At first light on the ninth of September, dawn broke over Riga and revealed the truth the night had hidden.
The city had become a battlefield.
Smoke lay over the rooftops in long, torn bands, drifting between church spires, warehouses, shattered apartment blocks, and the old pale walls of Riga Castle. Fires burned where the Russians had set buildings alight, and where German shells, grenades, and machine-gun fire had done the work for them. The Western Dvina reflected it all in broken pieces—fire, smoke, dawn, and the dark shapes of men crossing into history.
At some sections of the city, the dead lay so thickly that the Black Legion infantry advancing through the streets could not move without stepping over bodies.
Some were Russian regulars. Some were Guardsmen from Saint Petersburg. Others were militia, local men of many different backgrounds, and boys given rifles in the last hours before the assault. They lay in doorways, across staircases, beneath windows, in gutters, against barricades, and in the middle of streets where they had fallen while running, firing, or simply trying to understand where death was coming from.
Blood ran between the cobblestones like dirty rainwater after a storm.
The few tanks and armored trucks that had already broken through with the spearhead did not slow for the dead. Their tracks ground over bodies and broken weapons alike, dragging scraps of cloth, flesh, leather, and splintered wood into the metal links. Armored truck wheels flattened what remained in their path. Behind them came infantry in dark uniforms, boots hammering across stones slick with blood, rifles raised, faces hidden, advancing toward whatever buildings the defenders still held.
The bridge over the Western Dvina was already being crossed.
The Black Legion flowed over it in disciplined waves, then spread through Riga like spilled ink, seeping into streets, courtyards, stairwells, and shattered buildings in search of whatever resistance still remained.
At the front, somewhere ahead through smoke, fire, and the roar of battle, Oskar moved with Shadowmane. Wherever men glimpsed them between burning walls and broken streets, fear spread faster than orders could contain it. And when they struck, whole pockets of resistance either broke within minutes—or ceased to exist at all.
But at places, some of Rigas defenders still held.
There were still those few stubborn pockets of Russians fighting from cellars, apartment blocks and wherever they could find a defendable position. Some had dragged machine guns into upper floors. Some had smashed through interior walls to avoid German-controlled streets. Some had barricaded themselves behind furniture and dead men. In places, they fought stubbornly enough that the Black Legion had to reduce buildings room by room.
Yet the larger movement of the battle was already clear.
The Russian line was breaking.
Those who fled north found German marines waiting for them, Prussian blue-clad men already ashore, holding roads and approaches with machine guns, rifles, and naval fire at their backs. The Baltic fleet of Prince Heinrich acted now as artillery support. The northern roads were cut off.
So most fled east through smoke and burning streets.
Past shattered carts, broken buildings, fallen statues of great men, abandoned defensive positions, dead horses, and civilians who had waited too long to leave. Soldiers ran beside wagons. Wounded men clung to cart rails. Local militia threw away rifles, then picked them up again when officers screamed at them. Civilians stumbled east along with the soldiers, and carried with them whatever in their panic they had managed to take with them.
Then the engines came.
At first the sound was distant, a low pressure rolling out of the southern sky.
Then it grew.
Two hundred aircraft came from the south like a flock of black and grey metallic birds, iron crosses marked beneath wings and along fuselages, their engines growling over the dawn. The H-1 bombers flew higher, sleek twin-engined machines with enclosed noses and heavy bellies, steady and terrible in their purpose. Beneath them came the F-2 fighters, fast aluminum monoplanes whose hard lines and speed made them seem like weapons from another age entirely. Around and below them swarmed the older F-1 fighters, biplanes by shape, flexible and deadly.
They did not come searching, because they already knew where the prey would run.
Thus the Black Legion Air Force went east of the city, and there their work began.
The ten H-1 bombers held formation in the pale morning sky, sleek twin-engined machines moving with dreadful calm above the smoke. They did not waste their loads on single men or scattered small clusters of men. Their targets were concentrations: road junctions, blocked columns, wooded margins where infantry had gathered, fields where men had thrown themselves flat in the hope that dispersal meant safety, and the narrow crossings over ditches and little streams where flight had slowed into a crush.
The first bombs fell beyond Riga's eastern outskirts.
Men saw the dark shapes drop and tried to scatter, but there was no time. The bombs came down in clusters, one after another, walking across the road, the ditch, and the field beyond it. The ground flashed. Earth leapt upward in black fountains. A wagon vanished into fire and splinters. Horses screamed and kicked against broken traces. Men who had been standing around it were thrown into the road and did not rise.
