April 1961
This book was first published in 1952, but for extraneous reasons was neither read nor noticed as much as it certainly deserved. The author, who was dropped into France in 1942, during the German occupation, was captured, and spent eighteen months in France - outside Paris - in solitary confinement. His experiences, of continuous and intense hunger, of cold, of anxiety (he was intermittently hauled off for interrogations of varying degrees of brutality and constantly expecting to be killed), and above all of being thrown absolutely upon the resources of his mind and spirit (nothing to read excepting occasional torn pages of newspapers or fragments of books given him for the lavatory) and nothing whatever to do (his cell measured ten feet by five) are described with a kind of serene intelligence made up of enquiry and detachment and with double regard - at the time to living and afterwards of writing - for the truth of his matter.
It is an adventure both bare and profound; uncovering resources which, however much they may be theoretically acknowledged, do, none the less, provide a most comforting inspiration in the flesh of personal experience. Mr Burney takes one so simply through the earliest lessons of imprisonment: ‘I soon found that variety is not the spice, but the very stuff of life’, that one actually feels the pangs of a starvation diet of impressions as acutely as one recognises his hunger for ordinary food. Adjustment to lack of the latter was a painfully slow, partial, and continuously difficult business; but the ways in which the author overcame the lack of natural nourishment for his mind and spirit are what make this book so eminently worth reading. By the time - at the end of it - that he is to be moved to Germany (to Buchenwald) he is reluctant to exchange his solitary confinement for the noise and promiscuity of a camp. ‘I knew that so many months of solitude, though I had allowed them to torment me at times, had been in a sense an exercise in liberty,’ Perhaps one of the most valuable points made in this exceedingly precise and courageous book is that liberty is a most personal and private business, and one which - above its crudest level - cannot be shouted about by one person on behalf of others.