I was a Stranger

General Sir John Hackett, distinguished soldier and scholar, commanded a parachute brigade at the Battle of Arnhem in September 1944 and was awarded a bar to the DSO which he had won in the Western Desert. But the after-math of the battle affected him even more deeply than the battle itself. He was severely wounded and, with other casualties, evacuated to a hospital in Arnhem which was in German hands. Within a few days of undergoing a major abdominal operation he was spirited through the German guards by the Dutch underground and taken to the home of a local family. The very presence of a British officer made that family, consisting of four middle-aged sisters and the son and daughter of one of them, guilty of a crime punishable under the German occupation by death. Their house stood within fifty yards of a German police billet. Yet they calmly set about the task they had accepted of restoring their guest to health and setting him on his way home. They dressed his wounds and fed and clothed him from their own very limited resources. As he recovered his strength, they exercised him in walks under cover of darkness to prepare him for escape. But they also for four months sustained his spirit with the Christian devotion by which the family was governed.

It was from this constantly threatened but serene and cheerful household that, one morning in February 1945, Brigadier Hackett rode off on a bicycle under an assumed identity. Several days later, exhausted by a gruelling and dangerous journey by land and water, he got through to the British in the south of Holland. The battle fought by his Dutch family, in which he had played his own part, had been won.

I Was a Stranger may be said to be a war book. It begins with one of the Second World War's most celebrated and tragic battles. It ends with a daring escape. But the central theme of Sir John Hackett's book is not war; it is love, and the devotion which overcomes all obstacles. It would be a hard heart that is not touched by it.