David and Rachel cleaned and dressed, then they all sat drinking their cool tea, nibbling on the Gruyère and knäckebrot and watching the valley. "It's a good thing I took the tea ball out before I came over," Rachel said, "otherwise this would be terribly tannic."

Maria told them about the activities the activities she had seen in the valley while they were occupied with other things. Two more trains had gone by, one down and one up. All the soldier movement had been back to camp, mostly shortly past five.

"Something must have closed or finished in town at five," she said. "There were two groups; one ten the other eight. After them, there was only a single. None had rifles. The three guard posts are still casually manned in the same disinterested way."

Maria pointed across to the horizon. "Over the top of that ridge, there to the left end of it, there's been steady movement on the road, a regular foot traffic and many automobiles." She passed the telescope to David.

He studied it for a while, then looked at the map. "That appears to be a little beyond Erzingen, this road leading out of town into Switzerland." He passed the scope to Rachel. "What do you think, Mama?"

"That's the border post. I recognise it. It looks like people are crossing. It appears as if they've reopened the border." She looked at the map then back through the scope. "Yes, that's it."

They remained quiet for another long while, watching for activity in the valley. There was none. The six o'clock bell rang, then the seven. A short while later he told the girls to go start dinner.

As the daylight faded, he watched the three guard squads muster and slowly march...

No, saunter is a better way to describe their movement. David corrected himself and looked at his watch. Not quite seven fifteen.

He continued to watch the squads as they moved along the road. There was a random lighting of lamps in both the town and the encampment.

The eight o'clock bell sounded, and he watched the steady lights in the valley for movement, but saw none. Then there was a growing loom of light on the rock slab around him and he turned to watch a candle lantern moving toward him with a shadowy yellow figure faintly behind it.

"The chef has advised dinner will be served in ten minutes," Maria said with a giggle as she bent to kiss him.

"Have you brought matches to relight the candle?"

"No, I didn't think of it."

"Then let's put the light far behind us, lie at the lip, readjust our eyes and look into the valley for a few minutes. One last check for any movement, for any moving light."

Satisfied, he rolled to kiss her again, and they lay in a long, warm embrace. "I love your thoroughness," she said. "Your extreme care and attention to detail. Your mind sees such a broader picture than I ever imagine exists."

"The more we know about the enemy, the stronger we are." He took her hand and assisted her up. "Move back a good distance from the rim before you lift the lamp. Don't let it be seen from below. I'll roll up the bedroll. It's beginning to dampen from the dew. What else is there here?"

"We took the other bedroll and everything else a while ago when we left. That's all there is."

She led him back across the ridge to their camp, deftly swinging the lamp to light his steps and hers. "You use the lantern well," he said as they arrived.

"Six nights a week since early October, walking home after eleven, after the gasthaus closed. Through autumn, winter and now spring, it became second nature."

They sat around the granite table enjoying the stew. "Rice and barley with diced ham, salami, half an onion, half a carrot, the last of the pleurottes and lots of garlic," Rachel said. "It isn't elegant, but it's nutritious and filling."

"And also delicious." David smacked his lips. "This is amazingly flavourful, Mama, much better than the Army food, better than any of the camp stews I've ever had in the mountains."

Rachel smiled at him. "We've enough for a few more meals. While we were preparing dinner, we did an inventory. We've eight cloves of garlic, an onion, a carrot and a few morels left; that's the end of our fresh. There's still a few days of rice, lentils, barley and split peas, we have five pair of landjäger and the last of the Tanenhof schinken. We've cheese for another two days, maybe three and we're down our last package of knäckebrot. There's still lots of tea left in the tin."

"So we can continue to eat well for two or three days with what we have," Maria said. "Do we need to begin rationing?"

David shook his head. "No, with the border now appearing to be open, you two can walk across. You have Swiss papers so it should be no problem. Besides, they'd be suspicious of men, not women."

"But what about you?" Maria asked.

"Don't worry about me, I'll gather more information, bide my time and find a way to cross. There's a week of food here for one person. Let's analyse the situation down there in the valley, think quietly for a few minutes, let our minds wander through possibilities, reasonable ones, strange ones, totally weird ones. Don't chase them too far, simply think about them lightly and move on to other possibilities. From what we've seen below today, what do you see as my best way to cross?"

They ate as they thought. After several minutes he said, "The obvious one is to head down to the woods at the bottom of the rib and wait until dark before I go through the trees by the slough and cross the river into Switzerland. I'm sure we all thought of that."

Both Maria and Rachel nodded. "That seems so simple," Maria said, "Almost as if they are inviting it to happen."

Rachel nodded. "That's also my sense."

"I tried with the telescope to see if they had barbed wire, but it isn't a sufficiently powerful lens. We use coils of barbed wire at our trenches and string trip wires to trigger bells. I told you about almost stumbling into one of their traps near Weil am Rhein."

