"Well?" the officer called from the doorway of the farmhouse. "Did you find that German pilot? I'm sure one of the devils came down not far from here."
The older soldier shook his head.
"No sign of him, sir. If he hit the ground out there, he's either buried in the mud or blown into pieces."
The officer's eyes shifted to Ronald.
"And this one, then?"
"French flyer, sir," said the older man. "Came down hard, but he's still standing. Talks English well enough."
The officer stepped out a little further into the grey light and looked Ronald up and down with a sharp, unwelcoming stare. He was a hard man, broad through the shoulders, with a face like weathered leather, rough-shaven and lined by fatigue. Mud had dried in layers on his boots and trousers, and there was blood on one sleeve that had long since gone brown. His cap sat low on his head, like all the others, and Ronald noticed at once—with a strange, detached clarity—that none of them wore helmets, only those peaked service caps, as if they had marched into a modern slaughter dressed for an older, gentler war.
The officer sniffed once and curled his lip.
"God, man, you stink," he said. "Like you've been sleeping in a drain with the dead." Then he gave a dismissive jerk of his hand. "Never mind. Get him something fit to wear, a rifle, ammunition, and put him in the line. He's coming with us, isn't he?"
Ronald, still half-caked in mud from the crater, nodded at once.
"Yes."
"That'll do," the officer said. "At least you're built right for it. Better that than some stringy French scarecrow who drops dead if you lean on him."
The men around him gave rough little laughs at that, ugly and casual, as if contempt were as natural to them as breathing.
Only then did Ronald allow himself to really look at the farmhouse.
From the outside, it had seemed merely worn and battered, another country house caught in the path of armies. But up close, and especially within, it was something else entirely—a place that had ceased to belong to ordinary life and had instead been given over to war. The smell struck him first. Not one smell, but many layered together until the air itself seemed fouled beyond cleansing: sweat, piss, old blood, wet wool, rot, smoke, mud, and the sour staleness of too many wounded men kept too long in too little space.
Inside the open doorway, the dim interior was crowded with suffering. Men lay on blankets, on doors torn from hinges and turned into stretchers, on piles of straw, on bare boards darkened with damp and blood. Some groaned in low, animal tones. Others stared upward, blank and hollow-eyed, already drifting somewhere beyond pain. Nurses in white aprons moved among them, their garments marked and spoiled by the work of their hands. One knelt beside a boyish soldier whose bandaged head had already soaked through, while another bent over a man whose breath came in bubbling gasps. Their voices were soft, almost gentle, but the room itself made a mockery of gentleness.
And the soldiers treated it all as though it were no great matter.
They stepped around the wounded, cursed, laughed, tightened straps, checked bolts, and spat on the floor as if the place were merely inconvenient rather than hellish.
They were tough-looking men, dark with mud and soot, broad-backed and rawboned, carrying themselves with that brutal, half-amused indifference common to men who had long since grown used to filth, misery, and death. Ronald had seen battle from above, had watched men die as flashes or falling shapes in the distance, but this—this closeness, this reeking intimacy of broken flesh and exhausted bodies—struck him in another way altogether.
He felt, dimly and uncomfortably, that some dark chamber of his mind was opening and storing it away: not as memory alone, but as image, as symbol, as something that would return one day in other forms, beneath other names.
There was a savage ordinariness to it that chilled him more than the grand violence of artillery.
A Lee-Enfield was thrust into his hands. It was heavy, wet, and sound enough. Along with it came webbing, fifteen rounds in chargers, gloves, and a coat that was far too narrow across his shoulders.
The man handing them over gave him a brief grin.
"There. That's better. You look almost human now."
Ronald pulled the coat on and said nothing. He could feel them looking at him with fresh approval now that they had seen the breadth of him properly beneath the mud. Whatever else they thought, they could see he was no weakling. He was tall, broad, and hard through the chest and arms, and in a place like this that seemed to count for more than papers or names.
The officer glanced at him again and grunted.
"Aye. You'll do. Just keep up and don't get clever."
Ronald inclined his head.
"I shall do my best."
That earned him another laugh, harsher this time.
