A Light Beyond the Trenches

by Alan Hlad

Genres: Jewish Fiction; General Fiction

Synopsis

Based on the true story of the first school to train guide dogs for the blind, USA Today bestselling author Alan Hlad's latest novel is a fascinating, poignant, and life-affirming tale of heroism and resilience in World War I . . .
By April 1916, the fervour that accompanied war's outbreak has faded. In its place is a grim reality. Throughout Germany, essentials are rationed. Hope, too, is in short supply. Anna Zeller, whose fiancé, Bruno, is fighting on the western front, works as a nurse at an overcrowded hospital in Oldenburg, trying to comfort men broken in body and spirit. But during a visit from Dr. Stalling, the director of the Red Cross Ambulance Dogs Association, she witnesses a rare spark of optimism: as a German shepherd guides a battle-blinded soldier over a garden path, Dr. Stalling is inspired with an idea—to train dogs as companions for sightless veterans.

Anna convinces Dr. Stalling to let her work at his new guide dog training school. Some of the dogs that arrive are themselves veterans of war, including Nia, a German shepherd with trench-damaged paws. Anna brings the ailing Nia home and secretly tends and trains her, convinced she may yet be the perfect guide for the right soldier. In Max Benesch, a Jewish soldier blinded by chlorine gas at the front, Nia finds her person.

War has taken Max's sight, his fiancée, and his hopes of being a composer. Yet despite all he's given for his country, the tide of anti-Semitism at home is rising, and Max encounters it first-hand in one of the school's trainers, who is determined to make Max fail. Still, through Anna's prompting, he rediscovers his passion for music. But as Anna discovers more about the conflict's escalating brutality—and Bruno's role in it—she realizes how impossible it will be for any of them to escape the war unscathed…

Release date: February 3, 2022

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 42

Sample

On the eve of the war crime, Max Benesch was crouched in a trench on the western front. The shelling had paused and the battlefield was calm, except for sporadic barks of machine guns. He joined a small group of his fellow German soldiers who were gathered around a metal container, reminiscent of a tarnished milk can. Taking turns, they scooped tins of watered-down potato soup laced with specks of beef sinew.

Max—a tall, lean man with hair and eyes the color of chestnuts—took a spoonful of soup, bland and cold. He looked at Jakob, a haggard boyish-faced soldier. “The war will soon be over, and you’ll be devouring sauerbraten and spätzle.”

Jakob, his eyes dark with fatigue, smiled and spooned a bit of soup.

The trench, a three-meter-deep by two-meter-wide excavation, stretched for over twenty kilometers through the Belgian area of Flanders, creating a semicircular front line. The Imperial German Army had acquired higher ground, and they had the Allies—French, British, Canadian, and Belgian troops—partially surrounded. But the transport of soldiers to the eastern front to fight the Russians had depleted German forces. Both sides were dug in. Between them ran two hundred meters of no-man’s-land, a barren field scarred with shell holes, barbed wire, and mud. And despite artillery bombardments, ground attacks, and an escalating death toll, the Ypres battlefield remained a stalemate.

Max, a twenty-four-year-old Jewish German soldier, had arrived at the front six months earlier. Prior to entering the military, he had attended the Royal Conservatory of Music of Leipzig. A pianist and aspiring composer, he dreamed of someday performing at the Great Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna. But his ambition was placed on hold when war erupted in Europe. For Max and many other Jews, serving Germany created hope of being treated equal to non-Jewish Germans for the first time. However, Max was discouraged to learn that Jewish soldiers were limited in rank and could only become officers of the reserve, not the regular army. Regardless of his education and combat training performance, he was given the position of a soldat, the lowest rank of enlisted men in the army, and he was assigned to the front.

The initial weeks in the trenches were nearly intolerable for Max. The muddy, rat-infested conditions were abhorrent, spawning influenza, typhus, and trench foot. Artillery cannons perpetually boomed. The ground quaked. Shrapnel whistled through the air. He’d witnessed men, some of whom he’d befriended, die in battle. A looming sense of dread, knowing that he could be maimed or killed at any moment, haunted him like a shadow. Under a rain of shellfire, it was luck—not valor or skill—that determined who would live or die.

As weeks had turned to months, Max learned to accept that there was only so much he could do to influence his fate. Keep my head down, he’d told himself, crawling under a hail of machine gun fire. He hoped that he could endure six more months. After reaching his one-year anniversary on the front, he would receive a two-week leave, and he’d go home to his fiancée, Wilhelmina. He longed to see her and wrote to her often, but his deep-seated will to survive wasn’t solely driven by the hope of reuniting with her. It was fueled by the death of his parents. . .