Pied Piper

Pied Piper is a novel by the English writer and engineer Nevil Shute, published in 1942. Its title comes from the German folktale of the piper of Hamelin, and its subject is the flight of an old man across a country collapsing faster than anyone expects.

John Sidney Howard is seventy and takes a fishing holiday in the Jura partly to get over the death of his son in the Battle of the Heligoland Bight. The war has begun but he does not believe the German advance will be quick, so when an English couple he meets at his hotel ask him to escort their two young children to England he agrees, and he is still in France when the invasion sweeps past him.

Each stage of the journey goes wrong. Held in Dijon by the illness of one of the children, Howard takes on a hotel maid's small niece as well; on the road he collects a boy whose parents have been shot up by German aircraft, and a Dutch child the panicking villagers of one town take for a German. Overtaken by events, he turns for help to people he barely remembers from a skiing holiday with his son years before, and ends up in Brittany with six children and a fishing boat as his last way out.