Only minutes earlier, the foremost infantry of the First Army had been singing.
Nearly ten thousand men were moving west along the imperial road, their battalions stretching for kilometres through the dust. They had crossed into Bulgarian territory less than an hour before, and so far the invasion had seemed almost embarrassingly easy.
The frontier posts were abandoned. Farms stood empty. Villages had been left behind without a shot being fired. No Bulgarian infantry blocked the roads, no artillery waited upon the hills, and the cavalry screen had disappeared ahead exactly as it was supposed to, searching the bends and woodland before the infantry reached them.
For men who had spent the previous year hearing of nothing but retreat, defeat and humiliation, that emptiness felt like victory.
Someone near the head of the column had begun a marching song, and before long thousands of voices carried it backward through the ranks.
"Whose land is this?"
"Allah's land!"
"And what city waits for us?"
"Edirne!"
The answer rolled down the road like thunder.
Men sang of the old capital, of the Sultan, of Allah and of brothers buried during the first war. They shouted promises to return Muslim families to their homes and boasted about what would happen to the Bulgarians once Edirne was theirs again. Some of the verses were patriotic; others descended into promises of revenge.
Few cared about the difference.
Every kilometre passed beneath Ottoman boots without resistance, and with every abandoned farmhouse and empty crossroads the confidence grew. Men laughed beneath the July sun, shared water, slapped one another upon the shoulders and spoke of Edirne less as an objective than as something already won.
Then the road entered broken country.
Wooded slopes pressed closer on either side while a low ridge rose perhaps a kilometre ahead. The imperial road curved around it and disappeared beneath the trees. The cavalry had gone that way earlier.
Then gunfire erupted beyond the ridge, and the singing faltered.
At first the sound was distant enough to be confused with something else—a wagon board cracking, perhaps, or timber splitting beneath the heat.
Then came another burst, and another. This time there was no mistaking it. It was rifle fire, mixed in with automatic fire, men shouting, horses screaming.
What the infantry was hearing was the destruction of Cemal Nuri Bey's scouting company, although no one upon the road yet knew it.
Yet the noise lasted less than a minute. That was what made it unsettling.
There was no long exchange of fire, no battle rolling backward and forward beyond the trees. The shooting rose suddenly, became violent, and then stopped almost as quickly as it had begun.
The major commanding the leading battalion raised his hand.
"Halt!"
The order travelled backward from mouth to mouth, and the column slowed, then stopped.
Thousands of boots ceased moving almost together, leaving only coughing, horses shifting beneath riders and the creak of equipment.
The major remained mounted, staring toward the ridge. No cavalry appeared, no messenger came galloping back.
He waited several seconds longer, then turned sharply toward two mounted orderlies.
"Back down the column. Tell the battalions behind us to hold their formations and prepare for contact. No one advances until we know what happened."
The riders saluted, wheeled their horses around and headed east along the outer edge of the road.
The halted infantry occupied almost its entire width, packed in ordered ranks across the centre, so the mounted messengers kept to the narrow strip of dirt and grass beside them. Their horses moved quickly along the roadside, throwing up dust as they passed the stationary column.
One of the horses struck loose earth near the verge.
Its hoof scraped through the dust and exposed something thin beneath the surface.
"Sir!"
Several men looked down.
A soldier crouched beside the road and carefully brushed away a little more dirt with two fingers. Before joining the Army, he had worked in a mine, cutting stone and hauling ore from tunnels where explosives and blasting wire were part of ordinary labour.
He frowned.
"Wire."
A few nearby soldiers leaned closer, as the former miner gave a nervous little laugh.
"Looks like blasting wire. Perhaps the villagers left it behind."
The mounted officer came beside them and frowned.
"Do not touch it."
The soldier withdrew his hand at once.
Only a short length of the wire was visible where the horse's hoof had disturbed the covering. The rest disappeared beneath the loose earth and roadside grass.
The officer stared down at it from the saddle.
At first it seemed insignificant, merely a thin strand half-hidden in the dirt. Yet the longer he looked, the more deliberate it appeared. It had not been dropped carelessly or dragged there by a wagon. Someone had buried it shallowly beside the road, carefully enough that the passing column would never have noticed it had the horse not scraped the soil away.
His unease deepened.
