Lightning stitched the low clouds in pale, crooked seams, and for a heartbeat the rain turned to silver—each drop a thin wire in the air—before darkness swallowed it again. August warmth still clung to the town even at midnight, heavy and damp against the skin, but the weather had been relentless for three days. The storm didn't rage so much as endure: patient, exhausting, a siege made of water.
Rain slid down the hotel windows in steady sheets, smearing the promenade lamps into blurred halos of yellow. Beyond the glass lay the long strip of beach, and beyond that the Sea of Marmara—black and restless, chopped by wind, gnawing at the breakwater with a dull, repetitive slap. Thunder rolled over the water, low and distant, so much like artillery that the mind kept trying to pin it to a direction, to a range, to a map.
Sergeant Günther stood at the third-floor window, boots planted wide on polished boards, hands resting on the sill as if he could brace the whole building with his grip. The room was too fine for the men inside it—thick curtains, a patterned rug, the faint perfume of old soap sunk into expensive sheets.
But war had moved in anyway.
It clung in smell and residue—damp wool, antiseptic, gun oil, burned powder—the stubborn scent of men who had slept too close to smoke and blood for too long. Their civilian clothes hung over chairs and the wardrobe edge like costumes: a linen shirt, clean trousers, a straw hat with a cracked band, a tourist coat still salted from a walk they'd pretended was harmless.
On the table, beside a deck of cards and an unopened bottle of something sweet, lay a folded map—creased hard, stained at the edges, and marked in pencil with lines too deliberate for any holiday. The beach was crosshatched with faint shading; the road behind it boxed in; certain doorways and windows circled like answers. Next to a few of those circles, someone had drawn small, grim symbols—little X's, little hooks, a skull no bigger than a fingernail. Not decoration. Not humor. Reminders of work done at night in the rain, and of the local garrison's cooperation.
Behind Günther, the others inhabited the room the way wounded men do—each trying, in his own way, to pretend this was only a night indoors.
Otto and Max sat at the small table, "playing" cards without really playing. The game gave their hands something to do, a rhythm to lean on. Max's left shoulder was bound tight under his shirt; each reach toward the deck tugged a twitch through his face, as if the joint had teeth. Otto wore a dull bruise along his ribs and a bandage under his collar where a round had grazed him—nothing dramatic, just the kind of wound that reminded a man how thin luck could be. They spoke in half sentences, eyes drifting to the window between turns, as if the storm might suddenly announce something.
Göbels sat in an armchair like a man attending his own funeral, his bandaged right hand cradled against his chest. The white cloth was already spotted through, the shape wrong—missing pieces. His ring finger was gone, the middle finger with it, and the simple gold wedding band he'd worn like an anchor was still somewhere back on the Çatalca Line, lost in mud and smoke. He stared at the absence until his jaw tightened, lips moving once, quietly, as if the words tasted bitter.
"I'm not getting that ring back," he murmured. "Lost. My precious is lost forever."
Someone gave a dry chuckle that wasn't quite kind, and then the room sank back into rain and waiting.
On the bed, Adolf lay half-propped on pillows, trousers undone, shirt open, skin wax-pale beneath the lamp. One wound pulled tight along his side; the other—deeper, crueler—made every shift of his hips an act of hatred. He had the look of a man trying to argue his own body into obedience.
"Sea air," Adolf muttered, staring at the ceiling as another rumble passed through the building. "They say it's good for recovery."
Max flicked a card onto the table without looking at it. "They also say rain is good for crops," he said flatly. "Doesn't mean I want to sleep in it."
Lightning flashed again. The sea brightened in fragments—breakwater stones, a thin white line of foam, the dark mouth of the harbor—then went black as if someone had snuffed a candle.
Günther leaned closer to the glass.
Beyond the curve of the coast, beyond the rain-blinded horizon, faint pulses winked over Thrace—small, stubborn flashes, irregular and low. Too steady to be lightning. Too distant to be anything else.
Artillery. The front line still breathing under the weather.
He watched until his eyes began to ache.
Then something moved where the storm should have been empty.
At first he thought it was only the rain—cloud banks shifting, darkness thickening. But the shapes held. Black against black. Too straight. Too heavy. Too deliberate.
Smoke.
Low funnels. Dark hulls sliding in a loose line just beyond the harbor mouth, where there should have been only fishing boats and weather.
Lanterns winked—shielded, cautious—brief points of human intent in the rain.
