Early in World War One, a young Canadian soldier is wounded and trapped behind German lines. He uses quick thinking and ingenuity to evade capture, then deeper into enemy territory, he meets a young woman who recently lost her father and brothers to...
David leaned back against the slope and let his eyes wander up the trunk of the tree, thinking of his immediate options.
That so easily could have been me. Need to slow my heart rate, slow my mind. Need to act, not react.
With care not to crack the dry twigs underfoot, he moved back up the hill, found his cache in the tree hollow and changed back into his uniform. He sat on the log and looked at the watch on his wrist.
Ten past five.Not much more than an hour of daylight remaining.
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Unaccustomed to having one, he removed it to wind and to more closely examine it. The dial read:
Hans Wilsdorf Geneva
On the back was engraved:
on Retirement to Major Corcoran O'Byrne from the officers of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers 30 August 1912
So it seems Josef is a watch thief, a grave robber, but now so am I. Looks like the Major re-enlisted, or maybe he gave this to his son when he sent him off to Belgium. When I get out of this, I'll have to send this back to its proper home.
He strapped the watch back onto his wrist, took the atlas from his rucksack and looked at his surroundings in the dim light. He was in the southwestern corner of Germany, in the Schwarzwald, a large area of hills and low mountains rising, it appeared to him, to a bit below 1500 metres.
Feldberg is the highest elevation I can see, marked at 1492 metres – could be 1493. Difficult to read the small print in this light. Whatever, it looks like the highest point on the map.
He pulled out the postcard with the rendering of the valley which ran east from Müllheim. The prominent peak in the background was labelled Belchen.
Strange. It's an attractive peak, but I can't find it mentioned on this map.
The area of mountains was framed by the right-angled bend of the Rhein where it turns from flowing west to flowing north as it passes Basel.
Along the margin of the map, the latitude read 48º directly beside a large town named Freiburg. The main body of the range looked to him to be about a degree square. He remembered Conrad telling him, "A degree of latitude is 60 nautical miles or 111.1 kilometres. I have no idea what that is in the miles you use here in Canada."
Wonder what Conrad is doing.
The Black Forest mountains are lower than those he knows in the Columbia Ranges and the Rockies.
Less than half the height. More like the ones on southern Vancouver Island and they're at almost exactly the same latitude.
The hachures on his map showed rather gentle hills, cut with streams. Then it became too dark to see the map comfortably.
