An Austrian court has sentenced the British historian David Irving to three years in prison for Holocaust denial in speeches delivered 17 years ago. Even if the British public is as na? about military affairs as Mr Reid claims, we can surely recognise that much.. Let us remember that this was not a case of a few stray baton strikes in a spur-of-the-moment confrontation with protesters. What we saw on that video was four Iraqis being dragged into a British compound for a severe and potentially lethal beating.

The Defence Secretary's talk of putting this episode in perspective is insidious. The vicious assault in southern Iraq, first brought to public attention just over a week ago, was plain wrong from whichever angle it is examined. He also insinuated disgracefully that the media is playing into the hands of terrorists by bringing such abuses to light. Instead Mr Reid chose to recommend that we be "a little slower to condemn and a lot quicker to understand". The tone of John Reid's speech on the British Army at King's College London yesterday was severely misjudged.

Speaking in the wake of new revelations of abuse by British troops in Iraq, the Defence Secretary ought to have made a frank admission of the damage this episode has done to the reputation of the British Army and to have pledged to ensure that nothing similar would happen again. After his death that year she settled in Alaska.In the 2000 Paris celebrations honouring the memory and execution of Jean Moulin, on the 60th anniversary of General Charles de Gaulle's 18 June rallying call to all the French, Marly, still of a Russian sprightliness at the age of 83, sang "Le Chant des Partisans" with an undefeated voice, accompanied by the massed choirs of the French army.James Kirkup. Claude Berri's 1997 thriller Lucie Aubrac, meanwhile, about underground resistance in Lyons, uses "Le Chant des Partisans" as its ominous background music.Anna Marly moved with her second, Russian, husband to Argentina, and then the United States, writing an autobiography, M?ires, published in 2000. But somehow her first "Partisan" song - soon well known on both sides of the Channel as "Le Chant de la Lib?tion" - seems to have been stolen from her by time, though it was often re-recorded, notably by Germaine Sablon (1945) and Yves Montand (1955). We shall go down there where the crows never fly And the Beast can discover no passage. ."Le Chant des Partisans", as it now was, became, in all its inaccuracy, the signature tune of the Free French Radio in London.At the same time, Marly also wrote "La Complainte d'un Partisan" with words by her friend Emmanuel d'Astier de Vig?e, a song later made internationally famous (as "The Partisan") by Joan Baez and Leonard Cohen.

.?" This image is further expanded in her text:From one forest to another, the road follows a precipice High, high above, the crescent moon hurriedly passes. Apparently many people had a hand in the affair - none of them practising poets, but all dominated by the fixed ideas of Druon, who later claimed he was the sole author of the French text.At the time, Anna Marly mildly complained that nothing of her own original version remained except the word corbeaux ("crows" - a metaphor for Nazi bomber planes) in the phrase "Friends, do you not hear the dark flight of the crows across the plain. The English words were provided by Louba Krassine, daughter of the Russian ambassador in London, at whose house it was sung for the first time by Marly to her guitar accompaniment. In 1935, as Anna Marly, she appeared in the celebrated Parisian nightspot Sh?razade, the paradise of the European jeunesse dor?With the outbreak of war, however, she and her new husband, a Dutch aristocrat, became refugees, and in 1941, via Spain and Portugal, they made their way to London. It was the Russian word partisanski in a report of the German attack on Smolensk which inspired her to write a song based on the word's attractive rhythm, creating a sombre, haunted elegy with the rhythm of a slow funeral march."The March of the Partisans" has an unusual metrical form, in lines of 11 syllables with a three-syllable "cadence" at the end of each verse As "Guerilla Song", it became a hit on BBC radio. At the age of 13 she was presented with a guitar, which she learnt to play with feeling and invention She was taught by Prokofiev By 16, she was dancing in the Ballets Russes in Paris. She and her mother and baby sister escaped to the very select Russian colony established in Menton.She showed early artistic and musical talent, and her gifts were encouraged in that kindly environment that recalls still the early novels of Vladimir Nabokov.

Her mother was a radiant Greek beauty, her father one of those Russian aristocrats murdered by the Bolsheviks. It was just what the French needed to encourage them to resist the enemy that was occupying their country.""The March of the Partisans" became "Guerilla Song" (for the BBC) and then "The Song of the Partisans".Anna Marly was born Anna Betoulinsky in Petrograd (St Petersburg) in 1917. One day I read about the partisans in the former Soviet Union where I was born. I was so impressed by how the Russians were defending their country against the onslaught of the German army."She then picked up her guitar, she told The Daily Star newspaper in New York State where she then lived, and wrote "The March of the Partisans": "I sang this song at a private party one night and everyone was just astonished and moved. In London, I was eagerly following the progress of the war by reading newspapers. Anna Betoulinsky (Anna Marly), singer, songwriter and composer: born Petrograd, Russia 30 October 1917; married 1939 Baron van Doorn (marriage dissolved), 1947 George Smiernow (died 2000); died Lazy Mountain, Alaska 15 February 2006.