From the moment we are taken on the ten-week death march to the prison camp in Poland, Greasley assaults our senses with vivid descriptions of all the inhuman suffering he and his fellow prisoners had to endure every day, every hour, and every minute of their trip.

This is an amazing story and well worth the read. At times I couldn’t help but think that and elderly Horace was using the book to reminisce nostalgically about being a young man which brought the content of the book down. Even in the most horrifying places on earth, hope still lingers in the darkness, waiting for the opportunity to take flight. I completed this book as it was a book club challenge, but never have I forced myself on through a book so unwillingly. I can’t believe someone’s planning to make a film about this!For example, the sex scenes were very graphic and didn’t fit with the mood of the book at all- it was kind of like reading a cheap romance novel. The size of Horace’s penis was bragged about around 3 times- each time more random than the first! I couldn't paint a picture of Rose in my head because all I knew about her was that she had nice boobs and a nice body and that she was always satisfied by Jim (and his massive willy)... That's it. Cringe. This is billed as a memoir. The author claims he’s only telling the story of Horace Greasley. At times I didn’t get that feeling especially when conversations took place with their captors. I was also trying to figure out if this is a story about a Englishman who is captured in France or an attempt at pornography. The lines truly become blurred.

The first time Horace has sex with Rose (the love of his life and the reason he started escaping over 200 times).... it's rape. She says, "No. Stop. We'll get caught." and whether that last line means she wants to but is afraid to get caught or not, the first two words make it rape. AND he even says he was raping her.Horace 'Jim' Greasley was 20 years of age in the spring of 1939 when Adolf Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia and latterly Poland. There had been whispers and murmurs of discontent from certain quarters, and the British government began to prepare for the inevitable war. Although Jim was from a time when sexism appeared to be ‘accepted’, Jim’s persistent self-congratulatory remarks about his performance in bed were tedious and only reflected poorly upon his personality: ‘I left Rosa, with a satisfying soreness between the legs’. Jim possesses a proud obsession with mentioning how endowed he is and seems to save all his adjectives for these all-too-frequent occurrences, which have no significance to the story. In the world of literature, I think it’s safe to say we’ve gone pretty deep in terms of memoirs from the Second World War, in the sense we got many different approaches and outlooks on various aspects of this historical period.

There are plenty of interesting chapters in the book about his captivity and the harsh treatment the SS doled out to the English pigs and how they would rebel against their captors even if it meant they would receive a severe beating or worse. I enjoyed when Horace, “Jim” busted up the sergeant that surrendered without firing a shot. It’s true, even if they would have fought it out, it wouldn’t have prevented France from falling, but at least they would have made a stand. Justice was served! Now, I certainly don’t want to undermine the author’s daring exploits, but if you were looking for something to rival The Great Escape I may have to disappoint you. It wasn’t an entirely uncommon practice to bunk out of prisoner camps the way he did, and for the most part they weren’t the tightly-guarded fortresses depicted in movies. Book Genre: Autobiography, Biography, Historical, History, Holocaust, Memoir, Nonfiction, Romance, War, World War IIHorace's war didn't last long. . . On 25 May 1940 he was taken prisoner and so began the harrowing journey to a prisoner-of-war camp in Poland. Those who survived the gruelling ten-week march to the camp were left broken and exhausted, all chance of escape seemingly extinguished. This quote (which is meant to be the thoughts of a close friend in the book) kind of sums up the way that Horace (Jim) is consistently described throughout the book, “Jim Greasley was almost certainly one of the unsung heroes in the Second World War. He was the hunter, the gatherer, the engineer, the smuggler, the lover and the fighter. He was the most stubborn bastard he’d ever met.” These sorts of descriptions are pretty constant. I immediately looked for more details on his story and saw there was this book about it, got it through the library, started in.