During the year 1913, in much of the world—and in Germany most of all—the summer month of July passed in comfort and leisure.
Schools were closed. Offices slowed. Factories shortened their hours. The nation slipped into its annual exhale: a long, warm pause in which time felt generous and the future secure.
Across the Reich, summer settled gently. The rains stayed away. Roads shimmered beneath the heat as Muscle Motors' cars and motorcycles rolled toward the countryside, engines humming with the quiet confidence of prosperity. Buses followed, packed with families chasing the same promise—water. Inland lakes with smooth, welcoming shores. The coast beyond, where sand met sky and worries were left behind with shoes and coats.
Children ran barefoot over warm sand, building crooked castles and burying one another up to the neck while shrieking with laughter. Parents watched without hurry, as if nothing in the world demanded their attention more urgently.
Women lay beneath the sun in small, brightly colored bikinis, skin bronzing, hair loose, bodies worn openly and proudly. There was no shame in it—only confidence. They laughed, stretched, tilted their faces toward the light, and glanced at the men nearby with playful curiosity. Men in shorts wrestled in the sand, played games, or dug aimless holes near the waterline, muscles flexing with each movement—bodies shaped in gyms and workyards, strength displayed not as vanity but as proof of discipline and health. Sweat, motion, and heat blended into something vibrant and alive.
Bottles of cold drink sweated inside ice boxes, opened only when the sun became too insistent. Tourists filled streets and beaches alike, drawn to see this strange, confident new Germany for themselves. Restaurants were crowded from morning until night. Ice cream for children was an afterthought, not a luxury.
Money was plentiful.
Work paid well.
Life, for most, was good.
Weddings filled the churches—especially those overseen by the priests of the New Dawn—creating scenes that would have looked strange almost anywhere else. Some men stood proudly with not one, but two or even three women at their sides, hands joined, smiles unhidden. Such arrangements were most common in the countryside, where families intertwined easily and bonds grew close, or among the wealthy, for whom fortune softened convention.
And the newspapers were filled with Crown Prince Oskar.
He spoke openly—relentlessly—against cigarettes and alcohol, calling them wasted money and wasted health. Smoke was weakness dressed as habit. Drink was surrender disguised as pleasure. A strong people, he said, didn't need poisons to feel alive. He said drinking liquor is the drink of the wise, suggesting that only those who know how to drink responsibly—or in moderation—should consume hard liquor. But he didn't ban anything, just handed out some free advice.
Then came laws no one had expected: the first sweeping animal-protection statutes in the world. Cruelty made criminal. Neglect condemned. Animals were not objects, Oskar declared—they were living beings placed under human responsibility. A nation's character could be measured by how it treated the voiceless.
Germany argued about it everywhere—restaurants, Pumpworld gyms, shopping centers, especially in the saunas where men talked like philosophers and women listened like judges.
Those were the arguments people preferred. They were safe.
Unlike the reports creeping in from the south.
The war in the Balkans was discussed only in passing—and mostly by men. Early headlines had shown burned villages, ruined roads, fields full of death. Mothers protested the ugliness. The papers learned quickly. After that, the Balkans shrank into small columns and distant headlines—something unpleasant happening far away, among old hills and older hatreds.
Men read them.
The young and the beautiful on the other hand went to the movies. Went to listen to music. Went dancing.
There was a summer to live after all.
Few in Germany—save a select inner circle—knew German men were already fighting down there.
So Germany enjoyed the summer in peace, and life was good.
---
Elsewhere, July was not kind.
South, in Bulgaria, along the Çatalca Line, life had been stripped down to survival.
There were no children running on warm sand here. No laughter. No music drifting from cafés. No cold drinks sweating in ice boxes. Only men moving through ash and smoke toward gunfire—boots crunching over ground that had once been green, passing blackened trees that stood like dead spines against the sky.
A sun that felt too close hung over Thrace like an accusation. It bleached the hills, baked the trenches, and pulled moisture from mouths until tongues stuck to teeth. Canteens turned warm within minutes. Throats stayed dry anyway. Every breath tasted of dust and cordite. Sweat didn't cool—it only salted the skin and glued uniforms to flesh.
Radios hissed endlessly—static and broken voices carrying the language of war: advancing columns, ambushes sprung and spent, positions failing, ammunition gone, Moss Men pulling back unit by unit, the line warping under pressure as every movement became an attempt to steal time from an enemy that would not stop.
