FORCE, AND FRAUD, ARE in war the two cardinal virtues.
—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
I am bookless, homeless, sans everything but my eyes to weep with. All my … notes on animals gone—I shall never write that book now.
—Rose Macaulay, letter to Daniel George, May 14, 1941
Before war turned life on its head, Patrick completed one last story. “No Pirates Nowadays,” a Ross and Sullivan episode appearing in the 1940 Oxford Annual for Boys, was vintage Russ. It introduced Ross’s orphaned school-age nephew, Derrick; carried the reader to a remote island, mixing piracy and fur hunting; and turned on a trick of language. The three-part story can be read as a prequel to Patrick’s postwar novel The Road to Samarcand, which also involves Ross, Sullivan, and Derrick and begins on board the sailing schooner Wanderer. But that book would not be published until 1954. In fact, “No Pirates Nowadays” was the last fiction Patrick published for more than a decade, and the last under the name Russ. The following year, both Chums and the Oxford Annual for Boys published for the last time, and Hussein fell out of print.
War organizations soon began to siphon off publishing personnel and resources, not to mention writers. On January 2, 1940, King George VI signed a proclamation extending military service for men up to age twenty-seven. Because of lingering ill health, Patrick was not accepted for active duty. Likewise, his two immediate older brothers struggled to find their niches in the Allied war machine. In 1938, Barney had attempted to enlist in England but was rejected on medical grounds; viper bites and a severed nerve from an accident with a pig-castrating knife had withered his right arm. After moving to Seattle, where he lived with his uncle Cecil Goddard and worked in a sawmill, he attempted to enlist in Vancouver, Canada, but was again rejected. When France fell in June 1940, however, Barney was made a gunner in the Royal Canadian Artillery. The following year, Mike, working as a timber contractor in Queensland, Australia, shaved several years off his age to qualify for the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). He reverted from O’Brien to his family name, preferring to fight and die, if necessary, as a Russ.
Victor served in Arabia as an RAF paymaster, and Connie joined the Imperial Military Nursing Service. Later, in Palestine, she met and married Richard Russell, a British policeman, who happened to be her cousin, the son of Ernest Russ, who had changed his name to Russell during the Boer War.
On the night of September 7, 1940, 180 Luftwaffe bombers attacked central London. They dropped more than three hundred tons of high-explosive bombs and thirteen thousand incendiaries, killing and wounding hundreds of civilians, destroying homes and buildings, and snarling roads with wreckage. During the day, three hundred Luftwaffe bombers had struck the city’s East End and docklands, flattening blocks of slums and turning ships and warehouses into infernos. In the next week an average of two hundred bombers attacked London each night amid a constant barrage of antiaircraft fire and the sickening wail of air-raid sirens.
The Blitz would last until May 11, 1941. During those eight months, German bombers dropped almost nineteen thousand tons of bombs on London, killing fifteen thousand people and leaving many more homeless. Patrick later described the beginning of the Blitz in his novel Richard Temple: “London turned into a uniformed camp overnight, and those who had no uniforms pinned arm-bands on themselves: Philippa had one as an ambulance driver, and she vanished into a fetid underground garage for twelve hours of the day or the night. It was a time of indescribable confusion, excitement and exaltation. … The general vitality of the people had been jerked up to an extraordinary level, and it stayed there” (p. 274).
Four days into the Blitz, a jaded Dylan Thomas wrote: “I am trying to get a job before conscription because my one-and-only body I will not give. I know that all the shysters in London are grovelling about the Ministry of Information … and all I have managed to do is have my name on the crook list. … So I must explore every avenue now … because along will come conscription and the military tribunal, and stretcher-bearing or jail or potato peeling or the Boys’ Fire League. And all I want is time to write poems and enough money to keep two and a bit alive.”*
But England somehow shuffled its talent into the right roles. Thomas, a pacifist, would not end up in jail or at forced labor but flourishing as a broadcaster and a scriptwriter for the BBC and holding forth at the Gluepot, on Mortimer Street in the West End, with other BBC staff and a host of musicians, poets, artists, and British and American journalists. Patrick, too, would eventually find a niche that made good use of his particular skills. But at first he drove ambulances, among the most vital of jobs during the terrifying bombing raids.
To assist the twenty-two stations of the London Ambulance Service, more than a hundred auxiliary stations, each equipped with some six cars and three ambulances, went into action. Eight thousand paid volunteers, mostly men aged thirty to fifty and women aged eighteen to fifty, manned these stations, with women outnumbering men by about two to one. Four stations operated in Chelsea, where Patrick lived and most likely served.
