Cren tried to answer, but the words jammed in his throat. The shockwave from the last artillery barrage still rang in his ears in one long, metallic note as a church bell struck inside his skull. Every heartbeat pulsed through his temples like a hammer. When he pushed himself up to move, the ground seemed to tilt sideways, and for a terrifying second, he felt as if he might pitch face-first into the mud.

  He blinked. Once. Twice. The world snapped back into a shaky focus. Ahead of him, the Americans of the Big Red One were surging up the ridge, silhouettes breaking through fog and smoke, rifles high, their shouts muffled and warped by Cren’s damaged hearing. Sergeant Roux grabbed his arm. “Philippe! Eyes here!” Roux’s lips moved, Cren barely registered the words, but he felt the meaning through the strong tug. “Forward. Up. Help them!”

  He nodded and stumbled after his sergeant. The French line surged with them: Lieutenant Moreau leading two sections up the left side, Max Killerman charging forward with a strange, fearless grin, shouting something Cren couldn’t process. They followed the Americans into the gap created by the destroyed machine-gun nest, climbing over the ripped-open sandbags, the twisted ammunition belts, the German corpses torn apart by Tex Walker’s grenade.

  As Cren vaulted over a fallen pine trunk, a shell screamed overhead and exploded somewhere behind them. The concussion hit him like a blow to the spine. His vision fuzzed white, and his legs froze mid-stride. The roar faded into a high-pitched whine, and for a moment, he wasn’t on the ridge at all; he was back in the Paris battle, mud up to his knees, the air trembling under a thousand guns. He felt his breath hitch. His hands shook violently around the grip of his Berthier rifle.

  “Philippe! PHILIPPE!” Max Killerman had doubled back, gripping him by the collar. “Stay with me, mon ami!” he yelled, dragging him forward.

  Cren exhaled sharply as reality snapped back into place. The ridge. The Vilaine. The Americans were pushing ahead. He forced his boots to move again, every step feeling like wading through thick fog. Ahead, an olive-green uniformed soldier (Tex Walker) waved the Frenchmen onward, pointing toward a second German position tucked behind a pile of boulders, and another nest of Wurttemberg mountain troops hurriedly resetting a gun. Bullets cracked past the French infantry, smacking into the stones and showering them with sharp fragments.

  Roux shouted, “Flank right! Follow the Americans!” Cren followed, clinging to the motion, the momentum of others. His stomach clenched, his head throbbed, but he kept going. He saw Tex dash forward, firing from the hip, and Moreau’s men spreading out beside him. The Americans and French closed the last few meters together, bayonets low, grenades raised.

  As the assault crashed into the German redoubt, Cren felt the old terror rising in his chest, but this time he pushed through it, letting the surge of desperation carry him. If the Germans wanted the ridge back, they’d have to take it from him, claw by claw. And Philippe Cren, broken or not, would not let go.

  (…) Wurttemberg Mountain Battalion (…)

  Captain Erwin Rommel knew this was the defining moment of the battle, as enemy troops had broken through a section of his defensive line. To his left and right, other units’ captains and officers recognized the danger as they were also being overwhelmed, and sent their men to the attack.

  Erwin and his men had retreated along with the rest of the Regiment, and, apart from a nice little raid south of the river, had been steadily pushed northward across the Vilane River/estuary.

  Their job was now to contain the enemy's breakthrough, and the Captain of Mountain Troops had his own solution to offer. During the night, he had infiltrated enemy lines along with two of his best soldiers, Theo Stark and young Willi. They also had brought along Lieutenant Helmut Stern, one of the German Pioniertruppen (combat engineers), as Rommel’s oblique approach to warfare had again found an alternative way to stop the enemy offensive: destroy the La Roche-Bernard Bridge. Without it, the Entente wouldn’t be able to bring more troops in a timely fashion, or move materiel fast enough to keep its troops on the northern side resupplied. While the enemy should be able to resist from their position and even keep the bridgehead it had, it wouldn’t be able to immediately expand, allowing time for the Western Front commander, Kronprinz Wilhelm, to bring up more troops and crush the enemy breakthrough.

