Watching Fritz

Background

This is the fourth book in the Posted As Missing series, so we'll begin with a précis of the first three books.

David Berry had volunteered as a soldier in the British Columbia Regiment in August 1914 in the weeks following the outbreak of the war against the Germanic aggression. With thirty thousand other Canadians, he was outfitted, trained and shipped to battle.

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.

(The foregoing is fact. The fictional story begins here.)

At dusk on the third day of the battle, David 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. Posted as Missing ended with David seeing possibilities of sabotaging the German war machine.

Missing followed the intensifying love between David and Maria as they find a way to get him safely across the border into Switzerland. Though he was now out of enemy territory, he was a foreign belligerent in Switzerland, living under an assumed identity and in violation of the Swiss treaty of neutrality.

While he continued to recuperate from his wounds and from the traumas of the trenches, his love of Maria deepened and matured. He increasingly questioned his duty to return to the war as he helped Bethia, Rachel and Maria re-establish in Switzerland.

Finally, honour and duty won his internal struggle, and he was left with no excuses to remain. He had gathered more than enough intelligence for his sabotage plans, so he drafted a letter to present to the British Embassy in Bern, hoping it would convince the Army to allow him to run sabotage missions into Germany, rather than sending him back to the trenches as an Infantry private.

He was championed by the Military Attaché and the Ambassador, whose negotiations between the War Office and Ottawa resulted in his being transferred to Headquarters and posted to the Officer Training Centre in Oxford, England.

Back in Action saw David training at Oxford while he was brought deeper into the Secret Service Bureau operations. With the Army's assistance, he assembled and trained a small team of German-speaking soldiers, and in October, the team was secreted into Switzerland, and accommodated in the converted carriage house at Bethia's Sonnenhang wine estate. Army Sappers were smuggled in through France, and they completed a tunnel under Bethia's vineyards which cross the Swiss-German border.

In early December, David and his saboteurs destroyed three German supply trains, disabling all three of the rail lines which connect central Germany to its war front with France in the Vosges Mountains of Alsace and Lorraine. Though his superiors were delighted with these results, they see much more potential for David and his team.

David is now legitimately back in Switzerland as the Aide-de-Camp to the British Ambassador in Bern, and he has also been issued a Swiss passport in the name of Maria's dead brother, Jacob David Meier.

His relationship with Maria has matured, and she is now pregnant. The story continues from Back in Action the day after David had returned from a three-day spying excursion in southern Germany.