"Listen to him," one of them muttered. "Sounds like a bloody schoolmaster."
Perhaps, Ronald thought. Or perhaps like someone who still remembered another life, another order, another world that had not yet been swallowed whole by mud.
But he did not say that.
The officer stepped outside once more, looked at the sky, then toward the distant muttering of the front, and made his decision.
"Right then, lads. Two of you stay here with the wounded and the nurses. The rest with me. We're not winning this war by hiding in a stinking farmhouse."
There followed the familiar business of men preparing to move toward danger—buckles tightened, rifles checked, muttered curses, little rituals of habit and superstition. Ronald fell in with them without protest.
As they passed the wounded, he felt a dull and complicated sickness in himself. Not merely because of the smell, nor even because of the misery laid out before him, but because these men had accepted him so easily. A coat, a rifle, a lie, and a body sturdy enough to be useful—that had been enough.
He went out among them as though he belonged.
Outside, the road was a ruin. Mud dragged at their boots. A broken cart leaned into a ditch. A dead horse lay in its traces, swollen and still, while a man in khaki sprawled nearby with his face turned into the clay.
This was not yet the endless trench labyrinth that would later devour whole generations. It was still farmland, still open country, still a world of hedges and fields and roads and little homesteads. Perhaps for that reason it felt more cruel, not less. War here had not replaced life; it had simply broken into it, fouled it, and made itself at home.
Then as they moved further along, soon enough there came flashes ahead.
The officer saw them at once.
"Spread out!" the officer shouted. "Quickly now—spread out! Incoming!"
The men broke at once, throwing themselves into the ditches on either side of the road. Ronald went down with them just as the first shells came in, hard, flat bursts at first, then a heavier one that landed squarely in a ditch crowded with men who had thought themselves safe. The explosion tore five of them apart in an instant. Mud, rifles, and pieces of bodies were flung into the air, and the survivors cried out more in shock than grief before the next burst drove their heads down again.
"Bloody hell," the officer snarled, wiping wet earth from his face. He peered through the smoke, saw something ahead, and made up his mind immediately. "There! Up there! Move, you bastards, move! Up to that fence line! Quickly!"
The men scrambled out in a broken rush, slipping in the mud, stumbling over roots and shell holes, then surging forward again. Ronald followed, nearly falling once, catching himself with one hand in the grass, then driving on after them.
Ahead, another company was already in place along a shallow rise where a half-broken fence, part stone and part timber, ran beside a line of bushes and thin trees. It was no proper trench, but it was cover enough for desperate men. By the time Ronald reached it, the position had already taken shape: rifles braced along the stonework, machine guns pushed into narrow gaps, bayonets fixed, officers shouting along the line to close intervals and keep men steady.
Ronald dropped behind one of the machine-gun crews near the center and looked out.
The ground before them rolled wide and bare toward a distant line of trees. It was open killing ground. No trenches. No real shelter. Only torn grass, shell craters, and death waiting in the open.
For a moment, he thought of an execution ground.
Then came the whistle.
A sharp, carrying note from across the field.
A second later rifle fire cracked from the far tree line, and one British soldier beside Ronald jerked backward with a wet cry and collapsed into the mud.
Then the Germans came.
They did not emerge in a neat little patrol or some cautious skirmishing knot. They came in force, company after company pushing out of the distant trees, rifles flashing, bayonets fixed, men moving in heavy, brutal waves. Some dropped and fired from the ground. Others rose and pushed forward again. Officers behind them shouted and drove them on as if sheer weight of flesh could force a path through lead.
Ronald stared in disbelief.
What in God's name are you doing?
He had spoken often enough with Oskar about war, about what killed armies and what saved them, about how old men sent younger men to die because they could not imagine new ways to fight. And now here it was before his eyes: brave men being fed into modern fire like offerings into a furnace.
The British officer along the fence saw them too and wasted no time.
"Steady—steady—"
Then his hand came down.
"Open fire!"
The whole line answered at once.
Rifles cracked in disciplined rhythm, bolts worked fast and hard, and the machine guns joined in with savage bursts that seemed to rip strips out of the morning. The effect was immediate. Germans fell by the score. One spun around and dropped. Another pitched forward face-first. Whole little knots of men went down together. Those who rose to charge were cut apart. Those who crawled were hit again when they moved.
