A Foreign Field

by Ben Macintyre

First published 2001

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In August 1914, four soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force are separated from their unit near the French village of Villeret as the German advance cuts across northern France. Local families hide the men for months, and one of them, Robert Digby, forms a relationship with a village woman and fathers a daughter while living behind enemy lines.

The soldiers are betrayed in 1916, captured and executed by the Germans. Macintyre reconstructs their concealment, relationships and deaths through family testimony, village memory and military records, examining the motives of the person who denounced them. The book was published in North America as The Englishman’s Daughter: A True Story of Love and Betrayal in World War One.