When open battle failed, the Russians fell back on an older habit.
It was not a new idea, nor one born only of this war. Since the days of the old tsars, Russian commanders had used Cossacks and other light cavalry in the same rough frontier way: if you could not break the enemy army in open battle, then bleed the enemy land instead. Send horsemen where whole regiments could not go. Raid roads. Burn storehouses. Strike couriers, supply trains, and isolated villages. Force the stronger enemy to turn his head, divide his strength, and fear the country behind his own front.
Peter the Great had used Cossacks in precisely those traditional roles of raiding, harassment, scouting, and rear-area pressure, and Russia would return to the same answer again and again. In 1812, when Napoleon drove deep into Russia, commanders sent out small Cossack detachments to strike the invader's flanks, middle, and rear, harassing supply columns and spreading fear far out of proportion to their numbers.
And now in the year of 1914, Lieutenant General Artamonov, now holding command of the Cossack cavalry after Samsonov's death, had chosen exactly that path.
So the Cossacks had been sent west.
Not in large organised formations, but instead they came like hornets shaken from a nest—little swarms of horsemen, three riders here, five there, ten, fifteen, twenty at most. Some went straight for the border posts and tried to break through by boldness alone, only to find the frontier watchtowers and fortified customs stations harder than expected. Machine guns and disciplined rifle fire checked those attacks quickly. Horses went down. Men tumbled into ditches. Those who survived turned away and sought easier ground.
And easier ground existed.
The German-Russian frontier was too long to seal perfectly, nearly 1200 Kilometres. There were ditches, marsh paths, forgotten lanes, wood roads, farm tracks, and strips of forest where no wall of men could stand at every hour of the day. So the raiders slipped through where they could—across fields, through pine woods, over creeks and drainage cuts—and spread themselves into East Prussia and beyond like wolves entering lamb country.
At first, they did what Cossack raiders had always done.
They struck farmsteads.
They burst into villages.
They killed men who resisted, dragged women from houses, looted food, horses, jewelry, and anything small enough to carry away in saddlebags. Smoke rose from barns and granaries. Telegraph lines were cut. Rural roads filled with terrified civilians fleeing in carts or on foot.
But the farther west they rode, the stranger Germany became.
This was not the Germany many of them had imagined.
The roads were not simple stone tracks and mud lanes but long strips of dark asphalt. Motor vehicles moved everywhere—cars, buses, motorcycles, delivery trucks, police wagons. The towns looked too clean, too ordered, too brightly lit. Shop windows gleamed. Banks and department stores sat beside cafés and barber shops whose polished glass reflected a society that felt less like Europe in 1914 and more like some decadent future that had appeared in the wrong century.
The people unsettled them almost as much as the roads.
German men were tall, broad-shouldered, straight-backed, clean-shaven or carefully trimmed, dressed in fitted coats and proper shoes, moving with the confidence of men who expected order as a birthright. German women seemed worse still—well-fed, perfumed, painted, hair carefully styled, skin clear, clothes cut in ways that to many of the Cossacks looked unreal, almost sinful in their refinement and especially in their revealing style.
To the rough riders from the east, with their shaggy mustaches, weather-beaten faces, hard coats, and frontier habits, it felt as though they had crossed not merely a border, but a century.
And once the first murderous heat of the raid passed, greed took over.
The raids became less like military operations and more like armed robbery.
Jewelry stores were smashed open. Cloth merchants looted. Banks threatened. Drunken horsemen fired pistols into the air and dragged armfuls of fine coats, watches, and silver goods out into the streets. Men who had ridden west to burn and terrorize now found themselves pawing through perfume bottles and women's dresses like thieves in a dream.
That was when the resistance hardened.
Because Germany, for all its polished surfaces and modern comforts, had been preparing for war inside its own flesh for generations.
Long before the German Empire had even been born, old Prussia had already understood a simple truth: a state surrounded by enemies could not afford soft men. So its sons were taken young, drilled hard, and taught that discipline was not a virtue but a necessity. Service, hardship, obedience, marching, shooting, enduring—these were not temporary burdens, but part of what it meant to become a man.
That old tradition had never died.
Under Oskar, it had only been sharpened.
In the new Germany, conscription remained universal, but the training was harsher, broader, and far more modern than anything old Prussia had ever known. Boys were not merely handed rifles and taught to stand in line. They were broken down and rebuilt. They ran obstacle courses, swam rivers, learned fieldcraft, drilled with knives and entrenching tools, trained in hand-to-hand combat, and spent endless hours on ranges and exercise grounds. They lifted iron in Pumpworld gyms, hardened their lungs and hearts, learned to move under fire, to fight in squads, to endure pain, cold, hunger, and exhaustion without breaking.
And when their formal service ended, many did not stop.
In their spare time they kept training—lifting, boxing, wrestling, running, swimming, drilling with reserve units, or simply trying to outdo one another in strength and stamina. Nor was it only the men. Even many women in Oskar's Germany had adopted the new culture of discipline, bodily care, and self-hardening. A stronger nation, Oskar believed, began with stronger bodies and stronger minds.
So the average German civilian was not a helpless peasant waiting to be butchered.
He had marched.
