Above the broken lands east of Warsaw, one aircraft flew alone.
It moved through the high morning air at a steady cruising speed, its engine beating in a clean, confident rhythm while the propeller carved the sky ahead. Clouds drifted past in slow white walls. Below, the earth spread wide and green beneath the early September sun: forests, fields, rivers, burned villages, blackened estates, broken roads, and the faint silver lines of rails running eastward through a land that had already learned the weight of war.
To the Russians, machines like this were Thunderbirds.
To Leutnant Manfred von Richthofen, it was simply his F-1.
His little red devil.
It was not the most elegant aircraft in the Black Legion Air Force, and Manfred knew that well enough. The newer F-2s were beautiful in a hard, modern way: metal-bodied, fast, sharp-nosed, almost arrogant in the air. The H-1 bombers had their own terrible majesty too, twin-engined and heavy, like flying fortresses dragged out of some future war.
The F-1 was different.
It was squat, nimble, biplaned, and almost ugly from certain angles, a compact fighting machine with a fat body, strong wings, and a mean little heart. It could land where the newer fighters would not dare touch: a good field, a flat road, a dry stretch of ground, anywhere a fuel truck could reach it, fill it, and send it back into the sky.
That was what made it great.
That was why Manfred loved it.
He had grown so attached to the machine that he had painted parts of its original grey body red, because red made everything faster.
That was not an engineering principle.
He knew that.
The mechanics had told him often enough, usually while rolling their eyes.
But Manfred still liked to believe it. And even if the red paint did not truly make the aircraft faster, it certainly made the enemy notice it faster before they died.
On the side of the fuselage, where there had once been only a black iron cross, he had painted a little red devil woman with a tail, a wicked smile, and fire curling from her slender fingers. Beneath her were burning skulls, each one meant to represent a kill.
How many enemies had he actually killed?
No idea.
It was almost impossible to tell from the air, from where men looked like dots running and falling. So after each mission, Manfred simply painted a few more skulls and decided the aircraft looked deadlier that way.
The mechanics had laughed.
His squadron commander had sighed.
His brothers, who had also joined the air force, had copied the idea and started painting their own machines.
Manfred considered all of that proof that he had been right.
Now the little red devil carried him toward Brest, the suspected headquarters of the Russian Second Army, which had already been destroyed twice, and perhaps a third time depending on how one counted such things. Yet somehow, stubborn as the Russians themselves, it still existed. Again. Rebuilt, patched together, renamed, dragged upright, and shoved back toward the front like a corpse being told to march.
And since the Russians refused to stay properly beaten, it had fallen to Manfred to scout the town and confirm whether the headquarters was truly there. If it was, then someone else would come later and blow it apart, and the Second Army could be sent into confusion yet again.
It was a simple, boring, long mission.
Brest lay far from Warsaw, close to the edge of what an F-1 could comfortably manage without refueling. Manfred had already flown nearly two hundred kilometers, and at that distance fuel, weather, and time all had to be respected, which annoyed him because respecting things was much less enjoyable than shooting at them.
That was also why he flew alone. One F-1 was easier to hide than a formation. One F-1 could land on a field or a road if it needed fuel. One F-1 could slip over the front while most of the air force was up north over Riga, busy with the great battle there. Along the rest of the nearly eight-hundred-kilometer line, lonely aircraft like his had been sent out to watch, report, and avoid doing anything stupid unless stupidity became useful.
At least, that was what the briefing officer had said.
Manfred had translated it in his own mind as: "Ride out. Find trouble. If the Russians stand in the open, make them regret having legs."
He smiled beneath his mask, then sighed at the boredom of it.
This was not what he had imagined when he first dreamed of war.
He remembered another September long ago, in the year of 1907, when he had been younger and much easier to impress. He and his brothers had just gotten their hands on the newly released Battleship board game, and naturally Manfred had chosen the Japanese. They were the underdogs, the clever ones, the ones who had shocked the world by crushing the Russians in 1904. He had thought that was magnificent.
For a while, the game had even made him want to join the navy where he could see them for real. The Battleships, Big guns, Glory, Steel castles on the sea.
Wonderful stuff.
Then he realized that if he wanted to become an admiral and command a battleship, he would need to spend half his life waiting, studying, smiling at the right old men, and pretending not to go mad from boredom.
So the first chance he got, he joined the Black Legion Air Force instead.
That had sounded much better.
