While Oskar continued handing out medals and the celebration in the royal palace of Potsdam carried on with full warmth and confidence. Beneath the chandeliers, surrounded by music, wine, and the steady roar of triumph, sailors and their families feasted as if victory itself had already been secured. Laughter rose through the halls and gardens, glasses were raised again and again, and for that one night the future seemed bright, certain, almost peaceful.
But the celebration was not truly for all of Germany.
It belonged mostly to the navy, to those who had broken Britain's pride upon the Atlantic and returned in glory. Many of the most important men of the army were absent, and their absence was not accidental. While the palace shone with light and laughter, the western army command sat awake in the city of Luxembourg, gathered not around banquet tables but around maps, reports, and casualty ledgers.
There, there was no music.
No laughter.
No sense of ease.
Only the war.
In the army headquarters, Helmuth von Moltke stood beneath harsh lamplight with papers spread before him and great maps pinned across the walls. Inked lines and arrows showed the shape of Germany's advance, the front still holding against France in the south and center, while in the north the German right flank had driven through Belgium and spilled into France like a flood released from a broken dam.
The Battle of the Marne was now fully underway, and the furthest German scouting elements had already reached the outer approaches to Paris. In some sectors they were barely ten kilometers from the city itself, clashing with scattered French companies entrenched in villages, farms, and small belts of woodland.
To an outside eye, it would have seemed that the Schlieffen Plan stood on the edge of triumph.
Germany had broken through the fortified cities of Belgium. Brussels had fallen. Namur had been taken. The grey tide had poured onward into France with terrifying speed, and now Paris itself lay within reach. Yet to Moltke's growing irritation, the deeper the German armies advanced, the more maddening the war became.
The French and their allies, though steadily losing ground, had not shattered. Again and again they managed to retreat in tolerably good order, pulling back before they could be cleanly encircled or destroyed. No great annihilating blow had yet been struck. No vast army had yet been trapped and erased. The enemy bent, but did not break.
That alone was enough to sour any thought of easy victory.
And there were other frustrations as well. Antwerp still held. Encircled, battered, nearly strangled, yes—but still resisting. Worse, Moltke had been forced to pull several corps away from the advancing front, not to strike at France but to secure what had already been taken.
Belgium, once occupied, had not become quiet ground. Sabotage spread constantly through the countryside. Rail lines were cut. Bridges damaged. Supply routes harassed. Civilians and irregular bands attacked German logistics wherever they could, and the railway system through Belgium—already battered by the fighting—could not be relied upon as the smooth artery of advance Moltke had hoped for.
That was becoming one of the central curses of the whole campaign.
The further the German armies pushed into France, the more heavily they depended on transport to keep them supplied, and in that regard the western command was now paying the price for old arrogance.
Before the war, too many within the western army establishment had resisted serious large-scale investment in Oskar's motorized system, considering it excessive, expensive, or unnecessary beside the familiar comfort of horse and rail.
Now they were suffering for that blindness. With the rail net through Belgium damaged and constantly harassed, Germany's western armies were increasingly forced to rely on Muscle Motors trucks and other motor vehicles to carry forward fuel, ammunition, food, and the endless weight of a modern offensive. They did not have enough of them. Not nearly enough.
For Moltke, at least one mercy remained.
The eastern front had required no reinforcements. Oskar's victories had been so sweeping that not a single additional corps had needed to be diverted there, and without that, the line in the west had at least been allowed to remain intact. Had the Russians still been a true threat, the entire western effort might already have begun to come apart.
Even so, the war before him was becoming dangerously fractured.
But that was only a part of that which troubled Moltke that night. In theory, the great northern sweep of von Kluck's First Army should have carried farther west, around the outer flank, rolling past the Channel approaches and down behind Paris in a grand movement that would complete the encirclement. But theory had collided with reality. Moltke had approved the decision for the First Army not to swing so wide. Instead of a great sweeping movement through the north, it had been ordered to continue more directly toward Paris, keeping closer to the Second Army.
It was a necessary choice.
To send the First Army too far outward would have exposed the flank of the Second Army at the very moment when the Germans could least afford it. On that exposed side stood not only the Belgian First Army, still troublesome despite everything, but also the British Expeditionary Force—small compared to the continental masses, yet stubborn, disciplined, and constantly troublesome.
