The Prisoners of Mainz

The visceral account of a British officer's descent into the hell of German POW camps during the final months of World War I. Alec Waugh fought at Passchendaele with the Dorset Regiment before capture in the German spring offensive of March 1918. He was held first at Karlsruhe, then transferred to Mainz on the Rhine, where he would spend the war's remaining months starving, plotting escapes, and enduring the slow collapse of a defeated Germany crumbling around him. This is not heroics or glory. It is hunger, perpetual and gnawing. It is the absurdity of men waiting for an end that keeps receding. It is the strange brotherhood that forms among those who have lost everything except each other. Waugh writes without sentimentality about the daily negotiations of captivity, the failed escape attempts, the black humor that kept men sane. For anyone who wants to understand what war actually felt like from the inside, this book offers something rare: an unsparing, personal record of endurance.