Prisoner of War
After the Second World War broke out, in 1940 Turner enlisted in the Royal Artillery as a Gunner, equivalent to a Private. He served in Thailand, and was commissioned as an officer, but was captured by Japanese forces in early 1942 and held as a prisoner of war. The Japanese forced him to work on the Burma Road; Turner gave lectures on politics to other prisoners of war during his captivity. He weighed only 7 stone (44.5 kg) on his return.
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Famous quotes containing the words prisoner of, prisoner and/or war:
“I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new forms they may assume.”
—Italo Calvino (1923–1985)
“The son will run away from the family not at eighteen but at twelve, emancipated by his gluttonous precocity; he will fly not to seek heroic adventures, not to deliver a beautiful prisoner from a tower, not to immortalize a garret with sublime thoughts, but to found a business, to enrich himself and to compete with his infamous papa.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–67)
“Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus, 44:14.
The line “their name liveth for evermore” was chosen by Rudyard Kipling on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission as an epitaph to be used in Commonwealth War Cemeteries. Kipling had himself lost a son in the fighting.