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Time Out of War

Every now and then a book is so badly published that it never quite recovers, however eloquent its admirers. Robert Kee’s account of the three years he spent in a German prisoner-of-war camp is one of the great books of the Second World War; it is also sadly neglected, thanks to the part played in its publication by the novelist Graham Greene.

Greene left MI6 in 1944, and took up a job as the editorial director of Eyre & Spottiswoode, a rather grand, old-fashioned firm of publishers with a strong line in Catholic books. Robert Kee was demobbed from the RAF in 1945, and the following year he sent Greene the typescript of A Crowd Is Not Company. No doubt Greene both liked and admired his new acquisition, but he made two fatal publishing errors: he allowed Kee to retain the book’s eminently forgettable title, a quotation from Francis Bacon; and, less forgivably, he insisted on publishing what was self-evidently a memoir as a novel, on the grounds that after the First World War it had taken a good ten years before autobiographical accounts of the war – Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Blunden’s Undertones of War, Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer ‒ began to enjoy commercial and literary success.

As it turned out, prisoner-of-war memoirs like The Wooden Horse, The Great Escape and The Colditz Story became bestsellers not long after the publication of A Crowd Is Not Company in 1947. Kee had ambitions to become a novelist, and happily went along with Greene’s suggestion, but when shortly after publication Peter Quennell told him he couldn’t understand why he had agreed to its being published as a novel, ‘I immediately wished I hadn’t.’ The combination of unmemorable title and miscategorization proved fatal to the book’s durability and fame; Jonathan Cape reissued it as a memoir in 1982, but the damage had been done.

A product of Stowe and Magdalen Colle

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Every now and then a book is so badly published that it never quite recovers, however eloquent its admirers. Robert Kee’s account of the three years he spent in a German prisoner-of-war camp is one of the great books of the Second World War; it is also sadly neglected, thanks to the part played in its publication by the novelist Graham Greene.

Greene left MI6 in 1944, and took up a job as the editorial director of Eyre & Spottiswoode, a rather grand, old-fashioned firm of publishers with a strong line in Catholic books. Robert Kee was demobbed from the RAF in 1945, and the following year he sent Greene the typescript of A Crowd Is Not Company. No doubt Greene both liked and admired his new acquisition, but he made two fatal publishing errors: he allowed Kee to retain the book’s eminently forgettable title, a quotation from Francis Bacon; and, less forgivably, he insisted on publishing what was self-evidently a memoir as a novel, on the grounds that after the First World War it had taken a good ten years before autobiographical accounts of the war – Graves’s Goodbye to All That, Blunden’s Undertones of War, Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer ‒ began to enjoy commercial and literary success. As it turned out, prisoner-of-war memoirs like The Wooden Horse, The Great Escape and The Colditz Story became bestsellers not long after the publication of A Crowd Is Not Company in 1947. Kee had ambitions to become a novelist, and happily went along with Greene’s suggestion, but when shortly after publication Peter Quennell told him he couldn’t understand why he had agreed to its being published as a novel, ‘I immediately wished I hadn’t.’ The combination of unmemorable title and miscategorization proved fatal to the book’s durability and fame; Jonathan Cape reissued it as a memoir in 1982, but the damage had been done. A product of Stowe and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he had become amorously involved with A. J. P. Taylor’s wife, Kee joined the RAF at the outbreak of war, while still in his early twenties. He flew Hampdens on bombing raids over Germany but was shot down over Holland in 1942, captured and eventually sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in what is now part of Poland. ‘For you the war is over,’ his German captors insisted time and again: isolated from the world at large, he and his fellow-prisoners picked up what they could about the progress of the war from talkative guards and covert tunings-in to the BBC; ‘I heard it all from the same patch of sand, four hundred yards long by a hundred wide, in the middle of a Silesian pine forest.’ Camp life veered between moments of unexpected happiness, claustrophobia and intense frustration.

The smooth-phrased BBC announcer, the amusing don, the self-confident politician, the jargon-perfect critic, the editor of the literary magazine – all are reducible within a few weeks to a bewildered defensive creature with hollow cheeks and desperate eyes whose only cares will be to see that he gets his fair share of the potato ration, that nobody steals his bed boards, and that he exchanges his cigarette ends for food or vice versa at the best possible price . . . some tendencies in human behaviour were encouraged, others repressed, and the results were both pleasant and unpleasant.

