Episode One of BBC TV's 1987 production of Olivia Manning's Fortunes of War



September 1939 ΓÇô Newlyweds Guy and Harriet Pringle arrive in Bucharest, as does the impoverished Prince Yakimov, who takes up a temporary job as a journalist on a British paper to save himself from complete poverty. Harriet is introduced to her fellow expatriates (making friends with the middle-class Bella, who has married a local man), and to Guy's Romanian friend and admirer Sophie. However, their happy life is interrupted by the assassination of Romania's prime minister C─âlinescu and Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. Rumours fly of a German invasion of Romania and Guy, though absorbed in his work and organising social events, is encouraged by his Communism to take steps to protect the family of a Jewish student of his, Sasha Drucker, from the anti-Semitic Romanian regime.