There have been many accounts of great heroism by officers in the Second World War, but very few lower-ranking servicemen have thought to put their own experiences on record. Lance Corporal Chesterton, however, felt strongly enough about the ordinary soldier's role to relate his own wartime memories in Crete was my Waterloo. Called up in January 1940 at the age of 19 into the Royal Engineers, his first experiences of war, only a few months later, were to witness the horrendous sinking of the Lancastria and the evacuation of St Nazaire. Taken prisoner by the Germans during the battle for Crete, he spent the next four years in prisoner-of-war camps in Austria. Told with humility, burnout and restraint, this memoir celebrates the daily life of the ordinary soldier - the struggle to stay alive against all odds, the pranks played on German guards, the comradeship that bonded men together in intolerable conditions - this is a book for all of us to read and acknowledge a debt.
