Customer Reviews

The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War I

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The woman being searched for could be either THE ENGLISHMAN'S DAUGHTER herself - an old French woman named Helene, whose father - Pvt. Robert Digby, is one of the central characters of this true story. Digby was an English soldier serving in France in 1914 during WWI. Or the author could be looking for the identity of the woman in the French song known by all the people of Villeret. A woman "so jealous and wicked" as one verse says, that she betrayed Digby and three other allied soldiers to the Germans. All four men were promptly executed. Three others managed to escape to Britain.

The villagers had initial success in hiding these seven soldiers, first in the nearby forest then in outlying buildings. The author - Ben Macintyre - clearly shows that the villagers had contrasting emotions. Honor and pride in hosting and looking after their guests, yet also trepidation and fear from recognition of the great risk that they were taking. As time passed it was decided to cease hiding the men and to try and incorporate them into village life. Macintyre creates an almost palpable sense of danger when writing that the villagers "set about the courageous but daunting task of turning these English and Irish soldiers into northern French peasants." Danger only grew as time stretched to two years. The year 1916 saw an increase in the German presence and the harsh rules of occupation enforced by the German commandant Major Karl Evers made the situation very trying indeed.

Poignancy enters by way of the ultimately doomed romance between Digby and Claire Dessenne, a beautiful young villager. Helene was the result but the cost was great. The relationship put a strain on the inherent kindness of the populace, the war was taking its toll, and the eagerness to continue hosting the soldiers began to wane. The outcome was the arrival on the morning of May 16th of a group of Germans at the sleeping quarters of Digby and three others. Their roundup and execution by month end in the neighboring village of Le Catelet provides the sad denouement of the romantic story but the end for Villeret came a year later when the Germans destroyed every building in the village as they withdrew.

We began with a quest and Macintyre ends the same way. The woman who betrayed the Englishmen may have been Claire's mother but there is reason to suspect others, most prominently Villeret's acting mayor, the postman, and the baker. Perhaps in keeping with the sadness of the story it is appropriate that in the final outcome we never know who.

In 1997, Ben Macintyre, as Paris correspondent for _The Times_ of London, was called to a little village in Picardy. He was reluctant; the story was only that of a dedication of a plaque commemorating the execution by the Germans in World War I of four British soldiers who for two years had been hidden within the village of Villeret. He endured "God Save the Queen" excruciatingly played by the band from the local mental health institution, a decrepit honor guard, and some parochial proclamations of self-importance. One old, old lady in a wheelchair cornered the British representative to tell him how seven British soldiers had been protected by the village, and three had eventually escaped to Britain, and four had been shot. "That was in 1916," she explained. "I was six months old... Those seven British soldiers were our soldiers. One of them was my father."

Thus began Macintyre's research into a tragic romance, which he reports in _The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War I_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). It is a sad and almost forgotten episode from the first terrifying days of The Great War, and though he has had to rely on stories filtered through the generations, faulty memories and incomplete records, Macintyre has been able to bring out a fine story of ordinary people within the village. They are not very great heroes and not very great villains, just rustics trying to live through an intolerable situation. Private Robert Digby, along with seven other soldiers, was hidden by the villagers in a conscientious show of resistance. During the two years hiding, fell in love with the prettiest girl in the village, who bore him a daughter. Although this is a tragic love story, its strength is the picture of stressful and disastrous life under German occupation under the paranoid commandant, Major Evers. Eventually, the soldiers were betrayed and shot; Macintyre speculates who the traitor was: it could have been a suitor spurned by Claire, or a village woman interested in Digby, or a German sympathizer, or maybe just someone who wanted more food.

