Helena Schrader's Historical Fiction

Hitler's Demons -- An Introduction to Alexandra

2012-02-25T13:12:00.002+01:00

The following is an excerpt from Chapter 12 of Hitler's Demons:

Albrecht v. Rantzow was a tall, distinguished-looking man with greying side-burns and a cultivated English appearance. Colleagues jokingly claimed that he could easily be mistaken for Chamberlain himself -- something that he only pretended to dislike. He kissed his wife, gave his stepdaughter his cheek, and then asked the ladies if they wished to join him in an aperitif. Alix and her mother asked for sherry, while he poured himself a cognac.

"Did you have a nice day, dear?" his wife asked.

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"As good as can be expected," he answered, with a suddenly sour twist to his lips, turning at the waist to give a reproving look to Alix. She surmised he had learned about the impending invasion of the Soviet Union and no doubt blamed "the Generals" (and so Alix) for it. He turned politely back to his wife, "And you, Louisa?"

"I'm afraid Grete brought home some very disappointing grades," Frau von Rantzow broke the news to him gently.

Albrecht v. Rantzow's face clouded over at once. "What's the matter with the girl? There's nothing wrong with her intelligence. Why doesn't she apply herself more? She's just plain lazy!"

Alix did not consider this a fair judgment of Grete and would have liked to speak up on her behalf, but she knew her "interference" would not be appreciated. She had been nearly twelve when her mother remarried in 1925. To this day politeness and distance, rather than warmth and sympathy dominated their relationship. In any case, Alix's mother was quick to defend her younger daughter. "Now, Albrecht! That's not fair. She's just having a hard time adjusting after the five years in Paris."

"We've been back two years now. Plenty of time for her to settle in," Herr v. Rantzow insisted sternly.

"Naja, and would you really like it if she had adapted as well as Rudi?" his wife asked softly, but with a raised eyebrow.

Albrecht v. Rantzow was instantly silenced. There was nothing he wanted less than to have another Nazi in the house. After a moment of awkward silence, he asked, "Just where is Rudi?"

"Tonight's his soccer night."

Herr v. Rantzow looked at his watch. "It's already 7 o'clock. He should be home by now. He knows we eat punctually."

"It's some sort of special match. Against another Jungvolk troop, I think. He did warn me he might be late."

"Warn you? Since when do little boys warn their mothers? This is absolutely appalling. I won't tolerate it!" After the bad news about Grete, this was too much, and Herr v. Rantzow lost his temper. "It is bad enough that he's gone twice a week at the damn Jungvolk meetings. I will not tolerate him missing dinner a third night in the week. From now on, he'll be home on time on Fridays, or he will not be allowed to play football at all!"

"But, Albrecht -- " Frau v. Rantzow fell silent as Helga appeared in the doorway.

"Dinner is ready, Frau v. Rantzow."

"Thank you, Helga. You may go ahead and start serving. We'll be right out."

Alix went quickly to the downstairs toilet to wash her hands before joining the others on the terrace. As she joined them, she found Grete already energetically defending herself. "But, Papa, you were the one who said the Jews didn't cause the inflation. Don't you remember? I asked you how it was the Jews could make the inflation without hurting themselves since they used the same money as we do, and you siad it was all rubbish about them causing the inflation!"

Herr v. Rantzow looked somewhat embarrassed, while his wife wore the same I-told-you-so look she had used on Alix earlier.

"Grete," her father said sternly, "you are old enough to know that you don't repeat everything you hear at home in school. From now on, in school you repeat exactly what your teachers tell you and forget anything you've heard from your older sister or myself."

"But, Papa, if it isn't true--"

"Don't whine at me like that!"

Grete didn't risk any more defiance, but she clearly felt she was being unfairly handled. She pushed her hands between her knees and sat with hunched shoulders, pouting at her plate.

Alix, who had taken her place at the table, remarked in what she hoped was a casual tone as she removed her napkin from the silver ring, "Don't you think it's asking a lot of a child to expect her on the one hand to be honest and on the other to give answers she knows are false to her teachers?"

"Alix!" Her mother warned, anxious to avoid any confrontation between her eldest daughter and her second husband.

Herr v. Rantzow took the remark surprisingly calmly. "The girl has to learn how to get along in the real world. I'm afraid that the sooner she learns that survival requires a certain amount of hypocrisy, the better. Hypocrisy and apparent conformity with public opinion have become necessary nowadays."

Alix felt her temper rise. Although she didn't want to fight with her stepfather, she just couldn't let this remark stand unchallenged. "Adapt instead of resist, you mean?" she asked acidly.

Her stepfather leveled his steel-grey eyes at her and said firmly: "That is exactly what I mean. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by dramatic gestures of defiance. Least of all from a child. I realize, of course, that at your age, your actions are governed by idealism and emotion, but I can assure you, you will outgrow both. In the meantime, I expect you to scrupulously avoid misleading your impressionable younger sister. Now that is the end of the matter."

"May I ask a question?" Alexandra asked, in a tone that clearly reflected her resentment at being talked down to in this fashion.

Frau v. Rantzow sighed; Herr v. Rantzow waited with raised eyebrows.

"Agreeing with you that it is wrong to incite school-age children to futile gestures of defiance, I would nevertheless be curious to know at what point -- if any -- you consider the refusal to adapt an advisable course for an adult?"

"At that point where one can effect meaningful change and not merely endanger or disadvantage oneself and one's family."

"One more question, if I may?"

Herr v. Rantzow nodded.

"Was it then your conviction that you could not oppose the Regime in any worthwhile manner -- not even at the Embassy in Paris -- that induced you to become a member of the Nazi Civil Servant's Association?"

"Precisely -- and the fact that if I had not joined, my career in the Foreign Ministry would have been terminated. I do, after all, have a family to support. Your preference for heroics is a mark of your immaturity and irresponsibility. The head of a family cannot afford either. Is that clear?"

"Perfectly," Alexandra assured him, but he remained acutely aware of her disapproval.

"Hitler's Demons" Released

2012-02-18T15:22:00.000+01:00

My novel on the German Resistance to Hitler, first published in 2008 under the title An Obsolete Honor, has just been released in Kindle format under the new title Hitler's Demons.

An Obsolete Honor was well received, earning good reviews and winning a literary award from Readers Views in the "Global" Category in 2009. Below is the review written by Steve Donoghue for the Historical Novel Society. Since the content is identical, the review applies equally to Hitler's Demons.

Helena Schrader’s new novel An Obsolete Honor [Hitler's Demons] deals with a dilemma of 20th century history that’s often easily forgotten by the general public: the fact that many Germans in the late ‘30s weren’t Nazis, didn’t want to be Nazis, and didn’t at all like the Nazis.

This alone would make Schrader’s novel noteworthy, but it’s got much more to recommend it; this is a meaty, gripping, entirely impressive work of historical fiction, full of observant (and surprisingly wry) prose and dialog that rings true. Schrader has spent a great deal of time in Germany and interviewed many survivors of World War II, and as a result, the book feels effortlessly authentic in its details.

The plot centers on Philip Baron von Feldburg, an officer in the German army who intensely dislikes the changes he sees being ushered in by Nazism. His younger brother Christian is star struck by the Reich’s early military victories, and his sister Theresa confronts the domestic side of National Socialism when she marries an up-and-coming party member. Philip feels isolated in his discontents until he meets Alexandra Mollwitz, a General Staff worker who shares his disillusionment. It’s predictable that the two would fall in love, but it’s handled so winningly that the reader is only pleased.

Alexandra is the most remarkable and memorable character in An Obsolete Honor [Hitler's Demons], especially as she and Philip become involved in various plots to assassinate Hitler and end the madness of the war. Actual historical figures mix with fictional characters in the time-honored way of so many historical novels, and Schrader’s portrayals are uniformly believable, even when she’s writing about full-blown Nazi psychopaths. Readers will, of course, be prepared for several less-than-happy endings, but hope also survives. This novel is enthusiastically recommended.

Steve Donoghue

I hope this review will encourage those of you who don't already have a copy of An Obsolete Honor to buy either it or Hitler's Demons. If you do, don't forget to write your own review on amazon.com when you finish.

What’s in a Name: The Importance of Titles

2012-02-10T21:26:00.000+01:00

Titles have always been important. Everyone knows that. The problem is deciding just what constitutes a “good” title – keeping in mind that fashions for titles change at least as frequently as fashion for shoes.

Furthermore, a good title must fulfill multiple functions. It must have some relationship to the content of the book it designates. It must be notable. It must be comparatively unique. It must attract the right readers. And, nowadays, it must also work-well for on-line search engines. Fulfilling all these functions can be difficult, to say the least.

Authors of non-fiction rarely have difficulty finding a title that describes the content of their book (“Accounting Fundamentals” or “American Gardening ”) are both good solid titles, for example, that tell the reader what the book is about and will therefore attract the right readers – those interested in accounting or gardening respectively. Such titles also work well for search engines because the key words that a reader would use to search for books about accounting or gardening are built directly into the title.

The problem for non-fiction writers is more often coming up with a title that is comparatively unique and notable. Without even looking it up, I’ll bet there are a lot of books that are called “The Fundamentals of Accounting,” or “Accounting Basics” or “Basic Accounting” etc. The same is true for gardening. To be notable, therefore, non-fiction authors need to look for some means of spicing up their titles, e.g. “Accounting for Dummies” or “Sexy Accounting,” for example. The risk here is the author, who names his/her book “Sexy Accounting” and delivers a very dry book will soon get bad reviews from disappointed readers. Alternatively, a non-fiction author can try to make the topic more unique by being more specific: “Granit Gardening on the Maine Coast,” for example.

An increasingly popular alternative to trying to find the perfect “catchy” but informative title is to use subtitles. Let me use an example from my own books. My comparative study of women pilots in the U.S. and the U.K. during WWII needed a better title than: “Women Pilots in the U.S. and U.K during WWII.” I played with “Winged Auxiliaries” and the publisher chose “Sisters in Arms.” The later titles are short, notable, and “catchy,” but alone they might have attracted the wrong readers. Readers of non-fiction want to know what a book is about before they even pick it up because they are only going to buy it, if it is about a subject that interests them. Thus, my book became: “Sisters in Arms: British and American Women Pilots in World War Two.” Another example is my book on the Berlin Airlift. “The Berlin Airlift” is a short, notable title – that has been used scores of times already. Titling the book “The Blockade Breakers” gave it a unique identity, but on its own would have been insufficiently informative; there have been too many blockades in the course of history to tell a prospective reader what period of history and what part of the globe the book was about. So the title became: “The Blockade Breakers: The Berlin Airlift.”

Fiction, of course, has totally different rules. Traditionally, the titles of fiction books needed to be catchy, intriguing, poetic, or evocative – but not necessarily informative. Nothing about “Gates of Fire” tells us this is a novel set in ancient Greece. Yet not being informative is not the same as having nothing to do with the inside. Anyone who reads “Gates of Fire” quickly learns that Thermopylae means “hot gates” in Greek and understands that “Gate of Fire” refers to the battle at Thermopylae.

For my novel about the German Resistance, I initially chose the title “An Obsolete Honor,” because the main character in the book, a German aristocrat, feels that opposing Hitler is the only way he can retain his personal honor as an honest and upright man, yet also recognizes that his sense of honor is completely obsolete in the 20th Century.

But there is a problem. In 2010 (I don’t have the figures for 2011 yet) roughly 67,500 novels were published in the United States. That’s a lot of titles. To get a reader to take an interest in your particular title and want to read the book is difficult among competition like that. Furthermore, even the best novels are not universally appealing. There are a lot of readers who like mystery novels – and probably just as many who don’t. The same is true for historical fiction, romance, science fiction, fantasy and all the other genres. Even “literary” novels that allegedly have a universal appeal do not really appeal to readers who don’t like that kind of “literary junk.” This suggests that a title is more likely to succeed if it can flag something about at least its genre in order to attract readers of that genre. Murder mysteries like to have the word “murder” or “blood” or something that evokes crime and thrills in the title, for example.

And then there is the issue of search engines. People looking online for a book to read are most likely to type in key words having to do with the subject of a book because if they type in “novel” they’re going to get millions of entries – 67,000 from last year plus all the books from previous years! If they type in “historical novel” the field might be reduced to just a couple 100,000 – but that’s still too many. If they type in “historical novel, WWII” the field narrows again etc. etc. If an author wants to increase the probability of his/her title landing on the first page of a search, he/she needs to have a title that puts the book in a searchable category. This is the main reason I decided to change the title of “An Obsolete Honor” to “Hitler’s Demons.” A book with Hitler in the title immediately tells the reader it is about WWII.

Furthermore, because of search engines, it is also becoming increasingly common – though by no means standard – to add subtitles to novels. If nothing else, books often have “A Novel” prominently placed on the cover near the title to help readers know what they are getting. (People like to know if they are getting facts or fiction right from the start.) The subtitle, furthermore, enables an author to retain a catchy, non-specific title while still providing information. For example, based on the poem “High Flight” written by an American Spitfire pilot early in WWII, I selected the title “Chasing the Wind” for my novel about the Battle of Britain, and added the subtitle: “A Novel about British and German Pilots During the Battle of Britain.”

Here, however, I ran into another problem. “Chasing the Wind” was just too good a title. Within just a couple of years my “Chasing the Wind” had been displaced by a half dozen others with topics ranging from sailing around the world to wind power. I needed a new title to move my title up in search engine results, and my publisher and I came up with the title “Where Eagles Never Flew.” Nobody likes this title as much as “Chasing the Wind” but it evokes flying, is based on the same poem (“High Flight”) and with the more concise subtitle “A Battle of Britain Novel” is selling significantly better than its predecessor. We shortened the subtitle, by the way, based on what key words were most commonly used for searching. “Battle of Britain” was such a popular search phrase that the rest of the sub-title was just getting in the way.

By the time I was ready to publish my novels on Leonidas, online sales of my books had become so important that I decided to give the key search engine phrase “Leonidas of Sparta” prominence as the title, and make the individual titles of the three part biographical novel the sub-titles. While somewhat awkward, sales suggest it was the right strategy.

Finding the “right” title for a book is, however, always tricky and I have often considered dozens of possible titles before settling on one. As the examples above illustrate, I have made mistakes and needed to “re-brand” a novel entirely in two cases already. Readers of this blog know that I look for reader in-put as well as I struggle to find titles for new works.

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer -- "A Must Read"

2012-02-04T12:39:00.000+01:00

Quantico1 published a review of "A Peerless Peer" and awarded it a full five stars! Thanks Quantico1 -- whoever you are! As I've said before, reviews are always a benefit to writers and other readers, so please don't be shy about posting reviews online of any books you read! Now Quantico1's review:

Most novels (and motion pictures) dealing with Sparta dwell mostly on the military aspects of this strange society, and rightly so--Sparta may have arguably produced history's most formidable soldiers. Helena Schrader's "A Peerless Peer" takes a different tack. Schrader's approach is to create a story rich in the detail of relationships, from the inevitable rivalries between the Royal houses to the more mundane lives of the Spartan state serfs known as Helots.

Leonidas, the future king and hero of Thermopylai, is the main character. The novel (second in a trilogy) follows his life after he becomes an adult in the Spartan army. In intricate and at times speculative detail, Schrader builds a very human portrait of this legendary king while contrasting him with his brothers, especially his twin Cleombrotus. Through a myriad of experiences and interactions, Leonidas character is built, layer upon layer, revealing his altruism, courage and personal integrity in a society where virtue was the ultimate measure of a man.

The character of Gorgo, his future wife, is developed as richly as Leonidas. She is precocious, headstrong, intelligent, and a driving force in the story. All the other players of the era are addressed from Cleomenes to Aristogoras, adding a Herodotean authenticity to the novel.

This is a highly recommended "must read" for anyone interested in ancient Sparta.

Birth of a Book, Part 10 -- Marketing

2012-01-26T19:57:00.000+01:00

This is the last part of a ten part series on the stages involved in producing a novel.

Most aspiring writers I know do not expect or want to market their books. I was no different when I started writing. I considered myself a “writer,” an “artist.” Marketing was something slightly dirty, money grubbing, something for “ad executives” and Madison Avenue. I remember telling people that "my books are my children – they may not be perfect but I love them, warts and all. You can’t sell you children!" I felt it was both beneath my dignity and beyond my capacity to aggressively get out and sell my books. I felt, furthermore, that selling books required a totally different set of skills from writing them. Even if, I told myself, I had the time to sell books (which I don’t), I wouldn’t know how to do it or be very good at it if I tried.

But as I mentioned earlier, commercial publisher have only limited budgets, which are dedicated for the most part to the books of already famous people and successful authors, while print-on-demand publishers don’t do any marketing at all. Furthermore, the sheer number of books coming onto the market makes it increasingly important to market books.

To understand the situation, let me provide some key statistics:

• In 2010 roughly 450,000 books were published in the USA.

• Of these, roughly 135,000 were self-published

• Roughly 15% of all published books were novels; e.g. some 67,000 novels were published in the U.S. in 2010 alone.

• Less than 3% of all books published in the USA sold more than 1,000 copies. That’s about 13,500 books – a lot of books! – but still only 3%.

• Today, on average, each published title sells 70 copies. That means for every best seller that sells 10,000s, 100,000s or even a million books, there are a lot of books out there that sell only a handful of copies.

In short, if you are not a celebrity or an otherwise already a successful author, the chances are your book is going to be one of those that sells less than seventy copies – unless you are prepared to do something to promote your book yourself. Thus, whether you like the idea of marketing your book on not, and whether you think you are suited to the task or not, it is advisable to be prepared to market your own product.

There are two ways of doing this, of course. One is to hire a professional book or literary publicist. There are many agencies offering marketing and publicity services to authors today. Many are very professional and good. They are not cheap. I was quoted a price of $1,000 per day by one London agency -- with no guarantees of success. There are also a lot of agencies out there offering services at a reasonable price. Most of these have a standard package of services (press release, reviews, website, social media page, twitter, book fairs, contests). They do not have time to read the books they market. They don’t need to. They rely heavily on in-put from the author and operate using a “cookie cutter” approach. They can afford to charge reasonable fees precisely because they churn out marketing materials for lots of books that are pretty much the same regardless of the book.

Alternatively, you can try to do all the marketing yourself. This requires a lot of time, effort and above all patience. At a minimum, you will need at least one website with considerable content – not just the cover image and cover blurb. You will need to have a blog -- again with serious content that is updated regularly. You should be prepared to surf the internet for the blogs and websites of your competitors and to actively take part in social media forums on topics related to your book. Other things you can do are:

• Enter your book in literary contests

• Place ads for your book in newspapers, journals etc.

• Pay to have your book to be displayed at book fairs

• Organize readings and signings at your local book shop (but don’t expect a lot of people to come!)

Most important, be creative. The world of book marketing is wide, wild and constantly changing.

Just remember, unless you are prepared to market you finished product, that wonderful flash of inspiration that you had at the start of the creative process is likely to be drowned in the ocean of books flooding the market and will end up as one of those titles that does not sell even 100 copies.

Birth of a Book, Part 9: Reviews

2012-01-13T19:11:00.000+01:00

This is the ninth part of a ten part series on process of producing a novel.

Reviews are both a mirror and a marketing tool. They are to be valued for both reasons.

Reviews – honest, objective reviews from strangers – are the very best way to assess your success as a novelist. Obviously, not every reviewer is fair or honest, and I have become disgusted with the number of reviewers who only regurgitate back what was on the cover blurb or in the “Forward” or “Notes” of the book itself. But increasingly, through online retailers, authors are getting a lot more feedback from real readers. These reviews may not be from famous critics and they may lack literary style, but they are from the very people you depend on to buy your books. The unexpected reviews from readers I never dreamed my books would appeal to are those that have been most exciting and satisfying, while complaints from readers about one or another aspect of my books make me rethink my writing. Thus the “mirror” function of reviews should never be neglected.

The marketing function of reviews is, however, increasingly important, particularly for the self-published novelist. In the absence of a large distribution network and well-connected executives, reviews are the single most important means of convincing readers that your book has value. Press releases may tell them about the content, and book signings might draw attention to the title. Ads may create a degree of name recognition. Interviews will generally focus on the process of writing and the author’s objectives. Reviews, however, offer readers more than all of the above. Reviews provide an assessment.

This has led many novelists into the temptation of buying good reviews or pushing family and friends into writing favorable reviews. Such methods work for a while, but even assuming potential customers don’t see through them from the start, people who are misled into buying a book that doesn’t meet expectations are the first to post their own negative reviews on the sites of online retailers. If you have as many one star reviews as five star reviews, readers are going to guess that the five star reviews were fake.

Furthermore, I have had readers tell me that they don’t bother to read 5 star reviews, assuming these rave reviews are just “hype.” They prefer to read the critical reviews because these generally address both the positive and negative, the successful and the less successful aspects of the book. These sophisticated readers, incidentally, usually also dismiss as “crap” any review that is simply insulting. In short, the reviews taken most seriously by these decerning readers are those in the 3 to 4 star category.

