A Serbian NCO, beard streaked with white, swung a captured Ottoman rifle like a club, felling one attacker before a bullet took him through the throat. A French officer drew his sword, absurdly bright in the grim haze, and led a handful of men in a desperate countercharge that ended in a crush of bodies and steel.

  Mehmet’s arms felt heavy, his lungs burning, but he kept moving, kept thrusting and firing and reloading almost without conscious thought. The ridge that had seemed so impossibly high hours before was now a cramped, bloody corridor where men killed at arm’s length.

  At some point, he could not have said when, the resistance in front of him thinned. The foreigners were no longer holding; they were no longer counterattacking. They were falling back in ragged groups, limping, dragging each other, stumbling down toward the inland slopes or toward the gullies leading back to ANZAC Cove.

  “Hold the crest!” Hasan yelled, voice hoarse. “Do not chase! Hold!” He dropped to one knee, chest heaving, and planted the butt of his rifle in the torn earth. Around him, the survivors of the 57th Regiment and other units were doing the same and forming a new line on ground that had been foreign-held only minutes before.

  Above them, the smoke thinned just enough for Mehmet to see the strait again, the Ottoman fleet just loitering now, sailing northward toward the Sea of Marmara and safety.

  Chunuk Bair, against all odds, was theirs again.

  (...)

  The battle did not end with the recapture of the crest. Kemal’s great counterattack continued to unroll across the peninsula like a dark tide. While the twenty thousand men on Chunuk Bair drove the Entente from the ridge, the fifteen thousand on his right flank clawed their way down toward the slopes above ANZAC Cove, aiming to cut the enemy’s supply artery.

  From the air, had anyone been able to see it, the fight would have looked like a spreading stain of fire. Turkish forces poured along the ridges and through the gullies in great arcs, attempting to cut off the foreign troops who still clung to footholds near the beaches. Entente commanders, shocked by the fury of the counterattack and the devastation wrought by the fleet’s guns, scrambled to form new defensive lines. Fresh American and British battalions rushed forward to plug gaps, supported by French artillery dragged up at breakneck speed.

  In the gullies above ANZAC Cove, the fighting became a series of isolated, savage struggles. Ottoman units burst from the brush to fall on marching columns, bayonets cutting into men who had not even had time to unsling their rifles. In other sectors, machine guns hidden in caves stitched the slopes with fire, forcing Turkish attackers to crawl from rock to rock under a scything hail of bullets.

  Naval guns from Allied ships off the Cove responded in kind to the Ottoman fleet bombardment, hurling shells inland to smash Turkish concentration points. Whole companies vanished in single blasts, their bodies reduced to fragments scattered among uprooted scrub. Down in the Cove, stretcher-bearers waded through surf slick with oil and blood, carrying back wounded from units that had been nearly annihilated.

  By afternoon, the battlefield had become a vast mosaic of shattered formations. On Chunuk Bair, Kemal’s men held the crest but at staggering cost. Whole regiments were reduced to companies, companies to platoons. Ammunition was running low. Medics worked in a macabre rhythm, stepping from man to man, making quick decisions about who could be saved and who could not. The ridge was carpeted with bodies, foreign and Ottoman, jumbled together in silent testimony to the storm that had passed.

  Yet the Entente had suffered even worse. Their grand breakthrough from Cape Helles had run into a wall of fire and steel. Units that had marched north with flags flying now stumbled back in broken remnants. Communications lines were in tatters, officers killed or missing, artillery outpaced and forced to relocate or be overrun. From a position of dominance only days before, they now fought simply to avoid encirclement.

  Alamy: Image ID: EFEDRG License Order number: OY0110181691

  Kemal rode up to a forward observation point just below the crest, his uniform stained with dust, his eyes rimmed with exhaustion. He looked over the ridge he had just retaken and saw not victory banners, but the wreckage of men and earth.

  “Our line holds, Pasha,” an officer reported, voice raw. “The foreigners are withdrawing to the south and west. Chunuk Bair is secure.” Kemal nodded slowly. In the distance, he could still hear the thunder of guns along the ANZAC slopes, like a harsh, continuous growl. Smoke rose in twisted columns where Ottoman flanking units clashed with retreating Entente formations.

