ground ahead in cruel detail: uneven patches of mud, strange little mounds, darker seams in the road, shallow cuts where German hands had disturbed the earth.
Tomasz saw them. He did not know exactly what they were, but he knew enough now to avoid them.
"Left!" he shouted.
The other man obeyed.
They swerved around one patch, then another, unknowingly avoiding two more buried traps. A rifle round snapped past Tomasz's head. Another struck the ladder and sent splinters into his cheek.
He kept running until they reached the ditch.
It had been cut in a sharp V before the wall, filled with mud, water, stakes, and a few strips of tangled wire. The fort's timber firing wall loomed above them, black and wet, muzzle flashes winking through slits and over the parapet.
Together, Tomasz and the other man tried to raise the ladder. It struck the side of the ditch, slipped, and fell back. Although the angle was wrong.
Placed in the bottom of the V, it could not reach the top. Set on the muddy lip, it slid under its own weight and threatened to collapse the moment men climbed it.
That was when Tomasz's shovel finally mattered.
He dropped to his knees in the mud and began hacking at the side of the ditch, cutting a shelf into the wet earth where the ladder's foot could bite. The other man held the timber frame steady, cursing, praying, shouting at him to hurry.
Behind them, more Russians surged forward.
Some still died on mines. Some fell into pits where sharpened stakes pierced legs, feet, and bellies. Some were shot from the wall and tumbled into the ditch before they could scream.
But others reached it. First another ladder arrived. Then another.
The mines were still killing men, but each explosion spent one more hidden charge. The bodies marked paths. The dead became signposts. The living followed them.
In the marsh, men still fired wildly at the fort. On the road, more came running.
While at the ditch, the first ladders began to rise.
The crude ladder Tomasz had helped place scraped over the mud, caught against the shelf he had carved, and tilted upward toward the wall. It did not reach cleanly. Its top fell across the outer coils of barbed wire and stopped just short of the timber palisade. Any man climbing it would have to crawl over the wire, reach up, catch the edge of the wall, and drag himself the last distance by hand.
It was bad.
It was also enough.
The older ladder man looked up, breathing hard, rain running down his face.
"Good enough," he said.
Tomasz nodded, though his stomach twisted at the sight of it.
More men crowded into the ditch, pressing low against the muddy wall, barely hidden from the defenders above. Some hacked at the stakes. Others dragged brush bundles into the water. One man lay sobbing with a spike through his foot while another tried to pull him free. A few clutched axes, knives, and clubs, staring upward as if the wall had become the side of a mountain.
The ladder bearers held the crude frame in place and stared at the men crowding in the ditch.
"Go!" the ladder man hissed. "Go, damn you! Climb or we will all die here!"
For a moment no one moved.
The men with axes, knives, shovels, and clubs only stared upward at the black wall, at the wire, at the firing slits, at the rain falling through the last dying light of the star shell. Some crossed themselves. Some whispered prayers. One man kissed a small wooden cross so hard his teeth clicked against it.
Then the first man climbed.
He went up quickly, too quickly, hands and boots slipping on wet wood. Another followed. Then a third. Then a fourth. The ladder bent under their weight but held. Men in the ditch began to breathe again. Someone muttered that God was with them.
The first climber reached the wire.
He threw his coat over it and began dragging himself across, one hand reaching for the top of the wall.
Then the star shell died, and darkness rushed back over the marsh.
For one heartbeat, the world vanished.
Then a black shape leaned over the wall.
The machine gun opened.
It did not sound like ordinary rifle fire. It came in a tearing burst, hard and fast, like a buzz saw cutting through wet meat and wood. The men on the ladder barely had time to scream. Bullets smashed through bodies, shattered arms, punched through backs, tore faces open. The top man folded over the wire and hung there, twitching. The man beneath him fell backward, taking the third with him. The fourth clung for half a second longer before the burst found him too and flung him sideways into the ditch.
Then the gun dipped.
Bullets hammered down into the mud and water at the ladder's foot, ripping through the men hiding there. Dirt jumped. Water spat. Men shrieked and threw themselves flat as the line of fire walked across the ditch.
