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| Plot Summary of A Foreign Field |
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"This book tells the story of Robert Digby, a private in the British Expeditionary Force. Aged 28 at the outbreak of war in August 1914, he was one of several British soldiers trapped behind enemy lines on the Western Front. Unable to return to their units, they hid in the French village of Villeret. Living in daily fear of capture and execution, they were fed, clothed and protected by the villagers, including local tradesmen and the matriarch Madame Eugenie Dessenne, living under the noses of the German occupiers and masquerading as villagers.
A close bond soon formed between Digby and Madame Dessenne's 19-year-old daughter Claire. In November 1915 she gave birth to their daughter Helene, and six months later somebody in Villeret betrayed the men to the Germans. Digby and three others were captured, tried as spies and executed.
Villeret was deliberately destroyed in 1917 by the Germans, and a bleak picture is portrayed of a once thriving community, reduced to little more than rubble, a mass of dugouts and muddy craters overgrown with rank brambles of barbed wire. In peacetime the countryside slowly healed, with trenches filled and ploughed back into the fields, though the new post-war landscape was a bleak one shorn of mature trees and time-honoured landmarks, with grenades and poison gas canisters still buried in the soil.
This book is a very human portrait of how war changes and brutalises people in the name of survival, destroys cultures and whole ways of life, and deprives communities of their past, present and future.
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John Van der Kiste, Resident Scholar
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| Review Analysis of A Foreign Field |
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Our unique search engine provides a wealth of detail about books by breaking them down into many different literary elements, all of which are searchable (click here).
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Ratings are on a 1-10 scale (Low to High)
Plot
War/Cloak & Dagger story?
- Fought as soldier
War/Spying
Yes
Period of greatest activity?
- 1900+
Which war?
- World War I
Subject of Biography
Gender
- Male
Profession/status:
- infantry soldier
Is this an ordinary person caught up in events?
Yes
Ethnicity
- White
Nationality
- British
How sensitive is this person?
- sensitive to others' feelings
Sense of humor
- Strong but gentle sense of humor
Intelligence
- Average intelligence
Physique
- average physique
Setting
Europe
Yes
European country:
- England/UK
- France
Misc setting
- fort/military installation
Century:
- 1900-1920's
Style
Person
- mostly 3rd
Accounts of torture and death?
- moderately detailed references to deaths
Book makes you feel?
- concerned
Writer's slant towards subject:
- favorable
Story of entire life, or part?
- story of set of events during life
Pictures/Illustrations?
- A lot 11-15 B&W
How much dialogue in bio?
- little dialog
How much of bio focuses on most famous period of life?
- 76%-100% of book
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Note: the views expressed here are only those of the reviewer(s). | |
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