Chapter 101

Martha's trek toward the East-West border begins with a hasty retreat from a Westalian shop, where her lack of a ration card threatens to expose her identity. Reasoning that an Eastern woman caught alone faces the worst possible fate, she shears her hair short inside a barn and scavenges men's clothes, then plots a route using Anabel's map while the Ostanian army falls back somewhere ahead of her. Cold and hunger grind her down until she collapses on the road, where a passing vehicle of Westalian soldiers takes her for an Ostanian man and, to her astonishment, drives on without killing her: the war, they announce, is over.

The revelation carries her the rest of the way, at points literally crawling, until Ostanian troops near a forward outpost gather her up for the border crossing. Among them is Paul, a warm-hearted fellow Berlinter who knows her face from newspaper coverage of the Women's Battalion. Where most of the men grumble that a war with neither victor nor vanquished was fought for nothing, Paul stays upbeat, insisting that protecting their homeland gave it meaning. The homebound train crawls along for weeks as soldiers disembark at their stops and the health of those remaining steadily fails. Paul proposes marriage before they reach the capital; Martha turns him down, telling him her heart already belongs to someone else, and wonders what she will say to Henry. When the train finally pulls into Berlint and she moves to wake her friend, she finds Paul died the previous day, one of several men who could not hold on. After mourning her comrade, Martha walks out into a Berlint she has not seen since her deployment.

Martha adopts a male disguise to cross Westalian territory safely.

Enemy soldiers spare her life and reveal that the war has ended.

Ostanian troops carry her across the border, where she befriends the optimistic Berlint soldier Paul.

Paul proposes and is refused, Martha's heart being set on Henry Henderson.

Paul dies aboard the train the day before it reaches Berlint, and Martha finally returns home.

The map at the chapter's opening corresponds to a real stretch of the border between Hesse and Thuringia, and the river that carried Martha off follows the real course of the Weidbach stream along with the Weid river.

Martha again appears solo on the cover, and the soldier Tommy makes his debut.