While in the United States, President Woodrow Wilson and the men around him spoke carefully of preparedness, finance, so-called neutrality, and the future shape of the world, Europe did not wait for them to decide what sort of age was coming.
The war carried on, full force.
Steel moved, men continued to die, trains ran east and west beneath smoke-darkened skies, dragging guns, shells, food, horses, wounded bodies, fresh battalions, and the endless weight of empire from one front to another.
And upon one of those trains, bound eastward along the repaired rail line toward Warsaw, sat Crown Prince Oskar von Hohenzollern.
He was dressed for war again.
Not in court black. Not in the polished uniform of ceremony. Not in the softer clothes his children preferred because they could climb him more easily when he wore them.
Armor.
Black armor.
Layered, reinforced, sealed across him piece by piece until the man beneath seemed less like a prince and more like an answer dragged out of some older age of iron and judgment. His skull-faced helmet rested beside him for now, its hollow eyes turned toward the wall of the carriage. The long red cape had been folded back across the seat, heavy as blood-soaked cloth. His massive sword lay secured within reach, too large for the carriage and yet carried as casually as another man might carry a walking cane. Along his left forearm rested the integrated grenade launcher, cleaned, checked, and loaded before departure.
Outside the armored carriage, in a reinforced livestock compartment built specifically for him, Shadowmane travelled in black barding of his own.
The beast did not like trains.
That much had been made clear to every engineer, groom, and Eternal Guard unfortunate enough to stand too close when he first entered. But he endured it, because Oskar had ordered it, and because even Shadowmane seemed to understand that the road east had opened again.
The worst of the rain was passing.
The mud remained. The shattered roads remained. The rivers remained swollen and dark. But the first signs were there all the same: firmer ground, clearer skies between storms, longer intervals where aircraft might fly and engines might breathe without drowning in the world itself.
The eastern war would move again.
And so would he.
The train ran over rails that, only weeks earlier, had been broken, burned, or buried beneath the wreckage of retreat. Now they held. German engineers had worked without pause, repairing bridges, replacing sleepers, clearing lines, restoring signals, reinforcing culverts, and turning conquered land from battlefield into corridor.
Roads had been graded where possible. Depots had been seized or rebuilt. Warehouses had been inventoried. Fuel had been moved forward. Telegraph and radio posts had been established where Russian administration had collapsed.
It was not perfect.
Nothing in war ever was.
But it was enough to carry him back to Warsaw in an acceptable amount of time.
And where he went, his will went with him.
Oskar sat beside the window, one armored hand resting against his knee, the other holding a folder of reports whose contents had long since ceased to surprise him. He had read them all already. Twice. Some three times.
Ammunition expenditure.
Fuel requirements.
Railway repairs.
Police deployments.
Civilian movement.
Weather forecasts.
Disease warnings.
Replacement drafts.
Production estimates from the factories.
Casualty reports from the Marne.
That last category he had not read three times.
Only once.
Once had been enough.
His jaw tightened as the wheels beat steadily beneath him.
Germany was winning.
That was what the papers said. That was what the crowds believed. That was what his father wanted to hear. That was what half the men in polished rooms insisted upon repeating whenever doubt entered the air.
Germany was winning.
And yet Oskar could see the shape beneath the word.
The Western Front was eating men.
Not soldiers in the abstract. Not formations. Not numbers on paper. Real men. German men, young and old, with names, dreams, homes, wives, sweethearts, children, mothers, futures—thrown into the furnace because Moltke still dreamed of a decisive western blow clean enough to end the war before the Entente could fully mobilize against them.
The Battle of the Marne was still ongoing, and the reports were obscene.
Tens of thousands killed. More wounded. Units ground down and pushed forward again because there was still one more village, one more bridge, one more line of trees, one more crossing that had to be taken before Paris could be reached. Shells were being consumed faster than the railways could carry them. Trucks driven until engines failed. Horses collapsing in harness. Ambulance trains overflowing. Hospitals behind the front filling faster than surgeons could empty them.
More than a hundred thousand German dead already across the war.
Perhaps more by the time the next full accounting came.
Many times that number wounded, maimed, fevered, blinded, shattered, or lost somewhere between battlefield and record.
And still Moltke pushed.
Still the Kaiser waited.
Still old men argued.
Oskar's fingers tightened slightly around the folder.
His father had not refused him everything. That would have been easier to hate.
