Dead and Gone
By STRIX hE number of female human beings, includ- ing I infants, put to death privily by the German authorities during the Second World War is not ascertainable but exceeds, on the most cautious estimate, three millions. This is quite a lot of female human beings to kill in five and a half years.
It is with seven of them that Death Be Not Proud is concerned; it is written by Mrs. Elizabeth Nicholas and published by the Cresset Press at 21s. All were young women. Six were either parachuted or flown (by Lysander) into German-occupied France under the aegis of the Special Operations Executive, an ad hoc war- time organisation concerned with the fostering of sabotage and resistance, the seventh was' an agent of a French intelligence group connected with SOE. All were executed in 1944. Some of the Germans, who butchered them paid for the deed with their lives; others, after serving a term of imprisonment, now receive pensions from Bonn. Some of the Frenchmen who betrayed them to their captors were shot; others prosper.
Except for the seventh, who was not in the British service and whose fate Mrs. Nicholas was able to establish for the first time with certainty, there was no mystery about what had, finally, happened to these brave girls. Their stories have emerged, at least in outline, from the published reminiscences of their more fortunate colleagues in the cloak-and-dagger business; two have had lull-length books written about them.
In 1955, however, this literature was less copious hall it is now; and in that year Mrs. Nicholas, who had been at school with one of the girls, niana Bowden, decided to write the work which appears this week. `To forgive was one thing, to forget another'; it is clear that her impulse to nvestigate and record the truth about these leroines sprang from a deep and pious emotion uld was wholly free from commercialism. She as not after a 'good story,' she was after the acts; and some of the dedicated zest with which 'he Pursues them communicates itself to the 'reader. •
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It is not entirely the reader's fault if he be- '"les more interested in the hunt than the luarry, for this is what happened, I feel, to the authoress. At an early stage of her researches a :rusade which should have led to the bright up- ands of truth degenerates—without losing its original purpose—into a running fight with bureaucratic and other forms of obscurantism. Mrs. Nicholas keeps her temper throughout but to the effort to do so acquires a chip on her shoulder which sometimes leads her into otiose [Grays.
She discovered, for instance; that the airfield it Tempsford in Huntingdonshire, whence four by the girls had taken off for France, was in use DI' the National Institute of Agricultural En- gineering. She wrote and asked if she might have a look at the place; was courteously referred to the Ministry of Agriculture; was referred back to the NIAE; and was finally put in touch with an official of the County Agricultural Executive Committee, who gave her full information about the purposes for which the land was now used.
All this may be, as she says, 'a comical reflec- tion on our present bureaucracy.' But in the end she never did go to Tempsford. If she had gone there in the first place without writing to anyone she would have achieved her stated purpose of having a look at the place. And, although it is possibly true that John Bunyan 'might often have ridden over the very earth across which the planes had roared,' it is not easy to imagine what clues she hoped to pick up at a disused airfield where four of her subjects had spent, at the most, a few hours fifteen years ago.
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Her preoccupation with the chase, which the reader at least intermittently shares, creates what can best be described as a Devon-and-Somerset atmosphere. Everyone from the Master down is less interested in the stag than in the unspeakable members of the Anti-Bloodsports League who are trying to stop the hunt or throw hounds off the scent. Mrs. Nicholas met with the usual in- superable obstacles in her attempts to get access to official documents; but her researches brought to light a number of small, odd, shabby things. The next of kin of the girls had not been informed of their fate until long after it was known to SOE; the notifications of their deaths had been worded in so laconic a way that it was possible to infer that they had in some way failed in their duty; inquiries for fuller particulars had been side-tracked; when the executioners of four of them were brought to trial clumsy, pointless and unsuccessful attempts to suppress the names of the victims had caused suffering to the bereaved; a Croix de Guerre awarded to one had been re- fused by the authorities, and although there may conceivably be something to be said for the pro- tocol under which this was done, nothing can condone their failure to inform the girl's mother that her memory had been thus honoured. Not only, in short, was no effort of even the most perfunctory kind made by the State to repay its debt to six selfless heroines, but every attempt made by private individuals to do so was suc- cessfully obstructed.
Various aspects of these matters were raised from time to time in the House of Commons, normally under the championship of Dame Irene Ward, the historian of the FANY, to which corps the girls had belonged or been attached. Pulling up the drawbridge of, security, government spokesmen mouthed their evasive platitudes over the battlements. It was bootless to point out, as Mrs. Nicholas does at length, that considerations of secrecy could hardly be held to affect opera- tions of which detiiled accounts had been pub- lished, by those who survived them, in this country and on the Continent. Amid Ministerial cheers the old turnip-ghost of 'not in the national interest' was exhibited on the ramparts (whence for so many years it had, among other achieve- ments, frustrated Admiral North's attempts to salvage his honour); and as usual the perfunctory radiance of this jimmy-o'-goblin was accorded the status of a death-ray.
The result of all this has been to convey the impression that there must be a nigger in the woodpile or a skeleton in the cupboard or both. Mrs. Nicholas's inquiries made it clear not only that the SOE organisation in France was, with the help of French traitors, penetrated by the Germans on a fairly wide front but that SOE remained unaware of the fact for a long time and continued to concert arrangements for the dropping of agents over radio-links which were controlled by the enemy; and there is no doubt that a thorough investigation of all the circum- stances surrounding the fate of the six girls would—were it still possible--bring to light many sins, at the least, of omission, some blunders and much casual callousness. .
But I do not myself believe in the existence of a conspiracy of silence. There is in the nature of all clandestine organisations a streak of the equivocal. In matters of discipline and finance they are laws unto themselves. Their charters are ill-defined, their relations with each other be- devilled by jealousy. In war they grow swiftly to enormous sizes, at the first hint of demobilisa- tion they virtually disappear. And at all times they rely extensively, as does the cuttlefish on his inky exudations, on a thick pall of secrecy.
Mrs. Nicholas's purpose was to establish what happened to six girls, who volunteered for the most hazardous of all war-time duties, between their arrival in France and the dates on which, with either a bullet in their heads or a lethal injection in their veins, they were bundled into the incinerator. To all fair-minded people it must seem disgraceful that her purpose was thwarted by the authorities as far as it lay within their power to thwart it; but in anyone familiar with the clandestine demi-monde and its protective ambience of mumbo juMbo her sad, untidy story will not arouse surprise.
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