days end

Many years ago, I became fascinated with the story of my friend Nadya Murdoch’s parents, Guy d’Artois and Sonia Butt. They looked like ordinary people. But during the Second World War, they served in Winston Churchill’s secret army, the Special Operations Executive. They were highly resourceful Allied saboteurs who leapt from planes behind enemy lines through pitch-black skies to join the desperate people of the French Resistance to fight the Nazis. They were decorated war heroes. Until now their story has not been told.

Theirs is a history like no other, turned into a riveting book by a master storyteller, Nahlah Ayed. I can’t wait for the movie.

Sandra Martin’s review of Nahlah Ayed’s The War We Won Apart: The Untold Story of Two Elite Agents Who Became One of the Most Decorated Couples of WWII does what a good review should: It makes me want to read this account of Sonia Butt and Guy d’Artois. However, one small passage in her review needs elaboration; another is extraneous.

Regarding the former, Martin writes that Butt visited restaurants patronized by Germans, which “provoked smears that she was a collaborator,” but she doesn’t go any further with this speculative, tantalizing tidbit. Regarding the latter, Martin writes that Butt had an affair with an agent who later “went back to his wife, at least temporarily.” That agent doesn’t seem to figure prominently in the overall Butt-d’Artois narrative, so I don’t understand the relevance of the marital details.

One other passage gives pause. Martin writes that Butt and another agent “cohabited as man and wife.” This may have worked better as “lived together as man and wife” (the language at the time) or “cohabited as wife and husband” (the language today).

Those critiques aside, Martin’s review prepares the reader for an intriguing book.