He followed the exposed wire with his eyes. It disappeared beneath the grass, surfaced briefly farther ahead where the soil had been disturbed, then vanished again, continuing in the same direction as the road.
That bothered him more than finding it in the first place.
This was not discarded rubbish, no, it was as if the wire had been laid there intentionally.
The officer continued staring after it, trying to understand where it might lead, when something flashed upon the ridge far ahead. It was just a tiny point of white light.
He looked up.
The ridge rose beyond the bend several hundred metres away, covered in grass, scrub and scattered trees. For a moment he saw nothing unusual.
Then sunlight flashed again, and another glimmer appeared farther along the slope. Then another, and another.
The officer frowned.
Those were not random reflections. They were separated from one another, scattered across the hillside as though pieces of glass had been hidden among the vegetation.
"By Allah… what is that?"
The officer raised his spyglass and adjusted the focus. At first, the distant ridge offered nothing but grass, stone and scattered scrub. Then one of the bushes shifted in a way the wind could not explain, and beneath the foliage he caught the outline of what looked disturbingly like a man holding something long and dark.
Sunlight flashed from a lens.
A heartbeat later, the rifle fired, and the bullet struck the officer squarely in the chest with the force of a hammer. His body snapped backward in the saddle as blood burst across the front of his tunic, the spyglass spinning from his hands. He toppled heavily from the horse and struck the road while the terrified animal reared above him, screaming and pawing at the air.
The men nearest him recoiled in shock. The former miner managed only a startled, "Sir—!"
Another muted pop carried from the ridge, followed almost at once by the sharper crack of the passing round.
A lieutenant several paces away jerked violently as the bullet punched through his eye socket. The back of his skull burst open, spraying blood, bone and fragments of brain across the soldiers beside him. He slid from the saddle without so much as a cry, while his terrified horse screamed, wheeled around and bolted along the edge of the formation.
Beside him, another officer opened his mouth to shout an order.
A second pop cut him off.
The round tore through his throat.
He seized the wound with both hands as blood poured between his fingers. Whatever command he had meant to give dissolved into a wet, choking gurgle, and he sagged sideways in the saddle while his horse spun beneath him in confusion.
Then several more distant pops followed in rapid succession.
Men flinched and dropped almost together, some crouching instinctively while others stared wildly toward the ridge, unable to tell where the shots were coming from.
"By Allah!"
"Down!"
"Where are they?"
Nobody knew where to look. Officers were falling before commands could even be formed, and the infantry had barely begun crouching and dragging rifles from their shoulders when a soldier near the head of the column noticed movement far down the road.
Something green rose beside the distant ditch.
At that range it was scarcely more than a human-shaped blemish against the grass, but it moved with unmistakable purpose. The soldier swung his rifle toward it.
"There!"
The camouflaged figure bent over something concealed at his feet and drove one hand downward.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then, far ahead of the column, the roadside erupted. The first explosion threw a pillar of black earth, flame and shattered stone high above the trees.
Every man at the front stared.
A second detonation burst farther back, then a third.
The soldier with his rifle still raised suddenly understood what he was seeing. The explosions were coming toward them.
"BY ALLAH—!"
He never finished.
The hidden charges raced backward along both sides of the imperial road in a rolling wall of destruction, each detonation following the last so quickly that the separate blasts merged into one advancing concussion. Trees vanished behind clouds of dirt. Stones spun through the air. The road seemed to unzip itself beneath the marching column.
Men had perhaps a second to watch it approach. Some flinched, some turned to run. One simply dropped his rifle and raised both hands before his face.
Then the explosions reached them. Fire, earth and pressure swallowed the leading ranks.
The first soldiers disappeared inside a boiling cloud of dust and flame. Bodies were lifted bodily from the road and thrown into one another. Men standing six abreast were scattered like toys, some hurled into the ditches, others flung against trees with enough force to break them apart.
A mounted captain vanished into one detonation with his horse. Pieces of saddle and harness came down first. Part of the animal landed several metres away, followed by one of the officer's boots with the foot still inside it.
Another blast struck the opposite verge.
A soldier was thrown high enough to clear the heads of the men behind him. He struck a branch above the road, folded across it and remained hanging there while his rifle continued spinning through the leaves.
Then another charge went off, and another.
