Broken Shackles
By John Oxenham. Edite, adapted and introduced by Colin Heston.
A Modernized Edition
It is the winter of 1870–71, and France is losing the war with Prussia. Captain Patrice de Valle serves in its last army, starving, half-frozen, and badly led, as it marches through the snows of the Jura toward defeat. He watches his closest friends die in the final rearguard fight, lays down his sword at the Swiss frontier, and walks away from all of it: his country, his rank, and his loveless marriage to a society beauty. Even his own name goes.
Reported dead, he becomes Constant Duval, a sawyer in a remote Alpine valley below the Jungfrau. There, among pine forests, avalanches, and honest mountain people, he finds what he never had before: work he loves, a faith of his own, and the love of the remarkable Christine Bayr.
But a dead man is still a married man. And the past has a long memory. An old enemy recognizes him, and keeping his new life means keeping his secret.
First published in 1914, Broken Shackles combines a vivid, historically accurate account of the collapse of Bourbaki’s Army of the East with a love story and a moral dilemma. Can a good man build a good life on a lie? Oxenham leaves the verdict to the reader.
This modernized edition presents the complete novel, all three books and forty-five chapters, in clear modern English. It includes:
Frank Wright’s original color frontispiece.
A new introduction by Colin Heston on the novel’s history, its questions of crime, self-defense, and concealment, and the shackles of the past.
Read-Me.Org Inc. New York-Philadelphia-Australia. ..2026. p 205..