No, Wilhelm had listened. He had listened as Oskar spoke of production, food, chemicals, shipping, railways, occupation law, police authority, and the future shape of the war. He had listened when Oskar explained that Germany could not afford hesitation. That Britain could not be allowed to breathe freely through neutral shipping. That Russia had to be forced out before Germany's two-front burden became unsustainable. That every day spent pretending this was still a restrained European conflict was a day purchased with German blood.
His father had listened and then, as always, he had held back. There would be no unrestricted naval warfare.
Not yet.
No full adoption of Oskar's occupation methods in Belgium and the west.
Not yet.
No dismissal of Moltke for the failures and incompetence that were now costing Germany the Western Front.
Not yet.
His father always returned to that same miserable phrase, whether spoken aloud or not.
Not yet.
Not without additional proper cause.
Oskar's mouth curled faintly, but there was no humor in it.
Because his father's caution had a price.
Not yet meant German men dead.
Not yet meant Belgian rail lines cut again and again by men who hid among civilians. Not yet meant German soldiers shot from windows, blown apart by saboteurs, poisoned by wells, stabbed in alleys, and avenged afterward by clumsy reprisals that only made everything worse.
Moltke's answer had been as crude as it was predictable.
For every German killed, ten locals shot at random.
Sometimes men.
Sometimes old men.
Sometimes women.
Sometimes children.
A method meant to inspire fear, but one that only fed the fire beneath the ashes.
Belgium was proof of failure.
Not military failure. Germany still advanced.
Administrative failure.
Moral failure.
Strategic failure.
The old way of occupation had revealed itself exactly as Oskar had expected: indecisive at first, then savage without structure, then hated without control.
His lands in the east were different.
Harder, yes.
Crueler in the first stroke, certainly.
But clear.
In Oskar's occupied territories, the rule was brutally simple. Men who did not belong were removed. Those who hid and were found were shot. Those who resisted were shot. Any male civilian not registered under German authority, not serving as German police, not wearing a German uniform, not approved by the occupation administration, did not belong in the rear of his army.
There was no confusion.
No crowd from which a rifleman could fire and vanish.
No village full of men who might smile in daylight and cut a telegraph wire by night.
No rail station where a saboteur could pass as one more worker among many.
The anger caused by his order had been immense. He knew that. He did not pretend otherwise. The men driven east would hate him. Their sons would hate him. Some of the women left behind would hate him too, even while accepting German bread, German shelter, German order, German protection.
But after the first stroke, the wound could close.
That was the point.
There would be no endless cycle of murder and reprisal. No random executions to feed new revenge. No daily contest between hidden killers and frightened occupiers.
His method took the hatred, concentrated it, expelled it eastward, and left behind a land that could be governed.
Hard measures, taken once.
Not stupid cruelty repeated forever.
That was what he had told his father.
That was what he had told the cabinet.
That was what he had told the Austro-Hungarians, who had paled at the thought of what such methods might mean among their own Polish populations and yet could not deny the efficiency of the result.
He had not called it expulsion in those rooms.
Not officially.
Not when words mattered and men needed phrases they could survive repeating.
Evacuation.
Security evacuation.
Temporary removal of hostile civilian elements from active operational zones.
He had given them the language they needed.
They had taken it, because the alternative was admitting that the Iron Prince's occupation worked better than their own.
Oskar leaned back as the train thundered onward.
The carriage lamps swayed faintly with the movement. Opposite him, Captain Carter stood near the door with two men of the 3rd Company, all three silent, black-uniformed, and watchful. Beyond them, in the next carriages, the rest of his personal guard travelled east with weapons, ammunition, radios, medical kits, and enough quiet confidence to make the train feel more like a moving fortress than a royal transport.
The 3rd Company had returned with him.
His own men.
Not the 1st Company, which guarded his family. Not the 2nd, which watched over Karl and the industrial heart of his empire. The 3rd belonged to him personally, and now they were going back to the place where his authority was least diluted.
The east.
There, at least, he did not have to beg fools to understand necessity.
There, the Black Legion obeyed.
So did his police forces.
They answered to him and only him.
And there, the air force, the armored division, the corps commanders, the occupation administrators, the SEK detachments, the regular police formations, the engineers, the rail officers, and the intelligence men all moved beneath the system he had built.
There, war still made sense because he had made it simple enough to understand, with his so called, "House rules."
Or so he hoped.
Then he turned a page in the report folder and stopped at the section marked chemical defense.
His expression darkened.
The French had already used tear gas again along the Marne.