And day after day, the horizon flashed.
Ottoman artillery blindly hammered the line, and Moss Men mortars answered—fast, sharp, merciless—hunting guns that dared come close enough for direct fire. Wherever teams tried to unlimber, shells dropped among horses and crews alike, splintering wood, flipping guns, tearing bodies apart before a proper battery could settle. For a moment it would look like control—like the plan working.
Then the Ottomans advanced again.
They walked into traps. Wires. Pits. Ambushes that erased scouts and chewed the spear-tip of battalions into confusion. They fell in disorder, in screaming clumps, the front ranks collapsing and the ranks behind them stepping over the collapse because stopping was worse than dying.
And still they came.
Because where Germany had machines of comfort—cars, buses, cinemas—Thrace had only machines of death: artillery, mortars, rifles, belts of ammunition fed until barrels glowed and men's hands shook from heat and exhaustion. No engines carried families to the water here. Only gun teams dragged steel forward through dust, and wagons carried the wounded back, leaving long dark trails in the dirt.
Where Germany had weddings and hymns and clean church light, here both sides prayed with mud on their knees.
In the mornings, Ottoman columns would kneel. Foreheads pressed to earth. Verses whispered into dust. Scraps of cloth tied under tunics like charms. Private shields against an enemy they could not see. They told themselves they wore spiritual armor—that death was not an end but a door, that every step forward was righteousness, that every bullet was a test and every wound a ticket.
Then they rose.
Picked up rifles.
And marched back into the smoke.
On the other side of the line, the Moss Men did not pray for paradise.
They prayed for endurance. For a few hours of sleep they would not get. For magazines already half empty. For mortar shells rationed like gold. For explosives they no longer had enough of. For a world that still followed reason.
They were men of faith—Christians of the Church of the New Dawn—but theirs was not a faith of surrender. They did not wait for fate to decide the battle. They meant to win it with hands and steel and planning, not with martyrdom.
Still, exhaustion gnawed at them.
They were mad not just with belief, but with fatigue—with the horror of watching men keep coming even after those before them had been shredded, burned, and scattered. Mad with the quiet, sickening truth that killing did not always stop an army—and that sometimes it only fed it.
And so they prayed, they prayed for strength enough to see their duty here fulfilled.
When the Moss Men shouted, it was not scripture. It was defiance—hard lines barked through dry throats, the kind of words men used when the only alternative was to fold inward and vanish.
"For God and Fatherland—hold the line!"
"Make them pay for every meter!"
"Do not falter—only in death does duty end!"
"Kill the heretics!"
The Ottomans answered with one phrase, again and again, until it became part of the wind itself:
"Allahu Akbar!"
They charged open ground and were cut down by the hundreds, and they did not halt. Even when their own stepped on mines and burst into red mist, the rest did not stop—only shouted for Allah and ran until none of that wave remained. When the field finally fell silent, the Moss Men slipped back behind trees, behind rocks, behind rivers, loading what magazines they had left, laying wire, setting new traps—building the next stand in the minutes stolen between storms.
It was absolute insanity, but it was also something Oskar had fearfully expected would happen. When cornered men did not behave like ordinary creatures who loved life and feared death. When people believe they are trapped—when they feel the world tightening around their throat—reason becomes a luxury. Desperation takes its place. And desperation does not stop because a company before you fell like grain thrown into a field.
It stops only when it is annihilated.
The Ottoman generals were not discouraged by losses. Losses were Allah's will. The dead were martyrs. Their bodies on ash-grey ground were not warnings—they were reminders. Proof. Fuel.
To them, death was not the end.
It was a doorway.
A path.
A promised land—Jannah.
So they pressed onward, because the price of not doing so felt, in their minds, worse than any slaughter.
When infantry faltered, cavalry came—like in the days of old.
Horses were driven forward through smoke and fire, some with cloth tied over their eyes so they would not see the world they were charging into. Banners snapped. Hooves struck ash and bone. Men rode straight into gunfire because momentum felt like faith. Some horses hit mines. Others blundered into spikes hidden in the ground. More than a few reached the enemy line only as burning wrecks—terror on legs, collapsing in screaming heaps.
The sight stayed with the Moss Men long after the shooting stopped.
Horses still charged even as they burned, flesh sloughing and tack clattering, riders pinned beneath them and screaming until the sound tore itself apart. Banners caught fire and kept waving anyway, blackened cloth snapping in the heat, as if even the symbols refused to admit what had happened.