The recruitment effort had moved quietly through the army at first, searching for the fittest and bravest men, the ones mad enough to climb into machines no other army in the world truly understood yet. Prince Oskar himself had called fighter pilots the new knights of the modern age: men who rode not horses, but engines; men who carried not lances, but machine guns; men who fought above the battlefield like bright little gods, shaping battles from the sky as knights had once shaped them from horseback.
Manfred had liked that very much.
A knight of the air.
Yes.
That suited him.
And at first it had been thrilling. Training, engines, risk, speed, crashes that did not quite kill him, instructors shouting until they were red in the face, and the wonderful knowledge that every sensible man on earth would rather keep both feet on the ground.
Then came war.
And to his own horror, Manfred discovered the terrible truth.
War was mostly boring.
When he was younger, before the air force, before the Black Legion had shown Europe what the future looked like, he had imagined war as something more direct. More banners. More charges. More shouting. More medals pinned to uniforms while women watched with shining eyes. Men would meet other men in honorable combat with smiles on their faces, shooting and hacking one another to death while yelling slogans, proving beneath the gaze of God and history which side Had The Harder Skull.
That had been war in his imagination.
The reality was infantry hiding in woods, artillery crawling from one position to another, supply men hauling crates like overworked postmen, mechanics swearing at engines, pilots sleeping in warm bunks, briefings, maps, weather reports, fuel calculations, and endless waiting.
So much waiting.
Only a small part of war was actually fighting.
Ten percent, perhaps.
Less, most days.
And on the Russian side, many men died before they ever fired a shot. That was the great secret no recruitment poster mentioned: war was ninety parts boredom and ten parts terror, and even the terror usually had to be scheduled.
Today was supposed to be one of the boring parts.
Manfred hated the boring parts.
Below him, the land seemed quiet. The Russians rarely attacked now. They defended, hid, retreated, burned what they could, and ran when pushed hard enough. The front had looked quiet from the air before, of course. It always did, until something exploded.
Much of the countryside had been emptied by scorched earth, evacuation, panic, and German occupation policy. Villages lay burned or abandoned. Farm tracks crossed fields no one worked. Here and there, wagon scars and military roads cut through the land. He spotted a single German truck moving supplies toward some hidden position, crawling along a road like an ant with a purpose.
Otherwise there was little life, just animals, smoke from some campfire, and occasional movement.
The shape of war pretending to be countryside.
Here and there, Manfred picked out the signs of German forward positions west of the frontier river: trenches hidden in tree lines, fresh cuts in the earth, little black dots of dugouts, wire belts half-covered under brush, fortified farms, gun pits so well camouflaged that from above they might have been nothing at all.
But he knew they were there.
The Black Legion held the western side in teeth and claws. Not one great wall, but a web of strongpoints, where they were waiting with the patience of wolves. To an enemy on the ground, much of it would appear empty until the first machine gun opened fire, or some poor guy stepped on a mine, or a trap.
East of that line lay the Russians, hiding in their own chosen positions, although they were usually much easier to spot as they were far more numerous.
They had learned, at least. After enough bombs, bullets, and artillery corrections, even the stupidest men eventually understood that moving in columns across open roads meant death. So now they hid under trees, in barns, in trenches, in villages, beneath hay, beside streams, anywhere that might conceal them from the black crosses above. They moved at night or in small groups, like rats who had discovered the hawk was real.
Manfred almost respected that.
Almost.
He was just beginning to admire the boring silence of it all when the cloud cover thinned ahead.
Beyond the river that marked the current front line, through a break in the white, he saw it.
Brest.
The town appeared beneath him, low and dark and waiting.
At first glance, Manfred was unimpressed.
Brest did not look like a town important enough to hold an army headquarters. From above, it seemed like a clutter of wooden roofs, muddy roads, orthodox church towers, yards, storehouses, and dull little squares set among fields and water. Larger than a village, yes, but not large enough to impress a man who had seen what Germany had become under Oskar, with it's asphalt roads, broad avenues, marble fronts, clean parks, statues to kings, generals, inventors, and even ordinary workers who had served the nation with their hands.
Brest in contrast looked old, wooden, damp, Half-medieval.
There was a fortress near the river, red and stubborn-looking, and several churches rising above the roofs, but even those seemed less like grandeur and more like relics left behind by a poorer century.
Manfred tilted the F-1 and glanced at the map strapped across his lap.
River.
Railway.
Fortress.
Roads bending west toward the Black Legion line.
Yes.
This was Brest.
He had found the right Russian anthill.
He pushed the nose down slightly and dropped out of the higher cloud. The engine note sharpened. The wind pulled harder at the wings. Below him, the town grew clearer, and then he noticed it, movement.
