In Enemy Hands

This is the story of just one of the tens of thousands of ordinary Britons who answered their country's call in the early months of the First World War. The Territorial battalion which Alfred Hall joined crossed to France at Christmas and in the following April found itself involved in the Second Battle of Ypres, when the Germans used cloud gas for the first time and shattered the Allied line. On 8 May 1915, after a fortnight of desperate fighting, his battalion was all but annihilated and he himself was taken prisoner. He kept a diary, in which he recorded his thoughts and actions during three and a half years of captivity. Together with the numerous photographs taken at the time, the diary is a record of those years – a time of frustration, deprivation and homesickness, but also comradeship. Given the carnage of that war, he was lucky – though his luck was tempered: for nine months of his imprisonment, he was sent to one of the enemy's Strafe Kommandos, or punishment units, where conditions were harsh, starvation reigned, disease lurked and death once more hovered. Although Peace and Liberty saw him back in England, he was yet to be quite finished with Germany's prison camps. In 1919, in a final episode, he returned for several months, helping on behalf of the Red Cross to rescue the Russian POWs whom the Revolution in their own country had left abandoned and starving.