And still more came on.
Men dropped, fired, rose, and pushed again.
The machine-gun crew in front of Ronald were laughing now, the ugly laughter of men killing from strength and safety. Others shouted along the line with the same hard delight.
"Look at the bloody fools!"
"Mad bastards!"
"Huns! Keep coming, you swine!"
Ronald felt something cold settle in him.
These were not frightened defenders clinging to life. They were enjoying it.
And out there in the mud were Germans.
Not faceless "Huns." Not abstractions.
Germans.
Men of the same nation that had fed him, clothed him, educated him, given him purpose, given him Edith, given him a life.
He saw movement on the far left then, something even worse.
Motorcycles.
German motorcycles.
They came fast over the broken ground, engines snarling, skidding and bouncing through shell holes as if some idiot had mistaken speed for invincibility. Ronald almost spoke aloud.
What the hell are they doing?
That was not how motorcycles were to be used. Not like this. Not into a prepared firing line. They would be slaughtered before they got halfway across.
He hesitated for one second.
Only one.
Then he moved.
The machine-gunner in front of him was leaning into the weapon, shoulders shaking with each burst, wholly intent on the slaughter. Ronald brought his rifle up from almost point-blank range.
"Sorry," he whispered.
He fired.
The gunner's head snapped apart and he folded over the weapon.
The loader beside him turned, confused, not understanding.
"What the—"
Ronald worked the bolt and shot him too.
The second man fell backward into the bushes.
For a heartbeat, no one understood what had happened. The battlefield was too loud, too full of gunfire, screaming engines, and artillery, for two more shots to mean anything.
Ronald seized the machine gun, dragged it hard around, and opened fire.
The British line to his right took the burst first. Men dropped before they could turn. One pitched backward over the wall. Another spun and clutched his stomach. Ronald swung left and fired again, cutting through khaki, wood, brush, and flesh alike.
Now the line truly panicked.
Men shouted. Some went flat. Some turned their rifles toward him in confusion. Others were still shooting out toward the Germans, unaware that the center of their own line had just turned against them.
The motorcycles came on through the confusion.
One swerved hard through a gap in the fence line, its mounted gun chattering at near point-blank range, while two infantrymen behind it leapt off and fired into the disordered defenders. More grey-coated Germans followed close behind, and that instant of disorder was enough. The British line bent, tore, and began to break.
Ronald kept firing.
He swept the machine gun across one section, then lifted and dragged it toward another, spraying wherever he saw khaki still holding together. Men fell flat. Others tried to run. One officer stood and pointed, shouting,
"What the devil are you doing, Frenchman? Bloody—"
A German bullet hit him from the front and threw him backward.
That was enough.
The Germans were close now, very close. Bayonets met flesh. Rifles fired at arm's length. Men screamed in fury and terror. The motorcycles, mad as they had seemed, had done exactly what was needed: they had forced confusion at the right moment and given the infantry just enough time to close.
Ronald fired one last burst into a knot of retreating British, then abandoned the gun and crawled backward into the brush as Germans flooded through the breach.
One of them nearly bayoneted him on sight.
"Wait!" Ronald shouted in German, throwing up a hand. "Wait, wait—I'm German!"
The man froze.
Ronald tore off the cap and pointed at his own face.
"It's me! Ronald Tolkien!"
The soldier blinked, then stared harder through the smoke and mud.
"What—? 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 focus!"
The soldier straightened at once, still looking half stunned.
"Yes, sir!"
Ronald snatched up a rifle from the ground and turned just in time to see the last of the British trying to pull back across the field. Around him the Germans surged forward, no longer charging blindly, but flooding through the broken line in a savage, disciplined rush.
Within minutes, it was over.
The British were dead, scattered, or running.
The German company dressed itself raggedly across the captured ground, shouting, firing, and reforming all at once, and through the smoke came their captain, sword in one hand, pistol at his side, face blackened with dirt and sweat.
He saw Ronald at once, and he stopped to look at him once, hard.