The explosions rolled through hundreds of metres of the leading column, alternating along the verges and hammering the packed infantry from both sides. Men who escaped one blast were knocked down by the next. Those who instinctively crowded toward the centre found themselves struck by stones, splintered timber and fragments thrown across the entire width of the road.
A horse reared just as the earth beside it erupted. The blast opened its belly and hurled it sideways into the infantry, crushing several men beneath its weight while the animal screamed and kicked in its own entrails.
Behind it, a small supply cart simply came apart.
The wheels burst from the axle. One flew spinning through the smoke and struck a soldier across the legs, breaking both beneath him. The wooden body disintegrated into hundreds of jagged splinters that tore through the men nearby. One fragment buried itself in a man's throat; another punched through a cheek and left him shrieking around a mouth full of blood.
Crates of ammunition, bread, bandages and cooking equipment scattered across the road. A sack of grain burst above the wounded, its contents raining strangely white through clouds already dark with dirt and smoke.
Then another explosion swallowed everything.
The concussion became almost continuous. Men no longer heard individual blasts. Their ears filled with a single crushing roar followed by a piercing metallic whine. The world shook beneath them. Mouths opened in screams that seemed to make no sound.
The front of the battalion ceased to exist as an organised formation.
It became bodies.
Men lay across one another three and four deep. Some were dead before they struck the ground. Others crawled blindly through the wreckage, hands searching for limbs that were no longer attached.
One soldier sat upright with both legs gone below the knees, staring at the blood pumping from the torn ends of his trousers as though his mind had refused to accept what his eyes were showing him.
Another dragged himself forward with his abdomen ripped open, clutching desperately at his belly while loops of intestine slipped between his fingers and trailed through the dust behind him.
A severed arm dropped from somewhere above and struck a man across the shoulders. He grabbed it reflexively, stared at the unfamiliar hand hanging against his chest, then screamed and hurled it away.
Blood came down with the debris.
So did stones, pieces of uniforms, shattered rifles and fragments of men and horses too small to identify.
The road disappeared beneath smoke.
Those farther back had escaped the direct explosions, but not the violence they threw outward. Stones and scraps of metal whistled through the ranks. Splintered wood from a destroyed wagon cut through two soldiers standing together, opening one man's thigh and driving a jagged shard deep into the other's stomach.
Men ducked instinctively, others simply froze. One conscript pissed himself where he stood, staring into the advancing cloud with his rifle hanging uselessly from one hand. Another dropped onto his knees and began praying, unable even to hear his own voice over the ringing in his ears.
Horses screamed and tore at their reins. Wounded animals crashed through the infantry, trampling men already trying to crawl away. Officers who survived fought to control mounts driven mad by fire, blood and concussion.
The smell arrived almost at once: explosives, scorched earth, blood, opened bowels, burned hair, manure and the sour stink of terror.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the rolling destruction reached the end of the prepared stretch.
The last charge detonated, and a final wall of earth and smoke rose above the road. And the explosions stopped.
For several seconds after the last roadside charge detonated, the world seemed to stop.
The former miner lay half beneath the carcass of an officer's horse, his rifle trapped against his chest and one cheek pressed into the blood-wet dirt. The animal had taken most of the blast that should have killed him. Its body now shielded him from the road, steaming beneath the July heat, one hind leg still twitching weakly.
He could hear almost nothing.
Only a high, metallic ringing filled his skull.
His vision came and went in blurred fragments. Smoke rolled low across the road, turning the midday sun into a pale white disc. Dust hung so thickly in the air that men only a few paces away appeared as shadows moving through fog.
Then things began falling from above, dirt, stones, pieces of wood, and something warm struck his cheek as well.
He wiped it away and stared stupidly at the blood covering his fingers.
It was not his.
All around him, the proud column that had been singing of Edirne only minutes earlier had ceased to exist.
Men crawled through heaps of bodies looking for friends, weapons, missing equipment—sometimes missing pieces of themselves. One soldier staggered in circles with one hand clamped around the shredded stump of the other, staring at the ground as though he expected to find his fingers lying somewhere among the stones.
"My hand," he kept saying. "Where is my hand? Where is it?"
Another man stumbled through the smoke shouting a name.
"Yusuf!"
He climbed over a dead horse.
"Yusuf!"
He seized one wounded soldier by the shoulders, turned him over, saw the wrong face and immediately moved on.
