A minute ago, the ten battalions—ten thousand men on the imperial road—had been singing.
Not the quiet kind that fills the miles. This was the kind of sound an army makes when it believes history can be forced to kneel. They had crossed the border less than an hour earlier, and the lack of resistance had gone to their heads like wine. The first battalion threw the verse forward, raw voices scraping through dust and heat—Edirne struck again and again like a hammer on iron. God. Sultan. Vengeance. Old wounds turned into promises.
The men behind caught the chorus. Then the next. Then the next—never perfectly together, never clean, but enough that the song ran the length of the column like a rope you could grab when your lungs burned and your shoulders ached under straps.
It came in call and answer, shouted more than sung:
"Whose land is this?" "Allah's land!" "Whose city waits?" "Our Edirne waits!"
And then, here and there, it darkened.
Not as one voice, not as one disciplined hymn—more like rot surfacing through wood. A cluster of men near the road would howl a line, ugly and gleeful, and another cluster would answer with something worse, and the chant would ripple for a few seconds before the main chorus swallowed it again.
"What grows where the gâvur prayed?" "Ash!" "What falls when the crescent rises?" "Necks!"
They laughed at the words. They spat them out like curses. They sang of the enemy as filth, as animals, as prey—of homes broken open, of spoils counted, of captives taken and dragged along as proof that victory had teeth. They sang of churches stripped and silenced, of priests hauled down, of the enemies world overturned and made to choke on its own symbols.
The verses were crude. Repetitive. Easy to remember.
"Blood for blood!" "Fire for fire!" "What they took—we take back!"
Revenge became a chorus because it needed no melody. It fed itself. It was hunger given rhythm—rage turned into breath and made holy through repetition.
And like the hot dry air itself, the words were brutal.
Summer sun straight overhead, white and merciless. No wind, not even enough to stir a sleeve. Dust clung to lips and tongue until every breath tasted like dry earth. Men sweated through caps and collars; dark stains spread across grey-green cloth, and leather straps chewed into shoulders with each mile. Breathing felt like drinking sand. And still they sang—because singing turned suffering into proof, and proof into certainty.
Above them the banners rode high.
Red cloth—sun-hot, dust-bright—white crescent and star glaring hard as fresh paint, lashed to long poles that creaked and complained with every step. They swayed over the column like moving landmarks, visible even when the men themselves vanished around bends and shallow rises. Ten battalions drawn out into a line so long it felt unreal: the rear still threading a turn while the front was already climbing the next low hill. Where the stone held and the road widened they marched six abreast, shoulder to shoulder, rifles slung and gleaming; where the road pinched between scrub and thin trees the formation narrowed and lengthened, stretching, compressing, stretching again—an accordion of bodies and dust. From a distance it looked less like a march than a living thing crossing the hills, a red spine scaled in men.
They had been across the border less than an hour.
Not even long enough for sweat to dry at the throat. Not long enough for the first thrill to sour into caution. The land still looked half-familiar—fields, low villages, the same flies and sun—yet stepping over that invisible line had turned every stone underfoot into ours in their minds. Edirne—Edirne returned—was already spoken of as if it were waiting ahead with its gates unlocked and its streets intact, as if history itself would sit politely and let them take their seat again.
And the scouts were out ahead.
That was the comfort that made arrogance feel like sense. If danger existed, someone would see it first. Someone would shout first. Someone would die first—well ahead of the singing, well ahead of the banners.
Then, in the gap where the song had been, something else slid in.
A faint crack—so far away it could have been a wagon board splitting under heat.
Then again.
The song stumbled. A few voices tried to carry on out of stubbornness, but the rhythm died in their throats. Heads turned. The column's sound changed from music to boots and breathing.
This time there was no mistaking it. Every man who had ever handled a rifle knew that sound even softened by distance: a sharp, tearing snap that did not belong to trees or carts or birds.
Gunfire.
Not close—kilometers away. Not loud—more like distant thunder under a cloudless sky, wrong precisely because the sky was so clean and blue.