  Rommel crouched behind a line of boulders overlooking the riverbank. The morning mist clung to the water, muffling sound and turning the suspension bridge into a ghostly silhouette. On the near side, American and French troops surged up the heights, flashes of gunfire flickering like fireflies through the gloom. Rommel’s jaw tightened. “If we do not destroy it now,” he whispered, “there will be no stopping them.”

  Theo Stark nodded sharply, his lean, hard face smeared with mud. Young Willi, who was barely eighteen, swallowed nervously but kept close, rifle clutched tight. Behind them, Lieutenant Stern crawled forward, cradling the ignition pack and the insulated line reel needed to complete the demolition circuit.

  Stern nodded. “As I’ve told you, Sir, the charges are in place, good melinite blocks too, but the detonator line snapped somewhere near the anchor plate. We reconnect the leads, fix the battery, and she’ll go. The whole lower half of Brittany will hear it.”

  Rommel smiled. “Stay low.” They slid down the muddy slope, creeping through an abandoned German trench line littered with shattered rifles and torn haversacks. Bullets hissed overhead from the distant ridge, but no one noticed the four Germans approaching the bridge’s massive southern pylon.

  Rommel pointed. “Stern. Where?” “There,” Stern said and scurried under the lip of the stonework. The melinite blocks were wrapped in tarred paper and jammed into the crevices along the iron anchor plates, which remained intact. But the firing cable hung uselessly, severed during the Americans’ rush.

  Theo and Willi covered the road atop the bridge while Rommel and Stern ducked underneath. Stern worked fast, stripping the insulation, twisting new copper tails, and clamping the coupler in place. His hands shook from cold and exhaustion—but they were steady enough.

  “Battery!” Stern whispered. Rommel passed it to him. The combat engineer connected the terminals. A tiny spark flashed. “Circuit restored.”

  From the ridge above came a French yell. That was the men of the French 14th Division surging forward, pushing the German line. The Franco-Americans were minutes away from a breakthrough.

  Rommel made his decision instantly. “Set it off. Now.” Stern pressed the plunger. They were close to the structure, but from the way the Pionier had explained it to him, the explosion wouldn’t be a fireball of expanding debris, but rather localized blasts to sever the bridge links, and thus, being close to the bridge wasn’t that dangerous.

  A deep rumble groaned through the stone like the growl of something ancient waking in the earth. Then, a white flash erupted beneath the bridge deck.

  The explosion roared like thunder trapped in a canyon. The entire suspension span lifted into the air, with its timbers, steel cables, and the roadway heaving upward before tearing apart in a scream of tortured metal. Poor Entente soldiers were catapulted into the air and to the sides as they had been crossing at the moment of the explosion.

  A blast of wind slammed Rommel and his men flat as the bridge folded in on itself, the center span collapsing into the swirling tide below. Towers snapped, cables lashed through the air like giant whips, and a shockwave rippled across the river.

  A plume of smoke and debris shot skyward, blotting out the sun. When the air cleared, the La Roche-Bernard Bridge was gone, now nothing but twisted wreckage spilling into the water, its two halves dangling from their shattered pylons.

  Rommel exhaled once, slowly and in control. “It is done,” he said. “Now they will bleed slowly.” Behind him, Willi stared in awe, Theo Stark grinned through dust-covered teeth, and Helmut Stern simply slumped back against the stone, his hands trembling from shock and triumph.

  The Americans had their foothold on the ridge. But the river, the lifeline of their advance, was once again a barrier of fire and ruin, and they had two divisions stuck on the wrong side.

  Meanwhile, in the Ottoman Empire

  The other frontlines, May 1916

  (…) Caucasus (…)

  The frontline in the Caucasus was in a state of flux following the capture of Batum by the Central Powers – an Ottoman Army with a German division and a regiment of Austro-Hungarian Skoda heavy guns. The uncertainty of the situation was also due to a decision by the former commander-in-chief of the Russian forces (the Grand Duke) to remove half of the troops and rail them to the north, where the Empire was seriously threatened by the German offensive.

