A SCHOOLMASTER’S WAR

HARRY RÉE, BRITISH AGENT IN THE FRENCH RESISTANCE

ED. BY JONATHAN RÉE

Yale University Press, 192pp, £14.99

Harry Rée, DSO, OBE, was one of the heroes of ‘the shadow war’, that implacable conflict in which no quarter was given by either side. A Bolshie ex-public schoolboy who despised ‘turncoat, fire-eating ex-appeasers’, he volunteered for SOE because it would rescue him from ‘the fifth-form atmosphere of the officers’ mess’. It was a wise move, because according to the official history of SOE, he became one of their very best agents.

Like so many men and women who had ‘a good war’, Rée, who died in 1991, rarely spoke of it. But he did leave a variety of written pieces, including letters he received from France after Liberation, that his son, the philosopher Jonathan Rée, has deftly assembled into a riveting miscellany. A high point is Rée’s account of his brutal, hand-to-hand battle with an armed German officer, whom he overcame despite being shot twice. But, said Andrew Holgate in the Sunday Times, Rée’s ‘matterof-fact’ style underlines ‘just how ordinary life in the SOE often was…. and just how brave the people sheltering him were’.

In the New Statesman, William Boyd also paid tribute to the ‘secret army of “passive supporters”’ that allowed Rée and his comrades to function at all. Rée, he said, was determined that their bravery should not be overlooked.