Ambulance volunteers worked eight-hour shifts, six days a week. Racing to the rescue as bombs fell, they faced near chaos in the streets, which were unmarked (the signposts having been removed to confuse invaders), unlit, debris-strewn, and often cratered. Drivers could be deafened by explosions and antiaircraft fire, blinded by blazing buildings one moment and plunged into pure blackout darkness the next, and the ambulances themselves were temperamental. The American Dodges and British Bedfords, many of them converted service vans, stalled easily and required close attention in gear shifting, a task made more difficult if the driver was properly attired in cumbersome gas-proof coveralls and a hard hat.
On the trip out, an empty ambulance rattled and thumped like the inside of a drum, and on a trip to the hospital, it might be loaded down with a dozen severely wounded people for whom each jolt was agony.
Despite these hardships, ambulance driving, with its night schedule, proved most fortunate the night a Luftwaffe bomb struck Patrick’s apartment building, perhaps 24 Gertrude Street, where he and Elizabeth had lived prior to the war. The bomb that hit this building on October 20, 1940, did not explode, but it caused serious damage and had to be removed by the bomb disposal services. Patrick, on duty at the time, escaped injury. However, his manuscript in progress, a nonfiction account of St. Isidore and the Western bestiary, was destroyed.
Among the drivers in Chelsea, Countess Mary Tolstoy stood out. A petite dark-haired English society girl from Devon, she had gone to school in Switzerland, been presented at court at age eighteen, and married Dimitry Tolstoy, a Russian count in exile, at age nineteen. Now twenty-five and the mother of two, Mary had recently seen her marriage collapse.
Instead of zipping off to social functions in her sporty Jowett Jupiter, the soft-spoken countess now shifted the testy gears of an ambulance speeding to the aid of bomb victims. Often Miss Potts, her rough-haired dachshund, sat on her lap. (At other times, Miss Potts, who looked something like a mongoose, followed at her mistress’s heels so faithfully that she remained unleashed even in city traffic.) Tolstoy—a hill climber, a good shot, and a horse rider from her youth in Appledore—would prove to be of a far tougher nature than her social station might have suggested.
The work took strong nerves. The novelist Rose Macaulay, who also drove ambulances in central London during the Blitz, described in a letter one late-night scene she attended:
The demolition men worked and hacked away very skilfully [sic] and patiently, and we all encouraged the people inside, telling them they would be out in a short time, but of course they weren’t. There was a mother and a crying baby, who were rescued at 10.0 next morning after I had gone. I drove to hospital another mother, who had left two small children under the ruins. I told her they would be out very soon—but they never were, they were killed.*
Such harrowing incidents were not unusual. At one bomb scene where Mary was working, a victim walked by oblivious to the fact that a large shaft of glass protruded from his back.
In the spring of 1941, Hitler ordered the most violent attacks on London, in retaliation for the bombing of Berlin. The heaviest fell on April 16 (“the Wednesday”), when seven hundred bombers inundated the capital with explosive and incendiary bombs, and April 19 (“the Saturday”), the heaviest of all, with more than seven hundred Nazi bombers blasting the city. Being close to the river, near both government buildings and power stations, Chelsea took more tons of bombs per acre in the Blitz than all but two boroughs.
“Poor London went through a perfect imitation of Hades,” Joan informed Barney in an August 30, 1941, letter. “We went out in the garden and really we could not hear ourselves speak for the roar of the planes. That was at nine o’clock. It went on until four in the morning. We were not the target but we stayed awake til the all clear. The earth shook regularly all the time and what they must have suffered I cannot bear to think.”
The Wednesday’s eight hours of bombing killed or wounded three thousand people. In Chelsea, at 11:30 P.M., a bomb hit the Royal Hospital Infirmary, trapping forty inside and sending as many wandering about the darkened streets. The same blast knocked out the Auxiliary Fire Station on Cheyne Place. Two hours later, a double explosion destroyed Chelsea Old Church, killing five fire watchers in a heap of rubble and broken timbers. On Petyt Place and Cheyne Walk, the blast crumbled houses. The debris made Old Church Street impassable. Gas mains spouted flames like giant blowtorches. The nearby ambulance station was wrecked. Rescue workers searched for survivors in streets reeking of gas. Sirens, antiaircraft fire, and explosions created a hellish din. The dazed and wounded wandered about, as did, disconcertingly, some downed Luftwaffe pilots. Firefighters fought blazes throughout Chelsea.
