Rating: 
Summary: Perfect Blend of Romance & Realism Delivered as MicroHistory
Review: "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.
Rating: 
Summary: Reads like good fiction....definitely movie material!
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: good but not great
Review: 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...
Rating:
Summary: A very human drama
Review: In 1914, a small cadre of English military was stranded behind enemy lines. The French peasants of Villeret tried to hide the soldiers from the occupying German forces. However, the German army began using the homes of the villagers to quarter their troops and living off the local economy straining the food supply. The villagers refused to turn their English "guests" over to the Germans and collectively protected them over the next two years. One of the English, Private Robert Digby even fell in love with a local girl. However, by 1916 as sustenance became a problem and the withdrawal of the occupying army seemed like it would never happen, someone broke ranks and turned in Robert and his peers. The Germans executed the English soldiers.
In high school and college World War I is a desert dry footnote starting with Ferdinand, consisting of Wilson, neutrality, and the Lusitania, and ending with the League of Nations. On the other hand, Ben Macintyre takes a relatively minuscule incident from that War and breaths life into it and for that matter any war. THE ENGLISHMAN'S DAUGHTER focus on that French incident between 1914-1916, but furbishes the audience with the underlying generalization that in war in spite of technology people count. It is the true human drama that makes history hum and enables the audience to understand the past, connects it to the present, and projects it into the future. Mr. Macintyre has written a winner that should be required reading at the military academies and included in any world history class so that we can learn in a lively exciting environment. <P<Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: A very human drama
Review: In 1914, a small cadre of English military was stranded behind enemy lines. The French peasants of Villeret tried to hide the soldiers from the occupying German forces. However, the German army began using the homes of the villagers to quarter their troops and living off the local economy straining the food supply. The villagers refused to turn their English "guests" over to the Germans and collectively protected them over the next two years. One of the English, Private Robert Digby even fell in love with a local girl. However, by 1916 as sustenance became a problem and the withdrawal of the occupying army seemed like it would never happen, someone broke ranks and turned in Robert and his peers. The Germans executed the English soldiers.
In high school and college World War I is a desert dry footnote starting with Ferdinand, consisting of Wilson, neutrality, and the Lusitania, and ending with the League of Nations. On the other hand, Ben Macintyre takes a relatively minuscule incident from that War and breaths life into it and for that matter any war. THE ENGLISHMAN'S DAUGHTER focus on that French incident between 1914-1916, but furbishes the audience with the underlying generalization that in war in spite of technology people count. It is the true human drama that makes history hum and enables the audience to understand the past, connects it to the present, and projects it into the future. Mr. Macintyre has written a winner that should be required reading at the military academies and included in any world history class so that we can learn in a lively exciting environment.
Rating:
Summary: Oppression, Heroism, Betrayal
Review: 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."
Rating:
Summary: Agree it's good but not great
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Agree it's good but not great
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Brought to Life - Excellent!
Review: 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!
Rating:
Summary: Brought to Life - Excellent!
Review: 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!
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