“i did what heartbroken, lost soldiers have done for centuries. I made my way home to my mother."- Richard Von Schaumburg”

“I wanted to share the risks the digger in Afghanistan took every day. Whenever I could I joined patrols ‘outside the wire’, walking the same dusty tracks and fields as the ordinary soldiers. I did everything in my power to keep them alive, I failed. In that year I lost ten soldiers under my command, killed in action. I personally identified the remains of each of them, sending them home to their families. More than sixty of my soldiers were wounded, some horribly.”

“I am not a woman who would be practical in your life, Sam. You need a home and family...""I'm a soldier, Azami. That's who I am. What I am. My woman will be my home----my family...”

“I do recall hearing a conversation in our home in Strausberg, between my mother and my father, where my mother sounded very angry that my cousin had let the Rödels down by having to be dragged out of Oma’s house, crying for his mother and shouting that he did not want to return to the war in Russia.Like a great many other soldiers throughout that period, he died in Russia on 5 May, 1944. He was just twenty years of age, and is buried somewhere in that country.”

“I cast my lot in with a soldier, and where he was, was home to me.”

“I will never be able to read my mothers favourite books without thinking of her - an when I pass them on or recommend them, I'll know that some of what made her goes with them; that some of my mother will live on in those readers, readers who may be inspired to love the way loved and do their own version of what she did in the world.”