I must confess that after reading a few pages of this book I wondered if I should have got some other book instead. The tale of British soldier Owen Morgan towards the end of WW2 didn't seem to make any sense, at least to me. Neither did the characters - Owen, Ezra, Simone, Steiner and others. It also didn't help that many of the terms like coxswain, mill race and Pioneers were totally unfamiliar and I was in no mood to trawl the net looking for the explanations.
But I didn't want to leave my last reading of 2013 halfway through. So I trudged on. And was glad in the end that I did.
As far as the plot goes, British soldier Owen Morgan is sent to an isolated part of Channel Islands - St. Pierre, where he grew up - in order to gather information about a secret project undertaken by the Nazis there. A band of American soldiers is sent with him to mine everything standing in water. This group gets captured but Morgan manages to hide in a secret location. He is forced to show himself when he finds that no one is willing to venture out on a mine-laden beach to save a man who has been washed on shore.
Enter Manfred Steiner, a German officer, who is in love with the same woman Morgan once loved, Simone. Morgan has every reason to hate Steiner and yet, he finds himself agreeing with the assessment that his friends on the island have made of the German - that he is a very remarkable man.
Morgan - and the rest of the people on the island, except for the SS men - have a very different opinion as far as Colonel Radl goes. They are proven right when Radl declares his intention to keep fighting, despite the fact that Hitler is dead and Germany has lost the war. Things come to a boil when a boat called Pride Of Hamburg tries to find its way to the island in very bad weather and Radl refuses to send anyone to the rescue of the people on board.
A few lines from the novel will remain forever etched in my memory:
The field of battle is a land of standing corpses. Those determined to die will live. Those who hope to escape with their lives will die.
Men die or get wounded or crippled for life for the same reason it rains for every day of the fortnight's holiday that some poor wretch has saved for, and looked forward to, for the whole of a working year. Things happen because they happen. No reason. No reason at all.
But I didn't want to leave my last reading of 2013 halfway through. So I trudged on. And was glad in the end that I did.
As far as the plot goes, British soldier Owen Morgan is sent to an isolated part of Channel Islands - St. Pierre, where he grew up - in order to gather information about a secret project undertaken by the Nazis there. A band of American soldiers is sent with him to mine everything standing in water. This group gets captured but Morgan manages to hide in a secret location. He is forced to show himself when he finds that no one is willing to venture out on a mine-laden beach to save a man who has been washed on shore.
Enter Manfred Steiner, a German officer, who is in love with the same woman Morgan once loved, Simone. Morgan has every reason to hate Steiner and yet, he finds himself agreeing with the assessment that his friends on the island have made of the German - that he is a very remarkable man.
Morgan - and the rest of the people on the island, except for the SS men - have a very different opinion as far as Colonel Radl goes. They are proven right when Radl declares his intention to keep fighting, despite the fact that Hitler is dead and Germany has lost the war. Things come to a boil when a boat called Pride Of Hamburg tries to find its way to the island in very bad weather and Radl refuses to send anyone to the rescue of the people on board.
A few lines from the novel will remain forever etched in my memory:
The field of battle is a land of standing corpses. Those determined to die will live. Those who hope to escape with their lives will die.
Men die or get wounded or crippled for life for the same reason it rains for every day of the fortnight's holiday that some poor wretch has saved for, and looked forward to, for the whole of a working year. Things happen because they happen. No reason. No reason at all.
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