Book excerpt: The warm autumn air was thick with acrid smoke and the smell of fresh blood. Heinz Steiner crouched low in the dense thicket. As the crack of gunshots and screams echoed through the dense woods, he stopped and carefully considered his options. The sounds were coming from near the clearing at the north edge of the woods where the widow Rothnig and her five scrawny, starving spawn lived in a makeshift hovel.Unarmed, Heinz was no match for the élite French troops who relentlessly terrorized the lower Rhine and upper Danube River Valleys. They killed whatever and whomever happened to be in their path, and they enjoyed it.When Princess Theraisa Von Steiner discovers she is with child soon after the tragic death of her beloved David Ritter, there is no match for the trepidation that consumes her soul. The smallest level of comfort finds her when her Aunt Louisa offers her only solution: travel to the Volga to have the child in secret. Little did Theraisa and Louisa know that the journey would be so perilous, and the newborn child would be the one responsible for bringing the Sreiner bloodline to America at the turn of the century.Based on the true story of author Karen Schutte's family, Seed of the Volga captures the chilling tale of her ancestors' journey to the German settlements along the Volga River in Russia They left their family and the only home they had ever known while realizing they would never see them again.