You'll have to read the book to find out what happens next. However, with all the humour, there are some supremely evocative moments of personal discomfiture--and sheer terror. There's a tense moment on a railway platform in

bomb-ravaged Brunswick when the crowd of increasingly angry passengers on the platform opposite spot him: 'Englander, Arzt!'

At the POW hospital at Wolfenbuttel (Lager Lazarett XIB) in the suburbs of Brunswick, he is subjected to his first major night raid:

'The crash and thunder of bombs and guns and the surging roar of the engines beat at one until almost all sensation, including that of fright, was lost.'

That's as good a description of the sheer paralysing terror of an air raid as I've ever read. He describes brilliantly the contrast between, what now seems to his 1944 self, the puny German bombing raids of 1940 and the all-encompassing devastation of the massed Allied attacks of later in the war. New POWs would often stay outside the shelters to 'watch the fun'. Old-time POWs like him knew better: 'We might have affected nonchalance but never carelessness. The careless never came home.'

Then there's the memorable scene on the railway platform at Halle, where angry German civilians refuse to let him into a shelter during a raid. His guard suffers a broken arm in the ensuing bombing--which he then sets.

At Wolfenbuttel a disgruntled German communist guard called Hans helps the POWs in every way he can. Then he's sent to Oflag 79 (at Waggum, near Brunswick) where he notes the contrast between the plain uniforms of those captured in 1940 and the uniforms of the airborne 'Normandy men' emblazoned with all sorts of insignia so that, 'the men looked like bedecked Christmas trees.' As a comical rebuke, one annoyed 1940 vintage POW makes his own divisional sign: of a cross-eyed man with a bald head, a poking tongue and the name 'Stillborne'!

Colditz

It's Chapter 26 and page 189 of the 208 pages of the 1956 edition before Schrire is assigned to the now famous Oflag 4C at Colditz Castle. Reading the book now in the aftermath of so many other books, movies and TV programmes about Colditz and what's fascinating is Schrire's calm outsider's take on his fellow POWs' hyper-active escaping activities. He's happy to be drafted into help, but his war has been altogether different to theirs. Escape was never on his agenda and his status as a doctor meant he has always had at least some freedom of movement.

Colditz inmates he mentions in passing include: Lt Col W Tod MC, 'Rex' Harrison, 'Bush' Parker, Lt Dick ('The Arab') Jones, and Lt Simon Hacohen, He also remembers listening to a lecture on the 1944 Warsaw Uprising by General Bor-Komorowski in which the General warns that the lecture is copyright and can't be re-used postwar without his permission!

With the liberation of Colditz by US troops in April 1945, Schrire ceremoniously burns his copy of the Geneva Convention and, one hectic ride back through US lines later ('they handled their trucks like chronic alcoholics in acute delirium.'), he's aboard an RAF flight back to Britain on the 20th April 1945.

I enjoyed this book immensely--and got though in one marathon sitting. It's short on names, exact dates and details, both medical and military, but the horror, the humour and, above all, the absurdity of war are here aplenty. Unjustly forgotten--my inter-library loan copy seems to have been last issued in 1963!--I highly recommend it as an essential POW memoir.

Other Details for the 1956 Allan Wingate edition

Index: none.

Photographs: none

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