"Men without a Country" is a thrilling story within a story of an American journalist who visits free French fighting Germans at a secret airfield in England and discovers an even more exciting tale. The captain of the free French tells the journalist a confidential account of five convict Frenchmen who attempt to flee from prison in French Guyana to fight on behalf of their French captors against the Germans. This story was made into a 1944 movie called Passage to Marseille. It reunited a lot of the cast from Casablanca (Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, and Sydney Greenstreet) and is sometimes thought to be a sequel, though it is not.
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Theirs is a simple story—the story of men whose love for their country transcended the cruelties which it had imposed upon them. There were five of them: Maillot, Garou, Le Petit, Marius, and Matrac. Five tough, hard-bitten prisoners escaped from French Guiana. Their escape had been motivated by the patriotism smouldering within them—the thirst to fight for the freed which had not been theirs.
But on the French freighter which picked them up were two French officers whose desire for their own security was equaled only by their blind submission to routine authority. And with the fall of France rose the inevitable conflict between these followers of the Vichy regime and the five men who were determined to remain Frenchmen and Free.
It is a simple story. But it carries with it a realization of the immortality of freedom as embodied in the souls of these five outcasts to whom liberty had been an empty word.
(This story was published in the Atlantic Monthly under the title of "Men Without a Country.")
Jacket drawing by George F. Kelley
—from the dust jacket
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The legions of Nazi Germany were smashing through the democracies of Western Europe. France itself was threatened. At this dark moment in history five tough, hard-bitten prisoners escaped from the penal colony in French Guiana. Their escape had been motivated by the desire to fight for the freedom which had not been theirs.
On the French freighter which picked them up were two French officers whose desire for security....
... who gave such a brilliant performance in "Casablanca" and "Sahara" . . . a Warner Bros. production.
—from the dust jacket for Passage to Marseille (a later title for this book and the film based on it)
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