It was in such madness that Patrick and Mary drove their ambulances. Mary later told her niece, Jane Wicksteed, that she sometimes felt her instincts take over, warning her to avoid certain roads for no apparent reason, only to find out later that they had been bombed out. It was a time of random death and destruction when one could easily believe in the supremacy of fate. And it was on such a night as the Wednesday that, according to Russ family members, a fateful bomb hit a building in Chelsea that provided billets for officers of the Free French Army. French speakers were desperately needed to help the wounded. The “unearthly, Martian” sirens, as Patrick would describe them in his novel Richard Temple (p. 274), called both him and Mary Tolstoy to the scene, and so in the heat of rescue they met.
For Patrick and Mary, both still reeling from unhappy marriage breakups, a love that would last the rest of their lives blossomed amid the bombs. Soon, they were discussing moving in together, an arrangement that would have shocked London society just a few years earlier. But the war had a way of bringing down social conventions.
Patrick soon moved into Mary’s Queen Anne house, called “the Cottage,” at 1 Upper Cheyne Row. With four bedrooms, a large dining room full of polished silver, and a prim garden, it was spacious and emphatically English. Patrick had never lived anywhere so fine.
Mary had moved into the Cottage in June 1941 after leaving Tolstoy, who, according to one friend of the family, had had an affair with her best friend, but she would pay a heavy price for living with Patrick. Her husband, Dimitry Mihailovich, Count Tolstoy Miloslavsky, the grandson of a principal counselor to Nicholas II, the last czar, was a barrister specializing in divorce. He was a tough, inscrutable man who had survived the Bolshevik revolution as a child, and he determined to use his legal expertise and Mary’s relationship with Patrick to prevent her from seeing her children, Nicholas (known as “Nikolai”), age six, and Natalie (known as “Natasha”), four. In May 1942, Tolstoy petitioned for divorce from Mary, naming Patrick Russ as the correspondent. The fact that Tolstoy went on to write the standard textbook on divorce indicates just how formidable an opponent he was.
At Crowborough, in August 1941, Zoe Russ worked hard to put food on the table. Charles’s current labor was also, at last, linked closely to that end. He gardened. “There’s hardly an inch unused and we have had crops of every conceivable veg. this year,” Joan informed Barney in her report. “It doesn’t suit him, but he grinds on day after day, hot or cold, rain or snow almost.” They were getting by, but Joan worried about her parents. “They are old, and anxious, both have had one War,” she wrote. “You know what Mother suffered in that and although that can’t happen to her again it is terrible for anyone to see her gently brace herself to endure violence.”
But they all had to stay braced for violence. Joan expressed her feelings with an insight and eloquence that indicated that her gift for writing, like Patrick’s, was quite substantial:
We have actually survived all this peril and horror, which staggers me. But it does do something to you mentally. The pulling out and stretching of the nerves, the listening and the helpless feeling acts on people I think. One gets more used to it, and able to discriminate between noises that are dangerous and noises that are probably O.K. But they get waves of mental panic, I’m sure, moments of complete horror when they realize their utter defenselessness and the pointless, hazardous way the bombs come. One thinks “What? Me. But I cannot die.” And after a bit it does something to you, in this way. With so many dying all over the country you begin to feel so valueless.
Joan mentioned no other family members in her lengthy letter, perhaps bowing to wartime discretion, or perhaps because the family had become so fragmented. She herself soon joined the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force and moved to Birmingham, leaving Charles and Zoe for the first time since returning home at the age of six. In Patrick’s case, she very likely had little information with which to work.
Following the Blitz, both he and Mary were recruited into the murky precincts of the intelligence community of London. Jobs in this line were usually filled through the “old boy” network, one friend pulling in another talented and trustworthy friend, and this usually implied extraordinarily good connections. In both cases, Patrick’s and Mary’s linguistic skills, not to mention their intellects, were valuable resources. They both spoke French and German, Patrick Italian and Mary some Russian.