  “Send word to Liman von Sanders and Istanbul,” he said to his staff. “We have held Chunuk Bair. We have thrown the invader from our heights. The peninsula’s heights still belong to us.”

  The wind shifted, carrying the mixed scents of cordite, blood, and the sea up the ridge. Behind the smoke and the thunder, the Dardanelles glimmered dully, the strait that had been the prize of the campaign from the beginning.

  21st Landwehr Division and the victorious Austro-Hungarians

  Beyond Ostrog, May 5th, 1916

  The fight for the Ostrog-Kovel Line had been a difficult one for the Austro-Hungarian Army, supported by the Germans and the Italians, but it was now finally over, and the 21st Landwehr and its sister divisions were on the move eastward.

  For men like Privates Helmut Gottenburg and Radno Karaciv, this victory added to the reconquest of Galicia and gave them a renewed sense of pride, as it did to many other soldiers in the K.U.K. Army. Austria-Hungary was a patchwork of many different nationalities, and most of those wanted independence from Vienna, or at the very least didn’t feel they lived in a country they were part of.

  Helmut started whistling, feeling light and happy about going east. If only they could achieve final victory against the damned Russians, maybe he could go home and stop being shot at.

  (…)

  Austria-Hungary in May 1916 stood at a rare moment of confidence, a brief, fragile high point in a war that had otherwise exposed the empire's every weakness. After months of brutal fighting, the Dual Monarchy had just accomplished what few believed possible: the Russians had been driven out of Galicia, and now, alongside Germano-Italian forces, Austro-Hungarian armies had won a major victory right across the Kovel–Lutsk–Ostrog line. The Russian retreat toward Zhitomyr offered something Vienna had not enjoyed since 1914: the smell of victory drifting over the front.

  At this moment, the armies of the empire were advancing again, cavalry riding ahead of the infantry columns, supply trains rumbling forward rather than backward, and officers speaking with a tone that felt almost triumphant. For many soldiers, whether they were Hungarians, Austrians, Bosnians, Czechs, or Poles, this was the first time in months that their suffering seemed to be paying off. The victories acted as a bandage, temporarily covering the deeper wounds within the empire.

  But those wounds remained. Austria-Hungary was still a patchwork of nations, held together not by shared identity but by circumstance. Czechs and Slovaks in quiet corners spoke of autonomy; Romanians whispered of Transylvania; South Slavs looked westward to Serbia and its dream of unification. Even with the armies advancing, the Serbs defeated, and the war going well in a general sense (Austro-Hungarian citizens couldn’t care less about what was happening in the West), many troops still felt they served a state that did not truly represent them. The war’s enormous casualties, disproportionately drawn from Slavic regiments, fed resentments, and though morale had improved, loyalty had not deepened.

  In Vienna, the government celebrated the victory, but officials understood its delicate nature. The empire’s political system was still paralyzed, as Magyar leaders in Budapest blocked reforms, the aging Franz Joseph remained aloof, and national grievances continued to simmer under the surface. The victories at Kovel, Lutsk, and Ostrog bought time, not stability. They silenced critics for the moment, restored pride in the army, and briefly masked the structural decay eating at the empire’s foundations.

  For now, the soldiers marched forward through Volhynia with renewed spirit, chasing a beaten enemy toward Zhitomyr. Flags snapped in the wind, regimental bands played again, and the troops felt, perhaps for the last time, that they belonged to a great and victorious empire.

  But beneath the triumph lay the truth: the Dual Monarchy had won a respite, that only final victory of the Central Powers could transform into a revival.

  CHAPTER 4

  MORE WAR EAST AND WEST

  “This war has become a trial of nations, not battles. It will end only when one side breaks within.”

  Paul von Hindenburg, Winter 1916

  “

  The fighting along the Arzal-Chateaubriant Line

  May 11th, 1916

  By the 10th of May, the frontline was again stalemated thirty miles to the north, the Entente having moved up to the new German defensive line ranging from the town of Arzal, by the Atlantic Ocean, to Chateaubriant. The OHL had been able to right the ship in a sort of way by digging in once more, but the fact remained that the Entente offensive wasn’t over, and thus, more fighting erupted.