"Brother! Yusuf! Where are you?"
Nearby, someone screamed for his mother until his voice broke. Another man lay beneath the remains of a wagon reciting the shahada again and again while blood seeped steadily from beneath him. A wounded horse attempted to rise upon two shattered forelegs, collapsed, screamed and tried again.
Men were everywhere and nowhere. Some crawled, some prayed, some simply sat where the explosions had thrown them and stared.
The road itself had disappeared beneath the wreckage. Torn packs spilled bread and ammunition into pools of blood. Rifles lay beneath bodies. A cartwheel burned beside an overturned ammunition chest while strips of uniform and flesh hung from the branches overhead.
The former miner lay weak and half-stunned beside the dead horse, but forced himself onto one elbow.
Long before the mines, before years spent cutting rock and hauling ore beneath the earth, Mustafa Kemal had worn an officer's uniform. He had known drill, command and the discipline required to make frightened men move when every instinct told them to remain still.
Some remnant of that man survived inside him.
His ears screamed with a high metallic ringing, but he forced himself to listen until the world slowly began returning.
First came the screams. Then the shrieking of wounded horses. Then the dry crackle of grass burning along the roadside. And beneath it all came something quieter.
Pop.
A sharper crack followed as a bullet passed through the smoke.
Mustafa turned just in time to see the soldier who had been searching frantically for his brother stop in the middle of another shout.
"Yusuf! Broth—"
His cap flew from his head, as he collapsed across the corpse he had just been climbing over, blood spreading rapidly beneath his hair.
Mustafa stared.
Another muted pop came from somewhere upon the ridge, then another.
All around him men began dropping. The soldier who had been wandering through the wreckage searching for his missing hand suddenly spun as a bullet tore through the side of his skull. Blood, bone and brain matter sprayed across the road, and he fell beside a severed hand that might, absurdly, have been his own.
A wounded corporal struggled onto one knee.
Pop.
He collapsed again.
Behind an overturned wagon, an officer rose high enough to wave his men toward cover.
"Form on—"
A round struck him through the face. Blood sprayed across the wagon boards, and he disappeared behind them before the command was finished.
Mustafa flattened himself against the horse as he realised it then fully, the ridge, the shots were coming from the ridge.
He cautiously raised his head above the animal's bloated flank and searched through the drifting smoke, but he still could not see the men firing. Trees appeared and vanished behind grey curtains of dust. Sunlight occasionally flashed from something buried among the vegetation—a brief wink of glass, gone almost as soon as his eyes found it.
The enemy was there.
He simply could not see them.
The rifle fire moved methodically through the wreckage. Anyone who stood too high was shot. Anyone who attempted to give orders drew a bullet. Men who abandoned cover and tried to run were struck before they travelled more than a few paces.
They were not fighting an enemy they could see. They were being hunted.
Then the ridge opened fire in earnest.
The sound that followed was unlike any machine gun Mustafa had ever heard.
It began as a mechanical growl and instantly climbed into a savage, buzzing roar, so rapid that the individual shots disappeared inside one continuous tearing sound. It reminded him grotesquely of some enormous insect screaming beside his ear, or a powered saw chewing through timber without ever slowing.
Another weapon joined it, then another. The smoke on the road flickered as bullets tore through it.
Mustafa ducked as the road around him erupted in sprays of dirt, splintered wood and blood. Farther ahead, three soldiers sheltering behind the wreckage of a wagon vanished beneath the first burst. The boards exploded around them. One man's rifle shattered in his hands before several rounds punched through his chest and threw him onto his back.
The soldier beside him tried to crawl away. A second burst walked across him, and his body jerked repeatedly against the stones before becoming still. The third man disappeared behind a cloud of broken timber and red mist.
Men screamed and flattened themselves against the road.
One soldier, maddened by terror, raised his rifle and fired blindly toward the ridge. He managed a single shot before automatic fire struck him across the side. His body twisted violently, his abdomen opening as he fell. Blood and torn flesh spilled across the terrified man crouching beside him, who buried his face against the road and began sobbing.
Everywhere Mustafa looked, the same lesson repeated itself.
Stand up and die.
Run and die.
Crawl too far from cover and die.
Only those wedged inside shell holes, beneath wagons, behind dead horses or among the bodies seemed to survive for more than a few moments.