From farther back in the marsh, Russians began firing wildly at the wall. Rifle flashes winked in the darkness, scattered and desperate. The machine gunner shifted at once, turning his fire toward the road and the reeds where the return fire came from.
The same thing was happening everywhere.
At one ladder, the men climbing were cut down before reaching the wire.
At another, the ladder itself bucked under the weight of corpses and slipped sideways into the ditch.
At a third, a man reached the top only for a black-gloved hand to appear, press a pistol to his face, and fire.
The assault was turning into slaughter.
Tomasz saw it happen and something inside him snapped.
He dropped his shovel, grabbed a knife from the mud beside a dead militiaman, and rose just high enough to see the black shape above the wall. He held the knife by the blade, drew back his arm, and threw.
The knife spun upward through rain and darkness.
It struck the machine gunner's helmet with a sharp metallic clang.
The blow did not kill him, but it stunned him. The black figure jerked back with a muffled groan and vanished behind the wall. The machine gun stopped.
For one wild second, the men in the ditch cheered.
Then the grenades came.
Round black shapes sailed over the palisade and dropped into the mud among them.
The older ladder man saw them first.
"Grenades! Down!"
The ditch erupted.
Explosions tore through mud, water, wood, and flesh. Men vanished in red flashes. Stakes snapped. Bodies were thrown against the ditch wall. A severed hand slapped against Tomasz's shoulder and slid away. The air filled with smoke, splinters, blood, and the thick wet stink of opened men.
When Tomasz lifted his head, the ladder was broken.
The lower half had splintered and sagged into the ditch. The upper half still leaned uselessly against the wire, leaving the way upward exposed again.
The older ladder man stared at it and cursed.
"They broke the ladder!"
Tomasz wiped mud from his mouth.
"Then we climb without it."
He reached for the slope, but the older man grabbed his shoulder.
"No."
Before Tomasz could answer, the young officer came scrambling through the ditch, leaping over corpses and crawling men. Blood covered the side of his coat, though none of it seemed to be his. Several soldiers followed him, panting, wild-eyed, too frightened to disobey and too frightened to stand still.
"The enemy is suppressed!" the officer shouted. "Now! Get up there, you dogs! Make an opening! The rest of us will take the gate!"
The gate was to the side of them, damaged and partly open, its timbers split by earlier fire. But wire still hung before it in tangled coils, and the ground between the ditch and the gate was swept by German fire. Men looked at it and hesitated.
The officer raised his pistol and roared, "Forward!"
So they went.
Some rushed the broken ladder and began climbing the muddy slope with axes and bare hands. Others surged toward the gate, hacking at the wire, throwing coats over it, trying to climb or cut through.
Then a horn sounded from inside the fort. And for an instant, all the Russians froze as a light then flared inside the broken gate.
Then came the growl of an engine, and in the next moment the damaged gate burst outward in a spray of splinters as an armored truck forced its way through. It rolled forward with brutal, deliberate power, painted Prussian blue beneath the mud, its front plates scarred and wet, the letters SEK visible across the hood. It stopped in the gateway like a roadblock made of steel.
Mounted above the cab was a machine-gun position enclosed behind thick glass and armor plates. Behind that cracked, rain-streaked glass sat a Prussian blue-armored figure, faceless beneath helmet and mask.
The gun opened up with force and swept the men at the gate away, tearing all in it's path to pieces.
Russians fired back in panic. Rifle rounds bounced from the truck's armor or cracked against the glass without piercing it. Then the headlights lifted, glaring white into the marsh. The whole road vanished behind blinding light. Men farther back could see nothing now except those two terrible eyes burning in the rain.
The officer stared at the blocked gate.
Then he turned back toward Tomasz and the others.
"Up the walls!" he screamed. "The gate is blocked! Climb, you dogs! Climb!"
The men climbed.
Tomasz hesitated only until he saw the older ladder man begin clawing up the muddy slope. Then he seized his shovel again, drove its edge into the earth, and hauled himself after him.
More grenades came over the wall.
They fell behind the climbers and burst in the ditch, killing the men still crowding there. Screams rose from below. Mud and blood rained down on Tomasz's back. Above him, black shapes leaned over the palisade, firing downward into the slope. Without a star shell in the sky, the defenders were only silhouettes: helmets, shoulders, rifles, masked faces briefly lit by muzzle flashes.
