The Russian barrage tore into the Black Legion line like a storm made of iron.
Shells burst among the trees, cutting trunks in half, ripping branches apart, and throwing columns of earth, roots, stones, and splintered wood into the morning air. The forest belt west of the Bug River shook under the impacts. Leaves shredded. Birds vanished screaming into the sky. Dugouts trembled. Wire jumped. The ground itself seemed to breathe upward in black bursts and fall back down as mud and death.
In one old pine near the forward trenches, a red squirrel crouched inside a hollow with an acorn clutched between its paws.
It had lived there for nearly two years, which was a respectable lifetime for a squirrel. It had seen farmers cross the fields, children chase one another near the trees, foxes hunt beneath the roots, and snow weigh down the branches in winter. Then the men had come. Black-uniformed men with covered faces, shovels, wire, planks, strange metal boxes, and the smell of oil and smoke. They had cut the earth open beneath the trees and vanished into it like burrowing animals.
The squirrel had not understood any of it.
Now it watched its world explode.
A shell struck nearby. The pine lurched. The squirrel squeaked, dropped its acorn, and clung to the hollow as the whole tree cracked. For one long second the trunk groaned. Then it toppled, crashing down across the edge of the trench in a storm of needles, bark, and broken branches.
The squirrel fell with it.
It hit the mud, scrambled in blind terror, and darted into the first dark opening it saw—a small dugout cut into the trench wall and shielded by a movable plank of wood.
Inside, a Black Legion soldier stared at it through the gloom.
The squirrel stared back.
Neither moved.
Then another shell burst overhead, and both decided the arrangement was acceptable.
The squirrel was not alone. Rats, field mice, insects, and even one blind mole driven mad by the shaking earth had found their way into the German holes. The bombardment had frightened every living thing in the forest, and for a few minutes men and animals shared the same instinct: get low, get underground, and wait for the sky to stop falling.
The Black Legion survived because it had done exactly that.
Not by courage alone.
By shovels.
Every soldier carried one: Oskar's compact folding field shovel, a sturdy little black-metal tool that could be shortened, lengthened, locked straight, folded tight, sharpened at the edge, used as a hatchet, a hammer, a cooking plate, a weapon, and, most importantly, a shovel. Given a day, a Black Legion squad dug in. Given a week, it turned bushes and earth into a small fortress.
They had not held this line long, but long enough.
The trenches were narrow and crooked, cut in zigzags beneath the tree line, with firing steps, crawl holes, covered shelters, plank shields, ammunition niches, and camouflaged roof sections thrown together with ruthless efficiency. When the Russian shells began falling, the men did not stand and stare like fools. They dragged the wounded into dugouts, pulled planks across openings, covered their faces, flattened themselves into the earth, and waited.
Above them, the barrage smashed branches into splinters and tore the forest apart.
But inside the holes, most lived.
Farther behind the front, Black Legion artillery began waking.
At first the German guns answered slowly, feeling for the enemy. Then reports came in from the single F-1 circling above Brest. Manfred von Richthofen's voice crackled through static, calling flashes in barns, tree lines, orchards, low ridges, and hidden gun pits. Forward observers risked quick looks over trench lips, saw smoke, counted muzzle flashes, and dropped back down before Russian shells found them.
Then the German counter-battery fire began in earnest.
Guns hidden far behind the forest spoke. Shells passed overhead with long, rising screams, west to east now, answering the Russian thunder. The duel spread across the morning: Russian guns hammering the Black Legion line, German guns searching out the Russian batteries, Manfred circling above like an angry red insect, pointing death wherever he saw smoke.
But the Russians were not only firing.
They were crossing.
East of the Bug River, boats slid into the water by the dozen. Some were proper rowboats. Others were planks tied to barrels, doors lashed together with rope, anything that could float long enough to carry men to the western bank. Soldiers waded beside them. Officers shouted. Horses fought the water. Men rowed, cursed, prayed, and sometimes vanished when a raft rolled under them and the river took them whole.
The Black Legion line did not wait directly on the riverbank.
It waited farther west, hidden in the trees, watching the approaches from a distance. Between the river and the German positions lay mud, reeds, brush, low greenery, open field and barbed wire.
The Russians would have to cross the river, survive the bank, and then run more than two kilometers before they even reached the German line.
They knew that.
They also knew about the hidden mines.
So General Scheidemann had found a solution fitting for an army of peasants, desperation, and bad choices.
Animals.
Farm animals, dogs, pigs, chickens, ducks, anything that could be bought, stolen, found, or dragged screaming from a farmyard had been brought down to the river. It was ugly. It was absurd. It was cruel. But against mines, it was the best idea anyone had managed to produce.
On one boat, a young soldier held a barking dog under one arm as the craft scraped into the shallows. The dog seemed delighted by the whole adventure. Its tail thrashed. Its tongue hung out. Shells flew overhead. Men shouted. Water splashed against the hull. To the dog, it was all some grand, wonderful game.
Then the boat hit the shore and men jumped down into the shallows on either side. The soldier with the dog jumped forward too eagerly, not into the water like the others, but onto the muddy bank itself.
Something sharp pressed through the thin sole of his peasant shoe and bit into his foot.
He winced and stumbled.
