In the spring of 1953, Farley Mowat returned to Europe to retrace his wartime footsteps and search for peace. He returned to England and France - countries that less than a decade previously had been made weary under the weight of war. He returned to the nightmarish battlefields of Italy that had seen Canadian soldiers, his friends and comrades, fall in tragically high numbers. He wanted to see what the land - and its peoples - were like when the world was not a charnel house of mud, rain, metal and death. What he found was a world that was - after so many years of misery, tragedy, and destruction - overwhelmingly and energetically embracing life, nature and hope. Driving through Western Europe with his wife Frances, Farley Mowat begins his traveller`s tale. He meets former French resistance fighters who, when they learn that he`s a Canadian veteran, greet and fete him with food, drink and stories as if he were a long-lost brother. He sees San Carlo, an Italian town practically levelled as the site of a horrifying battle in the winter of 1944, rebuilt and teeming with life, as if risen from the grave. He meets people shaped and changed by tragedy and yet determined to move forward. They tell Mowat the stories only the inhabitants of a war-zone can tell: stories of the evils of war and the courage, sacrifice and resilience of ordinary people. Farley Mowat also sees places still, but probably for the last time, untouched by the rapid "progress" of this last half century. In Kent, he is invited into a flagstone-floored Tudor brewery where, since the days of King Henry VIII, time and brewing methods have stood still. In Positano, a seaside fishing town where he spent some of his war years, Mowat watches firsthand as fishermen ply their trade as their ancestors did during the Roman Empire. Mowat paints an unforgettable portrait of ancient places on the cusp of unimaginable change. Aftermath: Travels in a Post-War World is vintage Mowat: lively, moving, heart-stopping and beautifully told. (1995)