Nor should we forget the importance of quantity. A book with no or only one review looks like it hasn’t been read very much. It looks like a loser. A book with scores of reviews looks like a winner. Bestsellers have hundreds of reviews. So, let me take this opportunity to appeal to all of you – my readers – to post reviews of any of my novels that you have read. They don’t have to be long. Just tell others what you liked – or didn’t like – about my books.

Thank you!

(Note: My next entry will be January 28 after I return from holiday.)

Birth of a Book, Part 8: Self-Publishing

2012-01-07T09:15:00.000+01:00

This is the eighth part of a ten part series on the process of producing a novel.

Self-publishing got a bad name from “vanity” publishing, a racket in which a “publisher” charges an author an outrageous fee to “publish” a book. I know all about it. I did it and got burned. The bottom line is that such schemes not only allow a lot of books of execrable quality to be published, they also kill good books because these are simply dumped on the market and left to die. Vanity publishers do no marketing for books whatsoever and often go bankrupt at regular intervals to avoid paying any royalties to authors who have managed to sell their own books.

In today’s world, however, “self-publishing” is also used to describe “print-on-demand” publication services. Here too the author pays for a professional to format, print, register and list his/her book. Often cover design is included in a standard package or as an extra service. The author can select formats from hard to trade paperback and ebooks. Kindle formatting is increasing popular. These pay-for-service publishers differ significantly from the “vanity publishers” because their charges are reasonable, but just like “vanity publishers,” they do no marketing for the books published under their imprint. They list the books with the major wholesalers and online retailers, but they do not market them.

While this may sound like a serious disadvantage, readers of my blog entry about commercial publishers will remember that the majors don’t necessarily do a great deal of marketing for the all their titles either. If you are a new author or you have a book with only a niche market that probably won’t attract the attentions of the majors anyway, self-publishing is a viable, possibly attractive, alternative.

I have become a convert to self-publishing ever since I found Wheatmark, a very reputable and competent publishing partner. (Note: not all pay-for-service publishers are either reputable or competent and you should do careful research on line before selecting one.) The main advantages of self-publishing are: 1) time to market, 2) control of the product, and 3) control of the marketing and publicity.

Time to market is much faster with a self-published book. Commercial publishers generally take a year or more after a manuscript has been accepted for publication. Self-publishing generally takes half that, and can take as little as 4 months if the manuscript is in good shape.

Control of the product is, of course, even more important. No editor at a pay-for-service publisher is going to tell you to “make this a happy ending,” or slap a cover on the front that you abhor. They do reject manuscripts that are offensive, pornographic, slanderous, incite to violence etc. etc. or of too poor quality, but if they accept a manuscript and you are playing by the rules, they are not going to start trying to interfere with your product. Likewise, they will not accept amateurish covers and have excellent graphic designers on hand to help design an attractive cover for you, but if you have a good design, they will let you use it. They are not going to force you to accept something you do not want. Instead, you will have the opportunity to work with them until you have something with which you are both comfortable.

Finally, because they do not pretend to do any marketing for you, you know from the start that marketing and publicity are all up to you. Knowing that, you can design your own marketing and publicity campaigns, or you can hire other professionals to do this for you. You decide how much time and money you want to invest. You decide if you want to do a “hard” or “soft” sell. You decide what aspect of your book you want to stress.

Ultimately the biggest disadvantage of self-publishing is that you really have no one else to blame if things go very wrong, but I have personally found the experience enlightening and educational – if not always satisfying.

Birth of a Book, Part 7: Agents

2011-12-29T19:51:00.000+01:00

This is the seventh part of a ten part series on the process of producing a novel.

In my last entry I mentioned that many commercial publishers nowadays will not accept manuscripts directly from authors. Instead they require manuscript submissions to come through literary agents. As a rule, there are more publishers of non-fiction books that do not require representation, while publishers of fiction almost always do.

Agents, like publishers, generally have specialties and preferences. Therefore, an author should very carefully research literary agents and approach only those with an interest in representing the kind of fiction they write. The best way to select potential agents is to consult one of the many reference books about the publishing industry such as the annual “Writer’s Market: Where and How to Sell What You Write” or Jeff Herman’s “Guide to Book Publishers, Editors & Literary Agens” which is also updated regularly.

However, keep in mind that it is almost as difficult to get an agent as a publisher. Maybe harder. The most recent statistic I heard is that literary agents receive between 70 and 80 manuscripts per week. That makes for roughly 3,750 manuscripts a year. No agent reads all submissions. In fact, as a rule agents read parts of maybe one tenth of the manuscripts they receive. Most submitssion are rejected based on the letter of inquiry alone. "Thanks very much but we are not taking any new clients at this time...." Or "thank you for your submission but we see no market for a book of this kind...." etc. etc.

Even if you get past the first cut (which may be made by an intern or very junior employee), agents still rarely read an entire manuscript. They will read a couple of chapters at most and rapidly make a decision about whether they like the book enough to want to represent it or not. On average, a literary agent will sign on 1-2 new customers per year. Many refuse to take new customers at all, feeling they have enough work with the clients they already have. In short, you’re probably going to have to write to a lot of agents before you find representation. Once you have an agent, they – at least in theory – should be able to open doors to publishers, but they make no guarantees.

My own experience with agents is not very good. Let me explain. After I did my research in the above references and carefully selected only those agents who specifically stated an interest in the subject and genre of my book and indicated they were still accepting clients, I approached 18 different agents. I carefully followed the individual guidelines about whether I should submit electronically or in hard copy, whether to send a synopsis or first chapter etc. etc., and followed instructions about a short introductory letter meticulously. Yet all eighteen agents rejected the manuscript (unseen) because there was “no market” for the book. Since I’d already written book, however, and this was a piece of non-fiction, I decided to approach publishers directly. I found six publishers that specialized in the genre (aviation history) and wrote letters of inquiry to them. Three (50%!) showed interest, and I rapidly signed a contract with one of them. What is more, I have since sold the TV rights to this book. In short, there was a comparably hot market for the very book that all 18 literary agents specializing in the genre claimed there was no market for. This suggested to me that not one of them knew the very market they purported to be experts about very well.

After this experience, I felt there was very little point wasting time, effort and emotion on intermediaries who appeared to be more a hindrance to success than agents of it. I have never written to a literary agent since, but that is a personal choice and many of you may find agents receptive and helpful. Certainly, as stated above, they are the “door keepers” to the larger, commercial publishers. As I outlined earlier, there are advantages to publishing with “the majors," so if they are your target an agent may be an necessary evil. However, the other option is self-publishing, a topic I will discuss in a later blog entry.

Birth of a Book 6: Commercial Publishers

2011-12-10T07:24:00.000+01:00

This is the sixth part of a ten part series on the process of producing a novel.

I have published four of my books with commercial or trade publishers and the rest have been self-published. Both forms of publication have their advantages and disadvantages. This week I will address the advantages and disadvantages of commercial publishers.

The first thing aspiring novelists should know about major publishers is that on average they accept only 1% of all books submitted to them in any one year.

Second, the major publishers don’t really want “niche” books. Just like the big pharmaceutical firms, they want every book they publish to be a “block buster.” After all, they have large staffs and fancy, expensive New York or London offices to finance. In fact, the overheads are so high that despite being very picky about which books the publish (see above), they still lose money on 9 out of 10 books. In short, books have to have the potential make a lot of money before a major publisher can afford to invest in them. Books most likely to make "big bucks" are books by celebrities – or already successful authors. I recently heard that publishers won’t even look at a book from an author who doesn’t have 2,000 twitter followers. It’s not easy to have that number of followers, if you aren’t already famous.

Last but not least, because the majors want books with “universal” appeal, very, very few accept “unsolicited” manuscripts. This means that in most cases you will need an agent in order to even approach a commercial publisher with a manuscript. (Next week I will discuss agents.)

The greatest advantages commercial publishers offer are well established and extensive distribution networks, marketing expertise and large marketing budgets. If a commercial publisher decides to invest in a book, they can - and do - spend hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars doing so. They can buy bookstore window space, space in airport bookstores, ads in important publications, TV-spots, radio-spots, etc. etc. etc. They have the relationships to editors and talk-show hosts that will increase the probability that your book will be prominently reviewed, that you will get invited to appear on TV or give radio interviews – all those things you see successful writers doing.

But every aspiring author should understand that publishers can’t afford to do that for every book they publish. Big as the marketing budgets appear to be, they are nevertheless finite and far too small to market all titles equally. Publishers need to allocate resources carefully. What this means is that they invest the bulk of their marketing resources in only a tiny percentage of their titles. Furthermore, they tend to invest where they expect the greatest return on investment. In plain language: the more famous you are, the more marketing support you can expect. If you are already a celebrity (rock star, national politician, popular athlete), your book will be given the lion’s share of the marketing budget. If you are the new kid on the block, the first-time author, you are going to get the scraps. These can be so meager you may hardly notice anything.

Despite the comparative success of my four non-fiction books, I have found self-publishing more satisfying for my novels. I’ll discuss why in future entries.

Results of Last Week's Survey

2011-12-03T09:35:00.001+01:00

Dear Followers,

Thanks for participating in last weeks' survey on a new title for Book III of the Leonidas Trilogy. Participation and feedback was high, and I especially appreciated hearing from some of you directly with your own suggestions. In fact, one suggestion was so good that after consulting with my publisher, cover designer, editor and other professionals, I have selected it. Everyone's input was important, however, because the results showed a clear preference for a sleek title.

The results were as follows:

56% voted for Leonidas: A Spartan King
Equal numbers (18%) voted for Leonidas of Sparta: An Extraordinary King or Leonidas: Sparta's Quintessential King.
Only 8 % chose Leonidas: Sparta's Indomitable King

The selected title reflects the majority preference for a direct -- well, Laconic -- title. Clear text. The third book in the trilogy will be titled:

Leonidas of Sparta: A Heroic King.

The first draft cover has also been designed, so all is still on track with this book. I'll resume the series on "Birth of a Book" next week with a post about commercial publishers.

Help Select a Title for Book III of the Leonidas Trilogy

2011-11-26T12:19:00.001+01:00

Dear Followers,

I'd like your feedback on the title for Book III of the Leonidas Trilogy, so I'm interrupting my series on "Birth of a Book" to conduct a survey.

Regards Leonidas, the third book in the trilogy following Leonidas of Sparta: A Boy of the Agoge, and Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer describes the last 12 years of Leonidas' life. It focuses on how Leonidas became king of Sparta, on his reign, the conflict with Persia and, of course, his death at Thermopylae.

When I originally conceived of the Trilogy, I tentatively titled the last book "A Dispensable King" because I thought this provocative title might arrouse curiousity and so attract readers. However, I am increasingly uncomfortable with this title. First and foremost, it does not describe Leonidas or his importance to Sparta and History. Thus while the title might be witty and provocative, it is still inadequate. I've come up with some alternatives and would greatly appreciate you taking the time to vote in my survey.

Feel free to send me your own suggestions as well -- either as a comment or an email. Keep in mind, however, that both "Leonidas" and "Sparta" (or a form there of) must be included in the title and a close parallel to the titles of the first two books in the trilogy is also important.

Thank you!

Birth of a Book, Part 5: Editing

2011-11-19T12:41:00.000+01:00

This is the fifth part of a ten part series on the process of producing a novel.

Most aspiring but unpublished writers I have met believe that editing is something the publisher does. This is a misconception. Publishers employ editors and publishers can do (usually for a fee) some more in-depth editing if necessary, but the bulk of a book’s editing is up to the author. The bottom line in today’s competitive market is: a poorly edited book doesn’t get accepted by an agent or commercial publisher, while if you’re self-publishing, a poorly edited book is simply a disgrace and embarrassment.

In short, every author should expect and plan to take responsibility for editing their book. This can take two forms: you can do it yourself or you can hire a professional to do it for you. I personally find that a combination of these two forms of editing works best.

Because an author – particularly after two or three re-writes – knows exactly what he/she intends to say, it is virtually impossible to see even glaring errors. I can’t say how many times I have turned over a manuscript I think is “perfect” to a reader, only to have them find screaming mistakes on the first page. As soon as these are pointed out to me, I ask myself “how could I miss that?” The mistake, once pointed out, jumps out at me snarling and howling like a vicious dog, but there it is: I had read and re-read and read again that very page and never seen the error -- until someone else pointed it out to me. For this reason I have learned to send my manuscripts to a professional, freelance editor as soon as I feel it is finished in form and structure. This is also a good opportunity to get a little distance and perspective on the project so that when I look at it again, I too have a “fresh” eye.

When the editor returns the manuscript after a first round of cleaning up typos, spelling and grammar, I go through the manuscript again. The objective this time is not to change content but to polish style. This is not about whether the characters are doing and saying the things they need to do to move the story forward, reveal their true nature or convey the themes, but about whether phraseology is awkward or anachronistic, words are used too repetitively, sentence structure is clear and effective and the like. I find this kind of editing can only be done in small doses. It is better to look at the manuscript only one scene at a time and really take time to edit. Efforts to rush this stage usually backfire. When I take time with each scene, however, I am usually amazed by how much the language itself can be tightened and fine-tuned to produce a clearer, crisper image that allows the characters to stand out against a more vivid backdrop while keeping action and suspense alive.

Once I have finished going through each and every scene looking for ways to make the writing more effective, I send the whole manuscript back to the professional editor again. This is both to eliminate the typos, spelling and punctuation errors that have crept into the manuscript as a result of the latest re-write and also to give the editor the opportunity to look at everything again or give a new editor the opportunity to comb the manuscript for errors.

Only now is the manuscript ready for a publisher.

Birth of a Book, Part 4: The Re-Write

2011-11-11T17:40:00.000+01:00

This is the fourth part of a ten part series on the process of producing a novel.

If writing the first draft of a novel is like eating dessert, the re-write is like eating the main-course. The pleasure is less intense and ecstatic, but it is nevertheless satisfying and sustaining.

In my experience, no novel – or scene for that matter – is perfect at its inception. If nothing else, when writing at a fast pace to get the raw idea/inspiration translated into coherent words, it is normal to make typographical if not spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors. Such corrections fall more properly under editing which I’ll discuss later. Today I want to focus on something more fundamental.

Even if a novelist writes one brilliant chapter after another, with each scene therein a masterpiece, the novel as whole will probably still need re-writing. This is because a novel evolves during the writing process, particularly if it takes, as it often does, years to write. By the time the last scene of a novel is written, when the ending is final and the author knows this is “it,” there are likely many aspects or parts of the early portions that no longer fit properly. Essentially, because a novelist rarely knows how individual characters will evolve and because in the course of a novel important sub-plots and ancillary themes evolve, the beginning usually needs to be re-examined after the end is certain.

The first re-write is, therefore, a matter of going back to page one and re-reading each scene again with the final form of the novel in mind. This is not merely a matter of removing extraneous or superfluous material, it usually entails adding things as well. For example, if in the latter portion of a novel a particular character or theme have become more important, it may be necessary to provide more information about the character earlier or foreshadow thematic developments. This may require the drafting of completely new scenes or even chapters. In the extreme, it may require a completely new beginning to the novel.

Once the structure of a novel stands, i.e. the beginning and end are set and the episodes of the novel are complete and lined up in the correct order, I personally find it useful to let a novel sit for a year or two. Ideally, I am already at work on the next novel, and set the finished one aside without further thought to concentrate on the new project. Alternatively, if I am anxious to get a book to print, then I like to get the opinion of others while I take a break from the book of at least two months.

During this phase, the rough draft of the novel is sent to several people for candid but constructive feedback. Based on the suggestions of these readers, I undertake a new re-write. Again, this may include cutting or adding entire scenes. More often it entails massaging existing scenes to make them sharper and more effective, or it may entail providing additional background information about characters and developments. This is the stage in which I test how effectively I have communicated my message. I see the re-write as an opportunity to adjust the method of telling the story to make it more successful.

There is no set number of re-writes that a novel must undergo, but experience certainly helps reduce the number. My first novels (such as An Obsolete Honor) underwent at least a dozen re-writes. More recent novels, like my Leonidas Trilogy, are not taking more than two to three.

Birth of a Book, Part 3: First Draft

2011-11-05T07:23:00.000+01:00

This is the third part of a ten part series on the process of producing a novel.

In the past I have compared writing the first draft of a novel episode to eating Tiramasu – or any other sweet that one absolutely adores. This is because, at least for me, writing a fictional scene for the very first time always produces a rush of satisfaction similar to a heavy dose of sugar/chocolate.

The most delicious aspect of writing anything for the first time is the excitement of not really knowing what the end product will look like. Even though I always know what I intend to write, I can never be sure where the creative process will actually lead me. A finished first draft is always full of surprises: unexpected developments, witty repartee from my characters or maybe just an unexpectedly vivid image.

Obviously, there are bad days when these unexpected plot changes or a head strong character lead straight to a dead end. I have been known to write a large chunk of novel only to be brought to an abrupt halt by the realization that I am not where I want to be. Curiously, sometimes I have fun writing even these scenes, but usually when I wander too far off course, it is like getting lost -- or eating too much of a particularly heavy desert! --and I end up feeling frustrated or angry with myself.

Fortunately, such misadventures are comparatively rare. It is far more common to find myself on a delightful journey into a new and wonderful place. As the story unfolds, I feel I am as much an observer as a creator. At one level, of course, the novelist is the person recording the story and translating the ideas/images/emotions etc. into a form that can be transmitted to others. On another level, however, the novelist is just a tool of a greater creative force, the servant of the idea that is the novelist’s inspiration.

Thus, when I plunge into writing an episode or scene for the first time, I have the pleasure of anticipation; I know I’m about to experience something new. The writing itself sweeps me up and absorbs me completely. The images and emotions I am describing envelop me. The words flow onto the page with little conscious thought. And then I sit back with a sense of being full and satisfied – just like when one finishes a piece of hot apple pie.

Birth of a Book, Part 2: Research

2011-10-29T11:08:00.001+02:00

This is the second part of a ten part series on the process of producing a novel.

Last week I wrote about the role of inspiration in the creation of a novel. While inspiration is critical to the ultimate success of a novel, it can land an author in a difficult situation. Lucky is the novelist whose inspiration is for a novel set in a familiar place and time. If that is the case, it’s easy to get started right away. This is one reason why many teachers of creative writing recommend their students “write about things they know” and the reason why many successful “novels” are thinly disguised autobiography.

However, if the inspiration is a call to write about an environment with which the author is not already intimately familiar, then a great deal of research is required before the actual writing begins. As a historian, I am particularly fanatical about this point, but it applies to books set in different countries, classes, generations and work-places as well as books set in different time periods. For example, if you want to write a book about a contemporary police officer, pilot, or professional athlete but have never done the work of a policeman/pilot/athlete, you need to do some serious research before you even start. The same goes for a novel set in a different country – even if your characters have your own nationality. No novel, no matter how inspired the plot-line or sympathetic the characters will succeed if the environment in which the action occurs is flat, vague or blatantly inaccurate. Remember, if your book is set in modern times, it is far easier for readers familiar with the milieu you describe to spot errors, inconsistencies or lack of depth -- and complain loudly in reviews.

Good research is therefore almost always part of the writing process and it has four very important benefits. First, good research will enable the novelist to produce a vivid environment – an effective and colorful stage on which the characters can act. In other words, research will yield up details about places, professions, customs, contemporary culture, technology and fashion – all things which will enable the novelist to evoke the scenery, surroundings and life-style of the protagonists in the novel.

Second, research may impact the shape of the novel itself. I have often found that the shadowy outline of the book that emerged from the initial idea starts to take on clear contours and may even change shape significantly as research progresses. Research may in the extreme reveal that an original idea was implausible, but usually also suggests an alternative that works better than the original.

Third, research can help give the characters clearer features and defining traits. The more one knows about the environment in which the characters need to operate, the easier it is to understand them – how they think, why they act certain ways, what they are likely to feel in certain situations. Research will help you visualize the kind of dreams they are likely to have, and help you understand the fears and inhibitions they will have absorbed from the society around them. Learning about the culture, social structures, educational and judicial systems of a novel’s proposed setting enables a novelist to give the ghostly figures of early inspiration flesh, blood, and depth of character – not to mention the right clothes and personal habits.

Finally, research usually uncovers so many intriguing new facts about an unfamiliar place, time, or milieu that inspiration follows. Long before I’ve finished with the research for one novel, I usual have several ideas for other novels set in the same environment. Thus research is rather like investment, returning far more than one spends on it in terms of quality products and new ideas.

Birth of A Book, Part 1: The Idea

2011-10-22T12:12:00.002+02:00

This is the first of a ten part series on the process of producing a novel.

In my experience, the origin of a novel distinguishes itself from the origin of a work of non-fiction by the role of inspiration. I have written and published four non-fiction works, and each of these came into being as the result of a rational process. In each case, I considered a variety of topics that might meet my objectives for the book, did market research on what books were already available on these and similar topics, adjusted the focus as appropriate and then got to work.

