Edited extracts from an article in today's Guardian, written by  Michael Morpurgo, the author of the book (which became a movie) 'War Horse', in which he explains why he has written and published a new book 'In the Mouth of the Wolf'. (Yes I know there is a thread for 'books', but this is about WWII).
My uncles have fascinated and inspired me since I was a child. In my family, their lives are legendary. All my writing life I had wanted to tell their story. Writing it was my way of trying to remember them, of acknowledging my debt to them, and all the millions of “mouthless dead” of two wars. They had fought for peace. ...
The two brothers, though very different – Francis, tall, confident and charismatic, Pieter, smaller, tentative and fragile – were close. They came from a Christian socialist family, their father, Emile, was a Belgian poet and free thinker, later art critic, philosopher and professor of Belgian studies at London University. Their mother, Tita, was an actor, a devoted Christian, a formidable and highly principled woman. There were four equally formidable sisters, my mother among them. It was a house of music, theatre and books, of heated discussion and strong opinions. Holidays were often spent walking in the Ardennes, which the family loved.
Francis, a socialist and pacifist, went to Cambridge and became a teacher. Pieter went to Rada in London and was starting out on a promising career as an actor when war broke out in September 1939. He joined up almost at once. Francis, following his convictions, became a conscientious objector, and was sent to work as a shepherd on a Lincolnshire farm. The Germans were soon invading Belgium, through the family’s beloved Ardennes, and marching into France, towards the Channel. Invasion was threatening.
In 1941, Pieter, now a sergeant observer in the RAF, was killed when his plane crashed in St Eval in Cornwall. The family were devastated. Francis, still shepherding but now a husband and father, decided he could no longer stand by while others were fighting for his family’s survival, and for the beliefs and freedoms that were so precious to him.
He confided his dilemma to Harry Rée, his great friend, fellow teacher and pacifist, who, unbeknown to Francis, had already joined the Special Operations Executive, SOE. Francis spoke fluent French. Harry said that could be useful, and that he would put him in touch with someone in London. Francis walked into an interview in an upstairs room in Baker Street a shepherd, and came out an officer in the SOE.
After months of gruelling training, during which he could say nothing to his wife, Nan, or his friends and family, Francis found himself in German occupied France. In Paris, he realised at once that fellow agents there were compromised. Within days more than 60 were rounded up and shot. Francis by this time had made his way south, where he found himself organising and supplying resistance fighters, the Maquis, across a swath of southern France, an army that in the end numbered more than 10,000 men and women, comprising communists, socialists and Gaullists, from all walks of life, all determined to rid their country of the invader.
So this pacifist uncle was now a secret agent, fighting the enemy, living in constant danger of capture and death. But he proved to be an agent who had all the right instincts. Trust, he knew, was everything. He had seen others’ mistakes. He picked his few friends with great care. He was courageous, and scrupulous about security, never sleeping more than two nights in one place. He inspired and gave great loyalty.
The Germans put a huge price on his head, but he was never betrayed. He managed to outwit both the Gestapo and their counterparts in the dreaded French Milice, and survived these perilous years through his skill and bravery, but also through the love and courage of his comrades. He returned after the liberation of France to his family, and to his life as a headteacher, and a principal of teacher-training colleges in England and in Botswana.
When Francis was an old man, I visited him in Le Pouget, the village in south-east France where he came to live in his latter years, to be closer to his family and his old friends from the resistance. Only if pressed would he speak of his war years. Two weeks before he died, the villagers gave him a 90th birthday party. The children sang, the mayor made a speech. He was a legend there, too, not only in his family.