At first, only a few dots emerged from the southern edge of the town. Then more came from behind barns, from tree lines, from yards, from side roads and alleys. Men gathered around mounted officers. Men formed near roads leading west. Men clustered in fields and along fences.
More and more of them.
Manfred narrowed his eyes.
"Well, well," he muttered into his mask. "Look at all you little rats crawling out."
They did not look like proper soldiers from up here. Some had uniforms, but many wore dark coats, pale armbands, caps, packs, belts, rifles, tools, sticks, whatever the Russians had managed to shove into their hands. From the sky they looked less like an army than a crowd being beaten into shape by angry officers on horseback.
It was a rabble, a big one.
And if there was one thing a man in an F-1 could appreciate, it was a target considerate enough to gather itself in the open.
Manfred grinned.
"You lot are temptin' me," he said. "Bad manners, that."
He dropped lower.
Then the horizon flashed.
Not once.
Many times.
From the edge of town, from behind a barn, from low ground masked by brush, from tree lines and positions that had been invisible a heartbeat earlier, Russian artillery opened fire.
The sound reached him a moment later.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom-boom-boom.
The whole line around Brest seemed to wake at once. Smoke spat from hidden guns. Muzzle flashes blinked through the morning haze. Then something screamed past his aircraft.
A shell.
Then another.
Not aimed at him, but close enough that the disturbed air struck the F-1 like a giant hand. The wings shuddered. The control stick kicked. His little red devil lurched sideways.
Manfred laughed through his teeth.
"Oi! Rude!"
He fought the plane steady and looked back.
The shells were falling westward, toward the Black Legion positions, places where men had probably been drinking cold coffee and congratulating themselves on the quiet morning.
Now explosions bloomed among them.
Black smoke jumped from the ground.
Then more.
Then a whole row.
Manfred's grin vanished.
"You cheeky bastards," he growled. "Nobody shoots at my boys while I'm up here."
There.
A flash from a barn on the northern edge of Brest.
The doors had been thrown open. Smoke curled from within. A gun was hidden inside just behind it's now open doors, firing from shadow like some cowardly little gremlin with a cannon.
Manfred pushed the throttle forward and threw the F-1 into a dive.
The engine roared, causing the wind to hammer against the aircraft as the town rushed up at him.
Men below heard him coming and began to scatter, but too slow, far too slow. The barn filled his sights, its open mouth dark beneath the roofline.
"Right then," Manfred said, almost laughing. "Let's make some noise."
He opened fire.
The machine guns rattled.
Tracer and lead tore down in a hard stream, walking across the yard, cutting through men running beside the wall, then punching into the barn doors. Wood burst apart. Sparks leapt inside. A horse reared and vanished backward into shadow. One artilleryman spun away from the entrance, arms flung wide like he had decided to dance.
Then something inside caught.
For one brilliant instant, the barn glowed from within.
Manfred's eyes widened.
"Oh, that's gonna be a good one—"
Then the barn erupted.
The blast blew the doors outward and punched flame through the roof. Half the structure lifted, twisted, and broke apart in midair. Timber, tiles, smoke, and men were hurled into the yard. A gun wheel spun end over end through the mud. Bodies went with it. One man ran burning for several steps before collapsing face-first into the dirt. Another was thrown so high he seemed to hang against the morning sky before falling behind a fence.
The explosion hit with the force of dozens of light artillery shells going off at once.
Manfred pulled up through the smoke, laughing now, wild and bright.
"Yes! Ha! That's it! That's the stuff!"
He banked hard over Brest, the little red devil climbing with flame reflected beneath its wings.
"Got one!" he shouted to no one but himself. "Big boom! Proper boom!"
Then he looked down again.
The town was awake.
Church bells began ringing below, frantic and wild, not for worship but for alarm. Streets that had seemed half-empty a minute earlier were suddenly filling with men. They poured from courtyards, barns, sheds, schoolyards, alleys, orchards, and side roads. Some carried rifles. Others carried axes, shovels, farm tools, clubs, anything that could be called a weapon if the man holding it was frightened enough.
The southern road filled first.
Then the fields beyond it.
Then the lanes around the town.
Manfred's grin faded a little.
"Hey what's this," he muttered. "That's a lot of you."
He rolled the F-1 westward and dropped into another pass, aiming for the men spilling out beyond the edge of Brest toward the river and the German-held woods on the far side. From higher up they had looked like insects. Lower down, they looked worse: civilian coats, white armbands, caps, mismatched boots, officers on horses shouting themselves hoarse, men trying to form columns and failing, then reforming, then surging onward anyway.
A rabble, yes, but a rabble in enormous numbers.