The column slowed by instinct. Men craned their necks as if they could see through low hills and patches of scrub and the abandoned villages crouching in the heat. Somewhere up front an officer shouted something—too far back for most to hear—and the first battalion compressed as men drifted closer without meaning to, curiosity and unease tightening the ranks.
More cracks. A short burst. Then silence.
And then—worse—more cracks from another direction.
Left. Far ahead. Then, faintly, from the right, as if the sound was circling them at a distance, shutting doors one by one across the horizon.
The lieutenant colonel in the forward battalion reined his horse, eyes narrowed beneath the brim of his cap. He listened, jaw working, and the staff around him went still. Someone lifted field glasses and stared at empty hills that stared back.
They waited for a messenger from the forward scouts.
None came.
So the lieutenant colonel sent his own rider back through the line at once—hard hooves, dust flaring—to warn the battalions behind that something might be happening, that they should keep the line closed, that they should be ready, that nobody was to panic at shadows.
But no one had anything real to say, because no one had anything real to know.
The waiting stretched into something sour.
Men shifted their grips on rifles. Metal gleamed hard and indifferent. No bayonets fixed—this was still a march, still supposed to be safe—and that made the weapons feel strangely incomplete, like tools missing the part that admitted what the day might become. A few whispered prayers under their breath now, not for glory but for understanding. Others said nothing at all, jaws clenched, eyes fixed ahead.
They had crossed the border without resistance. In their minds, Edirne had already fallen. They had imagined themselves entering it in a week if they marched well, with banners raised and songs bouncing off old stone.
Now the road ahead felt longer.
Uncertainty pressed in from all sides—thicker than heat, heavier than any load on the back. Not knowing was worse than fear. Not knowing meant imagining everything at once.
A man near the middle of the column muttered, barely loud enough to hear:
"Why hasn't anyone come back?"
No one answered him.
A full minute had passed since the last distant burst.
Still the column kept moving—because stopping felt like admitting doubt. Because stopping made fear visible. Because stopping invited questions no one wanted to ask, and an army's pride is often stronger than its caution. They moved forward on numbers and habit and the belief that ten thousand men could not be surprised.
And at first—other than those earlier cracks—nothing looked wrong.
Then a captain riding along the side of the front ranks slowed his horse as a voice called out behind him—sharp with the excitement of discovery.
"Sir—look. A wire."
The soldier had already crouched, fingers hovering above it as if he meant to pluck it free like a weed.
"It's like the kind we use in the mines to blast rock," he said, half-laughing. "What's it doing here?"
Heads turned. The marching rhythm faltered. Men bumped shoulders as the front of the column compressed, curiosity tugging them closer.
The captain leaned in, eyes narrowing.
A thin wire lay half-buried in the dirt where stone met grass, running parallel to the road—too straight, too deliberate, as if someone had placed it there with care. It did not sag. It did not tangle. It did not belong.
Something cold slid into his stomach.
The men around him still looked puzzled—annoyed, even, as if this were merely another inconvenience left behind by fleeing villagers.
But the captain had seen war.
Not enough to know every trick, but enough to recognize intent when he saw it.
His mind produced the image instantly: something hidden beneath the earth. Something waiting.
He opened his mouth to shout an order—halt, spread out, take cover—
But before he managed to produce the words, he noticed something as sunlight struck the low ridge ahead.
He squinted up at it—barely a rise, a swelling of earth where grass met stone and the road curved slightly around it—
—and something flashed.
A brief glint.
Like sunlight off glass.
His heart stuttered.
He raised his binoculars without thinking.
Another flash.
Then another.
No—more than that. Two. Three. A handful, scattered. The light winked and vanished, then reappeared somewhere else, as if the hill itself were blinking at him.
But the ridge looked empty.
Grass. Dirt. Rocks.
No banners. No trenches. No men.
Still… there were shapes. Small irregularities. Places where the ground looked too neat, or too broken—details his memory insisted hadn't been there when he was a boy on these roads.
