Prominent People
The Privileged Nightmare. By Giles Romilly and Michael Alexander. (Weidenfeld and Nicolson. 12s. 6d.)•MR. ROMILLY, a nephew of Sir Winston Churchill, was a war- correspondent captured at Narvik. Mr.- Alexander, raiding behind Rommel's lines in North Africa, was arrested wearing German uniform. He saved himself from execution by intelligent emphasis on his relationship to the British GOC, General Alexander, a relationship that existed, though less closely than, for his particular purposes, he then claimed. Eventually, with a court-martial still dangling in reserve, he found himself sharing a room with Romilly at Colditz Punishment Camp.
The two became the first of the Prominente, notable hostages secured by the Germans against an emergency that, after 1943, became increasingly probable. They enjoyed a certain privacy, but always with the fear that a successful Allied landing would mean their being handed over to the SS. In this invidious position they were later joined by such 'prominents' as the present Lords Harewood and Haig, the Master of Elphinstone, the sons of the then Viceroy of India and the American Ambassador to Britain, together with the hero of the tragic 1945 Warsaw rising, General Bor-Komorowski. Fellow prisoners deemed of lesser importance included a Rothschild, Douglas Bader, a son of Leon Blum, Richard Heard, then Dean of Peterhouse, and General Piskor, an intimate associate of Marshal Pilsudski. The material was complex and the authors did not lack leisure to assess it. The varied personalities and the attitude of each national group to the War, to each other, to politics, is delicately delineated and the detached half-humorous writing is alive with undercurrents:•
The Poles brought stranger and more sombre titles. They brought their black heroism and their extraordinary past. In their dark shabby clothes they seemed to be wrapped in the loneliness of partitional memories. The Polish quarters were always darkly forbidding, cupboards blocked the light from the barred windows and the hundred and forty prisoners who moved in them appeared to have more than anyone else an authentic right to be inmates of a sullen castle. Shuffling, clogging, stooping, an amorphous and indistinguishable host of drab khaki made more remote by the barrier of Slav speech, the Poles lent to Colditz Castle a dignity which despite its hundred foot walls, clouds of barbed wire and giant reflectors, it did not inherently have.
Monotony was enlivened by escape-plans, Shakespeare, pro- ductions of Wilde and Priestley, stoolball (the French Players beat the English Gentlemen), music, toy-making, and such educational projects as Alexander's lectures on the Nineteenth-century Novel. ('Trollope wrote sixty novels. Fifty-nine are good and there is one I haven't read.') Romilly went further, tried to escape in a packing case, nearly suffocated and emerged to public view on Colditz Station 'like a baby crocodile cracking its egg.'
The double surfaces of prison-life can seldom have been better conveyed. Sometimes the strain becomes overpowering. Mika Sinclair broke from a walk, ran crazily to the gate and was shot dead: Mittai, Haig's devoted Maori soldier-servant, suddenly assaulted him in pent-up, almost fatal rage. The Protninente themselves, sharing a shock-proof patrician dignity, reacted each in his own way, Haig with his painting, Lascelles with his music. Max de Hamel, 'with the air of a chamberlain looking for an emperor' specialised in cooking and theology. Elphinstone sternly salvaged time from intellectual discussion to see that they all kept up appearances, as a weapon against a race always sensitive to externals.
All survived, though in the last days of the Reich .Himmler inter- vened and ordered their withdrawal further inland. True to for Romilly escaped over a castle wall ninety feet high, reached Munich and contacted the Americans. The fascinating if dangerous inde- pendence of watching the downfall of a regime as.an escaped alien on the run, in a city from which the regime first arose, was reinforced by a privileged visit to Dachau. Meanwhile the others had the distinction of being sentenced to death by Hitler himself by long- distance telephone from beleaguered Berlin, though their captor (an SS General with plans for the future more substantial than those of his Fiatrer), risked ignoring the order, and after a sight of the Red Army indiscriminately assaulting German chastity and German jewelry, they too linked up with the Americans.
This is a planned book controlled-by an exact feeling for words and movement so that When the pressure hardens the impact is direct. The contrasts throughout remain even. The Germans are inspected as coolly as anyone else, not as grotesque maniacs but as predictable, sometimes attractive human beings, outrageously gullible, terrified of ridicule, striving to be correct, filled with loud rather appealing mnposities. CI extend to you the right hand of friendship. If that d is rejected I shall resort to severe measures.') Unlike even their prisoners they seem, through their obscure cravings, always unable to enjoy life at the moment and even at their best are never entirely trustworthy. In this admirable book they retain the ludicrous pathos of some dumb Housemaster who, despite sinister and total authority, remains baited by schoolboys whoare in their own way as ruthless as he and with a far clearer idea of what theY want.
Mr. Romilly and Mr. Alexander are very good writers indeed and have written one of the few war-books in which mood and character, often so perfunctorily treated, are as engrossing as the ostensible plot of imprisonment and escape.
PETER VANSITTARI
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