REVIEW - ESCAPE TO LIVE (1947)
I finished reading Escape to Live by Edward Howell a couple of
weeks ago. The author tells his story of frequently unlikely
survival through fighting (airborne and on land), injury,
inprisonment, and escape from German-occupied Greece during WWII.
It's not entirely the adventure story that one might expect, since
a good portion of the book concerns his many months in German POW
hospitals, starving and in poor conditions. In recalling this time,
during much of which he was unable to move at all due to his
injuries, the book adopts a philosophical aspect as Howell recalls
his endless state of self reflection and reactions to his
surroundings. Eventually in a sudden vision, he discovers religion,
from which he takes inspiration to attempt his long-planned escape.
Undertaken on his own, even with his arms and hands largely
crippled, and while suffering from a fever.
This discovery of God isn't in tune with my own convictions, but he
writes of it as a personal discovery. Of someone who in spite of a
Christian upbringing was before that point a firm non-believer, and
as such it's generally not overly preachy (even though his father
was in fact a priest). Certainly his journey through the Greek
countryside, largely avoiding roads and towns for fear of German
patrols, and without any real plan to secure his escape from a
country where many of its own population also wished to flee,
proved extremely fortunate. He attributes that to God, whereas I
would put it down to a conflation of coincidence, but the
inspiration he found from religion seems to have been essential to
him either way.
His writing is very personal, rarely much embellished, and written
from his perspective at the time, including before his religious
conversion. I found it quite compelling, including his
recollections of some other characters whom he met, which included
quite a number of Australian soldiers and Army doctors whose
presence in Greece during WWII isn't as well remembered here today
as the fighting elsewhere.
After the war Howell became active with a movement called Moral
Re-Armament, founded shortly before the war around the idea of
reshaping the world through the embrace of Christian morals. My
1948 copy of Escape to Live even has a sticker inside the cover
with the details of their Melbourne office, although it isn't
mentioned in the text. His ending thoughts reflect the movement's
ideology on finding inner freedom through faith and using this
perceived effect to reshape the post-war society to build more
moral world than that which preceeded and created the war. Beyond
the scope of the Moral Re-Armament movement, this seems to reflect
a general sense of opportunity to move society in a new direction
that dominated the social fabric of the post-war era. Until the
following generation grew up to actively reject those morals
imposed upon them, ironically in much the way that Howell seems to
have initially rejected his own religious upbringing - going so far
as to deliberately fly aerobatic maneuvers on sundays over the
church where his father preached.
While clearly unsuccessful at reshaping the world through the power
of Christian faith, a modern incarnation of the Moral Re-Armament
movement has created a web presence for the late Edward Howell, who
died in 2000. The obituary preserved on their website seems to be
the source for a reference to "the BBC Television series
Deliverance, screened some years ago" in their short biography
about him, for which I cannot find any other reference online.
Since that would probably date the TV series to the 80s or 90s it
must be archived somewhere, but either not available online or
simply impossible to find with such a generic title.
That website does however offer a PDF of the last, 1981, edition of
the book for free download here:
https://www.foranewworld.org/material/publications/escape-live-1981-edition
I'd certainly recommend it to someone of a mind such as myself
towards both historic wartime adventure and timeless
self-reflection.
There's also an interview with him about his WWII experiences which
touches on many key points of the book, albeit with a more
particular view on his religious experience since it was clearly
undertaken for the audience of the Moral Re-Armament community:
https://www.foranewworld.org/material/articles/interview-edward-howell
- The Free Thinker