Behind him someone muttered, trying to laugh the unease away.
"Probably nothing. Refugees drop all sorts of rubbish when they flee."
The captain did not laugh.
The wire at his feet.
The flashes on the ridge.
The silence ahead where scouts should have been.
His skin tightened as if the air itself had grown teeth.
"Stop—" he began.
The word never finished leaving his mouth.
Crack.
Distant. Precise.
The captain jerked in the saddle as something struck him hard in the chest. For a heartbeat he didn't understand what had happened—only that his breath had been stolen and his hands no longer obeyed him.
His horse reared and screamed.
The world tilted.
He slid sideways, hit the stones in a tangle of limbs and leather, and the sky spun above him—too blue, too calm.
Men barely had time to react when more cracks snapped through the air.
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Other officers toppled almost at once—pitched from their saddles, faces frozen in disbelief as command vanished in seconds. Men stared, stunned, as leaders folded into dust without ever seeing what had killed them.
And then—
Further down the road, something shifted.
Not a man—just a shape. Green. Broken by shadow. Half-hidden in grass.
An arm moved, low and controlled.
A finger pressed down.
Click.
For half a second, nothing happened.
Then the world split open.
Boom.
The roadside erupted in fire and earth. The first explosion tore men and horses into the air, stone and flesh flung together in a single, violent motion that erased the front ranks in an instant.
A heartbeat later, the second.
Then the third.
The blasts raced down the road like a ripping seam, one after another, the ground heaving beneath the column as if the earth itself were tearing apart. The imperial road folded inward under the shock, its packed stone and dirt collapsing into craters, the dense mass of men crushed by its own momentum.
Boom.
Boom.
Boom.
Men were hurled screaming into ditches. Bodies snapped mid-air. Horses went down wailing as the ground vanished beneath them, legs shattering, eyes rolling white. Smoke poured across the road in thick, choking waves, blotting out the sun until morning turned briefly to ash-colored dusk.
Limbs arced through the air. Something—an arm, a leg—caught and hung grotesquely from a roadside tree, swaying slightly as the blast wind died.
Ears rang. Men screamed. Orders dissolved into raw noise and then into nothing at all.
Some soldiers, driven by instinct alone, dropped flat and pressed themselves into the stones, faces buried in dust, hands clamped over their caps as if the ground itself might forgive them for being there.
And before anyone could understand what they had walked into—
The hills and trees ahead came alive.
Not with movement, but with sound.
A ripping, sustained roar tore through the smoke, unlike anything they had ever heard. Not the slow, uneven clatter of old machine guns. Not bursts or volleys.
A continuous scream of metal.
A mechanical howl.
Buzz saws.
Green shapes rose from the grass and treeline—men who had been there all along, invisible until the moment they stood. Gun barrels flashed. Streams of fire ripped straight down the road, cutting through ranks as if flesh and cloth were nothing more than tall grass.
Men were cut apart where they stood.
Whole sections of the column collapsed as if scythed. Limbs vanished. Bodies fell in heaps. The road itself disappeared beneath a carpet of dead and dying.
Horses screamed and thrashed, dragging fallen riders until bullets caught them too. Packs burst open. Rifles slipped from numb hands and vanished beneath bodies.
Some men tried to scatter.
Others refused to move and just pressed themselves flat behind corpses, faces shoved into dirt and stone as bullets stitched the road inches above their heads. They clutched their rifles, their packs, anything solid—anything that might convince the world not to notice them.
Crack.
A single sharp report.
A man screamed once—and went still.
Sniper fire.
Measured.
Patient.
Anyone foolish enough to rise. Anyone who tried to shout orders. Anyone whose posture suggested command was answered with a single, final shot.
And then a new sound entered the chaos.
Thump.
Thump.
Not rifle fire.
Something heavier. Hollow. Wrong—like someone striking a great drum somewhere behind the smoke.
Men looked up just in time to see dark shapes arc overhead, moving too far, too smoothly, like stones thrown by an impossible arm.
