Borders - Hardcover

1942. The Eastern Front. The German 6th Army is surrounded at Stalingrad. 300,000 men are trapped in 'the cauldron' and the Fuhrer will not countenance a retreat. Feldmarschall Erich von Manstein, the Wehrmacht's most gifted strategist, is charged with relieving the Sixth. For Markus Hebel, a Belgian radio operator on Manstein's staff, the fate of the cauldron is personal: his son, also a radio officer, is entrenched in the city. Manstein's rescue operation is readied - Operation Winter Storm, a lightning armoured charge across the frozen steppe - but still Hitler refuses to allow the Sixth to abandon their positions and attempt a break out. If Markus can convince his son to sabotage his equipment and free the encircled army from the Fuhrer's lunatic command, disaster can yet be averted. Caught between the exhilarating dash of Manstein's desperate, gallant gambit - a latter-day Charge of the Light Brigade - and the piteous suffering of the doomed 6th Army, Borders is a story of impossible choices in a theatre of total war. Family love, national identity, even military genius, count for nothing in the face of war's own almost sentient appetites.