Hi, so here is another chapter and I hope that you enjoy this one, this one is from Georg's point of view. He appeared so rarely in A Sister's Love that I wanted him to appear here. I wanted him to have more than the odd chapter from his point of view so while this story is predominantly Louisa based he will crop up again.
Also I have took a wild stab in the dark with the Von Trapp children and their ages but I think given the timing Louisa was probably born either at the start or during the first world war. Sailers did find themselves with shore leave so it's not out of the realm of possibility that Georg wouldn't have come back to his wife at some point or she would have come to him.
I am also taking a stab with building my own foundations on Georg's past life before his marriages as there is literally nothing about him.
Disclaimer-Nothing is mine.
Please Read and Review.
And please keep aware that there is a time gap between these next few chapters.
Some TRIGGER WARNIGNS For child neglect.
Poetic Justice
Chapter 9-A Time To Speak
We have Georg's point of view as the world goes to war for the second time and he thinks back on his children, his past, and his future (some mention of events that take place in A Sister's Love)
"For the second time in the lives of many, we are at war"
For some reason he couldn't shake that sentence. It haunted his very brain, sunk into the very essence of his soul, his bones, his blood, his heart. Everything that was everything that was everything.
"For the second time in the lives of many, we are at war"
God how appropriate. He was sure it was some King who had said that but it was true nonetheless weather it was a King who had said that or the man who swept the streets but it was enough. It was the same either way.
"For the second time in the lives of many, we are at war"
War.
The thing that dragged good men and even younger boys out of their homes and their lives and dragged them to places far away and made them bleed mentally and physically until there was nothing left of the people they had once been before the war. Asking ordinary men and woman to do extraordinary thing. Making woman and children widows and orphans, making mothers lose their sons and father's lose their futures and leaving the world to pick up the pieces once more.
Georg knew all of this. He had been a solider in the last war. He had been a father as well. But a small baby was not a woman. A small baby was not a man grown in uniform. And now he had children. Not babies. Children. Who were cannon fodder in this, the new World War.
So much for the war to end all wars.
He was giving himself this one night. This one Christmas Day night to think and drink and grieve. He gave himself one night a year for this and Maria, God Bless her understood where it was coming from. So much of his life now involved putting on a mask around his family and tonight, this one night he was allowed to be vulnerable. He was allowed to be human. He was swallowed to be a man and not a present father, husband or solider or refugee or absentee father or whatever role he had to play these days.
It wasn't like Georg hadn't seen this coming. The second that the Germans had advanced into Austria he had known the world was on a ticking clock. Hitler had, had to be stopped, at some point someone was going to have to stop him. It had been Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and then finally the British and the French had gone in. Then France had fallen and he had invaded the Soviet Union.
What on Earth had possessed the hierarchy of the German forces to invade the Soviet Union was beyond him. Georg might be a Navy man through and through but even he had been able to figure out that a large scale invasion of one of the biggest land based unions in history as well as simultaneously fighting a front with the British while also supplying an air and a naval battle had to be one of the most stupid decisions you could make. Sure while countries were in disarray you could get away with it but the second there was anything resembling a competent fighting force fighting against you then you had to be done. Surely?
In those first few days after the world went to war in September he had heard a great deal of muttering about how they could be here again. Personally he agreed. He had been a career naval officer, he had climbed the gritty ladder or bureaucracy and responsibility, he had married young and if truth be told he had accepted his naval commission for the sheer simple pleasure of getting away from his father. In those early days of their marriage it had been Agathe who'd had to deal with his father and his overbearing presence. Georg and the man had never clicked well and honestly though God save his soul for saying it but he hadn't missed the man since the day he died.
Actually if he was being honest with himself he had never missed him even before.
Agathe and he and had lived comfortably in that big empty house. With his father's death (when Liesl had just been a baby on his wife's hip) they had moved in. Then Friedrich had come along and Georg had been enchanted to have a boy and a girl of his own to come home to. He had thought about them during all of those long months of deployment and then when things had been perfect (his life, the world even), one lone bullet had destroyed the peace and so began the war of Kings and Empires.