Then something clicked.
The dog wriggled free from his arms and bounded away through the reeds.
The soldier looked down just as a small metal cylinder, shaped almost like a tin can, kicked itself out of the mud and jumped into the air.
For half a heartbeat, he stared at it in wonder.
Then the mine burst.
Hundreds of small steel balls tore outward in a vicious fan. They struck faces, throats, hands, bellies, and eyes. The young soldier died instantly, his face and chest opened as if by a giant shotgun. Others were not so lucky. They fell screaming into the shallows, blinded, shredded, clutching at torn cheeks and ruined mouths while the river turned red around them.
The men in the next boat stopped.
The dog kept running.
An old officer in a soaked greatcoat saw it and snapped.
"What are you staring at?" he roared, saber raised. "Forward! Follow the dog! Move, you rabble! Forward for the Tsar! For Russia! Take back your lands and avenge the fallen!"
The men moved because they were more afraid of stopping than of going.
The dog ran through the brush as if playing chase. Men followed in a broken stream, stumbling out of the shallows and into the low greenery beyond the bank. Around them, more boats landed. More animals were released. A pig was shoved squealing from a raft. A basket of chickens burst open and sent birds flapping uselessly into the reeds. Somewhere, a man ran after a duck tied to a string, shouting for the others to follow as if the duck had been promoted to field marshal.
It worked.
For a few seconds.
The dog crossed a muddy strip safely, and thirty men rushed after it. A pig blundered through a patch of grass and survived, so a platoon used its path. Men began to cheer in short, relieved bursts.
It was not glorious. It was not the stuff of old war paintings.
Nobody cared.
They only wanted to live.
Then the dog reached the open field and stepped on something.
A click sounded.
The dog barked once as a mine sprang from the earth with a dull metallic hop.
Several men saw it and threw themselves flat.
The dog looked back, confused.
The explosion tore it apart.
Fur, meat, and blood vanished into smoke.
The men behind it slowly lifted their heads, pale and suddenly leaderless in a field that might be safe nowhere.
The officer pointed with his saber.
"Forward!"
The man at the front stared back at him in horror.
"Forward, damn you!"
So the man ran.
He made it six steps before another mine went off under his leg. His right leg vanished in a blast of dirt and blood, and he fell screaming into the grass. Another man, seeing that, nearly lost his nerve completely and turned back toward the river. He tripped on a hidden wire and disappeared in a burst that threw mud, cloth, and pieces of him into the men closest to him.
The officer screamed for order, but no one listened. Instead they scattered.
That made everything worse.
The field began to pop and crack with sudden little eruptions. Bouncing mines sprang from grass and mud, burst in the air, and filled the morning with steel balls. Men fell holding their eyes. Men clutched opened bellies. Men crawled through the grass searching for legs that were no longer attached to them. One stumbled in circles with both ears gone, blood running down his neck while he shouted that he could not hear. Another tried to pull a metal ball from his cheek and only tore the wound wider.
"Keep rank!" the officer roared. "Keep rank, you cowards!"
One man tried to obey. He ran toward the officer with his rifle clutched to his chest.
A mine lifted beneath him.
He vanished in a flash. Shrapnel punched into the officer's side, and the old man dropped to one knee, still trying to point his saber forward while blood spread through his coat.
Elsewhere, the pig made it farther than the dog.
For nearly two hundred and fifty meters it ran squealing through the grass, chased by a knot of Russian soldiers who had decided that the animal was now strategy. Then it vanished in a flash and a wet slap of dirt, leaving only smoke, blood, a rain of pork, and several stunned men staring at the place where their guide had been.
The duck did better.
That was the worst part.
It waddled through a dangerous-looking patch of field with a rope tied around its fat body, quacking furiously, and nothing happened.
The soldier holding the rope laughed in wild triumph.
"See? I told you! Black ducks are lucky!"
He ran after it, cheering, and the others followed.
What none of them understood was that the duck was too light to trigger the mine.
The men were not.
The blast took the first soldier from the waist down and hurled what remained of him backward, still tangled in the rope. The duck panicked and flapped away, dragging him several feet through the grass before his intestines caught on a root. For one stunned second the man stared down at the long, wet rope of himself as if he had discovered something fascinating.
Then reality reached him and he screamed until he died.
The men behind him stopped, stared, and scattered as more mines cracked awake around them.
Officers tried to restore order.
Some stood behind the waves with pistols, sabers, and threats, driving men forward. They ordered men without rifles to take weapons from the fallen. They ordered men to follow trails of corpses where there were no animals left. They ordered them to run straight ahead if they had to and pray to God that the earth chose someone else.
So they went.
And as men died, more and more men were already coming behind to replace the dead. Hatred pushed some forward. Love of home pushed others. Fear pushed most, but strength in numbers also helped.
The first waves found the mines with animals and courage.
The next waves followed the dead.
That became the method.
The Russians ran between bodies, over bodies, beside bodies, using torn men, farm animals, blood trails, and blasted earth as a map through the field.
And beyond the minefields, hidden in the trees, the Black Legion waited for the artillery to fall silent.
Once it did, they would rise with machine guns, carbines, mortars, grenades, and rifles.
And the real killing would begin.