Selecting the topic for a novel, in contrast, is not a rational process. Ultimately, people don’t read or like novels for rational reasons either. Novels by their nature must appeal to the heart more than the head. Novels are like human beings. Each is unique – even if they tell a familiar story – and each needs a spark of inspiration if they are to succeed.

I have been told that some novelists can write novels based on a formula. Perhaps this is even a useful way of writing crime fiction or dime-store romance. I have no experience with this kind of writing, however, and question whether something that is uninspired can ever read as if it were. I have also listened to aspiring novelists agonize about not knowing what to write. There is a very simple answer to this common dilemma: If you don’t know what to write, don’t.

To create is to imitate the Creator of us all, and creation always has a spark of divinity in it. That spark manifests itself as inspiration.

The origin of each of my works of fiction has been a spark of inspiration.

Next week: Part II will look at the importance of research for a novel.

Meanwhile, the first reviews of Where Eagles Never Flew our out:

Great story with superb flying accounts, October 15, 2011
5.0 out of 5 stars
By Hawgheater
This review is from: Where Eagles Never Flew: A Battle of Britain Novel (Kindle Edition)

As a retired US Air Force fighter pilot, I just finished reading "Where Eagles Never Flew"...for the 2nd time! As my bread and butter, I found the flying scenes to be most accurate, but I also really enjoyed how the four main characters were all interconnected as the book continued on. I found the book to be very readable...hard to put down...and perfect for a follow-on Hollywood cinema production.

A wonderful complement to non fiction Battle of Britain books, October 17, 2011
5.0 out of 5 stars
By Roy Crawford (Whitesburg, KY)
This review is from: Where Eagles Never Flew: A Battle of Britain Novel (Kindle Edition)

I must begin with a disclosure: I reviewed the manuscript of this book for technical and historical accuracy. I am a forensic engineer and serious amateur historian of the Battle of Britain. Among other things, I have read dozens of books about it and sat in the chairs Rex Harrison and Winston Churchill sat in at RAF Uxbridge on Eagle Day.

Since one of my favorite ways to take in history is to read fictional stories woven into historical events, I loved Where Eagles Never Flew and very highly recommend it for everyone. The major differences between it and straight history books is that it allows the reader to get inside the everyday lives of airmen, both inside the cockpit and out, including their romances, on both sides of the Channel. Battle of Britain Wing Commander Bob Doe wrote that Eagles is the best book he's ever read on that piece of history, adding that authoress Schrader got it "smack on the way it was for us fighter pilots." High praise indeed. You'll get details you wouldn't elsewhere, and you'll feel as if you're right there in the thick of wartime life rather than just observing from the future and the outside.

One of my first thoughts upon finishing this book was that it should be a movie. The ending is particularly stunning.

News and Reviews

2011-10-16T16:14:00.001+02:00

Readers of this blog might be interested in a event sponsored by English Heritage. Novelist Laura Wilson will conduct a workshop offering advice on writing historical fiction covering everything from conducting research to character development and negotiating matters of historical licence. The workshop will be held in Wellington Arch, London, on Nov. 29 from 6-9 pm. For more information go to: www.english-heritage.org.uk/events

I will be holding a similar event here in Leipzig on November 18. More on that in later blogs.

First, here are the most recent reviews of Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer.

Excellent description of difficult period...

by Brenda Miller (North Carolina), September 30, 2011
4.0 out of 5 stars

Helena Schrader has done it again, amazingly. In this, her second volume in the Leonidas trilogy, she has brought an admittedly difficult period in Leonidas' life to a level of sustained reader interest. The earlier volume covering the agoge period had an easily identifiable theme and historical framework, and the last volume, which will emphasize Thermopylae, also has an identifiable historical framework to build on. It is this interim period, about which very little is actually known, where Ms Schrader shows her skills as an historical novelist. It bears repeating here that Ms Schrader does and has done, her "homework" on ancient Sparta in this period. Her research is beyond reproach and although she embellishes (as she must),she does not make up her own facts. Although my own field of Greek historical interest is a much earlier period, I know enough about 5th Century Sparta to recognize the accuracy of her descriptions. I can also state that based on my 23 years as an Infantry officer in the US Army, Ms Schrader has clearly done a significant amount of research on armies, soldiers, and what motivates them and makes them cohesive winners.

As she states in her prefaces, Ms Schrader aims to correct general opinion of Sparta as being some sort of brutal producer of robot-like ironmen. She succeeds, to the point where I and I suspect other, at least male, readers, might say that she has gone a bit too far in describing Sparta as a "touchy-feely", sensitive, place where a straight-arrow, incorruptible, nice guy, like Leonidas could even survive, much less become a King and army commander. But there is no arguing with Ms Schrader's research and if such is the Sparta she has uncovered, then so be it.My only disappointment is that I have to wait now for a seemingly interminable period for the final volume of this trilogy!

Ms Schrader has done a superb job here putting flesh on the few historical bones that we have of Leonidas. She has written an absolutely excellent historical novel which should have widespread appeal and which, with the other two volumes, would make a fascinating movie. I would not hesitate to buy the completed trilogy as a gift for members of my own family of very different ages.

AND

An extremely readable historical/biography
by M. Lignor (New York, NY), October 7, 2011 4.0 out of 5 stars

A good start for a review concerning Sparta might be for the layman to know just where Sparta is located. Sparta is on a plain, completely surrounded by mountain ranges. It was a Greek city/state but not fortified as most of the cities of Greece were at that time. Sparta was a collection of small villages built over a large rural area and six very low hills. The highest served as the acropolis and location of the Temple of Athena. Sadly, there's not much of it left to see.

Now on to Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer. The Administrators of the Spartan government tried to get the King of Sparta to set aside his wife and take another as she had not produced a child. The King refused and in an attempt to get an heir, the Administrators agreed to allow the King to take a second wife without putting aside his first. The new wife soon had a son, Cleomenes.

A year after the birth of Cleomenes, the King's first wife gave birth to a son, Dorieus, followed by twin sons, Leonidas and Cleombrotus. As Leonidas was considered to be her third son, he didn't have a chance to become King so he had to go to the agoge (a public school that all Spartan sons had to complete in order to qualify for citizenship).

King Cleomenes has to deal with a co-monarch, King Demaratus, and this King is a fighter while Cleomenes is more interested in sticking his nose into the affairs of Athens. Demaratus is against this move and soon the kings are at odds. Trading on this conflict, the Corinthians are challenging the Spartan's control of the area. At the same time, other Greek cities are asking for aid from Sparta in a rebellion against Persia.

Leonidas, if you remember, is the youngest half-brother of Cleomenes and is not really interested in politics. He has just obtained his citizenship from the school and doesn't think that this revolt by his countrymen will affect him in the slightest. He is an ordinary soldier in the Spartan army and a lot more interested in taking care of his own life. His biggest concerns are to find people to take care of his ruined estate and looking around for a suitable woman to become his bride.

He sets his cap for Gorgo; she is intelligent and tough - qualities that were not the norm for marriageable women in Ancient Sparta. They get married, and they are a good team. Gorgo is extremely clever and this helps Leonidas to take care of his people and the pair become very well thought of monarchs. But, that is for the next book in this very readable series to cover. This book is book two in the Leonidas saga. The first volume: Leonidas of Sparta, A Boy of the Agoge, deals with Leonidas' birth, growing up in Sparta and his schooling at the Agoge. This second volume is about his citizenship before he became ruler, his marriage, the battles (which were frequent) that he fought, and the politics that he learned to handle.

Readers will enjoy this book even if they have not read the first in the series. A Peerless Peer will definitely stand alone and is also a good lead-in to the final book in the series. When readers finish this story they will be anxious to see what happens to Leonidas and Gorgo when his fortunes change for the better.

The author is a superb writer of Historical/Fiction/Biography. The story was very readable and Ancient History buffs will be able to put themselves in the middle of these great battles and the politics that brought them to the attention of the author.

Next week I will be starting a ten part series on the "Birth of a Novel" from Idea to Marketing.

Writing Historical Biography: Dialogues with Ghosts

2011-10-07T20:49:00.001+02:00

In an earlier entry, I described the challenges of writing biographical fiction. This week I want to focus on the more personal complications of the genre. In normal historical fiction, as I have described elsewhere, characters often take on a life of their own, even pulling the novel in unexpected directions. My experience with headstrong characters has been overwhelmingly positive. A good character has a better feel for the direction a book should go than I do. Most of my books have benefited from this fact and evolved differently from the original concept. In one case, a secondary character completely took over the book and the initially conceived story has not been written at all.

But with biographical fiction, such course changes are unacceptable. The true biography of the central character lays down the route that must be followed. The author is free to decide which stations along the way will be described in greatest detail, maybe the author can add an embellishment here and there, but in the end the road-map must be respected. There can be no happy end where there was none in history.

Another challenge of biographical fiction is, of course, the fact that a historical figure does not “belong” to the novelist alone. A historical figure is a public figure, and that means that anyone else can choose to write about this person too. Unlike fictional characters, the novelist of a biographical novel has to “share” their central characters with others – and often compete with or confront existing interpretations. When I, for example, describe the German assassin Claus Count Stauffenberg, my interpretation of Stauffenberg will clash in many minds with the hero of the same name created by Tom Cruise. It makes no difference whether my research is better and my interpretation is more plausible. Tom Cruise’s Stauffenberg is more familiar to my reader than my historical sources and it has already occupied their consciousness. Altering readers’ perceptions of historical figures is far more difficult than creating new characters.

Finally, there is the difficultly of living with the ghosts of dead. A good biographical novelist will spend a great deal of time with the characters of his/her book and this means spending time with the dead. Depending on one’s sensibility, that can be quite unnerving. I have spent many a sleepless night, plagued by images of historical figures dissatisfied with my portrayal of them. They can be angry or simply disappointed, but they are unrelentingly hard task-masters, who demand an even higher standard of writing than their fictional colleagues.

Obviously, on the evidence of some historical novels that liberally apply the names of historical figures to characters with no resemblance to the personage carrying the same name in history, some authors do not take their responsibilities to the dead very seriously. I wonder that they are not haunted by furious ghosts. Perhaps they are and I just don’t know about it – or the ghosts consider them so insubstantial they can’t be bothered.

Where Eagles Never Flew - Excerpt 3

2011-10-01T11:51:00.000+02:00

This Excerpt from Where Eagles Never Flew focuses on the leading female character, the pacifist and Salvation Army volunteer Emily Pryce.

Emily was doing the washing-up after dinner with the radio playing softly in the kitchen. The walls of the terraced cottage were so thin that the music could e heard throughout the house. Fortunately, she was listening to classical music, which not disturb her parents as they sat together in the parlour. Mr. Pryce was reading Pravda, his Russian dictionary beside him for reference, and his wife was correcting exams, as it was end of term.

The telephon rang.

Mrs. Pryce was nearest to the door. She scowled and then, remarking indignantly, “Just who can be calling at this time of night?” she went into the hall to answer it. She was even more annoyed when a strange male voice asked for Emily and there were clearly pub noises in the background. She stepped into the kitchen doorway and said sharply, “Emily! Some man is calling you from a pub. You certainly will not meet him there.”

“No, of course not, Mum. Who is it?” Emily was not “seeing” anyone. Once or twice one of the sales representatives at the insurance company hinted about “doing something together sometime,” but he never carried through with an actual invitation. Might he have finally found the courage? Or could it be Michael? Maybe he was in the area for some reason? A little breathless with hope and apprehension she said, “Hello?”

“Miss Pryce?”

“Yes.” She still didn’t recognize the voice.

“Robin Priestman. We met about a month ago at the Salvation Army Mission.” He sounded as if he wasn’t sure she’d remember, but Emily remembered very vividly. In Fact, she’d agonized over the encounter countless hours since then, trying both to understand her feelings and dissect her behavior so there would be no repeat of her incredible faux pas. The voice in the receiver was continuing, “Look, I’m flying an old Spit down to the Supermarine works near Southampton for factory re-fit tomorrow, and don’t have to get back here until late. I thought maybe we could do something together. Dinner perhaps?”

“Dinner?” Emily was blind-sided. She had never expected to see this young man again. She had certainly never expected him to ask her out. And dinner with a young man she hardly knew was also something she had never actually done before. She had always assumed that anyone she actually with out with would be someone she knew well from University or work or the Mission….

“Yes, why not?” The young man was replying lightly. “Although, actually, I want to take off before dark, so it would be better if we could meet earlier.” The pub noises in the background were very loud – evidently young men in high spirits. Robin raised his voice to be heard over it all. “More high-tea, really Is that all right?”

'Yes, of course,” Emily stammered.

“Four o’clock, then? Where can I collect you?”

Emily registered that she would be at work at that time, and she would have to take time off if she wanted to go early, but she would worry about that tomorrow. She just managed to give Robin her work address before his coins ran out, and the loud buzzing of the telephone cut them off.

Dazed, Emily drifted intot he parlour where her parents looked at her expectantly, her father over his reading glasses and her mother very rigidly from her desk chair. “And just who was that and what did he want?” Mrs. Pryce demanded.

Emily perched on the edge of the nearest chair, the dishcloth still in her hands, and said in a dazed voice. “It was a man I met at the Seaman’s Mission.”

“A sailor?!” Her parents said in horrified unison.

“No, he’s Major Fitzsimmon’s nephew. He’s a pilot in the RAF.”

“Not much better!” Mrs. Pryce concluded. “One hears they drink like fish.”

“Well, I expect that’s a little exaggerated,” Mr. Pryce conceded. “I don’t see how they could be fighting off the Luftwaffe, if they all drank too much all of the time.”

“And what did he want with you?” Mrs. Pryce ignored her husband.

“He asked me out to tea tomorrow.”

"And you accepted?” Her mother sounded shocked.

Emily looked up and straight at her mother, and suddenly she was no longer uncertain and confused. She was 24 years old and earning her own living. She was tired of being treated like she was still a schoolgirl. “Yes, Mum. I accepted, and I’m going to go to tea with him whether you like it or not.” Then Emily stood and went back into the kitchen to finish the drying up, leaving her started parents gazing at one another baffled.

One thing was very clear to Emily: she was attracted to this young man as she had been only once before, to Michael. But after finding out he was in the military, she was intimidated by him, too. The military was an alien and rather frightening world. She wasn’t at all sure she could handle it, but she was determined to at least get to know Robin Priestman better. Surely nothing that came out of the friendship could be worse than spending the rest of her life here in ths horrible house with her heartless parents, doing nothing of any significance.

Where Eagles Never Flew - Excerpt 2

2011-09-24T11:33:00.000+02:00

The following excerpt from Chapter 2 of Chasing the Wind/Where Eagles Never Flew introduces two of the German protagonists in the book.

The dining room of the mess was far less sterile than the bedrooms. It had gracious dimensions and was decorated with Art Nouveau, including elegant chandeliers. The tables were set with white linen, silver and crystal -- as was standard for the Luftwaffe. There were fresh flowers on every table and the mess stewards, Geuke noted, wore white jackets rather than field grey, as if it were peacetime or they were in the Reich. Geuke was take to the head table, at which the Gruppenkommandeur and his three Staffelkapitaene, including Hauptman Bartels, stat.

Bartels was tall, blond, tanned and fit -- a German officer straight out of a UFA film. He wore the Iron Cross First and Second Class on his tailored uniform, and smoked long cigarettes. He considered Geuke wiht a mixture of disbelief and annoyance. Geuke could hear him thinking, "Have we really sunk so low that we have to take officers like this?"

Geuke wriggled uncomfortably in his brand-new uniform. The collar seemed much too tight. He wished he could have loosened his tie a bit, but instead had to stand at attention, trying to cut a military figure.

Bartels seemed to overcome his disappointment and with sigh, he announced, "Find yourself a free place to sit and have a meal. We're flying at 09:00 -- weather permitting. What do you think, Harmann," he turned to one of the other officers, 'Can we trust Feldburg with a Rotte?" Then answering his own question, he remarked with obvious disgust, "I don't suppose we have much choice. He's at least seen some combat." Then turnign back to Geuke he said, "You'll be flying wingman to Christian Freiherr von Feldburg. I'll send him over after dinner."

The only table with a vanct place wasone occupied by non-flying officers: the intelligence officer, signals officer, paymaster, quartermaster, doctor and chaplain of the Gruppe. These men made Geuke welcome at their table perfunctorily, and then continued their discussion about the relative merits of the British and German early warning systems. Gueke tried to listen, but he knew afr too little about either system to make any kind of intelligent contribution to the debate. He was relieved when the Gurppenkommandeur retired tot he bar.

But Geuke's sense of relief was short-lived. In the bar, the officers clustered together in familiar gorups, and Geuke was more an outsider than in the dining room. Here men could shoulder him aside or turn their backs without being rude. Geuke hisitantly went to the bar and after everyone else had been served, he timidly asked the Luftwaffe bartender for a beer.

"Account number, Herr Leutnant?" the bartender demande without even looking at him.

"Put it on my account," A voice said from behyind hm, and Geuke jumped and turned around.

The officer behind him smiled and heldo ut his hand. "Feldburg. The COG just told me the good news that you will be flyiing wingman to me tomorrow. I think that calls for more than beer, don't you? May I make that beer a glass of Sekt?"

Geuke was so taken aback he heardly knew what to say. This officer was another one of the propaganda-poster-types, and the hand he extended had the distinctive heavy gold ring with the inset stone on which his coat-of-arms must be embossed. Geuke heard the Staffelkapitaen's words rining in his ears, "You'll be flying wingman to Freiherr von Feldburg." The plumber's son did not believe he had ever shaken hands with a baron before. True, he'd encountered the odd Junker at training, but none with this exalted a title.

"Ah, Herr -- Freiherr --"

"Christian," interrupted the other man. "And let's go straight to 'Du.' As a Rotte we have to work together like brothers, after all. No room for formality. What's your first name?"

"Ernst," Geuke croaked out, wtill in a bit of a daze.

They shook hands again, and Christian insisted, "Champagne?"

First Reviews of Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer

2011-09-17T16:27:00.001+02:00

Just ten days after the release of Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer two reviews have already been posted on amazon.com. That's exciting -- especially when both are from people I do not know and to whom I did not send review copies. I hope this is a good omen and the book will continue to attract positive attention.

5.0 out of 5 stars

So Good It Will Make You Stay Up Past Your Bedtime..., September 8, 2011

Kathleen Ann Langley "Lucky 7 Tattoo Kings Beach" (Lake Tahoe, California)

(REAL NAME), Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is for: Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer (Paperback)

Yes, once again Ms Schrader has kept me up WAY past my bedtime for "just one more chapter." Rarely in historical fiction does this happen for me. I will hit a boring spot in a book and easily put it down until next time. Not so with the second book of this Leonidas trilogy "Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer." She had a tough job to outshine herself after the first part of this 3 part series, " A Boy of the Agoge" yet the author met the challenge with gusto.

All the main players of ancient Sparta are back, and some new ones add to the story without becoming confusing. Gorgo comes into her teenage years with timeless problems we can relate to. Leonidas becomes a man we would all desire to have in our lives as the ultimate compassionate alpha male. And the folks who surround these 2 ancient royal players have their own stories told too. Not a boring one in the bunch either. It's like a soap opera set in antiquity!

Now that I have plowed my way through this second book I once again cannot wait until the 3rd and final book comes out next year! If you even have a vague interest in what life may have been like for Leonidas, or the Spartan people at this time and place in history, you will dig this book.

AND

5.0 out of 5 stars

Thin rations, September 4, 2011,

Jessica Allan Schmidt (People's Republic of Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States)

(REAL NAME)

This review is for: Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer (Paperback)

William Styron, author of The Confessions of Nat Turner once commented that a historical novelist did best when given "thin rations". This book takes those scant rations available from the historical record and extrapolates them, using common sense as well as classical sources, to construct what life may have been like for Leonidas I. There are some interesting inconsistencies with the historical records -- for instance, it is not known if Cleombrotus was Leonidas' twin or younger brother, yet the series paints him quite convincingly as Leonidas' elder twin -- but on the whole, it provides a very interesting look at the dynamics of an unusual society.

Sparta is often treated by modern scholars as a nation of simple brutes, but records do not hold with this -- if the training of youths was simply a matter of testing them until they broke, Greek leaders from all over the peninsula would not have competed to send their sons to the agoge for whatever periods they could. Like military schools of today, Sparta's educational programme was much more clearly devoted to military *and* practical learning, but the relative dearth of universal military training during this period means that its military nature is over-emphasised. Moreover, the fact that attendance at the Spartan agoge meant for some préstige among other Greeks strongly implies that it was seen as a specialist school that was a great honour for youths inclined to eventually rise to rôles of command in their own city-state's military.