They would deny it, of course. They would dress it in legal language, in excuses, in claims of non-lethality, in technical distinctions between irritants and poisons. Their diplomats would speak of necessity. Their generals would speak of riot-control agents and temporary incapacity. Their newspapers would say nothing at all unless forced.
But Oskar knew what it meant.
The line had been touched. Not fully crossed, not yet, but touched.
And touching such a line was dangerous, because every great power knew the possibility. Every serious army had chemists. Every government knew that choking vapors, irritants, and poisons could be placed into shells, grenades, bombs, canisters, and cylinders. They knew the Hague restrictions. They knew the moral arguments. They knew the horror.
And they also knew desperation.
That was all that mattered.
Desperation would do what law could not prevent.
If Germany did not prepare, someone else would. If Germany waited for the enemy to escalate first, German men would die blind and choking while ministers debated whether the enemy had violated the proper article of the proper convention in the proper legal manner.
Oskar had no patience for that.
During his time in the capital, he had already given the orders.
A handful of chemical factories were to be redirected quietly toward military production. Not openly. Not with fanfare. Not yet with great doctrine attached to it.
Just practically, with some basic plans for chemical warfare that included many things, such as, "Shell fillings, Bomb casings, Dispersal methods, Storage, transport safety, training manuals, weather tables, delivery by artillery, delivery by aircraft."
And above all was the defensive countermeasures which included Gas masks and a lot of them.
That mattered most.
Germany already possessed respirators in mines, chemical plants, and industrial works. Crude things, limited things, devices meant for fumes and accidents rather than battlefields—but a foundation was still a foundation. They would be studied, improved, simplified, standardized, and produced in numbers fit not for a factory floor, but for armies.
Every soldier of the Black Legion would have protection first.
Then the rest of the army, if his father finally learned to stop hesitating.
Oskar closed the folder with decisiveness. He did not fear the idea of chemical warfare, because to him this was already, "Total war." Even if many pretended that it was not.
But every action being taken now proved otherwise.
And Oskar knew that this, war for survival would not remain polite because diplomats wished it so.
The train passed through a stretch of repaired countryside. Outside, fields rolled by under a grey sky. Some were empty. Some had already been marked for German-administered harvest. Others lay burned, abandoned, or trampled into mud by refugee columns and military traffic.
Here and there, German work crews and local women labored under police supervision, repairing roads, clearing debris, stacking timber, unloading supply wagons.
None of the local women were forced, but work meant pay, and pay meant food, and food meant survival.
So many worked with the Germans. Others plowed their own fields in peace, just as Oskar had permitted them to do. Everywhere he looked, it was the same arrangement: German men or local women.
The local men were gone as all of them, willingly or with some additional motivation had been pushed east into Russia.
Oskar watched without expression.
Zofia would be in Warsaw with Maria, ready to serve him as maids. Patricia and Elise would be there as well, tending to the palace and the city as its administrators, with their six children—his children—beneath that same roof.
He wondered, briefly, how the mother and daughter were doing now that Tomasz had gone east with the men.
How did a mother sleep, not knowing whether her son was alive?
How did a sister serve in a palace while her brother vanished into exile?
His gaze hardened faintly.
That boy would return one day.
If he lived.
Some boys carried grief like a stone. Some like a blade. Tomasz carried it like fire. Oskar had seen the hatred in his face beside the river, and later in the square. It was not the hatred of a man who would fade into survival. It was the hatred of someone who would demand justice.
And Oskar was pretty sure that the boy, just like many others he had wronged would be future problems for sure, perhaps true future enemy's, but so be it.
War made enemies faster than any man could count them.
What mattered was making enough of them irrelevant.
The train rocked slightly as it crossed a repaired bridge. The sound changed beneath the wheels—iron over iron, hollow and rhythmic—then deepened again as they returned to earth.
Oskar's thoughts shifted westward.
To Britain.
To Ireland.
To Tanya's work.
That, at least, had begun promisingly.
Tanya had always possessed a talent for people, though not in the gentle way Anna did, nor in the stabilizing way Gundelinde did. Tanya was different.
And now she had turned that talent outward.
Angelworks remained useful, of course. Uniforms, undergarments, socks, helmet covers, field equipment, camouflage cloth, ghillie suits, endless practical goods that armies and civilians alike consumed in silence and only noticed when they were missing.
But Tanya's true value had never been cloth.
It was people.
She had taken hostile souls and turned them into threads.
Thin at first.
Invisible unless one knew where to look.
Then stronger and wider, like a web beneath the visible war.
She was creating a war within the war.
An unseen war.