They looked less like men than executioners carved from night.
Bullets tore through the climbers.
A man trying to throw his coat over the wire was shot through the throat and collapsed onto it, twitching. Another reached up, fingers scraping the timber wall, then took three rounds in the chest and fell backward into the men below. A third hung caught in the wire, screaming for help until a burst of fire cut him silent.
"No!" Tomasz shouted.
He dug one hand into the mud, raised his shovel with the other, and hurled it upward at a black figure aiming down over the wall.
The figure twisted aside.
The shovel clattered against the palisade and fell away into the darkness.
Tomasz was unarmed.
Then the older ladder man was hit, once, twice.
Three times.
He jerked under the impacts, breath bursting from him, but before he fell he tore a knife from his belt and tossed it downward.
"Take it, boy!"
Tomasz caught it by instinct.
The old man slid past him, rolling down the muddy slope into the ditch, eyes already empty.
For a moment, Tomasz could only stare.
Around him, men were dying everywhere. In the ditch. On the slope. At the gate. In the marsh and along the road behind them. The enemy firepower was too great. Too cold. Too mechanical. Too impossible.
Then whistles blew inside the fort.
The black figures on the eastern wall began moving left and right, spreading along the rampart to answer new threats. For a few seconds, the section directly above Tomasz thinned. Perhaps only twenty defenders remained on the wall before him.
Tomasz saw the gap.
He gritted his teeth and climbed.
A black figure leaned out to fire toward the marsh. Tomasz threw the knife with all the fury in his body. It struck somewhere beneath the man's arm or in the throat guard. The figure screamed and fell backward behind the wall.
Tomasz climbed faster.
He crawled over the dead and dying, over bodies slowly sliding down the slope, over men tangled in wire and mud. His fingers dug into the earth until his nails tore. His cheap shoes slipped again and again, but he kept going.
At the wire, he found a man still alive, caught in the barbs, bleeding from his belly.
"Help me," the man begged.
Tomasz looked at him, and saw the axe still clutched in the man's hand.
"I'm sorry," Tomasz gasped. "I don't have time."
He tore the axe free and climbed over him.
Lightning flashed overhead.
For one white instant, Tomasz's brown eyes burned beneath the rain. His cap flew from his head, and his long dark hair spilled wild across his face. He climbed like an animal now, half-boy, half-rage, driving the axe into the timber wall where the slope ended and the palisade rose above him.
The blade bit.
He used it as a hook, pulled himself higher, kicked hard against the mud, and lunged.
His fingers caught the top of the wall.
For one terrible second he hung there, boots scraping, arms shaking, wire cutting at his coat below. Then he dragged himself up, rolled over the parapet, and landed hard on the wet wooden walkway.
He did not look around.
He spun toward the first black figure he saw.
The Legionary was firing down along the wall, unaware until Tomasz was already upon him. Tomasz swung the axe with both hands. The blade struck the man square in the faceplate, cracking steel, punching through glass, and biting into flesh beneath. The Legionary stumbled backward with a wet metallic gasp and toppled from the wall into the fort yard below.
Tomasz tore the axe free and roared.
His eyes were bloodshot. His breath came in animal bursts. He turned toward the next figure, but before he could move he heard heavy steps behind him.
Without thinking, Tomasz spun and swung the axe with everything he had.
And in that split second he saw a blade flash, not a bayonet, but a sword.
The cut sliced across the outside of his left wrist and bit into his right arm before the axe could land properly. His axe struck armor, glanced aside, and flew from Tomasz's hands into the darkness below.
Pain exploded through him and he screamed, as a black-gloved hand closed around his throat and lifted him off the walkway.
His feet kicked uselessly in the air.
The figure before him was enormous.
Not as vast as the Iron Prince, but still massive compared to the starving boys and peasants laying now dead in the marsh. Black armor covered him from throat to boot. A mask hid his face. Rain ran over dark goggles that reflected Tomasz's own terrified shape back at him. On the man's helmet, lightning revealed a silver eagle clutching a human skull in its talons, as if some Germanic bird of death had come down to harvest the battlefield.
