Written in 1915 while the Great War still raged, this is a snapshot of a world holding its breath. Dr. Bradford Stewart, an American surgeon in Cologne, shares a quiet coffee with his German colleague Hermann Bloem on a terrace that feels like the last calm before a storm. Bloem knows what is coming. He fears it. And as the two friends discuss the Escalating tensions and the machinery of militarism pulling Europe toward annihilation, Stewart finds himself entangled with a mysterious Frenchwoman whose life depends on his willingness to act. What follows is a story about the bonds of friendship that survive borders, the loves that bloom in catastrophe, and the impossible choices facing those who refuse to pick a side until the shelling begins. Stevenson, writing as history was being made, captures something later war novels lost: the terrible innocence of not yet knowing what the twentieth century would become.