Oskar still did not know whether to be proud or disturbed that Imperiel had taken part in those agent's recruitments. Teaching his son how to break a person was not something he had planned for. But he had not questioned Tanya's parenting methods.
Not aloud.
Tanya, Anna, Gundelinde, Cecilie, Bertha, Karl, the 1st and 2nd Companies of the Eternal Guard, the Church of the New Dawn—all of them, knowingly or not, had become part of something larger. A quiet network of loyalists, sympathizers, informants, admirers, worshippers, servants, and useful tools.
In Germany, it strengthened the center. It cracked down on dissent before dissent could become conspiracy.
Abroad, it loosened the enemy by spreading doubt.
Rumors were already moving through the British Isles and its many kingdoms. Rumors of the real cost of the war, which the government tried to hide. Rumors of German strength, German order, German prosperity. Rumors that to stand against Germany was not bravery, but foolishness dressed in patriotic colors.
The message did not need to be shouted.
It only needed to be repeated quietly, again and again.
British sons were dying for foreign interests.
The pride of old men in London was being purchased with the blood of workers, fishermen, miners, farmers, and clerks.
Germany was not a barbarian horde but a civilized power: disciplined, strong, ordered, rising beneath a new dawn.
Why fight it?
Did people not live and work in Germany as they did anywhere else?
Did they not live better there than most workers in Britain did?
What did the common man truly gain from this war? What would change for him when it was done? Had the old wars changed his life? Had the old promises fed his children, warmed his house, raised his wages, or spared him hunger?
And why had things not changed?
Not always because the old men of Britain were evil.
No, that was too simple.
Because they lived in another world entirely.
The world of the rich. The world of clubs, estates, Parliament, private schools, servants, and inherited certainty. They did not know how the common man lived and breathed each day.
Not as Prince Oskar knew his people.
Not as Oskar shaped policy, industry, food, work, health, and family around the real life of the nation.
In some ears, such words sounded like blasphemy.
In others, they produced doubt, and doubt sometimes was better than bullets.
Because a man who doubted did not volunteer as quickly. A dockworker who doubted did not work as hard. A priest who doubted chose his sermon carefully. A mother who doubted begged her son not to go. A nationalist person of a minority group who doubted began to ask whether his countrymen might survive better outside an empire dragging them into war.
That was where men like Jack came in.
Oskar smiled faintly at the memory of that name, Captain Jack Ashcroft. A poor ruined fool, that resembled a certain Captain Jack from his other life.
Smuggler, merchant, lover, future rebel—perhaps even future king, if the world became strange enough. Tanya and Imperiel had done well there. Very well. A man with grievance, charm, desperation, and an Irish connection was worth more than a hundred pamphlets written by men who had never been hungry.
Let Britain bleed from within as well as without.
Let the Empire discover that the seas were not its only weakness.
Still, even that pleased him only so much.
Because all of it was only part of the war. After speaking with Karl and the representatives of the Oskar Industrial Group, one truth had become increasingly difficult to ignore.
At the current rate, if the war did not calm down, Germany would begin losing momentum, simply because it's manufacturing could not keep pace with the needs of the army forever.
Not like this.
Not with both fronts attacking.
Not with the West devouring men and shells before Paris.
Not with the East requiring railways, armor, aircraft, police, food, fuel, and endless occupation infrastructure.
The pre-war stockpiles were vast, but not infinite. Factories worked day and night, but not magically. Men could be trained, but not created out of air. Trucks could be built, but steel, rubber, fuel, drivers, mechanics, spare parts, and roads all had limits.
The Black Legion consumed supplies at terrifying efficiency because it fought as a modern army.
The Western Front consumed even more because it fought as a modern army directed by men who still didn't quite understand how a modern war was supposed to be fought.
Germany could not do both forever.
Not at this intensity.
And Therefore Oskar had decided that he would try and force out Russia first from this war.
Not merely pushed back, but removed. That was why he was going east again.
If Russia remained in the war, Germany would be forced to feed two fronts beyond what even Oskar's preparations could sustain forever. The East had paused only because weather had forced it to pause. The mud had given him time to rotate men, repair roads, rebuild rails, stock depots, organize police, and impose order.
But the pause was ending.
The train thundered onward beneath the darkening afternoon sky.
Warsaw waited ahead.
His eastern capital.
His occupied house.
The place where his new order was being tested not in speeches, not in theories, not in books or boardrooms, but in hunger, law, fear, obedience, and survival.
Oskar turned his gaze toward the window as the land rolled by.
The road east had opened again.
And he was returning to walk it.