One soldier made a desperate dash toward the forest.
He managed perhaps ten metres before bullets caught both legs. He pitched forward, rolled onto his back and began clawing himself toward the trees with his hands.
A single quiet shot ended the effort.
Yet farther back, beyond the portion of the road devastated by the original explosions, fresh Ottoman troops were still coming forward.
Through the smoke appeared an officer with his sword raised, leading several dozen men into the wreckage. They stepped over bodies and broken carts, rifles in hand and bayonets already fixed, trying desperately to restore some shape to the shattered battalion.
For one brief moment Mustafa felt hope.
Then something screamed overhead.
A dark shape crossed the smoke and dropped among the advancing soldiers.
The explosion swallowed them.
Fire and earth burst outward, throwing men in every direction.
Mustafa flinched.
Another distant thump followed.
Something else came down among a cluster of wounded men and detonated in their midst, tossing bodies outward like discarded clothing.
Then another, and another. The road began erupting again.
Mixed among the heavier blasts came smaller, sharper explosions. Mustafa heard faint hollow thumps from somewhere beyond sight, followed moments later by compact bursts wherever men gathered. A group sheltering beside an overturned cart disappeared inside smoke and fragments. Two soldiers were thrown bodily across the road. A third remained kneeling for several seconds, blood running from both ears, before slowly falling sideways.
Mustafa searched desperately for whoever was firing, but he saw nothing. Only bushes, grass and trees. Occasionally something moved that might have been a shoulder or helmet, but whenever he focused upon it the shape dissolved back into vegetation.
He had never seen anything like it.
Then a deeper thump sounded from somewhere farther away.
Several veterans looked upward, and heard it, a faint descending whistle growing rapidly louder and closer.
Then the mortar bomb struck and the road jumped. Bodies, stones and broken equipment rose together inside the explosion before crashing back down.
Another bomb landed farther along the column, then another.
Fresh troops attempting to reach the front suddenly found the earth erupting among them. Men who had survived the roadside charges were torn down by fragments. Reinforcements scattered toward the ditches. Officers screamed for them to spread out, but commands vanished beneath the gunfire and concussion.
Nobody knew where safety was anymore. The battle had lost all direction.
Men fled into the trees simply because remaining upon the road had become unbearable.
They discovered almost immediately that the forest offered no refuge.
A squad disappeared into the undergrowth to Mustafa's left. He heard branches breaking, men shouting, then a scream so sharp that it carried even through the gunfire. Several rifle shots followed, and soon two soldiers came running back.
The first never reached the road. A muted shot dropped him among the bushes. The second staggered through the vegetation with blood covering half his face.
"Devils!" he screamed. "The trees are full of devils!"
He stumbled into the ditch and did not rise again.
Everywhere the Ottomans tried to escape, something waited for them. They died upon the road, in the ditches and vanished beneath the trees. Those who remained alive quickly learned the simplest rule of all: stay low, stay hidden and pray that nothing noticed you.
Mustafa was no different. His legs refused to lift him. He remained pressed against the dead horse, gripping his rifle so tightly that his hands ached.
He had studied war at the military academy and worked with dynamite enough to know what explosives could do to rock and earth. He had read of men being torn apart in battle.
But nothing had prepared him for the slaughter around him.
Then, through the smoke, he saw the major.
The battalion commander appeared suddenly behind a mound of bodies, bloodied and blackened but somehow still upright, his eyes burning with fury. For one incredible moment Mustafa thought the man had survived.
Then something screamed down through the air, and the following explosion swallowed him.
Mustafa instinctively turned his face away as smoke, dirt and blood washed over him. Pieces of flesh and torn uniform rained across the road. Something heavy struck the horse beside him. Another fragment landed near his knee.
When Mustafa looked back, the major had vanished.
Then something moved inside the drifting smoke. Mustafa stared, and as he did, his mind resisted what his eyes were showing him.
The major was still alive, or what remained of him was.
The lower half of his body had been destroyed. One leg was gone completely, the other reduced to torn cloth and mangled flesh. His left arm ended in a shredded ruin near the shoulder, while his uniform had been burned black and soaked dark with blood. Yet somehow he planted his remaining hand against the road and pushed himself upward.
For a few impossible seconds, the major managed to raise what remained of himself above the bodies around him, supported only by one arm and sheer instinct.
