The invisible soldier

by Veronica Cusack

"In November 1915, a shy, cosseted, and rather pompous bank clerk left Canada to fight as a lieutenant on the battlefields of Europe. William Arthur Peel Durie was thirty-four when he left, for the first time, the protective confines of his job and his mother's influence ... Anna Durie had ... important plans for Arthur. She even followed him to Europe in an attempt to manipulate his destiny ... Durie ... staunchly refused his mother's attempts to have him transferred to safety ... When her son died in the trenches of France, Anna Durie could once again control his fate. Despite the dictates of Britain and the Empire stating that soldiers must rest in the land where they fell, she made up her mind to smuggle his body from its grave in a military cemetery near Lens to the Toronto family plot. Veronica Cusack has unearthed ... letters, memoirs, and war records and used them ... to recreate a soldier finding himself in battle and a woman driven by her maternal obsession"--Jacket.