This is the seventh volume in the Posted As Missing series, so we'll begin with a précis of the first six books.

For those unfamiliar with, or a little rusty on, the history and geography of World War One, here are a few paragraphs to help set the scene.

On the first day of August 1914, the German Empire declared war on France and Russia. Three days later, they invaded neutral Belgium. Their intention was to quickly sweep across that country and into France to encircle Paris, causing the French to surrender. With that accomplished, they would turn their attention to the Russians.

As the German armies swarmed into Belgium, the Belgians destroyed their own railway bridges and other transportation infrastructure, slowing the advance toward Paris and forcing it to stall as it outran supply lines. The stalled German positions became the Western Front, and this remained rather stable during more than four years of horrific trench warfare.

With Belgian neutrality violated, on the 4th of August, the British Empire declared war on Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, bringing Canada and other Commonwealth nations into the conflict. Our story's hero, David Berry, volunteered as a soldier in the British Columbia Regiment in August 1914, in the weeks following the outbreak of the war. 

With 30,000 other Canadians, he was outfitted, trained and transported to England for further training. They arrived in France in February 1915, and within days, they were sent into the trenches to become accustomed to conditions at the Front. In mid-April, they were moved north to Flanders to take over large sections of the Front Line near Ypres.

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.

(Except for changing David's name, the foregoing is all fact. Now we begin a fictional story woven through unfolding events.)

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 quickly evolved 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 that 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 shopfront. 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, and then, as they continued talking, David started gently digging. Posted as Missing ended with David seeing possibilities of sabotaging the German war machine.

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

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

Volume Three, 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 crossed 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 saw 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. Back in Action ended the day after David had returned from a three-day spying excursion in southern Germany.

Volume Four, Watching Fritz, began with wedding and Christmas celebrations with family and the sabotage team at Sonnenhang. David's mission is changed by the Secret Service to identifying the sources Germany uses to produce its explosives. He moves to Bern, and after interference from a bumbling member of the aristocracy, he is promoted and appointed the British Military Attaché to Switzerland.

Using the Swiss identity of his wife's dead brother, he makes repeated trips into the industrial heart of Germany along the central Rhine, acting as a watch salesman. He and his team gather information to locate the ammonia-synthesising plant and its natural gas sources for hydrogen production. The sites are heavily guarded by soldiers, making an approach impossible except by air.

During his information gathering, David uncovered evidence pointing to a massive assault on Verdun. Unable to do anything but inform his superiors and have France warned, he monitored the unfolding battle as he waited for the aerial bombers to destroy or disable the gasworks and the ammonia plant. Adverse weather, the Fokker patrols and the short range of the French bombers had thus far prevented any success.

At this point in the story, David was juggling four identities:
- Lieutenant Colonel David Berry, DSO, Military Attaché to Bern;
- David Berry, a British Secret Service Bureau operative;
- Jacob David Meier, a sales agent for Rolex watches in Germany; and
- Jacob David Meier, a Swiss winemaker's son and a German deserter.

In his first identity, David is married to Maria, who is beginning another pregnancy after a miscarriage. The fifth volume of the story, Colonel Berry, began as he dropped her off at the Medical School of the University of Bern for her first lecture of the day. Then he drove northward under his fourth identity as his wife's dead brother, about to begin his mandatory Swiss Army indoctrination training.

His superior in London connected him with an espionage network in Schaffhausen, and they merged their efforts. The team destroyed eight coal gas plants in the central Rhine basin, prompting the Germans to heavily guard all their strategic locations, making it too dangerous to risk further sabotage missions.

During their covert activities in Germany under the guise of being Swiss artillery fuse salesmen, they had discovered how easy it is to approach and befriend the young women forced to work in munitions plants – particularly with Maria's insights and coaching on sexual attraction.

With sabotage missions too risky, plans turned to subversion. The men use the guise of being Swiss tourism promoters, showing the peacefulness of Switzerland while subtly showing the reality of the war and correcting misinformation in the newspapers and from the government.

David had met Prinz Wilhelm again, the prince wanting to negotiate the purchase of artillery fuses as they had discussed in their previous meeting. But with the Swiss requiring Germany to supply the necessary metals, the naval blockade made this impossible. So, while sharing a bottle of eiswein, they settled on another order of watches. As part of the deal, David agreed to the prince's request to find for him a selection of the best vintages of Château d'Yquem.

The wine would serve to maintain contact with the prince and to assure payment for the watches, as had been the previous promise to negotiate the supply of fuses. As Colonel Berry ended, David and Maria headed to Paris for a week with their grandparents to ferret out bottles of Château d'Yquem. Also, the time allowed David to gain a deeper experience and understanding of great wine, enabling him to keep ahead of Prinz Wilhelm's newfound thirst.

In the sixth volume, Subversion, David Berry shifts from sabotage to a subtler, far-reaching form of warfare. While travelling through Burgundy and Paris, he deepens his understanding of fine wine, luxury and social nuance, all of which become unexpectedly useful in his growing relationship with Crown Prince Wilhelm. Back in Switzerland, the mission expands at Sonnenhang, where David, Maria and their allies train teams to move through rural Germany as tourism promoters, quietly undermining official propaganda by awakening the discontent of the women left behind by the war.

As the operation broadens, David juggles espionage, diplomacy and logistics while dealing with crises in Bern, including the disgrace and removal of the unstable Wyndcom. New intelligence gathered from railways, newspapers, industrial contacts, and Wilhelm himself reveals growing strain inside Germany – military frustration, shortages of food and raw materials, and widening cracks between the Army, the leadership and the people. By the end of the volume, David's observations have become too important to be left at the edges of the war, and London calls him in, marking the end of one phase of his work and the beginning of a larger one.

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