The author was serving in the trenches of Passchendaele with the Dorset Regiment. Captured in the German offensives in March 1918, this book records his experiences as a POW. Waugh was first shipped to a temporary camp at Karlsruhe; and then moved to Mainz on the Rhine. This book records attempts to escape, but is also notable for its unsparing account of the privations of the prisoners, as underfed and permanently hungry, they awaited the end of the war in a Germany that was close to starvation.

Alec Waugh was a British novelist, the elder brother of the more famous Evelyn Waugh, the uncle of Auberon Waugh, and the son of Arthur Waugh, an author, literary critic, and publisher. His first marriage was Barbara Jacobs (daughter of author William Wymark Jacobs), his second wife was Joan Chirnside, and his third wife was Virginia Sorenson, author of the Newbery Medal-winning Miracles on Maple Hill. Waugh was born in London to Arthur Waugh and Catherine Charlotte Raban, the great-granddaughter of Lord Cockburn (1779-1854), and attended Sherborne School, a public school in Dorset. As a result of his experiences, he wrote his first semi-autobiographical novel, The Loom of Youth (1917), which dramatized his school days. Waugh served in the British army in France during World War I, being commissioned in the Dorset Regiment in May 1917 and saw duty at Passchendaele. Captured by the Germans at Arras in March 1918, he spent the rest of the war in POW camps in Karlsruhe and the Mainz Citadel. Waugh married his first wife, Barbara Annis Jacobs (1900-1996), in 1919. He later became a successful author, albeit not as successful or original as his younger brother.