What lay before the line was no longer ground.
It was a mass.
Bodies pressed together so tightly that the earth vanished beneath them, a warped, steaming carpet of the dead. The men who followed stepped onto it without slowing. Boots slid and sank. There was no solid footing—only give. Only collapse. Only the sickening sensation of something yielding that should never yield.
Rib cages cracked like rotten wood. Bellies caved. A step would sink too deep, and a man would lurch forward, clawing at air as his foot vanished into warmth and muck and the soft ruin beneath. Mud and blood and torn cloth clung, dragging at boots, trying to keep them.
The survivors learned quickly.
They shouted warnings backward through the smoke: step where the bodies had already broken—where the weight had flattened them into something firm. Never step where one still lay whole. The front would give. The front would take you with it.
And even knowing that—
even hearing the warnings,
even seeing what happened to the ones who hesitated—
they still came.
Wave after wave, boots slapping and slipping over the dead, climbing the remains of their own comrades as if the bodies were nothing more than ground that had changed shape.
And despite everything, the battle did not end during daylight.
Instead the enemy came at night as well.
They crawled through burned grass, over rotting bodies and ruined ditches, trying to reach the line unseen. Flares snapped overhead and turned the world white for a heartbeat—trenches, corpses, torn earth, faces frozen into masks—then darkness again. Sometimes they were cut down while they crawled. Sometimes they dropped into empty trenches only to find the Moss Men waiting behind the lip, silhouettes standing like executioners in the dark.
Sometimes they got close enough for knives.
Ottomans came with bayonets, only to have rifles ripped from their hands and blades turned back on them. Moss Men—trained to disarm, to break grip, to finish quickly—worked in tight silence: hands seizing collars, bodies yanked off balance, steel flashing once, twice, then gone again.
Boots slipped on blood.
Breath came in short, animal bursts.
Men died without ever seeing who had killed them.
By morning the trenches were red and clogged with bodies—
and the Moss Men had vanished again, leaving only the aftermath and the smell.
To keep panic from taking root, they shouted. Not because the words were beautiful, but because noise kept the mind from listening too closely to its own fear. Their cries were harsh, ritualistic—almost like scripture for a new, uglier age.
"If the enemy stands—we lay him low!"
"If he flees—we run him down!"
"If he begs—we do not listen!"
The Ottomans answered with their own chorus, always the same—Allah, Allah, Allah—as if volume could turn bullets aside, as if God could be forced to watch.
Over and over.
And as the land blackened, the Moss Men began naming the war in their own language, because the old names no longer fit what had been done to these places.
In the south, the Battle of the Grey Plains took place—although some called it the Ash Plains—where men charged across burned fields, over the remains of their own dead, again and again.
In the center was the so called Battle of the Black Creek, which quickly became the Red Creek, because the Ottomans reached the water anyway, and many could not swim, and others found spike traps hidden beneath the surface, and soon the current ran dark with what it carried.
In the north was the Battle of Okali Hill—fighting in the village at the base, fighting in the hills beyond, fighting in the skeletal forest where every stump looked like a crouching man.
Assault after assault.
Bombardment after bombardment.
Pressure that never truly lifted.
And the Moss Men did what they were built to do.
They held.
And then they fell back.
Not just because it was apart of their strategy, but because the same problem returned like a curse: they had no living supply line. Only caches—pre-made stores buried months earlier. Every time a cache emptied, the war forced them backward again, to the next stone, the next prepared line.
The Ottomans—fed by desperation and foreign supply—did not run out the same way. Ammunition kept coming. More men kept coming, conscripts poured in from the east with promises pressed into their heads like coins: paradise, honor, salvation and even land.
So the Moss Men traded ground for time, time for ammunition, ammunition for lives.
And behind them, the land filled with people.
Villages still holding Christian civilians emptied at first—families fleeing with what they could carry, eyes wide, mouths dry, knowing what awaited them if they stayed. But not all ran.
Some stayed.
Some looked at the smoke on the horizon and refused to abandon their homes without a fight.
So the Moss Men armed them with scavenged rifles stripped from Ottoman dead. They taught them ruthlessly fast—how to load, how to aim, how to keep your head down, how to fire only when you must, how to save rounds when waste meant death. Trenches were dug by hands that had never dug for war. Homes became forts. Stone walls became firing points. Men and women, young and old, took positions with trembling hands and stubborn eyes.