  (…) Big Red One Division, northern side of the La Roche-Bernard Bridge, town of Nivillac (…)

  Brent Tex Walker spat on the ground, at the sour taste in his mouth from all the cordite hanging in the air. The ground rocked from German artillery shells falling everywhere around, and dirt rained down from the catapulting geysers. He then sat down, resting his back against the trench wall, and watched a British soldier ahead of him in the swirling smoke.

  “When do you think the assault is going to happen?” said Private Hickman, his back also to the trench wall beside him. “Sergeant Dockerby said in about an hour,” he paused to check his wrist watch, “about an hour ago.” “Those fucking Krauts are lively today, hey,” answered Hickman out of pure nervousness.

  The Big Red One had just taken the La Roche-Bernard Bridge and crossed the Vilane River/estuary by surprise. The bridge was a long, narrow 19th-century structure of iron cables and masonry pylons that connected the granite heights of Nivillac on the south bank to the steep slopes of Marzan on the north. The bridge spanned roughly three hundred yards of fast-moving tidal water, its deck of timber and steel suspended high enough to clear the winter floods that rushed inland from the estuary. On either bank, the approaches were carved straight into the cliffs, forming natural funnels where even a handful of machine guns could hold up an entire division. Because of these commanding heights and the lack of any comparable structure nearby, the La Roche-Bernard crossing was the strategic chokepoint on the lower Vilaine.

  By pure luck, the Americans had arrived during the night as the last German units crossed to the northern side, and they rushed the bridge. The German engineers who had mined the structure to bring it down and deny the crossing to the Entente, were also surprised and had not been able to finish their work. The result was an epic battle on the ridge and heights of the northern banks between the counterattacking Germans and the Entente force pouring over and across the Vilaine.

  Relative to Arzal, the western-most city of the German defensive line, the bridge and the city of Nivillac sat several miles upriver, roughly seven miles eastward. While Arzal lay in a broad, flat estuarine landscape of salt marsh and mudflats, La Roche-Bernard perched on solid granite above a narrow, deep channel. Any army attempting to reach Arzal from the south could not hope to cross the tidal shallows there; instead, it had to move inland and seize the La Roche-Bernard bridge or attempt to throw pontoons across under fire. Thus, whoever controlled the bridge controlled the entire lower river line and the natural approaches toward Arzal, Nivillac, and the coastal roads beyond. If the Americans and their French allies could hold until the Entente rushed more reinforcements, the German line was doomed.

  When the German rear guard pulled back toward Redon, they left a small pioneer detachment to destroy the old suspension bridge. Charges were laid along the anchor plates, beneath the plank roadway, and around the southern pylon – blocks of melinite wrapped in tarred paper, wired to a central firing panel tucked inside a stone guardhouse. The Germans expected to delay the Allies by at least a day, perhaps more if the debris fell awkwardly across the channel. But sometime during the night, in the panic of seeing the Yankees cross, the detonator battery failed; coastal humidity, a broken wire, or simple haste ruined the connection. At dawn, when the pioneers pressed the plunger, the only result was a weak sputter of sparks. With the enemy already approaching from the south, the Germans abandoned the position and faded into the woods.

  An hour later, advance scouts of the U.S. 1st Infantry reached the slopes overlooking the river. Expecting rubble, they instead found the bridge intact, abandoned, and eerily silent except for the wind humming in the cables. French units of the 14th Division soon joined them, and together they pushed forward a scout platoon. Moving cautiously across the creaking deck, they encountered only scattered fire from the opposite bank. The Germans had withdrawn too quickly to organize a defense. Realizing the miraculous opportunity, the Americans rushed two battalions across before noon, followed by French machine-gun sections and engineers who established firing pits on the Marzan heights. By nightfall, the Allies held a solid bridgehead north of the Vilaine, opening the way toward Arzal and the coastal road system.

