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

This true love and betrayal story produced many emotions I don't get from fiction. It is a heart wrenching, heart warming account of WW1 action and the myriad behaviors of the participants. Of Mr. MacIntyre's four non-fiction books and counting, The Englishman's Daughter was my favorite and stays with me now.

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.

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 fiel