Günther exhaled slowly, controlled, the kind of breath that came from training rather than calm.
"Oh," he said softly. "No."
Otto looked up from the cards at once. "What is it?"
The horizon flashed.
Not lightning.
A flat, violent bloom of white tore through the rain, followed a heartbeat later by another—then another—like the sky itself had cracked open.
Günther didn't think. He shouted.
"Shit—TAKE COVER!"
"What?" Max barely got the word out before the sound arrived.
BOOM.
The building shuddered as if something enormous had struck the earth nearby. Dust puffed from the ceiling. Glass rattled in its frame.
Otto and Max were off their chairs instantly, cards scattering as they threw themselves flat, arms over their heads. Göbels swore and dropped hard beside the armchair, bandaged hand clutched to his chest as he curled into himself.
Another flash.
Another thunderous crack—closer this time.
Adolf yelped and did the most ridiculous thing imaginable: he yanked the sheet over his head like a child hiding from monsters, disappearing completely as the mattress bounced beneath him.
"THIS BETTER NOT BE THE END!" he shouted from under the blanket.
BOOM. BOOM.
The floor jumped. Somewhere below them, stone screamed as it broke.
Rain hammered in through the window. The lamps flickered.
Günther stayed low by the sill, teeth clenched, listening—counting the rhythm between impacts the way you counted breaths when you were trying not to panic.
"Shit," he said, voice hard and clipped. "Central was right."
Otto lifted his head just enough to look at him. "Right about what?"
Lightning flared and turned the room white for a heartbeat.
Günther didn't look away from the sea. "This isn't just a raid."
Max blinked, rainwater dripping off his hair onto the floorboards. "What?"
"Too many hulls," Günther said. "Too many shapes. They're not firing to scare the town. They're clearing it."
Otto's mouth tightened. "You're saying—"
"They're preparing to land."
Silence—then another impact farther inland, muffled by rain, close enough to shake dust loose from the ceiling.
Max stared at him like he was waiting for the punchline. "You're serious."
"Yes."
Max swallowed. "And we're… what. The only ones here?"
Otto let out a sharp, ugly snort and glanced at the bed—at Adolf's wounds, then at Göbels' ruined hand.
"Perfect," Otto said. "The cripple squad."
From under the blanket Adolf's voice came muffled but very awake. "I heard that. And considering the numbers, I'd say we're more like the suicide squad."
Günther snapped his head around. "Shut up."
They all looked at him then—faces pale, eyes bright, rain and dust streaked across skin. The room trembled again, not from thunder but from steel.
"You know the mission," Günther said, calm cutting through the noise. "We hold. We make them bleed for every meter. And when holding becomes impossible, we fall back."
Another distant boom rolled through the night.
"Fight," he finished. "Then retreat. That's it."
Otto yanked his helmet from under the table, shoved it on, and nodded. "Copy."
Max followed, voice quieter. "Yeah. Copy."
Göbels dragged himself upright, jaw set like iron. "Copy that, Sarge."
The sheet dropped. Adolf's face was white, but his eyes were clear.
"…Copy," he said.
Günther took one deep breath, steadying himself.
"Good," he said. "Gear up. Now."
They moved at once.
Chairs scraped. Webbing snapped open. Rifles came out of corners and were checked by feel. Magazines were seated with hard, practiced clicks. Straps were cinched tight until they bit.
Outside, the sea kept flashing.
Inside, the room filled with the familiar, hated music of men preparing to go back into hell—buckles snapping, straps pulled tight, magazines seated with a hard click, boots dragged on wood. No speeches. No prayers. Just work.
And the day was only beginning.
Out on the water, the Ottoman fleet came in from the west in loose order—dark shapes sliding through rain-flattened black. Old pre-dreadnought battleships led, squat and heavy, their silhouettes barely visible until lightning stitched the clouds and briefly revealed them: armored backs, turret crowns, funnels coughing smoke into the low ceiling of storm. Behind them, cruisers followed like leaner wolves.
And behind the warships came the transports—six big steamers packed with men. Not elegant vessels, not proud. Just blunt instruments of empire, low in the water, purposeful, throwing up smeared trails of coal smoke that merged with the rainclouds.
The bombardment began without ceremony.
The battleships fired inland with the slow, ancient rhythm of big guns—flash, pause, impact. Their aim was the town itself. They had no delicate instruments to see through rain and night, no perfect bearings, only maps, guesswork, and anger. They tried to crush the waterfront and the buildings along the beach—tried to level the place into silence.