The examination of what Spartan adult life was like is an interesting view of comparison and contrast. In the era before supertankers and jet aircraft, military engagements were by necessity no more than half the year, before mud and rain made it impossible to manoeuvre effectively, and, even more importantly, avoid disease decimating the ranks (a killer that was more likely than death by battle wound up through the Second World War), and therefore, even though Spartans were certainly careful to keep themselves in training year round and maintain constant operational readiness, they also had personal, civilian lives that were just as important to them, if not more so. As any tactician can tell you, the most motivated fighter is one who fights to defend a society he feels is integral to his life. Were Sparta a brutal place dedicated to warfare and only warfare, there would be no society to defend.

In this book, it is interesting to see the evolution of Queen Gorgo from girlhood to womanhood, even though most of it is conjecture based on what *is* known of the training of Spartan women. This book is also surprisingly engaging for the middle part of a trilogy, traditionally a time when *any* storytelling lags. The agoge is notorious, and Leonidas' death is equally well-known, but this period could have been fairly dull, yet it is as engaging as the first book in this series. I recommend it strongly.

Where Eagles Never Flew: Excerpt 1

2011-09-10T11:51:00.000+02:00

Dear Followers,

To whet your appetite for Where Eagles Never Flew I will be posting here excerpts from "Eagles" for the next several weeks.

Priestman unhooked his oxygen mask and shoved the hood back before he landed, gulping in the fresh air. When he set down on three points, he thought he had never in his life been so glad to have ground under him. He was aware of a pulsing headache and his eyes felt swollen in their sockets. He taxied absently to the side of the field, too tired to notice if someone was signalling him someplace else. He cut the engine, pulled off his helmet, and ran his hand through his hair -- it was wet and sticky.

He heard someone pant up beside him. "Robin?"

He glanced over; it was Roger Ibbotsholm.

"Aye, aye." Robin was having trouble unclipping his straps for some reason. Roger was on the wing and bent over to help him.

"Are we glad to see you! We thought you'd bought it!"

"They did rather catch us out -- again. Is everyone else back?"

"The CO's gone for six. Flamed out and went straight in from 10,000. Guy had to hit the silk over Seclin. Driver swears he saw a parachute land just beside the field so he's almost certainly a POW. Shakespeare says Spotty didn't make it either -- crate flamed before he could get out."

O'Brian and Sellers reached Priestman. They too were panting, having run over from the far side of the field. "Are you all right, sir?"

"I've got a terrible headache, actually," Robin admitted, rubbing his frehead.

"There's a ruddy big hole in the back of your seat, sir!"

"Oh, that. Yes. Good thing about the armor plating."

"You can say that again, sir! Look!"

A crowd was gathering. This Hurricane didn't look nearly as tattered as his old one, but the one neat puncture it did have indicated a cannon shell had lodged deep in the armour plating behind his seat. The others scrambled up the off wing and peered into his Hurricane. There were a lot of admiring whistles and excited comments. Priestman left the others to it and slid to the ground, leaning back against the trailing edge of the wing.

Only once before had he been so conscious of divine protection -- after capsizing a small boat in a Force Five gale in the Solent. Then he had been a foolish 15-year-old boy who over-estimated his abilities, and for whom a benign deity had no doubt felt pity. Today, with so many others dead, it was hard to understand why he should have been one of the lucky ones.

An airman appeared around the tail and offered him a cup of cocoa. It was almost cold, but Priestman sipped it graefully.

Priestman noticed Yardly approaching but didn't think anything of it -- until the Flight Lieutenant opened his mouth and said: "I'm acting CO now, if you're wondering." Robin hadn't gotten that far, actually, but he didn't like the sound of this. Priestman had never really warmed to Sharp, but he was a first-rate pilot and a conscientious commmander. Priestman had trusted him. Yardly was something else agian. From the day he joined the squadron, Yardly had seemed to resent him. In short, this was not a good development.

Yardly, meanwhile, was remarking, "I see you were lucky a second time, Priestman."

"Yes, sir." It obviously did not occur to the senior officer that maybe this pilot was particularly skilled or a talented dog-fighter.

"And the Blenheims got slaughtered again." The Flight Lieutenant made it sound as if it was Priestman's fault alone. Priestman kept his mouth shut. He might do stupid things when he got backed into a bad enough corner, but he wasn't inherently insubordinate or stupid.

Yaredly was compelled to continue his lecture without new fuel. "Our job is to protect our bombers, not go rushing off on our own. Don't forget it! I'm not going to put up with your nonsense the way Sharp did."

What nonsense? Priestman asked himself. He'd be behaving himself like a damned goody-two-shoes since he'd joined the Squadron!

(This excerpt is from Chapter 1 of Chasing the Wind, soon to be released in Kindle format under the new title Where Eagles Never Flew.)

Thank You! and now "A Peerless Peer..."

2011-09-03T11:07:00.001+02:00

Dear Followers,

Thank you for participating in my three surveys on the title, subtitle and cover image for the Kindle Edition of Chasing the Wind. There was considerable concensus that the best title is "Where Eagles Never Flew" -- although one or two of you confided in me well-founded reservations. After consulting with the publisher, however, the decision was made to go ahead with Where Eagles Never Flew as the title for the Kindle book.

Although the largest number of readers preferred the longest suggested subtitle, the publisher and cover designer vetoed this for practical reasons. The cover of a Kindle book never appears as anything more than a "thumbnail" and space is therefore at a premium. The publisher felt that we couldn't afford to spend so much "real estate" on the sub-title -- which would probably be almost illegible on a thumbnail anyway. So we opted for the shortest of all sub-titles: "A Battle of Britain Novel."

The cover was also a close call, with a slight plurality in favor of Cover 1. I have asked the designer to look at ways of combining the key features of these two covers and come up with a new design that meets the publisher's preferences but includes some of the features of Cover 1 that (from talking to some of you) was the main appeal of this design.

Otherwise, all is on track for the release of Where Eagles Never Flew in about 3 weeks time. I will be sure to post information about the release on this blog.

Meanwhile, the second book in the Leonidas Trilogy, Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer is available for purchase on amazon.com in both trade paperback and Kindle formats. For more information about the Leonidas Trilogy you can also go to the dedicated website: http://sparta-leonidas-gorgo.com/

Help Me Select a Cover

2011-08-28T08:34:00.000+02:00

OK. Thanks everyone for your contributions with respect to the title and subtitle!

It looks like "Where Eagles Never Flew" has won hands down for the title, but the sub-title is still undecided. If you have not yet voted, please take a moment to let me know what you think.

Meanwhile, I have three cover designs in contention, and I'd appreciate your views. Please vote for one only in this survery.

Thank you!

Helena

Help Me Choose a Subtitle!

2011-08-20T13:03:00.000+02:00

Last week I asked your help in finding a new title for Chasing the Wind, my Battle of Britain novel, which will soon be released in Kindle format. So far Where Eagles Never Flew is leading by a wide margin. Meanwhile, I want to focus on the subtitle.

A subtitle is particularly important for a book being released in Kindle format because the subtitle provides the key words that will be fed to the search engines. My publisher and I agree that the phrase "Battle of Britain" MUST appear in the subtitle -- as this is the most frequently used search phrase likely to draw prospective readers to the novel.

Another consideration when selecting a subtitle is that it has to fit on the cover. A subtitle that is too long runs the risk of cluttering the cover and detracting from the over all image and so attractiveness.

You may have noted that the two considerations conflict. For the first, more words is better, for the second, less is more.

But that is why I want your help!

Please take a moment to particpate in my survey. Note that for subtitle you may vote more than once.

Thank you!

Helena

Help Me Choose a New Title!

2011-08-13T15:39:00.001+02:00

Dear Followers and Friends,

My Battle of Britain novel, Chasing the Wind, is going to be released in Kindle format. However, since the original release, more than a dozen other books have been published under the same title. This led me (and my new publisher Wheatmark) to decide it was time to change the title -- and the cover image. We'd like your help! Please help us by taking part in the surveys I will be posting here over the next three weeks. Vote for the title, sub-title and cover you like best.

This week the survey is for the main title only.

The original title, Chasing the Wind, was inspired by the poem "High Flight" written by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., an American fighter pilot in the RAF during WWII. Magee flew Spitfires. He was killed in 1941, aged 19.

For those of you unfamiliar with the poem here it is:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth

Of sun-split clouds, -- and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of -- wheeled and soared and swung

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung

My eager craft through footless halls of air...

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace

Where never lark, or ever eagle flew --

And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

The new title will also be derived from this classic aviation poem, paraphrasing the third line of the second stanza, but we're undecided on exactly which phrase works best. You votes are very important to us, so I hope you'll take the time to take part in the survey.

Thank you!

Helena

A Cavalry Officer on the Road to Calvary: Philipp Baron von Boeselager

2011-08-06T13:06:00.001+02:00

I would like to end my four part series about the real people who inspired and influenced my novel An Obsolete Honor (soon to be released in Kindle as Hitler's Demons) by telling the story of Philipp Baron von Boeselager. I first met Philipp at an official reception hosted by the German President on July 20 to honor the Resistance. As a lone American, a mere graduate student working on a PhD, I felt rather lost in the exalted company and found myself looking about shyly for a place to sit. Baron von Boeselager spotted me, got up from his table, came over and bowed slightly before inviting me to join him and his wife at their table. He had never met me before in his life, and his gesture was that of the consumate gentlemen he was until his death.

Like Axel and Marion, Philipp Baron von Boeselager made no claim to be a hero – despite his Knight’s Cross and other lesser decorations for bravery he had received during the war. Others have begged to differ. Philipp von Boeselager is possibly the only recipient of Hitler’s Knight’s Cross, who is also an Officer of the French Legion of Honor. The latter was awarded him in 2004 in recognition of his role in the coup d’etat against Hitler on July 20th 1944. Boeselager, accepted the honor “for those who are no longer with us.” Boeselager provided me with unusual insight into the Wehrmacht and its command apparatus.

In the winter of 1941 Philipp Baron von Boeselager was severely wounded on the Eastern Front. Following a stomach wound, he could only walk with crutches and had extreme pain which he could only master with morphine. Nevertheless, he was deemed fit for staff work and asked whether he would be willing to serve as aide (Ordonnanzoffizier) to Feldmarschall von Kluge, then commanding Army Group Center on the Eastern Front. Just before the train pulled into Smolesk, Russia, where the headquarters of Army Group Center was located, Boeselager threw his crutches out the window. He feared that if he reported to his new superior on crutches, that the Field Marshal would send him home again as unfit for duty. He continued to take morphine until the end of the war.

The staff at Army Group Center was dominated by the First General Staff Officer, Henning von Tresckow, and Tresckow had turned the staff of Army Group Center into a nest of opposition to Hitler. Tresckow had been a witness to the slaughter of the Jewish population of Babi Yar by SS Special Units (Einsatzkommandos). By the time Boeselager joined the staff of Army Group Center, Tresckow was already working closely with two other nerve centers of military resistance in Berlin, the General Army Office under General Friedrich Olbricht, and Military Counter Intelligence under Admiral Canaris. Olbricht had already developed the blue-print for a coup, disguised as an official plan for suppressing domestic unrest, Plan Valkyrie. Meanwhile, Canaris’ right-hand man, Hans Oster, was working on finding a means and opportunity to assassinate Hitler. Tresckow’s role was to get his superior, Field Marshal von Kluge, on board the conspiracy, and so provide the conspirators with fighting troops with which to put down any counter-revolt by SS troops loyal to the Nazis.

Kluge had been an opponent of Hitler since before the war. He had been part of the coup plans against Hitler in 1938. He was also a first class general. It was his 4th Army that had broken through the ostensibly impassable Ardennes and so turned the French Maginot Line, and it was his Army that cut off the British Expeditionary Force with its back to the sea just weeks after the start of the Western offensive in 1940. It is an irony that the name of one of his subordinate divisional commanders, Erwin Rommel, is more famous today.

When Boeselager joined Kluge’s staff, Kluge was more disillusioned with Hitler than ever before – but he was not yet ready to move from opposition to resistance, from criticism to treason. As the situation on the Eastern Front deteriorated, Boeselager became a first-hand witness of Kluge’s cruel dilemma as Hitler’s Field Marshal.

One of the duties of a field marshal’s aide was to listen to every official telephone conversation that the field marshal conducted. Thus Boeselager heard everything Kluge said to his subordinate Army Commanders – and every talk with Hitler. Boeselager remembered vividly the way Hitler would manipulate conversations and confuse matters. He remembered the absurdity of Hilter – the Commander-in-Chief of millions of troops – ordering the re-location of individual battalions. He remembered that Hitler would try to distract Kluge from a specific request by talking at length in rambling language about his strategic plans for conquering India – or change the subject by saying something like, “Oh, and by the way, I have allowed myself to send roses to your gracious wife on the occasion of her birthday.”

Boeselager’s duties also took him to Hitler’s headquarters, where on occasion he was included in the inner circle. Boeselager personally witnessed the fact that in a small circle Hitler could be a witty and amusing conversationalist. Boeselager told me that at one dinner he was practically convulsed laughter, although he later could not remember exactly what the dictator had said. Nor did the incident in anyway change his abhorrence of man.

At least once, Boeselager’s inability to disguise his contempt for Hitler’s entourage got him arrested. On this occasion, Kluge was closeted with Hitler and other senior officers and Boeselager was left to take a meal with Martin Bormann and others of Hitler’s personal staff. Boeselager had flown in from the front with Kluge to plead for the right to pull back 100,000s of troops in danger of being cut off in a “mini-Stalingrad.” He could hardly eat for worry about what was happening on the front, but Hitler’s staff was complaining about the lack of fresh strawberries! Boeselager couldn’t contain himself. He told Bormann what he thought of him, and the next thing he knew he was locked in a small chamber with a guard posted outside. Kluge found him there and with a rhetorical “What are you doing here?” got him out. But Kluge also warned his aide that next time “he might not be so lucky.”

On another occasion, Boeselager overheard a conversation in which Hitler’s entourage discussed the fact that “once they were finished with the Jews” they would “go for the Catholics.” Boeselager interrupted immediately and told them that they could start with him. Bormann dismissed the objection, saying, “Recipients of the Knight’s Cross would be exempted from extermination.” A response, which did nothing to reduce Boeselager's loathing of Hitler and his minions.

Boeselager was also a witness to Kluge’s honest, tenacious and sometimes desperate attempts to get Hitler to allow Army Group Center to withdraw and re-group as the pressure from the Red Army became overwhelming. To no avail. By March 1943, Kluge could take no more. He agreed to join the conspiracy against Hitler – on the condition that Hitler was killed. Kluge argued that unless Hitler was dead, most officers would remain true to their personal oath to Hitler and there would be civil war. He approved a plan developed by his staff to shoot Adolf Hitler in a collective assassination attempt when Hitler visited Army Group Center Headquarters in Smolensk.

The plans were made. The location set: the Officer’s Mess of Army Group Center. The date: March 13, 1943. Hitler came to Smolesk, he ate in the Mess surrounded by officers determined to eliminate him, and nothing happened. At the last minute, Kluge apparently lost his nerve. Boeselager believes that the Field Marshal did not want to go down in history as a murderer and traitor.

But there is another explanation. As Hitler left Smolensk that day, Tresckow smuggled a bomb into his aircraft with the 30-minute fuse already running. If the bomb had detonated, Hitler’s aircraft would have gone down over partisan-infested territory. Plan Valkyrie would have gone into effect and the Army would have taken control of Germany's military and government apparatus before the wreckage of the plane could even be recovered. The British explosives used in the bomb would have suggested a foreign plot, and the conspirators would have been given a chance to consolidate power. In short, this means of killing Hitler was far superior to a joint pistol attack that instantly incriminated the German Army in the assassination. Is it possible that Tresckow informed Kluge of this option, and this was the real reason Kluge told his officers not to shoot? We will never know. But Boeselager had had enough staff work. He asked for and received a transfer back to the troops, to his beloved cavalry.

When July 1944 came, Philipp was commanding a cavalry regiment on the Eastern Front. His brother Georg commanded the cavalry brigade to which his regiment was attached and was working closely with Tresckow, who was now Chief of Staff of the 2nd Army. Tresckow knew about Count Stauffenberg’s plans to carry out the assassination against Hilter himself, and Georg Baron von Boeselager passed the word to Philipp. Philipp was ordered – by the conspiracy, not his military superiors – to re-deploy a 1,200-man cavalry task-force composed of six squadrons to Berlin to protect the post-Hitler government that would take power after the coup on July 20.

On 18 July 1944, Boeselager set the plan in motion. One thousand two hundred cavalrymen were withdrawn from their positions on the front and given orders to ride west toward a rendezvous point where they would transfer to motorized transport which would then take them to an airfield. Only a few of the cavalry officers knew what they were doing, but the troops trusted Boeselager implicitly and Boeselager did not act irresponsibly. Wherever he withdrew his selected squadrons, he ensured that sufficient troops remained behind to hold the front against the Red Army. Philipp himself stayed behind at his HQ as long as possible, and only at the last minute boarded a staff car to catch up with his troops, whom he reached on the evening of 19 July 1944.

His troops had now been riding for 36 hours straight. Philipp mounted and rode with his men. As the cavalry rode through the second night, some of the men were so exhausted they fell asleep even at a trot; some fell right out of their saddles and had to be helped back on their horses by their comrades. At three am, the cavalry task-force finally reached the rendezvous point with motorized transport and embarked.

Before they reached the airfield, however, a messenger from Georg Boeselager overtook them: Return to Base. Georg Boeselager had learned what many of the conspirators in Berlin didn't know yet: Stauffenberg had failed. The bomb he set off in Hitler’s HQ detonated – but failed to kill the dictator. With Hitler alive, the Nazi apparatus was still intact, and counter-orders, countermanding all the coup instructions, were already going out to all the various units. Even as Olbricht and Stauffenberg in Berlin tried desperately to bring down the Nazi government, Boeselager’s cavalry task-force was rushing back toward the front. Because the entire maneuver had nothing to do with the war and had not been sanctioned by his chain-of-command, Boeselager risked being exposed as a supporter of the coup d’etat. Despite the exhaustion of the men, Boeselager could not let them rest. They needed to return to their positions even faster than they left them.

Philipp summarized the urgency of the situation by saying that he gave the order to maintain a trot even on paved roads – something anathema to a good cavalry officer. As one of his squadrons trotted over a paved cross-road, they ran into Georg von Boeselager, the more senior of the brothers, and the troops – afraid of getting Philipp in trouble – immediately reduced pace to a walk. When Georg von Boeselager signaled them to keep trotting, they knew that whatever they had been doing was very serious indeed! As the news broke that evening of the failed assassination attempt against Hitler, many guessed the truth. But not one of the 1,200 men involved in the action betrayed their commanders, Philipp and Georg von Boeselager.

Philipp survived to tell the story. Georg was killed leading his cavalry brigade on August 27, 1944. He was one of the most highly decorated army officers of the entire German Wehrmacht, a devout Catholic and a bitter opponent of Hitler from start to finish.

Growing up in Nazi Germany

2011-07-30T09:09:00.001+02:00

Although not herself a prominent figure in the German Resistance to Hitler as Marion Countess Yorck or Axel Baron von dem Bussche were, Renate Bethge and what she told me about growing up in Nazi Germany had a profound impact on my understanding of what Nazism was like for ordinary people. She too contributed to making An Obsolete Honor a more authentic account of the period. (The Kindle edition of "An Obsolete Honor" will soon be released under the title "Hitler's Demons")

She was a quiet, unassuming woman, apparently the perfect „Hausfrau“ – housewife – to a famous man. Her husband Eberhard Bethge was famous because he had been Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s closest friend, his confidant and his disciple. Eberhard Bethge had willingly and passionately taken up the burden of publishing Bonhoeffer’s papers, of explaining and interpreting his theological legacy, and of keeping the memory of a great Christian alive in a modern world that was often hostile to faith and religion. But Renate Bethge was herself a woman of great courage and intelligence, and she provided me with some of the most significant insights into what life in Nazi Germany was really like.

Renate was the daughter of Rüdiger Schleicher and Ursula Bonhoeffer, one of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sisters. In the aftermath of the unsuccessful coup attempt against the Hitler on July 20, 1944, her father and three of her uncles were executed for treason by the Nazi regime. Her father and her Uncle Klaus were known to have been tortured by the Gestapo before their death. This alone is an indication of how staunchly anti-Nazi Renate’s upbringing was. It was a family that opposed Hitler before he came to power, and recognized the full extent of his immorality. It was a family that was actively involved in trying to put an end to the dictatorship.

Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that, on the day when “Heil Hitler!” was introduced as the compulsory greeting in school, Renate rebelled. Outraged that she was supposed to greet her teachers every morning with “Heil Hitler,” she stormed home and announced to her parents that she “absolutely refused” to say “Heil Hitler!” Only God, she told her profoundly devout parents, should be adulated in such a manner. (It was customary in much of Germany to say “God’s Greetings” rather than “Good Morning” of “Good Day.”)

