Frozen Gates

The winter came two weeks late. Two weeks was enough.

November 1941. The mud freezes early on the road to Moscow, and the German advance that should have died in the rasputitsa finds the ground hard under its boots. Sixty kilometres to go. Four days, the staff say.

Gefreiter Paul Brandt is twenty-four, a surveyor's apprentice from Celle who keeps a pocket notebook of distances and temperatures because measuring things is the only habit the war has not taken from him. His platoon has walked eleven hundred kilometres. Ahead of them is a city with roofs and stoves and steam heating. Behind them is a supply line made of sunglasses and summer socks.

Across three frozen months they will fight for a water tower that costs sixty-one men, hold a tram depot nineteen metres from an enemy they come to know by his singing, and learn to cross a city street by going through the walls of houses. They will take Moscow - street by street, building by building, at a price that would have broken any army in Europe.

And when they walk through the Trinity Gate at dusk on the seventeenth of February, the Kremlin is empty.

Not looted. Not burned. Empty - the files cleared, the chairs pushed in, the telephone lines re-terminated eight hundred kilometres east. The government is in Kuybyshev. The factories are behind the Urals. And the war Paul Brandt has been fighting for eleven months has not been in front of him at all. It has been going east the entire time, on trains, out of reach, into a country he has never seen.

In May they are ordered to follow it.

Frozen Gates is the first volume of The Iron Winter, a ten-book alternate history of the Eastern Front told from the frozen ground up: no miracle weapons, no supermen, no easy villains. Only soldiers, distances, and the slow and terrible discovery that a victory can be a trap.