Macintyre's attempts to find who betrayed Digby, and indeed the slight but touching love story that is the reason for the book, take second place to his description of the grinding brutality of occupation and the response of different villagers to the pressure. Their novel moral burdens were shouldered or shirked as this independent and willful region, which had always preserved some idiosyncratic separation from the rest of France, was overcome by a war imposed by gigantic outside forces. The moral ambiguity of the story has been impressed on the descendants of the villagers, who even on the day to celebrate the commemorative plaque for the lost Englishmen eight decades later were reluctant to tell family stories. There is a fitting symbol within the book: Robert Dessenne, a cousin of Claire's and named for Digby, years after the war "was plowing in the fields when he struck an unexploded shell, and was blown to pieces."

I enjoyed this book but was somewhat disappointed. I recognize how difficult it must be to write a non-fiction book about events that took place 80+ years ago..but somehow this book left me somewhat unsatisfied...it's as if McIntyre may have been better off writing it as a novel and taking more poetic license to make the story and the relatiosnhip between Robert and Claire and Robert and his fellow soldier-fugitives more dynamic and dramatic....I also felt that there was quite a bit of "filler" -- somewaht extraneous material of a general nature....but I liked it ..just didn't love it...

Somehow I stumbled upon this great work of non-fiction and true to its word, it was certainly a story of love and betrayal in WWI. MacIntyre brought not only the characters to life with flowing descriptions and actions, but also the town itself. While the town was not on the front line, it was near enough to it to see the horrors of war. The mystery of who killed Robert Digby is answered in the end, but it is the middle that is most satisfying, details of his love affair, and the ability of British soldiers to blend into rural France. A true gem!

This is an interesting book about a chapter of the First World War not often spoken of in the history books. We read a great deal in books about the Second World War how the various civilian populations, and stray lost soldiers, resisted the Nazis, but we read almost nothing with regards to World War I on the same subject. This book recounts a particular incident where 7 British soldiers found themselves caught behind German lines at the beginning of the war, during the first campaign. They hid in a village named Villeret, spending two years there, blending into the local population, making friends, and even in one case falling in love and fathering a child.

The main story of the book surrounds this love affair and the resulting child (still alive when the author wrote the book in 1999). After her birth, the child's father and his comrades were captured and four of them (including the father) were executed. This part of the book, and the subsequent reunion of the family in 1930, is told simply and rather elegantly by the author.

The interesting part of the story, to my mind, was the backdrop to the actual affair. I've always been fascinated by this sort of thing, and the author does a good job of recounting how the French civilians were treated during World War I if they were in territory occupied by the Germans. The Germans apparently looted quite thoroughly (the commander in the story issues a proclamation that eggs are for German officers exclusively!) and shot anyone who showed much defiance. There were French espionage rings operating behind German lines (one figures in the plot, murkily, in the background). There wasn't, however, the concerted effort to kill individual German soldiers and sabotage their operations that there was in the later war.

I enjoyed this book a great deal. I have MacIntyre's other books too, and I intend to read them when I get a chance.

This little gem is well researched and well written by an author who tells the tale of a group of British soldiers trapped behind German lines in 1914. The people of a small village, Villeret near the Somme River harbor the men for nearly two years as the Germans press the search for them and other British stragglers. An outstanding tale of love, romance, danger, narrow escapes and brutal suppression by the Germans and it is all true. Finally, after many long months of brutal treatment by the Germans, someone in the village betrays the British. Who betrays them and why? Read the book. You will not be disapointed by this one. A film just waiting to happen.

"The Englishman's Daughter" is wonderfully well researched and written. I've been doing extensive research on this exact time period and place on the Picardy plain as background for a novel. I found (with one minor exception) Macintyre's descriptions and context to be nearly flawless. He has expertly packaged most of what I have gleaned (and much more because his narrative includes French and German points of view for an extended time frame), into an accessible, multidimensional story. It offers a perspective on WW1 that is both more nuanced and timeless than most novels. Read it for the love story, the history or to solve the mystery and be broadened by the other aspects. This book is a marvel.