When the figure spoke, the mask made his voice low and distorted.
"What a pity," he said. "A boy so young, and already thrown away."
Tomasz clawed at the hand around his throat, choking.
The masked man tilted his head slightly, almost sadly.
"You know, if they carve a stone for you, they will write when you were born and when you died. But, between those dates, there will be a line. A small line. That line is your life, boy. And what will yours mean? That you crawled through mud, screamed for a master who never knew your name, and died for nothing?"
The sword moved.
Its point entered Tomasz's side.
Not deep enough to kill him at once. Not through heart or lung. Lower. Deliberate. Cruel in its precision. Pain tore through him and blood filled his mouth, hot against the cold rain.
The masked figure leaned closer.
"What will they remember you for?"
Tomasz's eyes widened.
Then, through the blood, he smiled.
"For this."
His wounded hand rose between them.
In his fingers was a grenade pin.
The masked figure understood instantly.
"You insolent little—"
The sword ripped free as he moved to throw Tomasz away, but Tomasz pulled both knees to his chest and kicked hard into the man's breastplate. The grip on his throat loosened. The armored figure stumbled back.
Tomasz hit the wet boards, rolled, and did not look behind him. He instead threw himself from the wall.
The grenade exploded a heartbeat later.
Fire and splinters burst across the parapet above him. Tomasz struck the barbed wire on the outer slope, and the hooks tore through his coat and skin before momentum ripped him loose. He tumbled down the mud, bounced off a corpse, slid through blood and water, and landed in a heap of dead men at the bottom of the slope.
Above, German voices shouted in fury.
Black shapes leaned over the wall and fired down.
Tomasz lay still among the bodies.
Bullets hammered into the corpses around him. One struck so close to his head that blood from the dead man beneath him splashed across his cheek. He did not breathe. He did not blink. He made himself into meat.
Then two grenades dropped from above.
His eyes snapped open.
He rolled away just as they burst, the explosions throwing mud, bone, and dead flesh into the rain. Tomasz staggered up and ran blindly into the marsh, one hand pressed to his bleeding side, the other burning uselessly from the sword cut.
Bullets chased him through the reeds. Water spat around his legs. Something tore across his shoulder, close enough to feel like a hot finger.
Then a hand seized him and dragged him down behind a fallen tree.
Half his body plunged into cold black water.
Panic took him. For a moment he thought the marsh itself had grabbed his legs and begun pulling him under. He thrashed, choking, until another hand clamped over his mouth.
"Quiet," a voice hissed. "Quiet, boy. Hold the tree and stop fighting the water. The swamp will not take you if you stop wrestling it."
Tomasz blinked through rain, blood, and mud.
The young officer crouched beside him, covered in other men's blood, his face pale but smiling.
"Well done," the officer whispered. "Very fine work. I will see you rewarded for that."
Tomasz tried to answer, but only blood came up.
The officer glanced toward the fort, where the eastern wall still flashed with gunfire.
"Sadly, it was not enough. We will have to wait for the second wave. Perhaps the third. This place will not break easily."
Tomasz nodded because he had no strength to do anything else. He pressed a hand to his side and gritted his teeth, trying not to bleed to death into the marsh.
Then, from the darkness behind them, the next roar rose.
"Uraaaaa!"
The second wave was coming.
The first wave, nearly three hundred men, had been almost wiped out. Bodies lay around the fort, in the ditch, on the road, across the wire, on the slope, and half-submerged in the marsh. They had tried to envelop the redoubt from every side and had been killed for it.
Now three more companies advanced through the rain.
Nearly a thousand men.
Their voices rolled across the wetlands, and the night shook beneath them.
The same scene was unfolding all along the vast eastern front. Across nearly eight hundred kilometers of rivers, forests, marshes, roads, and ruined villages, Russians hurled themselves against the Black Legion defensive line. Thousands were dying by the hour. Before morning, hundreds of thousands would be dead, wounded, missing, or broken.
Yet the Russian storm did not stop.
And under that storm, even the Black Legion began to bend, one desperate wave of men after another.