He had drilled.
He had fired rifles.
He had learned how to obey, how to endure, and, if need be, how to kill.
So when the Cossacks rode deeper into German territory, they did not find only screaming civilians.
They found ever increasing resistance.
Shopkeepers shot from behind counters with old reserve carbines. Farmers came out of barns with axes, hunting rifles, and military pistols kept from their years of service. Former conscripts gathered quickly, almost instinctively, into knots of armed men and began firing from windows, alleys, and hay wagons. More than one Cossack raider, expecting frightened villagers, was instead dragged from the saddle by a blacksmith, clubbed to death on the roadside by gangs of motorcyclists, or shot dead by a schoolmaster who still remembered his field drills.
The roads themselves turned against them.
Motorcars became battering rams. Trucks veered into horsemen. Buses, normally used to carry workers or schoolchildren, swerved and smashed riders into fences, ditches, and shopfronts. Motorcyclists sped away from danger not only to flee, but to carry warnings and call in armed response.
Then came the police.
Not sleepy constables with whistles.
Not village watchmen.
The police of Oskar's Germany wore Prussian-blue or black uniforms and moved with military speed. They arrived in cars, in pairs or squads, armed with pistols, rifles, and shotguns. They blocked roads, established firing positions, and struck fast. Where a village post was too weak, nearby towns reinforced it. Where a town was hit too hard, district headquarters sent more men.
And where the raiders gathered in larger numbers—where they tried to seize a school, a rail station, or a whole quarter of a town—something worse came for them.
The SEK.
Their vehicles appeared first.
Prussian-blue armored carriers rolled into the streets, low and heavy, engines growling like restrained beasts. Machine guns mounted on their roofs swept the roads ahead, forcing the Cossacks back behind wagons and walls before the vehicles had even fully stopped.
Inside, under dim red combat lamps, twelve men sat in absolute silence.
They wore darker uniforms than the regular police—heavier armor plating, reinforced helmets, visors hiding their faces behind cold glass. Every weapon was already loaded. Every strap tightened. Every man perfectly still.
On their chest plates and back harnesses, stamped in plain block letters, were three characters:
SEK
Spezialeinsatzkommando.
They required no speeches.
No last-minute plans.
They had rehearsed this moment a thousand times in training yards and on shooting ranges. Every man knew his role already. No thought was needed—only action. Like a weapon that fires the moment the trigger is pulled.
And when the trucks halted, the sergeant finally spoke.
His voice was calm. Almost casual.
"Remember your oath, brothers."
A pause.
"If you die—die well."
The men nodded once.
Then the rear doors slammed open.
The men poured out in a violent, perfectly coordinated motion.
Two dropped immediately to their knees on either side of the truck, rifles already firing to suppress the raiders. Four more moved left and right in pairs, covering angles, clearing corners, their shots precise and deliberate. The remaining men advanced straight forward, pushing through smoke and dust with the relentless momentum of men who had already accepted the possibility of death long ago.
There was no hesitation.
No shouting.
No warning.
Only the disciplined violence of professionals doing the one thing they had been trained for above all others.
The ordinary German man had been shaped into discipline by the Empire.
The SEK were that discipline perfected.
They were not negotiators.
They were not peacekeepers.
They were not there to restore order gently.
They were the Empire's final answer to violence inside its borders.
Where they appeared, the question was no longer whether the enemy would be stopped.
Only how quickly he would die.
And so the Cossack raids began to die with them.
One band was cut down in a jewelry district after trying to drag hostages into a bank vault. Another was hunted through orchards outside a village and shot from the saddle one by one. A third, which had tried to force entry into a school to seize children as captives, met two SEK trucks, a roadblock of garrison riflemen, and enough machine-gun fire to leave the street red and the horses screaming.
The farther the raiders rode, the less they resembled avenging cavalry and the more they resembled cornered criminals.
Some still killed.
Some still burned.
Some still took captives before they themselves were hunted down.
The damage was real. People died. Homes burned. Farms were ruined. Some women vanished eastward before police or militia could stop it.
But the raids did not become the great internal collapse Artamonov had hoped for.
Germany bent, but it did not break.
Because Oskar had known this problem long before the war began.
The eastern border was too vast to defend perfectly. No empire could place enough men on every kilometer of frontier to stop every mounted raider, every saboteur, every criminal band.
All he could do was prepare.
So he had modernized the police.
Militarized the garrisons.
Strengthened the roads.
Armed the interior.
Made the ordinary citizen harder.
And now those preparations were paying for themselves in blood.
Still, when the reports reached him, Oskar felt no satisfaction.
Only bitterness.
Every burned farm, every dead child, every woman dragged from a home reminded him of the same truth: there was only one final answer to the insecurity of the eastern frontier.
Push east.
Break the enemy's power.
Force peace so hard and so deeply into Russia that the thought of another war against Germany became an unthinkable thing.
Which was why, while the Cossacks spent themselves in little raids and petty looting, Oskar drove the Black Legion southward toward Warsaw.
***
Author's Note:
I'll be busy for the next few days grinding real-life paper bills like a madman, so updates may slow down a bit. Just a heads-up before anyone sends a search party.