not anything prepares a guy for struggle and personal Charles Waite, of the Queen's Royal Regiment, used to be ill-prepared while his convoy took a unsuitable turning close to Abbeville and met four hundred German squaddies and part a dozen tanks. "The day i used to be captured, I had a rifle yet no ammunition." He misplaced his freedom that day in may perhaps 1940 and did not regain it until eventually April 1945 while he used to be rescued by means of americans close to Berlin, having walked 1,600 kms from East Prussia. Silent for seventy years, Charles writes approximately his 5 misplaced years: the poor issues he observed and suffered; his pressured paintings in a stone quarry and on farms; his interval in solitary confinement for sabotage; and his lengthy trip domestic in a single of the worst winters on checklist, around the frozen river Elbe, to Berlin and liberation. His tale can be approximately friendship, of actual and psychological resilience and of compassion for everybody who suffered. a part of that tale comprises the bad lengthy March, or Black March, whilst 80,000 British PoWs have been pressured to trek via a vicious wintry weather westwards throughout Poland, Czechosolvakia and Germany because the Soviets approached. millions died. There are easily no memoirs of that negative trek - other than this one. So moved used to be ex-hostage Terry Waite on assembly Charles that he instantly provided to jot down a foreword to this book.