In our contemporary world, all who have studied history and are impeded neither by stupidity nor by ill-born revisionism view the eras of imperialism, communism and fascism with revulsion.

At least part of this revulsion wells up from the sheer human cost of each of these. And yet, our same humanity makes us intrigued by the stories of individuals who were inspired by the choices they made against the background of these ideologies – however ill-advised, naive or at very least eccentric these choices may seem now.

The world knows well the story of the Cambridge Four – Philby, Burgess and Maclean, Blunt – the undergraduates who preferred Stalin to John Bull. (There is not enough room here to even begin to try to explain this, but remember that just a few decades had passed since Disraeli referred to the Two Nations, of rich and poor. Much of the world’s map was still pink, the British Empire still existed, sending gunboats to quell troublesome natives, and “Take Up The White Man’s Burden” was still sung in churches. In an early form of political marketing, the Soviets had come up with the concept of the Potemkin Village, and had got rather good at lying to Westerners who leapt with alacrity to have wool pulled over their eyes.) While on the orders of the Kremlin the Cambridge Four, among others, concealed their allegiance the better to infiltrate and subvert the British establishment, there were those who lived and died openly communist, passing with an era that faded long before the ideology that they embraced was to collapse, bloodstained and discredited, in ignominy.

In Bulgaria, with each Remembrance Day ceremony in Sofia’s war graves cemetery, those who salute the graves and memorials know well that they are saluting the dead of all sides, given the inclusive style of such ceremonies these days, when Allied and Axis dead are remembered together. Just so, they also, unwittingly or not, salute the memory of Major WF Thompson, Royal Artillery, who has a special memorial there, behind which lies a fascinating story of those fascinating times.

Frank Thompson was born in 1920 and went on to become a brilliant Classics scholar at New College, Oxford. He met and fell in love with Iris Murdoch, and some accounts hold that it was she who converted him to communism. Whatever the truth of this, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1939, the year of the outbreak of World War 2. The young poet, lying about his age and against the wishes of his parents, joined the armed forces. History appears silent on the question that was a quandary for other young British communists of the time – it was all very well fighting fascism in the form of Hitler, yet the same Hitler was in alliance with Stalin.

Of a social background that at the time more or less guaranteed a commission, Thompson put on pips and went on to serve as an intelligence officer in north Africa and in Sicily.

A turning point in the destiny of Thompson was the formation of the Special Operations Executive, a bold new adventure in intelligence operations which included the mandate of supporting resistance movements, in the phrase of its sponsor Winston Churchill, to “set Europe ablaze”. It drew all sorts of characters – one involved, a young naval intelligence officer called Ian Fleming, spawned espionage icon James Bond – including Thompson. Infused with enthusiasm to fight fascism by helping partisans, many of whom were communists, the young officer found himself with a parachute on his back, descending towards the soil of Eastern Europe.

Anyone who has read the history of the times, or at very least Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, knows that the partisan business in the Balkans was a complicated one. Often as much at war with each other as with the formal enemy, the partisans also were pawns in a greater game. By 1943-44, when Thompson was dropped into Yugoslavia, not only was Stalin (and his faithful henchman, the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov) deeply engaged with the question of the extent to which the people of Eastern Europe should be allowed to liberate themselves rather than be “liberated” by the Red Army, Churchill’s Britain was contemplating luring countries such as Axis-allied Bulgaria to change sides. This was the high-level stuff, to which the Thompsons of the world were not necessarily privy. Lower down, it has frequently been suggested that Soviet agents who were players in this game were not above shopping Allied agents to suit the ends of the Kremlin. Philby was just one we know about.

Whatever was going on backstage and in the wings, in the more immediate theatre of war, British officers such as Thompson had the mandate to aid partisans, including in those parts of Yugoslavia liberated from the Nazis and Bulgarians opposing the Sofia government of the time. Wartime Bulgaria was a deeply divided society, nominally allied to Berlin, on the proviso that this did not include combat against Russians, and less formally but arguably more famously, refusing to give up for genocide the Jews of Bulgaria. It was the Bulgaria which may have opened its rail lines for Germany and have had its monarch, Boris III, photographed with the Fuehrer, but was in the long term always to suspect that the same Fuehrer who had Boris Saxe-Coburg murdered for Bulgarian recalcitrance.