  Since then, stopping the Ottoman forces' advances has been impossible. The Central Powers' offensive pushed north of Batum, following the main rail line, then split into two parts: half of the army moved toward Sukhumion on the Black Sea Coast, occupying it in mid-May, while the other half moved eastward toward the main rail node of Tbilisi.

  The Georgian provincial capital was still out of reach of the Turkish forces, as the terrain they advanced through was difficult, with its high mountain passes still covered in snow at mid-April. But there was no doubt it would fall when enough infantry arrived, as the Russians had no units to do anything about it.

  The entirety of the Caucasus looked ripe for the taking for the Central Powers.

  (…) Mesopotamia (…)

  Not much had moved in terms of the frontline south of Baghdad. The British, defeated and prostrate after the Kut disaster, had retreated south to Basra (just north of it, in fact) and dug in. Their new commander, General Townsend, was working feverishly to build a decent-sized supply base and get enough reinforcements.

  The Turks, victorious, remained weak in logistics in the sector, having to bring every drop of supply by caravans since there was no rail beyond Samara, seventy-five miles north of Baghdad. This incomplete line forced the Ottoman Army to rely on a patchwork of transport methods for the crucial final stretch to the capital. Supplies, reinforcements, and ammunition arriving by rail at Samarra had to be transferred onto river steamers, barges, camel caravans, or horse-drawn carts to continue southward. The lack of a direct rail connection to Baghdad placed increasing strain on Ottoman forces defending Mesopotamia, slowing their ability to reinforce the front and contributing significantly to the logistical challenges that shaped the campaign.

  The British, also forced to bring everything by ship, were nonetheless much better positioned in terms of supplies, as they had a well-functioning convoy system and a sprawling merchant navy in the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf.

  In short, the Ottomans were incapable of conducting any large-scale offensive south of Baghdad, and thus everything hinged on when the British would be able to launch another attack, which Townsend hoped to conduct in the fall of 1916.

  (…) Sinai (…)

  The British forces were slowly crawling up the Sinai, encountering severe supply difficulties across the desert. The Entente's aim was to reach El Arish at the height of summer, in order to finally enter Palestine and take Ottoman territory.

  Both sides treated the Sinai frontlines as a sideshow and a secondary front, resulting in fighting on a much smaller scale and lower intensity. The entire affair was more about controlling caravan routes and water wells.

  The fighting along the Arzal-Chateaubriant Line

  The fight for Castle Chateaubriant, May 13th, 1916

  Chateaubriant had once been a quiet Breton market town of slate roofs, narrow lanes, and the great stone bulk of its château dominating the river bend. By the spring of 1916, under German occupation and facing the pressure of an advancing Entente army from the south, it had become something entirely different: a fortified hinge anchoring the western half of the new Reich defensive line stretching from Arzal on the Atlantic to Chateaubriant and beyond. The town no longer resembled a civilian space. It had been reimagined, reshaped, and entombed beneath a skin of trenches, sandbags, and steel.

  The frontline cut straight through the middle of Chateaubriant. The Germans had chosen this line not by accident but by necessity; the town’s position at the crossroads of the region made it the perfect point from which to hold back a southern breakthrough. Roads radiated from the town like spokes on a wheel: toward Nantes (Entente-controlled), toward Redon, toward Rennes, toward Angers. In short, whoever controlled these arteries controlled northern Brittany. The Germans had dug themselves deeply into the southern half of the town, reinforcing every street and building with the precision and industry of veteran engineers.

  The southern approaches, that had once been simple streets of quiet merchants and stables, were now a choke of barricades, burned houses, and wire entanglements. Every intersection was blocked by piled stone, overturned wagons, and felled beams. Snipers occupied the upper-floor windows of shattered homes, their rifle barrels jutting through carefully carved loopholes. Anti-tank ditches, dug in anticipation of French armored cars, sliced across the boulevards. Telegraph poles had been axed down and lashed into crude chevaux-de-frise. The Germans intended that no advance by the Entente would take this section quickly or cheaply.

