Since you're asking for prose you can use in the novel itself, here's a standalone introduction in the style of a historical novel—echoing the reflective tone of August 1914 without imitating its wording. It frames the reader's expectations while establishing this as the Russian side of the opening act of World War DL.
Introduction
Wars are rarely recognized at their beginning.
The moment history later identifies as the opening of a great conflict is almost never accompanied by fanfare or universal understanding. Men rise for work, trains depart on schedule, children go to school, newspapers argue over yesterday's politics, and governments reassure their citizens that tomorrow will resemble today. Only in retrospect does the ordinary become extraordinary.
So it was in Russia during the months preceding September 2018.
The Russian Federation was neither at peace nor at war. Its armed forces were engaged abroad in Syria, its intelligence services contested influence across Europe and the Middle East, and its diplomats sparred daily with Western governments. Sanctions had become a fact of national life. Military exercises filled television broadcasts. Yet for the overwhelming majority of Russians, these were distant matters, discussed over tea or vodka before yielding once again to the practical concerns of mortgages, pensions, harvests, football, and family.
The young men entering military service that year believed they were joining one of the world's great armed forces. They expected hardship, discipline, perhaps deployment. They did not imagine that history had reserved for a handful of them a place in an operation that would be remembered long after armies, governments, and ideologies had changed.
Thousands of kilometers away, beyond the Black Sea, the Levant, and the deserts of the Middle East, another story was unfolding. A young American singer-songwriter named Demi Lovato was preparing for a humanitarian journey that few outside her immediate circle regarded as remarkable. To her admirers, it reflected generosity. To intelligence officers scattered across several capitals, it was merely another item crossing their desks.
Neither the Russian recruits nor the young woman in America could know that their lives were converging.
The collision would occur not in Europe, nor in Moscow or Washington, but on the grasslands of the Maasai Mara, where a single military mission would ignite a conflict that historians would later call the opening act of the World War Demi Lovato.
This volume tells that story from the opposite side of the rifle.
It is not an account of presidents or diplomats, nor an argument for the decisions they made. It is the story of ordinary soldiers serving an extraordinary state; of recruits who believed they were carrying out another assignment, unaware that they were walking toward one of the defining moments of the twenty-first century.
When they boarded trains in southern Russia, they believed they were beginning military service.
In truth, they were already marching into history.
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and then Add to home screen.