Another line of bombs fell along the edge of a wood where Russian soldiers had been gathering beneath the trees. For one instant the forest seemed to lift from its roots. Trunks snapped. Branches spun through the air. Men disappeared beneath leaves, soil, smoke, and shredded bark. Those who survived stumbled out coughing, bleeding, half-deaf, only to find the open fields no safer than the trees.
The bombers passed on.
Their purpose was not to kill every man.
It was to break the masses.
To shatter order.
To turn columns into crowds, crowds into fragments, and fragments into targets for what came next.
Then the fighters descended.
The F-2s came first, fast aluminum monoplanes diving from the morning glare with terrible speed. They did not circle lazily or hunt at random. They struck ahead of the rout, going for the front of the fleeing columns, the staff cars, the mounted officers and other tempting targets. Their guns tore through wagons, motorcars, horses, and men with the clean brutality of machines designed for another age.
A line of staff vehicles racing along a small dirt road east of the city became their target.
The first F-2 passed low over the road and opened fire. Bullets ripped through the last car in the line, tearing through its roof, windows, and doors before punching into the engine. The vehicle lurched sideways, struck a cart, and burst into flame as its fuel caught. Men inside screamed against the glass for a moment before the fire took the air from them.
The cars behind had to swerve around the burning wreck.
Some managed it.
Others did not.
One struck a fleeing soldier and threw him over its bonnet. Another smashed into the ditch and overturned, wheels spinning uselessly as men clawed at the doors from within.
Then came the F-1s, with a different kind of cruelty. They were not selective. They did not care who the men below were. If men moved in groups, the F-1s attacked them. If men ran toward trees, the F-1s followed. If rifles flashed from a ditch, a fighter banked and tore the ditch open with fire.
Machine guns stitched the roads.
Bullets walked through a group of local militia who had been running in a tight knot with rifles clutched to their chests. They folded almost together, one after another, as if some invisible scythe had passed through them at waist height. A man in a civilian coat spun twice and fell into the ditch. Another ran six more steps after being hit, still trying to keep up with men already dead beside him, then collapsed face-first into the mud.
Farther off, brave men tried to make a stand.
A handful of Russian soldiers stopped beside an overturned cart, dropped to one knee, and fired upward with rifles. Their single shots vanished one after another into the sky. While not far away, another group of men had placed a heavy machine gun against a wooden fence as they tried to aim it upward before the aircraft returned.
They almost managed it.
An F-1 came in low across the field, its wings flashing in the dawn. The machine gun fired a short, desperate burst, the barrel climbing too late, the rounds passing behind the aircraft as it swept toward them. Then the fighter's own guns answered. The Russian crew vanished in a spray of dust, blood, and torn canvas. The gun toppled sideways and fell into the mud.
Elsewhere, at the head of the flight from Riga, General Aleksandr Ivanovich Litvinov sat in the rear of his Muscle Motors 1913 variant of the A-Class and tried to keep his voice from turning into panic.
The A-Class was most definitely not a battlefield machine.
It was a car for ministers, generals, aristocrats, and men who expected doors to be opened before they touched the handle. Long-bodied, black, and polished beneath the mud, it had a proud silver radiator grille, broad rounded fenders, heavy doors, a proper roof, and wide glass windows framed in bright metal. Even now, streaked with soot and road filth, it looked like something that belonged outside a palace or grand hotel, not among burning wagons, dead horses, and fleeing soldiers on the road east of Riga.
Its engine roared as it tore along the main dirt road leading away from the city.
The driver hunched over the wheel, swerving around wagons and the mass of people on the road. Beside Litvinov, a staff officer clutched a leather case full of important papers against his chest as if it were a holy relic.
Behind them came two more cars and a truck—all that could be gathered of First Army headquarters in the time allowed.
They had already put some distance between themselves and Riga, yet even here the road was clogged. Although not so much by soldiers, but by civilians in such numbers that the whole road had become a choking human flood. Families pushed handcarts through the mud. Women dragged children by the wrist as old men staggered behind. Up ahead, a priest was trying to pull a wounded boy off the road before another wagon hit him. Ahead, a cart had broken down at the worst possible place, blocking half the road while two mounted soldiers shouted and lashed at the terrified horse still tangled in its traces.
Refugees poured around it, eastward, always eastward.
Litvinov struck the roof panel above him with his fist.
"Open it!"
The staff officer stared at him, stunned.
"Open it, damn you!"
The man fumbled with the latch. The roof hatch slid back, and cold morning air rushed into the cabin. Litvinov forced himself upward through the opening, one hand braced against the frame, his grey hair and crooked mustache whipped by the wind as he leaned out over the roof of the great black car.
"Move!" he roared. "Out of the road! Out of the way, you peasants! Move, damn you!"
The driver held the horn down.