Moltke did not possess the spare strength to deal with all of that while also driving forward and guarding his ever-lengthening rear.
And that was the truth of the matter.
Germany's armies in the west were powerful, perhaps even nearly unstoppable in direct battle, but they were being stretched farther and farther across an enormous front. Every mile gained increased the strain. Every village occupied demanded troops. Every rail line sabotaged demanded guards, engineers, and escorts. Every corps pushed too far risked becoming isolated. And more than anything else, Moltke feared that very thing now—his armies becoming too overstretched.
The problem was that Paris could not be brought down easily.
The city was not some open prize waiting to be seized by momentum alone. It still had its forts, its defensive belt, and now a fresh French Sixth Army under General Michel-Joseph Maunoury stood before it, adding yet another obstacle to a campaign that was already straining toward its limit. In another situation, Moltke might have accepted that as merely another military difficulty, serious but manageable. But the greater problem was not Paris by itself. It was everything surrounding Paris.
The further his armies pushed, the more the whole western front began to resist him in ways that no map had properly captured.
At the Marne, crossings stalled under fierce French resistance. Villages, farms, woods, and roads that should have been secured became sites of recurring confusion, ambush, and delay. Beyond the formal armies, the countryside itself seemed to turn hostile.
Every step deeper into France and Belgium brought more people under German occupation, and those people increasingly became as dangerous in their own way as the regular armies facing him. Sabotage, sniping, sudden attacks on isolated troops, damaged roads, cut lines, railway interference, false reports, hostile guides, missing supplies, all of it accumulated into a constant pressure that eroded certainty and slowed advance.
And there were limits to German strength, even now.
The tanks, which had seemed like instruments of near-miracle in the opening phases, were not made for endless road marches across hundreds and hundreds of kilometers. Oskar himself had always been clear on that point. They were meant to be transported by train where possible, then committed decisively where breakthrough was needed, not driven across half a continent like common motorcars.
But the war had demanded otherwise, and now the machines were paying for it. Their engines were being pushed toward failure, their tracks and mechanical parts worn down by hard roads, mud, debris, and endless movement. Even these early Panzer models, terrifying as they were to the enemy, had their limits, and Moltke knew he was reaching them.
The air force, too, for all its brilliance, was still too small to dominate everything.
It could strike hard, scout brilliantly, shatter concentrations, and unsettle entire regions, yes, but it could not suppress an enemy mass of over a million men spread across such depth. It could not be everywhere at once. And every day the front demanded more—more reconnaissance, more bombing, more correction of artillery fire, more intervention wherever the line bent or confusion spread. There were simply not enough machines and crews to solve every problem from the sky.
So the armies in the west were being pushed to their limit.
And Moltke knew it.
The reports never stopped. Casualty lists. Radio transmissions describing ambushes in villages and woods. Requests for more artillery shells because batteries were burning through ammunition faster than supply could replace it. Reports of advances halted, bridges not yet repaired, transport delayed, roads too broken, wagons stuck, trucks missing, horses dead, units exhausted, officers confused, villages "taken" yet still contested a day later.
Every one of those reports added weight to him.
He had seen the hospitals in Luxembourg City himself, not from paper, not through summaries, but with his own eyes. He had walked among the blood and the stink and the endless sound of suffering. He had seen men without limbs, men without faces, men crying out through morphine and fever, men too far gone even for that, reduced to moaning heaps of torn flesh beneath white sheets already stained red. He had seen orderlies and surgeons moving like exhausted ghosts through rooms full of ruin. And what had settled into him there had never truly left.
He felt like a butcher.
As if whole lakes of blood rested in his hands.
And worse than that, he no longer felt he understood the shape of the killing well enough to justify it.
There were reports now of German soldiers surrendering after being isolated in ambushes, only to be systematically executed afterward. Reports of hidden machine-gun nests turning roads and fields into slaughter grounds. Reports of artillery appearing from nowhere, firing, vanishing, then firing again from another concealed position. The sheer destructive power of modern fire, especially when hidden and layered into defensive ground, was beyond anything his father's generation or the history he had grown up studying had truly prepared him to face.
He was trying, every day, to make sense of it.
Trying to understand what was really happening at the front.
