The Ardennes: lush borderlands spanning four nations -France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. It was key to Hitler's most audacious campaign, and witnessed the defeat of his final offensive. Robert, native to these parts, never knew his father, an American G.I. captured during the Battle of the Bulge. He turns for guidance to Markus Hebel, a Belgian who served as a radio operator with the Wehrmacht in Russia, and has been pretending to be blind ever since. Only to Robert can he reveal his secret - and his story. It is the story of a man he never met, but whose voice he will never forget, whose gallant panzer-thrust across the frozen steppe almost saved the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad.

And of Markus' son, trapped in the city, whose fanatical loyalty to Hitler seals his fate. It is a story of impossible choices in a theatre of total war, where familial love, national identity, even military genius, count for nothing in the face of war's own all-consuming appetites.