They Fought in the Fields

They Fought in the Fields opens on a farm with a body already in it. After an air raid, two Luftwaffe airmen, Sabatowski and Schimmel, are taken prisoner and handed to Major Cornwall of the prisoner-of-war interrogation service, while nearby on Hugh Jackson's farm the farmer's son Tom, who works as a guard at the camp, finds his father shot dead in what is made to look like a suicide. The household around the dead man is a small wartime community: two Land Girls, Rose Henshall and Joan Dillon, a wood selector named Barbara Hicks, and a third German airman, Weiser, found near the farm with his pistol missing and taken into the camp infirmary. The episode sets the farm and the camp within sight of each other and lets both run on arrangements the authorities do not control.

Foyle begins by disputing the suicide, because the examination of Jackson's body does not support it, and the case then pulls in two directions at once. Foyle finds blood on the floor of the farm shed, and Milner uncovers a freshly dug grave that holds a pig carcass rather than a man, which points to black marketeering run off the farm. The black market is the misleading explanation the series reaches for so often, and here it is offered and then discarded. Andrew Neame, the man long believed to have run away with Jackson's wife eleven years earlier, is found living in the woods nearby and denies that he and the wife ever left together. Foyle then learns that Rose Henshall is pregnant by Hugh Jackson.

The two strands join into one story about which crime is really being investigated. Jackson had killed his wife and buried her on the farm, and the tale of her leaving with Neame was the cover for a murder that had gone unexamined for eleven years. The killing that opens the episode has a different author. Weiser is not a downed airman like the others but a secret German agent, sent to silence the captured Sabatowski, and when Jackson discovered this, Weiser shot him. So the present death is the work of an enemy agent covering an operation, and the long-buried death underneath it is the farmer's own.

The double-death structure is what distinguishes the episode, because the apparent suicide is the wrong question and the concealed murder is the right one, and the drama lies in watching the investigation change its mind. It is also one of the few records in the whole run written by someone other than Anthony Horowitz, the credited script being Rob Heyland's. Nigel Terry's Hugh Jackson is a corpse for most of the running time and has to be reconstructed from other people's accounts, which puts the weight on recollection rather than scene, and James Wilby's Major Cornwall turns out to have been handling something other than prisoners. Foyle's German, explained by his service in the previous war and a 1936 football tour, places him as a man with a Continental past.

The weakness is the reveal, which asks the audience to accept a spy among the downed airmen on limited preparation. The rural and Land Army setting is a change from the series' coastal-town default, and the Land Girls put class and gender into the episode, since the work is hard and the standing is not equal to a man's; Stewart's response to being told her driving job is cushy is to join the potato work rather than argue. It sits in series 3 as one of the fuller uses of home-front institutions in the season.