Things were rather thin for the Bulgarian partisans too. Notwithstanding post-war communist Bulgarian mythology, their numbers were never that large. Nor, notwithstanding the air drops by the RAF from southern Italian airfields from 1943 onwards, were they ever that well-resourced. They had little more than young officers like Thompson to help them as best they could, often with little more than training in sabotage (partisans in today’s Macedonia, for instance, were taught by HM officers how to blow up their own railway lines). At the same time, again against the post-war lies of communist Bulgaria, its partisans did not enjoy universal support among the local populace. In Bulgaria (as for that matter, in France and the Netherlands, for instance) the notion that every citizen would turn a blind eye and keep a vow of silence to assist the resistance, was and is a myth.

Within a few months of his arrival, a counter-offensive by Axis forces in Serbia hit the partisans hard. Losses were considerable and the British mission commander was killed and Thompson assumed command. Braving the unforgiving cold of the heights, the beleaguered and diminishing band crossed the border into Bulgaria. The plan was to link up with a group of Bulgarian partisans in the Iskar River gorge and from the Stara Planina, radio in for supplies to go ahead with the bold venture of attempting to inspire a popular uprising against the Bulgarian government.

But there was no group to meet. Its members were dead. What happened next is disputed, and relies on accounts gathered a long time after the war, but the story is that two locals recruited by Thompson’s group as guides reported them to the authorities. In a night attack, the group was dispersed and over the next few days, all captured and killed, the attackers pausing to rape the women members before executing them. Captured in May, Thompson was shot by firing squad in early June in the village of Letakovo, having been first interrogated under torture by Bulgarians acting under the supervision of a Gestapo officer. History recounts that all that they established was what he would have been eager enough to let them know: that he was a communist. One account says that he was shot, then poison injected into his body just to make sure, then buried in an unmarked grave. Another says that he was shot as part of a group, who together cried out “Death to Fascism!” just before the bullet crashed into them. What is not in dispute today is that his execution was illegal: he was a British officer in uniform, not pretending to be anything other, and therefore excluded by the rules of war from execution as a spy or a “terrorist”, the latter having been the formal charge against him.

The story does not end there. It did not suit Bulgarian communist higher-ups immediately after the war to acknowledge the role of the likes of Thompson in fighting with the resistance and ultimately for the communist cause. Ironically, in the first post-war years, he was reviled as an imperialist, an agent provocateur, who had set out deliberately to ensure that the mission failed.

But then the ideological tide turned, and he was rehabilitated as a hero. The contents of his pockets – a Byzantine coin and a volume of the poems of Catullus – were solemnly presented to Murdoch. His uniform went on display in the communist-era Museum of the Revolution (now shut down). A railway siding, a kindergarten and a town near Novi Iskar (“Tompsun”) were named after him, as was a street in Sofia. A monument was erected to him and the group of Bulgarian partisans, near the village of Batuliya.

Many years later, his younger brother, who rose to luminance as one of Britain’s leading left-wing intellectuals and historians, came to Bulgaria to seek the truth about what had happened to his brother. Edward Thompson, who wrote as EP Thompson, titled his 1997 book Beyond the Frontier, and understandably railed against what he called the “anti-historians” in Britain and Bulgaria who one way or another, obstructed or were unhelpful in the quest to establish the truth.

The memory of Major Frank Thompson endures, however, every time someone may happen to look at his memorial in Sofia. It endures too, in some of his writings.

Of those who died fighting the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, Frank Thompson wrote: “Those of us who came after were merely adopting the idea, that they proved, that freedom and fascism can’t live in the same world, and that the free man, once he realises this, will always win.”
And then there are the most frequently-quoted lines of his poetry, which was collated in a posthumous volume:

“So we, whose life was all before us,
Our hearts with sunlight filled,
Left in the hills our books and flowers,
Descended, and were killed.
Write on the stones no words of sadness –
Only the gladness due,
That we, who asked the most of living,
Knew how to give it too.”