This is a very interesting (true) story about how the inhabitants of a small (pop. 600),out-of-the-way French village behaved when occupied by German troops during World War I. From previous wars, the Germans had a gruesome reputation and when their troops arrived the villagers looked upon them with hatred. This was amplified as the Germans compiled detailed lists of all people, crops, livestock and items down to each familys' metal pots and pans for requisition for the German war effort. The village and surrounding areas were saturated with troops billeted in villagers' homes with offficers in nearby chateaus. Also billeted in the village, unbeknownst to the Germans, were seven British soldiers, separated from their withdrawing units, who were unable to get through the German lines to rejoin them.

In normal times, the village was rife with ancient family feuds, jealousies, gossip, and crime. The arrival of the British stragglers and the German troops created a kind of unity: protecting the British fugitives was a patriotic duty, they were considered trophies of resistance. At great risk to themselves, the villagers kept the British hidden (often in the same houses billeted with Germans)and fed. As months passed, the villagers' fears began to recede; relations between fugitives, their protectors, and the German invaders began to evolve. Individually, German troops were actually often human, courteous, helpful, and some even attractive. The British, on the other hand began to be seen as seven more mouths to feed in desperately hungry conditions. They were leading a soft life while others on both sides did the fighting, and the pregnancy of a village girl by one of the British soldiers produced a subtle but unstable reaction: old jealousies and animosities re-surfaced, whispering began, and the Germans began receiving anonymous denunciations.

In a novel like Sebastian Faulks outstanding "Birdsong" the personal horror and romance under the umbrella of war can be explored to maximum effect. The fact that Ben Macintyre's story is true makes it equally special. But in the end less satisfying because the focus of the book is far more than the story of the Englishman's Daughter. In England the book was published under the title "A Foreign Field" which really is a better title, in that the book explores the whole story of the war and it's effect on the Village of Villeret, France. The story of Helene Digby's conception and the execution of her father Robert Digby is the major emotional center of the book. What I found strange is that towards the end of the book Mr. Macintyre tries hard to finger who may have betrayed the Englishman, but I did not seem to care. I somehow thought it was understandable that the whole village did, and the fact that the Englishman, including Robert Digby could not have possibly survived the eventual total destruction of the village underscored the ultimate betrayal. The war itself.

The entire time I was reading THE ENGLISHMAN'S DAUGHTER, I felt as though I was reading a well-researched piece of historical fiction. Ben Macintyre has done a terrific job with a story that was begging to be told to the outside world.

In 1914, seven British soldiers, separated from their units for one reason or the other, found themselves trapped behind enemy lines. The citizens of Villeret, a small village near the front lines, hid the soldiers, fed them and kept them safe...sometimes to their great peril. However, after one solider, Robert Digby, fathered a child by one of the village maidens, someone blew the whistle on their charade and four of the soldiers, including Digby, were shot by the Germans.

I was never as concerned as the author about who ratted on the soldiers...they were in the middle of a war....everyone was under a great deal of stress...food was scarce....the German threat of retaliation was real....any number of people could have spilled the beans. The fact that the village kept them for over 2 years is a miracle of human constraint and discretion.

Macintyre was a reluctant author, having been sent to a small village of Picardy to record the dedication of a plaque on the spot where the soldiers were killed. After the ceremony, an elderly woman told him that one of the murdered soldiers was her father. Intrigued, Macintyre pursued the story and THE ENGLISHMAN'S DAUGHTER is the splendid result of his effort.

I'm not a true fan of non-fiction, but this book is so well done and the story is so compelling that I read it in one sitting....all the while trying to cast the characters in the film. Harrison Ford (in his younger years) would have been perfect as Digby. Angelica Huston would make an excellent Jeanne Magniez, the aristocrat who loved her horses more than people. Olympia Dukasis would be the perfect one to play Claire Dessenne's mother. Claire herself would be tricky, because her photos are at once beautiful and have an air of intelligence about them.

I hope someone with Hollywood connections finds this book. It would make a marvelous film.

Enjoy!