‘Cruel Crossing: Escaping Hitler Across the Pyrenees’, by Edward Stourton – review

‘One afternoon in September 1942,’ Edward Stourton opens this important and rewarding book, ‘a young man and a young woman could be seen sitting on the back steps of a farmhouse in south west France, looking up at the Pyrenees.’ It is like the first image in an album packed with snapshots set against this same glorious setting. ‘There is no neat way of telling this piece of history’, Stourton concedes; ‘it is a jumble of individual lives’. Collectively these brief glimpses tell the story of the perilous passages over the mountains between France and Spain during the second world war. Stourton is on a mission to ‘unlock the secrets of this most secretive region’, a task he undertakes vigorously, not only researching the stories of those on the run in the war years, and those risking their lives to help them, but under-taking the crossing himself.

Some of the tales he uncovers, of serial escapers and ‘very ugly’ middle-aged resisters carrying canes, ‘capacious handbags’ and legs of mutton in violin cases, seem to come straight from the pages of Boy’s Own. Stourton delights in accounts of British POWs on the run in summer, electing to take their chances at the local pool despite being nervously aware that here the Jerries ‘had no swastikas on their trunks’ and, in winter, a downed RAF pilot lamenting crossing the peaks ‘up to my testicles in snow’.

The MI9 gadget-master ‘Clutty’ Hutton also gets due attention with his flexible saws concealed in shoelaces and dart-firing fountain pens. As do remarkable women like Nancy Wake, the famous ‘White Mouse’, and Andrée de Jongh, who insisted her code-name ‘Postmistress’ be changed to ‘Post-master’, both running escape lines among other activities.

Because most of the recorded stories belong to survivors, by half way through the book it begins to feel a little as if anyone with some guts and gumption might have made it to safety.