ABSTRACT
In 1940 Donald Edgar joined the reserve element of the British army, the Territorial Army. As a barely trained private soldier in the East Surrey Regiment, he was sent to France along with rest of the British Expeditionary Force in much the same fashion as the original BEF had gone in 1914. Unlike the BEF of 20 or so years previously, however, the BEF of 1940 was not to halt the German advance. Edgar himself was captured by the Germans and spent the next five years as a prisoner of war of the Germans.