"What about farther along the valley, beyond Hedgerow and Zigzag?" Maria asked. "Away from the town. Maybe they're not watching up there. That seems like a lot of soldiers to be watching such a short stretch of the border. Could they be set up only at the easy places?"

"That's one of the things I was thinking of investigating." They sat silently eating for a while as he looked back and forth between their faces which were yellowed and shadowed by the candlelight. "It seems we don't know enough yet for me to safely move. I'll need to take my time to observe more, to look at other —"

"What's that?" Rachel said, pointing up out over the valley in front of her. "The bright clouds over the —"

They heard gunshots. Two in near unison. David and Maria turned their heads and looked up to where Rachel was pointing. A long patch of light on the bottoms of the clouds.

"A nice little trap they have down there," David said. "They must have trip wires which turn on electrical lights in the trees by the river. That was one of the things my mind played with a while ago. That's the duty of the other platoon. They're snipers sitting at night, like spiders waiting for flies in their webs."

He blew out a deep breath. "Don't worry about me. I'll find a way across and meet you in Unterhallau, in Küsnacht, wherever. You can walk through the border crossing with your Swiss papers."

"Swiss papers! How stupid of me." Rachel slapped her leg, sat straight up and stared at David. "How incredibly stupid of me. How absolutely and utterly dumb. Sometimes I'm an idiot."

"What is it, Mama?" Maria asked, "What's stupid? What's dumb?"

"Here we've been forging papers for David, making him a German, all the while in my little leather sheaf I've had his Swiss birth certificate. He's my son, we need only to decide which one."

"When were they born?" David asked, his eyes widening.

"Jacob was September 1894, Nathan was September 1895, and Maria was September 1896." She laughed. "I was very regular."

"I was born the thirteenth of September 1894. Can I be Jacob?"

"Jacob's birthday was the twenty-second, Nathan's was on the eighteenth and Maria's was on the twelfth. September was one long series of birthday celebrations for us, I was born on the fifth." Rachel smiled. "Edom almost made it, he was born the last day of August, but we forgave him that shortcoming ."

"Does it give eye or hair colour on the paper?" he asked.

"No, only his name, Jacob David Meier, the date, the place of birth and the parents' names, plus the official stamps."

"Do you mind if I use David, my middle name?" He looked at her and laughed. "I'm rather accustomed to that name."

"Funny, we had actually debated whether to call him by David or by Jacob."

After a long pause, David chuckled, "Mama, I've been wondering, now I'm a Jewish boy, do I have to get circumcised?"

"Over my dead body will any rabbi take a knife to you." She shook her head as she giggled. "If anybody questions, we can tell them the rabbi couldn't find a knife big enough."

She was quiet for a while before she spoke again. "Seriously, when we get out of here, I'm going to start a campaign to try to stop this barbaric practice of mutilating our baby boys."

"So, brother David," Maria said with a wide smile, "if the border is open, we can all walk along the roads in broad daylight without our packs. We can cross the bridge at Eggingen and head innocently toward Erzingen, to the border crossing."

"We'd look strange in our trousers," Rachel glanced down. "Out of place in men's clothing and cause questions. We don't want the German soldiers or border guards asking questions with David's suspicious accent."

"I could go into town and buy working dresses for us." Maria shook her head. "No, it would be much easier to modify these trousers." She looked at her lap. "We can split the inside seams of the legs and add wide darts in the front and the back using the cloth from the legs of our second pairs. Trim will be easy to add to our shirts, and we can make bodices with the flannel from a bedroll. We have a needle and a bit of thread in the biscuit box."

"I have a card of needles and plenty of thread." He paused and looked at each of them "Alright, we've now chased this idea along to a reasonable possibility. Have we any other ideas which make as much sense as this?"

They sat quietly for several minutes. Finally, Rachel said, "I really like the daylight approach." She leaned over and kissed David's cheek as she continued, "Thank you for being so careful."

"How long will it take to convert the trousers?"

"With all of us working on it, I can't see more than three or four hours," Rachel said. "We can start after breakfast over at the lookout as we watch what else is happening below us."

"I'll look suspicious down there as a healthy, fit young man. Most of those have been swept into the war. I'm glad now I strapped the crutches to my pack in case Mama needed them. They'll allow me to play invalid."

"We can be a little family group out for a walk." Rachel looked at him and smiled. "My son is recovering from an injury."

Maria pulled the lantern closer as David unfolded the map. "We can head across through here." He ran his finger across the forested slope from the rib to the road leading down into Eggingen. "It appears to be a more gentle slope back to the meadow than the route we followed in." Tapping his finger, he continued, "This road will lead us innocently into town to begin our own ruse."