Ben Macintyre's latest book proves to be more than just a haunting history of World War One. He falls short of simply detailing the "obscene war of mud, lice, and noise, of human excreta everywhere and sudden death in verminous holes and stagnant ditches." Instead, THE ENGLISHMAN'S DAUGHTER is an adventure and love story, the tale of British soldiers caught behind enemy lines and the French country folk who risked their lives to help them.
During a war too ghastly to comprehend --- a single battle could leave 50 thousand men dead for just one mile of territory --- the fugitive soldiers experienced a relatively safe haven from the degradations of the trench in the town of Villeret. The soldiers were given civilian clothes and told to blend in with the daily farming life of the village, while each family in town shared the burden of extra mouths to feed during near-starvation conditions.
The soldiers --- adored by most villagers --- were welcomed to the table in nearly all the homes. It's no surprise that local beauty, Claire Dessenne, fell in love with the natural leader of the band of fugitives. Dashing Robert Digby, fluent in French, tall and fair in a region of squat peasants, was an exotic and educated presence in the isolated Picardy region. The moment of the lovers' meeting had such an impact on their lives and the fate of the town that the event passed into local lore through oral history and inherited memory. Octogenarian villagers --- mere tots when the Great War passed their way --- still refer to Digby's years in Villeret in the present tense, as if the blonde, blue-eyed gentleman walked the town's cobblestone streets just yesterday.
I won't be giving away anything to reveal that the fugitives' existence in town was ultimately revealed and four of the soldiers were summarily executed by the occupying German forces. Many of the townsfolk who helped the British soldiers were deported to work camps for the duration of the war. Rightly or wrongly, Macintyre himself reveals their barbarous fate in the prologue. This may be done as a sort of kindness to the reader, who nevertheless becomes deeply attached to Digby, the romantic protagonist at the heart of the book's action.
Digby and Claire Dessenne's illegitimate child, Hélène, was born in the midst of warfare as the front lines grew dangerously close to Villeret. Interviewed in the 1990s by Macintyre, Hélène was only six months old at the time of her father's execution. This point in the book is where the story suddenly bears the dramatic earmarks of an RKO movie from the '40s. A besotted Digby presented Claire with a letter for his mother back in England. He dropped his characteristic English reserve in the last-minute missive and begged his mother to accept and embrace his lover and daughter after his death. Sadly, this letter went ignored for decades. It was discovered after the old woman's death as Thomas Digby, the soldier's brother, sorted through her private effects.
Thomas made a hasty return to the battlefields of France where he, too, had served during the bloody conflict, and a joyful reunion took place between Hélène and the closest relative of her long lost father. Some of the narrative's most moving scenes occur as Thomas marches down to city hall in the newly rebuilt Villeret to claim Hélène as his own daughter, finally bestowing his family name upon her.
Macintyre possesses a novelist's talent for cinematic detail and pacing that makes THE ENGLISHMAN'S DAUGHTER a compelling page-turner. Here is a real-life tale whose plot rivals such love and war fiction classics as THE ENGLISH PATIENT or A FAREWELL TO ARMS. The epilogue contains the most satisfying taste of Macintyre's flair for reportage, a journalistic style of prose he honed over the years as the Paris correspondent for The Times of London. Even though he unearthed abundant details about the 80-year-old love story, one aspect continued to haunt him. Who gave the soldiers away to the Germans? What town informant deprived a woman of her lover, a child of her father, and made countless families suffer unnecessary grief? In the final chapter, Macintyre demonstrates his gift for resolving the book's many themes and questions. The reader will be glad they undertook the adventure.
--- Reviewed by Andrea Hoag
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