Lines of Courage

Lines of Courage follows five teenagers over the course of four years during World War I, from June 28, 1914 to November 11, 1918. Each chapter is dated chronologically, and corresponding historical events are included in the narrative. In the Author’s Note at the end of Lines of Courage, Nielsen offers additional insight into selected historical events that are especially relevant to her novel, including the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Battle of Verdun, or the Russian Revolution.

In short, mounting tensions between European nations at the beginning of the 20th century erupted when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Serbia in 1914. This led the Austro-Hungarian Empire, backed by Germany and the Ottoman Empire, to declare war on Serbia, which soon allied itself with Russia, France, and Great Britain. The United States joined the Allies in 1917, while the Russian Revolution arguably undermined Russia’s position in the war. After the collapse of the German and Ottoman Empires, the armistice ending World War I was signed on November 11, 1918, in Paris, leading to the creation of several newly independent countries, like Poland, Czechoslovakia (the present-day Czech Republic), and Yugoslavia. WWI was one of the deadliest conflicts in Western history, with an estimated 40 million casualties.

Significantly, Nielsen explains that the novel’s historical context is particularly challenging to convey to a potentially uninformed reader:

Part of the difficulty in understanding World War I is that there is no central issue that all countries were fighting for. Some fought for power, others to support an allied country, and others still for revenge, or for national pride, or to gain land they felt should belong to them.

[…]

It is further important to acknowledge that the world itself was rapidly changing during these years. Many countries were experiencing revolutions or uprisings, a 1918 pandemic began spreading throughout much of the world, and there were major inventions or advances in technology, including communications, transportation, and medical science (328).

As a result, and although the characters and main plot points are fictional, Nielsen chooses to emphasize The Intersection of Collective and Personal History. This enables her to explore the impact of the era and the war on individual lives, and thus elicit an emotional response from the reader.