Train to Nowhere

“We were young and we were keen; Europe was in flames, and we were ready for whatever came.”

 “I used to think that war would make one braver, harder—but instead, it only makes one tired. The glamour of it wears off quickly when you’re pulling bodies from the wreckage.”

Train to Nowhere by Anita Leslie

Anita Leslie’s Train to Nowhere charts her transformation from the carefree optimism of a socialite to the hard-earned wisdom of a war-weary veteran. Written with distinctive candor and sardonic wit and without sentimentality, the memoir offers a vivid account of World War II.

Born into a rackety Anglo-Irish aristocratic family, Leslie’s early life was marked by privilege, including wearing hand-me-down baby clothes from her cousin-once-removed, Winston Churchill. Her journey takes her from a life of vague adventure to becoming a resilient French Army ambulance driver, serving with distinction across three continents.

First published in 1948, it was rescued from obscurity after 70 years. It’s the kind of book I would have loved to have discovered as a teenager when i was deep in war stories.  But better late than never.

Train to Nowhere is a vivid, unvarnished perspective on WW2 that captures the quotidian details as well as the extraordinary moments of terror, and human depravity.

There’s also eyewitness accounts of military pomp and ceremony and plenty of dark comedy, and satiric observation. The world around her is in chaos but she stays grounded. Her story reminds us how tenacity, courage, and wit can emerge in the face of unimaginable upheaval. 

Leslie’s pre-war life had a certain predictability and ease, shaped by her class, her upbringing and connections. In contrast, her wartime service is marked by risk, resilience, and a sense of camaraderie among those who shared the same dangers.

Written in a brisk, no-nonsense style, it  is an astonishing tale of understated courage told with an irrepressible sense of the ridiculous and deep humanity. 

Her war begins in 1940 when she escaped an abusive marriage by volunteering for the Mechanised Transport Corps (MTC). It ends with her demobilisation as un simple soldat de 2 è me classe from the French army in 1945 with a Croix de Guerre for bravery and the Africa Star, making her the only woman to receive both honors

South Africa and the Western Desert

When she embarked on the troopship Arundel Castle bound for Cape Town as a qualified mechanic and driver, her mother’s advice was “Don’t get sunburnt in Africa, men hate it.”

On board, she writes to her friend Rose Burgh: “Never again am I going to live a dull domesticated existence – I’m just going to be naughtier and naughtier!” 

We don’t hear much about such “naughtiness” but the memoir  doesn’t shy away from the difficulties she faced, from the challenges of being a woman in a predominantly male environment nor from the personal losses that came with the wider devastation of the war.  

These  South African girls were splendid, healthy, outdoor creatures who beat us hollow at sports, but they seemed to be given little respect because they were women. Their superiors – whose minds were impenetrable Victorian jungles – insinuated that women, working near any fighting front, would hinder the war effort. Perhaps I misuse the word ‘Victorian’, for during the Boer War my English great-aunts ran front-line hospitals in areas that today would be stamped ‘war zones unfit for women’.

The Heat, the Sand, the Flies, the Chaos and the Pride of El Alamein

In the first week of April Benghazi fell. How much Benghazi and Tobruk, which we had hardly heard of before, meant now. A month of driving wounded men and listening to their talk made the desert battles live before our eyes; we shared the maddening discomfort with them, the heat, the sand, the flies, and from the very beginning we felt the pride of that little army of the Nile

Before we had been in Egypt two weeks we were meeting wounded who came back from Greece instead of from the desert, and then one day we got loads, not of soldiers, but of military nurses from the British hospital at Athens. They were unwounded but collapsing from exhaustion, after terrifying trips across the Mediterranean in cruisers which were bombed all the way. We lifted them into our ambulances and they fell asleep in heaps on the floor. We realized that our forces were evacuating and we would never get to Greece

… and then Syria, Palestine and Lebanon

The memoir has many harrowing scenes and is unsparing in its account of death and devastation But remarkable too is the humor with which she infuses her story. She has an eye for the ridiculous  and there are moments of pure farce.

In Syria in 1941, one task was delivering the troop newspaper, the Eastern Times, through snow and mud to soldiers living in uncomfortable and distant units.  She  recounts the absurdities of the editing as  Arab typesetters guessed how to reset dropped lines of English. ”Headlines were back to front and words upside down’” 

The paper was full of ‘countless articles of grouse-shooting and yacht regattas (issued by the Ministry of Information to cheer the troops!) and when we could get them, the Daily Mirror cartoons of ‘Jane’’.”

The comic relief continues throughout the memoir for Leslie has irrepressible sense of humor and sardonic wit.

This part of the book is told as rather a  madcap adventure mixed with moments of derring do, peril, and privilege. There are times when a reader is almost lulled into the sense that war was one jolly jape full of mysteries, comical  foreigners, various deprivations and assorted Brits – friends and relatives – in high places. 

In Naples, after Monte Cassino she writes:

“As the hundreds of pitifully wounded men passed by, feeding the casualties from Anzio and Cassino was like trying to run a canteen in Dante’s Inferno with the Marx Brothers as assistants.”

Amid such horror, such observations can be a form of self-preservation. 

Italy and France

After three years in the Middle East,  she asked the Red Cross for a transfer to Italy, wanting to be in “the fight that lies ahead in Europe”. 

 “I had a faint selfish hope that the war would not end before I had time for some startling achievement.” 

Leslie bemoans  about ‘first-rate women subordinate to second-rate men,’ and, as the English army forbade women from serving on the front line, she asked to join the Free French Forces. 

