Shell

Part 2: Dinner Party in Colmar (Alcase-Lorraine), Germany. July 8 1914.

Colmar (Alcase-Lorraine), Germany. July 8 1914.

"Wir werden sehen, wer schneller Sohn ist!"

The dinner party erupted into laughter at the old man's challenge to his son. Mina almost spilled the bottle of wine she was using to refill the glass of her older sister, Ida.

Ida didn't notice. She was lost in admiration for her fiance, who was currently holding court with his father, Herr Kohler, the old man who just set the room laughing.

Mina couldn't blame her sister for being completely lost in preoccupation with her fiance. His royal posture and his steel jaw and his sly, full, red lips. But most of all, Mina loved his eyes. They were the same color as the lake they spent summers lapping in. A deep blue or indigo. Mina hadn't picked which yet, but she had decided it was the same color as his eyes, and she would just let it be that color.

Hugo's color.

Mina noticed all these things about Hugo. But the other things she noticed about Hugo made these things inconsequential. But apparently not for her sister Ida.

Hugo was up to his usual act as the life of the dinner party. Setting the agenda of conversation and having the best word, the most interesting word, and the last word. Unless his father chimed in. Then he would graciously give any or all of those words to Herr Kohler. Otherwise, Mina noticed how Hugo's words were the best, last and most interesting only because they were loudest, most sure and most charismatic. And also perhaps because most men in Colmar decided that it was less important to challenge Hugo than it was to keep their job at the steel factories that the Kohler family managed for the Krupps. Steel that supplied the air-fields in Dusseldorf and the boat yards down in Deutsche Bucht and the guns being made in, well, everywhere.

All owned by the Krupps.

The Kohler's were lucky enough to come along when Herr Freidrich Krupp was inventing cast steel and needed their smelt. Herr Kohler has told the story many times. They partnered with Krupp on the ground level of what became a steel empire and that empire helped make Germany the industrial force it had grown to be in the last century.

Alsace-Lorraine, the territory in the south between France and Germany was Mina's homeland. After it was annexed from France, Germany's prize to itself after beating France in Napoleon's war, the Kohler's were one of thousands of families that were sent there by German High Command. The Kohlers in particular were sent on behalf of the Krupp's and the Berlin elite to industrialize it and rebuild the new territory in Berlin's likeness.

Of course, if a Krupp were here holding court tonight, their word would be the last, best, and most interesting.

Even so, she doubted any Krupp had Hugo's eyes.

The topic at hand was the same topic at hand everywhere Mina went the last five days; the Prince being shot over in Sarajevo.

Mina looked up the city in the Kohler's new almanac after seeing the papers in the square so she could sound knowledgeable while at the market with her mother. And it was Franz, yes Franz was the fellow she remembered... shot with his wife in dramatic fashion and now for some reason or another all of Germany was getting ready to go about warring over it. But what Mina couldn't piece together was why they weren't talking about the people who did it, or the people who had it done to them. No, she thought, they were more worried about fighting people who didn't seem to have any involvement at all.

The French.

The same people Herr Kohler got to warring with some forty years ago. The same country who used to own their home-town until the last war where Herr Kohler and Germany won it. Mina didn't want to go to war with France. Many people in this town still considered themselves French. Most of all her mother, Felice, who grew up in Verdun during the annexation and met her German father shortly after. When the Germans annexed Alcace-Lorraine they gave Grandma and Grandpa Agathe and all the citizens within the territory the choice to leave the country or take on German citizenship.