Mustafa could not move. Neither could several of the men nearby. They all simply watched.
The major looked toward them, and his eyes found Mustafa's through the smoke. His mouth opened as though he meant to shout another order, to command the battalion back into shape by force of will alone, but no words came.
Then his gaze dropped and he looked down at himself. At the missing legs, at the destroyed arm, at the blood and exposed flesh beneath him.
Something changed in his face.
Until that moment, perhaps shock had protected him. Perhaps his mind had simply refused to understand what had happened.
Now it understood.
The scream that tore from him was raw and animal, stripped of every trace of rank or dignity. He clawed desperately at his ruined body with his remaining hand, as though he might somehow hold himself together if he pressed hard enough.
His fingers came away slick with blood, and he looked at them. Then back at Mustafa. For the briefest moment, there was nothing of the commanding officer left in his expression. Only terror.
Then whatever strength had kept him upright disappeared.
The major sagged forward, his head dropped, and he did not move again.
Around him, the battle continued without pause. Bullets cracked through the smoke. Men screamed and fell. Mortar bombs tore fresh holes into the road. Trees splintered and began to burn. Wounded horses thrashed among the bodies until their cries ended one by one.
Yet Mustafa barely heard any of it. For him, the world had narrowed to the dead major.
The men nearby seemed to feel the same. They crouched inside craters and behind corpses, staring at the remains of the man who had ridden before them that morning with sword, horse and authority.
Now he lay broken in the dirt like everyone else.
And in that moment something changed inside Mustafa then, not courage. He was still terrified. Not faith either, his thoughts were too scattered for prayer.
It was simply refusal.
His gaze shifted toward another dead officer lying nearby. Mustafa released his rifle, crawled toward the body and pulled the sword from the man's belt.
Then he saw the fallen banner.
Red cloth lay twisted beneath a dead standard-bearer, the crescent and star smeared with dust and blood.
Mustafa reached for it.
He dragged the flag free and gripped the staff hard, almost desperately, as though it were the only solid thing left in a world that had dissolved into smoke, blood and screaming.
Sword in one hand, banner in the other, he forced himself upright.
"Prepare bayonets," Mustafa said.
The words sounded feeble inside his ringing ears, almost absurdly small against the gunfire, explosions and screams consuming the road.
No one responded.
The men around him remained pressed into craters, beneath wagons and behind the swollen bodies of dead horses. Some were wounded and barely conscious. Others shook so violently that they could scarcely hold their rifles. One soldier had wet himself and seemed not even to know it. Another simply stared into the dirt, his eyes empty, as though his mind had retreated somewhere the battle could no longer reach.
Then, almost without warning, the enemy fire slackened.
It did not stop. Somewhere upon the ridge a rifle still cracked, and wounded men continued crying through the smoke. But the murderous mechanical roar faded, the hail of bullets thinned, and for a few precious seconds the shattered road seemed to breathe.
Perhaps the machine guns were being reloaded. Perhaps the drifting smoke had become too thick for the enemy to see through. Mustafa did not know.
He knew only that they had been given a moment.
Men began lifting their heads.
Blood-streaked faces appeared above dead horses and broken wagons. Soldiers peered from shell holes with rifles clutched against their chests. The road around them no longer resembled the ordered column that had crossed the frontier less than an hour before. Packs, rifles and splintered carts lay among heaps of bodies, while blood shone darkly between the stones.
Mustafa looked at them and understood what would happen when the guns opened again.
If they remained where they were, they would be killed one by one.
If they fled east, the hidden riflemen would shoot them in the back.
And if they allowed themselves enough time to comprehend what had happened—to look properly at the bodies, the missing limbs, the men crying for mothers who would never hear them—many would simply cease being soldiers at all.
So Mustafa chose movement.
"Bayonets!" he shouted.
Still, almost no one moved.
He spat blood and dust from his mouth and forced himself upright.
The banner rose with him.
Several soldiers stared.
Mustafa planted one boot upon the carcass of the horse beside him and climbed until he stood above the wreckage, one hand gripping the blood-streaked Ottoman flag and the other holding the dead officer's sword.
Now they could see him.
"Fix bayonets!"
His voice carried farther this time.
"You can lie there and wait for them to butcher you, or you can turn and run and let them shoot you in the spine. I will do neither!"
