POW diaries - Captain Percival Lowe

My great-grandfather was captured in the first weeks of the Great War, just at the start of the use of trenches, to the east of Paris in the department of the Aisne. A seasoned combatant, with experience in Boer war and the Ashanti campaigns, he came from an era that is foreign to us today. The story starts as he is aiming his rifle at one of his own men who is attempting to surrender because their trench is being overrun, and their position no longer tenable. My great-grandfather is knocked unconscious by schrapnel at the moment he intends to shoot his own man, and spends the next four years in various German POW camps. This diary, which is one in a series documenting his years serving the King in the British Army, documents in fine detail his attitude to his captors, and fellow inmates. The language and attitudes are often shocking to our over-sensitive politically correct ears, but tell an engaging story of one soldier trying to make sense of his captivity. He returned home in 1917 during a prisoner exchange in Switzerland. Confronted with ambivalent attitudes to his service and capture by his compatriots, and not being able to empathise with the horrors of the western front, he becomes disillusioned. A great cartoonist and draughtsman, one of the delights of these diaries are the constant drawings and sketches that elaborate the daily entries. The tone of the diaries is often mired in minutiae, which reflects the desolation of spirit a captured soldier must feel.