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The War Behind the Wire - The Life, Death and Glory of British Prisoners of War, 1914-18 (Paperback)
Loot Price: R260
Discovery Miles 2 600
You Save: R57
(18%)
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The War Behind the Wire - The Life, Death and Glory of British Prisoners of War, 1914-18 (Paperback)
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List price R317
Loot Price R260
Discovery Miles 2 600
You Save R57 (18%)
Expected to ship within 9 - 15 working days
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The last untold story of the First World War: the fortunes and
fates of 170,000 British soldiers captured by the enemy. On
capture, British officers and men were routinely told by the
Germans 'For you the war is over'. Nothing could be further from
the truth. British Prisoners of War merely exchanged one
barbed-wire battleground for another. In the camps the war was
eternal. There was the war against the German military, fought with
everything from taunting humour to outright sabotage, with a
literal spanner put in the works of the factories and salt mines
prisoners were forced to slave in. British PoWs also fought a
valiant war against the conditions in which they were mired. They
battled starvation, disease, Prussian cruelties, boredom, and their
own inner demons. And, of course, they escaped. Then escaped again.
No less than 29 officers at Holzminden camp in 1918 burrowed their
way out via a tunnel (dug with a chisel and trowel) in the Great
Escape of the Great War. It was war with heart-breaking
consequences: more than 12,000 PoWs died, many of them murdered, to
be buried in shallow unmarked graves. Using contemporary records -
from prisoners' diaries to letters home to poetry - John
Lewis-Stempel reveals the death, life and, above all, the glory of
Britain's warriors behind the wire. For it was in the PoW camps,
far from the blasted trenches, that the true spirit of the Tommy
was exemplified.
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