Belgium burned.
Not in one clean apocalypse, but in a rolling collapse—town by town, crossroads by crossroads—each stand broken by grey legions that moved with engines and steel and a cold certainty the Belgians had never faced. The forts of Liège lay behind them as shattered mouths of concrete. The name of the city became a warning whispered on roads clogged with carts and barefoot families.
Refugees ran.
Not in orderly lines, but in rivers of panic, convinced the Germans were not merely soldiers but something worse—an inhuman machine that would grind them flat, bury them within their own homes under steel and fire, erase them from the map. Villages emptied before the first tank even appeared. Fields stood abandoned, wheat bending in summer wind while no one harvested it.
And through that silence the First, Second, and Third Armies advanced—grey uniforms, steel helmets, motorcycle scouts, armored trucks, tank treads chewing earth. They pushed through resistance when it appeared and smashed it when it hardened. They did not pause long enough for Belgium to understand what was happening.
In Luxembourg, new flags already flew—German above, Luxembourg beneath—like a polite symbol covering a brutal truth: the small state had been folded into the German march with scarcely a struggle, its land turned into another road for invasion.
Across the Channel, Britain answered as an island empire always did: with ships.
Men kissed wives and children goodbye with smiles that tried to be brave and came out lighthearted instead. There was still that old, foolish sense of adventure in their eyes—the belief that war was hardship and glory and stories to tell afterward, even as grim reports from the front began to reach them. Transports carried them to Le Havre and Boulogne-sur-Mer, boots striking French docks as if stepping into history.
Not far away in northern France, the French Fifth Army moved east in long columns—battalions marching on sunlit roads, cavalry screens ahead, banners and bugles and dust. They had not yet seen the new Germany. Not properly. Not close.
Above them, a few scout planes droned forward—slow insects of canvas and wood, pilots with little more than goggles and a sidearm, flying toward Belgium to look, to warn, to return.
Then the clouds split.
Four grey shapes punched through the white like knives—sleek fighters, hard-edged, marked with black crosses, descending with terrifying speed. Machine guns stitched the air. The French scout planes simply came apart, canvas tearing, fuel igniting, frames tumbling down like burning birds.
Men on the road stared up in disbelief.
Cavalry halted. Horses screamed. Officers shouted.
"The Germans are coming!"
Rifles were raised and fired upward as if courage could reach the sky. But the fighters swooped lower, and the first bursts tore into the column—horses collapsing, men dropping, the road suddenly erupting into blood and dust and panic.
The German aircraft did not linger.
They struck, carved fear into the French line, and climbed back into cloud—leaving behind a single terrible understanding spreading through the ranks:
This war was not the war they had trained for.
And while the Western Front began to take shape in steel and smoke, the war at sea had begun as well—quietly, almost politely, in a form smaller than the slaughter on land.
There were no great fleet engagements yet. No lines of battleships trading broadsides beneath flags and smoke.
Only predators of steel moving through black water.
The sea war began not with spectacle—but with calculation.
It began the day after Oskar's speech in Berlin on 9 July 1914.
While his words were still echoing in the capital—before they had even reached Europe's newspapers—the Admiralty acted. Because those who understood modern war understood something simple:
Armies can march in days.
Railways carry men to borders. Columns advance. Within a week, rifles fire.
But fleets are different.
Steel does not cross oceans overnight.
Battlecruisers require coal and supply chains measured in thousands of tons. Submarines require staging grounds, patrol sectors, and weeks of preparation. To reposition a fleet from one sea to another can take half a month. To place it where it can strike effectively can take longer still.
And Germany was not preparing to fight a continental navy.
It was preparing to challenge an empire.
Britain's ships guarded trade routes from Canada to India, from Africa to Australia. Its power did not rest only in battleships—but in control of sea lanes. In choke points. In distance.
If Germany waited until war was formally declared, its fleet would still be in harbor while Britain sealed the exits.
And once sealed, they would not open again.
So if the sea was to burn on the first day of war—
the ships had to move before the world admitted war had begun.
Even before Oskar spoke, reports had reached Berlin that Britain was concentrating its naval strength around the Home Isles. Patrol patterns tightened. Reserve squadrons were no longer dispersed. Mines were being prepared. The outlines of a blockade—patient and suffocating—were already forming.
The intention was clear: strangle Germany at sea. Sever her trade. Isolate her colonies. Then strike outward at leisure.
So Germany did not wait.