Grenades.
They dropped into the packed ranks and burst with flat, vicious force—explosions that didn't roar so much as tear. Men folded inward. Limbs vanished. The road became a wet confusion of bodies and dust, and what the guns had missed, the blasts finished.
The first battalion—one thousand men—stopped being a formation. It became a mob.
The second tried to hold shape for a few heartbeats longer, then broke too—men stumbling over one another, crawling, running, pressing faces into the dirt and whispering prayers into mud because prayers were the only thing left that didn't jam or misfire.
Officers shouted until their voices turned raw. Signals meant nothing. Orders died before they reached the next file.
Then—before the dust could settle, before anyone could even understand where the grenades had come from—something heavier answered.
A deeper impact.
Slower.
Heavier.
Boom.
Mortars.
The ground betrayed them.
Fresh craters ripped open the road, swallowing men whole. Others were thrown into the air like broken dolls, arms and rifles and fragments of earth spinning together. Dirt and stone rained down in hard, choking sheets. Smoke rolled outward in thick waves, blotting out sky and direction alike until the world became nothing but dust, noise, and screaming.
Still the Ottomans tried to respond.
Rifles cracked wildly into the haze—into trees, into shadows, into nothing. Men fired because firing felt like action. Because standing still felt like dying.
Some prayed.
Some screamed verses into the smoke, begging Allah to make sense of it.
Others—caught in terror and feverish faith—rose and ran forward in small, desperate knots, bayonets out, convinced this was the moment that would make their deaths meaningful.
They ran three steps.
Then they were cut down.
A few officers farther back managed to gather little clumps of men and push them toward the treeline, shouting, trying to impose order on madness. The trees offered no shelter—only more uncertainty. Men stumbled into holes they hadn't seen. A scream rose as someone went down hard, impaled or trapped, and still no enemy revealed itself—only the sense of being watched, of being measured.
In the distance, brief green shapes appeared—broken silhouettes that dissolved the closer anyone tried to look.
Amidst it all, a young officer lay pinned against a fallen horse—his horse—its bulk steaming and twitching beside him. His ears rang so badly the world felt distant, as if wrapped in thick cloth. Smoke drifted low across the ground, and through it he saw something that his mind refused to assemble into meaning.
The lieutenant colonel was still alive.
Or what was left of him.
He had been torn open from the waist down. His left arm was nothing but shredded fabric and meat. His uniform was burned black and soaked dark, his insides exposed to the open air like something ripped from a butcher's table. And yet—impossibly—he pushed himself upright with his one remaining hand, balancing on what remained of his body.
For a heartbeat, the stump of a man that was him, just stood there.
The young officer stared, unable to move, unable to breathe. The colonel looked at him. His mouth opened. He tried to shout orders—anything—but no sound came. His eyes dropped, following the line of his own body down, and for the first time understanding reached him.
The pain arrived all at once.
A scream tore out of him—raw, animal, unbelieving. He clutched at himself as if he might gather the pieces back together by force alone. His fingers came away slick and useless. He sagged forward, touched the ruined flesh in dumb shock, and then the strength left him entirely.
He went slack.
Utterly still.
Around them the battle did not pause. Bullets cracked overhead. Men fell screaming. Explosions tore at the earth. Trees splintered, caught fire and burned. Horses thrashed and shrieked until the sounds cut off one by one.
But the young officer could not look away.
Neither could the others nearby—men crouched in shell holes and behind bodies, staring at the colonel's remains with the same hollow disbelief, as if something fundamental had broken in front of them. The man who had given them orders that morning, who had ridden at their head beneath the banners, was now just meat cooling in the dirt.
Something snapped inside the young officer—not courage, not faith—just refusal.
His head turned, and his hand closed on the fallen banner near him: red cloth, crescent and star smeared with dust and blood. He gripped it hard, as if it could anchor him to the world.
"Prepare bayonets," he said.