Where exactly was each division? Where were the real gaps? Where was the enemy actually stronger than expected? Where were his men being outflanked, or merely delayed, or simply lost in confusion? Who held what? Who was pushing? Who was retreating? What was real, and what was already outdated by the time the report reached his desk?
That was becoming one of the great torments of his command.
In one report, a town such as Meaux on the Marne would be declared taken, the flag raised, the bridges supposedly secured. Yet even a day later, another set of transmissions would report fighting still going on in the streets, French reinforcements crossing into the town, counterattacks from the riverbank, artillery still falling there. So what, exactly, did it mean for the town to be "taken"? Which districts did the Germans truly hold? Which roads? Which bridges? Which houses? Moltke often no longer knew.
Communications had undeniably improved thanks to Oskar's radios now reaching every army headquarters, but even that improvement had its limits. What reached him was still fractured, distorted by confusion, lag, stress, misunderstanding, and the simple chaos of war. He knew more than commanders in earlier wars could ever have known, and yet somehow he still felt blind.
Increasingly, Moltke felt an unease he could not quite master.
As if command itself were slipping through his fingers.
He wrote of it to his wife back home, though even there he softened it, because to write the full truth would have been too much like confessing collapse. More than a month of war and advance had not only worn down his armies. It had worn down him. More and more he found himself pacing in his office late into the night, muttering to himself, writing letters full of blood and exhaustion and the horror of what he felt responsible for. He wrote of the dead, of the wounded, of the burden of command, of the growing sense that he stood at the center of something monstrous and no longer knew how to shape it cleanly.
He felt personally responsible for all of it.
And yet he had no clear solution.
That was the part that truly poisoned him.
His method thus far, allowing his armies broad operational freedom without forcing every movement through a rigid centralized hand, had worked. Amazingly, it had worked. But now he felt the strain of that system at its outer edge. The campaign had reached a breaking point where momentum alone was no longer enough, where every army's independence threatened to become dislocation, and where overstretch might turn success into disaster.
And all the while, Oskar's victories in the east cast a shadow over him.
They had relieved him militarily, yes, but politically and psychologically they had become another pressure. The east had delivered grand victories. Armies shattered. Capitals taken. Fronts broken. In the west, despite all the advance and all the blood spilled, there had as yet been no such great decisive triumph.
Not yet.
However, while Moltke paced through the night in Luxembourg, muttering to himself and staring at maps that no longer seemed to obey reason, Oskar at last allowed himself to breathe a sigh of relief in Potsdam as he shook the final hand in the early hours of the 4th of September.
The long medal ceremony was done.
The stream of sailors and officers had at last ended, and with that burden lifted, he returned to the celebration itself. The palace still lived around him with music, laughter, conversation, and the warm disorder of victory. Families were still gathered. Children were still running where they should not have been. Men who had faced the sea were still drinking and eating as though they could now consume enough joy to make up for all they had survived.
Karl, quick as ever to reclaim a stage the moment duty allowed it, had already gone back up with his little band and begun singing again, turning the latter part of the night into a strange little concert inside the royal palace.
Oskar, meanwhile, found his attention drifting elsewhere.
He noticed the table where the team of writers who worked on his stories and books had gathered, and among them he recognized Edith. But something was wrong. Where were the Tolkien brothers?
He frowned slightly.
They usually lived more quietly now, out in the countryside where there was peace enough to write without interruption for entire days, but surely they would not have missed this celebration. Not this one.
So he made his way over to Edith.
She startled slightly when he approached, rising halfway as if she had not expected him to come directly to her. But before she could say anything, Oskar spoke first.
"Where is Ronald? And Hilary Tolkien?" he asked. "Where are my favourite writing brothers?"
Edith only stared at him for a moment, as if the answer was so obvious she did not at first know how to give it.
Then she said, "Well, they are at the front, Your Highness. Of course."
Oskar blinked.
Edith, still caught between surprise and conviction, continued, "They wanted to contribute to the war effort in ways beyond just writing stories. They were inspired not only by your speeches, Your Highness, but by the unity of the nation itself, and by the feeling that everyone must do his part. Just as we all must do our part for the greater good, Your Highness."
She said it with such absolute sincerity that the others around her nodded at once, all of them seeming to regard it as the most natural thing in the world.
And Oskar, for a moment, simply stopped.
He stared at her.
Then muttered under his breath,
"My God…"
A pause.
"They did what?"