  Farther north toward the town center, the landscape dissolved into chaos. Place Saint-Nicolas, once the hub of civic life, had been reduced to a cratered wasteland. Shell holes overlapped like the pockmarks of some giant disease. Tram rails had been torn up and bent into defensive spikes. The façades of cafés, shops, and municipal offices now leaned precariously over no-man’s-land, their interiors gutted by explosives. Every alleyway was a potential ambush point. The Germans had rigged collapsing storefronts with tripwires, mines, and delayed charges, creating a labyrinth of lethal traps that any advancing infantry would have to pick through street by street.

  But the true strength of the defense lay not in the wrecked squares or the barricaded southern suburbs. It lay in the town's northern half, where the defenders had transformed the medieval layout into interlocking zones of fire. Behind the narrow medieval lanes, they cut firing ports into stone walls, built sandbagged machine-gun nests covering every approach, and tunneled through basements to link houses into a continuous defensive web. The bocage-style gardens behind these homes provided natural trench lines, reinforced with logs and concrete. Mortar pits had been dug behind the sturdier stone structures, ready to rain explosive fire on any penetration.

  At the center of the German stronghold loomed the Château de Chateaubriant, the largest and most imposing feature of the town’s geography. Its thick Renaissance stone walls, tall towers, and enclosed courtyards were a dream come true for any defensive army. German engineers swarmed over it the moment the withdrawal northward was ordered. They turned its turrets into machine-gun platforms and observation posts; its roofline into a sandbagged parapet; its moat gardens into barbed-wire belts and concealed mortar pits. Wooden shutters and windows were stripped away, replaced by steel plates taken from locomotives and railway workshops. Within its chambers, they established a telegraph center, an infirmary, ammunition stores, and the command posts for two battalions.

  The courtyard was covered with camouflage netting to conceal troop movement from Entente airplanes. Pioneers dug shallow escape tunnels into the outer gardens, linking the château to nearby houses and supply caches. A battery of light Minenwerfer (German name for a class of short-range mine shell launching mortars) stood ready in the inner courtyard, their muzzles pointing south across the destroyed town center. A battalion of seasoned Landwehr troops occupied the château, reinforced by two machine-gun companies and a pioneer detachment who treated the ancient stone fortress as a modern redoubt.

  From the towers, German lookouts could see the advancing Entente forces to the south: American columns moving across the fields, French cuirassiers dismounting in the hedgerows, and British artillery batteries rolling up behind the ruins of the old boulevards. Smoke rose from the burning outskirts, carried by a wind that smelled of cordite and distant explosions. The defenders knew what was coming; they had spent weeks preparing for it. Chateaubriant, once a quiet town, was now a fortress waiting for the hammer blow.

  And in its heart, the château stood ready to become the last and fiercest point of resistance.

  (…) Indian Head Division (…)

  Colonel George S. Patton crouched behind the shattered stone wall of a former merchant’s house, peering through the smoke curling over the ruined street. The Château de Chateaubriant loomed ahead. It looked dark and massive, its towers jutting into the drifting haze like the turrets of a battleship run aground in a medieval town. The Germans had turned the Renaissance fortress into a bristling strongpoint: every lower window sealed with sandbags, loopholes carved into the stone, and Landwehr riflemen waiting behind each darkened slit with patient, murderous calm.

  Machine-gun fire erupted from the château’s north tower, sweeping the rubble-choked avenue. Patton spat dust from his mouth and ducked. “Damn them, they’ve turned the whole thing into a stone hedgehog,” he growled. “Every window’s a bunker. Every doorway’s a killing box.”

  The Indian Head Division had moved northward under the impetus of the Entente offensive after being heavily involved in the storming of the main enemy defenses in Savenay, near St-Nazaire. Since they did well there and during their advance north (they’d encircled and captured two enemy battalions during their march), they were sent to Chateaubriant by General John Pershing, who needed some spine in the attack.

  Patton and his company had arrived a day and a half before, and, while standing orders were to wait for the remainder of the troops to get there before the attack was launched against the impressive-looking German urban defenses, Patton had decided to probe them right away.

  “Sir,” said Lieutenant Hayes, crouched beside him with his Springfield tight against his chest, “those lower embrasures; they’re packed three rows deep. I watched one open fire a minute ago. Sandbags, firing slits … they built a fortress in a fortress.”