They missed the hotel.
A shell struck the neighboring building instead, splitting it open like rotten fruit under a boot—walls tearing apart, floors sagging, the inside of the place suddenly exposed to rain and fire. Another round shattered the promenade, stone and iron flung outward in a screaming spray. A third punched through a warehouse roof, and the structure collapsed inward with a heavy, choking roar, timber and tile tumbling down in a black, splintered cascade.
Still, the damage was enough.
Heavy shells ripped through the waterfront—stone torn up, iron bent, walls opened as if a giant hand had reached down and clenched. Fires flared even in the wet, rising bright and hungry from shattered rooms. People ran like spilled insects, scattering in all directions at once—dropping bundles, overturning carts, vanishing into alleys and doorways that did not save them from shockwaves.
From above, it would have looked like a disturbed ant nest: motion everywhere, meaning nowhere.
Then—because nothing answered back—the guns fell quiet.
The warships held their fire as the transports pushed in, closing the coast with slow, deliberate confidence. They edged toward the long crescent of beach until even the men on shore could have hit them with rifles, if anyone had been brave enough to stand and shoot. At last they stopped and anchored, screws churning just enough to keep the ships steady in the swell.
Lines went out.
And the small craft began to swarm.
Big wooden rowing boats—broad-beamed, ugly, built to carry weight—were hauled alongside, banging and scraping against steel hulls. Men poured into them.
It took time. Too much time.
Boots slipped on wet planks. Packs snagged. Rifles bumped. Oars were passed down, then passed again when the wrong hands grabbed the wrong ones. Officers shouted until their voices broke, trying to create clean order out of crowded panic, but the sea did not care about commands. Rain blinded. Wind tugged at boats. Currents pulled at lines.
Three small tugboats darted forward, taking tow on a handful of boats to pull them ahead—trying to shape the first wave into something more than a scattered smear.
By count, roughly thirty boats pushed off, each packed with three dozen men. Oars dipped and rose in dark water, the boats creaking with strain. The towed craft moved faster; the rest lagged behind, the line stretching and compressing as nerves and tide took their say.
As they closed the last hundred meters, the horizon began to lighten—not dawn, not peace, just enough gray to give shape to death.
The beach appeared.
The road behind it.
And the buildings—two storeys mostly, pressed tight to the shore. One stood taller than the rest: the three-storey hotel, dark windows facing the sea like blind eyes.
The tugboats cast off and peeled away.
The boats surged forward on muscle and momentum, grounding close together, bows biting into wet sand as men prepared to jump down and rush the open beach.
Then the thump came.
A dull sound—flat, wrong, too soft to be a rifle—landing in the middle of one boat just as its bow kissed shore.
A heartbeat.
Then the world inside that boat became fire and splinters.
The blast emptied it—men thrown backward, oars snapping, the boat jolting sideways as bodies spilled into the shallows. The survivors jumped instinctively into knee-deep water, flailing for footing, trying to run before their minds even understood what had happened.
And before the spray had finished falling, gunfire cut loose.
A machine gun opened from the hotel's second floor—short, controlled bursts raking the waterline. Carbines joined it from windows and balconies along the road. Bullets stitched the beach. Men dropped mid-step. Water kicked up in little white strikes around them as if the sea itself had turned hostile.
Another thump.
Another blast.
This one struck a second boat on the approach, punching a hole into its side. It didn't vanish—it simply began to die slowly, settling, listing, taking water in with a greedy sound. Men clutched at each other as it sank under them, panic snapping whatever discipline had survived the crossing.
Some jumped.
Some were pushed.
Many could not swim.
They flailed and sank in water barely over their heads because fear stole their breath before the sea did.
Then, from inland buildings, the Bulgarian garrison joined in—rifles cracking in uneven rhythm, not deadly at range, but adding noise, adding confusion, adding the sense that fire was coming from everywhere at once.
Boats collided.
Oars tangled.
Men shouted over one another, orders swallowed by rain and gunfire.
On the transports, officers screamed for speed. Tugboats snapped up empty craft, dragged them clear, and raced back toward the steamers for another load. Fresh boats shoved off even as the first wave collapsed into chaos on the sand.
And the landing—so clean on paper—turned into a problem of blood and minutes.
For a few seconds—then a few more—the fleet hesitated.