In March 1942, Robert Bruce Lockhart took charge of the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), a secret intelligence and propaganda organization that used the Political Intelligence Department (PID) of the foreign office for cover. Lockhart, a diplomat and journalist, was charming, capable, and a good leader. In his 1947 book, Comes the Reckoning, he described PWE’s two main goals approved by the foreign office and the chiefs of staff: “(1) to undermine and to destroy the morale of the enemy and (2) to sustain and foster the spirit of resistance in enemy-occupied countries” (p. 125). To accomplish these ends, the organization produced subversive radio broadcasts and leaflets, often dropped by RAF bombers over occupied territories.
A chief task was to counter the daily broadcasts of Joseph Goebbels’s Berlin radio propagandists. To do this, the BBC pumped out 160,000 words in twenty-three languages every twenty-four hours. Operating day and night, the PWE either wrote, vetted, or doctored these broadcasts.
Housed at two locations, the duke of Bedford’s estate in Woburn, forty miles northwest of London, and Bush House, Aldwych, in the same building as the BBC offices for European broadcasts, the PWE was organized by regions. Patrick and Mary joined the French Section, run by Dr. Leslie Beck, an expert on Descartes and an Oxford lecturer. Beck, a former Jesuit novice, had taught in India and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1930 to 1934. At the Sorbonne, he had developed a passion for France and perhaps had even crossed paths with Patrick. As chief intelligence officer of the French Section, Beck and his staff maintained close ties with the Charles de Gaulle camp in London.
Patrick and Mary worked, at least part of the time, at Bush House, where Lockhart tried to bring the organization under one London roof, even though it was not nearly as pleasant as Woburn. Lockhart described the layout in Comes the Reckoning:
The offices which we occupied were spacious but strangely un-English, for they were designed on the United States business pattern with a few small rooms and one large central hall in which all the staff could be under the constant watch of the management. We converted this space into cubicles and, to meet the requirements of the security officer, we wired the entrances from the lifts with heavy netting. In this zoo I remained until the end of the war. (Pp. 163–64)
The PWE and the BBC communicated continually, with the PWE having a strong voice in outlining the official BBC programs to occupied territories, which were considered white propaganda. The PWE also created black propaganda, which consisted of radio broadcasts meant to seem as if they were generated from within an occupied country, creating the illusion of a more powerful and organized resistance, as well as other demoralizing and disruptive campaigns, such as creating bogus German stamps that replaced Hitler’s head with Heinrich Himmler’s (in the hopes of starting rumors that Himmler was vying for power with the führer), and booklets for German soldiers with instructions for feigning injuries and wounds.
During the second half of the war, PWE agents helped draft British directives issued through the BBC to assist in operations in Europe. With the help of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret service formed in 1940 for promoting subversive warfare in enemy-occupied territory, some PWE agents infiltrated Europe for such purposes as helping to establish clandestine newspapers.
Because PWE employees often worked under pseudonyms in compartmentalized offices at scattered locations, their operations are difficult to trace. Agents kept paper trails to a minimum, and many of those that they did keep were destroyed after the war. But according to Mary’s niece, Jane Wicksteed, Patrick and Mary were involved in sending communications to the Resistance. Since radio transmissions were constantly monitored by the Germans, and meetings with Resistance agents in France were dangerous, the secret service sometimes found it expedient to mail communications. Agents were dropped into France with envelopes bearing Petain stamps forged in London and simply placed them in the nearest mailbox. Patrick was involved in this operation. Because of her Continental education, Mary, who worked under him, could address the envelopes like a native. Later, Mary gave Jane some of the bogus stamps she had saved.
Patrick and Mary may also have been assisting in the underground operations of Vic Gerson, head of Reseau Vic, a resistance organization operating in the south of France. In the fall of 1941, Vic, as he was known in the field, had recruited Armand Goëau-Brissonnière, a forty-six-year-old Parisian lawyer and World War I veteran, who represented the French politician Georges Mandel, a Jew, after he was arrested by the Vichy government. Goëau-Brissonnière, known by the pseudonyms “Gerard” in France and “Renelière” in England, had moved to Cannes and set up an independent, pro-Allied intelligence and resistance organization. He specialized in helping prisoners and fugitives escape. Before Vic found him, Goëau-Brissonnière had already masterminded successful escapes from prisons in Nice, Lyons, and Marseilles. Gerson’s superiors in London felt that Goëau-Brissonnière’s information on France and North Africa was reliable and important, and Gerson took him fully under his command in February 1942.
With the help of Goëau-Brissonnière, Vic decided to proceed with an escape he had been plotting of eight British parachutists being held in Mauzac prison, on the Garonne River, between Toulouse and the Spanish border.