Renate’s father was at this time a senior civil servant at the Ministry of Aviation and Head of the Institute for Aviation Law at the University of Berlin. He knew that Renate at this stage in her life wanted to study medicine like his own brother. When his young daughter furiously declared her determination not to “insult God” by saying “Heil Hitler!” he nodded and told her that she was “old enough to make her own decisions.” But he then went on to warn her: “However, you must be prepared to live with the consequences of your decision. If you refuse to say ‘Heil Hitler’ then you may be sent home from school. You will certainly not be allowed to go to high school, and that means you will not be able to go to university to study medicine. The decision you make today will affect your whole future, so make it wisely.” Renate went to school the next day and said “Heil Hitler” just like all the other pupils.

The significance of this story cannot be over-emphasized. It is too simple for anyone who has not lived under a totalitarian regime to think that it is easy to resist and protest. We forget that even small acts of defiance could have large consequences. A child’s stubbornness might not lead inevitably to a concentration camp, but cutting off all avenues to higher education for a bright young person is a powerful disincentive to dissent!

Time and again in my interviews, I was confronted with stories in which compromise was mixed with opposition because even the most courageous and dedicated of opponents had to earn a living. A woman whose closest friends were Jews took a job as translator with the Propaganda Ministry because it was “safer in the lion’s den;” because of where she worked, she was less subject to suspicion and she continued to visit her friends and take them forbidden gifts until they were deported. People joined various secondary organizations, the Frauenschaft, the Deutsche Beamten Bund and the like, to avoid becoming full members of the Nazi Party. It was dangerous to refuse to participate in a comprehensively organized society. It was very dangerous to be seen to reject the spirit of the times.

On the other side of the coin, it is important to remember that not everyone who was a supporter of the Nazi regime was a fanatic or an evil person. Secret opinion polls taken among official members of the Nazi Party in the late 1930s show that a majority of Nazis opposed the Nazi Party policies against the Jews! Most people in Germany supported the Nazis for a variety of complex reasons – because they had provided full employment, because they abrogated the hated Treaty of Versailles, because they had restored national sovereignty to the Rhineland etc. That does not mean that most people supported everything the Nazis did – and certainly not everything that all the increasingly corrupt officials of the regime did.

Ultimately, no matter how much a man or woman hated Hitler, he or she also had loved ones, whom he or she wished to protect from harm. And sometimes love leads us in strange directions. In a tiny, studio apartment in Munich I met the widow of Field Marshal Alfred Jodl. Jodl ended his career as Chief of the Joint Operations Staff (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) – and on the gallows. He was one of the men condemned at the first trial of major Nazi war criminals at Nuremburg. But his second wife was Luise von Benda, a close friend and associate of two of the most important leaders of the German military resistance to Hitler, Generaloberst Beck and General Henning von Tresckow.

Luise von Benda had been Beck’s secretary during the period when Beck challenged his fellow generals to join him in a collective protest against Hitler’s planned invasion of the Sudetenland in what was then Czechoslovakia. Beck urged his fellow generals to refuse to obey Hitler’s orders and advocated confrontation with Hitler that would – he hoped – end in the restoration of “the rule of law.” His secretary worked long and hard with him during this period in his futile efforts to win the support of his fellow generals. She shared Beck’s views on the illegality and disastrous consequences of Hitler’s foreign policy.

Luisa von Benda was furthermore the personal and family friend of Henning von Tresckow. Tresckow was the mind behind two of the most promising assassination attempts against Hitler and a tireless anti-Nazi conspirator. Tresckow did not confide to Luisa what he was planning, but he did keep his opinion of Hitler secret. As another family friend of Luisa von Benda, told me, Luisa shared Tresckow’s opinion of Hitler fully. It was this friend, Ludwig Baron von Hammerstein, who sent me to visit her. “You need to meet her,” he told me smiling, his eyes bright with mischief.

Luisa Jodl was a delicate, fragile woman in her eighties when she received me in Munich. She was anxious to be a gracious hostess, as was fitting for a woman born into the gentry, but she was embarrassed by what she could offer; all her china was chipped, and some of it glued back together again. As the widow of a “major Nazi war criminal,” she had not had an easy life in post-war Germany.

She was nervous too. Of course she had agreed to see me because Ludwig had provided the introduction, and Ludwig Hammerstein was an old friend, dating back to the days when his father had been Chief-of-Staff of the German Army and Luisa had been a secretary at Army Headquarters. But she still feared an American would judge her – and her husband – harshly.

“You have to understand,” she begged me, “my husband was a product of his upbringing.” Her husband, she explained (and most historians agree), was never a Nazi, never a believer in Hitler’s ideology or even in his genius – he was simply a man who could not find the moral courage to disobey. “At the age of seven,” she told me, “he as sent to a cadet school by his father. On the first day, the boys were lined up and told: ‘Gentlemen, you are here to learn how to die well.’” That was it. From that point forward, he had followed the rigid code of self-sacrifice, duty and blind obedience. Trapped by his own sense of duty into serving a man he inwardly detested, Jodl was a man in more desperate need of comfort and affection than many others. And so, although Luise knew that Hitler was leading Germany to both moral and physical destruction, she could not deny her love to the man she knew to be inwardly suffering and in need of what comfort she could offer as a wife.

Luise’s choice, no less than Renate’s, was the very human decision in favor of life and hope for a better future. No one, who has not been in their shoes, has the right to condemn them for it.

A Suicide-Bomber Targeting Hitler: Axel Baron von dem Bussche

2011-07-10T01:00:00.043+02:00

Last week I introduced Marion Countess Yorck. This week I'd like to introduce another survivor of the German Resistance, who had an even more profound impact on my novel An Obsolete Honor: A Story of the German Resistance to Hitler (soon to be released in Kindle format under the title "Hitler's Demons.") I came to know Axel very well, twice spending time as his house guest in Switzerland. He was a witty conversationalist, an insightful observer and commentator on contemporary events, and a haunted man. Few people who met him went away unimpressed.

“The survivors of a failed coup are never its heroes,” Axel Baron von dem Bussche told me the first time we met, but by most standards Bussche was a hero. At the age of 24, while a captain in the German Army, Bussche agreed to carry out a suicide-bombing against Adolf Hitler.

When he made this offer it was November 1943 and the conspiracy against Hitler, headed by former Chief of the German General Staff Ludwig Beck, had already made several unsuccessful attempts on Hitler’s life. Twice explosive devices had been activated in Hitler’s proximity, but in one case the bomb failed to detonate and in the other Hitler got out of range before the device could go off. Opportunities to get explosive devices near to the increasingly paranoid German dictator were few and far between, and the conspirators recognized that Hitler’s insistence on seeing the new officer’s uniform modeled for him personally was a rare and perfect opportunity for an assassination attempt. Under normal circumstances, anyone admitted to Hitler’s presence was first searched for arms, but a man modeling a uniform would have to be fully outfitted with side-arms - and grenades.

Axel Baron von dem Bussche was known to the conspirators as a “reliable” officer – i.e. a man who was a bitter opponent of Hitler. He was also tall, blond, blue-eyed, and good-looking. Furthermore, he was a veteran with multiple wound badges and he had been highly decorated. Bussche had the Iron Cross First and Second Class, and the German Cross in Gold at the time he was asked to serve as a model/assassin; he would later receive the Knight’s Cross. In short, he made an ideal “model.” Bussche was asked if he was willing to carry out an assassination attempt and agreed without hesitation.

Bussche traveled to Hitler’s HQ in East Prussia and prepared for the fateful meeting. The Conspiracy provided him with English plastic explosives and a fuse that could be set to various lengths, but Bussche preferred to use a German hand grenade instead. “I was a lot bigger and stronger than Hitler,” Axel told me bluntly, “and I figured I could hold on to him long enough for a three second fuse to go off. The plastic explosives were too unreliable.”

The date for modeling the uniform in front of Hitler was set: Nov. 23, 1943. Bussche waited impatiently, but the uniform failed to arrive. It had been destroyed in the previous night’s air-raid. Meanwhile, Bussche’s leave had run out. His division was involved in the heavy fighting on the Eastern Front, and as a company commander he was needed there urgently. He could not wait for another uniform to be sent. He returned to duty – and was shortly afterwards so severely wounded that his leg had to be amputated. He was in an SS hospital recovering from surgery – with the English plastic explosives he had not used in a suitcase under his bed - when Claus Count Stauffenberg made his assassination attempt on July 20, 1944.

On that same night, after hearing the news, Axel ate his address book page by page to prevent it falling into Gestapo hands. He also resolved to ask his first visitor to dispose of the incriminating explosives in the suitcase under his bed. Unfortunately, the first person who came to see him was “a young lady” and, as Axel put it, “unthinkable to impose on her.” So he had to wait for a second visitor, this time a fellow officer, who obligingly took the suitcase and threw it in a near-by lake – without asking any questions.

But in Berlin, more and more of Axel’s friends and comrades were being swept up in the Gestapo investigation of the July 20th Coup. Guilt by association was the rule, and over the remaining months of the war, men and women hanged for nothing more serious than giving a friend a place to stay the night, or expressing sympathy with the conspirators. As Axel made sure I knew, I had the opportunity to meet him only because friends and comrades did not betray his name - even under Gestapo torture.

So Axel survived the war, and I will never forget the first time Axel contacted me. I was working for a Washington area consulting firm when one day the phone rang. I answered unsuspecting with the company name and the standard question, “How can I help you?”

On the other end of the line a deep male voice barked: “Bussche. Ludwig Hammerstein says we should meet. I want you to come to dinner on Thursday.” The address and time followed. I really wasn’t given a choice – but I would have jumped at the opportunity any way. I knew who Axel Baron von dem Bussche was because by the time I got that call I had been researching the German Resistance for years; I knew Ludwig Baron von Hammerstein, the son of the Chief of Staff and C-in-C of the German Army in the 1930s, quite well.

That dinner in Georgetown was the start of a long friendship which included many conversations particularly during my visits to Axel’s baroque manor outside of Geneva, Switzerland. Axel had a way of telling stories that kept one breathless – but the laughter was never far behind. By the time I knew him, however, he not only suffered from severe “phantom pains” in his missing leg, but from a guilt complex. He felt guilty for having failed to kill Hitler – although it was not his fault. And he felt guilty that so many of his friends had died in the war and in the aftermath of July 20th, but he was still alive. Last but not least, he felt guilty for not having done more to stop Hitler’s atrocities. This was largely because Axel was one of the few members of the German Resistance who had actually witnessed the atrocities.

It was the summer of 1942. Bussche, having finally recovered from a lung wound that had kept him in Germany “convalescing” in the position of Adjutant to his Regiment's Reserve/Training battalion in Potsdam, was back on the Eastern Front. He was an Infantry First Lieutenant. One quiet day, a sergeant, one of the company couriers, rode up on a motorcycle. “Herr Leutnant, you better come and see this for yourself,” was all the man said. It was an unusual request but something about the man’s demeanor made Bussche go along with the messenger without question.

When he told me the story, he turned on me at this point and, scowling fiercely, growled: “You grew up knowing about Auschwitz! You know that we murdered millions! But I grew up thinking we were a civilized people – the people of Goethe and Beethoven. I had to stare at what was happening for five minutes before my brain would accept what my eyes told me: civilians were being brought up by the truck-load. The SS made them strip off their clothes – men, women and children – and then climb into an open pit which was already filled with a layer of corpses – some of them still twitching. The SS ordered them to lie face down on the others and then the SS shot them in the back of the head.”

Axel was never the same after this experience, and more than 40 years later he told me that he had given much thought to what he should have done. At the time, he said, he had wanted to rush to his superiors and demand that the Army intervene to stop the SS. But he soon recognized that this was futile. The Army had no control over the SS. Only Hitler could stop the SS – and Hitler had given the orders. So Axel became an even more fanatical opponent of Hitler than he had been before. He was prepared to kill himself in order to kill Hitler. But he did not have an easy conscience. He told me that after much soul-searching he had finally realized that what he should have done was step up to the edge of the pit, remove his officer’s uniform with the many decorations for bravery and recording his wounds, and climb into the pit with the victims.

Axel Baron von dem Bussche was a hero by almost any definition of heroism – except his own.

Encounters with Characters: Marion Countess Yorck

2011-07-03T01:00:00.003+02:00

When doing research for my novel, An Obsolete Honor: A Story of the German Resistance to Hitler, I had the priviledge to meet several of the surviving members of the German Resistance to Hitler, one of whom was Marion Graefin (Countess) Yorck von Wartenburg. At the time I was researching and writing from my apartment in Berlin and Marion lived in Berlin-Dahlem, so I had the opportunity to visit her many times. The stories Marion shared with me had a major impact on An Obsolete Honor (soon to be released in Kindle format under the title: "Hitler's Demons.") I would like to "introduce" the real Marion here:

She was not born a countess. On the contrary she came from solid bourgeois stock. One of six children, Marion was never spoiled, but the family believed in a good education for girls no less than boys. So she was sent to the most progressive and only co-educational school in Berlin, where she was in the same class as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and – what was exceptional in her age – she went on to university to study law.

Not that Marion was a book worm. She told me that she never worried about politics as a girl or young woman and remembers only the “good times” of the “Roaring Twenties” – the period when Berlin was one of the most dynamic centers of art, literature, music and theater in the world, easily on a par with New York, London and Paris.

One day she was invited to an extravagant wedding on a large estate in Silesia. The place next to her was left vacant for a guest who came late. The young man swept in and, Marion felt, treated her far too familiarly. She thought the young count was arrogant and cynical. But Peter Count Yorck von Wartenburg fell in love at first sight.

Peter too was a lawyer, and he had soon won Marion over – maybe in part because he never suggested she give up her studies. On the contrary, he helped her get her PhD in jurisprudence. They married shortly after he completed the equivalent of the bar exam in 1930. Although Marion had not yet completed the three-year practical training that was then a required part of German legal training before she could sit for the final exam, Marion was already 26 and wanted to have children. She stopped her studies, and devoted herself to making a home of the little apartment Peter and she shared.

Marion could not tell me exactly when she and Peter slid from opposition and disapproval of the Nazis to resistance and treason. One key factor was their friendship with Helmuth Count Moltke, whom the Yorcks met in 1940. Soon Peter and Helmuth, both sons of families that had produced two of Germany’s most famous generals in by-gone eras, were discussing with increasing energy all that was wrong with Nazi Germany – and what had to be done to set things right.

Neither Moltke nor Yorck were in a position to change anything. Both were civil servants. Nor did the two men initially know about the military conspiracy to depose Hitler. But it was obvious to them from 1941 onwards that Germany would lose the war and that the Nazi regime would one-day fall, and they wanted – in part just to keep themselves from despair, Marion said – to think about what a post-Hitler Germany ought to look like.

Gradually, they drew other people into their circle, selecting men, who had expertise in one area or another, so that all aspects of a future, German state could be properly thought through. Eventually, the connection was made to members of the military resistance, and a loose alliance was formed. While the military conspirators were responsible for getting rid of Hitler and his regime, the Kreisauer Circle, as the group of thinkers around Counts Yorck and Moltke came to be called, was responsible for developing the outlines of a future, post-Nazi German government and constitution.

Molke, it should be noted, opposed an assassination of Hitler. He felt that killing Hitler would enable a martyr-legend to evolve. He feared that Germans would convince themselves that Germany would have won the war “if only the Führer had lived,” and he felt the Germans needed to suffer complete and humiliating defeat in order to fully understand their complicity in the crimes committed in their name by the Nazi regime. Yorck, perhaps more strongly influenced by his distant cousin Claus Count Stauffenberg, supported the assassination attempt. Moltke was arrested for treason on January 11, 1944, before the coup attempt. Yorck took part in the coup and was arrested that same evening.

Marion never saw her husband again after saying good-bye to him on the morning of July 20, 1944. By evening, she knew the coup had failed and Peter was under arrest. All requests to see her husband were denied, but she learned that Peter was to go on trial before the feared “People’s Court” on August 8, along with several of other conspirators. The “People’s Court” was a Nazi institution which had been created in 1934 with the explicit mandate to eliminate all domestic opponents of the National Socialist Movement. By 1944, the Court, headed by the infamous judge Roland Freisler, was notorious for sentencing people to death for nothing more than circulating a joke against the regime or for a diary entry expressing doubt about “Final Victory.” Marion was under no illusion that her husband would get a fair trial, but she made her way to the imposing building that housed the court in the hope of being able to see Peter – and let him see her.

When Marion reached the gatehouse, the guards stopped her. She needed a special pass to attend the trial. But the guards, on learning who she was, invited her to sit in their little booth with them. Here she could hear through a window high in the wall over head the proceedings of the court.

All day, Marion sat with the guards listening to Judge Freisler’s high-pitched, scratchy voice heap abuse and insults on the defendants. He rarely let the defendants answer his questions, but rather cut them off in mid-sentence and mocked whatever they said. Marion could hear neither the court-appointed lawyers nor the men on trial. Because the judge never addressed the defendant by name, only as “Defendant,” she only learned when Peter was before the judge because the guards told her. She could not hear his answers any more than that of the others, but the trial ended with the death sentence.

Marion went home and wrote a last letter to her husband which she personally carried to Gestapo Headquarters. Here she begged the man on duty to give her letter to her husband. She told the Gestapo that her husband had just been sentenced to death, but the duty officer saw no urgency in her request. He sent Marion away. As she was later to learn, by the time she got home again that night, Peter was already dead.

Her own arrest followed the next day. She was arrested, as were the wives of all known conspirators, merely for being who she was - not because anyone suspected she had actually taken part in the planning of the coup. Fortunately for Marion, Nazi ideology cast women in the role of mothers and housewives, not intellectual partners.

Still, Marion’s fate was not easy. She was kept in isolation for weeks on end, locked in a cell with no direct sunlight – a time she came to treasure in retrospect because, as she put it, it was a chance for her to absorb Peter into her inner self. She was interrogated repeatedly, but never tortured. Eventually, she was granted the right to exercise, and then released – just in time to experience the Russian occupation.

Because she had returned to Peter’s parents home in Silesia, Marion found herself hiding in barns and graveyards in order to avoid the orgies of rape and murder that accompanied the Soviet occupation of Germany. Eventually, Marion made it back to Berlin without a serious mishap and there she was able to move into her old house. The Russians, once they had settled down into organized occupation, recognized Peter Count Yorck von Wartenburg – despite his aristocratic class - as an “Anti-Fascist Resistance Fighter” and gave Marion a document stating this and ordering everyone to help her!

But Marion kept slipping back across the new Polish border without proper papers to Peter’s home in Silesia. One day the Poles caught her. She was put in prison and her paper from the Russians did her no good. Weeks went by and she had no idea why she was being held. There were lice in the cell and the food, as Marion put it, was worse than what they fed the pigs on Peter’s estate. Eventually, however, she was sent to Warsaw and here, at last, a Russian colonel recognized the significance of her “Anti-Fascist” I.D. He agreed to help her - but first she had to spend another three weeks in a freezing cell, from which water dripped off the walls.

Then just as suddenly as the arrest, Marion was set free. She was in Breslau, a city that had once been German but was now Polish. She had no money. No clothes but what she was wearing and she was, as she put it, “as dirty as a hunting dog.” She had lice too. She went to Caritas, a Catholic aid organization, where she was taken in, given shelter, food, a delousing, a bath and clean clothes. Here she learned to her amazement that Freya von Moltke, the widow of Helmuth Count Moltke, had reported her missing to the Americans, and they had informed the French Consul in Breslau. Although it was not easy, eventually the Caritas managed to get Marion back to Berlin – loaded with secret messages from the Caritas in Poland to their sister organization in Germany.

Back in Berlin, Marion first took work with the social welfare office of the city council. This was dominated by Communists, but Marion’s work was to find and reunite the families of the resistance members. When the coup failed on July 20, 1944, not only were most of the wives, parents and adult children of the condemned also arrested, but the young children and infants of the conspirators were assigned new names and divided up among “good” Nazi families. Thus, quite apart from all difficulties of trying to find loved-ones in a world where the infrastructure was largely obliterated, neither post nor telephones worked, and new borders with new rulers had been created, the survivors of the resistance had to find out under what name and to which Nazi family their small children had been given. It was important work, and Marion enjoyed it. But around her she witnessed the increasing terror of the German Communists and their Soviet masters. Marion had experienced the consequences of one dictatorship far too acutely to be indifferent. She turned her back on the East and looked for new opportunities in the Western Sectors of Berlin.

The Americans at the time (1946) were desperately looking for trained lawyers and judges who were not tainted by a Nazi past. Marion was short just one exam and one last practical internship before being a qualified lawyer. She was advised to complete both qualifications as soon as possible, and no sooner was she finished than she was appointed judge.

One might think that her lack of experience as a lawyer made her ill-suited for the position of judge, but Marion pointed out to me that she had other experiences that were at least, if not more, valuable. Marion knew the smell of prisons from the inside, that “constant mixture of food and urine.” She knew the agonies of isolation, the indignities of lice and filth, and never could she forget the sound of Freisler screaming at her husband without using his name.

