Nordhoff, Charles Men Without Country
Co-written with longtime Nordhoff collaborator Charles Norman Hall (1887-1951), this World War 2 novella’s title is a direct reference to a famous 19th Century tale of patriotism, as explained in the blurb that ran in the June 1942 issue of The Atlantic:
“In December 1865, the Atlantic published “The Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale. We now follow that classic with one born of our own time, a short novel complete in this issue.”
Nordhoff and Hall’s story concerns itself with the actions of six “French évadés” (convicts) incarcerated in the prison colony of French Guinea who, in 1940, “when they learned that France, the country which has cast them off, was again fighting for her existence, they escaped, through jungle and over stormy seas, with one thought in their minds – to serve her.” Much of the tale is set aboard the ship which picks them up from their unseaworthy canoe in mid-Caribbean, the freighter VILLE DE NANCY (“... one of those venerable tramps which wallow across the backwaters of the world year after year. She was a coal burner ... and her ancient reciprocating engine broke down every fortnight or so. The seamen were French; the stokers were New Caledonian blacks. She wore the customary coat of rust-streaked black paint”).
Much of the ensuing conflict aboard the VILLE DE NANCY is between the patriotic “Free France”-leaning convicts-turned-seamen and a pair of Pétainist army officers who see no problem with collaborating with Nazi Germany. The army officers attempt a mutiny at sea in order to make certain that the VILLE DE NANCY proceed to Marseille with her cargo of valuable manganese ore (where the Germans would snatch it up) rather than divert the vessel to Britain. The mutiny is thwarted by the tough convicts, and the ship makes it to England (though not before being attacked by Nazi warplanes in the English Channel). There the Pétainists are interned and the convicts allowed to join Free French forces.
As for the novella’s updating of Hale’s 1865 title, one of the évadés, early on in the tale explains to the story’s narrator (a French Army officer also aboard the VILLE DE NANCY, one who favors de Gaulle and the Free French movement): “Convicts are men without country – no rights, no citizenship, nothing. Well, all Frenchmen are in the same boat now.”
In 1944 the story was filmed as a Warner Brother’s movie as “Passage to Marseille,” which reunited “Casablanca” alumni Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lore. As part of a movie tie-in, the book was re-released at that time under the title Passage to Marseille.