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The Englishman's Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One, by Ben Macintyre
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"I have a rendezvous with death, at some disputed barricade." Alan Seeger, 1916
In the first days of World War I four soldiers, left behind as the British army retreated through northern France under the first German onslaught, found themselves trapped on the wrong side of the Western Front, in a tiny village called Villeret. Just a few miles from the Somme, the village would be permanently inundated with German troops for the next four years, yet the villagers conspired to feed, clothe and protect the fugitives under the very noses of the invaders, absorbing the Englishmen into their homes and lives until they could pass for Picardy peasants.
The leader of the band, Robert Digby, was a striking young man who fell in love with Claire Dessenne, the prettiest maid in the village. In November 1915, with the guns clearly audible from the battlefront, Claire gave birth to Digby's child, the jealous whispering began, and the conspiracy that had protected the soldiers for half the war started to unravel.
Never before told, The Englishman's Daughter is a harrowing tale of love, duplicity and their tragic consequences, which haunt the people of Villeret eight decades after the Great War.
- Sales Rank: #802906 in Books
- Published on: 2002-01-12
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 1.02" h x 6.20" w x 9.34" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 254 pages
From Publishers Weekly
Innumerable soldiers were stranded behind enemy lines in World War I some injured, some lost, some sole survivors of decimated regiments. Macintyre (The Napoleon of Crime) has uncovered the story of a small band of English soldiers who, in 1914, were found and sheltered by the peasants of Villeret, a small French village near the Somme River. When the German occupiers became more intrusive in local life, billeting their troops in private homes and confiscating supplies, the French took a more collective approach to hiding the Brits sharing their food and housing among a network of families. One soldier was hidden in an armoire, another dressed as a girl; somehow, most did their best and eventually passed themselves off as locals. Private Robert Digby, the hero of this tale, blended in so successfully "It's almost like he was running for mayor," said one villager that he fell in love with the local belle, Claire Dessenne. At first, hiding the British was a unifying act of resistance, but by 1916, after years of hunger and occupation, solidarity broke. The four remaining British soldiers including Digby, now the father of young H‚lŠne Dessenne were rounded up and executed. Who turned them in? Claire's spurned rival? A spy turned informer? While Macintyre is satisfyingly thorough in his attempt to solve this long-buried mystery, he is even better at recreating the texture of day-to-day life in rural, occupied France. As readers grope with understanding our present war, they may find this more remote one oddly instructive. Weapons may change, but it's the people some treacherous, some brave, but most of them in between who count. B&w photos not seen by PW. Agent, Ed Victor. (Jan.)Forecast: This title has the potential to break out of the war genre; fans of Michael Ondaatje and Jayne Ann Phillips should enjoy this tale of love and its consequences.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
"War forges a few heroes and villains, but often it thrusts ordinary, frail people into a moral no-man's-land, forcing upon them choices or compromises they could never have anticipated." So it was for the townspeople of Villeret, France, who chose to hide a group of British soldiers caught behind enemy lines during World War I. It's a magnificent story and a stirring reminder that in times of war, bravery and self-sacrifice are not limited to the battlefield. Macintyre (The Napoleon of Crime) focuses on a variety of gripping details: the occupying Germans' powerful fears of treachery, which led them to forbid all manner of activity, from hanging out laundry to barking dogs; the love affair between a young French girl and a British soldier; and, most of all, the courage and self-sacrifice of the townspeople, who risked their lives on a daily basis to hide these young soldiers. The book has some surprising twists that include such pure examples of love, betrayal, honor, and sacrifice that it is easy to forget that the story is absolutely true. Recommended for all libraries. Amy Strong, South Portland, ME
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
"The Englishman's Daughter, though based on literal history, is as true as art." -- Robert Olen Butler, author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain
"A picaresque and, as the title suggests, romantic tale." -- Richard Eder, The New York Times
"A poignant love story set against the backdrop of war, tragedy, treachery . . . [that] turns into a page-turning mystery." -- Lyn MacDonald, The Times [London]
"Everything comes alive . . . the village feuds, the village characters . . . the hunger of the winter of 1914." -- Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Reads like a novel while succeeding as a sterling piece of investigative journalism." -- Rosemary Herbert, Boston Herald
"[A] lovely, affecting book . . . Macintyre has pieced together a remarkably thorough account that has the ring of truth." -- Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
"[The] flickering survival of the not-too-distant past inside the present is often this fine writer's largest subject." -- Thomas Mallon, The New York Times Book Review
Most helpful customer reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
good but not great
By Richard Kurtz
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...
23 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Oppression, Heroism, Betrayal
By Rob Hardy
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."
25 of 26 people found the following review helpful.
Chercher la femme
By Amazon Customer
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.
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