THE GIRL IN THE BLUE BERET
By Bobbie Ann Mason
Random House, $26 368 pages
A friend of mine spent one of his college years during the 1970s in England studying history. As part of a work-study assignment, he visited the homes of families in London living on public assistance to take stock of their material needs. In one house, he was introduced to an elderly woman, a survivor of the blitz who took the occasion to express herself about England’s role in World War II. “An American, eh?” she gibed. “You Americans think you won the war, but you didn’t. It was us what won it. We did it - all by ourselves, we did.”
The woman may have had a skewed view of history, but her words amply illustrate how memories and perceptions of World War II can vary wildly. The 1939-45 conflagration has spawned a cottage industry of second-guessing, revisionism and garden-variety bilge-mongering - the stock in trade of those who weren’t there. But for the dwindling number of combat veterans, there are long, quiet hours spent at home with their memories, some of them never revealed to those who ask, “Grandpa, what did you do in the war?”
In her novel “The Girl in the Blue Beret,” renowned short-story writer and novelist Bobbie Ann Mason walks in the shoes of one such veteran, a former B-17 co-pilot, Marshall Stone, whose plane was shot down over enemy-occupied Belgium in early 1944. With the pilot mortally wounded, Marshall managed to bring down the crippled plane for a soft landing in a farmer’s field, evacuate the crew and escape from the crash site before it was surrounded by German soldiers.
The crew members split up, and Marshall made his way through France toward neutral Spain with the help of the Resistance. These civilians - men, women and children - risked their lives to sabotage the German war machine and assist downed Allied aviators to escape capture and imprisonment. The activities of the Resistance, working hand-in-glove with the Allied military, hastened the end of the war.
That is not how Marshall has come to see things. Having survived the war, married, raised a pair of prickly, spoiled children and worked for more than 30 years as a commercial airline pilot, he is haunted by the memory of his escape and afflicted by survivor’s guilt. He sees the Resistance as the real heroes: living with seemingly nonchalant abandon, calmly committing small but significant acts of everyday sabotage to throw sand into the cogs of the German war effort. To Marshall, the lives of the Resistance fighters are living illustrations of Shakespeare’s defiant lines to live one’s life bravely, especially in the very teeth of peril, for “out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.”
Retiring from his work as an airline pilot, Marshall travels to France to find, if possible, the people who rescued and assisted him during the war. His memory is especially drawn to a teenage girl in a blue beret. This brave girl, surely a woman in her 50s by now, had been key in Marshall’s safety toward the final leg of his journey through Paris to the border of Spain.
Marshall initially senses that his journey is an act of dredging up that which should lie undisturbed; he senses that he is “wandering through a land of ghosts, slivers of memory, clues floating like summer midges.” But in time, as he discovers a number of the former Resistance fighters and their now-grown children and learns of their immense respect for this former American flyboy, he also learns that his rescuers’ perceptions of the war are concave reflections of his own.
From their perspective, if the Allies had not been on the ground and in the sky, they might all have been crushed by the Nazis eventually. Over time, Marshall discovers that they themselves were harrowed in ways that have left deep, never-healed psychic wounds. The American and his French rescuers slowly join on a journey of mutual understanding and healing.
In “The Girl in the Blue Beret,” Ms. Mason has crafted a novel of reconciliation with the past, escaping from the prison of self into a fuller understanding of the world and one’s place in it. In that world, phrases such as “We did it - all by ourselves, we did” have no part.
On a technical level, Ms. Mason has done her homework and demonstrates a commendable knowledge of the preflight and in-flight activities of pilots, whether for a B-17 or a Boeing 747. Her dialogue is natural and sure, and the narrative moves along at a tempo appropriate to the story of discovery she must tell, though the final chapters seem more prolonged than is necessary. She is a master of introducing small, vivid details that implant an instant image of recognition into the reader’s mind, such as mentioning a horse that had a splotch on his forehead shaped like Great Britain. In summary, “The Girl in the Blue Beret” is a work not to be missed; its audience is universal, but it may appeal especially to the children of World War II veterans.
• James E. Person Jr., the author of “Earl Hamner: From Walton’s Mountain to Tomorrow” (Cumberland House Books), is the proud son of a World War II flyboy.
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