On the night of 10 July, under cover of darkness, Wilhelmshaven stirred.
Grand Admiral Tirpitz—architect of the fleet and disciple of tonnage—set his first pieces in motion. From Kiel came the battlecruisers, long grey hulls sliding through the widened canal like drawn blades. Submarines followed in disciplined silence, threading the Kiel Canal unseen so that Danish watchers and British observers would sense nothing until the ocean itself betrayed them.
Interestingly enough, the canal had been opened in 1895 and later expanded under Tirpitz's insistence—with quiet financial backing from Oskar's industrial Group. And now it was a private artery linking the Baltic and the North Sea without any foreign permission being required.
Germany would not need to beg Denmark for passage in wartime.
Elsewhere, cruisers and minelayers shifted eastward into the Baltic, tasked with threatening Russian waters and closing access toward Saint Petersburg. But the heart of the gamble lay west.
At the edge of midnight, as the calendar turned, Tirpitz sent them forth.
Two battlecruiser groups slipped into the Atlantic approaches under darkness. Dozens of submarines submerged beyond the breakwaters and vanished into open water.
Their mission was not glory.
It was disruption.
To cut Britain's arteries before the blockade could tighten. To strike merchant traffic from the first hour of declaration. To ensure that when London spoke the word war, German steel was already far beyond the North Sea.
For Germany knew what waited in the north.
Scapa Flow—the clenched fist of the Grand Fleet—sat behind steel and minefields, ready to surge south the moment Britain chose to close the sea like a gate.
The Channel too would soon become a netted throat—mined, patrolled, watched from both shores. A narrow passage easily choked.
Tirpitz would not sail into that throat.
He would go around.
Around Scotland.
Into the open Atlantic.
Toward the arteries of empire—southbound cargo from Spain and the Mediterranean, westbound traffic from America heavy with grain and steel.
Before the British hive at Scapa Flow fully woke, Germany intended to already be behind it.
And so, on the morning of 16 July, beneath a ceiling of low Atlantic fog, Vice Admiral von Spee was already leading the Navy's 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron westward—far from European shores, and moving farther still, into the vast grey where distance itself became armor.
The ocean swallowed sound.
Only the steady pulse of engines broke the quiet.
A runner stepped onto the bridge and handed him a narrow strip of paper.
There was no ceremony.
No speech.
No trumpet call.
Just ink.
Spee read it once.
Folded it neatly.
And nodded, as if the sea had merely confirmed what he had known for days.
"Signal Goeben and Seydlitz," he said evenly. "The time has come. We are now officially at war."
The words hung in the fog for a heartbeat.
Then he continued.
"Free hunt for enemy vessels is authorized. Report immediately upon contact with any British warship."
A pause.
"Disperse the light cruisers and destroyers. Maximum spread."
The 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron was not arranged in parade formation.
It was stretched across the Atlantic approaches like a cast net.
Three Moltke-class battlecruisers—long, lean, and predatory—moved many kilometers apart, each angling into separate arteries of imperial traffic. Around every capital ship, light cruisers and destroyers prowled outward in widening arcs—fast scouts, sharp-eyed and ready to vanish at the first sign of danger.
They were not hunting fleets.
Not yet.
They were hunting arteries.
Coal freighters.
Grain ships.
Passenger liners.
Supply transports heavy with cargo from the Americas and from southern sea lanes—ships that kept an empire breathing.
There was no radar.
Oskar had pushed research forward, yes—but the concept remained experimental, not yet a weapon to trust in fog and storm. The Atlantic was still what it had always been: a realm where war depended on human eyes, discipline, and patience.
Lookouts swept the horizon with binoculars until their vision blurred.
Signal officers searched for the faintest thread of smoke against the grey sky.
Wireless operators leaned into static, hoping for a careless transmission.
Everything depended on sight.
Everything depended on who saw first.
Farther north, Vice Admiral Hipper led his own formation—three Blücher-class battlecruisers carving a separate path through the ocean. His orders mirrored Spee's: avoid decisive engagement, harass trade, vanish before superior forces could assemble.
The submarine flotillas, slower and more methodical, were still en route from European waters. Their time would come.
For now, the work belonged to steel hulls above the waves.
The hunt had begun.
And far beyond the horizon, British merchantmen steamed forward in steady confidence—funnels smoking, holds full, captains unaware that war had been declared.
Unaware that the sea ahead of them had already changed.