Autumn had come to the Argonne Forest with a cruel beauty. Blood red leaves carpeted the forest floor while mist draped between the trees like mourning veils. The front was shifting again. German high command, reacting to Allied probes and internal strife, had withdrawn some of its best units to the Eastern Front, leaving parts of the Western line exposed. For the first time in months, opportunity knocked on the battered doors of France's weary soul.
And Emil was ready to answer.
He stood in the command tent of the newly expanded 11th Experimental Combat Group, once a mere auxiliary logistics force but now grown into something stranger — and stronger. Beside him stood Colonel d'Artois, his uniform newly adorned with a crimson sash denoting his special liaison role to Paris. Across from them stood Commandant Fournier, the former railway officer Emil had pulled from obscurity and made into his chief of movement operations.
"Two regiments. Lightly armored, stretched over 12 kilometers. Mostly conscripts," Fournier said, pointing to the hand-drawn map. "They're holding the ridgeline south of Binarville. If we dislodge them, we threaten the entire German salient between Montfaucon and Romagne."
"And what's the catch?" d'Artois asked, fingers steepled.
"Artillery support is minimal," Fournier replied. "And we'd be operating without the bulk of the 4th Division. They've been redeployed east."
Emil leaned over the map, narrowing his eyes. "Then we don't use brute force. We use shock, speed, and illusion. We'll turn our lack of numbers into an advantage."
D'Artois gave a skeptical chuckle. "I've heard you say that before. What's your plan this time, Strategist?"
Emil turned to his notebook — not filled with musings, but mathematics. "We feint west with makeshift artillery carriages — dummies with smoke pots and fake flashes. We'll create the illusion of a night bombardment while slipping a mobile force around through Ravine de la Mort."
"Ravine de la Mort?" Fournier interjected. "It's overgrown. Impassable for carts."
"Not for carts," Emil replied. "For bicycles."
A silence fell over the tent.
"Bicycles?" d'Artois said, incredulous.
"Yes," Emil said. "We have twenty-eight folding Humber bicycles requisitioned from the British. Lightweight, foldable, and silent. Combine that with six pneumatic-engine scout wagons I've personally modified. We'll carry demolition kits, silent weapons, and small arms. The goal isn't to destroy the ridge by force — it's to unravel it with fear."
Fournier scratched his chin. "We'd be outnumbered three-to-one."
"But not out-thought," Emil said. "Their lines are stretched. If we strike surgically — sabotage comms, cut rations, blow a few ammo dumps — their cohesion will snap."
D'Artois shook his head, half in admiration, half in disbelief. "You want to turn the war into a magician's act."
"No," Emil said softly. "Into a chessboard. And I'm playing both sides' clocks."
They moved three nights later.
The ravine was colder than expected, and narrower too. Thick roots clawed out of the earth like skeletal fingers. Above them, a crescent moon illuminated just enough to see the path but not enough to be seen.
Thirty-two men made the journey with Emil. Only a handful were regular soldiers. The rest were specialists — engineers, saboteurs, scouts. They wore patched uniforms and carried unconventional gear: hand-forged wire cutters, suppressed pistols, wax-sealed demolition charges.
Emil rode near the front, his bicycle strapped to his back as they climbed the steepest sections. He breathed through his nose to keep the noise down, each breath catching on the scent of wet earth and autumn decay.
They reached the ridgeline at 2:17 a.m.
The first strike came not with thunder, but with silence. A small German relay station was taken without a shot — two sentries, both young and shivering, clubbed unconscious. Emil himself planted the charges on the field telephone switchboard, timing it for a staggered detonation.
The second target, a small ammo depot dug into the side of the ridge, proved trickier. A third sentry had been hidden — sleeping behind stacked crates. He woke too soon, too fast.
A shot rang out.
It was the first sound of the night louder than a whisper.
Emil's heart froze. Then everything accelerated. He waved the fallback signal, but already tracer rounds lit the treetops. German gunners opened fire into the darkness, confused and blind, but deadly nonetheless.
"Fall back by squad!" Fournier barked, now carrying a carbine like an infantry sergeant. "Demo team, get that fuse lit!"
The depot went up in a deafening roar. Orange light flooded the ridgeline. Confused German cries rang out, while French saboteurs scattered like ghosts into the brush.
But one man didn't make it back.
Émile Mazet, a twenty-two-year-old engineer from Lyon, was caught in the blastwave. Emil found his body the next morning — half-buried in mud, one hand still clenched around the broken bicycle frame.
The fallout was swift — and effective.
By dawn, the German ridge units were in disarray. Panicked reports of "hundreds" of French infiltrators filtered up the chain of command. A counteroffensive was launched in the wrong direction. Whole battalions were repositioned to meet phantoms. Within 48 hours, the French 78th Infantry took the ridge with minimal losses.
General Michelet, previously skeptical of Emil's unorthodox strategies, personally commended the action.
"You turned thirty men and a box of British bicycles into a divisional victory," he told Emil. "You're either a genius or a lunatic."
"Sometimes it takes both," Emil said quietly.
Back at the foundry, the aftershocks were less glorious.
Word of Emil's actions had reached not just the general staff, but also the political hierarchy in Paris. The Ministry of Armament dispatched a special observer to "review the industrial-military synergy" Emil was pioneering.
She arrived in a black motorcar, elegant and sharp-eyed: Amélie Moreau, formerly of the École Normale Supérieure, now a ranking bureaucrat and daughter of a powerful senator.
She toured the factory grounds with polite silence, asked difficult questions, and requested a private interview with Emil in his office overlooking the assembly floor.
"You've created something strange here, Monsieur Laurant," she said, seated stiffly. "Neither wholly military nor industrial. A machine of its own."
"I prefer to think of it as an ecosystem," Emil replied, watching the cranes lift steel frames for the next prototype armored car. "Innovation needs shelter. And war, paradoxically, offers it."
She raised an eyebrow. "And what happens when the war ends?"
"I haven't thought that far ahead."
"You should. Because people in Paris are thinking for you."
Emil turned to face her fully. "Am I to take that as a warning?"
"As a courtesy," she replied. "You have enemies now, Monsieur Laurant. Traditionalists. Men who think war should be fought with honor, not engines. And you've made them look obsolete."
Emil didn't flinch. "Then I'll keep making them look that way. Until we win. Or they do."
She stood. "Very well. But watch your back. There's more than one battlefield in this war."
As she left, Emil looked down once more at the floor of the foundry — his sanctuary, his weapon, and perhaps his curse.
Outside, the leaves began to fall faster, like red snow. And somewhere on the Eastern Front, another telegram was being sent. Another decision was being made. Another pawn was moving across the board.
And Emil was already calculating the next move.