According to Jean Yves Goëau-Brissonnière, Armand Goëau-Brissonnière’s son, Mary Tolstoy visited Cannes around this time. She was probably either delivering money or documents to Goëau-Brissonnière for the escape or conducting some other PWE mission.*
Acting as the lawyer of a prisoner, Goëau-Brissonnière established a legitimate presence in the camp in order to plan the logistics. An associate of his who had already escaped from prison directed the operation, arranging for locals to provide clothes and two trucks. In the middle of July the parachutists escaped from the prison and made their way through the Pyrenees to Spain. From there they flew to England.
Two weeks later, Vichy police arrested Goëau-Brissonnière for his suspected role in the escape, detained him in Toulon, and interrogated him for a week. He conceded nothing, however, maintaining that his only involvement in the affair was as counsel to one of the prisoners. On August 11, Goëau-Brissonnière himself escaped, and a few weeks later, Reseau Vic conceived a plan to smuggle him out of France by submarine, possibly through Collioure, where Patrick and Mary would live after the war. That scheme failed. Instead, agents escorted Goëau-Brissonnière through the Pyrenees to Spain. He flew to London on October 20, 1942.
Goëau-Brissonnière’s wife and children were prevented from leaving France by the German invasion of the Free Zone in November 1942. Jean Yves holed up in Nevers, France, with no money and no news of his father’s safety, until one day in a BBC broadcast he heard the message “Le Vétou est arrivé et vous embrasse” (Vétou has arrived and sends you a kiss). “Vétou” was the nickname of Jean Yves’s sister, Yvette. Jean Yves knew his father was safe.
The extent of Patrick and Mary’s role in this undertaking is unclear, but their connection to Goëau-Brissonnière afterward is not. They worked with him in London, and the three became good friends. After the war, Patrick dedicated a story, “The Little Death,” to the Frenchman. He sent The Last Pool, the book in which it appeared, to Goëau-Brissonnière in Paris with a note saying that he hoped Goëau-Brissonnière and several other of their friends understood what he was trying to express in the story when he described the state of mind of a man who was fed up with killing.
There is no evidence that Patrick left the country during the war, but these words show that he, like his fictional character Stephen Maturin, knew intimately the necessary measures sometimes involved in intelligence work and that Patrick and Goëau-Brissonnière, who definitely worked in the field, shared an understanding about such things. O’Brian greatly respected the Frenchman, an intellect who boldly risked his life to fight for his moral beliefs and who, like Maturin, served in the intelligence agency of a foreign nation to fight for the liberty of his countrymen. Few men could have better served as a model for Maturin’s most noble qualities.
The year 1942 was surely one of the dreariest of the war for the English. The duke of Kent was killed in a flying accident in August. Not until British general Bernard Montgomery defeated German general Erwin Rommel at El Alamein, Egypt, in October and November did national morale receive a boost.
For Patrick, the lowest point of that year was not a matter of international significance but a personal one.
In February, Richard turned five and Patrick sent him a present. The previous year he had sent one, he admitted, of a “revolting sort”: malt and cod liver oil. He admonished Richard to try to enjoy it because it was good for him. He added some silly verse and concluded, “Now be a good lad, Ricky, and look after our women folk.”
But this was a sadly impossible task. On March 31, 1942, twenty-four years and a day after the death of his mother, Patrick’s three-year-old daughter, Jane, died of complications caused by spina bifida.
While Patrick had embarked on a new life, Elizabeth had coped with Richard and Jane. For nearly two years, they had lived in a state of limbo in the home of Patrick’s oldest brother and his wife in Thorpe-next-Norwich. Godfrey and Connie Russ had kindly provided for them. For Elizabeth, Jane’s death in the hospital was a particular agony. The doctors had not allowed her to be with her daughter in her last hours of life. Elizabeth’s sense of loss was enormous.
A month after Jane died, on the nights of April 27 and 29, the Germans began the massive bombing of England’s historic cities dubbed the Baedeker Blitz. The Luftwaffe’s explosive and incendiary bombs wracked poorly defended Norwich, killing more than two hundred people. In the middle of the night, Elizabeth and Richard woke up and stared out of a window at the horrific but mesmerizing sight of the flaming city.
