Oskar's gaze lowered.
Down in the streets around the castle, his Eternal Guard were holding the perimeter exactly as trained.
They had occupied buildings, dragged furniture into alleys, overturned carts, shoved crates and doors into barricades, and blocked streets with anything heavy enough to stop a rush. The Russians tried to break through because they had no choice. They fired from windows, from doorways, from corners of buildings. Some tried to move through courtyards. Some tried to rush the barricades on foot. A few officers, desperate or brave or simply mad, sent mounted men down the streets in the hope that speed and shock might carry them through.
But Riga's streets were not fields.
They were narrow, crooked, hard-walled choke points. In many places two horse carts could barely pass side by side. There was no room for glory there. No room for a grand charge. Only stone, smoke, splinters, muzzle flashes, and men trapped in lanes where death came straight down the line.
Oskar saw one barricade near the bridge approach.
Twelve Eternal Guardsmen held it.
They had built it out of whatever the street had given them: overturned carts, broken doors, tables dragged from empty apartments, crates, mattresses, shutters, a Russian officer's motorcar shoved sideways across the stones, and iron railings torn from some courtyard fence. It was ugly, improvised, and perfectly placed.
The street before it was narrow.
Too narrow for maneuver.
Too narrow for courage to matter much.
Two horse carts might have passed side by side there if both drivers were careful and sober, but for men under fire it was little more than a killing lane. Brick walls pressed close on both sides. Windows and doorways overlooked the road, but every opening had already been marked by German eyes. Every corner was a trap. Every patch of cobblestone between one wall and the next was open ground.
The Eternal Guard had turned the street into a firing range.
Six riflemen held the line, three to each side, carbines resting over the barricade. One machine gun sat in the center with its assistant crouched beside it, fresh belts laid out in neat loops over an upturned crate. Behind the broken cart, a grenadier knelt with his launcher resting across a wheel rim, calm as a hunter watching a burrow. Their officer moved behind them with short, efficient gestures, pointing, correcting angles, giving orders too brief to waste breath.
Farther back, in the upper floor of an apartment building, a two-man sniper team watched the street from a dark window.
The shooter lay behind a table dragged against the sill. His rifle rested across folded cloth to steady the barrel. Beside him, the spotter used a small glass and whispered range corrections. They were high enough to see over the barricade, down the street, into windows, across doorways, and along the line where the Russians kept trying to gather courage.
The Russians facing them were not rabble.
They were Guardsmen, detachments sent from Saint Petersburg, men attached to the Sixth Army's reinforcements for Riga. Their uniforms were good. Their rifles were clean. Their boots were proper. They knew how to drill, how to form lines, how to crush riots, how to march beneath banners and obey officers who shouted in polished parade-ground voices.
But they had not been made for this.
Not for black-clad soldiers with modern carbines. Not for machine guns hidden behind furniture. Not for snipers above them. Not for grenades bouncing around corners.
They tried what men of their era knew how to try.
They occupied buildings farther down the street, firing from windows and doorways. They crouched behind stone corners, leaned out, fired, and ducked back again. Officers gathered groups in alleys and tried to push them forward in knots. Cavalrymen, brave and foolish, waited farther back for a chance to rush the barricade by speed alone.
But speed meant nothing in a tunnel of fire.
A Russian soldier tried to sprint across the opening to the far side of the street.
Three carbines cracked in quick succession.
All three shots struck true. The man jerked as if invisible hooks had caught him mid-stride, then collapsed face-first onto the stones, his rifle skidding ahead of him into the dark.
Oskar saw the death.
He also saw the cost.
Not only the tragic waste of a young man who had chosen, or been ordered, to take up arms against him, but the monetary cost of the shots that had killed him.
Each carbine round was perhaps four-tenths of a mark. Brass, powder, lead, machining, packing, transport. One shot was almost nothing. Three shots were still almost nothing.
But his riflemen did not fire once.
They fired again and again.
A fifteen-round magazine cost five or six marks. A thirty-round magazine, twice that. Every time one of those men pressed a trigger, Oskar saw a thin shaving of Germany's labor vanish into smoke.
Not wastefully, no.
His men were disciplined. They aimed before firing, killed what they meant to kill, and conserved ammunition whenever they could. They were doing exactly what he had trained them to do.
However, that almost made it worse.
Because as it so happened, even proper killing was expensive. Perhaps more expensive than careless killing, because every precise shot represented training, equipment, discipline, and years of investment carried all the way to this narrow street in Riga.
Then, further back another Russian leaned from a window, rifle raised.
The sniper fired once.
The Russian vanished backward into the room behind him, his head snapping out of sight as if a hook had pulled him into darkness.
The shooter worked the bolt, smooth, controlled.
Metal slid back. The spent casing flicked away and rang softly against the floorboards. Another round slid into the chamber. The rifle settled again against the folded cloth.
