Love and betrayal behind the lines

To the recent spate of books about the First World War, here is a distinguished addition. Ben Macintyre has taken the true story of seven British soldiers trapped behind enemy lines and, with brilliant research, built a powerful picture of what life was like for the Picardy villagers who protected them, under German occupation. I was fascinated.

The adventure began for him in 1997, when as Paris correspondent of The Times he was invited to the French unveiling of a plaque to four of these soldiers, captured and executed by les Boches in 1916. There he met a local woman aged 81 who said: "I was six months old ... we were betrayed. One of those brave soldiers was my father."

And so he learned of the doomed romance between Private Robert Digby and Claire Dessenne, daughter of a local mason, in the village of Villeret, northwest of St-Quentin. At a risk to their own lives, the villagers fed and shielded the men, who were given civilian clothes and disguised as peasants. Some even learned the local patois. One dressed as a woman. Another was hidden for months in a cupboard.

Macintyre has cleverly made of the episode a full-length book, setting it firmly into its context: the murderous guns of the Somme were audible at Villeret, which he treats as a microcosm of the suffering and the mixed courage and equivocations of the occupied French peasantry in a war they barely understood. He has conducted a wealth of research in local archives, and has sourced this with scholarly precision. He has also tirelessly interviewed today's descendants in the area. He even found two 90-year-olds who told him their own childhood wartime memories: one recalled seeing the tumbril carrying the soldiers to the firing squad.

Above all, in this quiet village Macintyre found that the unquiet events of 1914-16 were "permanently inscribed in the collective memory". The villagers talked of the executions and of the love affair as if they had happened yesterday; they still argued heatedly about the wisdom of Claire's behaviour. But they had prudently brushed under the carpet the central mystery, to which Macintyre could never get an answer: who had finally betrayed the soldiers? Was it the Dessenne clan's rivals, the Lelongs, whose daughter was also in love with Digby?

The book gives the taste and smell of village life in those harsh years. Being so close to the front, Villeret suffered a far tougher occupation than most of France was later to undergo in 1940-44. Many villagers had their possessions and farm produce confiscated; some were executed for acts of defiance. But the German occupiers, at first so brutal and much hated, gradually wearied and grew gentler as the war went on, and some villagers became friendly with them. As in 1940-44, a few girls even slept with the enemy. Thus Claire's cousin Marie had a daughter by a German soldier - and later these two "children spawned by rival armies" were to become close friends.

Macintyre's style is both witty and lyrical; only rarely does he veer towards the purple or pretentious. His one odd fault is a geographical vagueness: several times he writes "west" when he means "east". Are these copyediting errors? Or does he really see the world like that?