Its blare cut through shouting, engines, crying children, and the distant hammer of guns. People turned, saw the general's car bearing down on them, and scattered as best they could. Some fell into ditches and crawled aside. Others were dragged out of the way by mounted soldiers. A woman lost her grip on a bundle and left it in the road without even looking back.
Then another sound sharpened above them.
An engine sound, closing in fast.
Litvinov looked up.
An F-2 came down out of the dawn, sleek and fast, its aluminum body catching the pale morning light as it dropped toward the road.
"Oh, God—"
He dropped back through the roof hatch and collapsed into the rear seat just as the fighter opened fire.
Bullets tore along the road in a hard, straight line. They struck the earth behind the convoy first, climbing forward in quick, savage bursts. Mud leapt. Men fell. Then the line of fire reached the lorry behind the A-Class and ripped across its front. The driver vanished behind a burst of glass and blood. The lorry swerved violently, smashed into the broken wagon ahead of it, and tipped sideways into the ditch.
For one second it seemed it might only crash.
Then the fuel caught.
The lorry burst apart in a flash of flame, wood, canvas, and men.
The blast slapped the rear of the A-Class and made every window rattle in its frame.
The staff officer screamed.
Litvinov crouched low, breath locked in his throat, as bullets struck the car itself. One punched through the rear panel with a hard metallic crack. Another shattered the side window and filled the cabin with glittering fragments. A third tore through the open roof hatch and buried itself in the upholstery.
Then a round came through the windscreen.
The driver jerked violently.
The left side of his face and neck opened in a red spray. Blood struck the steering wheel, the dashboard, the glass, and the polished trim. His mouth worked once, as if trying to speak, but only a wet choking sound came out. Both hands remained clamped to the wheel by instinct even as his body began to fold.
The A-Class swerved.
"Jesus Christ!" the staff officer cried.
The car lurched toward the ditch, where refugees were already throwing themselves aside. Litvinov lunged forward between the seats and seized the wheel over the driver's collapsing body. The car struck the edge of the road, bounced, clipped a broken fence post, and slewed sideways before Litvinov dragged it back into line with both hands.
For a moment he was pressed shoulder to shoulder against the dying man, the driver's blood soaking into his sleeve.
The driver made another sound.
Not speech.
Pain.
A low, wet, pleading sound.
Litvinov looked at him for half a second.
The man had driven him for years. Litvinov knew his face. He knew his voice. He knew his name. The man had made him laugh more than once with some rough little joke from the barracks or the road. Recently he had even been trying, carefully and respectfully, to draw nearer to Litvinov's daughter. Litvinov had not objected. The man had been reliable. Decent. Useful.
Then Litvinov's face hardened.
There was no room for memory on that road.
"Get out of my car, you useless sack of meat," he said.
The driver gurgled.
Litvinov reached across him, shoved the door open, planted one boot against the wounded man's ribs, and kicked.
The man tumbled out of the car and hit the road hard, still alive enough to twist when he landed. One blood-slick hand reached back toward the open door, fingers clawing once at empty air.
Litvinov slammed the door closed.
The hand vanished somewhere behind the car, as the A-Class kept rolling.
"Hold the case," Litvinov snapped.
The staff officer clutched the leather case tighter and looked as if he might vomit.
Litvinov slid fully into the driver's seat. His boots slipped on blood. The wheel was slick beneath his hands. The windscreen was cracked, and blood ran down the inside of the glass in thin, trembling lines.
For years, men had driven him.
Now he drove himself.
The A-Class roared forward.
Ahead, a civilian man staggered into the road, both arms raised. He was middle-aged, broad-shouldered, with a little girl clinging to his coat and a woman shouting after him from the roadside. Perhaps he was begging for space. Perhaps he wanted the car to take his child. Perhaps he only meant to stop them before they crushed someone else.
Litvinov did not slow.
The man's eyes widened.
The grille struck him full-on.
His body folded beneath the proud silver radiator and vanished under the front wheels. The A-Class rose once, dropped, then jolted again as the rear wheels passed over him.
On the roadside, the woman screamed.
The little girl fell to her knees beside what remained, trying to pull at a coat already trapped in the mud and blood of the road.
The staff officer flinched violently and looked back.
Litvinov did not.
His knuckles whitened on the wheel. His jaw tightened. The car surged forward through smoke, dust, and the fleeing bodies of the army he had ordered to hold.
Behind them, Riga burned beneath the dawn. Above it, the Black Legion's aircraft circled like carrion birds that had learned discipline, while desperate men below fired rifles into the sky and received machine-gun bursts in return for their courage.
Meanwhile, Litvinov's report had already reached the town of Daugavpils, where General Zhilinsky had it in his hands.