Aboard the battleships, officers hunched over charts slick with rain, shouted bearings into speaking tubes, argued over angles and elevation. The problem was simple and impossible at the same time: they didn't know where to fire. The shore was full of their own men. The enemy was hidden in buildings, indistinguishable from the town itself. To fire too early was to slaughter the landing force. To wait was to watch it be carved apart in slow pieces.
So they waited.
Each hesitation cost lives.
More boats grounded. More men jumped into the shallows and ran headlong into fire. Some were cut down immediately. Others hit the wet sand and stayed there. Some slipped into the water and never found footing, dragged down by panic, packs, and the heavy, hungry pull of the sea. The machine gun walked its fire from boat to boat, then back again. Rifles cracked from windows and doorways. The beach became a churned strip of scattered men crawling forward because stopping felt worse than dying.
Still, they came.
The Ottomans did not break. They went low. They flattened themselves behind sand ridges, behind packs, behind fallen bodies that had become the only cover available. Officers shouted themselves raw, trying to shape a firing line out of chaos. Men began to shoot back at windows, at shadows, at anything that looked like a muzzle.
And then an officer—young, furious, soaked through—did what officers do when fear starts to spread.
He rose, sword in hand, and screamed for a charge.
"Forward!" he bellowed. "Forward, sons of the Empire—Allah is with you! Up! Up!"
A knot of men surged to their feet, desperate for something that felt like movement instead of waiting to be harvested. They ran.
They made it ten paces.
Then the beach answered.
A sharp, dry crack under a boot—so small it almost sounded like a snapped stick—followed by a flat, violent burst that threw a man sideways into the sand. Another step, another crack. Another blast. Not artillery. Not rifles.
Mines.
The first explosions tore holes in the line and in the men themselves. The second wave hit the same strip without understanding, feet following feet as if obedience could outrun reality—and then more bursts stitched through the running group like invisible teeth. Bodies dropped. Men screamed and crawled back, clutching what was missing. Others froze, staring down at the sand as if it had betrayed them personally.
The officer's voice faltered.
His sword lowered a fraction.
And in that pause, the machine gun found them again.
Farther down the beach, away from the hotel and the worst of the fire, boats landed almost calmly. A few bullets snapped overhead, but men spilled out and formed knots of relative order. The machine gun swung toward them—then stuttered, coughed, and went silent.
For a heartbeat, there was only rifle fire.
That was enough.
On the flagship, the order finally came.
The big guns answered.
Not one shot—many.
Battleships and cruisers opened together, their broadsides flashing through the rain in blunt, terrible rhythm. Shells screamed overhead and came down short, long, and everywhere in between. One burst on the beach and erased an entire cluster of men as if they had never been there. Another struck a boat mid-landing, tearing it apart so violently that wreckage and bodies slammed into neighboring craft. Two boats capsized outright, their contents flung into the water and then swallowed by it.
The fire walked inland.
Buildings folded. Walls collapsed outward. Roofs vanished in clouds of dust and tile. A shell punched straight through the hotel—clean through stone and wood—without detonating, then exploded in the street beyond, flattening what little cover remained there.
The town ceased to exist as a place. It became an impact zone.
Bulgarian militia fire faltered, then broke entirely. Men ran. Rifles were abandoned. Positions emptied as panic replaced courage. Civilians who had not already fled poured into the streets, screaming, dragging children, racing away from the beach and the guns toward the hills.
Among them—pushing a cart piled with packs, camouflaged bundles, and scavenged gear—were Günther and his squad.
"FASTER!" Adolf shouted from atop the load, white-faced but grinning wildly, one hand gripping the cart's edge as the other waved uselessly at the road ahead. "I LIKE THE SEA, BUT NOT THIS MUCH!"
"We're going!" Günther snapped back, shoulders burning as he and Göbels leaned into the weight. "Unless you want to help push, shut up!"
Otto and Max ran alongside, weapons slung, heads down, boots slipping on wet stone as another salvo thundered behind them. The air shook. Windows burst. The street filled with dust and smoke and rain.
They did not look back.
Behind them, the beach was lost.
The naval guns fell silent only once the firing line ashore had grown thick enough to survive their mercy. More boats came in. More men landed. By mid-morning, the count reached its grim conclusion: fifteen thousand Ottomans ashore—and nearly a thousand casualties in the first minutes alone.
It was a disaster.
And it was a success.
By weight of men and steel, the Ottomans had made landfall. The southern approach was open. A new axis of advance had been carved into the war, paid for in blood and iron.
The invasion from the sea had begun.