He remembered the night before he had been due to go to the shipyard and take his commission, he remembered pouring all that love and quite desperation into his wife, into her soul, putting it all on her shoulders, asking her to safeguard his house and his children and his money in the event that they lost. He remembered getting the damp, travel stained letter thrust at him as his ship had limped back into port one dreary day in December (about six months later) to tell him that he was a father for the third time. That the baby was a beautiful golden haired girl with big blue eyes and that his wife had named her Louisa.
It was three years before he had been able to get home, the war had finished, his country was breaking apart and he and everyone else in uniform had scurried home and waited to see how badly affected they were from the aftershocks of The Great War.
And he had come home to his wife with a three year old on her hip that looked at him as if he was a stranger with her big blue eyes.
There had been other children after that. Kurt, born kicking and screaming after an easy labour, Brigitta who had been an arduous labour in which his wife swore curses at him that would make a sailor blush and then little Marta and Gretl both of them surprise babies because after Brigitta they had both said they thought their family complete. Surprise babies but welcome and loved nonetheless.
And then it had all fallen apart.
And there were five years of distance and chasing away memories and refusing to look at his children because he was afraid of what he might find. Of what he might see if he looked at them.
Her.
His wife.
Christ she'd have killed him if she could have seen him.
Until Maria he had never considered the damage he was doing with his children. He had left them the same way his father had left him, with governesses and staff and each time he had come home he had left as soon as he could because the old house was a mockery of the life that he could have and should have had.
And then Maria had come slamming into his life with the full force of a hurricane and he had realised just all the time that he had missed out on. Liesl had been a woman grown and doing something that he hadn't bothered to find out, with that telegraph boy who he most certainly had not approved off. And then there had been Friedrich who had eyed him the way a man does a fellow man and not a son a father. Louisa who had been even colder, Kurt who had been mostly confused by his change in attitude and Brigitta who had hidden herself away in her books (half of which he was sure were inappropriate) and the little ones had just wanted to be loved.
Even now it was harder to gauge his relationship with his older two children than it was with his youngest.
Losing Liesl and Brigitta along the way had been…
The only word he could think of was gut-wrenching and even then that was not enough. That was not enough to describe the agony that came with the knowledge that he had lost two of his children to the wilderness and then had been forced to leave them so that his other children could survive. He didn't understand how it had happened, even when Rolfe had stepped out from behind that gravestone he had known that the plan he'd had was solid. He had never anticipated that they would be separated.
And no matter how many he times he had sat and racked his brains on the ship coming over here he still did not know how it happened.
Maybe it would be as Maria had said to him one morning as he had seen Europe fade (in more ways than one) one of those things that years later they would never understand. But he had lost two of his children and he didn't know where they were or where they laid their head at night, or if they were together or if they were even…
Sitting outside his small little house in his new country Georg gripped his stomach as if he was coming down with a stomach ache. The thought of either of his missing girls dead was enough to make him want to lie down on the floor and die himself his other children be damned. He had missed so much time…that he couldn't help but pray with everything he had that he hadn't missed it forever.
He had tried to make up for it by taking more an in interest in his other children. More of an effort, the younger girls were off an age where everything could be listened to and sorted with a kiss and a hug. Kurt was obsessed with planes and that was easy enough to deal with and as 1939 turned into 1940 and 1940 turned into 1941, Friedrich had turned from a boy into a man like Maria had told him, he would and soon all his thoughts had been consumed with the idea of going to war.
It wasn't like Georg could blame him. When he had been Friedrich's age he too had thought the idea full of glory. He knew what he had thought of it. Even during the Great War there had been moments in the first few months when glory was all that he had thought about. It was different when it was your children in the firing line.
"For the second time in the lives of many, we are at war"
Sat on the porch swing in the freezing cold that Christmas Night watching the stars in the sky and thinking to himself he thought if he could go back and change anything it would be the this…his children.
And that was before you got to his last child.
Louisa.
His golden haired, blue eyed child, his war child. His war baby.
He took knew that Louisa was rearing to go. Her personality was as such that she was born for chaos. Outdoorsy, strong willed, opinionated.