Alsace and the Battle of Colmar

On 15 August – the day of the allied landings in southern France – the Red Cross handed Leslie over to the French Forces. Paperwork was demanded, including “a certificate stating that the British Government did not mind what was done to me … there were unpleasant clauses about deserters getting shot.”  In October, she landed at Marseilles. She was now  an ambulancière – un simple soldat de 2 è me classe in the French Army. 

Here her war begins in earnest. She and her fellow drivers – all of them young women – face front-line duty, bombardment, exhausting and emotionally harrowing work with the injured,  and great danger.

“Army lorries had to travel in convoy of at least twenty accompanied by two tanks. Only the ambulances rolled alone through enemy country.” 

Leslie was soon in the front-line as an ambulance driver in the 1st French Armoured Division that played a vital part in the liberation of France. It was grueling and unsparring work.

Leslie dedicated the book to her remarkable commanding officer, Jeanne de l’Espée, whose first command to the new recruit was, “Whatever happens, remember to use lipstick because it cheers the wounded.”

The fighting was brutal and the casualties heavy as the allies drove north-east towards the Rhine. “In all directions, men advancing through the fields were suddenly blown up in a fountain of scarlet snow.”

The chapters describing her experience in Alsace and the Battle of Colmar are amongst the most vivid and wrenching. 

The emotional intensity in this section contrasts with the rather matter-of-fact reporting of much that is deadly and dramatic. The drama is understated and her ability to get on with the work no matter what impressive. As an observer she sees the details and her clear sighted account is neither dismissive of feeling nor the emotional intensity is in the events themselves and not wrought by the prose.  This straightforward understated style lends integrity to the account and her stories of extraordinary moments are told in unassuming prose, grounded in carefully observed  detail, often infused with humor and always fully believable. 

She doesn’t shy away from the horror. A French peasant avenges her son’s death by shooting two German POWs in cold blood. And then a page later she is at a dugout lit by a candle debating fashion with a former shop assistant who asserts, “Only shoes, stockings and gloves really matter…”

Leslie reflects on the emotional toll of her work as an ambulance driver: 

“There’s a peculiar emptiness after the bombs stop falling, a kind of numbness that I can’t quite shake. I smile and joke with the men, but I feel as if I’ve left a part of myself somewhere in the rubble.” 

She has created self-protective barriers as a coping mechanism for the routine exposure to devastation, dismemberment, and death.  She does not dwell on her personal reactions and experiences and her personal losses. Rather, she maintains a stoic facade of business as usual, there’s work to be done, mustn’t grumble, if it’s got your number on it, get on with it attitude. “Don’t you know there’s a war on?” allows for no emotional excess

She writes, “I find it easier to laugh at the madness than to think too much about it,” Humor is her shield—a way to process the chaos without succumbing to despair. After all, what is the alternative?  The world is out of control, the individual must hold on to self-control. The world is falling apart but – despite everything – she will not. 

Train to Nowhere becomes a testament not only to the bravery required on the battlefield but also to the quiet resilience it takes to keep moving forward, even when the initial thrill has long since faded.

Germany

As the ambulance corps moves toward Berlin she writes,

“We crossed a great line of fortifications without realising it was the Siegfried Line – the very one where we had, unfortunately, not hung our washing five years before…” 

Then, as the war in Europe ends she is despatched to drive 300 miles to Germany to collect “sick French prisoners”.

“To travel through a new part of Germany in the Spring weather was delightful” 

Leslie’s co-driver  is Genny who had joined the unit after serving as reconnaissance in Lorraines for the American 3rd Army under General Patton. They do not know that their destination is Nordhausen, a vast factory complex for the manufacture of V1 and V2  weapons and a slave labour extermination camp. 

‘I had grown bored with the outcry about concentration camp horrors, but neither film nor pen could describe the sinister atmosphere.”

What ensues is a horrific description of what she saw and what she did and it is very moving. The unflappable and phlegmatic survivor wished she could “vomit mentally’ and Genny comments “Nothing could ever matter again after this, could it?”

“Better that the whole earth remained desolate as the moon if this is all mankind can make of it.”

Berlin

On the 21st of July 1945, Leslie was in Berlin for the official Desert Rat Victory Parade on the Under Den Linden in Berlin in front of Churchill, Eden, Atlee and Mary Churchill in her ATS uniform.  At lunch she sits between Churchill and Eden in the heart of conquered Germany.

From Berlin she writes home on Adolf Hitler’s notepaper, headed with an eagle and swastika, taken as a souvenir from the Fuhrer’s blitzed Chancellery.

 The End

As her service comes to a close she says farewell:

“…the Peronne II tank gave a lunch party for me….

There was not one Frenchman I ever disliked and the girls I loved. It was all over now and pedalling back along the bumpy road to Wittlich in the warm sun of that German autumn I almost choked – it was too ridiculous, people weep at leaving school and when they get married … not at departing from a combat zone’’

In September, she is demobbed in Paris as a un simple soldat de 2 è me classe after a night in an unspeakable transit hostel.

This was a typical French transit hostel, transit being a suitable adjective – for it certainly made you want to move somewhere else speedily.

Train to Nowhere is a remarkable book – a candid account that is harrowing and humorous but never sentimental nor unfeeling. 

Leslie’s account concludes with a poignant moment: she took possession of the wool from Churchill’s map room to be knitted into baby clothes. She sent the wool – used to mark the advance of the armies – to Monique, whose arm had been blown off by a shell while unloading an ambulance. She was expecting a baby and wool was impossible to find.