Re: Blood and Iron

The rails sang long before the trains came into view.

First a tremor, then a rumble, and finally a roar as armored locomotives screamed across the frontier, their steel flanks painted with the double-headed eagle of Russia and the crowned Eagle crest of Tyrol intertwined.

Smoke and steam boiled upward, blotting out the pale winter sky.

Behind them trailed strings of cars: troop carriages bristling with rifles at the windows, flatbeds stacked with armored hulls under tarpaulin, boxcars stuffed with ammunition and grain.

It had been three days since France crossed into Belgium.

In those three days Russia had moved as if some ancient giant had risen from its slumber.

Gone were the ponderous mobilizations of 1914 that had once doomed her armies to disaster.

Now railways cut like arteries through the empire, armored trains thundered along their length, and the logistical spine of a modern war bent westward with ruthless precision.

At the main marshalling yard of Smolensk, tens of thousands of men pressed into formation. Rifles gleamed under the grey light, bayonets fixed, ammunition pouches bulging.

Officers barked orders over the shriek of whistles and the groan of couplings as one train after another lurched into readiness.

Chaplains walked the lines swinging thuribles, the smoke of incense mingling with coal and oil.

Men crossed themselves, some with faces pale, others with eyes shining as though the moment were a sacrament.

At the head of the platform, Tsar Alexei Romanov stood in full dress uniform.

Beside him was Elsa von Zehntner, Grand Duchess of Russia by marriage, together they were the symbol of this alliance, the flesh-and-blood bond between Berlin and Moscow.

When Alexei raised his hand, the crowd stilled.

"My brothers!" His voice rolled across the yard, amplified by loudspeakers rigged hastily along the platforms. "Three days ago the French Republic spat upon the peace of Europe, trampling Belgium as they once did in 1914. We are once again called upon to honor our alliance to Germany, and honor it we shall!"

A thunderous cheer answered him, echoing off the stone walls of the station.

"The French Republic and its allies have made their position clear with this aggression, that they will not tolerate any order in this world other than the one they impose with ballots and bullets! But our order is older, and stronger than their failed ideals could ever imagine. For God, for Tsar, for family, and motherland I bid you stand and fight men of Russia!"

He lowered his hand, and the whistles screamed again, long, triumphant blasts that seemed to split the clouds.

The first trains began to move, wheels biting steel, smoke belching from stacks.

Columns of infantry vanished into the carriages.

Tank crews clambered atop their vehicles strapped to flatbeds, waving their caps to the crowds that surged along the platforms.

Mothers wept, wives threw flowers, children waved flags painted in black, gold, and white.

Every five minutes another train departed, bound westward.

Smolensk shook with the passage, the earth itself humming as if the land approved of this mobilization.

At Stavka headquarters in Moscow, the war council unfolded like a theater of maps and telegraphs.

Field Marshal Tukhachevsky spread his hand across the Western Front schematic.

Colored pins marked German spearheads already deep into France; other pins showed the desperate French attempt to hold the line near Ypres.

"Our armored divisions will arrive in Warsaw by nightfall," he reported, voice clipped.

"From there, the German rail network will take them directly to the Belgian frontier. With your permission, Majesty, we will reinforce the First and Third German Armies within the week."

Alexei nodded. "And the fleet?"

"Baltic squadrons already sortieing. The High Seas Fleet will not fight alone."

Elsa leaned over the map, her gloved finger tracing the rail lines.

"Our advantage is speed. My father built Germany's trains for war. Now, Russia shares in that gift. We must exploit it before the Allies can bring their weight across the Channel."

The generals exchanged glances. None dared contradict her.

Elsa was not merely the Tsarina by marriage, and though she normally reigned by Alexei's side with quiet and dignified grace.

She was still Bruno von Zehntner's daughter, and the war itself bore his stamp.

Telegrams crackled in from Berlin, Rome, Budapest, Constantinople, and Madrid: coordination points, shared codes, timetables meshed down to the hour.

The Central Powers moved as one body, and Russia was no longer the limping limb but the driving muscle.

Three days later, the border towns of East Prussia saw the arrival of the first Russian armored brigades.

Sleek E-series hulls built under German license rolled from the flatbeds, their steel plating glinting under frost.

Crews in Russian Camoflauge patterns worked side by side with their German counterparts, fueling, re-arming, checking tracks and optics.

For the locals who remembered 1914, it was a sight that reminded them of the unity their two countries had long since held.

Then, Russia's army was decades behind Germany's. And largely acted in support of German operations.

Now? Now they pulled their own weight.

At dusk, when the lamps flickered to life, Elsa rode out to the rail yard with Alexei.

She dismounted, boots crunching on gravel, and spoke with the tank crews in their own tongue.

She did not use lofty rhetoric.

She asked about their families, whether they had enough food, whether their boots fit.

And when one young soldier stammered that he had never been beyond Smolensk before, she smiled and said, "Then you will see the world now, and you will help decide how it is shaped."

The boy straightened, shoulders squared, pride burning in his eyes.

From Berlin, Bruno watched the mobilization unfold through reports and photographs delivered hourly.

One in particular caught his eye: Elsa standing on the platform beside Alexei, her cloak whipping in the wind, her face set with iron.

For a moment the Reichsmarschall felt the sharp ache of memory, of the young girl who had once clung shyly to his arm, who now stood at the heart of an empire, binding two great powers together by marriage and by war.

He folded the photograph carefully and set it beside his maps.

The generals around him pressed for details, when the Russian columns would link with the German advance, how their artillery could be integrated into the bombardments at Lille, how their armored trains might be used to reinforce Luxembourg.

Bruno gave his answers with precision. But in his heart he allowed himself one quiet thought:

The world may call this a war of empires, but it is also a war of families. And my family will decide how it ends.

The thunder of Russian mobilization rolled westward, train after train, day after day.

From the Urals to the Vistula the empire moved, not with the chaos of the past but with the discipline of steel rails and dynastic resolve.

The French spoke of liberty. The British spoke of balance. The Americans spoke of democracy.

But in the East the rails carried a different creed, one written in smoke and iron, in banners of eagles and lilies, in the certainty that history itself now bent toward Berlin and Moscow together.

And as the night swallowed the last of the trains, their whistles fading into the dark, Europe trembled at the sound.