Yesterday I read Drink to Yesterday, the first in a series of twenty-two spy thrillers written in the years between 1939 and 1959 by British spy Cyril Coles and his neighbor Adelaide Frances Oake Manning.  The series stars the very English, very brave, and quite laconic yet brilliantly resourceful British secret service agent Tommy Hambledon. Hambledon and his crew of spies are very good at what they do, like infiltrating the German intelligence agency and sabotaging German strategies, but they are not super heroes: they make mistakes, innocent people die, and war goes marching on, leaving those still standing scarred inside and out.

I read the second in the Tommy Hambledon series, A Toast to Tomorrow, before the first, but the backwards chronology didn’t hinder my enjoyment:  I loved both of these books.  The novels are exciting but also very gritty and real, with no excess of war or savagery or misery or deprivation: just the facts, and the facts are powerful enough. The facts come from Cyril Coles’ personal experiences as a very young man, lying about his age to join the British army during the first years of World War I in and being quickly brought into espionage because of his facility with the German language.  This wartime spying is not cloak and dagger stuff, no elaborate plans of hidden meeting places and code words and discreet handing off of packages.  The spying that goes on is intelligent but it is also, by necessity, done by the seat of the pants, it is  spontaneous and resourceful, and effective only when luck is working for the British that day.

Drink to Yesterday is far more somber than A Toast to Tomorrow. The book begins as Britain is drawn into war against Germany and British males are urged to do the honorable thing and join up.  Join up they do and sent off they are, to Ireland to quell the rebellions, to Belgium and France to fight the “Jerries”, and to shipyards in England to build the machinery of war. Drink to Yesterday is masterful at portraying what happens to these young and idealistic young men.  A few months in the trenches ages a man fast and furious, changing  him beyond the understanding of those he’s left behind in Britain, even as difficult as daily life does become in a rationed and deprived Britain. Pat Barker explores brilliantly the more profound and far-reaching mental and physical disabilities that maim the men of World War I in her Regeneration trilogy but the Manning Coles spy novels do a good job of explaining the changes that occurred for every soldier that while not permanently disabling were permanently altering.  Alteration of a personality, of an outlook, can be a form of disability when those at home who have known you all your life can no longer understand you or know what you have been through “over there.”

Because the story of Drink to Yesterday is based almost entirely on Coles’ personal experiences in the war, the novel is genuine in both fact and emotion.  These are not generic or embroidered-together experiences of trench warfare, Coles was there and he felt disgust as the rats climbed over his body, he felt fear as he saw new friends blown apart, and he felt desperately lonely as he heard the roar of German planes overhead.  The tales of war time spying are real as well; Coles was actually placed behind enemy lines to infiltrate German intelligence, he played his role and killed when necessary, and he was burdened with the knowledge of what he had done, for his country but against his humanity.

Drink to Yesterday concludes with the defeat of Germany at the end of World War I but there is little to rejoice about: too many men died, too much poverty and misery have resulted, and the world is altered, irrevocably and yet without any wisdom gained.  Within twenty years another world war will begin.  There was no happy ending to World War I and there is no happy ending to Drink to Yesterday.  But there is much for the reader to learn and to enjoy in the novel and in its successor, A Toast to Tomorrow.  They are the best spy thrillers I’ve ever read, and even more, they are moving and personal portrayals of the costs of war.