His voice sounded wrong to his own ears—too thin, too small.
No one reacted.
The men around him were frozen. Some were wounded. Some shook uncontrollably. A few stared at nothing at all, their trousers darkened with fear. They looked at him as if he were mad, as if the words belonged to another life entirely.
Then, for a brief—terrifying—pause, the fire slackened.
Not silence. Never silence.
Just… less.
A gap in the ripping roar. A thinning in the hail. A moment where the smoke stopped shuddering with impacts and the living realized—at the same time—that whatever was killing them needed to breathe. Needed to reload.
Men lifted their heads by inches. Mud-streaked faces. Eyes wide and wet. Mouths working without words. Hands still clamped to rifles like prayer beads. The road was no longer a road—it was a butcher's floor: torn packs, splintered stocks, slick stone, bodies piled in knots where formations had been.
And in that gap, with the dead still warm beside him, the young officer understood exactly what would happen next.
If they stayed down, they would be fed into the next burst like grain into a mill.
If they ran backward, they would be shot in the spine like animals.
If they tried to think—really think—about what was happening, their minds would break before their bodies did.
So he chose the only thing left that still resembled a decision.
He drew breath until it hurt and forced his voice into the open air like a blade.
"Bayonets!"
It came out harsh, cracked by dust. Too small again.
No one moved.
They stared at him from shell holes and behind corpses, men shaking so hard their caps fell off their heads, men with hands pressed to their throats to keep from sobbing, men whose eyes were empty already—gone somewhere safe where sound couldn't reach. A few didn't even look. They just stared at the ground like it might open and swallow them gently.
The young officer swallowed blood and spit.
He tasted iron. He tasted smoke. He tasted fear—and he hated it.
So he stood.
Flag in his left hand, rising through the heat and ruin like something torn from myth.
Then his voice cracked the smoke like a whip.
"Fix bayonets!"
It wasn't a command—it was a challenge. A dare.
"There's no point lying here waiting to be butchered! You want to stay on your bellies like worms and let their guns harvest you—fine! Or you can turn your backs and run like cowards and be shot in the spine like dogs!"
Heads snapped toward him.
Eyes that had been full of terror only moments ago now flashed with something harder.
He stepped forward.
His boot slid on something slick—he didn't look down. He wouldn't give the ground the dignity.
"I will not run!" he shouted. "I refuse! Because how could I ever live with myself after that? To flee would be to spit on the corpses of the brave—today, yesterday, throughout our history! You want to crawl away and pretend you didn't see this? Pretend you didn't hear them die?"
He raised the banner and drove it down into the stone like a spear.
"Then look at them! Look at our brothers! Look at our officers! Look at the men who marched beside you an hour ago and now lie torn open in the dust!"
His voice shook with fury.
"If we kneel here—if we rot here—then their deaths mean nothing. Nothing but meat thrown to pigs!"
Something in him snapped—not into calm, not into wisdom—
Into raw refusal. A kind of holy rage.
He turned and climbed the dead horse beside him.
Boots grinding into tack and blood-soaked hide, he pulled himself up into the smoke—rising above the broken line of men like an omen.
And there he stood.
One hand gripping the banner.
The other drawing steel—a cavalry sword dark with dried blood, sunlight catching the edge like a thin, cruel smile.
From up there, he saw it all: the shattered column stretching back into haze, bodies scattered like dropped grain, the second ranks crouched and waiting, half-dead already without knowing it.
He lifted the banner higher.
"Rise!" he roared, voice ripping itself apart.
"Rise and press your fear away!
Rise and bring forth your pride—as heir's of the faithful!
As sons of empire! As heirs of warriors!
Bring forth your fate—your rage—your answer to this slaughter!"
And as if heaven itself chose that moment to answer—
The wind stirred.
Small. Indifferent.
But enough.
The red cloth snapped open.
Crescent and star—streaked with blood, crusted with dust—unfurled in the smoke like a challenge thrown at the sky.
Men stared.
And in their staring, something caught.
