Why this book

Written in the shadow of the Great War, this novel of 1914 was penned to honor a generation that flew, fought, and vanished into history's first air war.

The Story

Franky Sherbrand, a Guards officer, marries the wealthy Margot Mountjohn, so their honeymoon carries them to Paris, gay and unclouded, before any shadow of war.

In Paris, Margot discovers she is with child, which terrifies her — her own mother died bringing her into the world, and she dreads the same fate.

Franky insists she accept motherhood regardless, since an heir is needed to keep the earldom from his disgraced Uncle Alan's line, so he sends her to Dr. Saxham.

Walking in the Bois de Boulogne, the pair stray into a restricted military zone and are halted by guards, until Captain Raymond Sherbrand, Franky's estranged cousin, recognizes him and intervenes.

Raymond invites them to watch his invention: a hovering 'Bird of War' monoplane, stabilized by his gyroscope, holding steady over targets while a motorcyclist swerves to avoid Margot and crashes.

The rider is Raymond himself — family pride keeps him distant, so he declines their thanks and rides away, leaving Franky to wander Paris alone, aching for the son he hopes for.

At a gallery, Franky meets an old priest who challenges his easy dismissal of faith, then returns to Margot, who has drugged herself to sleep rather than face her fear.

That night, at a dinner party, Count Theodor von Herrnung, a German officer obsessed with strength, toasts a coming 'Day of Supremacy' and predicts war within two years.

Word arrives that an Archduke has been shot in Sarajevo, which is why the German officers at the table pale and slip quietly away, their gaiety extinguished in an instant.

Von Herrnung escorts Patrine Saxham, the doctor's sharp-tongued niece, through the gardens, forecasting an Austrian ultimatum, then forces a kiss on her, so she strikes him and flees.

Patrine meets Alan Sherbrand, Franky's inventor cousin, who has just flown the Channel to prove his stabilizer to French officials since London refused him a hearing — he warns her war is coming.

Von Herrnung intercepts a card Alan gave Patrine, reads his name and workshop address, and mocks her for keeping company with an unfashionable engineer, before returning it with contempt.

Von Herrnung's pursuit does not stop — he sends roses and summons, so Dr. Saxham, alarmed, warns his niece plainly that the Count's attentions are dangerous, not flattering.

Margot and Franky sit before Dr. Saxham, who dismisses fashionable 'Twilight Sleep' drugs as dangerous — they erase memory, not pain, and poison the child instead.

Saxham shows Margot a triptych of his late wife, who died bearing his own son naturally — the parallel to Margot's mother lands hard, and she finally softens toward motherhood.

Yet Margot flees the consultation and lies to Franky, claiming the doctor approved the drugs after all, so the truth waits, unspoken, while war edges closer.

Franky reveals that all officers' leave has been cancelled — the crisis in Europe is no longer distant, and their honeymoon peace is ending faster than either expected.

Intercepted wireless code reveals the Kaiser's true design: bluff neutrality, invade Belgium regardless, and steal old Lord Clanronald's forgotten war-engine plans using Count von Herrnung's aircraft.

At Patrine's club, Rhona Helvellyn needles her about a bet, a magpie pearl won from von Herrnung, so Patrine storms out, straight into the Count's path outside.

Von Herrnung seizes the moment, commandeers a taxi, and drives Patrine not homeward but toward Hendon airfield, ignoring her demands and her threat to jump from the moving car.

At the aerodrome, a car draws alongside and German dignitaries hand von Herrnung a leather dispatch case — the stolen Clanronald plans, now his to fly home.

Patrine, shaken loose from the car, finds young Bawne Saxham nearby — her small cousin, a Scout who has just flown as ballast in a test, delighted with his day.

General Sir Roland, the Chief Scout, quietly tells Dr. Saxham that war is forty-eight hours off, and that the man carrying that dispatch case must be watched.

Sir Roland turns to Bawne directly and gives him an order: shadow Count von Herrnung, and do not let that leather case out of sight.

Alan Sherbrand's own hover test succeeds spectacularly, thirty minutes steady at ten thousand feet — French officials certify it, so von Herrnung demands to fly the machine himself.

Alan's mechanic is off duty, so von Herrnung, needing light ballast, chooses Bawne to ride along — the boy accepts at once, since it was the Chief Scout's own order.

Once aloft, von Herrnung turns the 'Bird of War' east instead of circling home, and Bawne understands with a lurch that he has been stolen along with the machine.

Von Herrnung, desperate to outrun pursuit, flies the stolen plane out over open water, so the craft, never built for such a crossing, falters and ditches into the North Sea.

The dispatch satchel, with the Clanronald plans inside, sinks beneath the waves — a loss that will cost von Herrnung dearly, whatever else the sea has spared him.

A German submarine surfaces and hauls both the Count and the boy aboard, so Commander Luttha, learning the satchel is lost, places von Herrnung himself under arrest.

Bawne is carried to the German base at Nordeich as a prisoner, then brought before the Kaiser himself, who questions the boy with cold, curious formality.

For losing the plans, the Kaiser strips von Herrnung of rank, degrading him to a mere supernumerary pilot, which is why he is forced from then on to fly with a captured child.

Von Herrnung, bitter and often drunk, compels Bawne to fly reconnaissance with him over Belgium and France, using the boy as his unwilling co-pilot through the war's opening months.

On the ground near Ypres, Franky, now fighting with the Guards, learns his young cousin is somewhere overhead in enemy hands, and vows to find him if the chance ever comes.

That chance comes in a ruined bakery near the line, where Franky confronts von Herrnung directly and shields Bawne from him, but German fire finds Franky first, and he falls there, defying the Count to the end.

Franky dies of his wounds, recommended for the Victoria Cross, so word reaches Margot in London that she is a widow before her child is even born.

Margot, once terrified of motherhood, bears a son that November, then turns the family's Hanover Square house into a hospital, grief remade as purpose.

Patrine, who has survived von Herrnung's pursuit and the war's opening horror, becomes engaged to Alan Sherbrand, then breaks it off herself, confessing a private shame she cannot forgive in herself.

She goes instead to the Front as a volunteer nurse, so it is there, amid the wounded, that she and Alan meet again on equal footing, both changed by what the war has done.

Alan, now a decorated pilot with nine victories, is blinded in combat against a Zeppelin, then, wounded again at Ypres, the shock reverses itself and his sight unexpectedly returns.

Bawne, still a captive after two years, seizes a German Taube, bombs the machine-guns holding him, and crashes it behind British lines at Langebeke, free at last, and alive.

Word of Bawne's escape reaches Lynette too, who has dreamed for months of her son alive in a corrugated-iron shed, now proven right by a telephone call she could barely believe.

At midnight, Lynette meets her living son at Charing Cross station, so months of desperate prayer resolve at last into an embrace neither Bawne nor his mother expected to have.

Von Herrnung, disfigured and stripped of favor, ends the war in a convent hospital as an unnamed patient, until one Easter morning he is found dead, a grey trace of poison on his ring.

That same Easter, at Poperinghe near the front, Patrine Saxham marries Alan Sherbrand at last, the shame she once confessed forgiven, the sight he once lost restored, both survivors of the same war.

What it means

This is a story of a generation forced to grow wings in fire — fear transformed into courage, cruelty answered by sacrifice, and love proven not in peace but in the surviving of war.

🎧 Read-along audio is being prepared — text-only for now.