God help the fucker who ended up with her under his command.
Woman in the Great War had been nurses, they had driven ambulances, they had been there…perhaps not in large numbers but they had been there. Most of them were treated with respect as well but the thought of Louisa going to war chilled him in a way that the thought of Friedrich going didn't. It was different he supposed though he hated the idea of even thinking it—when a war broke out you expected your son to go, your daughter…well…that was another story. This was 1941. And he had two grown up children.
One of whom couldn't even look at him.
He tapped his nails against the glass of brandy he was drinking in the silence and the solitude. He had left his wife in her warm bed and he was allowing himself this one night. This one night to think about what the hell came next.
And yet his thoughts kept straying to his children.
Friedrich and Louisa had been the hardest to come around to his new…personality. It wasn't that Georg could blame them. He had gone from ice cold to warm and loving and friendly within days. It had been Maria, with the Baroness it had been easy for him to sleep, to slip from her warm bed in the morning and come back at night and pretend that his children didn't exist. Even then when she had accepted his marriage proposal he knew she had not done it to be a mother for his children. He did not know what she had done when the invasion happened (though he knew her well enough to know she was no Nazi) but he knew she would not have left his house with all it's luxuries with seven children on a whim of what might happen.
And he had not heard from Max in two years now.
Damn he should have made the man come with them! But no. Max had to be the one to stay behind, to use his position to get as many of his friends across the border as he could until he couldn't.
Max had always been a dreamer. And God knows he had been a braver man than most.
He thought of Louisa who he had seen out here sometimes cigarette between her lips. He'd admonish her but the fact was that it could have been worse. And also…he didn't think she'd listen. Out of all of his children Louisa was the one who had his personality down to a T. And Louisa was the one who had made it clear that she could not forget, and she could not forgive.
He had been like that with his own father, unable to forgive the crippling loneliness. And now here they were.
The little digs he could take because not even his daughter with her mother's big blue eyes could hate him as much as he hated himself. He knew Maria was annoyed with the comments, the flat stares, the general way Louisa held herself which was always as if she was about to bolt. She acted sometimes like a trapped animal and there was nothing that he could do about it. He could barely begin to talk to her because everytime he thought today was the day that he was going to have an honest conversation with her the memory of that day in Switzerland haunted him.
She had been dead serious too and it was the tough love that looking back he needed. He had needed her to tell him that and God knows she had been the only one brave enough to tell him that he had to get up and keep the family going. He had hauled himself to his feet after she had gone half because he'd half too and half because as soon as the door had shut behind her he had felt a terror the likes of which he had never known. It was the kind of terror that came when you believed truly, madly, deeply, that you were losing another child.
His love for Louisa had never changed.
His pride for her had significantly increased however.
And he had finally understood what his wife had always been telling him. That one day he would look up and see that his girls were not girls anymore but woman and then he would realise what he would miss.
She had been talking about Liesl. But it was obvious with Louisa.
And so when Maria had come through the door to tell him that she was pregnant with his eighth child (and her first) he was already on his feet. He was already standing and when his daughter had come back up she had looked at him with those blue, blank eyes and there hadn't been time to say anything.
He was running out of time now.
But still here he was, trapped by his own decisions, watching as the world around him went to hell.
He was an officer. He was used to command and control. It was his identity.
And yet…
"For the second time in the lives of many, we are at war"
Yes he thought downing the brandy in the glass and standing up least he worry Maria (and/or freeze to death in the process) and forcing his body that was getting older than he wished it too, into action.
They were at war. And he like so many other families were warring on the home front.
Terrible things were about to happen he thought looking at the snow that was falling and patterning onto the driveway.
But he closed the door on that thought, on the ghosts of the past and when he slipped up to bed he thought that he was not the only parent in the world right now lying awake.
And yeah, there we go, hope that is alright. I will do my best to bring you the next chapter sooner rather than later.
Next Chapter-Time goes on and the men are marching to war. Friedrich joins the Marines and life is never the same again. Louisa on the on the other hand is offered an opportunity.