Then snapped, "And who in God's name are you supposed to be?"
The soldier beside Ronald answered quickly, still half in awe.
"Herr Hauptmann, it's Tolkien!"
The captain frowned.
"Tolkien?"
Ronald turned toward him, chest heaving, rifle still in 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?"
The captain stared at him for one hard second, then stepped closer.
He was older than Ronald, broader in the chest, taller by enough to make the difference obvious, and looked like a man who had spent long months in the field and had no patience left for nonsense.
"And what do you think you're doing?" he barked back.
He did not wait for an answer. Instead, he shoved Ronald hard in the shoulder, pushing him aside like an insolent boy who had wandered somewhere above his station.
"Out of the way, boy," he growled. "I know who you are. I've seen your name on papers and books. But you have no business here. These are my men. I command here."
Then he turned away from him at once, already shouting to the line.
"Finish it here! Dress the position! Ammunition forward! We keep moving!"
The men, still breathing hard, still smeared in blood and mud, began to stir.
And Ronald felt something in him snap.
"No," he said.
The word was not loud, but it carried.
The captain stopped and looked back over one shoulder.
Ronald stepped forward, face pale with fury, eyes fixed on him.
"Absolutely not," he said again, louder now. "If you push forward as you are, you'll only send these men into slaughter, you fool."
The captain turned fully.
For a second there was pure disbelief on his face, as though the mud-spattered writer before him had just barked at him like an equal.
Then outrage followed.
"Why, you insolent little—"
He came in fast, right fist swinging for Ronald's jaw.
It was the sort of punch an older, stronger man threw at a younger one when he expected the younger one to freeze.
Ronald did not freeze.
He shifted just enough that the blow missed him by inches, caught the captain's arm with both hands, turned with the momentum, and threw him clean over his shoulder.
The captain slammed into the earth with a hard, ugly crash.
The men around them gasped.
One soldier actually cried out, "Captain!"
The captain groaned and tried to rise, but Ronald was already standing over him, breathing hard, pointing down at him with sudden, hard authority.
"No," Ronald snapped. "You listen to me now."
The captain glared upward in shock and rage, but Ronald seized his arm and twisted it back against his body in a rough lock, just enough to make the older man stop trying to rise.
"I am Ronald Tolkien," Ronald said, voice shaking with fury and adrenaline. "And that little move you just felt was one Prince Oskar himself taught to me."
That name landed like a gunshot.
The soldiers stiffened.
Even the captain stopped moving for a moment.
Ronald pressed on, his voice rising not into panic, but into something stranger and more dangerous — conviction.
"I have spoken with Prince Oskar," he said. "I have studied with him. I have written with him. I have argued with him over history, war, language, and the madness of men. And this—" he pointed sharply toward the corpse-strewn field they had just crossed, "—this is not warfare he would tolerate from any officer in Germany."
He leaned closer over the captain, eyes burning.
"Now by the authority of the Prince, my friend, my savior, and yours whether you understand it or not, you will listen to me."
The captain's face had gone from anger to something closer to alarm.
Around them, no one spoke.
Because the one name no one here wished to trifle with was Oskar's.
Ronald released the lock and stepped back.
The captain sat up slowly, breathing hard, looking at Ronald now not as a boy but as a person he now felt that he had to take seriously.
Ronald turned away from him before the man could gather his pride back around himself.
He looked at the survivors.
There were fewer than fifty left standing in any organized shape.
Mud-covered, blood-streaked, shocked and waiting for someone to tell them what to do next.
Ronald pointed at them.
"Forty-eight of you still able to move?" he shouted.
A few nodded. Others blinked. One man muttered a number to his sergeant.
"Good," Ronald snapped. "Then you will spread out into five teams. Five separate teams, each under one man. Choose your leaders now."
No one moved at first.
The captain started to stand, but Ronald cut him off with a look and a raised hand.
"No," he said sharply. "You've done enough."
Then Ronald faced the men again.
"From this moment onward, you do not charge blindly across open ground like cattle being herded to slaughter. You move through cover. You advance by walls, ditches, hedges, folds in the earth, and tree lines. You use your heads."
The men were staring now.
