The wartime diary of Private Ross Taylor, a British prisoner of war whose daily jottings never exceeded 140 characters, is to be broadcast on Twitter.

Private Taylor, a driver in the Royal Army Service Corps, kept a meticulous daily diary thoughout 1940 as he was captured at Albert during the Battle for France and held at Stalag VIIIB in Poland.

His meticulous entries in the leather AA drivers' journal, a gift from his girlfriend Florence, detail spending New Year's Day in a drill hall in Chesterfield, being trapped in an ambush and the tortuous march 200-mile march into Germany.

He recorded watching German fighter planes massacre columns of French refugees, and how starvation rations, forced labour and dysentry pushed him to the brink of death.

Chris Ayres, his grandson, realised each entry was no more than the length of an update on the Twitter microblogging site....