A breath. A thought. A flicker of heat that hadn't died after all.
The young officer leaned forward, eyes blazing with fury and disbelief, and screamed until it felt like his lungs might rip open:
"Rise for Allah! Rise for the Sultan! Rise for our people! Rise for the courageous fallen—
and make the world remember that you were men!"
Then he threw two fingers to his lips and blew the whistle.
Sharp. Final. Cutting.
A sound that didn't belong in the chaos—but sliced through it clean, like steel through silk.
Bayonets clicked onto rifles.
One. Two. Ten. A dozen.
The sound spread like a sickness—cold, mechanical, contagious.
And then men began to stand.
Not cleanly. Not like in drill.
They stood like wounded animals—shaking, bleeding, furious. Some rose with arms hanging wrong. Some rose dragging a leg. One man with his face wrapped in bloodied gauze stood, vomited into the dirt, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and fixed his bayonet anyway. Another trembled so badly his friend had to guide the blade onto the muzzle for him.
Blooded.
Broken.
Not beaten.
And the ones farther back—those who hadn't heard the words, hadn't seen the banner—saw only one thing:
A lone officer, high above the smoke, standing atop a dead horse, a blood-slick banner in one hand, a naked sword in the other, roaring like a man already written out of this world.
The sight was enough.
It didn't matter what he'd said.
It mattered that he stood.
Men rose because the ones in front of them rose.
Men rose because their chests burned with shame at staying down.
Men rose because to crawl was worse than death.
A sound swelled up—not an order, not a chant, not a drill command—something feral, something grieving, something holy.
"Charge!"
It came in waves.
"For Allah!"
"For the Sultan!"
"For the fallen!"
"Allahu Akbar!"
And then they went.
Some poured into the trees, bayonets forward, crashing through brush as if the forest itself had betrayed them.
Others ran down the road—boots slapping blood and stone—scrambling over the bodies of their friends, their brothers, because to stop was to die, and no one had mercy left inside them.
The wounded charged too.
Men with holes in them. Men with arms tied to ribs with rags. Men limping hard, teeth bared, eyes red, who ran not because they thought they would live—
—but because they refused to die quietly.
The enemy answered.
The buzz-saw roar returned—ripping through the haze.
Men dropped in lines. Bodies burst. Explosions flung limbs like dolls tossed by a cruel hand.
And still they didn't break.
Still they rose.
Still they pressed forward—bleeding, burning, broken—but breathing. Moving. Living.
They fired blind into smoke. They slashed at ghosts. They stabbed at shadows—not because they thought it would change anything—
—but because doing nothing would be worse.
They didn't charge out of courage.
They charged out of refusal.
Not fearless. Never fearless. But possessed by one brutal, perfect truth:
Better to die reaching for the enemy
than to rot on your knees.
So there, on that blood-soaked road, with the screams still ringing and the air thick with powder and iron, the Ottoman ranks did what men sometimes do when the world turns into an abattoir:
They rose again. Even shot, they rose. Even maimed, they rose.
Some men couldn't stand on their own—they were lifted by brothers beside them.
Some men couldn't see—they followed the rhythm of boots and shouted prayers.
Some ran screaming.
Some charged silent.
But they all surged forward—one body now, one breath, one defiance—like an unstoppable tide made of smoke and steel and memory.
They did not rise for orders.
They did not rise for the hope of victory.
They rose because to stay down meant to betray the ones who already lay still. They rose because the dead could no longer scream, and someone had to do it for them.
And they roared.
They roared like men possessed—not by hate alone, but by shame, by duty, by a fire that wanted to make meaning of this slaughter.
They ran not only for Allah, not only for Sultan, not only for Edirne—
They ran for the fallen.
They ran so the names of the men beside them would not vanish into ash and silence.
And on that road—choked with blood and smoke and bone—the fateful of Allah showed their enemies what it meant to face men who had nothing left to lose but their place in history.
Their fate was to suffer.
Their choice was to rise anyway.
And so they did.