More heads turned toward him.
Mustafa swept the sword across the devastated road.
"Look around you! These men marched beside us this morning. They sang beside us. They came for the same reason we did, and now they are dead!"
His voice grew harsher.
"Will you leave them here and crawl away? Will you let the enemy kill the rest of us while we hide beneath their bodies?"
Nobody answered, but Mustafa could see something changing in their faces. Terror remained—nothing could remove that—but shame and anger were beginning to rise beside it.
"I will not run," he said. "I will not lie here waiting for death. If Allah has written that I die upon this road, then I will die moving toward the men who did this."
The hot wind stirred.
The banner opened above him.
For the first time since Mustafa had dragged it from beneath the dead standard-bearer, the crescent and star became fully visible through the smoke, stained with dirt and blood but still recognisable.
Men stared at it.
Mustafa raised the sword.
"Stand!"
One soldier moved.
He crawled from behind a horse, trembling so badly that he fumbled his bayonet twice before fastening it to his rifle.
Another followed.
Then another.
Metal began clicking along the road.
A wounded man with blood running down one side of his face pushed himself upright against a wagon wheel. Another soldier, one arm bound tightly against his chest with a strip of torn uniform, held his rifle between his knees and fixed his bayonet one-handed.
The movement spread.
Men farther back had not heard Mustafa's words, but they saw the banner rising through the smoke and the soldiers around it beginning to stand.
That was enough.
Mustafa brought two fingers to his mouth and blew his whistle.
The sharp note cut through the ruined road.
Then he shouted with everything left inside him.
"For Allah!"
Voices answered.
"For the Sultan!"
More joined them.
"For Edirne! For our fallen brothers!"
A roar began spreading backward through the survivors.
"Allahu Akbar!"
The words came first from a handful of men, then dozens, then hundreds. Soldiers hauled one another from craters. Men who had been sobbing only moments earlier wiped their faces and gripped their rifles. Some were bleeding. Some could barely walk. Others shook with terror even as they lowered their bayonets.
They were not suddenly fearless.
They were simply moving.
Mustafa pointed the sword toward the smoke-covered ridge.
"Forward!"
He jumped down from the horse and ran.
The survivors followed.
They did not advance in neat ranks. There was no parade-ground alignment left, no measured cadence and scarcely any command beyond the direction in which everyone was running.
They surged forward as a shattered mass.
Some charged along the road, scrambling over bodies and burning wreckage. Others poured into the ditches and pushed toward the trees, bayonets extended before them. Wounded men limped beside the healthy. Those who stumbled were dragged upright by comrades behind them.
The cries rose with them.
"For Allah!"
"For Edirne!"
"For the fallen!"
Mustafa ran beneath the torn banner, sword raised, boots striking blood and broken stone.
For several extraordinary seconds, the enemy remained silent.
The Ottomans crossed ground they had believed impossible to cross. Men who had spent the previous minutes hiding beneath corpses suddenly found themselves running through smoke toward the invisible ridge.
Then the buzzing began again.
Mustafa heard it before the bullets reached them.
The terrible mechanical growl rose from the hillside and became that same ripping, continuous roar.
The front of the charge folded.
Men pitched forward almost together. One spun sideways and vanished beneath the feet of those behind him. Another took several rounds through the chest and collapsed against the man running beside him, pulling both of them down.
Yet the survivors continued.
There was nowhere else left for their fear to carry them.
The machine guns swept across them again.
More men fell.
Those behind climbed over them.
Rifles cracked toward the ridge. Most shots struck trees, dirt and smoke, but the Ottomans fired anyway, advancing between shots, screaming prayers and curses at enemies they still could barely see.
Some of the men entering the forest vanished almost immediately. Hidden fire struck them between the trunks. Others stumbled into concealed hazards and disappeared beneath the undergrowth with screams.
Still the rest came on.
Not because they believed themselves immortal.
Not because Mustafa had somehow convinced them that victory was certain.
Every man upon that road had just learned how cheaply a human life could be destroyed.
They charged because remaining where they had been meant waiting helplessly for the next bullet.
They charged because their officers were dead, their formation had been annihilated and the bodies of their friends lay beneath their boots.
They charged because movement, however desperate, still felt like choice.
And above them, through smoke and burning branches, the torn Ottoman banner continued forward.