Abandoned British tanks at Dunkirk . . . Everyone knows about the brave Tommies who escaped on the famous "little Armada" of boats as the Germans advanced through France. But the experience of the soldiers of the 4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry was very different, writes Maggie Hartford.

They helped to prevent the Germans from reaching Dunkirk, so that the evacuation could take place safely.

In Dunkirk: Fight to the Last Man (Viking, £25), Hugh Sebag Montefiore describes how only a handful of these rearguard fighters got back safely to England. The rest endured hardship as prisoners of war, with no recognition although a plaque was recently erected in the fortified town of Cassel, the scene of some of the worst carnage.

In the book, chaplain David Wild describes a picnic with Ox and Bucks officer 2nd Lt Dick Troughton and Major Ronnie Cartland, brother of Barbara Cartland, who later died in the Cassel siege. "It might have been a picnic by the Cherwell," he writes. "Our prospects that night were not exactly cheerful..."

One soldier, Sgt Jim Loftus, described seeing the anti-tank gun commander standing next to him decapitated by a shell. But as the author says, it was the stretcher bearers, medical orderlies and doctors of the Ox and Bucks who coped with the worst sights.

Another Ox and Bucks soldier, Bill Small, a former farmer who collected corpses after the first day of the fighting at Cassel, was shocked when a head fell out of his truck and had to be put back.