Manfred pushed the nose down.
"Right then," he said. "Let's thin the herd."
He fired, and the machine guns rattled.
Bullets tore across the edge of the town and through the men gathering near the southern road. Bodies dropped in a dark seam through the moving mass. Men threw themselves flat. Others scattered into ditches. Some ran harder, as if speed could outrun bullets falling from the sky. A man with a shovel lifted it over his head in furious defiance, and vanished a heartbeat later beneath the stream of fire.
Manfred felt the old thrill surge through him.
This was it.
This was what he had imagined.
The knight of the air. The red machine. Enemies below. Speed, noise, fire, and the whole world spread beneath his wings.
Then the Russians fired back.
At first he thought it was only a few fools as rifle flashes winked from the field.
Then more.
Then dozens.
Then hundreds.
Men stopped running, turned, dropped to one knee, or simply fired upward from the hip. The whole ground seemed to spit little orange sparks at him. Most shots went nowhere near the aircraft. A few did.
Something snapped past his head.
The right wing shuddered as rounds punched through fabric. Another struck a strut with a bright metallic ping. Splinters flew from the cockpit rim. A hole opened in the upper wing. Then another.
The F-1 rattled beneath him.
"Shit!"
He hauled back on the stick and kicked left.
The little red devil climbed hard, engine screaming, while bullets cracked and hissed around him. Below, one Russian actually threw an axe. It spun upward with all the fury of a madman trying to murder the sky, reached nowhere near him, and fell back into the crowd.
Manfred barked a laugh despite himself.
"You lunatics!"
Then another round snapped close enough to make him flinch.
"Mad, axe-throwing bastards!"
He climbed higher, banking away over the town, heart hammering now in a way that was not entirely joy. Not fear. Not exactly. But close enough to remind him that even peasants became dangerous when there were enough of them and every one of them pointed something upward.
Then more Russian artillery shells screamed past him again.
The rounds tore westward toward the German front. One passed close enough beneath the F-1 that the shock of its wake kicked the aircraft upward and sideways.
Manfred wrestled the stick, cursed loudly, and spat into his mask.
"Oh, I see you! I see you, you sneaky little gun-grots. I'll get you next. I'll get every damn one of you."
The aircraft steadied and then he saw the truth. Not just Brest or the southern road. Not just one clumsy formation spilling from town.
The whole landscape was moving.
From the forests east of the line, men poured out in columns. From marshy ground, from villages, from orchards, from behind low ridges and hidden assembly areas, they emerged in masses. Wagons moved behind them. Cavalry flowed along roads. Field guns flashed from concealed places. Infantry spread across open ground in dark bands. White armbands flickered everywhere like pale foam on a dirty tide.
Some men were already dragging boats toward the river.
Others carried planks, doors, barrels, rafts, anything that might float long enough to carry bodies westward. Along one bend, Manfred saw men pushing a makeshift boat into the water while officers beat at them with flat blades to make them hurry. Farther north, another group was already crossing, black dots against the silver river, pulling themselves toward the German side with desperate strokes.
They were not only near the town.
They were everywhere.
As far as Manfred could see, Russia was coming out of the earth. Like ants from a thousand nests.
For once, he stopped smiling.
"My God…"
This was not a probe, not a local attack, not one desperate commander throwing a few battalions forward to die.
This was a general assault.
The last time they had come in such mass had been East Prussia.
There, the Black Legion had destroyed them.
But now they were coming again.
Manfred swallowed, all the wild joy draining into something harder and colder. He could dive again. He could strafe the road. He could burn another barn, kill twenty men, fifty, a hundred if God loved him and the ammunition belts held.
It would mean nothing.
Below him, the earth was emptying itself of men.
And most of the Air Force was far to the north over Riga.
Down here, for this moment, there was only him.
Manfred reached for the primitive radio set mounted beside him. His gloved fingers slipped once before finding the switch. Static crackled in his ear. He pulled his mask down just enough to speak clearly, the wind tearing at the edges of his voice.
"This is Leutnant von Richthofen, reconnaissance flight from Warsaw," he said, forcing the excitement out of his tone. "To any Black Legion forces receiving: Brest sector under heavy Russian artillery fire. Repeat, heavy Russian artillery fire."
Static answered.
He banked slightly and looked down again.
The masses kept moving.
"Mass infantry movement east of Brest, to all Black Legion forces," he said, louder now, urgency cutting clean through what remained of his earlier delight. "The Russians are attacking. This is a general assault. Repeat—the Russians are coming in force."
Below him, the land continued to pour men toward the west.