Oskar knew that sound too.
One sniper round, carefully made, selected, inspected, cost perhaps a full mark. Maybe a little more. A five-round load was five marks: not much to a prince, not much beside a ship's shell, but enough to buy bread, milk, and coal for a poor family for days.
The sniper breathed out, then fired again.
A Russian officer leaning from a doorway, trying to catch one clear glimpse of the enemy, folded sideways and disappeared behind his own men.
Five marks loaded.
One mark spent.
One life ended.
The bolt slid back.
Another round entered the chamber.
More money waiting to become death.
Then the Russians tried cavalry.
Oskar saw them gathering at the far end of the street: horsemen in Guards uniforms, sabers low, pistols in hand, an officer shouting at them to ride hard and trust speed. It was old thinking, brave thinking, doomed thinking.
They came into the street at a gallop.
For a heartbeat the image almost belonged to another century: horses lunging through smoke, sabers catching flame-light, men leaning forward over their saddles, mouths open in battle cries.
The machine gun answered them, not wildly or wastefully.
Instead, the gunner leaned into the stock, corrected once, and fired in a hard disciplined burst.
The belt jerked.
Cartridges vanished into the weapon.
The front rider opened from chest to throat and fell backward. The second horse screamed as rounds tore through its neck and shoulder. The third rider tried to fire and lost half his face before his pistol flashed. Horses crashed into one another. Men tumbled beneath hooves and falling bodies. One rider hauled on the reins, trying to turn away, and the gunner cut him from the saddle before the horse had taken three more steps.
A large box of machine-gun ammunition held two hundred and fifty rounds.
About a hundred marks.
A hundred marks gone in seconds if the gunner emptied it.
This time he did not empty the whole belt. He did not need to. He fired in controlled violence, perhaps fifty rounds, perhaps seventy, perhaps more than Oskar could count from above.
Whatever the case, that was twenty marks, maybe thirty, or forty.
Enough to pay a worker for weeks.
Enough to buy a good stove, a good bed, a month of food for a careful family.
And now it was gone, just like that. Used to kill a suicidal cavalry charge.
At the far corner, more Russians hid behind the stone edge of a building and fired blindly around it. Their bullets struck the barricade, tore through a mattress, sparked off the motorcar's frame, and punched holes through a cabinet door that had once belonged to someone's home.
The Eternal Guard officer pointed.
The grenadier shifted, "Thump." The launcher gave its ugly little cough.
The round flew low, struck the masonry above the corner, and exploded.
Stone burst outward in a sharp grey cloud. Men behind the corner screamed as fragments of wall became shrapnel. One stumbled into view with both hands pressed to his eyes. Another spun out backward, coat shredded, blood spraying from his neck and cheek.
To Oskar that was fifteen marks, that single launcher round.
Casing, propellant, fuse, explosive, shaped body, machining, safe packing, transport. Fifteen marks turned into smoke, broken stone, and men screaming behind a corner.
The grenadier opened the launcher.
The spent casing popped free and smoked in the air before dropping behind the barricade. He took another round from his pouch, slid it in, locked the breech shut, and waited for the officer's next gesture.
Another fifteen marks ready to speak.
Then he looked to the other street corner and reached to his belt and pulled loose one of Oskar's round hand grenades.
Not a stick grenade. Not one of the old awkward things. A modern little ball of iron and death, compact and round, meant to roll, bounce, skip, and betray cover itself.
The grenadier pulled the pin.
He did not throw it straight.
He threw like an athlete. Like a baseball player from a world that did not yet exist. His whole body moved with the motion: shoulder, hip, wrist, release. The grenade flew high, struck a street sign with a metallic clang, bounced sideways off the iron frame, vanished around the second corner, and detonated exactly where the Russians had thought no German could reach.
Five marks, that was all.
Five marks thrown like a child's ball. Five marks turned into fragments, screams, and blood on brick.
The explosion was small compared to the guns south of the city.
But in that alley it was enough.
A rifle clattered across the stones. Someone's leg flew into view, screaming followed.
And from up high, Oskar watched it all.
He watched his men work like professionals, he watched and saw no Eternal Guard die, not a single one.
A few Russian bullets struck the barricade. One sparked off a shoulder plate. Another punched through the top of a helmet and glanced away without penetrating. The men flinched, cursed, adjusted, continued firing. The armor held. The position held. The line held.
And still Oskar felt cold.
Because even victory had a price.
This single barricade, one squad, one sniper team, one narrow street—this tiny vein of the city—had already consumed enough ammunition to buy a small worker's house. Perhaps more. Add the damaged equipment, the replacement belts, the grenades, the medical supplies if one of his men were hurt, and the number rose.
Add death, and the number became something else entirely. If an Eternal Guardsman fell, it was not only grief. It was training lost. Years of instruction lost. A family to compensate, a widow and children left devastated. A funeral, a pension.