Marion vowed that she would never address a defendant by anything other than their proper name. And she vowed she would never condemn anyone to any sentence without first making sure that she understood his or her motives. She rose rapidly in the ranks of the West German judiciary and retired in 1969. And she kept her vows.

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer -- Chapter 1, Scene 4

2011-06-26T10:22:00.000+02:00

Cleombrotus was Leonidas’ twin brother. The news that Leonidas had killed a wild boar reached him in his tent, where he was dicing with his seven mess-mates. Hearing that Leonidas had broken an arm in the encounter, Cleombrotus snorted and remarked contemptuously, “Lucky someone was around to rescue him from worse harm!”

When they were little, Cleombrotus had been significantly bigger and stronger than Leonidas and had used both advantages to bully his brother. In the agoge they had been separated and rarely met; but Cleombrotus continued to excel, particularly at boxing, eventually winning in the youth competitions at Olympia. He had won the honors at the Feast of Artemis Orthia as well, and he carried that title and trophy for life. Throughout these early years he had looked down on his smaller twin, sneering at him for failing to be elected herd leader and for failing to win honors or Olympic laurels. But last year everything had turned upside down and bitter, when both youths were twenty-year-old instructors at the agoge, called eirenes. Cleombrotus lost his command after a case of unprecedented insubordination by his unit, resulting in it being turned over to his twin brother.

“That’s not what Alkander is saying,” noted the man who had brought Brotus the news.

“Alkander? That trembler! He p-p-probably shit at the sight of the b-b-boar and didn’t notice what was g-g-going on.” Cleombrotus imitated the stutter that Alkander had had as a boy, to the amusement of his companions.

When they stopped laughing, however, the messenger put him right. “You’d better come see the carcass first, Brotus. It’s huge! It took four men to carry it, and the tusks are at least two feet long. Alkander held it down with his spear while Leonidas stabbed it with his sword. They weren’t hunting and didn’t have a proper boar spear with teeth—just their standard-issue war spears, which were still in it when Demaratus got there.”

“Demaratus? What the hell was Leonidas doing hunting with the Eurypontids?” Cleombrotus made it sound like treason.

No one bothered to answer, because everyone knew that Leonidas and Alkander had been friends since boyhood, long before Alkander’s sister married Demaratus. “Come and see for yourself,” Brotus’ comrade suggested sensibly, and they all scrambled out of the tent to take a look.

Torches were forbidden in a Spartan camp, no less than in the city of Sparta, but they didn’t have much trouble finding the source of commotion. It was, after all, not yet late, and most men had not gone to sleep. The arrival of Demaratus with this immense trophy had brought many men out of their tents, and word had rapidly spread that Leonidas had killed it.

Despite himself, Cleombrotus was impressed. The boar was the largest specimen he had ever seen. Nor could he comfort himself that the beast was old, decrepit, or lame. Not a hair was gray, and there was not one other injury on its body besides the ones sticky with fresh blood. The boar was muscular, with bristling black hair and eyes that—even in death—were full of power and contempt for lesser creatures. How could Little Leo have vanquished such a beast? For the first time in his life, it occurred to Brotus that Leonidas might have qualities he had failed to notice up to now. Leonidas, he registered, might be more than he appeared to be.

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer -- Chapter 1, Scene 3

2011-06-18T10:02:00.000+02:00

King Cleomenes was happy that Demaratus had accepted the invitation to dine with the Corinthian polemarch. As a result, he was the only king present in the royal mess. This gave him undivided precedence in everything, and enabled him to dictate what wine was poured and in what proportion it was mixed with water, to choose what songs (if any) were sung, and to dominate the conversation.

Cleomenes was thirty-three. Like his co-monarch, he was not a handsome man, though it was harder to say why. Cleomenes was tall, with no obvious blemish, and yet neither his features nor his limbs seemed to fit together gracefully. His forehead was too high, his chin too short, his shoulders too narrow, and his arms too long. He had huge knees over weak calves. But the worst of his features was the way his eyes wandered, never settling on anything for long and rarely looking another man in the eye—as if he wanted to avoid the disapproval, shock, or anger he so often saw reflected back at him in the faces of others.

Tonight was no exception. He either did not notice, or did not care, that the faces of the men around him were grim or disapproving as he drank more and more. Before too long the others had ceased drinking altogether, and shortly thereafter the five regimental commanders, the lochagoi, excused themselves one after the other.

This left only two priests. Yet even as Cleomenes addressed Asteropus, the younger of the two priests, Cleomenes did not actually look at him. Instead he gazed at the tent wall over his head. “So what’s this I hear about the Corinthians having an omen foretelling Corinthian triumph?”

Asteropus had a long, acne-scarred face, and he stroked his short beard as he considered his king. Truth to tell, he did not like Cleomenes. He thought the king impious, arrogant, and excessively temperamental—although there was no doubt about his raw intelligence or his high level of education. Cleomenes could cut through superfluous discourse like a knife through butter, and he hated illogical argument. Asteropus had learned to admire that, because he was an ambitious young man and Cleomenes had offered him a rare opportunity—to be the Agiad representative to Delphi.

Asteropus had snatched at the opportunity not only because it was a fascinating job, but because he had not had many successes in his short life. He had been one of those boys and youths who, no matter how hard he tried, inevitably lost at contests of strength and speed and dexterity. He was short-sighted and had spent most of his years in the agoge slogging miserably behind the leaders. It had not helped that he could not sing or dance, either, as those were skills the Spartans admired at least as much as skill at sports. Only his wits had sometimes won him praise and respect; but once he had joined the army at age twenty-one, even that no longer mattered so much. In the army, skill at arms and physical courage eclipsed all other virtues. Asteropus hated army life.

Cleomenes had rescued him from it. He had reached out his bountiful hand and appointed Asteropus his representative to Apollo, and from that day forward Asteropus was exempt from military service.

Asteropus knew he had attracted the king’s attention because, despite his mere twenty-five years of age, he had demonstrated an uncanny ability to read the omens of the Gods—as if his physical short-sightedness had been replaced with divine insight. When still in the agoge, for example, he had predicted a disastrous thunderstorm that killed five boys during the Phouxir. And just this spring he had foreseen the disaster that would strike Cleomenes’ half-brother, Dorieus. The latter in particular brought him Cleomenes’ favor, because the Agiad king hated his brother Dorieus—even more than he hated his co-regent King Demaratus.

Dorieus had been born to Cleomenes’ father, King Anaxandridas, by his first wife—but only after the ephors had made Anaxandridas take Cleomenes’ mother, Chilonis, as his second wife. Although Cleomenes had been born a year before Dorieus, Dorieus had been such a paragon of manly virtue while growing up that there had been a faction that supported his claim to the throne, saying he had precedence since he was son to the first (and implicitly only legal) wife of their father. At Anaxandridas’ death, the ephors and Council had ruled in Cleomenes’ favor and the Assembly had ratified the decision—albeit by a small (and some said dubious) majority. Outraged by the slight, Dorieus left Sparta in a rage, unwilling to accept Cleomenes as his king. He first tried to set up a colony in Africa, but was expelled by the Carthaginians. The oracle at Delphi then advised him to go to Sicily and found a city in honor of Herakles, promising him success if he did so. With only a handful of Spartiates but many perioikoi, he departed. Cleomenes had been glad to see him go; but he also feared that Dorieus, if successful abroad, might return to challenge Cleomenes at home—this time with an army at his back.

Cleomenes’ worries increased incrementally as news of Dorieus’ successes filtered back to Sparta. Dorieus appeared to be growing richer and more powerful by the month. Soon alarming news arrived: Dorieus’ Spartan colony was considered so powerful that he had been asked to assist in local wars—just as Sparta did at home. Cleomenes could picture the fleet that would land on the western shore of the Peloponnese and sweep through Messenia, rallying his subjects to revolt against him. His nightmares became so dreadful that Cleomenes consulted Sparta’s senior seer, Hekataios, but the answer was ambiguous and unsatisfying. He had then, almost as an insult to the older man, asked Hekataios’ barely mature son, Asteropus, what he thought Dorieus would do next.

In a flash of inspiration from his “second sight,” Asteropus had replied without hesitation. “You have nothing to fear from Dorieus, for he will pay for transgressing the instructions of the oracle. He will leave his body on the field of honor and be in Hades as soon as he tries to use his arms for a purpose other than that assigned him by Apollo.” Within just two months a ship from Sicily put in with the news that Dorieus was indeed dead, and Asteropus had secured the job of Cleomenes’ personal representative at Delphi.

Unfortunately, he had no flash of inspiration now. The Gods were fickle, after all, and he did not have an answer that would calm Cleomenes’ unease.

“Well?” the king prodded impatiently, reaching again for his wine. “What is all this nonsense about? Our allies share our victories and defeats. The Corinthians cannot win a victory without us. Surely they can see that?”

“Undoubtedly—if only the signs we had were not so adverse.”

“So why are they adverse?” Cleomenes demanded.

Asteropus was relieved by the arrival of a helot messenger. The man entered the tent and respectfully came to a halt before Cleomenes, his eyes down and his hands by his side.

“What is it?” Cleomenes demanded irritably.

“The surgeon sent me to inform you that your brother has been injured by a wild boar, sir.”

“Which brother?” Cleomenes wanted to know. Even with Dorieus dead, he still had two younger half brothers, likewise sons of his father’s first wife, and so from Cleomenes’ point of view untrustworthy.

“Leonidas,” the helot answered.

“Oh. Will he live?”

The helot glanced up, startled. “He has only a broken arm, sir.”

“So why the fuss?”

The helot treated the question as rhetorical, and withdrew.

“Fool!” Cleomenes commented to Asteropus with contempt. “He shouldn’t be out hunting boar if he doesn’t know how to keep out of their way.” Cleomenes reached again for his wine.

But in that moment Asteropus had one of his flashes of inspiration, and he warned Cleomenes, “Do not underestimate Leonidas. He may prove far more dangerous to you than Dorieus ever was.”

“Little Leo? Nonsense. Cleombrotus is the one to watch. He covets my throne. Leonidas is as docile as a lamb. Lambonidas would be a better name for him!” Cleomenes liked his own joke and laughed at it.

Asteropus let it go. He did not feel it was his job to contradict the king. He had done his duty by warning him.

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer -- Chapter 1, Scene 2

2011-06-12T16:22:00.001+02:00

“Master! Master! A catastrophe!” The slave burst into the symposium, at which his master was hosting a dozen important guests. “A horrible accident!” the slave gasped out.

Archilochos’ symposia were famous for the quality of their food, entertainment, and conversation. Wealthy, well-traveled, and active in politics, Archilochos prided himself on employing the best cook and serving the most coveted wines in all Corinth, because he found both useful bait to pull men into his circle. He was, at the moment, exceedingly pleased to have snared one of the Spartan kings, Demaratus.

King Demaratus was not a handsome man. He was short and bowlegged and had a very large nose. Aware of this, he was not vain about his person, and he dressed in the practical clothes of a common ranker in the Spartan army, without any hint of his royal status. He braided his hair from the roots, as was custom, and bound the tips with tarred twine like marines did. Despite this almost defiant refusal to dress like a king, however, he was very conscious of his royal dignity and sensitive to slights to his status.

Despite the superficial differences between Demaratus and the elegant and cultured Archilochos, they found common ground in their opposition to the other Spartan king’s plans to make war on Athens. They met tonight to discuss ways of putting an end to the ill-advised adventure; and Archilochos deplored the unprecedented interruption of a slave, who had no business in the symposium for any reason.

“Stop babbling!” Archilochos snapped at the hysterical old slave.

But the slave was Lychos’ tutor, the man who had watched over him when he was growing up, and he was far too distressed to calm down. “Lychos has been gored by a wild boar. They say he was tossed around in the air, speared on the tusks of the boar, and his guts were spilling out of him!”

“Who says? What are you talking about?” Archilochos started to focus on what the man was saying.

“Master Lychos is bleeding to death! He―”

“Calm down and give me a coherent report!” Archilochos ordered, alarm rather than outraged propriety lending his voice an edge now.

Except for Demaratus, Archilochos’ guests were all Corinthian aristocrats who knew their host’s son personally; they exchanged horrified glances. Even Demaratus knew that his host had lost one son at sea, and guessed that this youth was Archilochos’ heir.

“He was riding beyond Acrocorinth when his horse shied at the sight of a boar, and he was thrown to the ground, and the boar gored him!” The slave was trying desperately to get his master to do more than stare at him in horror.

“Where is he?” Archilochos demanded.

“In the forest on the far side of Acrocorinth!”

“He’s still out there? But how did you hear of this?” Archilochos demanded, rearing up from his couch.

“A Spartan! A Spartan found him and killed the boar, but he could not bring him back. He only just managed to capture his horse and ride to Pytheas for help.”

“Pytheas?”

“Of course!” The slave was impatient with his master’s slowness. “Lychos was riding out with Chambias, and Chambias gave instructions to his own house.”

“Why didn’t he come himself?” Archilochos demanded in terrified outrage, his anger an expression of his unfathomable fear. He could not lose this son, too!

“Chambias broke his knee falling from his horse. Lychos―”

“They left him out there? Bleeding to death?” Archilochos grabbed for his himation, fumbling for his sandals.

Demaratus had never seen a grown man look so lost and helpless.

“The other Spartan and Chambias stayed with him, but we must get help to him! Master, we must get the surgeon!”

“Don’t give me orders, slave!” Archilochos snarled back, and only then remembered his guests. He turned to them, unseeing, muttered “excuse me,” and was gone, the old slave in his wake.

The other men collected their himations and slipped their feet into their sandals. The owner of the flute girls shooed them away while they chattered excitedly like a flock of chickens. Demaratus, however, took his time. While the other guests departed, he tied his own sandals and deliberately wrapped his thick red himation around him. Then he set his cross-crested helmet on the back of his head, the nosepiece on his forehead, and followed the others out.

Just as he had expected, he found his host in the outer courtyard. By now Archilochos had sent for a surgeon and ordered his horse tacked up, while a crowd of slaves collected in the courtyard carrying stretchers and torches. Demaratus moved calmly into the maelstrom of activity swirling around Archilochos.

Archilochos was in no mood for any distraction, and he scowled in annoyance at the Spartan king. “Forgive me, but this must take precedence—”

Demaratus waved him silent. “Of course. I merely wanted to reassure you. If two Spartiates were at the scene of the accident, then you can be sure they did all that could be done to save your son.”

“You don’t even know who they were! How can you be so sure? Ordinary soldiers are no surgeons!”

“Spartiates have gone through the agoge, and they are huntsmen. They know how to treat wounds caused by sword and spear, claws, teeth, and tusks, as well as how to handle other common injuries from sprains to broken bones. They will have done all that is possible for your son until a surgeon can see him.”

Archilochos was in no mood to listen, so Demaratus stepped back and let him go, but he called for his own horse. His helot attendant came forward at once, having anticipated the order and having already tacked both their horses. Demaratus swung himself easily onto the animal’s back and followed in the wake of Archilochos’ noisy party with their many torches.

They did not have far to ride. Just behind the huge Doric temple to Apollo, they stopped beside a house ablaze with torchlight. All the neighbors had lit torches, too, and slaves filled the street; the women crowded the balconies, shrouded in their shawls so that only their eyes showed.

Archilochos was met at the door by a man with long white hair and a flowing beard, who assured Archilochos that his own rescue party had set out a quarter of an hour earlier. Archilochos, however, was not calmed, and insisted on following them. Proceeding at a jogging pace along the long avenue leading out of the city to the west, they overtook the priest’s rescue party before it had passed out of the city walls.

Demaratus tagged along, unseen by the others, until he suddenly cantered past the rest of the party to the young man who was leading them. He drew up sharply, his horse’s hooves skidding on the paving stones. “Alkander! You? You killed this boar?”

“It was Leonidas who killed him. I merely pinned him down.”

They gazed at one another while the Corinthians came to a halt in confusion.

“What is this? We must hurry!” Archilochos demanded, riding up beside Demaratus.

“Indeed. And so we shall. Let me introduce my wife’s brother, Alkander.” Demaratus hesitated, but then he decided it would eventually come to light anyway. “And you need not fear that your son’s rescuers were ‘ordinary soldiers.’ The young man who killed the boar is none other than Leonidas, son of Anaxandridas and brother to King Cleomenes.”

Sparring with Ghosts: Writing Biographical Fiction

2011-06-03T19:55:00.000+02:00

While I have been writing historical fiction all my life, I only started to focus on biographical fiction after earning my PhD with a biography of General Friedrich Olbricht. Combining the skills of a biographer were those of a novelist is an even greater challenge than combing the skills of an historian with those of a novelist. History provides a context for fictional characters, but leaves the novelist almost infinite freedom to fit their characters into the general historical framework. Biographical fiction requires a higher degree of discipline and forces a novelist to operate within a more rigid structure. The rewards of evolving an internally consistent and legitimate interpretation of a historical figure are, however, almost indescribable.

The fact is, for most historical figues information about what went on inside their hearts and minds is scarce. We might have the odd letter or two, or if very lucky a diary, but the farther back in history a person lived, the less likely we are to have authentic, first-hand material. Most of what we know about historical figures was recorded at best by contemporary chroniclers, and more often by observers who lived decades or even centuries later. Many historical records come from foreign sources – Athenians writing about Sparta, Christian monks recording the raids of the Vikings, or Frenchmen decrying the atrocities of the English in the Hundred Years War. Even where we have contemporary, domestic sources, these may be hostile to the subject, for example the interrogation records of the Inquisition describing the Cathars or Gestapo memos on the German resistance to Hitler.

What this means is that the best information we have about historical figures is usually their actions. My father always told me to judge a man by what he did, not what he said, but this can be very difficult across the distance of 500 years or more. And, of course, in certain situations we cannot even be sure that deeds attributed to one personality or another were in fact committed by them. Did Richard III order the murder of his nephews or didn’t he? The sons of Edward IV disappeared while Richard III was king. Bones have been found that appear to match boys their age. Carbon dating suggests a date within the period of Richard’s short reign. Yet anyone familiar with the Richard III controversy knows there are powerful arguments against Richard’s guilt and a number of other historical figures, who could conceivably committed (or ordered) the murders.

In short, while a novelist writing biographical fiction has to keep to the known facts, he/she still has a great deal of leeway. In most cases, there is almost unlimited freedom when it comes to describing emotions and attitudes, and these in turn determine the nature of relationships and – ultimately – the character of an individual. With the identical set of facts, two good historical novelists could create equally convincing and yet virtually opposite characters. Sticking to my Richard III example: the bald fact is that Richard married Anne Neville, the widow of his arch-rival, the Lancastrian prince Edward. Depending on how one interprets this fact, he either forced himself on a helpless, grieving widow or he rescued his childhood sweetheart after her father bartered her into a hated first marriage.

It is all about interpretation, a phenomenon that actors will recognize well. In a play, the same actions, even the same lines, can be transformed by interpretation – and that is what makes writing biographical fiction so much fun.

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer -- Chapt. 1, Scene 1, Excerpt 6

2011-05-28T13:13:00.002+02:00

Chambias felt guilty for his earlier hostility to the Spartans. “Thank you. We would both be dead if you hadn’t happened along.”

The Spartan’s expression grew serious again. “Your friend needs a surgeon. Are you from around here?”

Chambias nodded and then, remembering his manners, added, “I’m Chambias, son of Pytheas; and that is Lychos, son of Archilochos.”

The Spartans flinched―as if they recognized the name―but made no comment. The spokesman merely asked, “Will your horses run home and alert someone about the accident, or should we chase after them?”

“Mine will probably run home. Lychos’ mare is better about staying.”

“I’ll see if Beggar and I can catch her,” the darker Spartan said to his companion; and whistling to his hunting dog, he set off. She was one of the big Kastorian hounds bred in Lacedaemon and admired around the world for their acute sense of smell, tenacity, and intelligence. This one had an ugly white patch on her face that would have made a wealthy Corinthian scorn her, Chambias noted; but she had certainly attacked the boar fearlessly. Now she bounded after her master with an eagerness and agility that was both beautiful and touching.

Chambias watched man and hound disappear behind the stunted trees and then turned awkwardly to the remaining Spartan. He found it disconcerting that because Spartans all wore identical red chitons and cloaks, he could not tell if this young man was rich or poor, the son of someone powerful or powerless. Up to now, he had always been able to tell at a glance whether he was dealing with someone of consequence. Now he could not.

The strange young man drew a goatskin off his back and offered it to Chambias, who accepted gratefully, only now conscious of how thirsty he was.

“Are you with the Corinthian army?” the Spartan asked.

“Not yet; we’re both ephebes―in the cavalry,” Chambias added proudly. “And you?”

“Peers,” the Spartan answered simply—and inadequately from Chambias’ point of view—but the yapping of a dog distracted them and they turned in the direction of the noise. A few moments later the other Spartan reappeared, leading Lychos’ black mare. “If you can climb up on that rock,” he suggested to Chambias, “you should be able to mount despite your leg.”

