It is clear this book is written by a journalist rather than a novelist. Wouldn’t you clearly recognize the difference between the words of a novel and those found in a newspaper? A newspaper article relates fact and number and dates. It states the people and places involved. You are told what happens. That is how this book is written. This book is based on official documents, letters, diaries and newspaper articles. Extensive research lies behind its content. The facts related are about the vil...

Ben Macintyre’s book The Englishman’s Daughter is a book of war, love, friendship, and betrayal. It is a story about a group of nine ally soldiers that all find their way to a small town in northern France named Villeret after being left behind by there retreating units. The people in this town hide the soldiers and care for them as they hide under the noses of the German soldiers patrolling around the town. When the Germans start to get suspicious, five soldiers leave and four stayed and when b...

In 1914, the British faked a retreat to draw the Germans out of position to fight them but this retreat became disorganized and many English soldiers were lost behind enemy (German) lines. Most of them surrendered but a few hid with French villagers including four men in Villeret. They quickly assimilated with the villagers and learned the language and customs and became unnoticeable to the German occupiers. One of the men, Robert Digby, fell in love with a village girl and they had a child. Rat...

3.5. This took me a while to read because the beginning was rather dry. It is interesting to see an early book written by Ben Macintyre and to see how his style has changed. WWI is a war that I don't know a great deal about. This book highlighted the plight of civilians in the war zone.

I can't offhand think of anything else I've come across dealing with life in the German-occupied portion of France during the First World War, so this was a fascinating change of pace with a lot of flavour: stranded British soldiers living in hiding, doomed wartime romances, conquered living with conquerors, spy rings, conspiracies. One has to be suspicious of any historical narrative whose only real sources are postwar accounts by the locals or family stories handed down from people's long-dead...

I finished this book on New Year's Day in 2003. What I noted at the time: Story of four English soldiers forced to hide in a French village during WWI. One of them falls in love with a village girl, who has his child. Someone betrays the soldiers, and they are shot. The author goes over evidence and speaks with survivors and family members, trying to figure out who betrayed them. Describes atrocities of war. Well done.

I've yet to read a Ben Macintyre book I didn't thoroughly enjoy, and The Englishman's Daughter was no exception. Excellent narrative nonfiction, with amazing efforts at reportage and a lovely eye for details.This is a fast read and covers one small but compelling story from WW1, but the intimacy and journalistic immediacy end up delivering deeper meaning than you might get from a more traditional strategy- or battle-focused overview of the war.Because you spend the story focused on a small count...

Solid nonfiction of an interesting WWI story, British soldiers stranded behind German lines, in a French hamlet that eventually found itself directly in the battle for the Somme. What is striking is the depravity of the 'Boche', the German military, in stripping the French of every morsel of food, personal possession, furnishings, jewelry, and finally, blowing up the village housing and church. Especially when this rapaciousness repeated in 30 years with WWII, on an even greater scale across Eur...

Actual score 2.5⭐️.Not the most thrilling read, you can tell it’s written by a journalist as it’s quite a flat fact based book. It is basically the story of a group if allied soldiers trapped behind enemy lines, 1 of the soldiers falls in love with a French girl, the French girls other live interest gets jealous and betrays the soldiers. Some of the information the book goes into is pure padding out the book. I’m glad I read it as I’ve not heard of this story before and the soldiers involved wer...

This is an older Ben Macintyre book that was written twenty years ago, well before his later books that I love so much. The story itself could be told in a few chapters but he fills out the book with really interesting insights into what it was like to live in a village in France near the front lines of World War 1. And I loved how he built a case for and against each possible informant in order to solve the central mystery.

Perhaps instead of the subtitle of A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War I a more apt subtitle for this book would be A True Story of a French Village during World War I. Maybe not as appealing but much more accurate. I found The Englishman's Daughter to be not so much a love story as a story about a small French village during World War I. Reading this book I got a good sense of what life was like for these French peasants before the war and during the German occupation. The affair bet...

This is an unusual and mysterious true story. 'Unusual' in that tells of four British soldiers who were stranded behind the German lines in the early weeks of the First World War and were then concealed for over eighteen months by the inhabitants of an occupied village until they were seemingly betrayed to the Germans and executed as spies. 'Mysterious' in that one asks why few if any attempts were made by these soldiers to escape - via Belgium perhaps - and also whether they - and in particular...

An interesting story but better suited for a smaller monogram.I didn’t know much about what happened behind the lines to French villagers under German control and was intrigued by a tale of some British soldiers left behind when the Allies retreated in September 1914.The soldiers were allowed by the villagers in merge into their lives as the best way to hide them.This was explained in a fairly leisurely way but the story became more interesting when somebody betrayed them.Their execution in 1916...

True story of four British soldiers who found themselves lost behind enemy lines in 1914. For two years the villagers of occupied Villeret hid and protected them as best they could, but in 1916, the soldiers were exposed, rounded up and shot. Who betrayed them and why is the mystery Macintyre tries to uncover through extensive research and interviews with the village survivors and descendents, but the real focus of the book is the unrelenting horror of living under German occupation and the amaz...

MacIntyre again does painstaking research to tell the story of 4 English soldiers hiding in German occupied territory in France during WWI. There really wasn’t much raw material to work with, but MacIntyre did a good job of weaving everything together into a compelling story. Enjoyable book.

A book about a small group of English soldiers trapped behind enemy lines during WW1, and how one town sheltered them from discovery until it all went wrong. It is a story of incredible courage equal to anything that happened in the trenches, and of the limits of human endurance when faced with unbelievable privation. A beautiful book.

Not one of Macintyre’s best: the blurb makes it sound sensational, but this story of a French village in World War One – and the British soldiers hiding there, later to be betrayed – is rather aloof and clunky. In many of Macintyre’s later books, you’re swept along on a tide of bromance and gimmicky but lively prose; here you can really see the mechanics behind the construction: it often feels more like a history essay than a proper book. It’s quite atmospheric and occasionally moving, particula...

Soon after the beginning of World War I four British soldiers find themselves stuck behind enemy lines and unable to return to their units, they seek shelter in the French countryside hiding close to German troops just outside a French village.They are soon discovered by the villagers of Villeret, a tiny village occupied by the Germans. The locals take the bold decision to shelter them in the barns and houses around the village, right under the nose of the enemy. Their uniforms are hidden, and t...

A well researched piece of work. Ben MacIntyre really knows how to bring the past to life. We know of the Great War as the slaughter in the trenches but rarely do we think about how it came to pass. The early description of the very start in 1914 was fascinating - and the decline into the barbarity and mass wonton destruction was well covered.Having recently read the story of Harry Patch it was interesting to read this very different story and realise that people's experience of war is completel...