  It was now the next day, and the idea was to try to expand the bridgehead, while the Germans on the other side also pushed hard to contain the enemy breakthrough.

  The whistles blew, indicating to Tex and his comrades that the time for the assault had come. They stepped over makeshift ladders, but it wasn’t difficult to get out, as the trench they had dug the night before wasn’t deep; there just hadn’t been enough time.

  The scene facing the Americans was one of withering fire, as the units facing them, the 5th German Division, the 7th German Division, and an elite unit of mountain troops (Wurttemberg Mountain Battalion) were able to bring up several machine guns and field howitzers during the night, and were now capable of putting up a wall of fire against them.

  “Damn, this isn’t going to be easy!” yelled Hickman through the din, but Tex barely heard him. The ridge above them was a jagged line of muzzle flashes, white needles piercing the morning fog. German MG-08’s rattled like giant steel sewing machines, stitching the ground with bursts that sent geysers of dirt into the air. Between those bursts came the deeper, booming coughs of the German field guns hidden somewhere behind the crest.

  Tex hunched low, running in short, desperate bounds from crater to crater, the wet earth clinging to his boots. A shell screamed overhead and slammed into the slope behind him; the concussion flattened him into the mud and peppered his helmet with sharp grit. When he lifted his head, he saw Sergeant Dockerby waving the platoon forward, pointing toward a rocky outcrop halfway up the ridge where the Germans had carved a shallow redoubt into the hillside.

  “That’s our way in!” Dockerby bellowed. “Walker! Hickman! You’re on me!” Tex forced himself up and followed, lungs burning from the smoke and cordite hanging heavy in the air. The slope grew steeper, cluttered with jagged stones and patches of tough Breton brush that snagged at their gear. A dead Frenchman (the French 14th Division was attacking along with them) lay sprawled over a boulder, his blue greatcoat soaked black with blood; Tex stepped over him and kept climbing.

  The redoubt ahead spat a steady stream of fire, its embrasures flashing like angry eyes. German mountain troops – compact, tough men, skilled in fighting from heights – were holding it with grim discipline. Hickman dropped beside Tex behind a splintered pine stump. “They’re zeroed in on the approach! We’ll get cut apart going head-on!”

  Tex scanned the ground. To the right, a shallow draw cut up the ridge, half hidden by smoke. It angled around the redoubt’s flank. It looked dangerous, but at least not directly under the machine guns. He leaned toward Dockerby and shouted, “Sarge! There! I can get close through that gully!” Dockerby looked, hesitated only a heartbeat, then nodded. “Do it. Take two grenades. If you can knock out that nest, the boys can push through.”

  Tex swallowed hard, grabbed the grenades from the sergeant’s belt, and sprinted toward the gully. Bullets snapped overhead, clipped branches, and kicked stones against his legs. He dropped into the depression and scrambled upward, half running, half crawling, the air filled with the metallic stench of blood and hot brass.

  Voices reached him. They were German and very close. He slowed, pulled the pin on a grenade, and crept to the lip of the gully. The redoubt’s flank was right there: three mountain troops crouched behind sandbags, feeding another belt into the MG-08. Tex hurled the grenade.

  The explosion blasted dust and bodies to the sides. Before the smoke cleared, Tex vaulted from the gully, firing rounds from his Springfield as he closed the distance. One German tried to rise with a bayonet, Tex slammed into him, knocking the man backward, and drove his own bayonet home with a grunt.

  When the last defender fell, Tex staggered into the ruined redoubt and waved wildly downslope. “It’s taken! Push up! PUSH UP!” And from the fog below, the Big Red One surged forward, the ridge above the Vilaine beginning, at last, to crack open.

  (…) 14th French Infantry Division (…)

  Private Philippe Cren, still struggling with a resounding headache because of the relentless pounding all around him, watched the brave American soldier hurling a grenade into the machine gun nest that had pinned them down for the last ten minutes. The resulting thumps and blasts catapulted dirt and body parts, signaling the end of the German bastards firing at them. “Come on, Philippe!” yelled his friend as he stepped over the small mound of dirt they’d been hiding behind. “Let’s go help our American brothers!”