Prologue
For all 17 million victims of the World War I, their partners, children, parents and friends.
Munich, 23 December 1987
Lucia Winter was trembling as she pressed the doorbell of a small house on the outskirts of Munich.
It was not really her way to be excited. She had already spoken to many people, written an article about them or even entire books.
But today was somehow different.
It wasn’t the snow falling in soft flakes on the small front garden and the cherry tree.
Nor was it the gentle wind, or the cold temperatures that made her shiver.
Something told her that something long gone was in the air here.
She flinched when a young lady opened the door for her. She had been so lost in her thoughts that she had forgotten that she had actually rung the doorbell.
“Aria Tomlinson,” the young woman introduced herself and invited the historian into the entrance hall. “You can just put your shoes with the others.”
Lucia was astonished: several pairs of children’s shoes, of different sizes, and many, many pairs of adult shoes stood neatly together.
“May I take your coat?” asked Aria kindly, to which Lucia nodded and picked up her briefcase from the floor again, placing her shoes with the others and looking at them expectantly. There were a few single snowflakes caught in her black hair.
“My father is in the kitchen,” Aria answered her silent question, and as she made her way through the entrance hall, she observed the many family pictures hanging on the playfully painted walls.
Laughing children could be heard from the living room, and Lucia believed they were all the children in the countless family photos.
One picture in particular, however, caught her eye: the picture of a young soldier, in his early twenties, in uniform, yet smiling. The picture was in brown tones and hung in a black frame on the wall.
Right next to it was the door to the living room. Six children were playing there on the floor with a large model railway and dolls. They were four boys and three girls who were jabbing at each other.
“These are my sister’s and my children,” Aria explained, pointing at the playing infants. “She’s out shopping right now, should be back any minute though.”
When the children noticed Lucia, they were silent for a moment, eyeing her up and down. It made her uncomfortable, but she tried not to let on.
“Who’s that, Mommy?” one of the girls asked, turning questioningly to her mother.
“This is the writer I told you about,” Aria explained, smiling fondly at her daughter. “The one who wants to speak to your grandfather in a moment.”
Aria led Lucia past a cosy fireplace, though there was no fire burning in it. Finally she entered the kitchen and looked into the bright blue eyes of the man she was actually here for:
Louis Tomlinson.
By now he was an old man, but it was his story that brought her here to the little house in Munich.
“There you are,” he smiled, still seeming very in shape for his 97 years.
He had just brewed some fresh tea. “Would you like some?”
Lucia nodded hesitantly and looked around unobtrusively. The kitchen was kept small, yet very spacious. The walls were of wooden panelling, and the kitchen furniture playful, also of wood.
The floor consisted of plain parquet and the curtains had a red-checked pattern.
Exactly how one would imagine a cottage kitchen to look, Lucia thought, but she said nothing, quietly accepted the cup of tea Louis offered her and followed him back into the living room.
The children had dressed in the meantime and gone into the garden to build a snowman.
At that moment a young woman came in the door with two shopping bags in her arms and a large German shepherd dog on a leash. “My God, what a hustle and bustle this town is,” she sighed, placing the bags on the floor before taking off her shoes. “It’s the same every year before the holidays, isn’t it?”
“Did you get everything?“, Aria wanted to know from her sister and she nodded.
“This is Mona, my sister,” she introduced her to Lucia. “And this is Lucia, the lady Dad was supposed to see today.”
Mona nodded and extended her hand politely before taking off her coat and letting the dog off the leash.
Finally, she too grabbed a cup of tea and sat down to join the round. Louis put a few logs in the fireplace and lit it.
A downright cosy, almost familiar atmosphere arose in the small living room.
Silence.
A whole minute of it.
When Louis sat down again, he was the first to regain his speech. “So they found my diary?”
“Yes,” Lucia replied, pulling an ancient diary, almost completely yellowed, out of her bag. “On a former battlefield in Ypres, Belgium.”
She placed it in the old man’s trembling hands and watched him look at it closely.
As Louis held it in his hands for the first time in almost 60 years, he felt tears welling up in his tired blue eyes.
He smiled bitterly. “I fought in all four Flanders battles near Ypres for years, and later at Verdun,” he began to tell, folding his arms in front of his chest. “I remember exactly where I buried it. I haven’t had it in my hands for over sixty-five years.”
“Why did you bury it?” Lucia wanted to know, marvelling at how fit Louis actually still was at his age.
A bitter laugh forced itself from the old man’s chest. “I was afraid it would fall into the wrong hands. In those days homosexuality was strictly forbidden, even today it is far from socially accepted. We would have been shot, after all we were two soldiers of opposing armies. No one knew about it. No one except Niall.”
Lucia smiled. “”You’ve unleashed a bit of a sensation with that though,” she said, taking a sip from her teacup, which she was still warming her frozen-through fingers on.
Louis smiled back. “It would have then, too. Just in a different, more vicious way.”
Lucia cleared her throat and glanced at her notes to ask him her first question:
“What do you remember most about that Christmas morning 73 years ago?”
Louis thought for a moment. He didn’t answer immediately, then took a deep breath and looked into her eyes. “The silence,” he finally answered. “That tremendously unfamiliar silence.”