And while civilians hardened into defenders, the Moss Men moved along the edges of the war like ghosts—snipers and wire, pits and bombs—turning roads into wounds, turning confidence into caution, making every step forward cost blood.
At regular intervals, new defensive lines were thrown together to stall the enemy for a few days… sometimes only for an hour.
One such line—built along a long sloped belt of country, higher elevations in the north and lower ground in the south, dotted with villages and the hard bones of towns—was given a name that sounded like a vow:
The Kókkinos Line.
And as Central expected, the Kókkinos Line did not last long.
From ridges behind the militia, Moss Men snipers fired until their barrels ran hot. Mortars thumped out what little ammunition remained. Traps flared. Fires rose. And still the Ottoman push came on—massed, relentless—until the militia positions began to buckle under the weight of it.
The line did what militia lines always do when faced with overwhelming pressure and fanatic momentum:
It wavered.
It cracked.
It collapsed in sections.
The Moss Men dragged as many back as they could—hauling the wounded, pulling the panicked out of the open, shouting orders into smoke. But the rest were swallowed by the tide: those caught in the open, those who couldn't run, those who fell and could not be lifted again. Men and women who had fought like soldiers vanished into the smoke and the chaos, taken by the advance, their fate lost in the churn.
It was brutal to leave them.
But there was nothing else to do.
Six hundred men could not hold a sixty-kilometer front.
They could only shape it.
They could only decide where the enemy paid—and how much time could be bought before the next retreat.
By the end of July, the Moss Men had pulled back over eighty kilometers from where they had begun on the 12th. Adrianople was no longer a distant idea. It was almost in sight—close enough that a hard ride might reach it in an hour or two.
So Central did what it always did:
It built another line.
With local support, they marked a new defensive belt—longer, rougher, full of gaps, stretching over sixty kilometers and impossible to hold properly as one unbroken wall. And yet they gave it a name anyway, because naming a line made men believe it existed:
The Mávros Defensive Line.
There, at last, the sky changed.
The rains came.
They came hard, sudden, and cold against skin baked by weeks of sun. They flattened ash into black mud. They pulled smoke down from the air. They dampened fires that had burned for days. Water ran in dirty sheets through trenches and shell holes, washing blood into the ground and turning the world into a sucking, miserable swamp.
Behind them lay a wound cut across Thrace: hundreds of villages and even a few small towns left in ruin—blackened beams, collapsed walls, wells fouled, orchards burned down to stumps. The landscape had been stripped until it looked less like countryside and more like a dead place that had once been green. Animals fled first. People followed after. Roads filled with carts and barefoot columns—families carrying what they could, faces grey with smoke and exhaustion.
And then, strangely, the Ottoman advance faltered.
Not because mercy had arrived.
Not because fear had finally won.
But because something else had begun to kill them—quietly, efficiently, without bullets.
Fires still rose from their camps in the distance—watchfires and cooking fires, too many of them, smeared by rain. From far away it looked like preparation for something enormous.
Central expected a storm.
Instead, infiltrator teams returned with a different report:
Sickness.
Not one disease, but many. Men collapsing in lines. Camps stinking of waste and vomit and rot. Water sources fouled. Whole units weakened—unable to march, unable to push in mass, unable to keep the hammer swinging.
The Ottoman hammer had not broken.
But it had begun to rot.
Back in Germany, Oskar read the reports and stared at photographs smuggled out by German reporters embedded in the chaos—men who sold the story carefully, never naming the Moss Men, never hinting at the true structure of the defense. To the public it was simple: Bulgarian civilians making a brave, desperate stand against invading Ottomans, aided only by a handful of foreign mercenaries.
It was a lie.
But it was a useful one.
And Oskar, looking at those images—the trenches carved into new soil, the ash-black horizon, civilians with rifles held like unfamiliar tools—felt an unexpected, quiet relief.
Because historically, by the beginning of August, the borders were supposed to look very different. Adrianople was supposed to be gone.
Instead, the conflict dragged into another month of desperate fighting.
Yet Oskar's relief did not last.
Because the defense was still collapsing in slow motion, and no militia—no matter how brave—could hold forever against an empire fed by foreign supply and fanatic will.
And worse—far worse—the Ottoman navy was on the move.
Planning something big.