The POWs were crammed on to wooden bunks in windswept wooden huts, and the resultant overcrowding was unbearable at times: the fact that ‘you could never turn your head without seeing some evidence of their closeness – their clothes or their books or their photographs’ – led to rows with even the most congenial inmates, all of whom addressed one another with the obligatory ‘old man’ or ‘old boy’. Music, painting and poetry often had an unexpected appeal, and many people who would normally never have had anything to do with such things were forced by their environment to look into them and found there greater wealth than they had ever known before. An extraordinary range of books was available in the camp library, including the complete novels of Thomas Hardy, Frazer’s The Golden Bough, and works by John Stuart Mill; Kee tells us that at one time he was reading Houghton’s Life of Keats, and when they were eventually ordered to abandon the camp he took with him, as easy reading, Tristram Shandy. Dreaming of escape was, for most prisoners, no more than an agreeable fantasy, offering ‘almost unlimited scope for invention and strategy, and the personal romanticising in bed at night. It was the schoolboy’s dream come true.’ Kee reluctantly agreed to take part in an attempt to scale the wire fence with ladders after somehow fusing the perimeter lights, and when it failed ‘I went about the camp like a man reprieved while on his way to the chaplain and the hangman.’ Despite his earlier sense of relief, Kee later took part in a rather more successful escape attempt. In classic prisoner-of-war style, a tunnel was bored from inside a lavatory block. It grew narrower and more airless as it neared its destination beyond the wire, rather like a ‘bottle of hock’, and Kee, clutching his possessions in a briefcase, wondered whether he would ever make it out of the vertical hole at the end, or whether he would be stuck fast, waiting to be picked up by a searchlight or a machine-gun. He eventually squeezed himself out and, equipped with a compass and a home-made map, he and his friend Sammy picked their way along a railway track in the direction of the nearest town, from where they planned to take a train to Berlin. They looked like a couple of tramps – the sole was peeling off one of Kee’s boots, and he was smeared with mud after toppling into a pond – but in this they were no different from many of the forced labourers from all over Europe whom they encountered over the next few days. They took a stopping train to Berlin, reckoning that they were less likely to be challenged by officials demanding to see their crudely forged and increasingly smudged identity papers if they travelled on local trains.

In Berlin the sun was shining from a blue spring sky. I understood from the conversation of a man and a woman in our carriage that there had been an air raid two nights before. There were isolated signs of damage: some houses down by the railway, a burnt-out church – less on the whole than could have been seen from a train passing through London at that time. But the effect of morning sunshine on the roofs of a terrorised city was much the same and even to us sitting in the train it seemed very good to be alive.

Many of the Germans they encountered, both in the camp and on their travels, turned out to be kind and friendly. For some reason Sammy was convinced that they could meet up with members of the Belgian Resistance in Aachen so, claiming to be foreign workers en route to the Krupp armament factory, they boarded a ‘huge stallion of a train’ bound for Cologne. Although one knows perfectly well that they’ll never make it to the Belgian border, Kee’s account of their train ride across Germany is a nail-biting tour de force, which suggests that he might indeed have made it as a novelist. Needless to say, they were arrested outside Cologne and shipped back to Silesia. But by now the Russians were advancing from the east; the camp was abandoned, and Kee and his fellow-prisoners were force-marched to the west, joining the great waves of displaced humanity – Germans from Prussia and Poland, slave labourers from all over occupied Europe – fleeing from the Russians or simply trying to make their way home. Although the war was coming to an end, the book finishes on a disillusioned note. Herded into yet another squalid and barely functioning prisoner-of-war camp, a despairing Kee pulls from his pocket an anthology of verse, which had provided so much consolation during his long captivity. ‘Once I had believed that the beauty which it contained could never fail, that it redeemed the whole of life. Now the idea was absurd. I thought of the finest pages in the book, and they were worthless,’ he writes. He dropped the book on the ground, and ‘it lay there for a moment, its leaves turning slowly in the wind which blew over the mud, the breath of a new day. Then it was trampled out of sight by the boots of the man behind me.’ Robert Kee went on to become a publisher, a journalist, a historian and a television reporter and interviewer, famed for his saturnine good looks, but A Crowd Is Not Company remains his finest achievement.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 53 © Jeremy Lewis 2017


About the contributor

Jeremy Lewis was the deputy editor of The Oldie.

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