
My second wartime memoir in as many months, Anita Leslie's Train to Nowhere is very different in pitch and pace to John Hackett's I was a Stranger, but it's as moving and outstanding in its own way.
Daughter of a baronet and second cousin to Winston Churchill, Anita joined the Mechanised Transport Corps in August 1940 and was posted to the Middle East, spending three years as a mechanic and driver and then working in the press, editing and distributing papers to the British troops. Her account of her life in Egypt, Palestine, the Lebanon and Syria is breezy and breathy and always colourful:
"I spent two days travelling the flower-covered wilderness of the Jazira, trying to discover if and where the Taurus express ever stopped, if and where planes could drop anything and to whom. I waded knee-deep through a sea of wild larkspur and hollyhock and saw the snow-covered mountains of Persia, and explored great ruins that were the first cities of the world, but I never placed a single copy of the Eastern Times!"
Moving back to Europe she joins the French army as an ambulance driver, and here her war begins in earnest. First in Italy, then in France, Anita and her fellow drivers - all of them young women - are in the thick of things, facing bombardment, morale-sapping living conditions, running risks almost as great as those of front-line troops:
"Army lorries had to travel in convoy of at least twenty accompanied by two tanks. Only the ambulances rolled alone through enemy country." And the red crosses the ambulances bore were no guarantee of safe passage; but then as Anita says, "fear is comparative".
Involved in the liberation of Alsace, the Battle of Colmar, and then as war in Europe ends, despatched to Germany to collect "sick French prisoners", Anita and her colleagues do not know that their destination is Nordhausen, a concentration camp, and the patients they must transport from there to hospital are inmates now barely alive. The horrors she describes in that chapter make the usually phlegmatic author sick with despair of mankind, and as a reader of those passages you will weep.
Emotion apart, what gives the book its force, its vividness, is Anita's matter-of-fact reporting of all that she witnesses. Her understatement - for rarely does she labour a point - is telling, her spirit indomitable, her ability to get on with the job no matter what truly impressive. As an observer, no detail escapes her, but it's her wit and sense of the absurd, her good humour, essential humanity and clear-sightedness, which colour her words and which bring to life - real, harsh, painful life - the facts with which we think we are familiar.
First published in 1948, the book and its author must both have been ahead of their time, but Train to Nowhere has as much to say today as it did then, and is perhaps even more compelling for all of us who have not lived through those terrible years.