Chapter 244 - 244: A Time of Waiting

On the German Eastern Front in late August of 1914, the weather had turned grim in a way that seemed almost deliberate. Rain fell day after day without pause, soaking the land until the earth itself began to give way beneath the weight of men and machines alike, and when the rain did thin, it left behind a dense, clinging fog that swallowed distance and blurred the world into shapes and shadows. What little clarity the morning promised was quickly lost, and the battlefield became a place where sight could not be trusted and sound carried farther than it should.

Even so, the Black Legion had not stopped.

Their armour sat mired in the roads where mud had claimed it, and their aircraft—those strange, roaring machines that had once ruled the skies—were grounded by the low clouds and endless rain, but still they pushed on. Step by step, line by line, they had driven the remnants of the Russian First and Second Armies out of the Kingdom of Poland and forced them back across much of Lithuania and into Latvia, pressing them eastward like a tide that could not be turned. And now, some eighty kilometres south of the River Dvina—the natural line that guarded the approach to Riga that was the capital of Latvia—the Russians had finally drawn a stand.

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