The weekend’s literary pages sounded the Last Post in honour of Remembrance Sunday. The re-release of Sir Andrew Motion’s collection of war poems, Laurels and Donkeys, is being feted by critics. And Motion read from the book at a party in Oxford on Friday night, a memorable experience for those who witnessed it.
The former Poet Laureate also took part in a discussion about new war literature for the Guardian, together with Michael Morpurgo and Luisa Young. The events of the Great War have now, for the most part, passed out of living memory and into history. The challenge for writers and historians, say those interviewed by the Guardian, is to preserve the sentiment of Remembrance Day: to honour those killed in war, even if one cannot sympathise with the cause in which they died. To that end, 13 national libraries in Europe have collaborated to make their enormous war archives available online.
In a similar vein, the Telegraph’s Toby Clements has reviewed two new books that draw on the private correspondence of ostensibly ordinary people and their experience of the First World War – one by Swedish historian Peter Englund and the other by British historian Richard Van Emden. Clements writes, “Of the two books, Englund’s is the more thrilling, a grand narrative of war, full of colour and movement, like an old-fashioned cavalry charge, while van Emden’s is the more shattering for its wealth of tiny heartbreaking truths.”
Michael Morpurgo once said that “war does not just break buildings, it breaks lives”. Writer and journalist Ben Macintyre has disinterred more than a few tales that contradict Morpurgo’s truism, describing the lives of people who were made by war. A few years back, Macintyre published a biography of Eddie Chapman, AKA Agent Zigzag, a chancer, crook, womaniser and double agent. Since publishing the book, Macintyre has found (£) a new angle on this rogue and his wartime love affair with Norwegian beauty, Dagmar Lahlum:
‘In 1944 Chapman was parachuted into Britain for a second time. He told Lahlum that he would return after the war, marry her and clear her name from the taint of collaboration. He never came back.
When I wrote the book, I assumed that was the end of the matter: another doomed wartime love affair. But while making Double Agent: The Eddie Chapman Story for the BBC, another version began to emerge, a story of two people thrown together and then forced apart by war, who never forgot and, in Lahlum’s case, never recovered. In the archives of the BBC we found an interview with Chapman from 1994 that was never broadcast, hours of footage that could not be aired at the time without violating the Official Secrets Act. In it, Chapman described, with amazing candour, his life as a criminal, a spy and a double agent, but he also talked about Lahlum, “the lovely little girl” he met in Oslo more than half a century earlier. “We had a great love match and I had the intention of going back and marrying her. “I’d love to see her again.”
Chapman was living in the Canary Islands in the 1990s, where he was interviewed by the BBC, the very picture of a high-rolling former crook retired to sunny climes. It was in the Canary Islands that he met a Norwegian woman, who happened to know Lahlum, and put him back in touch with her. They began a correspondence. “I remember you as a charming fellow,” she wrote. “Always smiling”. In 1997 they were finally reunited. Lahlum flew to Britain. Perhaps their brief meeting in old age brought closure for Chapman, but for Lahlum, according to her nephew, it opened an old wound. Chapman died of heart failure later that same year.’
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