Some with confusion. Some with disbelief. Some, especially the younger ones with a kind of desperate hope.
Ronald pointed toward the field and the distant farm buildings beyond.
"If I tell you to take a house, that does not mean rush it like idiots until the dead pile high enough for the rest to climb over. It means that house becomes the objective. You work together, by teams, to take it with the fewest dead possible. One team pins. One moves. One flanks. One watches for counterattack. One holds ready."
He swallowed once, then drove the point home.
"We cannot afford to keep losing men like this."
That sentence hit harder than all the others.
Because every man there had just seen how true it was.
Ronald pointed again, faster now, more certain.
"You five there. You're one team. Sergeant, take them."
"You four, left side. Behind the hedge line."
"You six, center reserve. Stay low and move only when called."
He turned at last and pointed directly at the captain.
"And you. You follow me from now on."
The older man stared at him in disbelief.
"What?"
"You heard me," Ronald said coldly. "You follow me."
For one second it seemed the captain might refuse outright.
But then he looked around.
At the men. At their faces. At the field behind them. At the name of Oskar still hanging over all of it like judgment.
And he said nothing.
Ronald took one breath, steadying himself, then faced the company as a whole.
"Choose your leaders," he barked. "Now. And once you've chosen them, spread out."
At last the men moved.
Not quickly at first, not cleanly, but they moved. Small knots formed along the shattered rise, sergeants pointing and cursing as men checked their rifles, counted what little ammunition remained, and slipped into whatever cover the broken ground could offer. It was clumsy, uneven work, but it was something—something better than standing in the open and waiting to die. Slowly, uncertainly, they began to think again, not as one terrified mass, but as smaller, sharper pieces.
The captain remained where he was, standing beside Ronald in the mud, his face still hard with anger and humiliation, yet now held in check by something he could not ignore. Around him, his men no longer looked to him alone.
They looked… elsewhere.
Beyond them, the war did not pause.
The Battle of the Marne rolled on, guns thundering across the horizon, smoke dragging low across fields that had once known only quiet labor. Men continued to fall beyond the next rise, and the earth swallowed them without ceremony. Nothing here had changed the war itself.
But something had changed in this small corner of it.
Ronald Tolkien stood among them, breath unsteady, mud and blood drying across his borrowed coat, a rifle clutched in his hands. Only hours ago he had been above it all, watching war as something distant and terrible. Now he stood within it, shaping it—forcing it, if only for a moment, to make sense.
Above, somewhere beyond the smoke and cloud, his brother still flew.
Below, Ronald led.
And the war carried on.
Meanwhile, far away in the heart of Germany, beneath the calm stone and ordered silence of Potsdam, Prince Oskar did not share that calm.
He did not know where the Tolkien brothers were.
He did not know if they still lived.
And that was enough.
Oskar was not a man who waited for certainty. If the war had taken them beyond the reach of reports and reason, then he would reach into the war itself and take them back.
From the Third Company of his Eternal Guard—his own—he chose five men.
Not by rank.
Not by reputation alone.
But by instinct.
Günther—the one who held the line when others broke, a natural leader who needed no permission to command.
Otto—the steady hand beside him, a support shooter who did not miss and did not falter.
Max—fast, aggressive, the kind of rifleman who closed distance instead of fearing it, a shotgun slung at his side for when things became close and ugly.
Adolf—the grenadier, precise and relentless, a man whose past would have seemed almost absurd in another life… a painter once, a salesman after, and now something far more dangerous.
Göbels—the heavy, carrying the machine gun like it belonged to him, the kind of man who could anchor a fight simply by refusing to move.
Together, they had earned a name.
Half in jest.
Half in truth.
The Suicide Squad.
Oskar's gaze lingered on Adolf for the briefest moment, a flicker of memory passing through him—an echo of another life that did not quite belong here. Then it was gone, dismissed as irrelevant to the man standing before him now.
"Find them," Oskar said.
There was no speech or ceremony, just an order.
"Bring them back."
And thus the five men received that order and began to move—into a war that swallowed armies whole, and toward two brothers who did not yet know that someone had already come for them.
While back at the Marne, the guns rolled on.