London was no longer necessarily the most dangerous place to live, and Elizabeth decided that she and her son might as well move back. They took a cold-water flat in Chelsea at 237 King’s Road, not far from Poulton Square, where they had once lived with Patrick. Elizabeth found work assembling electrical parts in a factory in Earl’s Court. Richard, who at age six had felt the tremor of tanks as they rolled down the streets of Norwich in a plume of sparks, with their iron tracks clashing against the pavement, now roamed the streets of London with other young boys, gathering and swapping shrapnel after bombing raids and dazzling drivers by reflecting the sun with shards of broken mirrors. While the homeless foraged outside the charred shells of buildings, he chased after Mitsy, his pet Yorkshire terrier, who was prone to getting picked up by the dogcatcher. And sometimes the boy hung out with his father’s friend the painter Francis Cox and his wife, who lived in the flat beneath them.
From time to time, a Russ brother called on Elizabeth and Richard to make sure that they were managing. In early 1943, Mike dropped in to meet his nephew. Mike was living life as if he knew he was on a fast track to demise. In March of the previous year, he had embarked with his RAAF unit for Canada, leaving behind a fiancée in Australia, and, by October, when he had sailed from Canada for England, he left behind yet another. Of course, neither knew that he was already a married man.
To Richard, the six-foot-three-inch, sandy-haired flying officer was a rollicking giant. On the floor on his elbows and knees, Mike took the boy’s popgun and knocked down the closest things to Wehrmacht he could find, which happened to be cardboard figures of the Seven Dwarfs. Richard cheered him on.
Fun-loving and quick with a smile, Mike had the ability to connect with people, and, in his uniform, straight and powerfully built, he had a presence that inspired confidence. He was, indeed, mechanically adept, competent at practical matters, a natural survivor. He served as a navigator, and soaring through the heavens in a Lancaster bomber—his “sweet kite,” he called it—he had “so sound a basis of mathematics,” an anonymous eulogist later wrote about him, “that he could laugh at the certainty of navigation under the stars.”
However, his farewell that day, a sullen “good-bye,” did not cheer Elizabeth. She could read the serious expression on his tan, chiseled face.
“No, not good-bye,” she replied.
“Yes,” Mike responded, struggling to maintain his composure. He had a bad feeling. He was about to fly his first combat mission, over Germany, where his Lancaster would be very vulnerable to the Luftwaffe’s Messerschmitts and to antiaircraft fire.
Mike went about seeing his family. He tried to dissuade Nora from making her final profession as a nun, which was anathema to the family, but not even her favorite brother could do that. In July of that year, she would dedicate herself to the Feast of the Ascension and take the name Sister Mary Francis of the Ascension.
Mike took the train up to Birmingham to visit Joan, whom he had not seen in fifteen years. By luck, he ran into her at the train station. She was heading out to the countryside with a beau. They chatted for fifteen minutes, and Mike got back on the train.
He visited Olive in Ilminster and then went to see the three spinster Hill sisters, who used to care for him during holidays at Shebbear. From there, he wrote Olive on April 17: “Have been sawing and splitting logs all morning, and weather still perfect. Really think my visit to Ilminster deserves a letter of thanks and appreciated the rest very much. It has been the pleasantest holiday I’ve yet had on leave in England.”
Whether Mike saw Patrick, who had been only thirteen when his brother sailed for Australia, is unknown but probable. It is certain he would never see him again. Mike joined the 460th Squadron at Breighton, Yorkshire. Five days later, in the early morning of May 4, 1943, Lancaster A4878 was shot down over Dortmund, Germany. Among the seven-man crew, all of whom died, was thirty-four-year-old navigator Flying Officer Michael Russ. Charles Russ received a telegram in Crowborough, as did Mike’s fiancée in Queensland.
Mike had had his shortcomings. He was self-centered, an unrepentant womanizer, and tough, but he was also capable and spirited. He had had a hard life, and he had fended for himself. But he was much loved and admired by his family, a favorite sibling, and his death rent the family even further.*
* From Backs to the Wall, by Leonard Mosley, p. 24.
* From Rose Macaulay by Constance Babington Smith, p. 153. Coincidentally, Macaulay also lost a bestiary in progress to one of Hitler’s bombs, on May 10, 1941.
* Then sixteen, Jean Yves Goëau-Brissonnière distinctly remembers having lunch with his father and Mary Tolstoy in Cannes. He recalls not just her beauty but the fact that her name was Tolstoy, because he was a devoted reader of Leo Tolstoy. He would see Mary again after the war, when she and Patrick visited his father in Paris.
* Mike Russ was buried in the Reichswald Forest War Cemetery, plot 3, row A, grave 6.