As promised, the cover. This took quite a bit of searching but, as usual, Dreamstime came up with the goods. The first problem was Bruno. I needed a picture of a young man in a Wehrmacht uniform, who wasn’t wearing the familiar coal skuttle helmet, and who didn’t look like he was about to machine gun somebody. Put another way, a soldier in Hitler’s army who was also a nice guy. Here he is. Meet Bruno Karl Haslinger.
The second problem was Alice, and she was really two problems. Type ‘1940s Girl’ into the search bar and you find lots of pictures of young women who look like Veronica Lake or Rita Hayworth. Type ‘Farm Girl’ in and you end up with zillions of milmaids. You have to be a bit cleverer than that. This picture came up after a lot of searching. Her hair and clothes evoke the period, but she doesn’t look glamorous. Farm work is not glamorous. It is strenuous and builds muscles. She is still good-looking, though. She had to look as if she could cope with it. Here she is. Meet Alice Margaret Dodds.
The other Alice-related problem was the image. My photo-editing software, Photoscape, allows an image to be inserted inside another image, so that wasn’t a problem. What was a problem was the fact that she is posed against a plain white background, and that looked intrusive. I solved it by making her translucent and positioning her on his grey scarf. Thus, it looks like she is in his thoughts, which is true to the book. That is what you call making a virtue out of a necessity.
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