Chambias looked at the indicated rock, at his friend’s sweating and clearly nervous mare, and then down at his knee. The mere thought of trying to mount and ride with this knee made him nauseous. If the horse spooked and he was thrown a second time, it would be unbearable. He shook his head. “Can’t either of you ride for help? I can direct you to my father’s house. It is directly behind the Temple to Apollo; he is the chief priest.” Chambias felt it was important that these Spartans realize that even though he was not as rich and important as Lychos, he was not a nobody.

The Spartans glanced at one another, and for a moment Chambias feared that neither of these ordinary Spartans was capable of riding; most Corinthian foot soldiers had little skill with horses. But then the darker of the two decided, “You had better go, Alkander. Beggar and I have a better chance of fighting off any predators.”

The Spartan addressed as Alkander, the Apollo-like blond, frowned and seemed inclined to contradict, but the other Spartan shook his head once and the blond accepted the decision. Wordlessly and effortlessly he vaulted onto the mare before turning to Chambias for more instructions. These given, he trotted away, leaving Chambias with the other Spartan.

The latter went at once to check on Lychos, but quickly turned back to Chambias. “Could you lend your friend your chlamys? He is dangerously cold.”

“Of course.” Chambias was ashamed he had not noticed himself. The Spartans had, after all, already shredded one of their cloaks for bandages and wrapped Lychos in the second. Chambias pulled his short cape off his back and the Spartan came and took it from him. The Spartan seemed to hesitate as he noticed that the garment was of the finest wool, dyed a costly turquoise blue with an elaborate border. It was obviously very expensive. “It’s all right,” Chambias insisted. The Spartan returned to Lychos and, kneeling on one knee beside him, carefully tucked the chlamys around him.

Now that he was without a cloak, Chambias noted that the sun was behind the western mountains and it was getting chilly. He looked again at Lychos, who was rolling his head back and forth in evident pain. Chambias registered for the first time that it could take hours for someone to get here with a stretcher or litter. By then Lychos might be dead. Even if the bleeding had slowed, only the Gods knew what damage had been done to his insides. It would also soon be dark and, as the Spartan had already hinted, there were other wild beasts that might be drawn by the smell of blood.

The Spartan seemed to sense what was going through Chambias’ head, because he abruptly broke in on his thoughts. “Alkander is a good rider, and we visited the Temple to Apollo this morning. He will find your father’s house without trouble. Meanwhile, it’s a fine night. The only thing I’m worried about is that the carcass of the boar may draw scavengers.” He pointed to the wheeling vultures overhead. Finishing his thought, he added, “I’ll build a fire to warm your friend, keep the wild animals away, and help Alkander find us again. Do you have bears or wildcats here?”

“No bears; but the cats, although small, are very vicious. And there are wolves, of course.”

The Spartan nodded and started to collect dried wood, of which there was plenty. As he worked, Chambias noticed that he was holding his left arm cradled at his waist and working only with his right hand.

“Are you hurt?” Chambias asked as the Spartan went down on one knee to build the fire, still cradling his left arm.

“The boar broke my left forearm as I went in for the kill. That’s why I sent Alkander for help.”

Chambias was ashamed to think that they were both suffering from broken bones and the other was doing all the work. “Can I help?” he asked.

“If you could strike the flint it would be a big help,” the Spartan admitted with a smile.

Chambias looked blank.

“It’s here. In my hip pouch.” The Spartan indicated the leather pouch that hung from the right-hand side of his belt.

Chambias hobbled over, reached inside, and withdrew the flint; but the Spartan had to explain how to use it, and it took Chambias several tries before he managed to strike a spark. It took many more tries before he ignited the pile of dry leaves and twigs the Spartan had so carefully prepared. “I’ve never done this before,” Chambias said, defensively excusing his obvious incompetence. “We have slaves to light our fires.”

The Spartan nodded ambiguously, blowing gently to stoke the fire and then feeding it from the pile of kindling he had collected. Only after it was going solidly did he again turn his attention to the Corinthian, suggesting, “We might as well eat some of that boar.”

This was going too far. It wasn’t just that Chambias hadn’t the faintest idea of how to go about flaying a carcass; he also did not think it a proper task for a youth of his station. No priest sullied his hands with the meat of the sacrificial beasts. His father employed no less than three professional butchers to flay and filet the sacrificial animals. They were skilled men, but all were slaves or former slaves.

The Spartan apparently understood his look of outrage and shrugged. “If you aren’t hungry, we don’t need to bother. I can go without.” He then settled down to feed the fire.

“Have you spent the night out in the open before?” Chambias asked, glancing nervously at the darkening sky.

“Many times; haven’t you?”

Chambias shook his head. It had never occurred to him that spending the night out in the open might be something desirable. In his experience only beggars, vagabonds, and shepherds slept out at night. It was a mark of status that he had never done so―but somehow this Spartan had managed to turn things on their head and make it sound like a deficit of some kind.

So they sat in silence, the Spartan feeding wood to the fire with one hand while his bitch gnawed happily at the carcass, and Chambias miserably listening to his best friend die.

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer - Chapter 1, Scene 1 - Excerpt 5

2011-05-22T17:25:00.002+02:00

Chambias saw his death in the malicious eyes of the black beast.

Lychos flung himself off his horse, grabbing his cavalry javelin from his back. He landed between the boar and his friend and hurled the javelin with all his strength. It was a gallant but futile gesture. The cavalry javelin was not designed to penetrate the tough hide of a boar.

The javelin glanced off the boar’s shoulder without even slowing him down. An instant later, the boar rammed his tusks into Lychos’ belly, and the youth crumpled forward.

The boar lifted his head with Lychos draped across his now bloody tusks and shook his head from side to side, with slow deliberate shakes. The beautiful gored youth screamed in agony as his guts were ravaged by each jerk.

Chambias staggered to his feet, screaming. He tore his chlamys off his back and tried waving it at the boar in a frenzied attempt to distract him. His friend’s blood was splattering everywhere as he hung like a limp doll on the tusks of the boar. Only his rasping screams gave evidence that he still lived.

Chambias could barely stand because of his shattered knee. His own two javelins had spilled onto the ground when he fell, and they now lay out of reach. He had no other weapon on him but his knife—a weapon far too short to damage a boar of this size, even if he could have thrown it with accuracy. He knew he had no chance of saving his friend or himself.

Out of nowhere, two men appeared on the run. They paused only long enough to grasp what was happening, and then reversed their spears from an underhand to an overhand grip and started to advance on the still-raging boar with a deliberation that made Chambias scream at them. “Hurry! He can’t last much longer! Hurry!”

The two men ignored him. His friend was dying with each shake of the boar’s massive head, yet the two men approached only with wary deliberation. Then, with a single exchanged glance, they raised their spears in a double-handed grip. The sun glinted briefly on the tips of the spearheads, and they brought their arms crashing down in almost perfect unison.

The boar saw the danger too late. He managed to toss the limp body of Lychos into the nearest gorse bush and turn toward his attackers, but by then they had already struck. The boar crumpled onto his right haunch, but he was far from dead. Grunting his outrage, the boar shook his bloody tusks and flailed wildly with his forelegs, trying to regain his footing.

From out of the underbrush, the Spartans were suddenly joined by a hound. She threw herself into the fray without a second of hesitation. While the men impaled the boar, pinning it to the earth with the weight of their bodies, the dog leaped onto the boar’s back and tried to bite down on the spine just behind the boar’s head. Yet the wild animal was not subdued.

It was now evident to Chambias that his rescuers had not come prepared for boar hunting. They had attacked with ordinary war spears. These did not have a cross guard and were thinner, less sturdy. Chambias groaned in horror as he heard the unmistakable crack of a spear breaking.

“Hold him!” the man with the broken spear shouted urgently to his companion. The latter flung his weight forward onto his own spear a second time, while his friend stepped back, reversed his spear, and used the butt end―the “lizard sticker”―to gore the boar a second time.

This, too, failed to kill the boar, who with an abrupt, twisting motion sent the dog catapulting through the air. The man with the long spear gave a shout of alarm, realizing he could not hold the boar alone much longer, and instantly the man with the broken spear abandoned it to draw his sword.

With alarm Chambias registered that the sword was ridiculously short; yet that did not deter the swordsman. The man lunged forward and sideways―not, as Chambias expected, for the jugular, but to thrust the sword deep into the chest cavity of the boar from behind the right elbow. He ran the sword in all the way to the hilt. The boar thrashed violently with his forelegs one more time; but then the life went out of his eyes, and he sank down on the ground with an audible thud.

The two strangers were breathing very hard and dripping sweat, as they stared at the massive beast they had only with difficulty managed to dispatch between them. Their red chitons and himations identified them as Spartans, but Chambias could think only of his friend. “Lychos! Lychos!” He staggered forward, dragging his injured leg.

His cries and sobs of pain drew the attention of his rescuers, and they went over to where Lychos had been flung. Together they retrieved the bloody body from the bushes and stretched it out in the small clearing. The hound, having recovered from her toss into the bushes, ran frantically around them, panting in evident agitation.

“Is he alive?” Chambias asked, still hobbling painfully over.

“Yes,” came the succinct answer; and then as Chambias got nearer, he could hear and see for himself that his friend moaned and writhed, trying to stanch the bleeding and pain in his abdomen. The two Spartans, meanwhile, had opened Lychos’ belt and sliced through the Egyptian linen of his bright yellow chiton to get a look at the wound. Chambias tasted his lunch in his mouth as his friend’s innards slithered out of the gaping wound. The Spartan who had dispatched the boar deftly shoved the innards back inside the wound and held it firmly closed in a grip that made his knuckles go white under the blood of boar and man mixed together. Meanwhile, the other set about tearing one of their red cloaks into bandage strips and winding these firmly around Lychos’ torso. Lychos screamed in pain as they worked, but they ignored him for his own good. When they finished, a broad band of scarlet held the wound closed and slowed the hemorrhaging. The second man then yanked off his himation and covered Lychos with it, tucking it in all around him and even winding it around his head so that he looked like a corpse, with only his face exposed.

“Will he live?” Chambias asked.

The Spartans looked over their shoulders and up at Chambias. To Chambias’ astonishment, the two men looked hardly older than himself. One possessed the kind of classical features that the sculptors liked to put on statues of Apollo. He had short, curly blond hair, bright blue eyes, and gentle lips. Chambias couldn’t help thinking he must have had lovers fighting over his favors as a boy. The other was less beautiful, with light-brown, coarse hair and green-gold eyes; but he was taller and broader than his companion, and he was the one who had thrust his short sword deep enough into the boar to kill it. It was also this youth who now replied. Without answering Chambias’ question, he stated, “You’d better sit down and let us tend to your knee.” He nodded toward Chambias’ leg, already discolored and swelling.

Chambias didn’t have the strength to protest. He hobbled toward a large boulder where, with an involuntary gasp, he eased himself down. The Spartans followed, the blond already working deftly to rip up what was left of the cloak they had shredded to bind Lychos’ wounds. When he started bandaging Chambias’ knee, however, the pain was so intense that Chambias had to bite down hard to keep from crying out. Everyone knew the Spartans scorned anyone who couldn’t endure pain with equanimity, and Chambias did not want to disgrace himself or his city. Despite what he wanted, however, he was trembling all over, and he could not hide that. He stammered an apology, “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I’m not usually like this.”

While the blond Spartan continued with the bandaging, the other tossed Chambias a smile and remarked, “Hopefully, you don’t regularly get yourself nearly killed! Don’t worry about it.”

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer - Chapter 1, Scene 1 - Excerpt 4

2011-05-13T22:12:00.002+02:00

“But it would be exciting to go to war!” Chambias admitted to his friend Lychos with a grin, as he let his stallion stretch out his neck.

The two Corinthian youths, sons of leading families, were returning from Acrocorinth, where they had been trying to get a glimpse of the Spartan army. The Spartans had invoked the defensive treaty with Corinth and her other allies that required the allies to follow wherever Sparta led. For days now, allied contingents had been pouring into Corinth in response to the Spartan summons. Punctually at the start of the full moon, the Spartans themselves arrived.

As the sons of wealthy men on the brink of manhood, Chambias and Lychos were enrolled as ephebes in the Corinthian cavalry, and they took a keen interest in the impending war. They were particularly curious about the Spartans, because they flattered themselves that they understood “a thing or two” about things military, and the reputation of the Spartan army was unmatched anywhere in Hellas. They wanted to see it for themselves.

And so, taking their flashiest, most high-strung horses and carrying their javelins to underline their status as combatants, the two young men had set out to inspect the Spartan camp. They dressed in bright, patterned chitons to show off their status and wore their short cavalry capes, called chlamys, which fluttered straight out when they galloped. They also wore broad-brimmed leather hats and boots that laced halfway up their shins―all of the best quality.

They were soon disappointed. Unlike the troops of the other Peloponnesian allies, the Spartans set up a camp outside the fortress and then put up sentries that prohibited entry to the camp. Lychos and Chambias had been turned away.

The day being young and the weather good, however, they elected to ride around the back of the camp into the surrounding countryside to get away from the bustle, dust, and stink of the overcrowded city. They galloped a bit to wear off some of their frustration and energy, but now they let the horses walk on a long rein so they could talk.

Lychos didn’t share Chambias’ enthusiasm for the impending war because his father, the chief polemarch of Corinth, had returned from a symposium the previous night fuming that the Spartans wanted to invade Attica and bring down Athens’ democratic government. Lychos eagerly explained to his friend what he had learned from his outraged father. “The only reason for this war is King Cleomenes’ injured pride―or his loins. My father says there are rumors that Cleomenes has his eyes on the wife of the Athenian leader, Isagoras.”

“I thought Cleomenes was married to the most beautiful woman in Sparta! Didn’t people talk of a second Helen?” Chambias countered.

“That was years ago! She’s had several children and is probably fat and sagging now,” Lychos retorted with the wisdom of his nineteen years, his views reflecting the sum of his experience with women―his mother, grandmothers, and aunts.

Chambias nodded agreement, his experience being no different.

Lychos had inherited an interest in politics from his father, however, and he continued intensely, “What I don’t understand is why the Spartans have kings at all―much less two!”

“That’s because they are so pious,” Chambias answered, echoing his father, chief priest of Apollo. “The Spartan kings are descendent from Herakles, after all, and to cast them out would be an insult to the Gods.”

“But how can you have two men in command of an army? That would be like having two captains on a ship!” In addition to being the chief polemarch of Corinth, Lychos’ father owned a trading empire that depended on a fleet of over a hundred ships. Lychos had sailed with his father often enough to understand command at sea. “What if the two kings disagree?” Lychos asked rhetorically, adding: “My father says the present Spartan kings hate each other. Demaratus is very jealous of Cleomenes, who he thinks is vain and takes too much credit for everything.”

“Which one was which?” Chambias asked. “They all looked the same to me.” Chambias was thinking of the ranks of Spartan soldiers, all wearing red chitons under their bronze armor and red cloaks. Even the shields were identical, all bearing the lambda of Lacedaemon—except for those of the officers, who had individual shields and whose crests, rather than black, were white or striped.

“The two kings wear cross-crested helmets,” Lychos explained. “Crests that go from ear to ear. They rode ahead of the Guard. Cleomenes was on the right.”

“On the white stallion?” Chambias could picture him now.

“Yes, exactly.”

Chambias nodded thoughtfully. As the sons of aristocrats, they were both cavalrymen and connoisseurs of horseflesh. There was no denying that the Spartan kings had been exceptionally well mounted: something that surprised Chambias, who had always thought of the Spartans as infantrymen.

Lychos continued showing off his knowledge. “Cleomenes was on the flashier horse, but Demaratus won in the four-horse at the last Pythian Games, driving himself. My father predicts he will win again at Olympia.”

“They weren’t at all as I expected them to be,” Chambias admitted, looking over at Lychos uncertainly. Lychos was a fair youth with even features over a lithe body, toned to perfection in the gymnasium. Chambias was plumper, poorer, and not so sure of himself. Chambias had only had one love affair, with a senior priest, and it had been rather short and vaguely humiliating. Lychos, in contrast, had attracted a very rich, witty Athenian, the kind of lover who drew attention and could be politically useful in the future. Chambias felt a touch of jealousy. Lychos had everything: he was the heir to one of the greatest fortunes in a rich city, he was attractive, he was healthy and bright, and his father adored him. Chambias had spent most of his life trying to keep up with Lychos and always coming up short.

“What do you mean?” Lychos asked.

Chambias shrugged uncomfortably. He didn’t like Spartans. He didn’t like men who were so disciplined and unimaginative, men who did everything in groups, men who were arrogant and sure of themselves. But until the day before yesterday, he had never actually seen one. “Well, you know, they’re supposed to be taciturn and dour, but they were laughing and singing even as they marched. And today they flooded the bathhouses just like everyone else. They don’t even―”

Chambias did not get a chance to finish his thought. Without warning his horse leaped sideways, reared up, and then spun around on its haunches, dumping Chambias on the ground. The youth landed on his knee with an audible crack and blinding pain shot upward, but he had no time for it. A massive boar with coarse black hair and gigantic tusks was charging at him with such force that the earth shook under his hooves.

A Review of “Xerxes” by Ren A. Hakim

2011-05-07T11:24:00.000+02:00

Ren A. Hakim’s work Xerxes is a film script which describes Xerxes’ reign, and particularly his campaigns against the Greeks, predominantly from the Persian perspective. As far as I can tell (and I am not an expert on Persian history), the book is on the whole accurate, with many scenes and quotes taken directly from Herodotus. It certain bears no comparison – in the positive sense – with the script of “300” with its comic-book and supernatural elements.

The most remarkable aspect of the work is that Hakim effectively makes Xerxes a multi-dimensional human being. At last, Xerxes is not an abnormal monster or flat caricature of a despot. Hakim’s Xerxes is human and he is understandable. I was particularly impressed by Hakim’s ability to pull me onto Xerxes side during the Battle of Salamis. During this episode I found myself fully identifying with Xerxes rather than the Greeks.

Other aspects of Xerxes’ character were less convincing. Xerxes’ relationships with women were on the whole mishandled. On the one hand, we have an honorable man with what we are told is an undying love for the woman married to his best friend. We also see a husband, who is patient and forgiving to a selfish and insolent wife. Then more than half-way through the script we discover that he also has a large harem. While not inherently inconsistent, I found it irritating that for half the book (script) Xerxes was portrayed as a virtuous, monogamous man faithful to his wife and scrupulously respectful of his best-friend’s wife, and then suddenly he turns into an oriental despot sleeping with multiple women – and not, as we are explicitly told, because he has changed but merely because the author failed to reveal this side of him earlier in the manuscript. I personally found the relationship between Xerxes and his adored, but untouchable, Suraz trite in the early part of the novel, and his relationship with his wife implausible, mostly because his wife is a caricature, without positive attributes that would explain Xerxes’ loyalty to her. Xerxes reaction to Suraz’s daughter, later in the script, was in contrast highly believable.

Politically, I find it hard to believe that there would have been so many revolts against Persian rule (Babylon, Egypt, Ionia – all more than once), if Darius and Xerxes had been as benevolent and just as Hakim portrays them. Yet the hyperbole is justified, I think, by the fact that most accounts err in the opposite direction. Hakim is probably right that most accusations of personal atrocities and vindictiveness are fabrications of Persia’s enemies, particularly the Greeks.

Hakim is, furthermore, clearly drawing a parallel between the Persian invasion of Greece in retaliation for the sack of Sardis and the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq following the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. To make this point, the Persian kings are shown to see themselves as the enlightened rulers of a just world fighting against barbaric elements that wreck murder and destruction on innocent people. The thesis is completely legitimate; no doubt the Persian kings did see themselves as the “civilizing” power of their own age, and Americans need to be aware that we are seen as an “evil empire” in much of the world today -- no matter how we see ourselves. In this respect, Hakim’s Xerxes makes a valuable contribution. I hope that Hollywood will not do too much damage to her ambitious undertaking.

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer - Excerpt 3

2011-05-01T09:22:00.003+02:00

Leonidas had been spotted. A voice called the men to attention. With remarkable unison for an ad hoc unit, the shields came to the ready. But Leonidas was now close enough to distinguish the faces under the helmets of the front rank. He halted abruptly, unable to move a step closer.

Dienekes stepped forward smartly. “Sir. May I present the three hundred volunteers of your Advance Guard, all fathers of living sons.”

“And all my friends. Is not one of my enemies willing to defend Greece?”

“On the contrary, sir. Even your brother Brotus and your nephew Pausanias volunteered, but we turned them away.”

“Just how many volunteers were there?” Leonidas looked at him suspiciously.

“1,359―not counting these men.”

“You sent 1,359 men away?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“That was not what I told you to do,” Leonidas told him in a low, ominous voice. “I told you to muster the volunteers―not to usurp my prerogative of selecting the Advance Guard.” Leonidas was beginning to get angry, and his voice carried to the front rank.