A letter written carefully so it would not sound as hollow as all such letters sounded.
A dead elite soldier cost more than any bullet.
And that was only one street.
South of the city, Hans von Seeckt's guns were spending money at a scale no street fight could approach.
Roughly a little more than three hundred guns.
Field guns, howitzers, heavy howitzers.
The light 77mm pieces barked fastest, each shell perhaps thirty or forty marks. The 105mm howitzers fired slower, each shell closer to eighty marks. The 150mm heavy howitzers spoke slower still, but each of their shells cost perhaps two hundred marks before it even left the barrel.
During a Five minute barrage, all of that meant a lot of shells and money spent.
The 77s might fire fifty times each, or more.
The 105s perhaps fifteen.
The 150s perhaps ten.
Thousands upon thousands of shells climbing into the sky with their white tracer tails, each one carrying not only explosive, but labor, factory time, rail space, storage, skilled hands, inspection stamps, horse teams, trucks, loaders, gunners, and clerks.
Four hundred thousand marks, perhaps more, burned south of the city in five minutes.
That was enough money to build a small factory, a real factory. With workers, machines, brick walls, windows, boilers, wages—now gone into mud and flame before the infantry had even advanced.
And at sea, Heinrich's fleet was worse.
Fourteen old battleships.
The Armoured Cruiser SMS Friedrich Carl.
Eight light cruisers.
The heavy naval shells alone were little fortunes. The secondaries added more. The light cruisers poured out smaller shells by the dozens. Every broadside was a bill thrown across the Gulf of Riga in fire. The five-minute naval bombardment would cost around a million marks in ammunition, perhaps more if the captains fired hard, and the gunners were fast.
And that was only the shells.
The oil burned during the five minutes itself was almost nothing, almost insulting beside the ammunition. But the whole sortie was not five minutes. The ships had to move into position. Screen, Maneuver, Launch and protect the landing craft. Wait, Fire, Withdraw, Return, Refuel, Re-arm.
A thousand tons of oil.
Perhaps two thousand by the time all smaller craft, destroyers, boats, landing vessels, and return movements were counted.
Thirty thousand marks. Sixty thousand marks.
Maybe more.
Oil that had to be made and bought from somewhere, carried by ship or rail, stored in guarded tanks, pumped, accounted for, and replaced before the next operation.
Then there were the marines, and the whole rest of the army and their pay, food and everything else.
And he didn't even want to think of the aircraft and their cost, or the factories running through the night to replace everything being spent before sunrise.
A battle was never only a battle.
It was a city of costs moving all at once.
To take Riga—truly take it, hold it, repair it, feed it, secure it, and use it—he would need the equivalent of his own five-million-mark lottery prize once, perhaps twice, perhaps more.
And that hurt more than he wanted to admit.
Because that money did not fall from heaven.
It came from workers buying lottery tickets with hope in their hands. From women buying soap, lipstick, stockings, and baby powder. From miners wearing helmets. From children buying comics. From factories running belts through the night. From Karl hunched over ledgers until his eyes burned. From Tanya and Anna with his sister Louise turning ideas into products. From millions of ordinary lives feeding the vast machine he had built.
To lose money was to watch all that human time and labour, and possibility vanish as it was all converted into fire.
Oskar's fingers tightened around the iron cross at the crown of the church tower.
Germany would need war bonds soon, or something like it. Something better than war bonds.
War bonds were too naked. Too much like begging. Too much like reaching into the people's savings and giving them paper, promises, and patriotic speeches in return.
He could do better.
Perhaps the answer was The German Welfare Lottery that could be rebranded to fit the current state of the world.
Buy a ticket and perhaps become rich.
Buy a ticket and help wounded soldiers.
Buy a ticket and feed widows.
Buy a ticket and support hospitals.
Buy a ticket and rebuild what the guns had destroyed.
Buy a ticket and fund Germany's war effort without feeling robbed by it.
Hope, greed, charity, patriotism, welfare, and finance, all braided into one machine.
It would be a soldier's lottery, a victory lottery, a wounded veteran's lottery.
The posters formed in his mind almost at once.
A mother buying a ticket in a village shop.
A wounded soldier smiling in a clean hospital bed.
A child holding bread.
A battleship on the horizon.
And beneath it, the line, "Your hope strengthens Germany."
Oskar almost laughed.
Even hanging from a church tower above a city in flames, his mind was still working to solve the finance's of the Empire.
That was the difference between tactics and strategy.
A soldier saw the street.
An officer saw the barricade.
A general saw the city.
But a true strategist had to see everything behind it: rail lines, hospitals, factories, bakeries, oil tanks, printing presses, newspapers, morale, widows, debt, replacement schedules, and the price of a man's missing leg.
If Germany was to survive the long war this could yet become, it would not be enough to win battles.
Germany had to afford victory.