In the early months of the First World War, a young Canadian soldier uses quick thinking and ingenuity to evade capture after being wounded fighting in Flanders. While escaping through Germany to the Swiss border, he becomes intimately entwined with...
This is the sequel to Posted As Missing, so we'll begin with a précis of that book.
David Berry had volunteered as a soldier in the British Columbia Regiment in August 1914 in the weeks following the declaration of war against the German aggression. With thirty thousand other Canadians, he was outfitted, trained and shipped to battle, his battalion arriving in France in February 1915.
On the 22nd of April 1915, outside Ypres, Belgium, the Germans launched an attack on the French, British and Canadian trenches, using chlorine gas for the first time in warfare. During the ensuing battle, over a hundred thousand were killed, wounded, captured or posted as missing. Of the more than eleven hundred and fifty officers and men in David's battalion, fewer than three hundred and sixty mustered for roll call when they were relieved and moved back four days later. David wasn't among them.
At dusk on the third day of the battle, he had been hit by fragments from a mortar shell as the Germans initiated another advance. It was dark when he regained consciousness with his face badly ripped and his mind still in a daze. He saw dark shapes with spiked helmets — German soldiers — and he started crawling away from them.
As his mind cleared, he realised the German advance had moved the line past him, and he was now behind enemy lines. He stripped a dead German soldier and dressed in the uniform, thinking his imperfect German grammar and his odd accent could be disguised by his wounded mouth. He continued through the dim starlight, moving deeper into enemy territory.
He was stopped and challenged. His ruse worked, and he was taken to a dressing station to have his wounds cleaned and assessed, then he was transported farther back to a field hospital for stitches.
His deceit continued as he was given a seven-day sick leave to go home to recover. He drew on his years of exploratory mountaineering and wilderness self-sufficiency to plan and prepare for a traverse of the Black Forest Mountains to escape into neutral Switzerland.
As he prepared to leave, he met Maria, a beautiful young woman serving his gasthaus dinner. He learned that her father and her brothers had been killed in the early fighting, and that Maria and her mother were planning to escape back to their family roots in Switzerland. She took David home, introduced him to her mother, Rachel, and they decided to join forces and attempt to escape together.
Young hormones and curiosity combined with the intensity of the situation, their openness and honesty, and the closeness of wilderness living, led to intimate relations during the week-and-a-half traverse. With Rachel's guidance and encouragement, David and Maria's youthful passions evolved quickly from physical intimacy into love.
Two weeks after David's injury and the start of his evasions, they arrived in Erzingen, a town just short of the border between Germany and the Swiss canton of Schaffhausen. Rachel was delighted her aunt, Tante Bethia, still had the metzgerei at the edge of town.
Though there had been no contact in nearly ten years, the family ties were deep, and Bethia welcomed them without question. She put on tea and sliced her award-winning hams and sausages, and they sat enjoying and chatting. Bethia's husband, Aaron, had passed away the previous September, and she was trying to sell the family slaughterhouse, the ham and sausage making business and the delicatessen shop-front. Her sixty-six-year-old body found them too much to run on her own.
As Rachel and Maria caught up on family, David learned more about Bethia's businesses and their possibilities. They brought wine up from the cellar, refreshed the food platters, then continued talking, as David started gently digging.
The story continues from the scenes at the end of Posted as Missing.
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This map shows the unusual bulge of the Swiss canton of Schaffhausen across to the north side of the Rhine River and how it is nearly surrounded by Germany. Elsewhere, the border between Germany and Switzerland is the cold, fast Rhine, and David had planned to walk across rather than attempt to swim. <><><>
Although this sequel is written as a stand-alone, if you haven't read Posted As Missing, it might make sense to read it before this sequel. To go to it, press the External Link below.