“Leo.” Alkander broke ranks to come up beside Dienekes. “It was our decision,” he said softly.

“Who do you mean by that?” Leonidas snapped back. He did not want Alkander to come north with him. The risk was too great. He wanted him here in Sparta so he could be with Gorgo, Pleistarchos and Agiatis when the news came that he was dead. He wanted Alkander to be the father Agiatis would need when she was old enough to marry. More: he was counting on Alkander standing by Gorgo and Pleistarchos in the years to come when Pleistarchos would be a boy king with too few friends and too many enemies. And even after he was a man, Pleistarchos would need the advice of the utterly loyal and profoundly trustworthy Alkander.

“The men in the front rank,” Alkander answered.

Leonidas glanced at them again. The others were still standing at attention, eyes fixed straight ahead. They were each in their way the best Sparta had to offer―even battered Prokles.

Alkander continued. “We chased Brotus away with insults and mocked Pausanias. A couple hundred others left with them to protest our rudeness. Then we put our case to the remaining men. We said they would all have the chance to show their courage soon enough. After all, the main body of troops―three thousand strong―is due to march out at the end of the Karneia; that’s only ten days away. We pointed out that this Advance Guard was in effect your personal guard, and that it was only right that the men closest to you be allowed to serve in it.”

“Why?” Leonidas asked. “Do you think I want to drag all of you down to Hades with me?”

“No. But nor will we let you face your death alone.”

“I’ll hardly be alone among three hundred Spartiates―not to mention the perioikoi and allies!” His distress made his deep voice rough; to the rankers at the back, who could not catch his words, it sounded like the growl of an angry lion.

Alkander did not answer directly; he just shook his head. “You may have made the decision to die on your own, but you have no right to tell us we cannot be beside you when it happens.”

“Damn it! I am your king! I’ll choose my own damn bodyguard!” Leonidas growled more loudly still.

“For the better part of your life you have been one of us―and proud of it,” Alkander countered calmly. He had foreseen this reaction and was prepared with his arguments. “As Brotus has never forgotten or forgiven, you are king because we made you king. No matter how much of Herakles’ blood runs in your veins, or how important it is to you that your son becomes the next Agiad king, you are still one of us. We turned away men who wanted to serve their king―in order to retain those who wanted to serve you. We will go with you, Leonidas, and die with you if need be, not as your subjects―but as your peers.”

It took a moment for Leonidas to get sufficient control of his emotions to be sure he could speak. Then he nodded, took a deep breath, and managed to say: “You are right. The best part of my life I was no more and no less than a Spartan Peer.”

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer - Excerpt 2

2011-04-25T12:38:00.004+02:00

If he was allowed only three hundred Spartiates to hold Thermopylae until the army arrived after the Karneia, then he couldn’t take the Guard. They were all young men, the majority unmarried, all but a handful childless. Casualties were inevitable while waiting for the promised three-thousand-strong army to arrive. Leonidas did not want to have the extinction of any family on his conscience. So he had asked permission to substitute Guardsmen with volunteers from among the citizens with living sons. The ephors had agreed.

Leonidas expected about a thousand volunteers. He calculated that if he had a thousand men to choose from, he would be able to put together the balanced force he needed. He needed both canny veterans and enthusiastic youth. He needed men good at dogged defense, but also men capable of a quick sortie or a night raid. He needed men who cared more about the freedom of their families than their own lives, and that meant men who loved their families. He needed men who were prepared to die―but only after taking a heavy toll on the enemy first.

Oh, yes, he knew what he needed in principle, but how was he to select the men in fact? How was he supposed to walk down a line of men he’d known from childhood, men who’d sweated and bled beside him in the Argolid, or youth he’d mentored as eirenes, men whose daughters sang and danced with his own, and men whose sons went to school with Pleistarchos―and decide who he was going to throw in front of the Persian host like a piece of meat?

Eventually, they would all fight. They would all take blood for blood when the time came. And every one of them―no matter whom he chose―was a trained soldier.

But because he’d failed to prevail in Council, only three hundred would be squinting into the sunlight to watch for the darkening that indicated a new volley of arrows. Only three hundred would stand in the murderous sun, shield to shield, while sweat poured from their straining bodies until their feet were churning mud rather than the dust of summer-baked earth. Only three hundred would be splattered with blood amid the screaming and the groaning of the dying, risking their limbs, their eyes, and their lives while the others remained with their wives and children, singing the paeans and cheering the grape-runners and feasting in the nine ceremonial tents of the Karneia….

Was he supposed to pick the three hundred men like the helots chose a sacrificial lamb? For the beauty of their bodies? Was he supposed to select the best Sparta had to offer? Or should he do the opposite, and take with him those that Sparta could best afford to lose?

Leonidas realized he was not prepared to risk the latter. If he took the worst and they failed when it mattered most, Gorgo and Agiatis, no less than all the other women and children of Sparta, would pay the price. No, he had to take the best to ensure they could hold Thermopylae until the army reinforced them.

He picked up the pace and turned the corner to enter Tyrtaios square, where he had requested the volunteers to muster. Instantly he was taken aback by the glare of sun reflected from bronze. The volunteers had drawn up across the square in full panoply. Although they stood at ease, with the hoplons resting on their knees and their helmets shoved back to expose their faces, they wore bronze fighting armor and red cloaks. The stiff, black, horsehair crests bristled proudly from their helmets.

Magnificent as they appeared, however, they were a mere handful―far fewer than the one thousand men Leonidas expected. He made a quick count of the ranks and files, and realized that exactly three hundred men awaited him. That could be no coincidence. Someone had made the selection for him. He frowned. He did not intend to let whoever it was get away with that! He would demand to see the complete list of volunteers.

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer - Excerpt 1

2011-04-09T11:49:00.002+02:00

How do you choose men for sacrifice? The question seemed to hang in the stagnant summer air, thick with the dust kicked up by herds of sacrificial beasts driven into the city for the start of the Karneia. Leonidas had looked into the eyes of the passing steers, and they had looked back at him with recognition and understanding. “We are part of the same fraternity,” the four-legged sacrifices seemed to say as they nodded their heads and moved on, flicking their tails at flies.

But Leonidas had come to terms with that. He had been selected by the Gods. He was a descendant of Herakles. He had taken up the burden of kingship with the conscious intention of leading Sparta to a better future. At the time, he had pictured different challenges, but he knew now this was his destiny. He would not fail.

But what about the others?

Leonidas looked about the empty streets. At this time of day on a holiday, the city seemed abandoned. School was closed and the children sent home with their familes. The soldiers of Sparta’s army were furloughed. The stalls in the market and the workshops of craftsmen were boarded up. The race-courses, palaestra and gymnasia were deserted. Only on the edge of town and along the backstreets, behind the shuttered windows and closed doors of the houses, families rested in the noonday heat, gathering their strength for the athletic and choral competitions scheduled for later in the day and week. Pleistarchos would be taking part in the sporting contests for the first time, and Agiatis had been selected to perform in one of the dances. Leonidas wanted to be there for them, cheering and applauding—but not if the price was that the next time they performed it would be as slaves for a Persian master!

The Persians were advancing faster than expected. Sparta could not wait until the end of the Karneia to deploy the army. By then it might be too late—particularly with half of Hellas in Olympia and sticking their heads in the sand!

For a moment, the anger flared up in his chest. Two-thirds of the Gerousia and two of the ephors were as stupid as all the other Greeks who thought Persia would respect the Olympic peace. They refused to see that this struggle was like none that had gone before. They refused to understand that Sparta and her allies could not wait for a convenient time to respond. They had to march now. If they didn’t, they would come too late—as they had at Marathon.

The argument in the Council still echoed inside his aching head. The ghostly voices of his counterparts and the even more ghostly whispers of what he should have said had kept him from his sleep throughout the night. Leonidas felt acutely his failure to prevail in Council. He had mustered all the intelligence they had on Persian strength in men, ships and horses. He had described in detail the terrain between the Persian host and Lacedaemon, underlining the advantages of a defense at Thermopylae. He had reminded them in gruesome detail of the costs of failure. And he had stressed until his throat was raw that too little too late could be fatal for all they held dear.

At length, the Council agreed that Thermopylae, although far north of Sparta’s sphere of influence and beyond the usual range of operation for her army, was the ideal place to make a stand. They agreed further to ask the Assembly to call up five classes of reserves, increasing the strength of the standing army to three thousand men, and they agreed this force must deploy “as soon as possible.” But the Council stubbornly insisted there could be neither an Assembly nor a deployment until the Karneia was over. To do either would be an insult to the Gods.

That was when Leonidas had taken a desperate gamble. Since a king could take the Guard anywhere he ordered, Leonidas had made a last attempt to force the Council’s hand by announcing that, if they would not give him the army at once, he would march north immediately with the Guard alone. To his dismay, they had agreed.

Three hundred men against a million!

Well, three hundred Spartiates and maybe twenty times that number of allies against the million.

A stray cat trotted purposefully but with lowered head along the side of the nearest barracks, disappearing into the next alley. A mouse hung limply from either side of her mouth. It was still twitching and left a trail of blood on the cobbles. Yet even a mouse, Leonidas thought, when cornered will stand and fight. They would fight.

My next entry will be posted April 25, as I will be travelling in Greece until then. Happy Easter!

Leonidas of Sparta: A Peerless Peer

2011-04-02T17:44:00.001+02:00

Leonidas is arguably the most famous of all Spartans. Numerous works of art depict him. He was the hero of two Hollywood films. There is even a line of chocolate confectionery named after him. But no serious biography has ever been written, and what is most often portrayed is his death. Leonidas is remembered for commanding the Greek forces that defended the pass at Thermopylae against an invading Persian army. He is revered for refusing to surrender despite betrayal that made defeat absolutely certain. Thus Leonidas came to symbolize the noblest form of military courage and self-sacrifice. The events leading up to the three-day battle and death of Leonidas with three hundred other Spartans and seven hundred Thespians at Thermopylae have been the focus of historians, writers, and artists from Herodotus onward.

But Leonidas was not a young man at the historic battle where he gave his life. He had lived close to half a century (if not more) and reigned for ten years before he took command of the Greek alliance defying Persia. It was those years preceding the final confrontation with Persia that made him the man he would be at Thermopylae. To the extent that we admire his defiant stand, learning more about his early life and tracing the development of his character is important. Yet so very little is actually known about his early life that historians have been discouraged from attempting a biography.

Novelists, fortunately, enjoy more freedom, and what we do know about Leonidas’ early life is enticing. This is why I chose to devote a three-part biographical novel to Leonidas of Sparta. The first book, A Boy of the Agoge, was published last year. In it I built upon known facts about Leonidas’ birth and family situation and Sparta’s unique educational system to construct a plausible picture of Leonidas’ boyhood.

This week I delivered to my publisher the second book in the trilogy, A Peerless Peer. In this second book, I focus on the next stage of Leonidas’ life, the years when he was a common citizen before he became a king. This is the period in which he married his niece Gorgo and gained experience in battle and politics. Building on the few known facts, listening to the sayings attributed to Leonidas and Gorgo, and knowing how Leonidas met his destiny at Thermopylae, I have written this novel.

While based on all known facts about Leonidas, Gorgo and the society in which they lived, the novel goes beyond the bare bones of the historical record. It interpolates from these facts a reasonable hypothesis of what Leonidas and Gorgo might have been like and what they might have done, thought, and felt. The characters that emerge are greater than the historical input. Leonidas is consciously portrayed as the quintessential archaic Spartan, because that is what he has become in legend. Gorgo, likewise, epitomizes that which set Spartan women apart from their contemporaries—without robbing her of individual traits and personality. The two principals are surrounded by a large cast of secondary, largely fictional characters, each of which is unique and complex. In short, this novel is quite candidly fiction.

As the publication date approaches, I will publish a series of excerpts from the the novel as a "teaser" in anticipaton of the release of the book.

Women of the Past Part III: Sparta vs Athens

2011-03-25T18:58:00.002+01:00

Are They Singing in Sparta?

The Spartan treatment of women was one of the features of Spartan society that set Sparta apart from all other Greek cities, and the relative freedom of Spartan women was viewed in the rest of the ancient world as scandalous. Most modern readers, however, have no idea the extent to which ancient Greek women – outside of Sparta - were restricted, disenfranchised and disdained. As a result, when writing about ancient Sparta, the challenge is not merely to show how Spartan women differed from us, but also how they differed from their contemporaries. I address the differences in a variety of ways. Here are some examples:

The first scene is from Leonidas of Sparta: A Boy of the Agoge. Twelve year old Leonidas and his friends, Alkander and Prokles, have come to watch Prokles’ younger sister compete in a girls’ race at one of the Spartan festivals.

“Why are there so many strangers here?” Leonidas asked because he noted that almost everyone around, although Greek, was speaking a different dialect – mostly Ionic.

“Oh, that’s because they don’t have maiden races in other cities,” Prokles’ grandmother Leonis explained. “In fact, they don’t let their maidens out of their houses at all.”

“So how do they go to school” Prokles wanted to know.

“They don’t.”

“They don’t go to school?” Leonidas was shocked. “Not at all?”

“And that is the proper way of things!” one of the men standing near them insisted, butting into the conversation firmly. He addressed himself to the boys rather than the women. “Everything a girl needs to know in life, she can learn at her mother’s knee in the safety and seclusion of her own home. By letting girls run around in public view you only encourage licentiousness and disobedience! The less a girl sees and hears the better she is.”

The three Spartan boys stared at the stranger in open bafflement. Because he looked at least 40 and by his rich clothes and carefully coifed hair appeared to be a man of wealth, they dared not contradict him.

It was Prokles’ grandmother who answered him sharply. ”If it is such a scandal, why are you here?”

“See! That’s just what I mean!” the man declared, still addressing the boys. “Silence, SILENCE, is a woman’s greatest virtue.” Then turning on Leonis, he sneered at her, “Flaunting your bodies is not half so bad as the way you chatter and interfere in men’s affairs!”

“If you are afraid of women’s words, go back where you came from!” Leonis retorted.

“I intend to do just that!” The man said indignantly and would have turned away, but Leonidas stopped him.

“Excuse me, sir.”

The man looked back.

“May I ask where you are from, sir?”

“I am from the great city of Athens!” the man proclaimed, loudly enough to make others start to take notice.

“Oh!” Leonidas looked so surprised that the man’s curiosity was aroused.

“Does that surprise you?”

“It does, sir.”

“Why?” the man asked, perplexed. He evidently felt that his nationality should have been obvious from his clothes and accent.

Leonidas hesitated. He glanced a little uncertainly at Prokles’ grandmother. She could not know what he was going to say, but she awaited it expectantly. “It’s only that I was taught that Athens was a great and powerful city, sir.”

“As indeed it is, boy – nothing like this provincial pig-sty you call a city! Why, your whole acropolis wouldn’t qualify as more than a collection of third-rate district temples in Athens, and your agora would fit inside ours three times over!”

“I accept your word for it, sir, but it surprises me nevertheless – although I knew you had walls....” Leonidas trailed off enticingly.

“What surprises you, boy?” the man asked impatiently, frowning, sensing something behind Leonidas’ words that he could not identify yet.

“It surprises me that you are so easily frightened.”

“Frightened?!” the Athenian demanded, flabbergasted and uncomprehending.

“I mean,” Leonidas still sounded baffled and respectful, because it was a guise he had long since honed to perfection in the syssitia. “If you fear even the words of women, how you must tremble before the spears of men.”

This exchange is important because it highlights women’s comparative freedom, but also stresses that in Sparta too “the spears of men” were still more important.

The next example also comes from my Leonidas Trilogy, in this case from the second part, A Peerless Peer, (scheduled for release this coming fall). In the exchange below, Leonidas is now 24 and on a visit to Athens. He is speaking with the son of his host, a man of roughly 30 years of age.

“What about your wife?” Leonidas asked.

Kallixenos looked at him startled. “What about her?”

“Can’t you talk to her?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never tried. Why should I? She’s about to provide me with an heir – at least I hope it won’t be a girl. What more is a wife for? Surely you don’t talk to your wife?”

“I would, if I had one.”

Kallixenos just laughed at him. “You may know about war, Leonidas of Sparta, but you know nothing about women.”

“It would seem I know more than you, since I have spoken to many of them.”

Kallixenos raised his eyebrows in obvious disbelief. “Seriously?”

“Seriously. My stepmother was a student of Pythagoras and is literate in the tongue of the Egyptians as well as Greek.”

Kallixenos stared at him. Then he shrugged. “The women in Sparta must be different then. Here they are all illiterate and dumb as sheep. Believe me, my wife hardly knows how to add 2 and 2 together and I don’t think I’ve ever heard her say a whole sentence at a time.

In the following example from The Olympic Charioteer , the exiled Spartan Lysandridas realizes his wife is miserable and wasting away in the confinement and inactivity of her life in Tegea.

“My wife is an excellent driver.”

“Your wife?!” Antyllus gapped at Leonis, who had been watching Afra being backed into the traces and not heard what Lysandridas had said. He was completely flustered and turned back to Lysandridas. “This is ridiculous! I know women are allowed to drive in Sparta, but you aren’t in Sparta any more. Women do not drive in Tegea!”

“I’m not suggesting she drive in public, not in the city. I’m only suggesting she help you to victory by driving on the training track here.”

“That’s the most demanding kind of driving there is! And what horses would I give her?”

“She drove my father’s team – two at a time. How else do you think he got them in shape for Delphi? My cousin Nikandros certainly didn’t do it!” Lysandridas scoffed, and Antyllus raised his eyebrows. He looked back at the oblivious Leonis. She was not his type at all. He found her tanned skin ‘common’ – like a slave’s – and she was too tall and lanky to be appealing. Her face was too square and her mouth too wide. She was even old by Spartan standards! … Of course, he had no idea what Leonis was like – he had no notion of her personality, education or temperament, as it was not his business to have any discourse with another man’s wife – not even his son’s.

Later in the novel, Lysandridas must make a choice between Sparta (which once exiled him) and Tegea. By now his wife Leonis is pregnant.

A terrible thought came to him. What if she carried a girl-child in her belly? How could he raise a daughter in Tegea? How could he confine Leonis’ child to a life alien to the sun and the wind and the strength and fleetness of her own body?

Yet for all the freedom Spartan women enjoyed compared to their sisters in other cities, they were not the equals of men. They were not trained in war, did not fight, nor were they enfranchised. Even in Sparta, marriages were arranged by families and while the girls often knew their bridegrooms and may have had some say in the matter, they were still expected to marry their parents’ choice for them. The excerpt below is from Spartan Slave, Spartan Queen and is self-explanatory.

“Have you met your intended?” he asked cautiously when their laughter faded naturally. Kassia shrugged, and Pharax was puzzled by her apparent indifference to her wedding and bridegroom. Most girls preened and beamed at the prospects of an imminent marriage – much less one to a prince. “Didn’t he meet with your approval?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. It was a formal introduction at the palace with Uncle Anaxandridas and Uncle Leobotas and Uncle Charillos – not to mention Queen Eupolia, Mom and Agesandros – all looking on. If Anaxilas had so much as touched my hand, I fear Agesandros would have gutted him on the spot. Mom was close to fainting the whole time, and Uncle Charillos looked like the cat that swallowed the canary. Actually, it was hilarious.” Kassia giggled, covering her mouth with her hand.

Spartan women remained women and felt themselves to be very different from their men. It would therefore be wrong to portray Spartan women as modern feminists. This last quote is from Are They Singing in Sparta?

Alethea lay in bed exhausted from another sleepless night and wished that she could sleep in. She wished she could hide here and not face another day with all her problems unresolved. Wasn’t it bad enough that Niko was still seen by his peers and the Peers with intense suspicion? That Kassia had lost the young man she was in love with in the Massacres? That the wine harvest was sour? That they had a plague of mice threatening the barley? Did Sandy have to disgrace her too?

Had she neglected Sandy these last years? He had always seemed the easiest of her children. With Niko running away and then Kassia almost killing herself with grief, maybe she had paid too little attention to Sandy, who had seemed so well adjusted and content?

How could she have raised a son who could ridicule a lame man? That was the worst of it. Not, as the others thought, that he had shown so little endurance under the cane…What was the world coming to when 11 year-old boys mocked and ridiculed lame men in the streets?

There was no way around it: it was her fault that her sons had both turned out so badly. She should have re-married right away, at the first opportunity, when the boys were still very young. How could she have been so selfish? How could she have deluded herself that she could raise two boys to manhood without a husband?

As this excerpt illustrates, a Spartan matron’s world consisted of her household and her children, and raising good sons was her principle concern. Sons who failed to meet the standards of society were a disgrace and the widow Alethea acknowledges that she has failed, and that she should have done what society expected -- marry a second time. Spartan matrons were not feminists in the modern sense. They too, like their sons and husbands, were products of their society, but at least that society recognized their role as important and honourable rather than treating them like a necessary and contemptible evil as in the rest of Greece.